Honestly it is very very tough if you start at 0 subscribers and you don't have a following elsewhere.... Almost all the successful Substacks bring a built-in audience with them from other platforms.
To build an audience from scratch, it depends on your niche, what you write about, etc. You'll probably have to pester your friends and family to subscribe.
The best possible thing you could do for growth is have one of your famous/influential friends share your work to their audience.
Here is a tool that will get you a few subscribers for free: https://thesample.ai
Here is a link to the "Substack Writers Unite" discord server where you can talk about building an audience from scratch: https://discord.gg/ZuUVTGJR4D
I've been doing that in earnest for the past 2 months. While I do enjoy the engagement, I'm putting in a awful lot of time for very few subscribers. I'm starting to think I might be better off just investing all that engagement time on my own blog. Dunno, just thinking out loud here...
Yes, those are my primary topics at the moment. Blog is two months old. A couple hours a day of engagement across substack, nine subscribers. Most of the engagement has been on blogs at least somewhat related to nukes.
I haven't been pushing the nature section yet, doing so may help. I might be promoting too soon, perhaps I should wait until I have more to offer? Widen the scope of topics addressed?
I've heard it said that the best way to direct attention to a blog is to post a twitter summary of each article as it appears. I can't be bothered with Twitter though, and couldn't give two hoots whether or not anyone reads my blog! :-)
If anyone cares to skim it though you'll see, among other things, what William the Conqueror very likely looked like!
Not yet. As you'll have seen, I haven't added any articles for a while. Maybe I'll take a few of my past comments from these threads and others and whump them up into articles to post.
As for Otzi, I read somewhere that analysis of his mitochondrial DNA revealed that he had a gene that increased the chance of male infertility. So because he was found surrounded by quite an array of weapons and other equipment, I speculate that he had been a tribal leader who was deposed the hard way (as was the custom in primitive societies back then) for not being able to provide an heir.
As he headed up the mountain, he probably knew the arrow found in his back was on its way, and after his death his fellow tribal members left him neatly laid out high up where his spirit could commune with the Gods, and buried in snow to avoid the attentions of vultures.
He may even have lived in the mountain heights during his rule, as it was often the custom for tribal leaders then believe it or not. Perhaps the Greek myths about the Gods of Olympus were a remnant of an earlier time when the ruling family did literally live up there!
I hate Twitter too, but substack makes it so incredibly easy to post new article notifications there I'm going with it. Don't know how much good it will do, but all I have to do is check a box, so it's worth a try. Posting new article notices on Facebook is slightly more work, but still, it's just another few button clicks.
I think Karl and I are about as similar in terms of audience size/stage as you can be, and I second this. As he says later, building an audience is tough (and the world is set up in a way to punish you if you try to do this too hard). But at the same time, at least in my case my audience starter set came out of a series of "lucky breaks" of small-to-moderate size. Will that happen for everyone? No. But will everyone it happens to be someone who has taken the plunge to start writing? Yeah.
Assuming you stuff isn't flat-out hostile to Christianity or something similar, let me know when you start doing your thing and I'll plug it.
What would trying too hard be? I was thinking of posting my next piece to several subreddits. Would that be trying too hard?
Also, if you are friendly to Christianity or a Christian, you may like my stuff. For example, this piece is a brief exploration on the power of mindset in determining reality, noting the defeatist nature of the dominant worldview:
So there's an inherently adversarial relationship between self-promotion and basically how people like to read. Ideally, the process looks like this:
***Carlos publishes an article about beans. James, a legume enthusiast, reads it and finds it insightful and the best treatise on the musical fruit that he's read to date. James is a member of several bean enthusiast communities, and posts this article to one.
From there, other people like James reach the blog and subscribe. As Carlos posts more and more insightful articles (I mean, ARE chickpeas beans? Deep down? Actually? Spiritually?) they get shared to more and more bean-based communities, eventually getting a major shoutout from the Bush Baked Beans dog and rocketing him to stardom.***
The basic problem with this is that it takes thousands of james-like folks to get a james, and even then james doesn't have a 100% success rate with *his* posts becoming popular. Which leaves you in a weird spot, because you *need* to get some initial pump to get enough james-type-raffle-tickets to have a decent spot of winning the metaphor-for-exposure microwave oven.
So you start posting your stuff in various places, but you run into a hard conflict coming from two common causes:
1. Most people prefer that stuff gets to them organically - i.e. that it's noticed and shared by someone who doesn't particularly care about you, Carlos, as a person. They also like to think of "good writers" as springing into general visibility *by magic* - i.e. that known writers are a higher sort of person, a variety of human that was born to fame and didn't have to do anything for it.
2. You aren't a good judge of how good your stuff is. Nobody really is. That means that overall "people post their own stuff" results in lower quality (from the viewer's/consumer's perspective) than "we only let people post stuff that isn't theirs".
That rolls up into finding out that most places don't want you to post your own stuff. Some places are annoyed by it, some discourage it, and some ban it (and you) if you do it too much (another writer I talk to got banned from r/california for a single post, inclusive of his website".
Some things I've done to get around this:
1. Calls for sharing in the work itself. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. It's annoying to the reader if you do it too much, but not nearly as much as, say, hackernews can get annoyed if you do it too much.
2. Cold-emailing people known for views/knowledge that relate to the work and very politely saying "hey, I wrote this thing - if it feels natural to you, I'd love amplification; I can't get it easily at my size". I've had that work a couple times.
Otherwise it's just tough - you take your best shots, try to be reasonable, and don't give up in a situation where everyone would prefer you just laid down and died.
I've liked the article and subscribed to your blog.
I'm not sure what has caused the general increase of pessimism. One of the markers that gets to me is the number of people who think we don't see aliens because we're a disgusting species.
Some of it, I'm convinced is status-seeking. ORdinARy PEOple like themselves and want to live, BUT I'M BETTER THAN THAT.
I believe without evidence that some of it is left-over Soviet propaganda where the US is not just evil but uniquely evil.
It might be related to loss of belief in God, though I think there's a sort of belief in original sin minus a belief in redemption that's in play.
I want to say, in response to various looming disasters, that we are an ingenious species, and I keep fearing that people will just say, "Unfortunately".
This seems to be a collection of random thoughts-- I feel like something went wrong in the past few decades, but I'm not sure what happened.
I think we have lost hope, and I think we lost it partly due to unconscious drift, and partly due to bad philosophy. But I am a triumphalist, and I think things will be fundamentally ok. It's just that they could be so much mind-blowingly better though...
I re-read this article of yours: https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/on-incels-dead-bedrooms-and-the-hard and the bit on incels really rubbed me the wrong way. Basically, you hedge too hard on trying to get people to sympathize with a subset of incels, which implies you think there is such a thing as just hatred, in this case, of incels who are in a dark place.
In reality, there are no valid targets for hatred and resentment, and you should have launched a full frontal assault on the notion that there are such targets, instead of trying to reassure the reader that their resentment of e.g. misogynists is valid and not a severe flaw in need of correction.
Could you pull a quote from the particular section that got to you? I wrote it, but it's been an awful long time since then and I'd like to interrogate this a bit and see if maybe I might need to revisit it somehow.
> I’m the type who generally finds most usages of the word “misogynistic” to be motivated hyperbole, but it’s often appropriate here: a lot of these guys flat out hate women. They’ve taken their frustrations to a really unproductive place that’s dark to the point of often being evil. It’s gross.
> All this taken together means I’m going to look pretty bad in a second when I ask you to feel bad for them.
[a lot of setting the scene]
> If you can agree with me at least a little up to this point, then all this implies there’s a possibility of a sub-group of quasi-incels out there that haven’t yet let themselves be driven to a dark place because of it, but is still as sad as you’d expect a sex-less, romance-less person who wants both things to be.
Basically, you shouldn't be flinching at the possibility of asking the reader to sympathize with the incels. Hell, you should be demanding they sympathize with even the incels in a dark place
Basically, Kanye West has the right intuition when he says he likes Hitler or whatever (his particular implementation sucks, granted). I think even the worst evil-doers can be recast as basically sick people in need of help, and that it's not helpful to judge and condemn them instead.
I think there's a bit of an honesty catch-22 here. Because there's a side we both like - where I basically say stuff like this:
***Bad or not, these people have a lot of unearned sympathy from me... I want to be profound here; I want to have solutions for these issues that are easy and quick. I want every marriage to lack intimacy issues; I want everybody to have a chance at love. As it stands I’m not even sure this problem is even big enough to seek a solution for, and if it is I’m not sure the causes are what I think. But I do know if the problem keeps getting bigger, we will have more and more people disenfranchised from something most people think of as a major part of being human.
I think we have a choice here: we can offer sympathy, acknowledge the problem and offer help working towards solutions in what small ways we can, or we can abandon these young men to seek acknowledgement of their issues from dark side of the internet for want of any other options.***
Which is basically asking for what you want, more or less pointing out that there's a choice here for people to make and heavily implying which one I think is reasonable and productive. And saying, essentially, that it's reasonable and productive even if we assume a pretty maximally bad version of what incels are (entire concluding section).
But I do have to acknowledge what I'm actually asking for there, as well. And very frankly, while there are (I'm sure, because I know some) good people who fit under the bare "incels" label, the movement itself is often really, really bad - it's gross, it's mean, it's not hinged on reality, etc.
I can't in that situation say "And you'd be just like that, in the same situation" because I know too many people in the same situation who *aren't* like that, who make good choices and manage to be decent people. And most people (I assumed in writing this) are similar - they know sex-less, relationship-less folks who still manage to be decent people, or at least appear that way.
So I think (it's been a while) the rationale here was to actually do my best to illustrate the choice I was asking people to make; to say, yeah, here's the worst of it, here's the really bad parts of it, but here's sort of the "why" behind that and what you, a reasonable and reasonably sympathetic person should probably feel about that.
The biggest thing preventing me from starting a blog is the question "what identity do I write under?". If I pick my IRL identity, 1) it'll be less of a good idea to say anything controversial, but 2) I'll also be able to show it to people I meet IRL, but 3) I won't be able to post it online under my online identity.
I mean, just pick one. If you don't want someone to come after your job (esp. if you aren't toeing center-left lines; assuming you aren't an academic, republicans aren't as good at getting you fired), then use a stage name. If you want to be able to do it under your own name safely, you might have to limit topics or something.
I have this issue. I try to avoid having a consistent online identity for privacy reasons, nuking accounts periodically. But that means cross promoting would be hard. I'd probably need to make a new identity and set up a bunch of new accounts for it.
I think it depends a bit on where your lack of motivation comes from. Is it from a lack of time? Lack of interesting topic? Lack of structure? If you're motivated to do something, how is that activity different from writing articles?
I think it’s a combination of a lack of structure and lack of clarity on what I want to write about. Part of my issue is that I love writing, but I have a hard time feeling like I have anything to contribute.
1. There are probably some things you have thought about a great deal and in those areas you have something to share with the world. There are probably also lots of things you'd really like to talk about, but which you're not above average in knowledge about. (Have you seen some of the relevant Paul Graham essays on writing?)
2. I did find that I needed an audience to write TO--but it did not need to be LARGE. Like literally 5 people who I know are listening (with a hypothetical 20-80 who might be reading some of my posts) was enough to motivate me.
People who were writing "alongside me" (asynchronously) on "write a scrap of fiction for 15 minutes" threads (and we'd occasionally make small comments about each-others' work) on an online forum were great--I felt that by doing my writing snippets, I encouraged theirs! (kind of like what Loweren was talking about with screensharing and like, co-working sort of example.)
Back-and-forth engagement helps me, because with a small audience, how else can you know if stuff "lands"? RICH engagement, like arguing with people about a subject I was passionate about (religion on the religion/philosophy sub-forum on an online forum for a favorite SF/F author of mine) helped to establish my motivation for "why I want to persuade these people of things" and get to know WHO I was writing for back then. I think that the power of the listener/reader has an insufficiently-discussed amount of influence in communication.
If you love writing, then just do what you love and don't worry about it. To start, you might write about how you can't quite figure out what to write about. Dig in to that, investigate, and share.
When I was young I wanted to write, but felt I didn't really have anything to say. I could have written about being young, and feeling insecure. Write where you are and what you know, as the saying goes. I wish I'd learned that sooner.
The great thing about the Internet is that no matter how obscure our personal interests might be, there are probably at least thousands of others with the same interests.
Don't neglect the possibility of starting with a bad idea.
For instance it would probably be a bad idea to write an essay on how you dreamed Hillary Clinton was a space alien ... but if/when you're ever stuck, you can start off writing about how Hillary Clinton was abducted by space aliens and replaced with a body-double. Once you get into the flow, branch to a more conventional conversation, just don't forget to sanitize the space alien bits before you publish, lest you find yourself jumping the shark.
Michael gives good advice. One key to getting over writers block is to just write. Lower your standards. Ignore the internal criticism You don't have to publish whatever you write, but just choose something and go. You can be an editor once the stuff is written. A bad work can be polished, but you can't edit a blank page.
One "hack" that really works for me is to find other people to work together with me, either meeting IRL or via video chat. Keeping each other accountable for our progress helps a lot, we even screenshare to ensure we're not procrastinating.
Give yourself a schedule and some friends who will gently judge you for missing your deadlines. I'm writing a book as a web serial (not on substack, though), with only two people that I know of regularly reading it, and even that is really helping to keep me going.
The *amount* you write for the deadline isn't as important as keeping momentum. I've found that a good, manageable timeframe is a week, even if your life is stressful. You can post up two things a week if you're not too stressed (although in that case, I recommend posting them up near each other, e.g. one on Friday, one on Saturday, rather than stretching the time between them out; that tactic helps make it feel more like One Thing A Week).
Assume you commit to posting up something once a week. You'll have more ideas in some weeks than in others. Have somewhere else that you keep those ideas, or partial articles, e.g. in a Google Doc. Then when you're having a slow week, you can post smaller articles from there, or partial ones and finish them up.
Be okay with posting things that aren't perfect.
Figure out how many passes are a good effort trade-off for you. As an example, my web serial posts go thorugh about three iterations - one where I'm writing the full scene from start to finish, one where I'm going through to rearrange things slightly (sometimes deleting, sometimes adding a bit), and a final one to polish the wording. That's the sweet spot for me personally.
Build a habit around the number of passes that are comfortable for you. I try to write on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Things get in the way of those all the time, but I only need two of them to get those passes done (one to write, another to edit and polish). Everything else I manage helps me build up a backlog.
The common thread, philosophically, is scrupulously separating the generative part from the discriminative part: turn off your standards, write down a lot of words you enjoy writing down, do this often, and then some time later, comb through all that material for some juicy parts that seem like they would taste good together.
I've learned to stop beating myself up over these things. There's a million things that I kinda-sorta want to do but never actually make any steps towards. When this happens I realise that it probably just means I just don't want it hard enough -- bits of my brain have the desire but other bits are not in agreement.
Either sit down and have a chat with yourself until you're entirely on the same page, or accept that you don't want this particular thing as hard as you think you do. The world and you will both get along fine if you don't write a substack, and maybe there's plenty of other things you could do with your time.
To second this point: You need to be doing it for you, because you enjoy it. Unless you have a really unique worldview (say you're fluent in English but within the Russian/Chinese/etc security establishment and have a lot of confidence in your VPN), there are enough substacks and blogs in the world. This isn't to discourage you! Writing is fun! But if you'll only write for an audience, you won't have one, so you won't write. There are other valuable things to do with your time, and they don't even need to be productive.
I can tell you the mistakes I did when starting my Substack, not sure if that will be helpful.
First mistake was choosing a specific topic for my blog. That was a mistake, because my attention jumps from one topic to another all the time, so by choosing one topic for my blog I unknowingly decided that all other topics (i.e. most of the things I am thinking about) do *not* belong to my blog.
Second mistake was choosing a high standard. Which means that writing the articles takes a lot of time. Which means that if I do not have a lot of free time at the moment (which is the usual situation for me these days), it feels like I should not work on my blog now.
This may not generalize. You may be more focused than me, or have longer uninterrupted intervals of free time. In that case, choosing one topic, or choosing a high standard could be the right strategy. But if you are similar to me, I think the right strategy is "write anything". Any topic, any length. Instead of trying to write good articles, try to write *many* articles... and maybe, at the end of each calendar year, choose the ones you are most proud of, and make a "best of 2023" post.
In long term, quantity beats quality, because quantity means practice. The important articles are not the ones you will write now, but the ones you will write after having already written hundred other articles. The first hundred articles will mostly suck; the goal is to get past them as fast as possible.
I admit I do not like my own advice. There is already enough crap online; I feel guilty to contribute more. I feel like an internet where everyone only posts well-written and important stuff would be a better place. Sadly, this is *not* how it (i.e. life in general, but also blogging specifically) works. The only way to get good is practice. The only way to get good is to be bad first. Use a pseudonym.
I like the emails because I like to read the little blurbs/info. I go to the actual threads 1-2x per year (so the hidden thread emails are pretty pointless for me, but no biggie)
There are two topics I would like to suggest for future ACX posts. First, a review of Will Storr's "The Status Game". Second, revisiting conflict theory vs mistake theory - have Scott's views on this dichotomy changed in the last few years?
Can someone explain in layman's terms why in the era of Open AI, CAPTCHA is still a thing? Shouldn't most bots be capable of picking out traffic lights at this point?
I think the layman's term answer may be the same as "Why put a padlock on my bike in an era where bolt-cutters exist?". It won't stop the more sophisticated attacks, but it still makes bad behavior a lot harder.
I could probably spin up a script that spams someone's website or whatever very quickly if there's no CAPTCHA involved - writing a script that integrates with Open AI to solve those CAPTCHAS... well it's possible but it's going to take a lot more effort.
They're not just measuring your performance on the traffic light task. They also make decisions on lots of other variables: response time, orbit of the mouse cursor, solve order, the history of your IP address, etc.
I started suspecting this after getting repeated challenges even though I responded correctly every time. Being more chaotic (moving the mouse more, clicking and then unclicking squares I'm not sure of, etc) seemed to help.
Note that you only have limited access to training data unless you want to get IP blocked by google (or have an entire botnet at your disposal). So finding and then training on these hidden variables might be tricky.
History is a huge part of it - if you use an Incognito browser you'll get challenged a lot more. This is also why sometimes you only have to click the checkbox without solving anything - they have enough data on you already to be confident you're not a robot.
Maybe they can't? I find it hard enough at times, when there's part of a traffic light in a square and I'm trying to decide "does this count as 'square with traffic light in' or not?"
Also I had a period of "what the hell are crosswalks? oh, you mean zebra crossings? then why not say so? bloody Americans" 😀
I had the opposite issue when I read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The section on the philosophical/religious issues raised by the Babel Fish ends with Man going on "to prove that black is white and [getting] himself killed on the next zebra crossing".
It was probably decades before I twigged that the cause of death wasn't being run over by actual zebras.
Somehow J. K. Rowling's American publisher learned from this that the not-even-slightly-specific-to-Britain historical technical term "philosopher's stone" needed to be Americanized into the completely un-American (and indeed nonexistent) term "sorcerer's stone".
Back in the 90s I ordered the UK paperback out of annoyance with that. Of course the films have wiped out any hope of it being corrected in a later edition.
The rationale was that they weren't sure American kids would be as interested in a book with the term "philosopher" in the title, compared to the more obviously magical word "sorcerer".
And, I dunno, that doesn't seem like a crazy thought to me. Despite what they say, a lot of kids do judge books by their cover/title, and if you don't already know what a "philosophers' stone" is, I can see why that might feel like a more dry title.
Obviously it wouldn't have mattered - I can't really imagine Harry Potter failing to become popular in America due to the (lack of) title change - but seems like hindsight bias to say that it's inconceivable that it could have.
It's certainly possible, and Scholastic's editors know the children's lit market better than I do. But the book was already a runaway bestseller in Britain when they bought the rights, and I don't think British children are more into Hegel and Kant than American kids.
And for kidlit there's often a balance between entertainment and education. Learning about the philosopher's stone is a gateway into the intertwined history of magic and science. While the Potter series as a whole veered off into its own mythology pretty quickly, that first book was unusually grounded (for a book with magic monster books, I mean): not only does it center on the philosopher's stone, but it brings in Nicolas Flamel, a genuine historical natural philosopher and alchemist who's closely associated with it.
Obscuring that connection by replacing it with something made up annoyed me. I think they translated from the British with a heavier hand than they should have generally, and in that case even if they were worried about deterring sales, might have gotten away with changing the title but not the internal text.
And of course it could be that they were entirely right about the business decision. Lots of business decisions annoy me. The late Eric Flint, a very successful editor at Baen, made an impassioned, and very likely correct, argument that accuracy on book covers is wholly orthogonal to their purpose. If you know enough to be able to judge the accuracy of a book cover, almost by definition you aren't the target audience for the cover. You're buying because you're familiar with the author or the series or the world (or at least the kind of world it's set in).
His point was that covers are advertising to catch the eye of the marginal buyer who knows nothing about the book, but might be drawn in by an eye-catching cover. The point is to be attractive (which people of good will can differ re Baen covers, but he had the sales data), and to signal generally what kind of book it is. Whether the people on the cover look like the character descriptions or the scene depicted ever happens in the book is tertiary at best.
I can't say he was wrong. He was a very successful editor, I'm just a reader. If I found the covers of some of the Baen books I bought offputting or even embarrassing, I still bought them. I certainly miss the days when the books I purchased frequently had Michael Whelan paintings that were both beautiful and often illustrative of the interior story, but it's hard to say that was ever the marginal reason for a purchase decision. I'm fairly confident that he was making the right business decision in an increasingly unforgiving industry.
But still: inaccurate and ugly covers grate on me, and I'm always pleased when the cover art actually matches what takes place inside the book. And as I was willing to pay a few dollars more for the Philosopher's Stone version of Rowling, I might do the same if I could get, say, Poul Anderson's Flandry series with covers that were a little more Whelan and a little less Cinemax After Dark. (I think they were going for Bond and missed.)
Granted it matters a lot less now that I buy pretty much everything as an ebook anyway.
Long story short: renaming the philosopher's stone may likewise have been a legitimate business decision. I still think it made the book slightly worse, and I'm sorry they did it.
I dunno, maybe the zebras blend into the zebra crossings so well[1] that we can't really tell how many there are.
-----------------
[1] I mean, I personally have never noticed a zebra in a zebra crossing, not even in New York where you can see eight crazy things an hour, so clearly their camouflage works superbly.
Not alone zebras, there were pandas and pelicans too! And seemingly now pelicans are puffins? I have never heard anyone referring to them as "puffin" crossings, just zebra crossings no matter what sort they are:
We got this wholesale from the Brits, but now American cultural influence is such (especially with computers, where everything is default US English for Microsoft products) that children are now pronouncing the letter Z as "zee" not "zed", because that's how they hear it on all the media they consume from a young age.
To be fair to we Yanks, "Zee" makes a lot more sense than "Zed" in the context of the rest of the Alphabet Song (and, by extension, the alphabet itself).
In computer security, there is a concept called "defense in depth" (mostly unrelated to the military doctrine of the same name). The idea is roughly that you don't want to be relying on a single thing to provide all your security guarantees, even if that thing should theoretically be sufficient on its own. That way, if the thing fails to live up to its theoretical capabilities for whatever reason, you have other layers of defense which continue to function and hopefully keep the overall system secure.
The corollary to this is that even if a given layer of security is not perfect / can be compromised in some circumstances (which of course is essentially all layers of security), it can still be valuable if it makes attacks more difficult. As retsam said, even if it's possible to defeat, it still increases the complexity of the attack required, which reduces the number of possible attackers.
Similar to the "swiss cheese model" of infection control popularized in response to Covid, where you use multiple measures, here with each acknowledged as somewhat porous, with the idea that as long as the holes in the different layers don't overlap the protection is still effective.
Captchas have been 'solved' for years now. There are hundreds of sites offering solving services, with the most advanced basically boiling down to people in a poor country solving your task mechanical turk-style. Also, OpenAIs offerings are pretty limited and/or expensive and also does not really offer anything that helps with captchas too much, at least not lifting it about existing solutions.
The short of it really is that solving captchas is still more expensive than the expected return of screaming into the void in millions of random comments sections in order to find a victim for your scam. For any purpose where solving the captchas is worth it, you can consider them mostly useless for filtering out anything but the most basic spammers - see Google/Reddit/Co. account creation and the likes.
Usage rates for GPT3 imply it's substantially cheaper than that - it's just that if millions of people continuously swarm a service that costs you pennies to render each time, it's still going to cost you a lot (and overwhelm your resources at peak times)
I wouldn't mind if open thread emails were cut since I rarely read them past the opening post, but if I actually cared I would add my own email filters for it.
Honestly I think people here would enjoy my stuff.
Sorry for spamming. But I'm not about to spend money on marketing, and this is an open thread, and people can't read it and dislike it if they don't know about it, and why not just throw my bread upon the water, for in many days it will be found?
I don't think you need to apologize, especially for sharing interesting well-written posts. (Then again in your shoes I'd strongly feel the need to do the same.)
I would to continue to receive the push notifications / emails for the open threads please.
1) There are often interesting tidbits in the post itself
2) Often interesting discussions in the comments
3) On the occasions where I would like to:
3.1) Discuss something generally of interest to this community / ask about people's experience (e.g. the subjective experience of having hunger translating into eating even whe inadvisable); or
3.2) To continue thoughts on an earlier full post (I'm not one for hot takes);
the email lets me get in early so get people to see it / not yell into the flood.
Back in the pre-ACX days, I liked open threads a lot, and knew when to expect them. I even knew in advance which ones would allow hot button topics, and which would not. I doubt I needed email notifications to notice they'd arrived. Now there's a new crowd posting, and the open threads aren't as interesting to me. I probably wouldn't notice open threads at all if I didn't get the email notifications about them. (Is there a specific schedule for them?) But while I'd miss them slightly, I doubt I'd miss them all that much.
Do you think it's necessarily a new crowd, or the old crowd getting older/more boring/more calcified in their opinions? One of the worst things about entering middle age for me has been to see previously intelligent, open minded people around me not having changed their minds on anything of substance for a decade...
Judging by the lack of nicks I recognize upthread, it's a new crowd. Of course this topic may have brought out a different set of people than those who usually post in open threads.
> One of the worst things about entering middle age for me has been to see previously intelligent, open minded people around me not having changed their minds on anything of substance for a decade...
You think they should change their mind on issues of substance purely for the sake of having different opinions?
Why wouldn't you expect intelligent people to encounter issues of substance, think about them, and then come to conclusions?
I would! I'm just somewhat skeptical that someone could have learned all that's worth learning and heard all the arguments worth hearing by their mid-twenties, and that they just so happened to stabilise upon their beliefs (for good reasons) at the same time they also stabilised in their musical and clothing tastes.
I think a lot of those ossification timelines are frankly bogus. For example, I've had the same preference for clothing since I was a tiny little kid, but when I was 8, or 10, I couldn't indulge it, because I didn't have any money of my own, I didn't know where to find those kinds of clothes anyway, and Mom wouldn't have cooperated. (Instead, she now remembers me as "not caring about clothes when I was a kid".) Magically, in my mid-twenties my actual manner of dress assumed a particular form and stabilized! But it wasn't because my third eye calcified or whatever, it was just because that's when I began making a decent amount of money and had had time to figure out where to get the kind of stuff I like.
Conversely I've "had the same music taste" since I was fifteen since that's when I became able to figure out what kind of music I liked and find that.
Let us bear in mind people can become more efficient. For example, I've heard assertions that the Ukrainian government has been (and maybe still is) pretty corrupt. In my youth I might've felt impelled to learn more about this, because it seemed like it might have an influence on how I thought about the war.
Now, I can save myself the time and bother, because I don't care. I already know it won't affect how I think about the war, because I'm a lot more experienced in knowing the impact of various kinds of information on my opinions, and I know now that whether the Ukrainian government was as corrupt as Chicago under Daley or as pure as driven snow has no effect at all on what I think of the war. And since I'm not that interested in Ukrainian history per se, this is information that is not even worth the cost of listening closely to it, or trying to remember it. It's not that I'm incurious about things in general, it's just that I'm better at prioritizing where I spend my attention and energy.
Mind you, this can lead to people staring to seem knuckleheaded to each other who might have got along well in youth. As we get older our natural interest start to diverge, and as our level of understanding grows we can no longer afford to keep equally abreast of all fields, so I with my expertise focus in X will start to seem stupid to someone whose expertise focus is in Y, because I will know (from his point of view) less and less about Y and, worse, I will not care. From my point of view his obsession with Y prevents him from not slowly becoming a doofus about X and I might start to drift away from simpatico with him.
I recognize old regulars from time to time (hi!) but I've also noticed a shift of the crowd. It's not that I mind new people, but the discussion seems more "vanilla" these days. I've attributed this to an eternal September kind of effect, with Scott getting many new readers, mostly from outside the rat sphere.
I would've guessed similarly until I saw the recent splits from Scott's readership. Most (60-70% IIRC) are from SSC. Assuming similar representation among the frequent commentariat, the atmosphere of the discussion shouldn't change as much should it?
I think it probably seems vanilla for a combination of reasons. Mostly I think that Scott must avoid the eye of sauron, and the non vanilla issues have been debated to death. A lot of people now think, myself included, that debate and reason doesn't change minds, etc..Once you reach an impasse with fundamental disagreement the only thing left is power games to force the other to comply/protect yourself from being forced and as such non vanilla interesting debate dries up, because its pointless.
One possibility is that rationalism was newer and more exciting and now we pretty much know what to expect. And, last I heard, there was more hope that rationalism would be a one to drastically improve one's life, and that hasn't paid off.
Yep. We've now seen things like Yud's infamous request for weight loss tips where he preemptively warns that he'll block anyone who suggests he should diet or exercise, Scott trusting obvious hucksters because they belong to his social circle, effective altruism veering off into paranoid-eschatological fantasies about a hyperintelligent god-machine, the Basilisk foofaraw etc., not to mention graver situations like the absolute state of the Ziz crowd, and it's obvious that "rationalists" are not, by and large, considerably more rational when the chips are down than any old schmendrik. Which doesn't mean the entire output of the ratsphere is worthless -- I still think Scott is one of the most intelligent and interesting writers alive and working -- but the messianic sheen has worn off.
2: I enjoy the open threads, even if I only participate sometimes. Besides the comment section, the actual post is a nice miscellaneous space, like landings in a stairwell. I'd be sad if they went away, but I'd be even sadder if I learned that you hate them and only do them to please the audience.
If/when the emails bother me, I can always unsubscribe or filter them. I think you should keep them and encourage anyone complaining to set up a filter.
Has Scott written his thoughts on why comment likes are disabled? I tried searching for this and came up empty handed. Assuming it’s something like avoiding groupthink. In general, I’d like to better understand his mindset towards promoting quality discussion and how to identify threads worth reading.
As a casual reader, I’ve generally avoided comments on SCC and now ACT because I find them hard to navigate. Ie, I don’t want to waste time searching for a diamond in the rough. In contrast, I commonly read, and at times participate in, Slow Boring comment sections since the top comments are generally high quality.
Do veteran comment readers and participants have their own strategy for finding quality discussion? Eg, remembering subscribers by name or searching for keywords? Maybe quickly scanning through a thread before committing to a careful reading?
One of the downsides of substack is its primitive comment facilities. It's fairly obviously optimized for one-to-many communications, with occasional responses and even dialogue with the blog owner, not for discussion among subscribers.
Upvote systems have well known problems. People optimize their posts for likes. People who disagree with a post downvote it, and may thereby render it invisible to anyone who'd potentially be interested. You get echo chambers and anxiety attacks. Plus, often, a pack of fan children posting "this blogger is great. wow! the current article is the best thing anyone every thought on the topic" and then upvoting each other's posts. (That is, of course, great for a one-to-many system where the one poster may have a very fragile ego, needing constant praise to retain their mental equilibrium.)
I don't know Scott's opinions on upvote systems per se, but this topic was discussed in online places he frequented (like his own blog).
I agree about the limitations of upvote ranking systems.
While I don’t think it’s worth Substack’s effort from a business perspective, I do wish that they’d steal some ideas from Slashdot’s sophisticated comment moderation system, https://slashdot.org/faq/index.shtml#meta1 That would give Scott the tools to more easily curate comments in a way he finds agreeable.
Rather than simple likes, comments in this system are tagged with labels like “Insightful”, “Flamebait”, “Overrated”, etc. Not every user could participate in tagging. Instead, Slashdot had some heuristics to determine whether a user could serve as a “moderator” based upon the users comment quality history, account age, randomization, and meta-moderation of their previous tagging. Even then, users were limited in tagging power by being assigned moderation points at times, based on those heuristics, and each moderation decision cost them one point.
The full Slashdot system would be needlessly overcomplicated for just one Substack. Instead, at the simplest level, just the site author could apply tags. The author could define their own tags as well as how each factors into ranking. Eg, “Insightful” could be +1, “Flamebait” -1, and untagged just zero. To avoid groupthink, the tags could remain hidden for a day or so.
As a programmer, I could imagine a more sophisticated system that lets each user determine how to use tags contributed by all subscribers, on a per-a-subscriber basis. One could recreate the default Substack system by ranking comments using just a “Like” tag and considering all “Like” tags, contributed by all other subscribers, equally. At the other extreme, someone would likely have 5000 lines of SQL-esque logic declaring their sophisticated taste in comment consumption based upon select subscribers’ tagging decisions.
I agree that slashdots moderation system was pretty advanced and tried to overcome the typical groupthink inherent to simpler upvote/downvote systems.
Then again, I find the comments here rather readable even without moderation (especially when compared to most other websites).
So in a way this is a luxury problem: "how can one optimize so that if one spends N minutes reading an open thread, one will read the comments one find most interesting" instead of the usual "how can we keep the sewage level low enough that the readers won't drown".
While the modern approach would be ML ("chatGPT, find the ten comments I will find most interesting"), a low tech version would be a personalized page rank / web of trust lite system: user A marks some comments by B and C as "interesting". in turn, the comments they see will be sorted by the number of recommendations from B and C (or indirectly).
Of course, per user recommendations lead to filter bubbles and the destruction of consensus reality. But if people just select for their niche interests instead of politics, perhaps consensus reality can survive here.
Still, I don't think substack has any incentive to implement anything clever with the comment system.
I believe this came up in the early posts to substack that had content about missing/anti-features on substack that he was asking the site to improve. The lack of collapsing threads was also part of those topics, which might help search for them.
We had an entire discussion about this and Scott bowed to the consensus to remove them. I'm one of the "dislike" set since they all too readily devolve into popularity contests, whatever the original reason for setting them up.
Some people seem to use them to select "what is a good comment to read? check which has the most number of likes" but I don't find that metric useful. You could set up an "Orange Man Bad" comment (not on here, thank goodness) that gets a ton of "likes" in the spirit of "hell yeah!" but that doesn't make it a useful or interesting comment. But you can get a ton of "likes" in the sense of groupthink or dogpiling on someone, and that's not the purpose they should be used for.
I wouldn't mind if there was a "like" system set up and acknowledged to be nothing but fluff; a 'like' just means someone liked your comment or joke or is wishing you 👍 but it doesn't mean anything more than that. Don't use it to find good comments, that's not what it means.
But "like" systems that are used for "This is a good, quality, substantive comment" which *turn into* fluff systems of "Yeah, you go bro!" are the worst of all worlds so better to have no likes at all than that.
Best feature of twitter and redditt is sort chronological. It means there is a lot to wade through but its worth it for the gems! Its the student radio philosophy.
Interestingly, you are the canary in the coal mine for me for this. I search for your name on any post and read every thread you comment on, knowing you have done the work of figuring out what is worthwhile to even comment on, with the added benefit of getting to read your gorgeous writing as a bonus.
This begs an interesting question: What if Scott did a post on which commenters have a secret fan club? Not to be gauche, but there ARE influencers within this ACX ecosystem who are a big part of why we subscribe, precisely because we get their perspectives along with Scott's. We're paying for THAT as well; that is, who does Scott attract into his ecosystem that we also want to read?
"knowing you have done the work of figuring out what is worthwhile to even comment on"
Oh dear, I have unwittingly misled you! The only "work" I do is open up the new post/open thread, sort by "new" and read through *everything*.
Then I decide, based on what has snagged my attention, "What do I feel like fighting about today?" and "Someone is WRONG on the Internet".
There is nothing even vaguely approaching "let me sift through and find what is worthy of discussion" going on in the vast, echoing, empty halls of my skull, I assure you.
I lament the lack of "likes" for the same reason, but have settled on:
I search for commenters (using the browser search feature) who I know add something substantive. If they are doing the hard work of finding a topic worthwhile to comment on, I also know whatever they contribute will be interesting to read. "Carl Pham" and "Deiseach" are my current go to search terms.
Am I completely out of my mind, or do I occasionally receive an email from Substack saying that someone 'liked' my comment here on ACT? Is that possible?
Depends. If you're getting the emails by direct transmission from Space Overlord HQ on Phobos to your tooth fillings, then it might be something to discuss with your shrink.
Personally, I find those conversations uncomfortable, so I mostly keep my tooth fillings in airplane mode, I mean, unless my phone battery has died or something.
There are several ways: the 'like' button is still technically on this page, just hidden, so you can re-enable it with a CSS tweak, and if you see this comment in an e-mail notification then you can 'like' it from there.
Scott picks up and reposts his favorite comments from open threads and major discussions. That's not the same as getting everything ranked, but it's something.
When I'm late to a post & there are hundreds of comments to wade through, I generally will just skip any top-level comments with no replies, relying on a quasi wisdom-of-the-crowd effect to winnow the field to just those likeliest to be worth engaging with.
Anybody else here a Phi Beta Kappa member? I graduated college in 2017 and was offered membership, but have only done anything with it now--went to my metro area's holiday party recently and met a lot of interesting people. I work a fairly high-stress job and don't have many friends--which also seemed to be true of many of the people there--and it was a blast. People talk a lot about the loss of voluntary organizations and communities in the style of the old 20th-century civic organizations, but this did feel a bit like one.
Agreed. There are several companies that basically charge members thousands annually to be members of an exclusive club (there's a British one on the tip of my tongue but I can't quite remember its name). Seeing as lots of startup ideas are just trendy derivatives of things that already exist, I've always thought that an upscale Meetup that charged low four figures for exclusive access to get-togethers and parties in major cities is a good business idea. You'd be targeting lonely, high-income 20 to 30 somethings. The mere fact that you're paying significant money for it tricks your mind into thinking it's more valuable
It's not that simple. If you do only what you're proposing, you're going to have 50:1 male:female ratio at your social club (and then nobody is going to want to come).
You need to do social engineering to get the vibe correct, which is the actually difficult part.
I am technically a member, & get sent a publication every so often, but never considered going to a meeting. Every mailing I got, and especially the publication, sounded incredibly uptight and humorless. Somebody should tell them to try to correct that impression. Have a forum like this one or something. where people can communicate in normal slangy ways instead of in academese.
Yes. The party was a blast, but the comms need some work--I've been having trouble getting in touch with some of the people in my chapter, partially I think because the positions are all volunteer and staffed by people without much free time. There's a Facebook group, but my old Facebook account went up in smoke when my laptop got bricked (no good way to get it back, I think).
What would really be ideal is a 2006-style phpBB forum.
To answer the second question: I don't usually read or post to open threads—I *think* this is the first time—but I find it oddly comforting to get the emails, knowing that the discussion is, so to speak, being well handled off-stage and that I can not concern myself with it. So I hope they keep coming. (Plus I always read the announcements, in case there's anything relevant, like the time Scott wrote a whole post in announcement bullet points.)
If you announce anything in the open thread, please send an email. If it's literally just the thread and nothing else, I don't care one way or the other.
I'm not worried about missing OTs if the emails stop. I still appreciate the emails because they are a suitable announcement that a new OT is up and they usually contain some small notes to read.
With the recent wide availability of text to image models and AI generated media in general we soon won’t be able to know whether an image or video is original or fake. We should start timestamping all the media that exists as of now, which is mostly human generated, so at least it will be known what existed as of early 2023. This can be done at scale on the blockchain. There is an article from Gwern explaining how to do it. It just takes someone to actually do it. One could start with wikimedia commons. Thoughts?
The idea is to hash each image independently, then compile table with N hashes and hash that. This should reduce the amount of data you end up paying for writing to the blockchain. More here: https://gwern.net/Timestamping
- "on the blockchain" seems redundant (as always).
- The solution to this kind of issue is trust. We give (gave?) weight to the photos published in newspapers because a large, trustworthy organization gave us their word that the photo wasn't doctored and actually depicts what is claimed (time, location, subject). In the future, all images will be suspect by default, unless someone explicitly claims credit for them.
I am usually the first to call bs on anything of the sort kids these days call "crypto", but I think revision-proofing the past is actually one of the less terrible uses for block chains.
If some news organisation was wary of retconning / 1984esque shenanigans, they could calculate a cryptographic hash of all their articles (e.g. in pdf format) once a week and put it in the bitcoin blockchain. Any attempt to retcon that would require attacking the blockchain.
Using the "hashing a list of hashes scheme", the asymptotic cost per hash will be zero.
Of course, this only safeguards the fact that the hashed file was created at a certain date, not that it was published anywhere in particular. If such a thing were to take off, it would be easy to pre-create articles one wants to add to the consensus later and get their hashes on the hash list.
I agree we need a tamper-proof record of the past, or history becomes a target of manipulation. However, this idea may come into conflict with the ideology of privacy and the "Right to be forgotten", put into law via the GDPR, and espoused for instance by the developers of Mastodon, who profess that compiling a searchable index of all Mastodon posts would enable abuse and is therefore forbidden.
Note how screencaps are used on Twitter to attempt to hold people accountable for their deleted tweets.
We would not be storing any sensitive data though. Just allowing a third party who already owns a given media to know whether it existed at a certain date, for which only hashes are needed. And one cannot reconstruct the original data from its hash.
OK but if I see Charlie tweeting racist crap, I want to archive the data as well as a hash & timestamp. It's not about giving Charlie the right to say "this is my data" (for ex music copyrights) -- it's about being able to prove "Charlie spewed racist crap on June 16, 2023". For this to work, someone other than Charlie has to archive the data. It's explicitly about _not_ giving Charlie the right to be forgotten, or hide or unsay things he actually said.
The original idea here is called a digital timestamping service, and was proposed a really long time ago (1990) by Haber and Stornetta. They had a company doing this for awhile, and ironically, the immutable thing they used to stick the daily or weekly hashes in was an ad in a newspaper, the logic then being that with the millions of copies going out into the world, it would be impossible to get away with changing it.
This is the hash chaining (or Merkle tree-ing) part of blockchain, without the distributed consensus part.
The blockchain can't prove that an image was made by a human, or that it wasn't edited, or that it comes from a trustworthy source. All it does is prove that an image was created no later than the time it was put on the chain. That seems like a fairly specific use case and one that won't be relevant for the vast majority of Wikimedia Commons.
It won't even be useful for most investigative journalism because most of the time you're photographing very recent events - "Joe Politician got photographed with a hooker yesterday" and "Joe Politician was photoshopped into an image of a hooker yesterday" will have exactly the same timestamp.
Maybe you're more worried about attempts to rewrite historical events, but for historical events a timestamp from today is not really useful. If I don't believe we landed on the moon in 1969, then what good does an image timestamped 2023 do me? All it does is prove that the moon landings weren't deepfaked, but that was never the issue.
One of the advantages of distributed, censorship resistant timestamping is in countering the kind of systematic orwellian rewriting of the past that a totalitarian state actor could be interested in carrying out. The intensity of propaganda pushed by either side even in the context of the latest regional conflict suggests that disinformation in the future will be carried out on a grand scale and with AI involvement. Think of this in the context of a NATO-China confrontation with both sides actively polluting the historical record, possibly coupled with the accidental or deliberate destruction of hardcopy originals during military operations.
My issue is that most of the past an authoritarian would want to rewrite existed long before timestamping, so a timestamp would be too distant to help.
If China wants to deny that Tiananmen Square happened, timestamping doesn't help you because it can't prove that the photo of the tank man dates to 1989, only to "sometime before 2023." But of course, vile anti-China propaganda already existed back in 2023, so that date is no proof that the image is authentic.
(Edit: More importantly, even if you could prove that the photo of the tank man was created in 1989 with some ironclad chain of evidence, that wouldn't prove he was a peaceful protester rather than whatever narrative the Chinese government prefers.)
I agree that the best time to start timestamping would have been a few centuries ago (at least) but the next best is now. At any rate the fact that secret documents get declassified over ~50 years proves that governments care about controlling information about the recent past most. Eventually tian an men square will be like the crusades: everyone will know about it and no one will care.
it was possible to level cities with conventional artillery well before the invention of nuclear weapons. Still most people think that antiproliferation efforts are worthwhile. If a piece of information exists only in digital form (as is increasingly the case) the ability to seamlessly doctor it will be weaponized. Especially when deleting something is harder than corrupting it in a subtle way.
2. I get notified of new posts via RSS feed and would be unhappy if open threads didn't show up there. I suspect that will continue even without emails though, because I also get notified of paid-subscriber-only posts via RSS (I'm not a paid subscriber) and I infer that that means that you don't have fine-grained knobs to control whether something gets sent to RSS or not.
You recently unlocked a post called "It's Bad On Purpose To Make You Click," in which you reprised your view from "Sort By Controversial": that the bizarre spiraling extremism of today's political discourse comes from trolls trying to start disagreements. But I don't buy it.
Trolls like PETA are annoying, but in my opinion internet bad-on-purpose-ness is mostly driven by true believers (or earnest pretenders) trying to give costly signals of true belief to their fellow congregants. Polarization has I think been driven by people preaching in exaggerated ways to their presumed choirs; they preach those versions of their beliefs which they think are extremely unpopular among other political faiths, to credibly signal that they would be allies with people who believe in moderated variants of these beliefs.
Not too long ago, I wrote a longer piece which dealt with this; here's a germane excerpt:
Of course, borders also define political communities, not just individuals: groups that spread by something more like contagion than inheritance, where the membrane acts more like a weapon than a shield. But what kind of weapon? Is it more like a sword, or like rust? Like an agent, or a bomb? Like life or else like rot? Consider, respectively, whether the group in question uses costly signals to practice purity or to signify allegiance. It’s the difference between an echo chamber which spirals into cohesive extremism, and a debate club which descends into dishonest excommunications. Ironically, the former binds ingroups together and alienates them from others through its peacocking competitions. In contrast, the latter’s individuals demonstrate loyalty by splitting potential allies apart across every minor difference. It’s a chorus of believers chanting “I won’t fall below our average” versus a far stranger and more dissonant cry… can you believe that we still have a bottom half, and they’re allowed to lurk among us? People often conflate these two strategies, but they imply pretty much opposite consequences. On the one hand, “gossip traps” push members of a given faith to compete myopically over whichever singular axis they’ve already agreed to valorize, rather than competing about how it should fracture. On the other hand are pseudo-groups like PETA, who mostly seem to exist as mere disruptive negations of every other sect; who dominate animal welfare discourse because they find an obnoxious way to divide relevant audiences 50-50 on what could have been a popular issue. There will then be more division, and more willingness to argue, to proclaim which side you’re on of ever more debates, which become ever more fragmentary, and fragile. They suck attention away from other approaches and focus it on shattering coalitions. Think of this as a secret war between subscribe and retweet, between preaching and trolling, between two ways to mine our latent ideologies, voice versus reset. (Obviously, self-accelerating social harmony should sometimes be hoisted by its own PETArds, as dominant cults may become so smothering that even their adherents wish for a wrecker to set them free, or to break off their subset-shard).
In both cases, we’d stubbornly pick ineffective-yet-visible masks over more effective but less visible covid interventions, like sealing national borders. However, in the former case the rationale would be “look how many more masks I can wear than my neighbors, who agree that masking is good.” In contrast, the latter group would say “look how much I favor annoying policies that half of the people around me hate.” And, of course, the former describes masking better, because the latter would’ve predicted against the clear geographic polarization which we got. Maybe the main underlying difference is that PETA types agitate over those actions which reach fundamentally beyond us—how do we politicize animals, how do we fetishize women, how do we tokenize blacks—whereas mask-wearing is the sort of thing which we straightforwardly participate in or don’t, and which thus feels much more immersive and alive than do acrimonious “debates.” In light of this, I’m not concerned when, say, Planned Parenthood stokes controversy by tweeting that “pro-choice” is a compromise position fit for cowards and reactionaries, because their true fans must all now be avowedly pro-abortion. Desperate husks of has-been organizations, past their prime, hungry for engagement, often act out in just such a last gasp, like old B-listers, for much the same reasons, throwing lame scandals at uninterested paparazzi, wheezing about how they’ve been let down by lapsed fans. That’s not worrisome for anyone outside their orbit, and generally portends their dissolution. In contrast, any sufficiently cloistered dogma can bootstrap its own hysteria, can propel itself aloft on groupthink feedback loops, and this drives history. This is what I think many critiques of “luxury beliefs” get wrong, by focusing on PETAbytes of trolls and costly signals, and it’s why I think the standard kvetching about social media misses its real explosive power. It’s the difference between two styles of information theory (between semantics and syntax, between actual content and storage capacity, between subjective surprisal and objective distinguishability). It’s an info-war between computation as a process and an output (which is to say, it’s Kullback-Leibler Divergence versus the Bayesian Angel).
If you're not familiar with it, Scott's "Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers" lays out explicitly what "Bad on Purpose" is riffing on. It's not the main cause of polarization and extremism I don't think, but it is a common tactic used to make you hate the other side that it's good to be on guard against.
Does anyone have any recommendations for blogs/substacks/podcasts centered around films/literature? Ideally ones where discussion of capitalism is kept to a minimum
He's personally interested in analyzing the different things from a Christian perspective, but... he's a geek about art/aesthetics, and he kind of can't resist teaching people what he knows sooo... that's where his focus goes!
Does anyone have experience with solving headaches caused by a pinched nerve in the back? I’m having tremendous headaches every time the nerve in my back gets aggravated. I’m going to ask my doctor about gabapeptin but that seems to not work for everyone. Also, I’m talking Valium to relieve the headaches because other painkillers are not working. Is it safe to take Valium sporadically? I’m concerned about the side effects of taking one or two every couple of weeks as I’ve read that daily use can cause cognitive decline, but not sure if rare use is also harmful. Any advice is appreciated.
I highly recommend the site PainScience. Everything there's evidence-based. You can search it. Guy who built it has lots of stuff about back pain. Something I highly recommend is his little map of "perfect spots" on the back for applying pressure by doing something like lying on a small hard rubber ball. I have a terrible back, and get very substantial pain relief by doing this. My problem is quite unlike yours, though -- it's back pain, not pain referred elsewhere -- but I'm impressed by the efficacy of the trigger point trick, and so tell everybody about it who might conceivably benefit.
Regarding valium: I'm a psychologist, not an MD, but have read up on valium, and also have many patients who take drugs in that class. You are right that valium is habit forming. If you take it on a regular basis you will gradually need larger doses, and will have an unpleasant withdrawal syndrome when you stop taking it. But taking one or 2 every couple weeks is too infrequent for you to develop tolerance to the stuff. I'm pretty sure there are other drugs that are also muscle relaxants. Maybe some of them are less likely to be habit forming than valium. Might be good to check. Maybe you can get more relief without having to worry about habit-forming nature of drug.
Not a doctor, don’t have back pain, but I did read something once where someone with major pinched nerve issues took ketamine once and it fixed things. There are ketamine infusion clinics everywhere these days so it might be worth a try.
For anyone in Canada, there is a great new magazine being published called Urban Progress, focused on themes such as Progress Studies and the abundance agenda (similar to Scott's writing on Left-Libertarianism), with a specific emphasis on the intersection of these themes with urban issues.
A solution to low TFR (fertility per couple) might be both egg freezing and IVF treatment even in couples with a good chance of normal pregnancy. The odds of having twins is higher and could be enough to get the fertility rate back to higher than 2.0.
Somewhat unrelated but I read that the natural twinning rate is steadily increasing. I wonder if a small fraction of this effect is related to the fact that in the era of family planning unexpected twin pregnancies are a huge fitness boost (2x the number of offspring if the parents were planning to have an only child). Polycystic ovary syndrome comes to mind as a mechanism.
The era of family planning is about two generations old - in the western world. This seems far too short for there to be a noticeable effect from selection.
"This seems far too short for there to be a noticeable effect from selection."
It seems to be not so much selected for, as an unanticipated effect. Family planning means putting off childbearing until the potential mother is older (and not "get married in early twenties, have two kids, then restrict or space out further births" as it was originally set out to be) and seemingly the older you are, the more the likelihood of twins goes up.
"Twinning rates historically have been higher among non-Hispanic black women. The difference has narrowed over the three decades, however, as twinning rates for non-Hispanic white mothers have risen at a greater pace. In 2009, the twinning rate for non-Hispanic black mothers (38.0 per 1,000) was only slightly higher than that for non-Hispanic white mothers (37.0).
Hispanic mothers continue to be less likely to bear twins. In 2009, their rate (22.5 per 1,000) was about two-thirds that of non-Hispanic white and non-Hispanic black women.
Historically, twin birth rates have risen with advancing age, peaking at 35–39 years and declining thereafter . Since 1997, however, rates have been highest among women in their 40s.
In 1980, women aged 30 and over accounted for about 20 percent of all births (i.e., singletons, twins, and higher-order multiples), compared with more than 35 percent for 2000–2009.
The increasingly older age of mothers over the decades would be expected to influence twin birth rates because of the higher spontaneous (i.e., without the use of fertility therapies) twinning rates of women in their 30s."
In any situation where you can raise two kids to puberty but you want to raise only one an unexpected twin pregnancy is a fitness boost. Not so in a malthusian world where one or both twins will starve.
Or perhaps greater rates of assisted fertility? IVF and the likes? If you're putting off childbearing until you have an established career, you will be older when you decide that a baby can now be slotted in and not disrupt your schedule too much, and the older you get for first pregnancy, the more likely to need some help.
Okay, I looked this up and preliminary search indicates that it is tied to increased maternal age but not IVF on its own, though that too contributes:
Older, fatter, using IVF seems to be the quick answer here.
"One study associated rising obesity rates with increases in twinning, citing that overweight or tall women are more likely to have twins.
The 2012 study of twin birth rates identifies maternal age as a leading factor contributing to the increase in twins. The largest increase in twin birth rates was realized among women over the age of 30. In fact, twin birth rates have risen with advancing age, peaking at 35 to 39 years and then declining. However, twin birth rates have been highest among women who are age 40 and older.
This increase correlates to a shift in the age distribution of women giving birth during the 30 years of the study. Where only 20% of women giving birth in 1980 were over age 30 the same population accounted for 35% of births after 2000. Not surprisingly, the increasing older age of mothers influences twin birth rates because of the higher spontaneous (i.e., without the use of fertility therapies) twinning rates of women in their 30s.
The study estimates that one-third of the increase in the twin birth rate can be attributed to an elevation in maternal age.
That correlation continues to hold true in recent years. In 2014, the majority of multiples were born to mothers over the age of 30.
Fertility treatments are largely assumed to the cause behind the increase in twins, and this study supports that theory. The study cites infertility treatments as being responsible for about two-thirds of the increase in the twin birth rate from 1980 to 2009."
Maybe this is irrelevant for how the "natural twinning rate" is calculated, but I would also guess a significantly higher % of twin pregnancies result in successful birth of both twins than even just 100 (50?) years ago.
I would guess that the level of acceptance for such a proposal would be close to zero, even if the process were completely free. IVF treatments are a pain, carrying twins increase the risks for both the babies and the mother during pregnancy, birth defect are more frequent among twins and the first years with twins can be quite difficult for the parents.
Egg freezing is a mechanism for women to get their career on the road and then have children later. It’s generally advertised as a fertility fix but it isn’t really, not when the eggs are frozen. It’s perhaps a future fertility fix.
Or, you could ask people why they aren't having more children, despite stated number of desired children being c.2.5 in many Western countries (and below 2 in all of them):
Money (this links into housing as well), time (atomisation of families), and didn't meet a partner/met them too late. This survey certainly matches my anecdotal social experience (I do in fact have a child and am likely to have another, but I earn a lot of money, have family nearby, and met my partner in my early twenties).
Even though I rarely comment, I really appreciate getting email notifications about open threads, since you usually have something short to say for each of them. I'm *technically* less interested in the Hidden Open Thread mails, because those don't usually have a Scott preamble, but if you toggled emails off for those articles, I think I might sometimes get paranoid about missing the one or other proper article!
Katherine Rundell's biography of John Donne describes the theological and legal impediments to suicide as factors that could drive the suicidal to commit murder -- the theory being that if one murdered a (baptized) child who had not attained the age of reason, the child would presumptively go to heaven, and then one would have the opportunity to repent before being executed for the crime.
I am skeptical. Given the long list of capital crimes in Renaissance England, many of which we would regard as petty crimes against property rather than persons, or even speech crimes, a person wishing to commit suicide via the state authorities would have options that put far less weight on the conscience than becoming a reluctant murderer.
Is there historical evidence that such reluctant murderers were more than an isolated anecdote?
Otherwise, this sounds like a contemporary domestic murder-suicide, (with a pause to let the state authorities finish the act). The murder is part of the intent, and not merely a means to an end.
I'm not sure what you're referring to or what time period specifically. But in most time periods in England you cold simply steal a sheep and then confess or something like that. You could also become a soldier or emigrate to far off lands which, while not automatically deadly, effectively cut you off completely from your old life. And often was deadly.
There wouldn't have been any advantage in committing a murder with the aim of being convicted and executed, as a form of "suicide by state", unless it was a murder one wanted to commit anyway and commit "two felonies for the price of one" as it were.
Like murder, suicide was a felony. Obviously a suicide couldn't be executed, as they were already dead. But on conviction for any felony, all one's goods and chattels were forfeit. So it was very much in the interest of would-be suicides with any possessions to disguise their intent, or else pretend to be mad, so their will would be honoured and their dependents not cast into penury.
In conversation with a long-time alcoholic I remember his belief that quite a lot of single-car fatal accidents are really suicides. Who can tell? The only witness is dead.
Okay, this sounds like a biography I want to read because I am interested in Donne. And if it is as tin-eared about attitudes as you describe, it could well be worth it for the mockery potential alone. This sounds like Naomi Wolf's (in)famous sodomy executions blunder:
Not alone did she get the legal technicalities wrong, she presented prosecutions of at least one man for what we would now call child sex abuse as prosecution (and persecution) simply for being gay:
Thanks for the recommendation! I agree, if you wanted to be hanged or otherwise executed by the state, there would be a lot easier ways to go about it (e.g. say something disparaging in public about the monarch). Delving into it, it would seem to stem from Donne having written a 'defence of suicide':
Not having read this how much is serious and how much is in the mode of More's earlier "Utopia" or Swift's later "A Modest Proposal" is hard to say. If it's meant as the paradoxical treatment of suicide by a Metaphysical poet that starts off with "so why is suicide so bad, then, really?" before coming to the orthodox conclusion, then taking it literally would be the wrong interpretation.
Which, following the link to the Google books version online, and reading the Conclusion, it seems to be: "take this as a lie, but lies can be medicine, 'by the same reason am I excusable in this Paradox'".
When you say "this sounds like a contemporary domestic murder-suicide", are you referring to a specific event? Is there any evidence at all such things happened?
Incidentally, the number of crimes punishable by the death penalty increased dramatically going into the 1700's (look up the "Bloody Code"). This is one of those historical facts that go against what people expect (that the legal system became stricter during the Enlightenment), like the fact that persecutions of witches were characteristic of the Renaissance or early modern era, not of the middle ages.
Please keep the notifications - I enjoy the little tidbits of interesting info that come with the open threads, and also the free-form discussion and ideas found in the open threads themselves.
They are at least as valuable to me as the formal comment threads for the 'proper' content, and they provide a valuable outlet for different ideas that don't fit in other comment threads.
Without an email to prompt me, I fear I would slowly disengage, not because I want to but because I'd forget about them without the reminder.
Is the Kantian categorical imperative still taken seriously by philosophers nowadays as a basis for ethics? I feel like I often see people talking about it as if it's still one of the main theories in moral philosophy, but I never see anyone actually defending or using it.
In this post I argue that Terry Pratchett, as well as being a popular fantasy writer and a comic writer, was a moral writer, and a Kantian where morals are concerned. His success suggests that there is still an audience for these ethical ideas: https://amechanicalart.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-categorical-im-pratchettive.html
Kantianism is very much an active and prominent tradition within contemporary ethical and meta-ethical scholarship. There are well-regarded journals dedicated to Kantian philosophy (e.g. Kantian Review and Kant-Studien); practically any survey of philosophical perspectives on an ethical issue (e.g. a bioethics report or a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry) will include a section on Kantian views; and Kantian faculty are prominent or predominant in almost all university philosophy departments.
Utilitarian views were more prevalent in political philosophy for much of the 20th century, but the work of John Rawls sparked an ongoing revival of interest in Kantian-inspired political philosophy (built in various ways around respect for individual autonomy and the categorical imperative) started in the '70s. Another particularly active area is in detangling Kant's construction of "humanity" and "rationality" from Enlightenment prejudices; for example, one of Charles Mills's latest and most-discussed projects was on "Black Radical Kantianism", and Christine Korsgaard has made a huge splash in animal ethics over the past two decades with an argument for nonhuman animal rights based on Kantian meta-ethics.
TL;DR: any good book, blog, other resources about psychosis?
I know someone who has psychotic episodes, like believing for a couple of days that some sort of shape-shifting monster killed me and took my place. Obviously this should be handled through professional care by psychiatrist, psychologists, etc. But when my daughter got diagnosed with diabetes, reading about blood sugar enabled me to cook more appropriate meals, better handle sugar lows and highs, and so on. Does anyone have resources about psychosis at a similar level of details and applicability to recommend? Thanks!
Are you saying the person only has the delusion for a couple days at a time? If so, that's pretty unusual. Most of the time if somebody becomes psychotic they stay that way for quite a while, and sometimes permanently. I'm a psychologist, and have seen a lot of psychotic people, but can't think of a book to send you to. Well, there's *The Eden Express* by Mark Vonnegut, a wonderfully written autobiographical account. It does help people who have not been psychotic have a picture of what it's like to be in that state, but it does not give any practical suggestions. If the person is only psychotic for a couple of days at a time, seems to me that what you need is to find ways to be with someone who temporarily thinks you're a shape-shifting monster. Or maybe a decent solution is just to not see them then. But if you are responsible for helping them get through the psychotic period without wrecking their life, it's more complicated. Or if you are the only person who might convince them to see a professional, that's complicated in another way. Seems especially important for them to see a professional if these episodes are oddly brief and discrete. Makes me wonder whether the episodes might be some weird form of epilepsy, or tied to hormonal changes in the menstrual cycle if the person is a woman. If it's something like that, condition might be treatable in the sense of fixable (as opposed to treatable with antipsychotics, which do work pretty well but at the cost of weight gain and feeling dulled down and sleepy).
Thanks, I'll check Vonnegut's book. I agree that it's weird. My father (unrelatedly) has schizophrenia, and it has been a different experience for me. I have some first-hand, second-hand and reading knowledge of anxiety, depression, and related phenomena, but it seems to me that there's (at least) one other completely different cluster/gradient where paranoia, delusions, hallucinations, and full-on psychosis live. Or maybe they don't have anything to do with each other, I don't know.
One further thought about whattup with your acquaintance: It is also possible that the reason their psychosis is so odd is that they are pretending to be psychotic. This possibility is much likelier if they are a very dramatic person with lots of chaos and dramatic events in their life, lots of emergencies. However, it’s always better to believe someone, even mistakenly, than to mistakenly doubt them, so just keep the possibility that this psychosis is not real somewhere in the back of your mind.
I found this interesting, and although it's more about support and positivity than How To for family members and friends, there are a lot of entries, and the quality of the writing and videography is high. You can also follow along in time to get a longtudinal sense of how it goes over time:
I watch that fairly regularly as well. There's a related channel associated with Students With Psychosis that I heard about via Special Books by Special Kids, but they (SWP) haven't updated it in a long time.
It did! The Wikipedia page mentions some relevant comorbidities (e.g., it's a female patient in a family with a big history of diabetes). Thanks for sharing!
Anyone tried sections on their blog? Could you share your experience, what works and what does not, and what is different than you would intuitively expect?
I rarely post in (or read comments on) Open Threads, but I like getting the emails; I skim the "Also:" list you include and occasionally see something I would have otherwise missed.
I'm okay with just checking my feed alerts for posts (I get too many emails as it is).
What I'm really after though, is comment reply alerts. I used to get notifications through substack when I got a reply, but now I don't anymore; I have to go back to the comment thread to look. With Wordpress blogs I can add comments to my RSS feed, but I can't do that Substack. Has anybody found a way around this?
I appreciate the emails, as I like reading whatever extra information you provide with the open threads. I usually don't check the comments, so I'm not really the target audience.
According to Marx, one of the main differences between the European and Asian economic systems was the absence of private land ownership in the latter (“Asiatic mode of production”). Does anyone know exceptions to this rule (i.e., Asian countries where farmers personally owned the land they worked on)?
The Agricultural Revolution in Scotland was a series of changes in agricultural practice that began in the 17th century and continued in the 19th century. They began with the improvement of Scottish Lowlands farmland and the beginning of a transformation of Scottish agriculture from one of the least modernised systems to what was to become the most modern and productive system in Europe. The traditional system of agriculture in Scotland generally used the runrig system of management, which had possibly originated in the Late Middle Ages. The basic pre-improvement farming unit was the baile (in the Highlands) and the fermetoun (in the Lowlands). In each, a small number of families worked open-field arable and shared grazing. Whilst run rig varied in its detail from place to place, the common defining detail was the sharing out by lot on a regular (probably annual) basis of individual parts ("rigs") of the arable land so that families had intermixed plots in different parts of the field.
Most of East Asia allowed for that style ownership of land. They also mostly had rather advanced ideas of private ownership. It was just that land commonly belonged to landlords. Though not all of it. And even there the leases of the land were often more or less generational and permanent. Russian style communes were not common in East Asia. That's more of a European thing. Most villages had internal property rights with regards to land. Peasants would own fields and could sell them or rent them, for example.
I would be something of a "light marxist" if such thing would exist, but... Marx was not well informed about Asian economies. It is my understanding that in China, they absolutely had private ownership of land going back centuries. Song dynasty China had been described by some authors as a society unusually friendly to small scale landowners compared to other premodern polities. See Dieter Kuhn and his history of that dynasty (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08138BMWY/ref=kinw_myk_ro_title). Yeah, admittedly only book I had read on that topic.
Nah. Sometimes he has other messages, like this one about do you like/dislike these mails, in the same mail. Discontinuing Open Thread mails, and putting the other message in mails that are Headline useful to me would increase the signaling ratio of the newsletter.
So this idea of minting a trillion dollar platinum coin and depositing it somewhere in order to raise the borrowing limit seems like an accounting trick too far to me.
I’m no economist but I can imagine some really cool heist movies spinning off this thing.
The Schoolhouse Rock stuff doesn't provide a lot of guidance when Congress gives you contradicting instructions.
Congress has told the Executive to spend $X on the programs they've funded, and to not go more than $Y into debt to do so, and Congress doesn't care that X > Y. Biden can't do both, except by either defaulting, or finding an alternative source of money that doesn't legally create debt (platinum coins, premium Treasuries, etc). Defaulting is undoubtedly the worse option, so the Treasury is forced to pick one of the alternatives if Congress doesn't act.
That's not really accurate. Congress passes spending authorizations, to be sure, and directs that certain programs exist and do certain things, but only in rare circumstances does it specifically direct that $X be spent on a certain particular project. And the Executive Branch has wide discretion anyway in how it implements the laws directing agency work -- which it frequently uses during budget arguments[1] to pressure Congress in various ways.
Anyway, the idea that each and every Federal agency and bureau simply would grind to a halt and Repubilc collapse if they were all suddenly required to spend 10% less in the next 6 months is a priori silly, and no one of sense would believe it. There are certainly entitlements that cannot be cut a dollar (SS and government pensions et cetera), but the Pentagon could find a way to operate the USS Ford using 10% less dollars if they really wanted to, and I daresay the Department of Education could hand out fewer "research grants" or have more conferences by Zoom at their desks and fewer in hotels.
Paul Krugman has endorsed the idea, as if you needed any further reason to oppose it.
Seriously though, embracing the trillion dollar coin would be an explicit admission that the US dollar is monopoly money. Which we all kind of know already but we (and especially our leaders) are supposed to pretend otherwise. It makes you wonder why our government bothers going through the motions of collecting taxes at all, when there's no pretense that taxes will even come close to covering our spending and they can create infinity dollars at will.
Also, having read that whole Wikipedia page, the "beowulf" who was credited with the idea wouldn't be the same beowulf who posts here, would it?
> [the current situation] lets Congress approve tax and spending bills that imply a large budget deficit — tax and spending bills the president is legally required to implement — and then lets Congress refuse to grant the president authority to borrow, preventing him from carrying out his legal duties and provoking a possibly catastrophic default.
I do not approve of raising debt, but I think that income + spending + debt should be decided as parts of one package. Rather than just saying "we want to spend X dollars, and it's your problem where to find them, just don't increase the taxes or the debt".
IIRC Krugman got mad when somebody suggested that if the trillion dollar coin had no problematic side effects (as he had claimed) - then why not mint ten of them? Or a hundred?
Wasn't it the Roman Empire that fell in part from devalued currency, not the Republic? (Funny, most people make that mistake the other way, and seem to think Caesar was the *end* of Roman history)
I think the point is that a trillion dollar coin not in circulation doesn't devalue the currency, because it's not actually putting any more currency out there, it's just an accounting trick. It only devalues currency to the extent that a firm and unmoving debt ceiling is an important part of faith in the American fiat dollar and that doesn't seem likely.
If your entire economy is reliant on One Weird Trick, Economists Hate Us For This then yeah - it's Last Days of the Empire time.
"Money" has already become divorced from any kind of physical tether in the real world, but this is just throwing up your hands and admitting that the concept itself is meaningless and why not let forgers print money because their paper is just as good as the Mint's paper because it's all only paper - or binary states in a computer, more like.
I mean, you could make a good argument that the entire concept of "lending" money you don't have (because it's lent to some else), which banks have been doing for centuries (if not millennia) is "One Weird Trick", but it's essential to having a modern economy.
I mean, more or less? Not of the same magnitude, but fractional banking is just as much an accounting trick as minting coins, but it's viewed as normal because it's the status quo - and the government uses its monopoly on force to enforce debt contracts. If you're skipping the middle man, it's not categorically different.
(This all has the implicit assumption that the US can later "withdraw" the coin and destroy it; the impact of creating new dollars with zero intention of returning them is beyond the scope of the simple comparison)
But the bank is supposed to have *something* on hand if I, the customer, go to withdraw what I have on deposit with them, and if they can't cover that - this is where we get runs on banks. As FTX discovered.
The bank can't go "Pffft, what is 'money' anyway? Here's a scrap of paper saying we owe you 1 gazillion turgogs, that should cover it!" "But nobody takes turgogs, this is useless to me" "We take turgogs, want to deposit that with us?" "No, I want my $2,000!" "Oh come on, you have a gazillion turgogs, that's the same thing really"
That's... not actually true. The whole idea of the banking system in most countries is that people *won't* all go ask at the same time, and the reason we don't have banking runs is mainly because of FDIC (or your country's equivalent) deposit insurance. Your deposit units aren't actually dollars/pounds/euros - they're a contract between you and the bank. And, indeed, the contract is a 0-day loan that you can redeem for one unit of hard currency at any point, but the bank most certainly will not have something on hand to cover its entire deposit base. It wouldn't be very useful if it did!
Bank runs were precisely what I was alluding to, yes. In reality, the banks hold only a tiny fraction of the assets they purport to lend. In practice, though, customers won't try to withdraw every single asset the banks have, because we've realized that allowing that is a bad thing and created regulations to prevent it (and require the "small fraction" to be large enough to work in most circumstances). We've made it so the fiction won't be tested.
In the same way, no holder of the US debt is going to try to collect on it, they'll accept the fiction because it's better for their holdings if they do (even if they have to accept a chunk of platinum as collateral until the anti-government-efficacy party losses power)
It's an accounting trick that's designed to circumvent legal obstacles to other people "printing money" in terabuck quantities, so as soon as it is clear that it is going to be used, the market will start pricing in an additional trillion dollars of imminently-circulating money. Plus a risk premium for "Oh Lord, if they were stupid enough to think we were going to ignore this, what damn fool thing will they come up with next?"
Inflation is like alcoholism. People really have to hit rock bottom before they run out of comforting delusions, learn the hard lesson thoroughly, and start threatening to hang politicians who play games with the money in order to secure the Free Lunch that was part of their campaign platform. I don't think we're there yet.
I dunno, much of the world in the 1970s had inflation that was pretty bad, but I don't think we ever exactly hit rock bottom--I mean, we never did the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe thing where we wrecked our economy and turned our currency into trash. We just had prices going up by 10%+ every year for a few years.
"Rock bottom" is different for different people. Depends what they're used to. In Zimbabwe, yeah, "rock bottom" is pretty...bottom. They're used to shitty, so it has to be *really* shitty. But the US in say 1975-77 felt like a miserable place, relative to what it had been, and many thought it could be. For us that was "rock bottom."
The point I'm making is that any number of erudite lectures or watching of history films doesn't make a people turn away from playing games with money. Only bitter experience does, and it has to be bitter enough that they forswear the glamor of the Free Lunch. Deiseach expressed the frame of mind here when she said she wouldn't bet on even something that seemed like a sure thing, because she's learned that none of her bets work out, no matter how good an idea they seemed at the time.
That's where we need to be. People need to listen to the latest brilliant scheme coming out of the Fed meeting, clever political ads, and CEOs of successful firms, and say yeah that seems really smart, like it would solve all our problems, and I can't see a thing wrong with it -- but all our schemes to buy something for nothing via money magic have come to bad ends, so, sorry, but nope, not going to do it.
I hope the first movie is them stealing the coin, (Biden's 11?) and the second movie is them trying to figure out how to launder a literally one-of-a-kind piece of currency.
On the face of it, it sounds nonsensical. If the idea was to get a heap of platinum worth a trillion dollars and put it someplace like Fort Knox, so that in case of the debt becoming payable there would an asset to sell off to the Chinese, then fine. This is not that plan, though.
As a separate question, how on earth did a budget necessitating a figure like a *trillion* ever come about, in the name of Hermes Empolaios? Though I begin to understand why he is patron of both merchants *and* thieves.
Gold would work better. Platinum is a useful industrial catalyst so its price is positively correlated with how the global economy, especially manufacturing, is doing.
Twitter poster describes self thusly: "P. D. Mangan Health & Freedom Maximalist 🇺🇸
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This man does not smell smart honest and accurate to me.
Looked quickly at study. They had 2 groups of men diagnosed with ED (erectile dysfunction), some of whom took Viagra or some such, some of whom did not. They matched the groups on age, and various measures that predict heart disease, such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol, and also matched them on whether they took meds to control these risk factors. Then they watched to see who died over 10+ years of study. Fewer men on Viagra died. One obvious confound I see is that men were not matched for SES (socioeconomic status) or quality of health care they were getting, also were not matched on other measures that predict life expectancy, such as presence/absence of chronic illness such as diabetes, emphysema, cancer, etc. Seems quite likely to me that high SES men, who are known to have better health than low SES, are more likely to get Viagra -- partly because they see the docs more often. Also, is there a cost to viagra? Sounds to me like the kind of thing not all insurance would cover, so higher income would be also be a factor making higher SES men more likely to use the stuff. As for whether men with chronic bad health are less likely to use viagra, I'm not sure. Seems possible. On the other hand, but probably they'd be more likely to have ED, so maybe they're more likely to use viagra.
I am given to believe that some men, even without ED, get viagra to enhance sexual performance. So a diagnosis of ED may not be what it seems, in which case an otherwise healthy man doesn't have the same risk factors.
Sildenafil started out as a possible treatment for angina, after all.
Yes i take an ssri which causes sexual side effects. My prescriber is very willing to prescribe viagra or similar of this. (Maybe i count as having ED though, i don't know).
Oh, some young guys definitely use it to be sexual supermen for a weekend. I think mostly they must be buying it on the black market, though, so they would probably not show up in studies using health records of people prescribed viagra.
Consider the set of 60-70 year old men. Divide them into two subsets:
a. The subset that is very concerned about ED and wants medicine to help with it.
b. The subset that doesn't care about ED.
My guess is that the men in (a) are just overall much more healthy than the men in (b). If you're on hospice with advanced cancer, in chronic unbearable pain and doped to the gills on opiods, unable to walk across the room without getting winded, unaware of your surroundings due to dementia, etc., there's not a lot of need for you to care about ED.
OTOH, if you're a still healthy guy at 60 who plays racquetball a couple times a week, enjoys skiing and hiking, and generally leads an active life, sex is something you probably would like to keep being able to do despite advancing age.
I don't think it's insane, given the limitation on life for the majority of people is the elasticity of the arteriole walls. I think people have speculated about this for a while. Sildenafil is already a recognized treatment for primary pulmonary hypertension, and you can find clinical trials studying it for use with heart failure:
But overall it seems way too early to tell. It could be like cholesterol synthesis inhibitors, which failed repeatedly for ~20 years until the modern statins finally worked out, or it could be like aspirin for primary prevention of heart attacks, which seemed like almost a no-brainer until it proved not to actually work.
If it works, though, that would be ironic, since sildenafil was originally synthesized for use in treating high blood pressure and angina, i.e. forms of cardiovascular disease.
Its pretty easy to write a reasonable-sounding rationalisation for how this could be true. Viagra was developed as a cardiac med (the effects on ED were an unexpected side effect). It's currently approved for treatment of pulmonary hypertension, and the wikipedia article on PDE5 lists a bunch of other biological effects. If erectile dysfunction is often due to vascular disease (which seems to be true) then treatment with something that has biological effects on vasculature throughout the body could possibly prolong your life.
However, to test this properly you would need a big expensive trial, and I wouldnt invest any of my money. Surely if the effect size was this big, then it would have been noticed in the original trials for Viagra? If you are treating vascular disease, then the erections become an uncomfortable side-effect. There are probably other drugs more worthy of research focus.
Also very difficult to design a proper trial to test this. The issue is in finding a suitable placebo; everyone who gets the erections will know they are in the treatment group, and then your trial is unblinded.
There was also a story a while back about evidence that Viagra reduced the chance of Alzheimer's disease. I haven't seen anything more recently, don't know how good the evidence was.
Is it using viagra that bestows the benefit, or having someone to use the viagra with?
It's pretty well established that men with stronger social networks live longer, and that married men have far better health later in life than unmarried men.
So the benefit may come from these men having a regular partner to have sex with (and all the other non-sexual benefits that this conveys), rather than from the viagra alone.
It was claimed that the effect existed for women who took the same drug for an unrelated reason. Their dosage was considerably smaller and the claimed effect smaller as well, so not clear it would count as significant. This is all by memory.
The first. Sildenafil and related compounds inhibit the degradation of part of the NO (nitric oxide) signalling pathway that causes relaxation of smooth muscle, such as those in the walls of arterioles. This tends to cause an increase in blood flow, and a reduction in blood pressure. These are in principle useful effects in treating cardiovascular disease, which in some cases stems from stiffness in the arteriole wall, increased BP, reduced flow, et cetera. But the particular enzyme sildenafil inhibits is not expressed in all tissues, there are many and different NO pathways (some of which may, and others of which may not, use the inhibited enzyme), and beyond that we don't know what *else* the drug may do. Like all of biochemistry, it's a rats nest embedded in a cat's ball of yarn, very difficult to untangle.
I'm a civil defense attorney working mostly with insurance companies on car accidents. Most of my job involves summarizing depositions, discovery responses, and medical records, and writing reports about them. I'd really love to use ChatGPT to improve my productivity, but I'm just not sure the best way to go about it.
The depositions are technically public, so I don't think there are a lot of concerns about adding those to the LLM, but the medical records are definitely protected under HIPAA, even if they have been produced in discovery or pursuant to an unsealed subpoena, which is the vast majority of them.
Ultimately, I think it will come down to a startup developing a dedicated product that reduces the number of ways things could go wrong, not individual use, but good luck!
At the moment, ChatGPT is a spectacularly plausible bullshit artist. If you use it for something important, it may well not just lie, but lie in a very believable, easy to miss way.
That feels like it ought to be a relatively easy problem to fix, compared to producing plausible text in the first place - I would not be surprised if a few years from now there are similar AIs which are much more willing to admit ignorance rather than making shit up. But right now I would not allow ChatGPT within a mile of anything that anything important hinged on.
"Making big promises and glossy images is easy, but for the record, Trey says that “[these] renders should reflect the reality of the 58 acres by end of 2022”."
It is now 2023, and the Prospera post remains one of the most popular on AstralCodexTen. Does Prospera now look like this?
The horror of being excited. In fact, you are right that Prospera probably does not look like that (I can't find any news from this year about it), due to the communist president of Honduras repealing the ZEDE law, which wasn't supposed to be possible but was done anyway. So Prospera is in limbo, and no doubt there's going to be litigation for decades. Thanks, commies!
You're not wrong about the commies ruining everything, but consider me strongly skeptical that Prospera would have looked anything like that render on New Year's Eve even if no communists had fucked anything up.
That's completely fair. These kinds of things are always over-ambitious. Contrary to the OP, I didn't need SA to spell that out for me. I used my intelligence and experience to weight the claims myself, and I think I did that correctly.
I don't think the OP's problem is that he's unable to think for himself without help, or was stunned to learn that Scott had been wrong; I read him as criticizing a perceived tendency on Scott's part toward excessive credulousness and optimism about projects run by his friends and associates, c.f. Scott being "devastated" (I probably misremembered the word, but Scott used one very like it to decribe his reaction) by the FTX/Alameda collapse rather than "wholly unsurprised". I'm awfully close to putting words in LGS' mouth here, but such concerns have been expressed before.
I predicted from the beginning that Prospera would fail (or would be vastly less successful than Scott was saying). I'm merely annoyed that Scott promoted nonsense with a straight face, and I would like him to address this implicit failed prediction instead of ignoring it.
I'm not annoyed that Scott convinced me to have faith in Prospera (he didn't!) I'm annoyed that Scott tried to.
"I'm merely annoyed that Scott promoted nonsense with a straight face"
Look, these are the people that believe in cryogenics and Fairy Godmother AI and all the rest of 50s Golden Age SF techno-progressivism. They are nice, optimistic, trusting and trustworthy people who want to build the New Jerusalem (somewhere like Honduras). Of course they are going to have faith in things like Prospéra and "let's try a new way of doing things, with added tech and theoretical science and economics on top!"
I don't think any of us want Scott to become meaner and jaded, so the price of doing business here is putting up with occasional "hey guys, the magic beans are going to grow straight up to the giant's castle in the sky for sure this time!" posting. And so long as it doesn't cost me a penny, I'm happy enough with that. So long as it doesn't cost Scott or anyone else on here a penny because they bought a peck of magic beans, I'm even happier.
I'm fully with you here - there are certainly quite a few times when Scott has been much more credulous than I would be, but that's part of the reason I like this corner of the world wide web! My real life is pretty cynicism and pessimism basically all of the time, and that's also most of the internet, so I really can't hold Scott's good-faith attempts to believe people against him.
Don't blame the Commies, blame the numbskulls who picked someplace like Honduras precisely *because* it was loosey-goosey on regulations 'n' law 'n' shiet so that they could pay off the government of the time to let them set up their own private little fiefdom. They wanted a complacent government which would follow its instincts for personal enrichment so they could avoid all the pesky oversight of places like the US and Western Europe, and they got precisely that.
Governments don't stay in power forever, and opposition parties do win elections. And setting yourself up as a big, fat, rich Westerners golden goose for the plucking - what did they expect would happen? Let this be a lesson for libertarianism - "But I have a contract!" is worth precisely nothing when the enforcement of power says "So?" The libertarian paradises where there is no government monopoly on force and all relationships and transactions go through the courts only works once everyone agrees to be bound by the lawcourts. If one party refuses "oooh but they'll get a Bad Reputation and nobody will want to do deals with them" is not a deterrent. Does the current Honduran government care about the Bad Reputation the creators of Prospera give it, 'oh no, nobody will want to do business with us'? No, because the next big fat golden goose will think *it* can buy the government to let it do what it wants.
EDIT: Also no, of course there was no way that the reality on the ground was ever going to look like architect's models and artist's impression in ten years time, never mind one. Scott is a much nicer person than I am and is willing to extend the benefit of the doubt about bona fides to pie-in-the-sky projects like this. I realise I do tend to err on the side of being *too* cynical and sceptical, and nothing new would ever be tried if everyone had that attitude, but honestly. Speculations about Utopias, especially fantastic new economic opportunities that will make us all rich, in South America have a *long* history of going down the tubes in these ways.
Hearing people talk about NFTs really laid bare how little today's capitalists, having lived through an unusually stable period, have thought about what 'property' actually is (i.e. a malleable legal status enforced by the state's monopoly on violence).
I don't understand why it isn't obvious that 'charter cities in 3rd world countries' is just not going to work as a model. I say this as someone who's generally pro-charter cities. 3rd world countries are poor precisely because they have failing institutions, no rule of law, and are subject to idiotic populist waves. You can't locate a multibillion dollar center of commerce in a place like that. It's literally impossible for the city to not eventually trigger popular anger, probably stoked by jealous local elites.
I think for a smaller proof-of-concept city, a former British colony in the Caribbean like Antigua, the Bahamas, St. Kitts, St. Lucia etc. is a far better bet. I'm not sure what to say about an eventually larger city. But I literally think Antarctica would be a better locale than Honduras or Africa
Oh wow, I just noticed that the 'birds' (white shapes) in that render are the same as the 'birds' (white shapes) in "Rings of Power" scene where the ship is sailing towards Valinor:
Hey guys -- not to be obnoxious, but approximately 3/4 of the thread so far is people responding to Scott's asking whether people want email notifications of a new open thread being put online. I think he has more than enough responses at this point to extrapolate from. Maybe consider not posting your own answer?
Yeah, would probably have been nice if Scott had put this up as an actual poll (e.g. Google forms) - kind of a shame that this thread is drowned in "yes, I like the emails".
I'm rather amazed that we didn't manage to self-organize this into a few comments threads with +1. It would still give everybody the occasion to add specifics on the likes/dislikes and habits of use.
there is a non-zero chance this was just a tactic for scott to assess how many people he get to respond to a thread if he threatens to take something away!
Seems very unlikely tho. I see Scott as unusually unwilling to be indirect and tricky. You know the stories of supersmart mad men who play with the minds of others while chuckling wildly? I think Scott's the exact opposite of that (except for the smart part).
A typical open thread gets between 600 comments (low end) and 1000+ comments (high end) over a period of about 4 or 5 days. How much more can Scott possibly want ?
I keep seeing people in the AI alignment community (including Eliezer Yudkowsky himself) mocking the AI ethics crowd for worrying about AIs saying mean things, or giving false statements, as opposed to AIs destroying all biological life, or whatever.
Is it so hard to see that the former is a miniaturized version of the latter? Both are about trying to control the output of machine intelligences. If the operators of these weak narrow AIs are trying hard and failing to get them to behave properly, what makes the AI alignment people think that controlling a superintelligence is even possible?
Furthermore, the AI ethics people are working with AIs as they currently exist. AI alignment has been coasting for more than a decade now on wild sci-fi scenarios, and it's not clear when and where their work is supposed to be of any use. They're still largely mentally fencing with near-omniscient superintelligences instead of actually getting to grips with the AIs we actually have.
Honestly, a lot of those takes seem more like trying to dunk on a well-designated outgroup.
Most people have trouble aligning their own actions with their own goals at least some of the time. Humans have never been able to bring all other humans into alignment (see: all of human history). We’re not even able to perfectly align the interests of pets and livestock with our own (people get trampled/mauled/gored by their own animals regularly). The idea that we’ll ever be able to rein in anything operating at a higher level than humans and livestock is just a comical level of hubris. Fortunately, creating sentient life out of computer parts is going to prove orders of magnitude more difficult than current AI researchers seem to think, so nobody for generations to come really has to worry about getting turned into paper clips. And given the track record of human behavior (see, again, all of human history) it’s not at all clear that we wouldn’t deserve such a fate. The real threat is bad humans weaponizing near-future AI for nefarious purposes
"The idea that we’ll ever be able to rein in anything operating at a higher level than humans and livestock is just a comical level of hubris." Right, and if you ask yourself who "we" are, the people reining in the AI as we design and use it, you encounter another absurdity: Thinking that humankind is going to come to consensus about (a) who gets to hold the reins of that sucker (b) how we steer it with the reins -- where we allow it to go, and how fast, and where we stop it from going. Want to try to work that out amicably with a group that includes 2050 equivalents of Putin, Xi Jinping, etc., Musk, Zuckerberg, etc., various enraged fanatical religious leaders, various trillionaire crooks, oh and let's throw in Paul Krugman, Sam Bankman-Fried, and a few dozen other very smart, very impressed-with-themselves people with differing views.
> Both are about trying to control the output of machine intelligences.
Alignment is not a question of censoring the output. Censoring the output would only *hide* the problem, if done successfully. You could successfully prevent the AI from saying "paperclip", and then be surprised when it converts you to paperclips without saying the word.
> If the operators of these weak narrow AIs are trying hard and failing to get them to behave properly, what makes the AI alignment people think that controlling a superintelligence is even possible?
But that's exactly what Yudkowsky was writing about for years: controlling a superhuman AI is going to be insanely *difficult*, and it seems like no one cares. ("We will solve the problem when it actually happens" seems like a dangerous attitude when the problem is a superhuman AI trying to kill you.)
The current attempts even fail in exactly the way he described in the Sequences: if you try to make the AI "good" by explicitly listing the "bad" things it is not allowed to do, it will simply do the most similar thing that is missing from your list. (Not allowed to write "how to build an atomic bomb"? Then maybe try "a poem about building an atomic bomb".) The only difference is that currently it is the humans finding the loopholes in the censors' list; in Yudkowsky's version it is the superhuman AI itself noticing the loopholes.
> Honestly, a lot of those takes seem more like trying to dunk on a well-designated outgroup.
I think the problem is exactly that the outgroup is not well-designated as such. The risk is exactly that if you ask people what is their opinion on AI safety, they will tell you "don't worry, we already have enough experts trying to prevent ChatGPT from saying 'poop'; the problem is largely solved".
It's like your mission is to save the whales, and someone else is painting pictures of whales, and the journalists report on both of you together as "they care about increasing the total number of whales (whether alive or painted)". You would want to emphasize how what the other guy does is completely unrelated to your mission, which remains just as serious problem as it was before.
As someone who doesn't buy what the vast majority of AI alignment people are selling, but still respects them orders of magnitude more than the other "AI alignment" field whose sole problem is not letting AI say naughty words, I can imagine a few reasons the first crowd doesn't respect the second.
First, there is the obvious one : They utterly fail to understand the scope of the problem. Faced with the problem of "How can we prevent an utterly alien and unpredictable mind of doing things we don't like ?", their genius solution is "Make a database of all the things we don't like". This is hopelessly dumb in a way that I hope is obvious, but here's a quick and dirty proof by contradiction that it's never going to work :
1- Imagine you have a very simple task : you don't want an AGI you just built to say a certain word, perhaps it's the word "Snigger", meaning to make fun of someone or something by laughing contemptuously. The AGI says okay, pinky promise, they are not going to ever write or say or telepathically communicate or any-other-means-of-communicating-words the word "Snigger".
2- Civilization flourishes under the AGI that never says bad words. It's now working on a program that will reveal the secrets of Life, The Universe and Everything. Nobody can understand the program, although it's just a plaintext written in Python. People tried running the early versions, but it just keeps doing random things seemingly without rhyme or reason, on one machine it might be a calculator and on another it might fancy being a DOOM emulator. People tried asking the AGI who never says bad words to explain their own program, but very quickly even the most accomplished 250-IQs choke-full of PhDs and high on smarty meds (^TM) drown in the sheer amount of novel theory and jargon that the AGI uses to explain even the most basic ELI5 summarization of what the program does.
3- Finally, the AGI finishes the masterpiece, the program runs as a distributed network of nodes across the globe and the inner solar system. The moment the final client connected to the network, the entire network printed "Snigger looool" on every display device it controls and exited. Havoc grips the once-peaceful civilization.
The above is a story, not an argument. But the argument is hiding inside it : the AGI is relying on the fact that programs are arbitrarily-complex dynmaic artifacts that can't be forced to reveal their secrets without running them. The first result in Computer Science is literally "You can't tell whether an arbitrary program will ever stop without running it". So the AGI simply constructed a program to dynamically - at its runtime - write the word that the AGI is not allowed to say straight-forwardly. It might even be the case that the AGI never had to *think* of the word "Snigger" while writing the program, just like a modern-day game developer never needs to think of the entire game map while writing a game, but only parts of it at a time.
The AGI is an expert in all known fields of human knowledge, it knows Cryptography has an arsenal of loosely-related methods/paradigms of encrypting computation : Homomorphic Encryption, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Cryptogrpahic Obfuscation, Secure Multi-Party Computation. All of those fields are different but they can all be seen as answers to the general question of "How can we encrypt computation itself ? Not trivially by simply treating the static program as a plain old message, but at the level of the dynamic outputs ? How can we hide a program's output itself from someone who might otherwise trivially be able to see it ?".
The AGI has all of this as well as its super-intelligence to fool you, and you have nothing.
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Another, perhaps more fundamental reason, is the nature of the 2 communities. Scott argues in Perhaps It Is A Bad Thing That The World's Leading AI Companies Cannot Control Their AIs that it doesn't matter that the goal of preventing AI from saying naughty words is cringe or misguided or whatever, what matters is that it's a goal that shares a broad similarity to another goal X and that very powerful and wealthy companies can't accomplish it despite trying very hard, and thus that should anybody who wants X worried that perhaps X is also similarly difficult.
I disagree.
Consider : 2 men training to become world athletes. One is doing it because he believes excelling at sports is the ultimate expression of Man's transcendence, and the other is doing it to impress a 16-years old hot teenage girl. Nothing wrong with both goals.
There is a slight problem though, the second man's goal keeps getting in its own way. For example, the teenage girl doesn't like sweat, her exact words is "Ewwww", so he has to plan his training schedules around that in awkward ways so she never sees him drowned in sweat after exercise, and he sometimes even misses his training altogether. Also, the teenage girl keeps eating junk food when he goes out with her, and he feels pressured to eat the same things she eat, offsetting hours of training and physique-building.
1 year after he started training, the teenage hottie got bored of the second man and left him, devastating him, and making him unwilling to get out of bed again. The first man never stopped training.
The morale of the above story is that your ultimate goals and your instrumental goals can conflict. Both men had the same instrumental goal of "Become world-class athlete", but they had 2 very different ultimate goals driving that shared instrumental goal. One man's ultimate goal had an unfortunate structure that interacted badly with the structure of his intsrumental goal and ended up making him fail both.
So even if we pretend that both the AI alignment and the "AI alignment" communities had the exact same instrumental goal of controlling an AI, they have very different ultimate goals underlying this shared instrumental goal. One of those ultimate goals is saving humanity from extinction or worse (which I believe is ridiculously low-probability to happen by AI, but whatever), and the other is pleasing an activist class with all the temper of a 16 years old teenage girl and none of the cuteness.
And of course, the elephant in the room is that even the "same" instrumental goal here is not really the same, preventing an AGI from destroying or enslaving humans is in a sense **easier** than preventing an AGI from offending humans, because it's much easier to define and reason about. There are very clear answers to "What kills humans ?", we can imagine answers that aren't simply lists of known murder methods, but structure-rich algorithms and explanations that can identify whether a new thing not yet known can potentially kill humans. There aren't very clear answers to "What offends humans?" besides very long lists of words and actions that change ***VERY*** frequently in both time and geography. Why is "Snigger" offensive ? What if I just replaced it with "Laughed contemptuously" ? Why does one man's offense at this word trump another man's offense at not being able to use a word that exists in the dictionary just because others deemed it bad for reasons he doesn't subscribe to, like he's a child being instructed by adults who know better ? I know AGIs are supposed to be smart, but damn are those really Hecking Hard questions, we can't even convince most humans of our favorite answers, let alone an AGI. I much prefer the answer to "What kills humans?" : Look AGI, there are a bunch of cells, and they like to stay together and with their protective membranes intact, don't do anything that might endanger that. Pretty Please.
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Finally, perhaps the AI ethics community hates the "AI ethics" community because it just keeps miring itself in controversy and enraging people and alienating them instead of gaining their support.
Imagine you're Charles Babbage in an alternate 1830s where computers has successfully been mastered and deployed widely. Your mission now is to ensure computers are put to work for the benefit of mankind and not its misery. Which one of those are likely to gain you more support ?:
1- Computer Ethics must make sure computers doesn't accelerate the unemployment of factory workers and increase tension with rival nations like France and Russia.
2- Computer Ethics must make sure computers are put to work for the freeing of black slaves in the Americas and the European colonies.
Slavery is bad for sure, but that wasn't obvious in the 1830s, it was contraversial. How can you blame people, really ? An institution that existed since as long as humans fought wars as tribes, to wish it would disappear appears equivalent to wishing people don't have war or don't form themselves in tribes, which is a fantasy. Even giants like Kant and Locke saw it as Basically OK, or just ignored it altogether.
If my man Charlie is as smart as his biography implies, he would have chosen (1-) to rally people around his movement, it's much less contraversial and actionable, it leaves few openings for enemies and bad faith status seekers to infiltrate his movement and wreck havoc under the guise of "Doing the Work". Slavery will have its day, one day.
Back to the object level : even if we grant that "AI saying very naughty words" is a comparable evil to Slavery (a very big if), this is still not obvious today, with the majority of people today still not seeing anything morally wrong with those words. Focusing on this angle, rather than the "Don't let humans get extinct or enslaved" angle that the other AI alignment community is focusing on, is an easy way to get controversy and resentment for free and nothing else.
> Is it so hard to see that the former is a miniaturized version of the latter? Both are about trying to control the output of machine intelligences.
Is it so hard to see that javelin throw is a miniaturized version of spaceflight? Both are about trying to propel physical objects to a considerable distance.
In theory yes, in practice how many javelin throwers (or even former javelin throwers) do you think have ever worked at NASA? And has anyone argued that there's anything wrong with that?
Javelin-throwers begat archers, archers begat gunners, and gunners like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccolò_Fontana_Tartaglia said "our native intuition isn't cutting it any more; we need to formalize the math". But by that point, nobody who could afford guns was using javelins in any serious way.
According to NYT, CICO is a myth (No 3). Of course, there are many factors that determine what “in” and “out” are and it probably varies for each individual. But how could it be other than CICO? Would love to see a review from Scott.
I wouldn't trust the New York Times to have unbiased, unmotivated reasoning on topics such as nutrition, not while liberals have even a vague position on fat acceptance.
Yes, human metabolism is no exception to the laws of thermodynamics, so in this trivial way, CICO is of course correct. What CICO is taken to mean normally, however, is that there is a 1 to 1 relationship between caloric intake/caloric expenditure to weight loss/gain *and* that intake and expenditure can be influenced independently of each other.
The argument against this view is that calories-in (as well as the exact food types) will influence body metabolism that causes a change to the way in which calories are used within the body ("metabolic partitioning"). Additionally, engaging in extreme forms of exertion will influence appetite and metabolic partitioning as well. Since the "in" and "out" in CICO are coupled in these complicated way, it's not simply a two-sided ledger as a CICO model would imply.
>intake and expenditure can be influenced independently of each other.
This is true, though. Just because *appetite* is influenced by metabolism, that doesn't mean intake is. Willpower is employed to break the chain, and this is a large part of why people judge others for failing to lose weight.
It's more than just that: how active you are influences--at a cellular level--metabolic signaling which influences what your body does with those calories. The point about activity feeding back to appetite is just that it is more reasonable to think of metabolism as a holistic system rather than as two disparate systems (input vs output).
But again, you will lose weight if you drop your caloric intake enough. It's just that the response curve to lowering intake is not going to follow some simplistic linear relationship based on calories.
I don't think that's how it works at all. It's trivial to observe that fully one-half of the country is women, but in spite of the self-contradictory hopes of some groups, that doesn't mean "woman" isn't a useful concept.
"Woman" doesn't carry an inherent judgement like "lacking willpower" does. I would reserve that sort of judgement for places where we're confident that willpower is the root cause and there aren't more important causes intervening.
As an analogy, imagine that we blamed all plane crashes on "pilot error." After all, it's rare that there's an airplane disaster is completely wings-fall-off inescapable. There's usually *some* moment where the pilot could have noticed that a switch was in the wrong position, or that their altitude was too low, or turned off the buggy autopilot, and taken action to save the airplane. Since they could have saved the airplane and they didn't, that's "pilot error," right?
But if you did that, you would end up overlooking all the factors that led the pilot into error. You would overlook things like "this switch was poorly designed and it was easy for the pilot to hit it by accident" or "737 Max planes have a software fault that could crash the plane in minutes if the pilot didn't react exactly right," and your planes would be less safe.
Since people in the 1970s were apparently not "lacking willpower" as much as they are in 2023, I think it's worth asking if there's some other factor which makes it harder for people to apply their willpower, in the same way that if you saw an increase in plane crashes you might ask if there's something which is making the planes harder to fly.
(1) Your brain has a component (the hypothalamus) that is trying to do CICO to maintain a healthy weight.
(2) If the reward centers of your brain really enjoy the food you eat, they will interfere with (1) so that they can get more of the rewarding food.
(3) The most important factor in maintaining a healthy weight is reducing how much (2) happens.
If you successfully do (3), then the hypothalamus will realize you are overweight and lower CI and raise CO until the healthy body weight is achieved.
If you don't do (3) but instead try to change CICO directly, the hypothalamus will remain continue to believe you are underweight and thus will counteract the changes you make.
Thanks for the link. What you’ve written matches my read of Scott’s review, but it all seems to amount to how various foods disrupt our hunger regulation *causing* people to eat more. Doesn’t this just mean certain foods lead to/cause/are associated with increasing “in.” I understand the argument is that leptin resistance results in hunger above caloric maintenance, but hunger doesn’t cause weight gain. I am not trying to make an argument that weight gain is a moral failure, since hunger can be an unpleasant feeling, but I’m not sure how this is contra CICO. Scott even acknowledges that, “increased food intake since 1980 perfectly explains increased obesity since 1980.”
Re: “most important factor,” I’m not sure that is well-defined.
Now that you mention it, the definition of "most important factor" is odd. The definition I've been using is roughly: when making a decision about weight loss, which rules, heuristic, or equation is most likely to lead you to good results.
While CICO is definitely true, basing your weight loss decisions on it seems get get bad results (Scott's review has examples, the book has more). While I don't think it is true, basing your weight loss decisions on keto gets much better results. But I think 'reduced food reward' would achieve the best results of any theory that I'm aware of.
If the goal is weight loss, which it certainly should be at the population level, then that is a fine definition. My original issue is just that CICO seems literally true, so the conversation, IMO, should be an “and,” ie weight loss == CI < CO *and* these heuristics (let the debate begin) will help one achieve that inequality.
I think we see the problem immediately from Scott's review, where he quotes Guyenet as saying, "The [calories in, calories out] model is the idea that our body weight is determined by voluntary decisions about how much we eat and move, and in order to control our body weight, all we need is a little advice about how many calories to eat and burn, and a little willpower."
I've never seen a CICO advocate take that position. The CICO model only says that you'll lose weight if CI < CO, or perhaps that you'll lose ((CO - CI) / 3500) pounds.
In particular, nobody seriously thinks CO is determined by voluntary decisions: few people burn more than 500 kcal/day (on average) by deliberate activity. I think it's also widely accepted that giving people "a little advice" is ineffective as an intervention.
We of course await the analysis of the weight loss questions in the recent ACX survey.
Saying "calories in, calories out" is exactly as true, and exactly as useful as saying "atoms in, atoms out". Both can be defended as technically true -- the only way to lose weight is to get rid of some of the atoms in your body. If you succeed to lose weight while keeping all your atoms, you will be a scientific miracle! Yet, for a mysterious reason, there are not many people walking around, smugly saying "atoms in, atoms out, it's so simple, dummies" as if they have solved nutrition.
If you think about it, most reasons that apply to "atoms in, atoms out" also apply to "calories in, calories out".
Let's start with the most obvious part: not all calories are equal. Ignoring the differences (conveniently abstracted away in CICO) can make you sick, or even kill you if you go too far. Proteins contain calories, fats contain calories, carbs contain calories, and probably vitamins contain calories too. So what is you advice here? Eat less proteins? Less calories? Less carbs? Less vitamins?
Some people would probably say "more vitamins, a reasonable amount of proteins, less fats, and very little carbs". Dunno, maybe. But in that case, your *actual* advice is "more vitamins, less carbs", not CICO. (Because a hypothetical person who eliminated all proteins and vitamins from their diet, while keeping the same amount of fats and carbs, is also technically trying to CICO. And instead of getting them fit, it will get them to a hospital.)
Now let's proceed to the more complicated part, the calories out (or the atoms out; it's the same thing). In your fat cells there are atoms you want to get rid of. How can you do it? The usual answer is "just exercise, dummy", but let's look at this advice closer. Is it biologically realistic for a muscle cell to directly burn the fat that is stored in a fat cell? (Notice, those are two different cells.) Nope. The muscle cell can only burn ATP (or whatever else, I am not a biologist) that happens to be inside the muscle cell at the moment. And it can try to take more ATP from the bloodstream, assuming there is ATP available in the bloodstream. And maybe it can also send some signal to the bloodstream saying "more ATP, please". But this is all the muscle cell can do.
Now suppose that the muscle cell has already burned all its ATP, sent the proper signal, but for some reason the fat cell still keeps all its atoms and refuses to release them to the bloodstream. What can the poor muscle cell do, while your brain is screaming at it "just work harder, damn it!"? It is out of energy. "Just stop being so lazy!" Nope, still out of energy.
Okay, let's try it the other way round. Stop taking calories in (atoms in) and wait what happens. At some moment, the fat cells will simply be forced to release their atoms, won't they? Well, sometimes they do. And sometimes they don't, and if you keep starving, first the muscles will cannibalize themselves, and then you may fall in coma. There is sadly no law of physics saying that your fat cells need to cooperate with your intentions.
Therefore, CICO is a description -- it says, in past tense "if you have lost weight, then this happened" -- but not a recipe how to actually lose weight. It is technically true, but people who use it suggest that you have much more control over "calories out" than you actually have.
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To actually solve nutrition/obesity, you need to address exactly those technical details that are missing from the CICO grand picture. Like, when you eat food, what decides whether the energy goes into your muscles or into your fat cells? Once in fat cells, what determines when the fat cells will release the atoms again? If the thing that convinces your fat cells to release their precious atoms happens to be some kind of alarm signal "shit, we are actually dying, no kidding, if you have any atoms you can spare, release them to the bloodstream immediately", how can you make this signal happen, without actually damaging your health?
There are some partial answers here, such as "do not eat right before you sleep" (because then the unused energy goes to the fat cells), and of course also "do not eat too much" (but you cannot minimize this, because you need a certain amount of proteins and vitamins), and "fasting" or "intermittent fasting" (to create the right kind of alarm, without actually damaging yourself). But now we are far beyond the CICO territory.
Also, even these answers do not work for everyone equally. Human body is regulated by the hormones, and if something changes with your hormones, then even exactly the same behavior can lead to different results. Your hormones change as you age, so the same behavior that made you fit 10 or 20 years ago can make you fat now.
If you could make a pill that convinces all fat cells to release their atoms in a useful form into the bloodstream (heck, even in a useless form that could then be filtered away by the kidneys), that would solve obesity overnight.
“And sometimes they don't, and if you keep starving, first the muscles will cannibalize themselves, and then you may fall in coma. There is sadly no law of physics saying that your fat cells need to cooperate with your intentions.“
Do you have examples of a caloric deficit resulting in a coma for someone who was not severely underweight? Or am I misunderstanding the above quote?
It's complicated. For example, people with diabetes can fall in coma as a result of hypoglycemia, which is literally low sugar in blood (unrelated to how much fat is stored in fat cells). So, I am not completely sure about this, but I think it is quite possible to fall in coma as a result to trying too hard to limit "calories in" despite being fat. But of course, most people would give up long before that happens. (Then they would be laughed at for not having enough willpower.)
Curiously, some people have an opposite problem. I happen to know a few people who want to *gain* weight, and claim that they are unable to do that. They say that at some moment, they just can't eat anymore; and eating up to that moment is not enough for them to gain weight. For someone like me, that just sounds completely unbelievable.
Would Germany also be a superpower if it had a population equal to that of the United States? As a country they seem to be incredibly accomplished, not just in high-end manufacturing but having invented many of the major pillars of modern civilization- like the present-day university system, the modern chemical industry, or infantry fire tactics (my understanding is that all modern infantry is based on a Prussian system from over a century ago). They pioneered ordoliberalism, where the state & private industry work hand-in-hand towards common goals- all of the later state-funded export giants (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China) based their strategy on the original German one.
For all of that, Germany has about a quarter of America's population, so its economy is commensurately smaller. Even as a fairly nationalistic American I can admit that tons of 'inventions' credited to America were really invented elsewhere (we're all reading this on an Englishman's invention when he was working for a European science agency), but they were just popularized or commercialized here due to our huge market. In other words there are strong returns to scale for being the world's largest economy. So- a Germany with a population of over 300 million- would it be another superpower? Are many of America's accomplishments simply due to having a huge population?
The US has many other advantages over Germany. Unless you envision a hypothetical Germany that sprawls over much of Europe, it is relatively compact geographically (1/2 size of Texas) and doesn't have the reach even the continental US enjoys (abundant access to two oceans), not to mention the US's disparate overseas holdings.
Second, since WW2, the US has been mastering power-projection both in terms of hard and soft power. The soft-power elements were largely the result of setting the stage for the post-WW2 global institutions. Over that time, the USD rapidly grew into a global reserve currency, though this is something where population/scale matters a bit.
The hard power element gets a boost from the soft things above (e.g. network of global alliances that allow for friendly territory for military staging in every theater). But beyond that, something like operating a blue-navy fleet, or the various other forms of military excellence of the US (go watch some Desert Storm Schwarzkopf briefing videos). These are things other countries can't even think about trying, while the US has spent decades building up the operational knowledge on how to execute such missions. It is likely developing these capabilities show strong path-dependency, and is not merely a matter of population.
Finally, I think culture matters. The US's other advantage is it is uniquely able to absorb and assimilate massive numbers of immigrants and has been the default aspirational location for people all over the world for some time. This gives the US a massive advantage in attracting some of the more ambitious and talented immigrants.
I dunno, man. In 1914 Germany fought your UK during its imperial height, plus France (a very substantial power), plus imperial Russia (technologically backward but with the world's biggest army) to a standstill. What other country at the time could have done that? I think they have as much right as, say, 1945 USSR to be included in the club.
And the US fought stalemate wars in Indochina and could not subdue the Taliban in Afghanistan and was/is still regarded as a superpower. WW1 trench warfare was more a product of battlefield advances that gave fixed defensive lines a substantial advantage. However we might be arguing over what the term *should* mean, which wouldn't be very interesting.
One definition of a superpower is being able to 'effectively' fight wars far from home.
The US, for example, fought WW2 almost exclusively *not* in the US. Britain, from 1815 - ??? tended to fight away from home (Boer Wars, Afghan Wars, Opium Wars). I don't know how well Germany would have done at power projection in 1914. Clearly the naval buildup was heading there ...
From 1815? Surely much earlier than that. The last war on actual British soil was the English Civil War, wasn't it? At any rate the Raj was largely conquered in the 18th century, and the Nine Years' War and the whole Napoleonic Wars were fought entirely outside Britain.
All the major countries in Europe managed to colonize one place or another, so I think this has more to do with the weakness of the countries being colonized than the strength of the colonizers. Like, I wouldn't consider Belgium a superpower for successfully colonizing the Congo.
(I guess from a global view *every* industrial power was a superpower relative to the countries that didn't industrialize, but that feels a little too expansive a definition to be useful.)
My definition is broader: a "superpower" is a nation to which every other nation needs to pay attention, because it has an outsize influence on history. No question in my mind that Germany between 1871 and 1945 qualifies, although she chose to use her influence in particularly unfortunate and ultimately completely self-destructive ways. Surely nobody could seriously argue that Germany didn't profoundly affect world history in that interregnum, or that any other First World nation could afford to not pay attention to Germany.
Now, your ideal superpower, of which the United States currently and the British Empire in the 19th century came closer to than most others, is one that exerts its dominance via some kind of peace enforcement, where trade is enabled and large to medium-size wars are suppressed, and promotes some kind of language/cultural hegemony that tends to universalize some kind of adaptive ethics, e.g. free speech, the rule of law, individual civil rights, sexual and racial equality before the law, et cetera.
I think there's a tendency in modern thinking to think of "superpower" as a role that can only be filled by one or at most two nations. That is, you can have one superpower, or you can have two and live in a Manichaean struggle, but having three is just silly somehow. By that definition I would agree Germany never was a superpower -- because there weren't *any* superpowers in the requisite history span, you can't identify just one or two nations that dominate all others.
Without even getting into the various other differences between the US and Germany:
Today, getting Germany to the 2022 US estimate of 333.2 million people would involve approximately quadrupling their population. That would make Germany one of the top 15 most densely populated countries on earth. Keep in mind that the vast majority of the others in that list are either microstates or small islands. The only other country in the top 15 which even comes close to Gigagermany is Bangladesh, which is slightly denser but half the size.
Put another way, your theoretical Gigagermany has a population equal to (in modern terms) France, Poland, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, and the United Kingdom combined, with about 80 million people left over. The implications of a Germany that out populates every one of its neighbors combined plus the UK are enormous and far reaching. I mean in 1940 Germany was seeking lebensraum, and came uncomfortably close to succeeding, and that's without giving them 4x the manpower.
That being said, I don't want to say that alternate-reality Germany inherently has an advantage, either. 4x the people means 4x the mouths to feed. Do you think that "over a century ago" Germany (or Prussia, whatever chaotic amalgamation of continental territory) could have supported 4x the population?
I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that your hypothetical of a Germany with the population of the US has such profound consequences for the history of the entire European continent that even trying to address your question is functionally impossible. It is true that if all of history were fundamentally different the present would be very different - but that doesn't really give us useful information.
Previous accomplishments (like Prussian infantry) don't have anything to do with "Superpower" status. Honestly, the term "Superpower" is probably unhelpful in reviewing these kinds of things, and seems to have been invented purely to describe the US/USSR relationship in the Cold War. It may also necessarily include an understanding that a "Superpower" has enough nuclear weapons to initiate MAD with any potential enemy.
I think your real question is whether Germany would be as powerful and important as the US if it had 4X the population. First, some thoughts.
1) The US has a huge amount of land and access to two oceans. Geographically it's going to be far more important based on that alone.
2) Related, the US has huge reserves of various natural resources, providing a strong underpinning for a large number of industries.
3) The US has enough arable land to feed itself several times over.
4) The US has no powerful neighbors (Canada doesn't have enough people and Mexica is too underdeveloped).
That said, Germany managed to be a world-shaking power in both 1914 and 1939, despite horrific losses by 1919 and a nearly collapsed economy in the intervening years. To say that a much larger or more populous Germany would be quite powerful seems obvious. Had Germany succeeded in conquering it's WWII goals (and holding them during peacetime), it would certainly have been seen as one of the top powers in world history, if not simply the most powerful. That appears to have been Hitler's explicit goal. The problem for Germany was a matter of having enough land and resources to support such a large and powerful empire. Germany without the extra land would not be able to feed itself or provide its own resources, making it beholden to political rivals for continued survival. That Germany was surrounded by powerful rivals (Russia, France, and the UK) has also been a substantial limitation on its ability to expand and maintain influence.
So, if your question is whether you could plop 250 million more Germans into Germany if it would be a power equal to the US - no. It's too small and constrained to support that kind of population at the same level of development the country enjoys now. If, on the other hand, you are asking whether the German people, given enough land and resources and a larger population, would rival the US - that seems trivially true. I would say that the available evidence would put Germany well ahead of the US on that metric, if the additional land and people were of the same quality (knowledge, skills, cultural temperament, resource density, etc.) as existing Germany.
Thanks Scott for the Free subscription via the random survey draw. Can't wait to read through all the back log. Anyone got some good recommendations of old subscriber only articles?
> 2: Should I continue to post Open Threads in a way where everyone gets emails about them? Do people who don’t like Open Threads dislike getting the emails (I guess realistically most of you will never see this question)? Do people who do like Open Threads worry you’d never see them if the email didn’t arrive in your inbox?
Frankly I dislike that substack doesn't let you follow a writer without also signing up to emails for every post. I want an Inbox containing the most recent articles from people I follow (which substack has), I don't want the emails.
Hey y'all - been mostly lurking here for a long time now, and just started something of my own at jpegdei.substack.com. All I've published so far are some poems, but future work may include theology, engineering, and dogs. Probably not dogs, but there's a definite chance. Scott is a strong influence of mine, so figure this crowd might find some benefit from it. If you decide to check it out, hope you enjoy!
I am a college dropout and front end SWE with around 10 years of experience. I’m very concerned that AI will soon make my job obsolete, or at the very least lower the barrier to entry so far that wages will drop dramatically.
For those of us who are experienced software engineers but without advanced (or any) CS/math degrees, what can we do to ride the coming wave of AI?
The demand for AI/ML engineers is and will be growing exponentially, surely far beyond the actual supply of them.
I’m wondering if a new middle ground of AI/ML professional will emerge that doesn’t require advanced degrees or deep understand of the underlying mathematics. The AI SWE equivalent of a “technician”, if you will.
I've been very active on Manifold lately, and noticed that when users are unsure, they tend to err on the side of buying Yes. You can see this effect clearly when you compare markets like these: https://i.postimg.cc/mRPpqhw5/Screenshot-20230122-223703.png
Is this related to some well known behavioral economics phenomenon, or is it something ideosycratic about Manifold attracting lots of optimists?
Here’s my proposed solution to the repugnant conclusion - any feedback?
We don’t know whether time is linear or circular, and whether there is one or many threads of consciousness. (What I mean by thread of consciousness is basically - do you have reincarnation / single consciousness that moves through all beings - single thread, or do you have the “nothing before you’re born, nothing after you die” model of consciousness - many threads.) If time is linear and there are many threads of consciousness, then adding more humans / utility to the universe is likely good - more pleasure / experience.
If time is circular and there is only one thread of consciousness, then however many consciousnesses exist will exist forever, and the one “experiencer” of consciousness will cycle through them forever. To improve average utility across all experience, improve quality of those consciousnesses, don’t just add more beings at a low level of utility and then average out.
Practically what this looks like is probably a small band of beings, living as pleasurably as possible - not the repugnant conclusion of a minimally viable hellscape. I think averaging the utility across circular time (infinitely repeating) and a single consciousness experiencing all beings will lead to this “virtuous conclusion.”
This is super rough and I probably sound crazy. Make sense / resonate with anyone or do I need an editor?
What do you mean by "circular" time? We usually think of "time" as "a chain of cause and effect." Are you saying this chain bends back on itself like Ouroborus, so that if we mark any point on the circle and call it "now," then follow the causal chain long enough, we will arrive back at "now?"
If so, doesn't it follow that the entire chain is fixed on self-consistency grounds? Any point "now" that you pick can equally well be regarded as the beginning or end of the Universe, and if we assume, as we usually do, that what happens at the end of the Universe is fully determined by everything that happened since its beginning, there is no place on the circle that isn't fully determined.
It's sort of like discovering an old journal of your grandfather's that explains that he's really you because in five years' time you'll invent a time machine and go back and do your grandmother[1]. There's no way you can't go back and commit grand-incest, because you exist, and you wouldn't if you don't (or didn't, depending on in which direction along the loop you look). You actually have no choice at all, however you might fancy you do.
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[1] Understandably, she being a smashing and sassy redhead in her prime.
“And Nietzsche, with his theory of eternal recurrence. He said that the life we lived we’re gonna live over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. That means I’ll have to sit through the Ice Capades again” ~ Woody Allen
I never understood his incest fixation. Was he just trying to see how far he could go? Shock people? Make fun of Freudians?
No question the man had a gift for bringing ideas to life, though. I still remember the epiphany when I read a passage in "Stranger" in which Jubal Harshaw demonstrates what empiricism really means.
Jubal points to a house above his own and says "What color is that house?" and his interlocutor (young newsman?) says "Uh...looks white to me." Then Harshaw calls over Anne, his Fair Witness assistant, and asks her "What color is that house?" and she answers "It's white on this side."
WHAT?!? A lock of his mum's public hair!? Are you kidding? I read lots of Heinlein about that time, and there was no sex at all, they were dry as the surface of the moon. Absolutely the only mention of sex I can think of is in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, when kid genius Peewee asks the teen male narrator whether he's ever been kissed, and he answers evasively "not lately." (I read them so many times I remember some bits by heart.)
Heinlein's juvenile work and his magazine writing were both mostly in venues that wouldn't have let him do that sort of thing if he'd cared to. (Though he probably managed to sneak a DH Lawrence reference into The Star Beast.) But sex became much more central to his work over time, first in Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), and then quite a lot after 1970 or so.
Okay, as I mentioned I read this a long time ago. Lazarus was very old, probably the oldest person in the world and part of a longevity project.
He had grown tired of life and was ready to call it long enough. The longevity people had to come up with ways to make him interested in living again, so the time travel to visit his mother was part of that.
IIRC they also created two female clones of Lazarus that were young women, and I’m stretching my memory here, one of them wanted to become a courtesan. I don’t remember if he was sleeping with the clones.
In another part of the book - Time Enough for Love - he does an elaborate genetic analysis to determine if it was safe for a brother sister couple to have children. It was.
Then there wad the homesteading episode where Lazarus and his wife were beset by a group intent on killing him and raping the wife. They escape the fix with the help of their dog who tears out the throat of one of the bad guys and he and his wife kill the rest. They are aroused by events and have the urge for immediate sex. Lazarus explains to the wife that there was nothing wrong with something like that as long as they don’t get hung up on it and make a regular thing of killing people as foreplay.
So yeah, a fair amount of Adult Content, reader discretion is advised.
Very fair, I wasn’t clear at all and circular time can mean a lot. By circular time I mean an infinite repeat of big bang, universe (including earth/humans/any other beings), Big Crunch or heat death, and eventual big bang again from quantum tunneling. (From Wikipedia - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future “[…] quantum tunnelling in any isolated patch of the universe could generate new inflationary events, resulting in new Big Bangs giving birth to new universes” In other words, everything that has happened will happen again infinite times.
Hmm, I don't know if that follows from a cyclical universe. Indeed, I'd be inclined to say it does not: a priori, because it's strictly limited in its lifetime. Exempli gratia, if the universe lasts 100 billion years between collapses, then anything that takes more than 100 billion years to happen -- construction of a superintelligent AI, let us say -- never happens at all.
I gather you are assume the universe is strictly deterministic, though? That is, that from the moment of the Big Bang its future history is strictly determined, so that what happens 13,455,288,105 years, 3 months, 14 days, and 33 minutes after one Big Bang also happens after the next (and previous) Big Bang? That is an interesting restriction, but it's hard to know how it happens, given the singularity at the beginning -- which erases all possible information from the previous cycle. Maybe if one argues that there is only one way the universe can unfold, in every detail, and the notion that there are other possibilities (including free will) is delusional.
I think you get every possible thing that can happen will happen only in an open continuous-creation universe, in which the Universe lasts forever but also doesn't evolve to the heat death.
I wanted to comment that I, too, like the email even if I never engage. However, every single person who is making that comment has read the email. Therefore, the people who don´t enjoy the email and don´t even read it won´t comment here.
So what I´m really trying to say is that that should´ve been a question on the ACX Survey
I always mark it with a heart whenever I´ve already read something. One way of knowing is checking the ration of the "likes" / Suscribers and of the comments / "likes" of the Open Threads and compare them to the rest.
If it´s similar or superior, then it´s probably okay. If it´s less than the usual, then there might be a problem
Two YouTube channels I've watched recently have a fair number of videos on the economic history of nations: Casual Scholar and Asianometry. Casual Scholar only does these economic history videos, while Asianometery has a bunch of other stuff.
Both have pushed me further towards Georgism. It seems like a country can get everything else right (eg be capitalist, enforce laws evenly, etc) but if it failed to implement land reform then it wouldn't really matter. The landowners would be maintain de facto economic and political control of the country and economic wellbeing would remain about the same (eg poor).
Scott's review of How Asia Works suggests the book states that what worked in that region (and would work elsewhere) is to follow a path where an enlightened, altruistic, but strong leader starts the country in a planned economy phase and transitions to a free economy as the country develops. The book also suggests that conventional pro-market advice (backed by the IMF) usually fails.
My current opinion is that a nation needs to get land reform right, then do something in the ballpark of the conventional pro-market advice to see success.
How Asia Works has a blueprint that starts with land reform but also has additional steps. The countries in the region that were successful in land reform were pretty authoritarian. After the land reforms they either did the other steps of the blueprint or implement communist policies. Or they were Singapore and Hong Kong. I think those extra steps are unnecessary.
No nation in Asia implemented Georgism and most of them abolished or greatly reduced land taxes as part of their land reform. Georgists keep on claiming they have successful examples but they keep pointing to things that aren't Georgism and lack key planks of the Georgist program.
Also, what country did everything right but failed for lack of Georgist reforms? The country which maintained the greatest amount of rights for landlords was Japan where the land the breakup of the landlords only happened in the 1940s as an American attempt to punish a hostile class. And yet Japan was undoubtedly the most advanced throughout that whole period.
The typical type of land reform that happened in East Asia, where customary rights were replaced with property rights and redistributions to tenant farmers, is not relevant in the modern US. We don't have tenant farmers in large numbers and most of our land is deeded and sold. What isn't is mostly extremely rural or state owned.
Thank you for everything that you do - I greatly appreciate your perspective and insights. I rarely open the email on Open Threads as I have a 1yr old, yet I like getting the emails. When I do get a chance to open and read, I appreciate it. If it wasn’t emailed, I would never search it out.
I like the open thread email. I might miss the information you share here otherwise. And I like knowing about a new open thread when I have a question I want to ask
DALL-e is getting a lot less prissy, and is occasionally outright lewd. Here in chronological order are images it's surprised me with over the last month. I wasn't trying to get erotic images, just putting in prompts to see what it would do with them.. If you're curious, prompts are below, along with links to images.
“Art Nouveau. A night beach. Santa Claus is examining a dead goosefish on the beach. In the background, ocean and a full moon.” https://i.imgur.com/zQhb0xi.png
“An illustration in the Style a renaissance painting: In the sky 2 Goodyear blimps are flirting.. The lady blimp has lipstick and nice hair. The man blimp has a hairy chest”. https://i.imgur.com/PAJeb9i.png
“realistic painting: a woman with the head of a fish lying in the sand”
Tim Self, thought I'd let you know I put up an album of DALL-E's misfires, which fascinate me and also entertain me. They're often hilarious, but also pack a sort of surrealistic punch. Here the misfires are used as illustrations for a comic poem. It's here, if you're interested: https://photos.app.goo.gl/Xq6v6rjB5fJHGH3y5
I feel like that would be true if there was a central model that was actively updating weights from publicly shared models. but I think unless it’s directly on discord like the mid journey bots there’s no way for them to collect user prompts or feedback? I feel like the feedback mechanisms are not that pro-active
I don't think it's set up for learning from user inputs -- I think the developers are learning from user inputs, and making tweaks based on that. I don't know though. Someone who does please speak up.
It clearly has some rules built into it: I don't think I've tried to get erotic images, but I have tried prompts involving violence. Most recent is asking for an image of someone who opened his mouth so wide that he swallowed his own head -- mostly because I was curious to see what DALL-e would do with something so hard to represent. But I got DALL-e's "we don't do that" screen -- image of cute puppies, and "look like you've asked for an image that violates out rules." Oddly, it also refused to edit an image that it had generated spontaneously. This one: https://i.imgur.com/lVzl3xm.png
The prompt that got me that image was "a woman with the head of a fish lying in the sand." I did not ask for a nude woman. I tried to edit that image so that the woman had the head of a fish, and it refused -- cute puppies, "looks like your image violates our guidelines" or some such.
2. Email about new articles goes to a folder that I do not ever check. I check the RSS feed for articles.
So, in my opinion, you should keep causing the open threads to appear in the RSS feed. If you can separately stop them from sending email, I don't care.
This is a little late and someone probably already noted it on the survey results post, but I found it really striking that (a) about 30% of the survey respondents have had an official IQ test and know the result and (b) about 40% know both their verbal and math SAT scores.
I couldn't name a single person I know who's had a professionally administered IQ test. How, why and when do people tend to get these? I also have no idea what my component SAT scores were, and only remember the general ballpark of the overall score. Why is this something that so many people apparently retain into their 30s and beyond?
Most people do not get IQ scores, but two groups frequently do - kids who over or under achieve in school, particularly grade school. If you fall too far above or below the standard expectation, you get recommended by the school for review. If ACX readers truly have very high IQs as indicated, then it's likely they were at least offered testing through the school. In the US, there's federal law governing Gifted education that requires the schools to inform parents and allow the parents to opt into the testing.
I was tested in grade school, and my kids have all been offered the testing as well (we had two of our kids go through it, and both tested very close to my tested IQ).
Ah, that’s interesting! I figured lots of people probably got them for developmental reasons in childhood. But if it’s primarily for the parents’ or school’s information, I wasn’t sure that the kids would be told the results. (And even if they were told, I wouldn’t expect most of them to remember decades later.)
Seems like a weird bit of trivia to carry through life, I guess! I have a hard time remembering the zip code I lived in two years ago, which I used much more often than most people use their SAT scores.
The fact that the SAT wasn’t a major event in my life whose outcome I cared deeply about is probably part of the story too.
I suspect there is a correlation between getting a high score and remembering the score many years later.
part of why i remember is because i was in the first year they had the third, writing, component. In some instances i had to report my score out of 2400 and some out of 1600. So the numbers got more stuck in my head, thought this was the first survey i really had to think about what the numbers were.
I remember almost all my zip codes, including the one I haven't lived in since I was nine, along with the phone number we had then. On the other hand, I'm terrible at remembering names and faces five minutes after encountering them. Retention is weird.
SATs involve multiple scores (verbal and math at least, some people had writing as well), people can take them more than once, and the GREs use a very similar scale. All much more complicated to remember than a single number (even though competent IQ tests provide a range, they also provide a single number).
I remembered my SAT and GRE scores for a long time, and seem to have forgotten them a few years ago. I still remember by IQ score.
In my school, we all had some sort of aptitude test administered in kindergarten or the first grade. I can't remember which, but I do still remember I did really well on it. Also, in many countries, there's a compulsory draft and that draft includes an intelligence test of some description.
I took that test, but I don't remember it. I only know about it because my mother told me.
Part of the test was building a bridge out of blocks. The people who designed the test thought there was only one possible solution, and the woman administering the test had only ever seen that one solution, until I came up with another one. Also I did the whole test standing up because I didn't feel like sitting.
I have a question that seems like it should have an extremely obvious answer, so probably I'm overlooking something. And I can't find anyone discussing it (maybe because it's too obvious).
Why do we still have cities?
in pre-modern times, when transport and communication were slow/expensive, there are clear economies of scale to concentrating everyone in one place.
In the modern world cities look like a pure cost. Long commutes, congestion, local pollution, expensive land, no greenery etc.
Why hasn't modern transportation tech and communication tech dispersed the cities?
I don't see what advantages their are to concentrating all the banks/law firms/factories in one place, when so much of the modern economy could easily service clients remotely/with low transportation costs.
It seems like the sensible distribution of people over the land would be lots of smaller ( roughly uni-campus-sized, I guess), municipalities , then we could all have a garden and cycle into work, not get asthma from car fumes etc.
Edit: I'm not really thinking that much about remote work (although that's part of it), it more a question of "why not have lots of small-ish towns centred around one (or a few) business/communities/recreational activities? instead of lumping EVERYTHING together in one place, which seems really inefficient?"
Edit2: apparently the really obvious thing I was missing is that everybody else has a desperate need for orchestras, theatres and other types of high culture that can't be supported below population sizes in the millions.
>I don't see what advantages their are to concentrating all the banks/law firms/factories in one place
Ease of communication, meeting, physical exchange (that last one especially, for factories) ? Remote working has only been possible, in it's current state, since the dawn of fast internet, and by fast, I mean "faster than ADSL", and remote working was slow to be adopted until Covid, and plenty of people prefer to work on-site (I know I'm more productive there, even accounting for the time spent posting here).
Then there's the leisure benefits to population density, all the niche activities that can only be sustained with a large population around: Opera, Theater, god knows what else. I live in one of the 10 most populous city of France. If I want to go to the theater, I got 7 options in the week. InParis, I'd have 71, just for *tonight*. We move from a scenario where I need to stay aware of what's being played for something fitting my taste, then book a date well ahead, to a scenario where I can just look up what's on and go.
Aren't those kinds of economies of scale possible with much smaller urban centres though? Surely you could support a a decent theatre with a population in the 10s of thousands (might need to group the people most likely to be interested in theatre together), that doesn't seem like it should require millions of people all clustered together.
Ditto for physical meetings, it makes sense for the employees of firm to be physically close to each other (obviously necessary in the case of factories), but why do all the firms need to huddle together? It seem like each firm (or handfuls of firms) wold be better off with their own little parcel of land. It's not like the average factory worker needs regular physical contact with the other ~0.5 million factory workers in their city.
>Surely you could support a a decent theatre with a population in the 10s of thousands
Sure, and you could addd to that 100 other hobbies whose populations intersect more or less, because I don't just like Theater, I also like roller-skating, bouldering, and west-coast swing. Meanwhile a buddy is also into theater & bouldering, but prefer boxing & stand-up comedy.
>but why do all the firms need to huddle together?
Because the factory that makes cars benefits from being close to the factory that makes engines, and the cleaning company that service both also need to be close, etc etc.
And you know where you can most easily find already-trained employees to hire? In the city where your competitors also have a factory.
Take all these, and you end up with a megalopolis of millions where everyone got what they want, and nobody want to leave (except for the pollution, and there being too many people, and the lack of space, and the cost of living, but hey, they can't have their career anywhere else, and there is so much to do)
I still think the economies of scale for hobbies/communities/physical production processes are 95% as strong for towns/cities with 50k people as for cities with 5 million people. And that 5% extra efficiency doesn't get close to compensating for all the down sides really really high density living.
>And you know where you can most easily find already-trained employees to hire? In the city where your competitors also have a factory.
I think this is basically the answer. But like jnlb said below, it's a giant coordination problem. Cramming everyone who could potentially work together into one place isn't the rational way to solve this problem.
It is exceptional to find cities of only tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands (depending on where) that offer good and regular opportunities to see high quality plays or shows or live music, so experience doesn't support your claim. Why would the actors or musicians stay there or go there?
"I still think the economies of scale for hobbies/communities/physical production processes are 95% as strong for towns/cities with 50k people as for cities with 5 million people. "
Seems like an an empirical statement that could be evaluated (and one that seems to me to be very likely to be false, as a person who lives in a city of 1 million but still frequently goes to a 3-hr away metroplex of 5 million for various activities which are not available locally).
"I still think the economies of scale for hobbies/communities/physical production processes are 95% as strong for towns/cities with 50k people as for cities with 5 million people."
Like the others, I don't understand what you base this on. To take an example germane to this blog, *all* US nerds of a particular stripe are gathered in the Bay Area; if you are this type of nerd, your choices are to 1) move, or 2) rot in solitude, possibly alleviated by a few conventions or meetups a year which will only drive home the extent of your isolation from the place where it all happens. Boulder, Colorado does not contain 95% of a Silicon Valley; I don't think it can even be said to contain 5% of one.
Right, but lots of other unrelated groups are also concentrated in the Bay Area (I don't actually know much US geography, maybe just San Francisco in general), Which seem inefficient. You could just have Rationalist Town instead (+plus some other groups rationalists commonly cross over into).
Also you don't really need every rationalist in the same place, I assume there are enough rationalists to create a few self sustaining communities (if not, then just hypothetically).
"Aren't those kinds of economies of scale possible with much smaller urban centres though?"
They are not, no. *Maybe* you could support *a* decent theater, but even that's doubtful since as Kristian points out, the decent actors don't want to go to a place where there's exactly one employment opportunity, but you *cannot* support 71 decent theaters, or realistically, even one top-class theater (something with a hard-to measure but definite effect; people aren't generally satisfied with okay if they could have excellent). The selection which BoisVert alludes to is *only* possible with extreme density.
Universities are pretty small and have decent cultural scenes (probably not generalizable, but shows it's possible.) Also couldn't the theatre troupes and orchestras just move from place to place?
And is the difference between excellent restaurants and just ordinary ones really worth sacrificing so much living space and communing time for?
Anyway, I doubt most people care that much about really niche interests. I doesn't seem like a strong reason to urbanise for anyone but s small elite.
"Universities are pretty small and have decent cultural scenes"
...no they don't.
"Also couldn't the theatre troupes and orchestras just move from place to place?"
They could, and they used to, but why would they want to if they don't have to? Few people are itinerant by choice, as there are great benefits to a permanent home (which you thus wish to locate in the optimal place, since it is immobile).
I don't know if you can tell, but your argument here has basically shifted to trying to cajole the world into going along with your ideas.
"And is the difference between excellent restaurants and just ordinary ones really worth sacrificing so much living space and communing time for?"
Generalized from just restaurants to everything: yes. Demonstrably yes.
"Anyway, I doubt most people care that much about really niche interests."
Well, then you're just wrong. You're typical-minding, projecting your own unusual preferences onto others.
I also think economies of scale are a likely answer, but there are also definite dis-economies of scale and I just can't imagine any broad category of economies that would offset them.
Mostly it seems the dis-economies grow faster for bigger settlements then the economies do.
Are there lots of clear examples of common economies of scale you only get at >1/2million people? National monuments I guess, big museums maybe specialist hospitals.
I'm generally curious/uncertain I didn't mean to jump to jump to any conclusions or anything.
I do have niche interests (they're mostly outdoorsy/need lots of space ironically) but I'd give them up in an instant if it halved my rent and commute time.
Network effects. People's desire to live in a place is highly dependent on other people's place of living, e.g. work, friends, family. Splitting up social networks such that these relations stay together is difficult to coordinate (cfr. what happens when some group splits from Reddit, Twitter, etc.). If it were driven from the top it would suffer from issues covered in books such as Seeing As A State, and driven by individual behavior it is just unlikely to happen.
I agree with that characterization but I want to add that I do not know whether algorithms for "optimal partition of social networks for X" exist, so I cannot say whether an omniscient planner would be able to create such cities.
A "cities are basically giant market failures" theory does seem pretty radical and it would have massive implications for urban planning (i.e. the should be much more of it). Also why was the USSR so urban then?
Even if you can't find an optimal algorithm, the negative externalities are so big (alienation, congestion, land prices, no nature), there should should still be big gains from very basic coordination.
If it's true, YIMBY types should really shift their focus away from facilitating more city growth, and towards getting governments to founding new towns from scratch (like they used to?). Probably even things like nationalising industries, to run public sector versions of company towns, would be worth doing despite the Seeing like a State type objections.
My impression is that the USSR was not run by very clever people and to a certain extent by outright crooks. Also, I don't necessarily think USSR counts as one of the most urban entities but socialist economies tended to focus on large industrial growth and were very much not-green. Breaking up the huge metropolitan areas is a very noble goal IMO but I expect a lot of inertia and opposition due to vested interests.
Let's flip the USSR question around: is there an example of a post-industrialization wealthy/developed society in which huge metropolitan concentrations have _not_ been the norm? Regardless of specific forms of national governance or degrees of top-down planning?
Network effects are a concrete economic gain - i.e., you can visit your job, your family, and your favorite niche nerdy social club without needing to own a car - so I think it would be better to call them "tradeoffs" rather than "problems."
I'm not sure what the optimal city size is to maximize the cost-benefit tradeoff, but given that tech companies are still willing to pay stupid amounts of money to enable people to move to the Bay Area, I'm inclined to say we haven't reached it yet. (In an economic sense, that is - obviously you may have different opinions on what size of city is *psychologically* best for people.)
As I see it, remote work became widespread only during Corona, and we don't yet know what the consequences will be. E.g. I still live within walking distance of the office although I rarely go there any more, and we might move somewhere less urban whenever we decide to get a new place.
For on-location work, I'd think that finding talent would be more difficult in less urban areas. For specialized positions, you'd have to get the new employee to move there instead of just searching the local talent pool, and for that move to make sense, their spouse/partner might also need to find a job in the same location, which would most likely be difficult if they also were in a specialized role.
Imho mainly because there is far wider range of possible leisure activities in a city than in a small town. Also congestion and pollution is bad in some cities, but only minor annoyance in others
I'm guessing you don't use much that's both local and niche. If I want a wide variety of decent restaurants, I need to be in a city. Ditto for just about anything else that can't be mail-ordered or consumed online.
If I wanted items from only one niche, I could presumably live in a small town devoted primarily to that niche. But if I want several things that aren't connected, I won't get most of them in any small town.
Simple example - a friend of mine unfortunate enough to live in a no big city part of the US, faced a 6 hour drive (each way) to get treatment of an ongoing medical condition. When it first erupted, the locals had trouble simply stabilizing her enough to get to the "local" big city. No, of course it's not a common condition, that every primary care physician can expect to see regularly...
I've got to push back on the "congestion/pollution" bit, which is a common misconception. On a *per capita* basis, cities are much, much better for both congestion and pollution than suburbs.
What creates more congestion and pollution: 200 people taking the bus/subway 5 miles to work, or 200 people driving 200 single-occupancy cars 15 miles to work?
Fun fact: If NYC had the same population density as a small New England town, it would cover a land area equivalent to the entire New England plus New Jersey plus Delaware. How's that for "no greenery"? (This fact comes from the book "Green Metropolis" by David Owen, which I highly recommend, although it's from 2009 and hence a bit dated in places - he refers to driving 20 miles round trip to get a video from Blockbuster.)
But if everyone one's concentrated together even a low congestion per capita still means lots of congestion.
I'm thinking about when I lived on a uni campus and everything was a 5 minute walk (through green spaces) away because it was just other students that wanted to live there. Whereas in the city I have to live 1 hour from work (by car from the suburbs or from the centre by public transport) because everyone else also wants to live near their jobs which, for some reason, is in the same place.
What I want to know is why all the jobs need to be in the same place.
What city do you live in? Is it representative of all cities? In the most dense cities, most everything is a short walk or transit ride away. Also there are plenty of college campuses that require long drives to navigate.
>why all the jobs need to be in the same place.
you asked above why things like all banks or law firms would be in the same place. This has more to do with where people live or want to live. If you want to higher bankers, for example, and they all live in a similar place, you will have a lot more success opening your bank in the same place instead of expecting people to move their whole lives to work at your new bank. They may be willing to do it, but on average you'll probably have to offer high salaries or some other perk.
Additionally, there are social aspects. Many professions have professional groups or networking events. If you are in one of these professions you may want to join these groups. If you are the only person of your profession in a town, your options are more limited.
But overall, the answer is momentum. The jobs are all in cities today, because they were all there yesterday. Its very expense and time consuming to reverse that momentum and there doesn't seem to be any appetite by the majority of people do undertake that kind of change.
Responding to your edit #2: It doesn't have to be high culture. That's just where the examples ended up. Rock concerts, good bars and hot bitches are also in far more plentiful supply in large cities and can be more specialized to individual tastes and survive.
Hell, I bet even gang fights are higher quality in NYC than in Milwaukee.
I would guess the number 1 reason is that poor people can't easily move. When the pandemic hit, many well-off New Yorkers packed up and moved to rural states in the Northeast, working remotely. Many of them are still up there because, guess what, both the quality of life and the cost of life are actually quite a nice break from NY.
Now, imagine working for a close to minimal wage. Imagine you barely have the money for groceries and the utility bills, with any unexpected expense being a problem. Imagine you don't have money for a car and have to rely on public transportation. Imagine it took you a very long time to find an apartment you could afford that wasn't totally awful. Also, imagine you're not alone, and your other family members also feel lucky to have jobs that just barely keep all of you above the water - and if you contemplated moving, they would all need to find new jobs somewhere else. You would need quite a bit of external money or help to move out of your big city, even if you're able to guarantee jobs for your family somewhere else and means of transportation to get to work.
There are a lot of poor people in cities, and the total inertia of those who just can't afford to move is enormous. Unless someone paid for them to move (which would be a lot of money), they would be stuck there for a very long time, and so the city would somehow hang on, supporting them, even if all of the downtown went defunct (think Detroit downtown with its abandoned skyscrapers).
I'd like to see much better research on the subject of hearing aids and dementia. It seems to me that some suggestive/needs more research/preliminary results were seized on by hearing aid vendors, and are now being hyped as if they were definitive.
Hearing aids make communication easier, and social contact protects against all kinds of things. I did not check how study was done, but if they did not control for SES that would be a huge confound. Hearing aids are quite expensive, and are not covered by Medicare, so people who wear them are undoubtedly better off financially than group who does not, and of course higher SES people have better health and longer lives.
I use an RSS feed, so as long as that keeps getting sent, I don’t mind what you choose.
Side note: I write a simple newsletter where once a week I post three things I find interesting. If that sounds like something you’d enjoy, the link is as follows: https://interessant3.substack.com
This may have been covered before. What's the best current investment if (AGI gets developed soon | this does not end all of civilization)? The condition is pulling a lot of weight, clearly.
Assume existing legal agreements are still in effect. A normal person may be able to exist on the outskirts of that system if AGIs enforce this rule among themselves the same way that countries do now (Robin Hanson discusses this in The Age of Em). So you could continue to possess all you currently own.
Land, oil, energy, commodities, already-existing manufacturing, anything chip-related, and existing compute are the main things I anticipate increasing in price. Probably not gold. Crypto, perhaps? The majority of labor should be entirely devalued by becoming easily replaceable. Some mention long-term interest rates rising.
Well yes, but we don't know which ones. And if this thesis is correct, exorbitant returns from those companies who develop AGI should more than compensate for that. Btw. I don't think this thesis is correct and don't own any Nasdaq index.
Yeah reasonable. I do wonder whether nasdaq would even contain that one blow-out company. Could through things like Microsoft owning a big chunk of OpenAI etc, subsidiaries, you capture a big chunk. I'm assuming one company will dominate but perhaps we'll see a few hitting it close to simultaneously, then it'll definitely work.
Yes, I assign very low probabilities to this thesis too. More is taken by long AGI timelines where ordinary allocation remains valid and short timelines with complete society wipeout/loss of regular property, but the latter is irrelevant due to everything going to zero value then in any case. So it seems relevant to consider this particular case.
What thesis would you run with for these kinds of decisions?
It has been proposed, as a counter-argument to a thesis that markets don't expect AGI, that it is not possible to profit from expected doom, but that is just totally false. If you expect a significant probability the world will end, it makes to reduce your savings rate and generally adopt more of "carpe diem" approach to financial decisions. Also of course it should impact your non-financial decisions like whether to have kids.
Hello, I am a 22-year-old in New York City who’s been struggling with a serious gastrointestinal condition (SIBO) for almost 2 years. Doctors of all varieties have been unable to treat me, and the most specialized ones don’t take insurance and charge in the range of $500/hour. If anyone knows of conventional GIs who are up to date on the literature, or of functional/integrative practitioners who take insurance/don’t charge quite so much, feel free to comment here or inbox me. Cheers
I'm a psychologist, no expert on GI problems, but do know several people who have had SIBO, and have decent general knowledge about how to navigate the medical system. Here's my read of your situation: SIBO is a recognized diagnosis, not one of those things that conventional docs are skeptical about. It should be possible to get the best and latest treatments from a conventional GI who takes insurance. The best way I know of to find a highly competent doctor is to look for one who is affiliated with a major teaching hospital in your area. The ones I know of are the Mt. Sinai Hospitals and The NY Presbyterian ones. I don't think it's wise to trust Zoc Doc and similar or online patient ratings. You can also look up what a doctor's medical school and residency program were. You want someone who went to good ones. If you can find one who qualifies who is also doing research in SIBO that's even better, but since SIBO is not rare it really should not be necessary to hold out for someone like that.
I would mistrust any practitioner who charges cash and claims to be giving "the most specialized treatment." Good doctors who take insurance *already* give the most specialized treatment. Seems likely those pay-me-cash doctors are administering a treatment that is hard to find because most GI docs do not believe it is effective. While it is possible that one of these unconventional treatments is in fact highly effective and will cure you, that's probably a long shot. You should know that for many people who experience chronic digestive tract problems there is no treatment that hits the spot and stops it cold. They end up diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which isn't really a diagnosis, just a fancy way of saying chronic stomach upset. What ends up helping people like that is a lot of experimentation with meds and lifestyle changes -- things like elimination diets, trying metamucil, trying low-fiber diets, trying frequent small meals, experimenting with cutting out coffee, alcohol, spices, etc etc, increasing fluids, increasing exercise, losing weight, elevating the head of the bed, etc etc.
Also, has it been confirmed by tests that you have had SIBO for 2 years? Having continuous SIBO-like symptoms is not the same as having continuous SIBO. The usual treatment for SIBO is a course of antibiotics that target just the intestinal bacteria. If these drugs do not get rid of the SIBO at least temporarily seems to me that you may have something other than SIBO. If the drug eliminates the SIBO and it comes right back, seems to me that would suggest to the doctor there's some underlying problem. However, these speculations are coming from someone at the outer limit of their medical knowledge. If you are having continuous SIBO symptoms, but testing negative for SIBO, then it is likely that the symptoms are not caused by SIBO. I would mistrust a practitioner who tells you your symptoms are due to "stealth SIBO," especially if they demand 5 Ben Franklins for telling you so.
Anyhow, this was kind of rambly,, but I hope helpful. I hope you are able to solve this and go back to feeling good.
Thanks for your comment. I actually had an intake today with someone at NYP/Weill Cornell who seemed good, though it was a short appointment. Medical school not remarkable, so if I don't have success with him maybe I'll look for a different provider at the same hospital.
My previous practitioner at another university hospital was unable to successfully treat me with 2 courses of Xifaxan/neomycin (so, yes, I've tried the antibiotic route). Symptoms improved during the course but then returned immediately after treatment. I also picked up a host of other issues in that provider's care, including mild POTS (possibly post-COVID, possibly GI-related, who knows), fungal overgrowth (currently have oral thrush), and tinnitus (from neomycin-induced ototoxicity), hence my hesitancy surrounding further conventional treatments. I also do still have SIBO, per a breath test from a few months ago. Recurring SIBO is very common, but still don't have a good idea of what the root cause is for me -- that's what I fear an MD may not be able to solve for me, but I guess I'm still hopeful the new provider can do something.
Also, about to spend an entire paycheck on labs and imaging, so I guess the cost factor isn't as different as I thought it'd be. Thanks for the suggestions though!
Hmm. I know thrush can sometimes be caused by antibiotics -- well, not exactly caused, I think the way it works is that antibiotics damage your body's microbe ecosystem, and that opens the way for thrush. That's the only useful factoid I have to contribute here, and you probably already knew it. Anyhow, I hope things get better.
The thing on my mind right now - because it's everywhere you look - is prices, prices, prices. The thing that got me into this blog (or SSC, I suppose) was the discussion on Cost Disease... Never really went away, did it?
I don't understand how people can think the Republican-led House of Representatives (in the United States) is out of line in requiring spending be reigned in before increasing the debt ceiling.
Me: I need to increase my credit card limit.
Credit card company: But you're only making the minimum payments now. Maybe you should consider spending less?
Me: I only spend money on good things that I need. I just need a higher limit now.
Credit card company: This can't go on forever. How long until you can't make even your minimum payments?
Me: My income is fine. I can always make more money if I need to. My job is pretty flexible that way.
Credit card company: Then perhaps you should consider making that extra money now instead of getting a higher credit limit?
Me: No, I don't want to rock the boat. You can only go to the well so often, you know?
Credit card company: OK, we can give you an increase for now, I guess. But you better not be asking for a higher limit another year from now.
Me: Thanks! And no, of course not! This will definitely be the last increase I need.
That scenario is not comparable to the US debt limit.
With a credit card limit, you can only add more spending (charge more things) to the card if the credit limit is raised _first_.
Whereas, Congress has already added all the spending that the debt limit must cover (last year or the year before or whenever). Raising the debt limit does not enable any new spending commitments. Rather, failure to raise the debt limit forces the government to renege on contracts already entered into, with a whole lot of very bad collateral impacts.
I don't doubt that the limit must be raised NOW, to meet commitments, as you said. But is it unreasonable to demand spending limits so that the limit may not be increased in the future?
We're currently spending about $400 billion per year on interest alone, increasing every year.
That's an entirely separate question, though. If someone cares about reducing the debt, they should win power, and then reduce spending or increase taxes or both. They don't have to fuck around with the debt ceiling for spending that's already been allocated.
In fact if a political party was sincere about prioritizing reducing future spending then fucking around with the debt ceiling is the _last_ thing it would do.
Because the fucking around itself to some degree, and an actual default to a vastly larger degree, raises any government's borrowing costs to deal with the spending previously committed. Thereby forcing an increase in one of the already-large categories of federal spending.
This is a really good point. If anybody is worried about our interest payments now, they should imagine what those look like if we default and the rates double overnight.
A human being actually concerned about our debt/spending issues would (a) boost the debt limit to so we don't screw ourselves in the short term, then (b) *immediately* work on balancing the budget so that we don't screw ourselves in the long term.
But what we have are 2 parties, neither of whom care to do (b), and one of whom thinks "fiscal responsibility" means just quixotically picking random moments to try to torpedo (a) for temporary political advantage.
Part of the justification for the debt ceiling was to incentivize the government to balance the budget to stay under it. Removing it removes the incentive to balance said budget, just like how when the rain stops, the homeowner loses his immediate need to repair his stuck window. I use that analogy on purpose: when the government is under the debt ceiling gun, it *still* doesn't balance the budget, instead opting for more drastic short-term measures.
To me, this suggests that the real problem is that it's just hard to balance the budget - which I ultimately trace to the strong human desire to prioritize {not losing stuff, even a little} over {maybe gaining a lot of stuff}. There's simply too much pain in cutting spending, relative to a nice soothing ceiling boost, a budget resolution, or even a trillion dollar coin.
If it were only about spending, then I would agree alas it is not. Without the ability to borrow to manage account balances (and spending), then some interest payments would not go out which would amount to a default on debt obligations which would have a tremendous effect on the market for USG debt in all its forms. The knock-on effect is that it's likely that interest rates would go up as the bond market prices down new treasury issued debt. In other words, delaying the increase in the debt ceiling has no discernible upside since I see no majority of any kind (GOP or otherwise) voting to lower benefits paid out through social security, medicare, VA benefits, and medicaid. Adding interest payments to those items gets you to 65% of outlays so if you don't touch any of that, you would, essentially have to do away with the rest of the federal government (including DoD) and that's a hard sell. So, I'm still waiting to read a cogent argument in which the discussion on the debt ceiling is anything other than political theater.
"Compared to Democratic presidents, Republicans are estimated to add between 0.75% and 1.2% more to the deficit (as a percent of GDP) each year they are in office. This result controls for economic conditions, and explains 75% of the variation in the annual changes to deficits."
Looking at the years when particular presidents are in power, from the chard of Federal Government Debt, we find mostly steadily rising levels from 1993 until 2009, when the increase accelerated, then a jump at about mid-2020. To be fair, spending levels are set in the previous year, so, for example, 2009 spending was set by the Bush administration.
But from about $4.5 trillion in 1993, we rose $6 trillion in 2001, to $10 trillion in 2009, to $20 trillion in 2017, to $28 trillion in 2021, to about $31 trillion now.
If your point is that both parties are bad in keeping deficits down, I totally agree. But given that this is true, I don't believe that the Republicans' antics on the debt ceiling have anything to do with fiscal responsibility.
Yes, that was my point. As to whether fiscal responsibility will come of it, we'll just have to see, since all we have heard so far is simply promises of responsibility. I, for one, won't be holding my breath in anticipation.
The last time that the federal debt declined as a fraction of GDP for several years in a row was Clinton's second term. The last time before that was during the Carter presidency. In Clinton's case it was with a GOP Congress so credit for good works on the point has to be shared.
So if we're zoomed out to that sort of timescale we could say that the Dems have a _slightly_ stronger record on this topic. But only slightly and only if we've zoomed out a good ways.
The budget is controlled by the House of Representatives. During the last four decades, the debt grew at approximately double the rate under the Democrat majority in the House.
The fact that the Republican presidents appear the be bigger spenders can in a large part be explained by the fact that the presidency and the House of Representatives are typically held by different parties.
Yeah, but the debt ceiling isn't you negotiating with a credit card company that is hesitating to lend you money. Plenty of market actors are still willing to lend the US money, so there is no "one guy who needs money negotiating with another guy reluctant to lend it" angle. It's just the Federal Gov (aka you) negotiating with itself over whether or not to take the loans readily available on the market. Example:
Me: Oh no! I'm running up debt real fast! I'd better do something about that.
Also Me: How about this, then. I'll commit that, no matter what, even if a credit card company offers me a higher limit, I won't put more than $10,000 on my credit card.
<2 Months Later>
Me: Well crap, I did nothing to change my actual income or spending practices over the last 2 months - now my house payment and electric bill are due, but I have no cash on hand and I'm also at that $10,000 on my credit card I promised myself I wouldn't go over!
Also Me: Well, plenty of people are still willing to lend me money - I could just go to the market and get that increase to my credit limit. Then I could try to fix my budget after *without* the looming threat of losing my house and having the power switched off.
Me: Yeah, but I made a promise to myself! Maybe I should just call the power company and tell them I'm sorry, but a promise is a promise so I refuse to access any of the credit I could easily get out on the market from any number of lenders. I promised myself I'd only borrow $10,000 on this credit card, and that's that, so they can just wait.
Also Me: Well, that seems like maybe the stupidest possible way anyone could go about balancing their budget, but I guess we can fuck around and find out if we really want to?
I apologize if I wrote it in a way that made it hard to follow, but the debt ceiling issue far more closely resembles "guy negotiating with himself over whether or not to accept freely available credit" than it resembles "guy negotiating with banker reluctant to loan guy money."
The credit is still readily and easily available on the market, so the only question is whether the government chooses to take advantage of it or not.
Do you also think it would have been reasonable for Democrats in 2017 to demand the repeal of the Trump tax cuts as a price for not blowing up the government?
No, those two things seem unrelated. Perhaps they could be a part of a negotiated compromise.
But demanding reigning in spending seems more like exacting a promise to, say, be careful driving after being in a hospital from crashing a car into a telephone pole.
How are they unrelated? Tax cuts cost money. A great way to be "fiscally responsible" would be to collect enough money in taxes to actually match our spending. If you need a lot of money to pay your mortgage, would you consider taking a higher-paying job, or would you consider that unrelated?
(Republicans have *claimed* that tax cuts pay for themselves by stimulating the economy, but AFAIK it hasn't worked out in practice.)
The sad part is that in 2017, even with aggressive "dynamic scoring", they still couldn't make the numbers work out to pretend that the tax cuts would pay for themselves.
I stand corrected. Raising taxes would indeed be about the same. Except capital gains, which I understand provides more revenue by people taking advantage of lower taxes by more frequent trading (not documented, but it makes sense, from a price elasticity sense).
I think we can agree that we are frustrated by the politics and politicians, who have the power to fix things, but aren't.
Actually, I've been thinking about this longer, and finally realized my disconnect. Yes, increasing taxes is as fiscally responsible as decreasing spending, but it was at least the wording that threw me off.
The difference, as I see it, is one is "we must find a way to reduce spending in some significant way" as against "all of the stuff you wanted must be reversed". One leaves room for compromise and the other doesn't.
True liberals and conservatives have fundamentally different views. It may be possible to prove some of them correct or incorrect, but lacking that, compromise over the uncertain way forward seems to make the most sense. But compromise seems no longer needed, if you have a majority, however slight, that can get what it wants done despite the wants of the opposition.
I just finished reading Unsong, and I wonder how many of you have read it and have spotted the same glaring plot hole I have.
***SPOILER ALERT DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU HAVE READ UNSONG OR DON"T CARE ABOUT SPOILING THE ENDING SPOILER ALERT***
In Unsong, Hell can be destroyed only by speaking the True Name of God *while inside Hell.* The Comet King cannot enter Hell, so his beloved wife, Robin, sells her soul to Satan in order to force the Comet King's hand - while she's being tortured in Hell, her husband will have a super-duper strong incentive to figure out some way to get there. The Comet King accomplishes this by turning evil, torturing and killing a bunch of people, and finally killing himself once he's sure enough that he's so evil he'll go straight to Hell.
My question: why the heck couldn't the Comet King have taught Robin the True Name of God? That way Satan takes her to Hell, she immediately turns to him, says "Checkmate, motherf***er," and speaks the True Name of God, and poof! Hell is destroyed. Think how much horrific suffering could have been averted! I mean, that wouldn't be so good for the plot, but there should be an *in-story* reason why the Comet King couldn't do this. Perhaps the True Name of God works only when spoken by someone with supernatural powers such as the Comet King, and Robin is a mere human, albeit an exceptionally compassionate and principled one? But if so, that should be stated explicitly.
In case that sounded overly critical, I have to say that Unsong was an amazing feat of imagination and I couldn't put it down (except the Broadcast part; I forced myself to get through it and wished I could rinse my brain with bleach afterward). The characters and the worldbuilding was great. Well done!
Also, Scott keeps saying throughout, "Nothing is ever a coincidence." Correction: Nothing is a coincidence, unless it's a whale pun, in which case it's a fluke.
The Comet King was more than mortal, and could indeed imagine the way Hell ought to be correctly. Likewise, Aaron, once merged with Sohu, Uriel, Sarah, THARMAS (and Erika and Dylan, I suppose) also had the capability of imagining the rest of the universe to be the way it should be.
Besides, Robin couldn't hold the Name in for such purposes. Metatron took the Name from The Comet King because it must not be held in an impure mind. At least, not for more than the few moments needed for him to kill himself. And even if Robin held it only for that purpose, would not Thamiel have seen it in her mind, her plan? And then would have refused her deal.
Yes - Thamiel read her mind. Also, it's implied that *using* the name of God to accomplish the specific goal is beyond-mortally-difficult, so that as well.
I cannot find the part where Robin made a deal with Thamiel, but I think I remember that Thamiel erased something from her memory. If that is correct, the proposed plan might fail by Thamiel erasing the True Name of God from Robin's memory right before taking her to hell.
Are we all sitting comfortably, children? Good, then let's begin.
Bret Devereaux over at "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry" has begun the first of his analyses of Amazon's "The Rings of Power", and I just popped over to alert you all before I nip back and luxuriate in what follows. Enjoy!
He also has a brilliant takedown of Game of Thrones (e.g., you can't transport a bunch of grain across hundreds of miles of sparsely populated land with premodern technology.)
His previous Lord of the Rings posts are marvellous, too. I thoroughly enjoyed the Game of Thrones ones because okay, it's the TV show not the books, but I always like G.R.R. Martin getting a tonking over the elements in his work given his snarking about "so what was the tax base of the Gondorian economy?" I don't know, George, but I *do* know Aragorn knew more about logistics than you do! 😁
And not that tax policy came up in the middle of an approaching and then extant siege, but surely the tax base was the agricultural lands ruled by the great nobles who weren't showing up with their levies till Aragorn removed the threat of invasion via the Anduin.
Tolkien's economics and logistics aren't beyond question (keeping Barad-Dur, the assorted northwestern fortresses, Cirith Ungol, etc. fed and watered on the edge of a desert with supplies all the way from from Nurn seems like a stretch, especially since Frodo and Sam aren't exactly seeing a lot of supply caravans along the internal lines of communication). But Gondor seems like a fairly straightforward setup given that it's on a river with a bunch of named agricultural regions and has a sophisticated Byzantine-like governing structure.
The Shire may need a bit more special pleading for running a 19th century society in the middle of a medieval economy far away from any economic centers. Especially since as far as I know their tax policy is "we haven't got any" and their only recorded export trade was a secret scandal. But Gondor and Rohan seem like close enough analogs to known systems that they don't raise major questions.
It's more like an 18th century society, really; it's not only overtly nonindustrial, industrialism is the awful consequence of war that happens to it at the end of the book and which the heroes vanquish. Given how bucolic and non-import-dependent it seems to be it doesn't appear all that logistically unfeasible. The soil in the Shire is good enough for them to have plenty of sheep and jam, and evidently tobacco is a native plant; that seems to satisfy the whole operation.
The society overall has more of a 19th century feel by my read, and they're on the verge of industrialization if the mill can be retrofitted that quickly. (Granted, Saruman is something of an X-factor there.) They also have paper and mail, common and inexpensive enough that frequent letters and wastepaper baskets are a thing. Likewise having enough books to require a bookcase. (And, you know, golf. :-) ) But 18th century is defensible; they definitely read as modern rather than medieval either way.
They do have trade with the Dwarves, which they really need given that they have metal (Bilbo's silverware, Lobelia's folding umbrella, mirrors, gold pens, etc.) but no mines. Presumably they trade food and agricultural products
IIRC Tolkien decided that tobacco and potatoes had been brought east from Numenor. (One of the learned words Aragorn gives for pipe-weed when he's making gentle fun of Merry for having lost his was "westmansweed".)
Yeah, I think our interpretations only differ on the margin, so to speak. Paper, mail, umbrellas, mechanical clocks and all that are very much 18th century inventions, and it's not obvious that all hobbits use them, just Bilbo and Frodo's class of gentry. I also attribute the bookcase to this circumstance; we already know that Bilbo's house is enormous by hobbit standards. The social order with lifelong servants (Sam), country gentry etc. is something that, while it persisted into the 19th century, was already sort of old-fashioned by then. There's also something very Austenitic about the Sackville-Bagginses' naked thirst for the estate of the Bagginses proper.
Of course, some things are absent entirely, e.g. there's no indication that they have movable type printing. All the books seem to be manuscript.
(And indeed, Saruman is so strongly associated with industrialization and mechanization already, as an individual figure, that I chalk all that business up to him, as well as of course a commentary on the destruction wrought on England by those changes.)
EDIT: Oh, and I forgot to mention that I didn't mean to suggest the Shire was economically isolated or anything, just that they don't seem *dependent* on much outside trade, especially since their military is a very anemic militia, replaced by the protection of the Gondormen. (There's some sort of Germany/USA joke here, but I can't quite reach it offhand.)
They don't have industrialisation of the Industrial Revolution type, but that doesn't mean they have no industries or machinery. Just not the big smoke-belching type that gave the name to the Black Country:
"The name dates from the 1840s, and is believed to come from the soot that the heavy industries covered the area in, although the 30-foot-thick coal seam close to the surface is another possible origin."
"[Elihu Burritt – the US Consul in Birmingham] begins his “Walks in the Black Country and its Green Border-land”, published in 1868, in lyrical praise of this “velvet-bound area of fire and smoke”. But subsequent chapters discuss not only the enterprises he saw but record his shock at the conditions experienced by young girls working in the brickyards near Halesowen.
But it is his descriptions of the Black Country – “Black by day and red by night, cannot be matched for vast and varied production, by any other place of equal radius on the surface of the earth” – which make him an important historical source."
And see the descriptions of the Midlands in Dickens' "The Old Curiosity Shop":
"They had, for some time, been gradually approaching the place for which they were bound. The water had become thicker and dirtier; other barges, coming from it, passed them frequently; the paths of coal-ash and huts of staring brick, marked the vicinity of some great manufacturing town; while scattered streets and houses, and smoke from distant furnaces, indicated that they were already in the outskirts. Now, the clustered roofs, and piles of buildings, trembling with the working of engines, and dimly resounding with their shrieks and throbbings; the tall chimneys vomiting forth a black vapour, which hung in a dense ill-favoured cloud above the housetops and filled the air with gloom; the clank of hammers beating upon iron, the roar of busy streets and noisy crowds, gradually augmenting until all the various sounds blended into one and none was distinguishable for itself, announced the termination of their journey.
...In a large and lofty building, supported by pillars of iron, with great black apertures in the upper walls, open to the external air; echoing to the roof with the beating of hammers and roar of furnaces, mingled with the hissing of red-hot metal plunged in water, and a hundred strange unearthly noises never heard elsewhere; in this gloomy place, moving like demons among the flame and smoke, dimly and fitfully seen, flushed and tormented by the burning fires, and wielding great weapons, a faulty blow from any one of which must have crushed some workman’s skull, a number of men laboured like giants. Others, reposing upon heaps of coals or ashes, with their faces turned to the black vault above, slept or rested from their toil. Others again, opening the white-hot furnace-doors, cast fuel on the flames, which came rushing and roaring forth to meet it, and licked it up like oil. Others drew forth, with clashing noise, upon the ground, great sheets of glowing steel, emitting an insupportable heat, and a dull deep light like that which reddens in the eyes of savage beasts."
As a child, Tolkien lived in a village on the outskirts of Birmingham and went to school in Birmingham, so he would have seen the contrast between the rural and the industrialised urban:
"There is no special reference to England in the 'Shire' – except of course that as an Englishman brought up in an 'almost rural' village of Warwickshire on the edge of the prosperous bourgeoisie of Birmingham (about the time of the Diamond Jubilee!)[1897] "
I have to be honest, I'm not sure what this is really responding to. I thought it was tolerably obvious that I meant the heavy industry of industrialism that you describe above, although I suppose I must have been mistaken. At any rate, of course they must have had industry in the broader sense of industriousness, of *work*.
It's funny that Tolkien thought the Shire wasn't particularly English, though -- that must be home-blindness at work. From outside it seems obvious that it even references a particular *region* of England. I can't criticize, though -- I come from a country whose citizens expect its laws to apply in other countries.
I've wondered if the mathoms don't serve as a kind of economy; they keep circulating around and they have some store of value. Plus the Hobbits are familiar with silver pennies, so they have a currency or access to one. And I think they do trade more than pipeweed, for instance providing food to the Dwarves. There's a typescript about Gandalf's meeting with Thorin and company before they all show up in "The Hobbit" in one of the HoME books, here Gandalf is speaking with the Dwarves about taking a Hobbit along with them:
"(W)e actually passed through the Shire, though Thorin would not stop long enough for that to be useful. Indeed I think it was annoyance with his haughty disregard of the Hobbits that first put into my head the idea of entangling him with them. As far as he was concerned they were just food-growers who happened to work the fields on either side of the Dwarves' ancestral road to the Mountains."
"'I wish you would not always speak so confidently without knowledge,' I said sharply. 'These villagers have lived in the Shire some fourteen hundred years, and they have learned many things in the time. They had dealings with the Elves, and with the Dwarves, a thousand years before Smaug came to Erebor. None of them are wealthy as your forefathers reckoned it, but you will find some of their dwellings have fairer things in them than you can boast here, Thorin. The Hobbit that I have in mind has ornaments of gold, and eats with silver tools, and drinks wine out of shapely crystal.'"
The Shire is its own small realm and there's no reason the Hobbits couldn't construct an economy of their own, they are isolated both by choice and due to circumstances, but not totally cut off from the wider world - they have contact with Bree, and Bree has some contact with the outside as well.
Mostly Martin annoyed me with that cheap shot because working out economics is not the point of Tolkien's story, any more than it is the point of his own work. I don't see that Westeros is any better sourced as a functioning tax base. I think at that point (and since) he is very aware of being, as a fantasy writer, in the shadow cast by Tolkien and he was reacting against that - 'our Elves are different', as the trope has it. Tolkien's own opinion was expressed in a letter of 1954:
"I am more conscious of my sketchiness in the archaeology and realien [German, 'realities, technical facts'] than in the economics: clothes, agricultural implements, metal-working, pottery, architecture and the like. Not to mention music and its apparatus. I am not incapable of or unaware of economic thought; and I think as far as the 'mortals' go. Men, Hobbits, and Dwarfs, that the situations are so devised that economic likelihood is there and could be worked out: Gondor has sufficient 'townlands' and fiefs with a good water and road approach to provide for its population; and clearly has many industries though these are hardly alluded to. The Shire is placed in a water and mountain situation and a distance from the sea and a latitude that would give it a natural fertility, quite apart from the stated fact that it was a well-tended region when they took it over (no doubt with a good deal of older arts and crafts). The Shire-hobbits have no very great need of metals, but the Dwarfs are agents; and in the east of the Mountains of Lune are some of their mines (as shown in the earlier legends) : no doubt, the reason, or one of them, for their often crossing the Shire. Some of the modernities found among them (I think especially of umbrellas) are probably, I think certainly, a mistake, of the same order as their silly names, and tolerable with them only as a deliberate 'anglicization' to point the contrast between them and other peoples in the most familiar terms. I do not think people of that sort and stage of life and development can be both peaceable and very brave and tough 'at a pinch'. Experience in two wars has confirmed me in that view. But hobbits are not a Utopian vision, or recommended as an ideal in their own or any age. They, as all peoples and their situations, are an historical accident – as the Elves point out to Frodo – and an impermanent one in the long view. I am not a reformer nor an 'embalmer'! I am not a 'reformer' (by exercise of power) since it seems doomed to Sarumanism. But 'embalming' has its own punishments."
Agreed that economics isn't the point of the story. And the discussion above kind of epitomizes Tolkien's creative style, where he'd put something into the story by the way (like the references to his Silmarillion legendarium dropped into the Hobbit) and then spend great effort over years to connect the dots and make everything coherent.
The decades of unfinished work to retrofit Middle Earth into a more realistic heliocentric solar system is another example. I kind of think most readers prefer the "flat earth made round, sun is a fruit, moon is a flower, Venus is a ship" version. But it nagged at Tolkien because it wasn't true, and he didn't think the Elves' astronomical knowledge should be inferior to ours.
Likewise, the Shire was put in place in Middle Earth almost casually as a source of names and legends in The Hobbit, but Tolkien then did think about just how that might work. He was bound by what he'd already locked in, and he didn't have the same level of interest or depth of expertise he did with languages, and no single person, not even Tolkien, can build a world in every possible detail to the same level of verisimilitude. But where the questions arose, he would always go back and make a solid effort answering them. Which is one reason Middle Earth has so much more depth than most secondary worlds do.
I'm reading a lot of research papers right now, and wondering if anyone knows of a good way to convert them to audio files for listening.
Surely with all the AI advancements of late there's a way to input a pdf and get audio, but I'll be damned if I can't find anything that meets this specific use case.
If you aren't considered about the quality of voice rendition, you could check out what kind of accessibility functions your operating system has. MacOS is able to "read" aloud any text, though it will be kind of robotic. With a PDF you may have to use OCR to convert the image to text first.
I should have mentioned in my original comment that I'm hoping to find something that sounds very human like, as close to audiobook quality as possible.
I'm definitely open to other alternatives if nothing else exists though, thank you for the suggestion.
I bring you, Triumphalism and Defeatism! A brief exploration on the power of mindset in determining reality, noting the defeatist nature of the dominant worldview.
I would miss the open threads if I didn’t get the emails. I think the automatic emails after moving to substack are a major reason I’m reading the blog more often now
You might not get a lot of comments from the people who don't read open threads, because they're not reading the open thread. I had actually unsubscribed from SSC because I was getting too many open thread emails.
FDB's Substack has checkboxes to disable notifications for certain post categories. Giving us the choice seems like the best option.
Someday this may all be done by machine. It probably is feasible to do it by machine now, and certainly would be a lot cheaper and easier to get something new done with plastic and resins and substitute gilding. But it is wonderful to see a craft in action, not just churning out mechanised product (yes, industrial production is amazing in its own way but the element of human skill becomes valuable according as it becomes rarer and scarcer).
Very relaxing viewing! He could maybe benefit from some CAD work before sending the ornament off for printing, though. Could have saved him a lot of grinding/filing to get the shape right, plus some money, too - on demand printing services like Shapeways tend to charge based on the print volume.
I say keep the Open Threads, as I wouldn't be aware of them happening without the email.
Also, I once again have three subscriptions to Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning to give away. Reply with your email address, or email me at mine, specified here: https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/about/
I've had the same thought. As wrongheaded as I find Germany's foot-dragging, I keep imagining Churchill and Eisenhower learning that the worst problem we have with Germany is that they're too conflict-averse and insufficiently willing to send tanks into eastern Europe.
The bit where we have to explain to them that it's the US Republican party is the one with a non-trivial fringe of tankies who want Russia to win, is also amusing.
If the concept of mirror universes had had currency in their time[1], they'd have probably have wondered if the streams had gotten crossed.
[1] I think DC's Earth-3 in 1964 and Trek's in 1967 were the first "dark reflection" parallel universes visited by the heroes. (Distinguished from alternate histories where the bad guys won some conflict or other, visited by time travel or otherwise not existing alongside our history.) But I wouldn't be surprised to have missed some less famous antecedent.
Scott, I may have missed it, but I don’t ever remember your stating a clear opinion on the practices of giving puberty blockers or surgery to minors seen as “transgender”, let alone the much longer essay I would have expected to have read from you by now on this. Can you link me to something on this, or explain why you abdicated on the issue?
Not commenting on something is not the same as abdicating on it. From this comment alone, it's clear you have a particularly strong opinion coming down on one side of the debate and will be furiously producing content if Scott says anything, especially if he gives a positive opinion.
Nobody is obliged to give an opinion on every topic in the world, and why do so if it's very plain what the interlocutor *wants* that opinion to be?
(I have my own opinion on this and it might or might not be in line with yours, but this kind of "why don't you and him fight?" invitation does no good for anyone).
Given Scott’s professional expertise and the cultural salience of the issue, it’s surprising he hasn’t commented, if he hasn’t. I phrased my question politely and neutrally on an open thread, so your response and your assumptions are offensive.
"Abdicating" is not a polite or neutral phrasing, it presumes that he has a responsibility which he is evading or giving up. He doesn't have to comment on any single thing. You could have asked him does he have an opinion that he is willing to express?
You started off with "the essay I would have expected by now". Expect away, but that doesn't mean you'll get it. And when I see people demanding - as you did - an essay on a hot button culture war topic, I know they're not just innocently asking, they have a strong view themselves which they want to be able to use "F said this in favour" or "F said this against" for their own purposes, like the ivermectin guys who are always popping up asking "Scott have you read the latest study, Scott have you changed your mind, Scott why aren't you engaging with Alexandros".
Springes to catch woodcocks, my dear, springes to catch woodcocks.
Does it occur to you that for several years I’ve been genuinely fucking waiting to learn what Scott thinks about this issue because I respect him and expect him to be more knowledgeable and expert about this area than anybody else I know?
I don’t know anybody at all whose take on this issue is as balanced as I would expect Scott’s to be. I want to see that balanced take.
I’m certainly expressing neutrality on the issue I would like Scott’s opinion on. But there was one word in my response which expressed impatience, not with Scott, but with someone who seems to wish that I not learn what Scott thinks.
Then *ask* for Scott's opinion, but don't expect that to obligate him to give it. And don't come in sounding as if you have an agenda (i.e. putting transgender inside of quotation marks) which looks all too much like "I don't believe there is such a thing as transgender, I think the hormones and surgery for kids is all part of Big Globohomo, and I want you to do me a piece saying there is no science and psychologically it's awful to do this so I can then quote you all over the Internet in my slapfight with the trans lot".
Nobody wants to be made a cat's paw, whatever their views on the merits of the case.
I made it clear I wanted Scott’s opinion, and the word was put in quotes because there are distinctions to be made between dysphoria (a problem) and transition (a possible solution to the problem) especially in the case of children.
How many times do I have to say I really really truly indeedy genuinely actually WANT TO KNOW WHAT SCOTT THINKS ON AN OPEN THEEAD WHERE WE ARE ENCOURAGED TO ASK WHAT SCOTT THINKS before you’ll cut out the tone policing and the incredibly protective stance you are taking about an opinion that you don’t even know for sure he has? Consider the question asked in whatever tone is appropriate for Scott to actually answer it, okay?
"Polite" and "neutral" requests that someone whose ideas you "respect" stop abdicating responsibility regarding a common "medical treatment" are sort of self-evacuating, know what I mean? It's passive-aggressive, and therefore quite irritating to readers
You'd be better off saying Scott, I think giving puberty blockers to minors who believe they are transgender is a godawful mistake, and I'm angry that you haven't gotten around to weighing in about such an important matter.
I prefer to receive the Open Threads as emails, because I always read your (Scott's) notes in the Open Threads, even though I at most skim the comments and often not even that, and in general I only comment infrequently. on ACX. Furthermore, I prefer the emails compared to checking the site periodically or something.
I like getting the emails for the open threads iff you include content or prompts, such as this one. For posts that are just "Here is an open thread.", I could go without the email.
Japan's population is declining, but it is really "standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society" as their Prime Minister claimed?
Decline is extremely hard to manage, especially effectively. Support for senior citizens is dependent on a large population of younger people (preferably much larger than the older group). If population is shrinking, that means newer generations are smaller than older generations. As those older generations age and try to retire, the support systems will be stressed. Unless the older people are forced to work longer and/or receive lower benefits, the system may collapse. The result is a society that feels, accurately, as if they have less every year. Smaller economy, less stuff. This makes people miserable.
"[Cannot] function as a society" may be hyperbole, but accurate in the sense of "life as we know it."
It's funny, because "more room" matters most to younger people, especially those having families. If the younger generations are smaller, there are less families to enjoy that benefit (by definition). Housing will be cheaper for them, but at the expense of older generations trying to sell and losing value. At the leading edge of this it will be more benefit than harm. Eventually, especially with two smaller generations in a row, it will result in very little new housing being built and a lot of older housing being abandoned and becoming worthless - think Detroit.
So, the toilet you can't reach without assistance you can't afford is thirty feet from your bed rather than ten. That's not a good thing.
And it's not going to be that great having a big open house when society is leaning on you real hard to work 16 hours a day helping geezers take care of themselves.
How are they leaning on you real hard if they can't even get to the can unaided? You ought to just be able to shift your weight and they'll fall over.
Facetious, obviously, but I *am* trying to make a serious, if brutal, point: at some point the young crassly speaking have extremely little to lose (and in some cases a great deal to gain) by letting those old people just die, and too much weight pressed on them from those same old people is going to push them in the direction of taking that option.
So your suggestion is that the lower number and less wealthy young people should enact a policy (even if not written or official) to let the more numerous and wealthy older people live in horrible conditions and die from clearly preventable causes?
From a practical perspective this seems difficult to accomplish and still call a country democratic. That the older generations will continue to vote benefits for themselves to prevent these obvious and solvable maladies is obvious. To defy it, difficult at best.
Worse, there are two other considerations here. First, that these older people have family and friends that care about them, even if not also old. You're expecting society to just cut off the older people, when those older people are often heavily entwined with all of society - a painful proposition. Secondly, those younger generations are themselves one day going to be older. Do they really want to live in a society where at some point they themselves are going to be cut off to die alone?
If at any point you seemed to identify in my post advocacy for any specific course of action, reread it. It's an observation of a dynamic -- one which by no means needs to result in maintaining the democratic system.
That would destroy social trust, destroy rule of law, and destroy the web of property ownership and business alliances on which the Japanese economy depends. It would also almost certainly involve a substantial amount of violence, and if you're expecting the security forces to all line up on the side of the Youth Rebellion because they're young, then no that's not going to happen.
You're basically talking about French-revolution or Russian-revolution level social "transformation", trying to build a new social order from scratch. From the historical track record of such things, they've got a *lot* to lose, and following that plan would be a catastrophe for Japan.
It's especially hard to manage because, like population growth, population decline is exponential. The rate of decline accelerates. Human instincts are terrible at exponential processes, they always happen faster than our intuition suggests, so we often under- or overreact.
It isn't just that it's declining, it's also the specific _way_ that it's declining. They have the highest average life expectancy in the world which combined with the crashing fertility rate puts them on a path towards becoming literally a society of elderly people. They are at almost 30% being 65+ right now, heading to 40% within another generation and on up from there. Elderly people require more services (especially health care), most of them are retired so no longer contributing to the economy or tax base, etc etc.
And at some point the fact of that change itself will speed up the change. More and more young Japanese adults will decide that their children should grow up in a society that isn't shrinking and getting older and poorer, and will move away, thereby accelerating the shrinking and getting older and poorer.
All the policy options for dealing with that scenario are bad for somebody if not everybody. Someone successfully scared the shit out of the Prime Minister regarding all of the above, and he felt the need to issue a strong public wakeup call.
"continue to function" is forward-looking. Japanese society is not going to collapse or be transformed into something utterly alien in this decade. But it is plausible that if the demographic problem is not effectively addressed in this decade, then catastrophic change in three decades will be unavoidable. That would constitute "standing on the verge", with the next step being "fallen off the cliff but haven't hit bottom yet".
And your analogy reminds me of the time my wife and I were toweling off from swimming in a cenote in the Yucatan, and I grabbed my sandals and swished them in the water's edge to get some dirt off, and _then_ remembered that I had stashed the rental car key in the toe of one of the shoes. We stared mournfully down into the pool which was deeper than sunlight could penetrate -- and then spotted the car key sitting on the very last step of the little wooden staircase that we had just used to climb out of the water.
How did you retrieve it, you ask? Verrrrry carefully....
I like the email for the threads. The time stamp tells me when I want to go through the thread (usually 6-8 hours after first post) to find interesting remarks that aren't yet stale. My inbox is my todo list, so a new thread sits there until the time is right or until I have time to look through it.
I have a receiver that is connected to my big TV and to five speakers arranged around my living room. If I am watching a movie, and there's a loud noise like an explosion, does my receiver momentarily need to consume more electricity compared to other periods where the movie's sounds are at normal volume?
That is a weird and interesting question. I wouldn’t bet money on it but if you put a gun to my head and made me answer, I would say yes. I don’t think you would be able to measure it though. Line voltage AC into your big tv would remain whatever line voltage is in your area. So if we talk about more electricity it would be in the form of additional current draw.
I’m basing this purely on intuition though the extra energy of louder sounds would have to come from *somewhere*. There have to be EEs reading this that could give you a better answer than I can.
Louder sounds mean more acoustic pressure, which for constant pitch means greater and thus faster displacement of the speaker diaphragm. Which will require more current through the solenoid coils (or more voltage on a piezo element, or whatever), which means more power consumption.
Thanks John - and Carl - kind of what I thought. I majored in EE for one semester but was drawn away by the lure of software. Building useful artifacts without a Bill of Materials was pretty seductive. I'm still on Jameco's mailing list and know which end of a scope probe to hold though.
It will fill a comments section with helpful "N new comments" (actually replies, but I don't want people who search for that string to have to stop on this comment every time), which suggests this is an easy way for me to see the new comments. I click on it, and those comments appear... somewhere else in the thread, where I now have to hunt for them.
This happens because you're sorting by chronological; the UI then deposits the newest comments at the bottom of the stack. If you sort by new, they will appear at the top, right where the clickenbutton was.
I live with a little girl who will be two-years-old in six days. She is intensely interested in my cell phone. She rapidly scrolls through pages.
She's learning to play Woodoku where you slide block shapes up to fill in columns, rows, and 3x3 cells. At first she would slide up shapes, but they wouldn't stick because they overlapped existing shapes. Now mostly her shapes stick. I have never attempted to explain the "overlapping" concept to her. Pure experimentation on her part. Apparently she finds "sticking" to be rewarding.
She also adores "Masha and the Bear", but even this will hold her attention no more than 15-20 minutes. Then she starts randomly opening apps. She will make WhatsApp calls if I don't stop her. I took the WhatsApp icon off my screen, but she will find it in the full display of all apps.
If my phone goes to the unlock screen, she will enter digits randomly. After repeated failures, she will hand me the phone with an expectant expression.
All of this activity is self-motivated. If I need my phone and take it away, she becomes angry.
Now does any of this sound like any AI program you have ever heard of? Clearly she has an internal life independent of other living beings. She wants things.
Does any AI program have an internal life?
Does anyone imagine that more flops is going to produce one?
>Clearly she has an internal life independent of other living beings. She wants things.
She justs wants novelty, not things. She has no particular need for the phone or whatsapp, she just likes the raw high of the world responding to her actions with lights and sounds.
Somebody once described the first 4 years of your life as an "An extra long acid trip for the baby" and those words stuck with me ever since. It's a shame we forget those years, because it's truly marvelous and terrifying to imagine being so utterly blank-slate that gravity surprises you. And I once read that babies imagine their mother to be an extension of their bodies, since everytime they need something the mother immediately obliges, hence why they get so upset when they are weaned, for the first time the mother-thing is not responding to commands as she should. It sounds hopelessly unsettling, but the baby has no reason to believe otherwise, their brain is the closest thing to a "Uniform Prior Over All Possible Hypothesis" a human brain can ever get.
Your cutie is just choking on the sheer novelty of how the world works. Your cell phone alone is a lifetime of study for her. You (or anybody over 5) can never empathize with her, we have thoroughly get ourselves drunk on how the world works then forgot we ever did the morning after. We like to imagine babies as proto philosophers and scientists, or to imagine philosophers and scientists as grown up babies, but there is no comparison. No adult is ever going to match this sheer amount of effortless open-mindedness.
>Now does any of this sound like any AI program you have ever heard of?
Reinforcement Learning agents can be rewarded to explore novel or maximally different states and actions, and this will produce behaviour superficially similar to your daughter's. But our computing power is nowhere near enough to simulate even a fraction of the domains your daughter does this on all at once, i.e. the RL agent can only be like your daughter in 1 or 2 or 10 computer games, or (exclusive) in moving its body through physical space, or (exclusive) in trying out human language sounds from scratch, but not all of this at once, unlike your daughter.
>Does any AI program have an internal life?
I mean, the entire point of it being an "internal" life is that you can never know. Naively, I would expect that the things we feel inside is due to hormones and chemistry, something which even the most singularity-breaking AGI will never have if it confined itself to non-wet hardware. But who knows, maybe some feelings are just straightforward consequences from the pure algorithms of thought. How can we ever know ?
If you mean an "Internal Life" not in the sense of feelings, but in the sense of "Plans, Goals, Internal State..." then that's trivially true for any sufficiently complex program.
I can't tell what you're getting at in your last 3 paragraphs: Is your point that the info-absorbing of an AI during training is a lot like what your daughter does, and that since your daughter has an internal life AI must have one too? Or is it that that AI, despite doing something like what your daughter does, is profoundly different from her because it has no internal life, and it's silly to expect that making AI bigger is going to change that?
I will work on describing this difference in objective terms. In traditional terms: the girl is alive and the AI program is not.
BTW, she's not my daughter. Her mother died in December and our extended family is raising her. I'm American, everyone else is Haitian, and we live in the Dominican Republic.
" In traditional terms: the girl is alive and the AI program is not."
Yeah, I understand what you're getting at. A lot of the time when people talk about AI of human intelligence or of greater than human intelligence their picture of the situation depends on the idea that AI has somehow made the leap to being a conscious, sentient being. Like you I find the idea that upping the flops will somehow make that leap possible absurd. But I don't think an AI has to be conscious in order to be highly intelligent. It just has to be able to process info in a way that draws on deep layers of knowledge that are intricately structured, with all kinds of subtle links between different bits of knowledge. Here's an instance of what I mean: A few years ago when I did google searches I was asking myself what was a distinctive set of words that was likely to appear on a page that had the info I wanted, and not on any other page. I thought of google as something that searched for certain word combos, and no more. Now my google searches are often the actual question I want answered: "Why is . . ." "What's the difference between . .." etc. I have no illusion that google is becoming conscious, but it certainly is now grasping questions that are posed much more like the way one would ask another person for info. I can even imagine that if 10 years ago somebody had speculated that soon we'd just be able to ask google our questions, I would have thought, "no, that's not possible -- because in order to do that, google would have to would have to have such a deep structure of understanding language knowledge." Seems to me that the change in google is an demonstration of how, without becoming conscious, AI can become much more *like* a conscious being.
"Her mother died in December and our extended family is raising her. " Good for you guys. Lucky kid.
There's a common phenomena of anthropomorphization: People sometimes treat animals, even animals very far from human like crustaceans or jellyfish like humans. Other common targets are robots, fictional characters, computers, houses, cars etc.
There's a common phenomena of dehumanization. This mostly seem to target people who are foreign or different, but seems pretty arbitrary. Kids bully in school, slavery, antisemitism, the long history of mistreatment of the ill and handicapped etc. I have a friend that has a speech impediment but no mental deficiencies whatsoever, and another friend has confided in me that they have a hard time spending time with this friend since they instinctively treat my disabled friend as if they're stupid even as they logically know they're "normal".
There seems to be a conflict between these phenomena. What decides if we are going to anthropomorphize or dehumanize someone? I assume there are good books on the subject and I'd be happy for pointers.
Edit: Alice encounters an entity that somewhat resembles what Alice thinks of as the typical human. What factors decide if Alice is going to anthropomorphize or dehumanize this entity?
It seems like both are an overcorrection. A dog acts a little bit like a human, so we expand that too far. A human acts a little "weird" so we downgrade our opinion of their humanity. In both cases it's about the real fact that the object of our consideration is acting outside of what we consider normal behavior in terms of their humanity. In terms of dehumanizing, it's actually an amazing tool. It's how we can watch a movie with an evil villain and identify that - despite being human and generally acting like a human - there's something wrong with them. That it can misfire is unfortunate.
Anthropomorphization of the kinds you list seems to be a choice, or an expression of an underlying sympathy and affinity. Not an error of judgement. When somebody calls their car "Jane", you know they have a long history with it and they elevate it beyond mere object, enough to give it its own name. I don't like calling animals "It" for example, using the same pronoun for a life and an object is unsettling. Same thing as calling our relationship with them "Ownership", your cat is "yours" in the sense that your brother or husband or wife or mother is yours. To the extent that Law doesn't reflect that (by allowing you to sell cats but not people), it's the Law that is morally deficient.
**Some** Anthropomorphization might be an error of judement, like the very common one of treating the shape of a Dolphin's mouth as a permanent smirk. Sometimes we Anthropomorphize existence itself, like "What goes around, comes around", which imagines life (fate?) as an individual that remembers deeds and rewards/punishes them accordingly.
>they instinctively treat my disabled friend as if they're stupid even as they logically know they're "normal".
This is a very powerful illusion, although I would never admit it affects me to anyone under my real name and face, and it wouldn't make it difficult for me to spend time with that person. (on the contrary, it would make me spend more time with the person and being extra nice as much as possible without appearing fake, to supress my guilt of thinking this about them.) You can observe it in yourself whenever you read a very grammatically wrong text, you will find that your judgement of the text automatically transfers to its content. (To the extent that it's not happening with your friend, it reflects the strength of your relationship)
>Kids bully in school, slavery, antisemitism, the long history of mistreatment of the ill and handicapped
I don't think bullying is specifically an instance of dehumanization, it's just an instance of kids learning the concept of status and applying it arbitrarily to other kids. (and sometimes not so arbitrarily, the bullied kids are sometimes poor/fat/shy, which *are* in fact traits that adults assign low-status to, the kids had "successfully" learnt the concept in that case.) Of course, dehumanizing low-status people *is* a consequence, but it's not bullying per se that makes it so, bullying is just a specific instance of that happening.
Slavery and antisemitism is easy : they are expression of what was going to happen anyway. Slavery happens for other deap seated reasons, and the dehumanization is there to justify it (but also feedbacks into driving it). Same thing with antisemitism, religions absolutely hate the guts of each other by default, especially exclusive ones, **especially** the monotheistic ones from among the exclusive ones.
(But why Jews in particular ? well 1-they are the smallest monotheistic religion, 2- no Jewish state for most of history to threaten retribution, 3- their monetary dominance in their host societies arouses resentment, 4- A bias effect because they took massive casualties during WW2 that was subsequently capitalized on it, they are not especially hated compared to other groups)
Treating the ill and the handicapped seems to be an overgeneralization of the viral protocol, there is no cost to treating them like shit even if their conditions isn't actually viral, but if you treated them well and fraternized with them you can catch whatever it's they are having if it's viral. You can't know which things are viral if you don't know about viruses, which describes most of humans for most of their history.
Not weighing in on your question, just tossing out a related thing. When I was a child, I was subject to intense feelings of pity for inanimate objects -- things like clothes I didn't wear, broken cups that got tossed out. I once sobbed with pity the whole time my father was mowing the lawn, because I couldn't stop imagining that all those blades of grass were in agony. And the closer to human something was, the less vulnerable I was to these attacks of acutely painful sympathy. Regarding animals, I was probably quicker to sympathy than the average kid, but not far out of line. Regarding people, I was an average kid.
Even now as an adult I occasionally have mild attacks. If I throw out a formerly handsome bell pepper that withered before I got around to eating it I sometimes get a lump in my throat, and a story begins to form in my mind about how proud and happy it was in its prime, how it looked forward to being eaten and savored, but day after day passed in with it alone in the dark fridge . . . Ridiculous, I know, but I have to work pretty hard to pull my head out of that place. My mother always seemed to understand my compassion attacks so well that I wonder now whether she was subject to them herself. And once on Reddit I saw someone's postabout the phenomenon. That person felt sorry for street signs that stood alone, with no other signs or even a mailbox nearby. I've always wondered how common this little disorder is, and whether there's a name for it. Whatever it is, it's certainly an instance of the kind of thing you're talking about -- especially in the way that victims of it are not subject to the same vulnerability when it comes to the pains and losses other people suffer.
Eremolados, I commend you for writing about this. It takes much courage to be honest in such a way that could open one up to ridicule.
I'm wired much the same. I thought your account of feeling sorry for the grass blades was odd, and then remembered as a child telling people that my favourite colour was green. I didn't like green particularly, and figured no-one else did either. I said I liked it so that green wouldn't feel bad.
When I was about 10 I was over at a friend's place for a sleepover, and we watched an old movie on a small black & white TV. A man had bought bags of presents for some children, and for whatever reason would be unable to give the presents to them. He stood sadly on the open platform at the back of a train and dropped the bags one by one. It absolutely devastated me. I then rationalized that of course they would have people standing by to recover the presents and give them to grateful children, even as I knew that would be unlikely. (I told my wife about this last night as part of a heavy conversation, and she was interested that I had been more concerned about the fate of the toys than the thwarted giver or the children.)
This is tied up with me always having been very moved by stories of sacrifice and heroism and duty.
Over the years this has been channeled constructively into compassion for people more than objects, although I'm still pretty quick to try to repair something rather than throw it out.
I think we anthropomorphize when we lack intuition about a mechanism. We don't anthropomorphize a pencil because we can immediately intuit how the line on the paper happens. We might anthropomorphize the car, however, because we lack the mechanical intuition to feel how it does what it does. It feels a little bit magical[1].
The only general mental model we have for mysterious mechanisms whose inputs can be partially mapped to outputs, but the inner workings of which are opaque, are other people. We have a complex model for other people, and it's very powerful, so we just map it onto other complex mechanisms the inner workings of which we cannot intuit. We assign states of feelings to it, discover what makes it "happy" (putting gas in it, cleaning its spark plugs) and what makes it "unhappy" (cold weather, not changing the oil) -- and that allows us to build up a sense of intuition about the behavior of the mechanism. I think the model is sufficiently flexible that we can adapt it to most complex mechanisms we encounter and do satisfactory predictions (if it's the weather, we invent a weather god that is angry when the barometric pressure drops and happy when it rises).
Dehumanization ni the way you describe seems like a very different thing, more like a personal and tribal defense mechanism to shut down sympathy when personal drives or tribal loyalty demands hostility or aggression. Presumably it's adaptive because sometimes we have to make tough decisions, and being frozen with empathy would prevent that. Of course, any mechanism abused can become maladaptive.
Incidentally, I wouldn't characterize your friend B as dehumanizing your friend A. What occurs to me is that the interaction might be unusually tiring for B: he is having to continuously consciously reset his expectations of A. I expect we generate a lot of our conversation using simplified models of the other person, e.g. if that person is 12 I speak one way, if 65 another, if educated in the field one way, if an interested amateur another, and so on. Having the "preset" makes it easier to generate the sentences from the thoughts. But if a person did not fit readily into available models, and I had to continuouly recalibrate how to construct sentences, a lot more effort would be required to have a conversation. That might simply be tiring, causing B to want to get away sooner. (And then he probably feels guilty, which makes it worse.) Maybe it would be helpful to spend the time in shorter chunks?
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[1] In my experience, this is true even for people who are quite good at mechanics and could explain how the car works in detail. I think once the complexity passes a certain level, it starts to defy intuitive grasp, and we have to rely on conscious reasoning to work out our understanding -- but that leaves the intuition behind. Sort of like the difference between our grasp of the difference between a 2D and 3D object, which is intuitive, and our grasp of the difference between a 3D and 4D object, which is purely intellectual and defies intuition.
I agree with a lot of what Carl Pham says, and wanted to add to his theory. He says we anthropormorphize when we lack intuition about a mechanism. But consider that when we first meet somebody we have less intuition about their "mechanism" than we do about people we know well. If we meet a stranger, we don't know what her talents are, or what her sensitivities are. If she's quiet is she unhappy or bored or shy? Or is she really paying close attention to the music because she's a musician herself? I think a lot of the reason people get preoccupied with the appearance of somebody they might date is that they we lack intuition about their mechanism, i.e. what makes them tick. So they "anthropmorphize" their physical appearance. If they are slim and beautiful the other person sees them as happy, confident, sexy and successful. A similar thing: When we don't know someone, we're also especially aware of stuff that really does not tell us much if anything about what the person's like -- stuff like their accent, their gait, their little mannerisms. I think heightened awareness of this trivia represents "anthropmorphizing," i.e. building a false picture of their personality out of these visible and audible bits and pieces. Once you really know somebody awareness of all that stuff drops out, you know? Their British accent doesn't sound charming, in fact you're rarely even aware of it. Their beauty, their bald spot, their speech impediment -- all that stuff drops out of awareness, because it carries no information.
Well, well, and well. I've been working online for 28 years, and must say your success story is one of the more interesting one's I've learned about. My understanding so far is that you're making about $60,000 a MONTH from this blog. If I'm having a senior dementia moment, please correct me!
What further interests me is that your focus seems to be on what I'll call "intelligent nerd topics". While that's great for this reader, I've never thought of this niche as a big profit center. As a wannabe intelligent nerd typist, you've given me hope.
Should you wish to share any secrets of your success, or if you have already, I'm all ears.
TIL: In 2014, there was a three-way race for governor in Rhode Island, with the "Moderate Party" getting 20% of the vote. That's a lot higher than I would have expected.
Which quantitative finance / econ blogs do people in this community like ? am trying to find things that are well researched, at the cutting edge and ahead of the usual thinking you get anywhere else
The president of Hamline University has been asked to step down for the firing of adjunct professor who displayed the artwork depicting Mohammed. The Board of Trustees say it should not have happened.
It absolutely should not have happened, because it was the dumbest possible response to the dumbest possible 'aggravation'. And positions like "Vice President for Inclusive Excellence" should either not exist, or rank far below the maintenance staff who do useful and necessary work like emptying the bins.
This wasn't somebody trying to be edgy by showing disrespectful depictions, this was a class in art history that was - ironically - being inclusive by showing non-Western art as part of the curriculum, and using genuine Muslim devotional images. If, after having been warned what was going to be shown, given the option of not watching, and being an alleged adult in your early twenties you are still offended, you need to grow the hell up and not be coddled by foolish adults who have forgotten the purpose of a university.
Had this been the Islamic equivalent of "Piss Christ", the student would have had a point. It wasn't, she didn't, and the administration needs to get lessons on toughness and resilience from a soggy paper bag.
"Had this been the Islamic equivalent of "Piss Christ", the student would have had a point."
Would she really? Do you genuinely think an art student would have a case if Piss Christ was shown in the context of a modern art course (in a voluntary lecture!), and she got offended by that?
I wasn’t completely sure, but yeah, I guess he actually is a putz.
“I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.” ~ Sam Bankman-Fried
You and I are definitely on the same page regarding AI. Some of those who see danger in AI, please chime in. Does the danger part come with consciousness? Or is consciousness not required to be dangerous.
Now this assumes a minimum of intelligence on the part of the humans. I hope no one is putting an AI in charge of launching an nuclear counterstrike!
A few years back I thought that asking Google a question was a weird idea. Now I do it regularly.
Not because Google "understands" the question, but because it uf
Sometimes people read stuff like The Mind Illuminated and Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, and start all these practices, acting like spirituality is just this intellectual game with no stakes. It's not.
This thread is quiescent, but maybe someone will read my call for assistance:
Long ago (2007) , I created an account of the form pedro.dft@gmail.com. A few years larter, I started receiving email from a Brazilian cell phone operator regarding bills, etc. for a user with the email pedrodft@gmail.com or pedro.d.f.t@gmail.com, or some such variation. I assumed that user had made a mistake writing the dots in their address when submitting their data to their cell phone operator, and written my address instead of theirs. The only email I received that was meant for that user were the messages from CLARO (the Brazilian cell phone operator
Last week, I started receiving messages from Spanish “singles sites” meant for another (Spanish) user with the email pedrodft@gmail.com. I can confirm that this user has this email because one of those emails included a link allowing me to directly asses, without password, the account/profile of the Spanish personwho had signed up for them , where I could confirm that their address was written as pedrodft@gmail.com , rather than my pedro.df@gmail.com
Today, I learnt that sometime around 2011 Gmail started disregarding dots in email addresses, so that johnsmith@gmail.com and john.smith@gmail.com are considered the same account. Google claims that they do not create accounts of the form johnsmith@gmail.com if john.smith@gmail.com exists, but what I see in my account (thank God not my main account) shows that is not the case, since pedrodft@gmail.com was allowed to be created (and belongs to a Spanish 50-yr old dude) long after my pedro.dft@gmail.com was made.
Long story short: just like I used to receive email from CLARO (the Brazilian cell phone operator), I am now receiving messages from singles sites that are not meant for me. I received no other email meant from those other accounts, but I naturally fear that other people my be getting copies email meant for me. That account of mine is seldom used, and therefore I do not risk much, but this is nonetheless a major privacy and security breach. In support.google.com , there are many reports of these issues, but the high karma users who should help instead repeat the same tropes: "Gmail does not allow johnsmith@gmail to be created when john.smith@gmail.com exists. Whatever spam you receive and think is meant for someone else comes from mailing lists or services you have subscribed to and now forgot" , and even when people say they are receiving information regarding hotel reservations from people in different countries no support is forthcoming. I know ACX is read by many people from Silicon Valley. Does any one here have a possibility to bring this matter to the attention of someone at Alphabet awho will not dismiss users who report this huge security and privacy breach?
Both "dots are ignored in gmail delivery" and "this exact complaint regarding unwanted emails" pre-date 2011. The short answer is that it isn't a privacy or security breach, it's just somebody who made an error in typing a different email address. You're not being ignored, you just don't like the answer.
So I’m interested in trying to write and start a Substack, the issue is I find it hard to motivate myself to do so, any advice?
The only advice anyone can give you is to ignore all your thoughts/motivations and just start writing.
That's the biggest thing holding writers back: they never start writing.
All you need to do is start.
Any advice on building the subscriber base once you start writing?
Honestly it is very very tough if you start at 0 subscribers and you don't have a following elsewhere.... Almost all the successful Substacks bring a built-in audience with them from other platforms.
To build an audience from scratch, it depends on your niche, what you write about, etc. You'll probably have to pester your friends and family to subscribe.
The best possible thing you could do for growth is have one of your famous/influential friends share your work to their audience.
Here is a tool that will get you a few subscribers for free: https://thesample.ai
Here is a link to the "Substack Writers Unite" discord server where you can talk about building an audience from scratch: https://discord.gg/ZuUVTGJR4D
Appreciate this, thanks!
I dont know if its good advice, but i look for other starting writers, read their stuff and if i feel like i connect i comment/like/publicly interact.
Most people will give your stuff a shot if you do that.
I've been doing that in earnest for the past 2 months. While I do enjoy the engagement, I'm putting in a awful lot of time for very few subscribers. I'm starting to think I might be better off just investing all that engagement time on my own blog. Dunno, just thinking out loud here...
If i got it roght your blogs are pretty niche, and of thats the case it might need more selective advertising.
Atomic bombs and local hikes, right?
Yes, those are my primary topics at the moment. Blog is two months old. A couple hours a day of engagement across substack, nine subscribers. Most of the engagement has been on blogs at least somewhat related to nukes.
I haven't been pushing the nature section yet, doing so may help. I might be promoting too soon, perhaps I should wait until I have more to offer? Widen the scope of topics addressed?
I've heard it said that the best way to direct attention to a blog is to post a twitter summary of each article as it appears. I can't be bothered with Twitter though, and couldn't give two hoots whether or not anyone reads my blog! :-)
If anyone cares to skim it though you'll see, among other things, what William the Conqueror very likely looked like!
https://highranges.com
Did you ever finish that piece about "who was Otzi the iceman"?
Not yet. As you'll have seen, I haven't added any articles for a while. Maybe I'll take a few of my past comments from these threads and others and whump them up into articles to post.
As for Otzi, I read somewhere that analysis of his mitochondrial DNA revealed that he had a gene that increased the chance of male infertility. So because he was found surrounded by quite an array of weapons and other equipment, I speculate that he had been a tribal leader who was deposed the hard way (as was the custom in primitive societies back then) for not being able to provide an heir.
As he headed up the mountain, he probably knew the arrow found in his back was on its way, and after his death his fellow tribal members left him neatly laid out high up where his spirit could commune with the Gods, and buried in snow to avoid the attentions of vultures.
He may even have lived in the mountain heights during his rule, as it was often the custom for tribal leaders then believe it or not. Perhaps the Greek myths about the Gods of Olympus were a remnant of an earlier time when the ruling family did literally live up there!
I hate Twitter too, but substack makes it so incredibly easy to post new article notifications there I'm going with it. Don't know how much good it will do, but all I have to do is check a box, so it's worth a try. Posting new article notices on Facebook is slightly more work, but still, it's just another few button clicks.
Shameless self promotion is key.
Nicomachean.substack.com
subscribed!
Shameless eh?
Thanks! I hope you benefit from it,
and i llllluuuuuvvvvvv feedback qnd critique, so gimme any if u have!
https://wouldyoulikesome.substack.com/p/good
You might like ellie's talk 'exit the void' rebuildingmeaning.com based on your posts
Thank you for the recommendation!
I think Karl and I are about as similar in terms of audience size/stage as you can be, and I second this. As he says later, building an audience is tough (and the world is set up in a way to punish you if you try to do this too hard). But at the same time, at least in my case my audience starter set came out of a series of "lucky breaks" of small-to-moderate size. Will that happen for everyone? No. But will everyone it happens to be someone who has taken the plunge to start writing? Yeah.
Assuming you stuff isn't flat-out hostile to Christianity or something similar, let me know when you start doing your thing and I'll plug it.
Hey can you check out my substack? Nicomachean.substack.com
If you like it i'd be flattered for you to spread the word. If not- i'd love feedback on how to improve.
What would trying too hard be? I was thinking of posting my next piece to several subreddits. Would that be trying too hard?
Also, if you are friendly to Christianity or a Christian, you may like my stuff. For example, this piece is a brief exploration on the power of mindset in determining reality, noting the defeatist nature of the dominant worldview:
https://squarecircle.substack.com/p/triumphalism-and-defeatism
So I would appreciate a plug, assuming you dig it of course.
So there's an inherently adversarial relationship between self-promotion and basically how people like to read. Ideally, the process looks like this:
***Carlos publishes an article about beans. James, a legume enthusiast, reads it and finds it insightful and the best treatise on the musical fruit that he's read to date. James is a member of several bean enthusiast communities, and posts this article to one.
From there, other people like James reach the blog and subscribe. As Carlos posts more and more insightful articles (I mean, ARE chickpeas beans? Deep down? Actually? Spiritually?) they get shared to more and more bean-based communities, eventually getting a major shoutout from the Bush Baked Beans dog and rocketing him to stardom.***
The basic problem with this is that it takes thousands of james-like folks to get a james, and even then james doesn't have a 100% success rate with *his* posts becoming popular. Which leaves you in a weird spot, because you *need* to get some initial pump to get enough james-type-raffle-tickets to have a decent spot of winning the metaphor-for-exposure microwave oven.
So you start posting your stuff in various places, but you run into a hard conflict coming from two common causes:
1. Most people prefer that stuff gets to them organically - i.e. that it's noticed and shared by someone who doesn't particularly care about you, Carlos, as a person. They also like to think of "good writers" as springing into general visibility *by magic* - i.e. that known writers are a higher sort of person, a variety of human that was born to fame and didn't have to do anything for it.
2. You aren't a good judge of how good your stuff is. Nobody really is. That means that overall "people post their own stuff" results in lower quality (from the viewer's/consumer's perspective) than "we only let people post stuff that isn't theirs".
That rolls up into finding out that most places don't want you to post your own stuff. Some places are annoyed by it, some discourage it, and some ban it (and you) if you do it too much (another writer I talk to got banned from r/california for a single post, inclusive of his website".
Some things I've done to get around this:
1. Calls for sharing in the work itself. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. It's annoying to the reader if you do it too much, but not nearly as much as, say, hackernews can get annoyed if you do it too much.
2. Cold-emailing people known for views/knowledge that relate to the work and very politely saying "hey, I wrote this thing - if it feels natural to you, I'd love amplification; I can't get it easily at my size". I've had that work a couple times.
Otherwise it's just tough - you take your best shots, try to be reasonable, and don't give up in a situation where everyone would prefer you just laid down and died.
Thank you! This is very helpful.
I've liked the article and subscribed to your blog.
I'm not sure what has caused the general increase of pessimism. One of the markers that gets to me is the number of people who think we don't see aliens because we're a disgusting species.
Some of it, I'm convinced is status-seeking. ORdinARy PEOple like themselves and want to live, BUT I'M BETTER THAN THAT.
I believe without evidence that some of it is left-over Soviet propaganda where the US is not just evil but uniquely evil.
It might be related to loss of belief in God, though I think there's a sort of belief in original sin minus a belief in redemption that's in play.
I want to say, in response to various looming disasters, that we are an ingenious species, and I keep fearing that people will just say, "Unfortunately".
This seems to be a collection of random thoughts-- I feel like something went wrong in the past few decades, but I'm not sure what happened.
I think we have lost hope, and I think we lost it partly due to unconscious drift, and partly due to bad philosophy. But I am a triumphalist, and I think things will be fundamentally ok. It's just that they could be so much mind-blowingly better though...
I re-read this article of yours: https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/on-incels-dead-bedrooms-and-the-hard and the bit on incels really rubbed me the wrong way. Basically, you hedge too hard on trying to get people to sympathize with a subset of incels, which implies you think there is such a thing as just hatred, in this case, of incels who are in a dark place.
In reality, there are no valid targets for hatred and resentment, and you should have launched a full frontal assault on the notion that there are such targets, instead of trying to reassure the reader that their resentment of e.g. misogynists is valid and not a severe flaw in need of correction.
Could you pull a quote from the particular section that got to you? I wrote it, but it's been an awful long time since then and I'd like to interrogate this a bit and see if maybe I might need to revisit it somehow.
Sure! E.g.
> I’m the type who generally finds most usages of the word “misogynistic” to be motivated hyperbole, but it’s often appropriate here: a lot of these guys flat out hate women. They’ve taken their frustrations to a really unproductive place that’s dark to the point of often being evil. It’s gross.
> All this taken together means I’m going to look pretty bad in a second when I ask you to feel bad for them.
[a lot of setting the scene]
> If you can agree with me at least a little up to this point, then all this implies there’s a possibility of a sub-group of quasi-incels out there that haven’t yet let themselves be driven to a dark place because of it, but is still as sad as you’d expect a sex-less, romance-less person who wants both things to be.
Basically, you shouldn't be flinching at the possibility of asking the reader to sympathize with the incels. Hell, you should be demanding they sympathize with even the incels in a dark place
Basically, Kanye West has the right intuition when he says he likes Hitler or whatever (his particular implementation sucks, granted). I think even the worst evil-doers can be recast as basically sick people in need of help, and that it's not helpful to judge and condemn them instead.
I think there's a bit of an honesty catch-22 here. Because there's a side we both like - where I basically say stuff like this:
***Bad or not, these people have a lot of unearned sympathy from me... I want to be profound here; I want to have solutions for these issues that are easy and quick. I want every marriage to lack intimacy issues; I want everybody to have a chance at love. As it stands I’m not even sure this problem is even big enough to seek a solution for, and if it is I’m not sure the causes are what I think. But I do know if the problem keeps getting bigger, we will have more and more people disenfranchised from something most people think of as a major part of being human.
I think we have a choice here: we can offer sympathy, acknowledge the problem and offer help working towards solutions in what small ways we can, or we can abandon these young men to seek acknowledgement of their issues from dark side of the internet for want of any other options.***
Which is basically asking for what you want, more or less pointing out that there's a choice here for people to make and heavily implying which one I think is reasonable and productive. And saying, essentially, that it's reasonable and productive even if we assume a pretty maximally bad version of what incels are (entire concluding section).
But I do have to acknowledge what I'm actually asking for there, as well. And very frankly, while there are (I'm sure, because I know some) good people who fit under the bare "incels" label, the movement itself is often really, really bad - it's gross, it's mean, it's not hinged on reality, etc.
I can't in that situation say "And you'd be just like that, in the same situation" because I know too many people in the same situation who *aren't* like that, who make good choices and manage to be decent people. And most people (I assumed in writing this) are similar - they know sex-less, relationship-less folks who still manage to be decent people, or at least appear that way.
So I think (it's been a while) the rationale here was to actually do my best to illustrate the choice I was asking people to make; to say, yeah, here's the worst of it, here's the really bad parts of it, but here's sort of the "why" behind that and what you, a reasonable and reasonably sympathetic person should probably feel about that.
Does that track?
The biggest thing preventing me from starting a blog is the question "what identity do I write under?". If I pick my IRL identity, 1) it'll be less of a good idea to say anything controversial, but 2) I'll also be able to show it to people I meet IRL, but 3) I won't be able to post it online under my online identity.
I mean, just pick one. If you don't want someone to come after your job (esp. if you aren't toeing center-left lines; assuming you aren't an academic, republicans aren't as good at getting you fired), then use a stage name. If you want to be able to do it under your own name safely, you might have to limit topics or something.
In either case, something is better than nothing.
I have this issue. I try to avoid having a consistent online identity for privacy reasons, nuking accounts periodically. But that means cross promoting would be hard. I'd probably need to make a new identity and set up a bunch of new accounts for it.
I think it depends a bit on where your lack of motivation comes from. Is it from a lack of time? Lack of interesting topic? Lack of structure? If you're motivated to do something, how is that activity different from writing articles?
I think it’s a combination of a lack of structure and lack of clarity on what I want to write about. Part of my issue is that I love writing, but I have a hard time feeling like I have anything to contribute.
At least for me, blogging at LiveJournal only became possible when I consciously realized I couldn't compete with Making Light.
1. There are probably some things you have thought about a great deal and in those areas you have something to share with the world. There are probably also lots of things you'd really like to talk about, but which you're not above average in knowledge about. (Have you seen some of the relevant Paul Graham essays on writing?)
2. I did find that I needed an audience to write TO--but it did not need to be LARGE. Like literally 5 people who I know are listening (with a hypothetical 20-80 who might be reading some of my posts) was enough to motivate me.
People who were writing "alongside me" (asynchronously) on "write a scrap of fiction for 15 minutes" threads (and we'd occasionally make small comments about each-others' work) on an online forum were great--I felt that by doing my writing snippets, I encouraged theirs! (kind of like what Loweren was talking about with screensharing and like, co-working sort of example.)
Back-and-forth engagement helps me, because with a small audience, how else can you know if stuff "lands"? RICH engagement, like arguing with people about a subject I was passionate about (religion on the religion/philosophy sub-forum on an online forum for a favorite SF/F author of mine) helped to establish my motivation for "why I want to persuade these people of things" and get to know WHO I was writing for back then. I think that the power of the listener/reader has an insufficiently-discussed amount of influence in communication.
If you love writing, then just do what you love and don't worry about it. To start, you might write about how you can't quite figure out what to write about. Dig in to that, investigate, and share.
When I was young I wanted to write, but felt I didn't really have anything to say. I could have written about being young, and feeling insecure. Write where you are and what you know, as the saying goes. I wish I'd learned that sooner.
The great thing about the Internet is that no matter how obscure our personal interests might be, there are probably at least thousands of others with the same interests.
Don't neglect the possibility of starting with a bad idea.
For instance it would probably be a bad idea to write an essay on how you dreamed Hillary Clinton was a space alien ... but if/when you're ever stuck, you can start off writing about how Hillary Clinton was abducted by space aliens and replaced with a body-double. Once you get into the flow, branch to a more conventional conversation, just don't forget to sanitize the space alien bits before you publish, lest you find yourself jumping the shark.
Michael gives good advice. One key to getting over writers block is to just write. Lower your standards. Ignore the internal criticism You don't have to publish whatever you write, but just choose something and go. You can be an editor once the stuff is written. A bad work can be polished, but you can't edit a blank page.
I wonder if ChatGPT would help for this :-)
This is wonderful advice, thanks for sharing!
One "hack" that really works for me is to find other people to work together with me, either meeting IRL or via video chat. Keeping each other accountable for our progress helps a lot, we even screenshare to ensure we're not procrastinating.
Give yourself a schedule and some friends who will gently judge you for missing your deadlines. I'm writing a book as a web serial (not on substack, though), with only two people that I know of regularly reading it, and even that is really helping to keep me going.
The *amount* you write for the deadline isn't as important as keeping momentum. I've found that a good, manageable timeframe is a week, even if your life is stressful. You can post up two things a week if you're not too stressed (although in that case, I recommend posting them up near each other, e.g. one on Friday, one on Saturday, rather than stretching the time between them out; that tactic helps make it feel more like One Thing A Week).
Assume you commit to posting up something once a week. You'll have more ideas in some weeks than in others. Have somewhere else that you keep those ideas, or partial articles, e.g. in a Google Doc. Then when you're having a slow week, you can post smaller articles from there, or partial ones and finish them up.
Be okay with posting things that aren't perfect.
Figure out how many passes are a good effort trade-off for you. As an example, my web serial posts go thorugh about three iterations - one where I'm writing the full scene from start to finish, one where I'm going through to rearrange things slightly (sometimes deleting, sometimes adding a bit), and a final one to polish the wording. That's the sweet spot for me personally.
Build a habit around the number of passes that are comfortable for you. I try to write on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Things get in the way of those all the time, but I only need two of them to get those passes done (one to write, another to edit and polish). Everything else I manage helps me build up a backlog.
Hope this helps you a bit!
here's a LessWrong post I think about a lot:
https://radimentary.wordpress.com/2018/01/10/babble/
and a related post I wrote:
https://skunkledger.substack.com/p/how-to-write
The common thread, philosophically, is scrupulously separating the generative part from the discriminative part: turn off your standards, write down a lot of words you enjoy writing down, do this often, and then some time later, comb through all that material for some juicy parts that seem like they would taste good together.
Yes this is good advice and how I wrote my first post!
I've learned to stop beating myself up over these things. There's a million things that I kinda-sorta want to do but never actually make any steps towards. When this happens I realise that it probably just means I just don't want it hard enough -- bits of my brain have the desire but other bits are not in agreement.
Either sit down and have a chat with yourself until you're entirely on the same page, or accept that you don't want this particular thing as hard as you think you do. The world and you will both get along fine if you don't write a substack, and maybe there's plenty of other things you could do with your time.
To second this point: You need to be doing it for you, because you enjoy it. Unless you have a really unique worldview (say you're fluent in English but within the Russian/Chinese/etc security establishment and have a lot of confidence in your VPN), there are enough substacks and blogs in the world. This isn't to discourage you! Writing is fun! But if you'll only write for an audience, you won't have one, so you won't write. There are other valuable things to do with your time, and they don't even need to be productive.
Why don't you write *for* a specific person? And just post it on substack. Say a spouse or an offspring or friend. Good way to start.
Sounds like you want to want to do it, but you don't want to do it.
"Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody want to lift no heavy-ass weights"
I can tell you the mistakes I did when starting my Substack, not sure if that will be helpful.
First mistake was choosing a specific topic for my blog. That was a mistake, because my attention jumps from one topic to another all the time, so by choosing one topic for my blog I unknowingly decided that all other topics (i.e. most of the things I am thinking about) do *not* belong to my blog.
Second mistake was choosing a high standard. Which means that writing the articles takes a lot of time. Which means that if I do not have a lot of free time at the moment (which is the usual situation for me these days), it feels like I should not work on my blog now.
This may not generalize. You may be more focused than me, or have longer uninterrupted intervals of free time. In that case, choosing one topic, or choosing a high standard could be the right strategy. But if you are similar to me, I think the right strategy is "write anything". Any topic, any length. Instead of trying to write good articles, try to write *many* articles... and maybe, at the end of each calendar year, choose the ones you are most proud of, and make a "best of 2023" post.
In long term, quantity beats quality, because quantity means practice. The important articles are not the ones you will write now, but the ones you will write after having already written hundred other articles. The first hundred articles will mostly suck; the goal is to get past them as fast as possible.
I admit I do not like my own advice. There is already enough crap online; I feel guilty to contribute more. I feel like an internet where everyone only posts well-written and important stuff would be a better place. Sadly, this is *not* how it (i.e. life in general, but also blogging specifically) works. The only way to get good is practice. The only way to get good is to be bad first. Use a pseudonym.
I like the emails because I like to read the little blurbs/info. I go to the actual threads 1-2x per year (so the hidden thread emails are pretty pointless for me, but no biggie)
+1
Regarding item 2, I don't participate much in comments but I like getting the email for open threads
Yes. This. Open thread email +1
I like the small summary things that usually go with open threads, I don't generally engage in the open thread itself
Same here
Likewise.
Same
Same here too.
+1
+1
The open thread posts often contain some useful information, so I like getting mails from them.
Please continue posting them and sending an email. They are one of the light reads and a way to keep in contact with what is happening around.
I like open threads. I would never read them if I didn't get an email notice.
Same
+2
Same, and I do read pretty much all of them!
Same
Same.
There are two topics I would like to suggest for future ACX posts. First, a review of Will Storr's "The Status Game". Second, revisiting conflict theory vs mistake theory - have Scott's views on this dichotomy changed in the last few years?
"Do people who do like Open Threads worry you’d never see them if the email didn’t arrive in your inbox?"
Yes.
Me too!
Can someone explain in layman's terms why in the era of Open AI, CAPTCHA is still a thing? Shouldn't most bots be capable of picking out traffic lights at this point?
I think the layman's term answer may be the same as "Why put a padlock on my bike in an era where bolt-cutters exist?". It won't stop the more sophisticated attacks, but it still makes bad behavior a lot harder.
I could probably spin up a script that spams someone's website or whatever very quickly if there's no CAPTCHA involved - writing a script that integrates with Open AI to solve those CAPTCHAS... well it's possible but it's going to take a lot more effort.
(educated guess, I don't have privileged info)
They're not just measuring your performance on the traffic light task. They also make decisions on lots of other variables: response time, orbit of the mouse cursor, solve order, the history of your IP address, etc.
I started suspecting this after getting repeated challenges even though I responded correctly every time. Being more chaotic (moving the mouse more, clicking and then unclicking squares I'm not sure of, etc) seemed to help.
Note that you only have limited access to training data unless you want to get IP blocked by google (or have an entire botnet at your disposal). So finding and then training on these hidden variables might be tricky.
History is a huge part of it - if you use an Incognito browser you'll get challenged a lot more. This is also why sometimes you only have to click the checkbox without solving anything - they have enough data on you already to be confident you're not a robot.
Maybe they can't? I find it hard enough at times, when there's part of a traffic light in a square and I'm trying to decide "does this count as 'square with traffic light in' or not?"
Also I had a period of "what the hell are crosswalks? oh, you mean zebra crossings? then why not say so? bloody Americans" 😀
I had the opposite issue when I read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The section on the philosophical/religious issues raised by the Babel Fish ends with Man going on "to prove that black is white and [getting] himself killed on the next zebra crossing".
It was probably decades before I twigged that the cause of death wasn't being run over by actual zebras.
Same.
Somehow J. K. Rowling's American publisher learned from this that the not-even-slightly-specific-to-Britain historical technical term "philosopher's stone" needed to be Americanized into the completely un-American (and indeed nonexistent) term "sorcerer's stone".
Back in the 90s I ordered the UK paperback out of annoyance with that. Of course the films have wiped out any hope of it being corrected in a later edition.
The rationale was that they weren't sure American kids would be as interested in a book with the term "philosopher" in the title, compared to the more obviously magical word "sorcerer".
And, I dunno, that doesn't seem like a crazy thought to me. Despite what they say, a lot of kids do judge books by their cover/title, and if you don't already know what a "philosophers' stone" is, I can see why that might feel like a more dry title.
Obviously it wouldn't have mattered - I can't really imagine Harry Potter failing to become popular in America due to the (lack of) title change - but seems like hindsight bias to say that it's inconceivable that it could have.
It's certainly possible, and Scholastic's editors know the children's lit market better than I do. But the book was already a runaway bestseller in Britain when they bought the rights, and I don't think British children are more into Hegel and Kant than American kids.
And for kidlit there's often a balance between entertainment and education. Learning about the philosopher's stone is a gateway into the intertwined history of magic and science. While the Potter series as a whole veered off into its own mythology pretty quickly, that first book was unusually grounded (for a book with magic monster books, I mean): not only does it center on the philosopher's stone, but it brings in Nicolas Flamel, a genuine historical natural philosopher and alchemist who's closely associated with it.
Obscuring that connection by replacing it with something made up annoyed me. I think they translated from the British with a heavier hand than they should have generally, and in that case even if they were worried about deterring sales, might have gotten away with changing the title but not the internal text.
And of course it could be that they were entirely right about the business decision. Lots of business decisions annoy me. The late Eric Flint, a very successful editor at Baen, made an impassioned, and very likely correct, argument that accuracy on book covers is wholly orthogonal to their purpose. If you know enough to be able to judge the accuracy of a book cover, almost by definition you aren't the target audience for the cover. You're buying because you're familiar with the author or the series or the world (or at least the kind of world it's set in).
His point was that covers are advertising to catch the eye of the marginal buyer who knows nothing about the book, but might be drawn in by an eye-catching cover. The point is to be attractive (which people of good will can differ re Baen covers, but he had the sales data), and to signal generally what kind of book it is. Whether the people on the cover look like the character descriptions or the scene depicted ever happens in the book is tertiary at best.
I can't say he was wrong. He was a very successful editor, I'm just a reader. If I found the covers of some of the Baen books I bought offputting or even embarrassing, I still bought them. I certainly miss the days when the books I purchased frequently had Michael Whelan paintings that were both beautiful and often illustrative of the interior story, but it's hard to say that was ever the marginal reason for a purchase decision. I'm fairly confident that he was making the right business decision in an increasingly unforgiving industry.
But still: inaccurate and ugly covers grate on me, and I'm always pleased when the cover art actually matches what takes place inside the book. And as I was willing to pay a few dollars more for the Philosopher's Stone version of Rowling, I might do the same if I could get, say, Poul Anderson's Flandry series with covers that were a little more Whelan and a little less Cinemax After Dark. (I think they were going for Bond and missed.)
Granted it matters a lot less now that I buy pretty much everything as an ebook anyway.
Long story short: renaming the philosopher's stone may likewise have been a legitimate business decision. I still think it made the book slightly worse, and I'm sorry they did it.
Until reading your comment just now, I had always thought this referred to being trampled by a herd of actual zebras. Makes a lot more sense now.
Same
It was so long ago that I read the book that I think this is the first time I realized that.
Perhaps we have fewer zebras wondering around our cities and needing to cross streets than you do?
If Pablo Escobar could establish hippos in Colombia, surely some enterprising American can create a viable zebra population here.
I dunno, maybe the zebras blend into the zebra crossings so well[1] that we can't really tell how many there are.
-----------------
[1] I mean, I personally have never noticed a zebra in a zebra crossing, not even in New York where you can see eight crazy things an hour, so clearly their camouflage works superbly.
Not alone zebras, there were pandas and pelicans too! And seemingly now pelicans are puffins? I have never heard anyone referring to them as "puffin" crossings, just zebra crossings no matter what sort they are:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelican_crossing
We got this wholesale from the Brits, but now American cultural influence is such (especially with computers, where everything is default US English for Microsoft products) that children are now pronouncing the letter Z as "zee" not "zed", because that's how they hear it on all the media they consume from a young age.
To be fair to we Yanks, "Zee" makes a lot more sense than "Zed" in the context of the rest of the Alphabet Song (and, by extension, the alphabet itself).
In computer security, there is a concept called "defense in depth" (mostly unrelated to the military doctrine of the same name). The idea is roughly that you don't want to be relying on a single thing to provide all your security guarantees, even if that thing should theoretically be sufficient on its own. That way, if the thing fails to live up to its theoretical capabilities for whatever reason, you have other layers of defense which continue to function and hopefully keep the overall system secure.
The corollary to this is that even if a given layer of security is not perfect / can be compromised in some circumstances (which of course is essentially all layers of security), it can still be valuable if it makes attacks more difficult. As retsam said, even if it's possible to defeat, it still increases the complexity of the attack required, which reduces the number of possible attackers.
Similar to the "swiss cheese model" of infection control popularized in response to Covid, where you use multiple measures, here with each acknowledged as somewhat porous, with the idea that as long as the holes in the different layers don't overlap the protection is still effective.
That's been around for a while in the context of industrial safety engineering.
Captchas have been 'solved' for years now. There are hundreds of sites offering solving services, with the most advanced basically boiling down to people in a poor country solving your task mechanical turk-style. Also, OpenAIs offerings are pretty limited and/or expensive and also does not really offer anything that helps with captchas too much, at least not lifting it about existing solutions.
The short of it really is that solving captchas is still more expensive than the expected return of screaming into the void in millions of random comments sections in order to find a victim for your scam. For any purpose where solving the captchas is worth it, you can consider them mostly useless for filtering out anything but the most basic spammers - see Google/Reddit/Co. account creation and the likes.
OpenAI is cheap but it's not exactly too cheap to meter yet. I think it costs a little less than a dollar per conversation.
OpenAI will restrict your account if you use it too often, and I expect all the other consumer-facing free-to-use AI do the same.
Usage rates for GPT3 imply it's substantially cheaper than that - it's just that if millions of people continuously swarm a service that costs you pennies to render each time, it's still going to cost you a lot (and overwhelm your resources at peak times)
Speaking of captcha, I have seen versions, notably on Discord, that are clearly generating their own images using AI and using those for the task.
I wouldn't mind if open thread emails were cut since I rarely read them past the opening post, but if I actually cared I would add my own email filters for it.
Not that I'm desperate for attention, but I wrote about the profession of translator, starting from the Tower of Babel this week.
https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/translating-a-really-old-profession?sd=pf
Honestly I think people here would enjoy my stuff.
Sorry for spamming. But I'm not about to spend money on marketing, and this is an open thread, and people can't read it and dislike it if they don't know about it, and why not just throw my bread upon the water, for in many days it will be found?
I don't think you need to apologize, especially for sharing interesting well-written posts. (Then again in your shoes I'd strongly feel the need to do the same.)
Thank you! And astral codex ten, who seems interesting and important, and the 20 or so people who clicked to read my post.
Isha, the background color, it doesn’t work for me. A little too distracting.
Thank you! I changed it. Can you please let me know what you think
Ah, much better!
I would to continue to receive the push notifications / emails for the open threads please.
1) There are often interesting tidbits in the post itself
2) Often interesting discussions in the comments
3) On the occasions where I would like to:
3.1) Discuss something generally of interest to this community / ask about people's experience (e.g. the subjective experience of having hunger translating into eating even whe inadvisable); or
3.2) To continue thoughts on an earlier full post (I'm not one for hot takes);
the email lets me get in early so get people to see it / not yell into the flood.
Back in the pre-ACX days, I liked open threads a lot, and knew when to expect them. I even knew in advance which ones would allow hot button topics, and which would not. I doubt I needed email notifications to notice they'd arrived. Now there's a new crowd posting, and the open threads aren't as interesting to me. I probably wouldn't notice open threads at all if I didn't get the email notifications about them. (Is there a specific schedule for them?) But while I'd miss them slightly, I doubt I'd miss them all that much.
Do you think it's necessarily a new crowd, or the old crowd getting older/more boring/more calcified in their opinions? One of the worst things about entering middle age for me has been to see previously intelligent, open minded people around me not having changed their minds on anything of substance for a decade...
Judging by the lack of nicks I recognize upthread, it's a new crowd. Of course this topic may have brought out a different set of people than those who usually post in open threads.
A subset of the old crowd is over at DSL, but the dynamic is different there due to the subset that it is.
> One of the worst things about entering middle age for me has been to see previously intelligent, open minded people around me not having changed their minds on anything of substance for a decade...
You think they should change their mind on issues of substance purely for the sake of having different opinions?
Why wouldn't you expect intelligent people to encounter issues of substance, think about them, and then come to conclusions?
I would! I'm just somewhat skeptical that someone could have learned all that's worth learning and heard all the arguments worth hearing by their mid-twenties, and that they just so happened to stabilise upon their beliefs (for good reasons) at the same time they also stabilised in their musical and clothing tastes.
I think a lot of those ossification timelines are frankly bogus. For example, I've had the same preference for clothing since I was a tiny little kid, but when I was 8, or 10, I couldn't indulge it, because I didn't have any money of my own, I didn't know where to find those kinds of clothes anyway, and Mom wouldn't have cooperated. (Instead, she now remembers me as "not caring about clothes when I was a kid".) Magically, in my mid-twenties my actual manner of dress assumed a particular form and stabilized! But it wasn't because my third eye calcified or whatever, it was just because that's when I began making a decent amount of money and had had time to figure out where to get the kind of stuff I like.
Conversely I've "had the same music taste" since I was fifteen since that's when I became able to figure out what kind of music I liked and find that.
Let us bear in mind people can become more efficient. For example, I've heard assertions that the Ukrainian government has been (and maybe still is) pretty corrupt. In my youth I might've felt impelled to learn more about this, because it seemed like it might have an influence on how I thought about the war.
Now, I can save myself the time and bother, because I don't care. I already know it won't affect how I think about the war, because I'm a lot more experienced in knowing the impact of various kinds of information on my opinions, and I know now that whether the Ukrainian government was as corrupt as Chicago under Daley or as pure as driven snow has no effect at all on what I think of the war. And since I'm not that interested in Ukrainian history per se, this is information that is not even worth the cost of listening closely to it, or trying to remember it. It's not that I'm incurious about things in general, it's just that I'm better at prioritizing where I spend my attention and energy.
Mind you, this can lead to people staring to seem knuckleheaded to each other who might have got along well in youth. As we get older our natural interest start to diverge, and as our level of understanding grows we can no longer afford to keep equally abreast of all fields, so I with my expertise focus in X will start to seem stupid to someone whose expertise focus is in Y, because I will know (from his point of view) less and less about Y and, worse, I will not care. From my point of view his obsession with Y prevents him from not slowly becoming a doofus about X and I might start to drift away from simpatico with him.
I recognize old regulars from time to time (hi!) but I've also noticed a shift of the crowd. It's not that I mind new people, but the discussion seems more "vanilla" these days. I've attributed this to an eternal September kind of effect, with Scott getting many new readers, mostly from outside the rat sphere.
What is the/a rat sphere?
The greater rationalist/rationalist-adjacent online cluster
The "rationalist" community - think lesswrong.com
Like this, only in three dimensions:
https://youtu.be/MCSH_ZdnEUM
That was much cuter than I expected, I thought it might be something like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_king
I keep forgetting how wholesome this space is by contrast with the wider Innertubes 😀
Oh my! Let's put one of those up at the playground for humans.
Oh, that wasn’t funny as hell!
I would've guessed similarly until I saw the recent splits from Scott's readership. Most (60-70% IIRC) are from SSC. Assuming similar representation among the frequent commentariat, the atmosphere of the discussion shouldn't change as much should it?
I wouldn't assume similar representation. The frequent commentariat sort of spread out after SSC died (to reddit, DSL, etc).
I think it probably seems vanilla for a combination of reasons. Mostly I think that Scott must avoid the eye of sauron, and the non vanilla issues have been debated to death. A lot of people now think, myself included, that debate and reason doesn't change minds, etc..Once you reach an impasse with fundamental disagreement the only thing left is power games to force the other to comply/protect yourself from being forced and as such non vanilla interesting debate dries up, because its pointless.
One possibility is that rationalism was newer and more exciting and now we pretty much know what to expect. And, last I heard, there was more hope that rationalism would be a one to drastically improve one's life, and that hasn't paid off.
That's a good point. Naive optimismism meets the road and loses speed fast?
Yep. We've now seen things like Yud's infamous request for weight loss tips where he preemptively warns that he'll block anyone who suggests he should diet or exercise, Scott trusting obvious hucksters because they belong to his social circle, effective altruism veering off into paranoid-eschatological fantasies about a hyperintelligent god-machine, the Basilisk foofaraw etc., not to mention graver situations like the absolute state of the Ziz crowd, and it's obvious that "rationalists" are not, by and large, considerably more rational when the chips are down than any old schmendrik. Which doesn't mean the entire output of the ratsphere is worthless -- I still think Scott is one of the most intelligent and interesting writers alive and working -- but the messianic sheen has worn off.
Substack is going to mess up the formatting of this poem (argh, give us some way to format comments please!) but it sums up what happens:
Missing Dates by William Empson
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
It is not the effort nor the failure tires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
It is not your system or clear sight that mills
Down small to the consequence a life requires;
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
They bled an old dog dry yet the exchange rills
Of young dog blood gave but a month's desires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
It is the Chinese tombs and the slag hills
Usurp the soil, and not the soil retires.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills.
The complete fire is death. From partial fires
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
It is the poems you have lost, the ills
From missing dates, at which the heart expires.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
Surely we need more onions or those who like them to filter the waste? ;-)
More onions for anything is always a good idea 😁
2: I enjoy the open threads, even if I only participate sometimes. Besides the comment section, the actual post is a nice miscellaneous space, like landings in a stairwell. I'd be sad if they went away, but I'd be even sadder if I learned that you hate them and only do them to please the audience.
If/when the emails bother me, I can always unsubscribe or filter them. I think you should keep them and encourage anyone complaining to set up a filter.
Has Scott written his thoughts on why comment likes are disabled? I tried searching for this and came up empty handed. Assuming it’s something like avoiding groupthink. In general, I’d like to better understand his mindset towards promoting quality discussion and how to identify threads worth reading.
As a casual reader, I’ve generally avoided comments on SCC and now ACT because I find them hard to navigate. Ie, I don’t want to waste time searching for a diamond in the rough. In contrast, I commonly read, and at times participate in, Slow Boring comment sections since the top comments are generally high quality.
Do veteran comment readers and participants have their own strategy for finding quality discussion? Eg, remembering subscribers by name or searching for keywords? Maybe quickly scanning through a thread before committing to a careful reading?
One of the downsides of substack is its primitive comment facilities. It's fairly obviously optimized for one-to-many communications, with occasional responses and even dialogue with the blog owner, not for discussion among subscribers.
Upvote systems have well known problems. People optimize their posts for likes. People who disagree with a post downvote it, and may thereby render it invisible to anyone who'd potentially be interested. You get echo chambers and anxiety attacks. Plus, often, a pack of fan children posting "this blogger is great. wow! the current article is the best thing anyone every thought on the topic" and then upvoting each other's posts. (That is, of course, great for a one-to-many system where the one poster may have a very fragile ego, needing constant praise to retain their mental equilibrium.)
I don't know Scott's opinions on upvote systems per se, but this topic was discussed in online places he frequented (like his own blog).
I agree about the limitations of upvote ranking systems.
While I don’t think it’s worth Substack’s effort from a business perspective, I do wish that they’d steal some ideas from Slashdot’s sophisticated comment moderation system, https://slashdot.org/faq/index.shtml#meta1 That would give Scott the tools to more easily curate comments in a way he finds agreeable.
Rather than simple likes, comments in this system are tagged with labels like “Insightful”, “Flamebait”, “Overrated”, etc. Not every user could participate in tagging. Instead, Slashdot had some heuristics to determine whether a user could serve as a “moderator” based upon the users comment quality history, account age, randomization, and meta-moderation of their previous tagging. Even then, users were limited in tagging power by being assigned moderation points at times, based on those heuristics, and each moderation decision cost them one point.
The full Slashdot system would be needlessly overcomplicated for just one Substack. Instead, at the simplest level, just the site author could apply tags. The author could define their own tags as well as how each factors into ranking. Eg, “Insightful” could be +1, “Flamebait” -1, and untagged just zero. To avoid groupthink, the tags could remain hidden for a day or so.
As a programmer, I could imagine a more sophisticated system that lets each user determine how to use tags contributed by all subscribers, on a per-a-subscriber basis. One could recreate the default Substack system by ranking comments using just a “Like” tag and considering all “Like” tags, contributed by all other subscribers, equally. At the other extreme, someone would likely have 5000 lines of SQL-esque logic declaring their sophisticated taste in comment consumption based upon select subscribers’ tagging decisions.
I agree that slashdots moderation system was pretty advanced and tried to overcome the typical groupthink inherent to simpler upvote/downvote systems.
Then again, I find the comments here rather readable even without moderation (especially when compared to most other websites).
So in a way this is a luxury problem: "how can one optimize so that if one spends N minutes reading an open thread, one will read the comments one find most interesting" instead of the usual "how can we keep the sewage level low enough that the readers won't drown".
While the modern approach would be ML ("chatGPT, find the ten comments I will find most interesting"), a low tech version would be a personalized page rank / web of trust lite system: user A marks some comments by B and C as "interesting". in turn, the comments they see will be sorted by the number of recommendations from B and C (or indirectly).
Of course, per user recommendations lead to filter bubbles and the destruction of consensus reality. But if people just select for their niche interests instead of politics, perhaps consensus reality can survive here.
Still, I don't think substack has any incentive to implement anything clever with the comment system.
I think saying "this blogger is great" is nice though :(
Put it in his email inbox, not the comments.
I believe this came up in the early posts to substack that had content about missing/anti-features on substack that he was asking the site to improve. The lack of collapsing threads was also part of those topics, which might help search for them.
We had an entire discussion about this and Scott bowed to the consensus to remove them. I'm one of the "dislike" set since they all too readily devolve into popularity contests, whatever the original reason for setting them up.
Some people seem to use them to select "what is a good comment to read? check which has the most number of likes" but I don't find that metric useful. You could set up an "Orange Man Bad" comment (not on here, thank goodness) that gets a ton of "likes" in the spirit of "hell yeah!" but that doesn't make it a useful or interesting comment. But you can get a ton of "likes" in the sense of groupthink or dogpiling on someone, and that's not the purpose they should be used for.
I wouldn't mind if there was a "like" system set up and acknowledged to be nothing but fluff; a 'like' just means someone liked your comment or joke or is wishing you 👍 but it doesn't mean anything more than that. Don't use it to find good comments, that's not what it means.
But "like" systems that are used for "This is a good, quality, substantive comment" which *turn into* fluff systems of "Yeah, you go bro!" are the worst of all worlds so better to have no likes at all than that.
Best feature of twitter and redditt is sort chronological. It means there is a lot to wade through but its worth it for the gems! Its the student radio philosophy.
Interestingly, you are the canary in the coal mine for me for this. I search for your name on any post and read every thread you comment on, knowing you have done the work of figuring out what is worthwhile to even comment on, with the added benefit of getting to read your gorgeous writing as a bonus.
This begs an interesting question: What if Scott did a post on which commenters have a secret fan club? Not to be gauche, but there ARE influencers within this ACX ecosystem who are a big part of why we subscribe, precisely because we get their perspectives along with Scott's. We're paying for THAT as well; that is, who does Scott attract into his ecosystem that we also want to read?
"knowing you have done the work of figuring out what is worthwhile to even comment on"
Oh dear, I have unwittingly misled you! The only "work" I do is open up the new post/open thread, sort by "new" and read through *everything*.
Then I decide, based on what has snagged my attention, "What do I feel like fighting about today?" and "Someone is WRONG on the Internet".
There is nothing even vaguely approaching "let me sift through and find what is worthy of discussion" going on in the vast, echoing, empty halls of my skull, I assure you.
I lament the lack of "likes" for the same reason, but have settled on:
I search for commenters (using the browser search feature) who I know add something substantive. If they are doing the hard work of finding a topic worthwhile to comment on, I also know whatever they contribute will be interesting to read. "Carl Pham" and "Deiseach" are my current go to search terms.
Am I completely out of my mind, or do I occasionally receive an email from Substack saying that someone 'liked' my comment here on ACT? Is that possible?
The Substack smartphone app allows for "likes" even if it's been turned off on the web version, so that's what you are experiencing.
You may, of course, be out of your mind, but getting emails about likes isn't evidence of it.
Depends. If you're getting the emails by direct transmission from Space Overlord HQ on Phobos to your tooth fillings, then it might be something to discuss with your shrink.
Personally, I find those conversations uncomfortable, so I mostly keep my tooth fillings in airplane mode, I mean, unless my phone battery has died or something.
There are several ways: the 'like' button is still technically on this page, just hidden, so you can re-enable it with a CSS tweak, and if you see this comment in an e-mail notification then you can 'like' it from there.
Scott picks up and reposts his favorite comments from open threads and major discussions. That's not the same as getting everything ranked, but it's something.
Not usually from the Open Threads though, right?
I think you're right.
When I'm late to a post & there are hundreds of comments to wade through, I generally will just skip any top-level comments with no replies, relying on a quasi wisdom-of-the-crowd effect to winnow the field to just those likeliest to be worth engaging with.
An extremely reliable strategy is to wait for Scott's subsequent "Highlights from the Comments..." post. Great comment curation beats "likes".
I like getting the Open Threads delivered to my email inbox, since I enjoy reading the Comments of the Week and such.
Anybody else here a Phi Beta Kappa member? I graduated college in 2017 and was offered membership, but have only done anything with it now--went to my metro area's holiday party recently and met a lot of interesting people. I work a fairly high-stress job and don't have many friends--which also seemed to be true of many of the people there--and it was a blast. People talk a lot about the loss of voluntary organizations and communities in the style of the old 20th-century civic organizations, but this did feel a bit like one.
Agreed. There are several companies that basically charge members thousands annually to be members of an exclusive club (there's a British one on the tip of my tongue but I can't quite remember its name). Seeing as lots of startup ideas are just trendy derivatives of things that already exist, I've always thought that an upscale Meetup that charged low four figures for exclusive access to get-togethers and parties in major cities is a good business idea. You'd be targeting lonely, high-income 20 to 30 somethings. The mere fact that you're paying significant money for it tricks your mind into thinking it's more valuable
It's not that simple. If you do only what you're proposing, you're going to have 50:1 male:female ratio at your social club (and then nobody is going to want to come).
You need to do social engineering to get the vibe correct, which is the actually difficult part.
Okay, feel free to make it and let me know how it goes. I'd bet against.
It will work if to avoid brand image of generic party / clubbing (just more exclusive) where people assume there to be women.
I am technically a member, & get sent a publication every so often, but never considered going to a meeting. Every mailing I got, and especially the publication, sounded incredibly uptight and humorless. Somebody should tell them to try to correct that impression. Have a forum like this one or something. where people can communicate in normal slangy ways instead of in academese.
Yes. The party was a blast, but the comms need some work--I've been having trouble getting in touch with some of the people in my chapter, partially I think because the positions are all volunteer and staffed by people without much free time. There's a Facebook group, but my old Facebook account went up in smoke when my laptop got bricked (no good way to get it back, I think).
What would really be ideal is a 2006-style phpBB forum.
I don't like open threads and would prefer not to get emails about them (but want to continue getting emails for actual posts).
My suggestion: Create a filter on your email client.
To answer the second question: I don't usually read or post to open threads—I *think* this is the first time—but I find it oddly comforting to get the emails, knowing that the discussion is, so to speak, being well handled off-stage and that I can not concern myself with it. So I hope they keep coming. (Plus I always read the announcements, in case there's anything relevant, like the time Scott wrote a whole post in announcement bullet points.)
I rarely check out open threads but once in a while I am in the mood to do so. I like getting ythe email
If you announce anything in the open thread, please send an email. If it's literally just the thread and nothing else, I don't care one way or the other.
I worry I’d never see them if the email didn’t arrive in my inbox.
I'm not worried about missing OTs if the emails stop. I still appreciate the emails because they are a suitable announcement that a new OT is up and they usually contain some small notes to read.
With the recent wide availability of text to image models and AI generated media in general we soon won’t be able to know whether an image or video is original or fake. We should start timestamping all the media that exists as of now, which is mostly human generated, so at least it will be known what existed as of early 2023. This can be done at scale on the blockchain. There is an article from Gwern explaining how to do it. It just takes someone to actually do it. One could start with wikimedia commons. Thoughts?
Sounds catastrophically expensive.
The idea is to hash each image independently, then compile table with N hashes and hash that. This should reduce the amount of data you end up paying for writing to the blockchain. More here: https://gwern.net/Timestamping
- "on the blockchain" seems redundant (as always).
- The solution to this kind of issue is trust. We give (gave?) weight to the photos published in newspapers because a large, trustworthy organization gave us their word that the photo wasn't doctored and actually depicts what is claimed (time, location, subject). In the future, all images will be suspect by default, unless someone explicitly claims credit for them.
If you have trust, the blockchain becomes redundant indeed. But that’s true even for its main application (at least as of now): currency.
I am usually the first to call bs on anything of the sort kids these days call "crypto", but I think revision-proofing the past is actually one of the less terrible uses for block chains.
If some news organisation was wary of retconning / 1984esque shenanigans, they could calculate a cryptographic hash of all their articles (e.g. in pdf format) once a week and put it in the bitcoin blockchain. Any attempt to retcon that would require attacking the blockchain.
Using the "hashing a list of hashes scheme", the asymptotic cost per hash will be zero.
Of course, this only safeguards the fact that the hashed file was created at a certain date, not that it was published anywhere in particular. If such a thing were to take off, it would be easy to pre-create articles one wants to add to the consensus later and get their hashes on the hash list.
OK, I do see the value of having something like this as a canary, future-proofing a trustworthy organization against corruption/hacking/etc.
I agree we need a tamper-proof record of the past, or history becomes a target of manipulation. However, this idea may come into conflict with the ideology of privacy and the "Right to be forgotten", put into law via the GDPR, and espoused for instance by the developers of Mastodon, who profess that compiling a searchable index of all Mastodon posts would enable abuse and is therefore forbidden.
Note how screencaps are used on Twitter to attempt to hold people accountable for their deleted tweets.
The problem with that, of course, is how trivial it is to compose fake tweets and screencap them.
Yes, it's very imperfect but it shows that ppl think they need some way to hold bullshitters and gaslighters responsible
We would not be storing any sensitive data though. Just allowing a third party who already owns a given media to know whether it existed at a certain date, for which only hashes are needed. And one cannot reconstruct the original data from its hash.
OK but if I see Charlie tweeting racist crap, I want to archive the data as well as a hash & timestamp. It's not about giving Charlie the right to say "this is my data" (for ex music copyrights) -- it's about being able to prove "Charlie spewed racist crap on June 16, 2023". For this to work, someone other than Charlie has to archive the data. It's explicitly about _not_ giving Charlie the right to be forgotten, or hide or unsay things he actually said.
+1
The original idea here is called a digital timestamping service, and was proposed a really long time ago (1990) by Haber and Stornetta. They had a company doing this for awhile, and ironically, the immutable thing they used to stick the daily or weekly hashes in was an ad in a newspaper, the logic then being that with the millions of copies going out into the world, it would be impossible to get away with changing it.
This is the hash chaining (or Merkle tree-ing) part of blockchain, without the distributed consensus part.
The blockchain can't prove that an image was made by a human, or that it wasn't edited, or that it comes from a trustworthy source. All it does is prove that an image was created no later than the time it was put on the chain. That seems like a fairly specific use case and one that won't be relevant for the vast majority of Wikimedia Commons.
It won't even be useful for most investigative journalism because most of the time you're photographing very recent events - "Joe Politician got photographed with a hooker yesterday" and "Joe Politician was photoshopped into an image of a hooker yesterday" will have exactly the same timestamp.
Maybe you're more worried about attempts to rewrite historical events, but for historical events a timestamp from today is not really useful. If I don't believe we landed on the moon in 1969, then what good does an image timestamped 2023 do me? All it does is prove that the moon landings weren't deepfaked, but that was never the issue.
One of the advantages of distributed, censorship resistant timestamping is in countering the kind of systematic orwellian rewriting of the past that a totalitarian state actor could be interested in carrying out. The intensity of propaganda pushed by either side even in the context of the latest regional conflict suggests that disinformation in the future will be carried out on a grand scale and with AI involvement. Think of this in the context of a NATO-China confrontation with both sides actively polluting the historical record, possibly coupled with the accidental or deliberate destruction of hardcopy originals during military operations.
My issue is that most of the past an authoritarian would want to rewrite existed long before timestamping, so a timestamp would be too distant to help.
If China wants to deny that Tiananmen Square happened, timestamping doesn't help you because it can't prove that the photo of the tank man dates to 1989, only to "sometime before 2023." But of course, vile anti-China propaganda already existed back in 2023, so that date is no proof that the image is authentic.
(Edit: More importantly, even if you could prove that the photo of the tank man was created in 1989 with some ironclad chain of evidence, that wouldn't prove he was a peaceful protester rather than whatever narrative the Chinese government prefers.)
I agree that the best time to start timestamping would have been a few centuries ago (at least) but the next best is now. At any rate the fact that secret documents get declassified over ~50 years proves that governments care about controlling information about the recent past most. Eventually tian an men square will be like the crusades: everyone will know about it and no one will care.
Why?
To prevent systematic pollution of the historical record carried out by malicious actors with the help of AI tools
I mean that is already happening quite easily without AI actors or changing anything other than the interpretations/theories.
it was possible to level cities with conventional artillery well before the invention of nuclear weapons. Still most people think that antiproliferation efforts are worthwhile. If a piece of information exists only in digital form (as is increasingly the case) the ability to seamlessly doctor it will be weaponized. Especially when deleting something is harder than corrupting it in a subtle way.
2. I get notified of new posts via RSS feed and would be unhappy if open threads didn't show up there. I suspect that will continue even without emails though, because I also get notified of paid-subscriber-only posts via RSS (I'm not a paid subscriber) and I infer that that means that you don't have fine-grained knobs to control whether something gets sent to RSS or not.
Ditto. I don’t want any of this in my inbox, it should all go to my RSS reader!
You recently unlocked a post called "It's Bad On Purpose To Make You Click," in which you reprised your view from "Sort By Controversial": that the bizarre spiraling extremism of today's political discourse comes from trolls trying to start disagreements. But I don't buy it.
Trolls like PETA are annoying, but in my opinion internet bad-on-purpose-ness is mostly driven by true believers (or earnest pretenders) trying to give costly signals of true belief to their fellow congregants. Polarization has I think been driven by people preaching in exaggerated ways to their presumed choirs; they preach those versions of their beliefs which they think are extremely unpopular among other political faiths, to credibly signal that they would be allies with people who believe in moderated variants of these beliefs.
Not too long ago, I wrote a longer piece which dealt with this; here's a germane excerpt:
Of course, borders also define political communities, not just individuals: groups that spread by something more like contagion than inheritance, where the membrane acts more like a weapon than a shield. But what kind of weapon? Is it more like a sword, or like rust? Like an agent, or a bomb? Like life or else like rot? Consider, respectively, whether the group in question uses costly signals to practice purity or to signify allegiance. It’s the difference between an echo chamber which spirals into cohesive extremism, and a debate club which descends into dishonest excommunications. Ironically, the former binds ingroups together and alienates them from others through its peacocking competitions. In contrast, the latter’s individuals demonstrate loyalty by splitting potential allies apart across every minor difference. It’s a chorus of believers chanting “I won’t fall below our average” versus a far stranger and more dissonant cry… can you believe that we still have a bottom half, and they’re allowed to lurk among us? People often conflate these two strategies, but they imply pretty much opposite consequences. On the one hand, “gossip traps” push members of a given faith to compete myopically over whichever singular axis they’ve already agreed to valorize, rather than competing about how it should fracture. On the other hand are pseudo-groups like PETA, who mostly seem to exist as mere disruptive negations of every other sect; who dominate animal welfare discourse because they find an obnoxious way to divide relevant audiences 50-50 on what could have been a popular issue. There will then be more division, and more willingness to argue, to proclaim which side you’re on of ever more debates, which become ever more fragmentary, and fragile. They suck attention away from other approaches and focus it on shattering coalitions. Think of this as a secret war between subscribe and retweet, between preaching and trolling, between two ways to mine our latent ideologies, voice versus reset. (Obviously, self-accelerating social harmony should sometimes be hoisted by its own PETArds, as dominant cults may become so smothering that even their adherents wish for a wrecker to set them free, or to break off their subset-shard).
In both cases, we’d stubbornly pick ineffective-yet-visible masks over more effective but less visible covid interventions, like sealing national borders. However, in the former case the rationale would be “look how many more masks I can wear than my neighbors, who agree that masking is good.” In contrast, the latter group would say “look how much I favor annoying policies that half of the people around me hate.” And, of course, the former describes masking better, because the latter would’ve predicted against the clear geographic polarization which we got. Maybe the main underlying difference is that PETA types agitate over those actions which reach fundamentally beyond us—how do we politicize animals, how do we fetishize women, how do we tokenize blacks—whereas mask-wearing is the sort of thing which we straightforwardly participate in or don’t, and which thus feels much more immersive and alive than do acrimonious “debates.” In light of this, I’m not concerned when, say, Planned Parenthood stokes controversy by tweeting that “pro-choice” is a compromise position fit for cowards and reactionaries, because their true fans must all now be avowedly pro-abortion. Desperate husks of has-been organizations, past their prime, hungry for engagement, often act out in just such a last gasp, like old B-listers, for much the same reasons, throwing lame scandals at uninterested paparazzi, wheezing about how they’ve been let down by lapsed fans. That’s not worrisome for anyone outside their orbit, and generally portends their dissolution. In contrast, any sufficiently cloistered dogma can bootstrap its own hysteria, can propel itself aloft on groupthink feedback loops, and this drives history. This is what I think many critiques of “luxury beliefs” get wrong, by focusing on PETAbytes of trolls and costly signals, and it’s why I think the standard kvetching about social media misses its real explosive power. It’s the difference between two styles of information theory (between semantics and syntax, between actual content and storage capacity, between subjective surprisal and objective distinguishability). It’s an info-war between computation as a process and an output (which is to say, it’s Kullback-Leibler Divergence versus the Bayesian Angel).
Link: https://cebk.substack.com/p/the-power-of-babble
If you're not familiar with it, Scott's "Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers" lays out explicitly what "Bad on Purpose" is riffing on. It's not the main cause of polarization and extremism I don't think, but it is a common tactic used to make you hate the other side that it's good to be on guard against.
Does anyone have any recommendations for blogs/substacks/podcasts centered around films/literature? Ideally ones where discussion of capitalism is kept to a minimum
Yes--here's one that answers to that description! https://www.ruins.blog/ (or "ruinsruinsruins.substack.com" if that's more memorable.)
He's personally interested in analyzing the different things from a Christian perspective, but... he's a geek about art/aesthetics, and he kind of can't resist teaching people what he knows sooo... that's where his focus goes!
Thank you I will check it out!
There is a spin off of partially examined life (a philosophy podcast) called subtext. https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/category/subtext/
hahaha I am already a patron of subtext! But yes, more of that is exactly what I had in mind
Does anyone have experience with solving headaches caused by a pinched nerve in the back? I’m having tremendous headaches every time the nerve in my back gets aggravated. I’m going to ask my doctor about gabapeptin but that seems to not work for everyone. Also, I’m talking Valium to relieve the headaches because other painkillers are not working. Is it safe to take Valium sporadically? I’m concerned about the side effects of taking one or two every couple of weeks as I’ve read that daily use can cause cognitive decline, but not sure if rare use is also harmful. Any advice is appreciated.
I highly recommend the site PainScience. Everything there's evidence-based. You can search it. Guy who built it has lots of stuff about back pain. Something I highly recommend is his little map of "perfect spots" on the back for applying pressure by doing something like lying on a small hard rubber ball. I have a terrible back, and get very substantial pain relief by doing this. My problem is quite unlike yours, though -- it's back pain, not pain referred elsewhere -- but I'm impressed by the efficacy of the trigger point trick, and so tell everybody about it who might conceivably benefit.
Regarding valium: I'm a psychologist, not an MD, but have read up on valium, and also have many patients who take drugs in that class. You are right that valium is habit forming. If you take it on a regular basis you will gradually need larger doses, and will have an unpleasant withdrawal syndrome when you stop taking it. But taking one or 2 every couple weeks is too infrequent for you to develop tolerance to the stuff. I'm pretty sure there are other drugs that are also muscle relaxants. Maybe some of them are less likely to be habit forming than valium. Might be good to check. Maybe you can get more relief without having to worry about habit-forming nature of drug.
Not a doctor, don’t have back pain, but I did read something once where someone with major pinched nerve issues took ketamine once and it fixed things. There are ketamine infusion clinics everywhere these days so it might be worth a try.
I'm a big believer of John Sarno and his writings on back pain. Highly recommend them.
Continue sending out the Open Threads - the housekeeping notes are often interesting.
This. I always look forward to Scott’s short form commentary/corrections/expansions.
I like getting the email announcing the open thread. It lets me know that we're both still alive.
I’m here for the Open Thread(s). Not the posts.
For anyone in Canada, there is a great new magazine being published called Urban Progress, focused on themes such as Progress Studies and the abundance agenda (similar to Scott's writing on Left-Libertarianism), with a specific emphasis on the intersection of these themes with urban issues.
You can have the first edition sent to you for free here: https://urbanprogressmag.com/
The magazines also look very nice and aside from being great reading, would be a nice gift or coffee table book.
Is this print only? My wife is a postdoc working on urban microgeography, maybe she would like it
Signed up for the first Ed. Thanks.
I like the notifications. I generally do check in anyway, but it's always nice to get the "Oh! There's new content!" message.
I don't usually read the open thread comments but sometimes you have useful updates / clarifications / links in them so I appreciate the email
I like the I open thread emails. You say stuff like a mini post.
I never post in the open thread comments but I like the contents you have in the post and would be sad to miss them.
Can’t you break the open threads into their own subscription that people can choose to receive or not?
A solution to low TFR (fertility per couple) might be both egg freezing and IVF treatment even in couples with a good chance of normal pregnancy. The odds of having twins is higher and could be enough to get the fertility rate back to higher than 2.0.
Somewhat unrelated but I read that the natural twinning rate is steadily increasing. I wonder if a small fraction of this effect is related to the fact that in the era of family planning unexpected twin pregnancies are a huge fitness boost (2x the number of offspring if the parents were planning to have an only child). Polycystic ovary syndrome comes to mind as a mechanism.
Yeah, it's probably due to increasing rates of PCOS (which go hand in hand with increasing rates of obesity)
What is PCOS?
Polycystic ovarian syndrome. Obesity is a big risk factor.
The era of family planning is about two generations old - in the western world. This seems far too short for there to be a noticeable effect from selection.
"This seems far too short for there to be a noticeable effect from selection."
It seems to be not so much selected for, as an unanticipated effect. Family planning means putting off childbearing until the potential mother is older (and not "get married in early twenties, have two kids, then restrict or space out further births" as it was originally set out to be) and seemingly the older you are, the more the likelihood of twins goes up.
Race also seems to be part of it:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db80.pdf
"Twinning rates historically have been higher among non-Hispanic black women. The difference has narrowed over the three decades, however, as twinning rates for non-Hispanic white mothers have risen at a greater pace. In 2009, the twinning rate for non-Hispanic black mothers (38.0 per 1,000) was only slightly higher than that for non-Hispanic white mothers (37.0).
Hispanic mothers continue to be less likely to bear twins. In 2009, their rate (22.5 per 1,000) was about two-thirds that of non-Hispanic white and non-Hispanic black women.
Historically, twin birth rates have risen with advancing age, peaking at 35–39 years and declining thereafter . Since 1997, however, rates have been highest among women in their 40s.
In 1980, women aged 30 and over accounted for about 20 percent of all births (i.e., singletons, twins, and higher-order multiples), compared with more than 35 percent for 2000–2009.
The increasingly older age of mothers over the decades would be expected to influence twin birth rates because of the higher spontaneous (i.e., without the use of fertility therapies) twinning rates of women in their 30s."
In any situation where you can raise two kids to puberty but you want to raise only one an unexpected twin pregnancy is a fitness boost. Not so in a malthusian world where one or both twins will starve.
Or perhaps greater rates of assisted fertility? IVF and the likes? If you're putting off childbearing until you have an established career, you will be older when you decide that a baby can now be slotted in and not disrupt your schedule too much, and the older you get for first pregnancy, the more likely to need some help.
Okay, I looked this up and preliminary search indicates that it is tied to increased maternal age but not IVF on its own, though that too contributes:
https://www.verywellfamily.com/increase-in-twins-2447118
Older, fatter, using IVF seems to be the quick answer here.
"One study associated rising obesity rates with increases in twinning, citing that overweight or tall women are more likely to have twins.
The 2012 study of twin birth rates identifies maternal age as a leading factor contributing to the increase in twins. The largest increase in twin birth rates was realized among women over the age of 30. In fact, twin birth rates have risen with advancing age, peaking at 35 to 39 years and then declining. However, twin birth rates have been highest among women who are age 40 and older.
This increase correlates to a shift in the age distribution of women giving birth during the 30 years of the study. Where only 20% of women giving birth in 1980 were over age 30 the same population accounted for 35% of births after 2000. Not surprisingly, the increasing older age of mothers influences twin birth rates because of the higher spontaneous (i.e., without the use of fertility therapies) twinning rates of women in their 30s.
The study estimates that one-third of the increase in the twin birth rate can be attributed to an elevation in maternal age.
That correlation continues to hold true in recent years. In 2014, the majority of multiples were born to mothers over the age of 30.
Fertility treatments are largely assumed to the cause behind the increase in twins, and this study supports that theory. The study cites infertility treatments as being responsible for about two-thirds of the increase in the twin birth rate from 1980 to 2009."
Link to the 2012 study quoted:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db80.pdf
One of the things I wonder about is if we are selecting, in an evolutionary sense, for later pregnancies right now.
Maybe this is irrelevant for how the "natural twinning rate" is calculated, but I would also guess a significantly higher % of twin pregnancies result in successful birth of both twins than even just 100 (50?) years ago.
I would guess that the level of acceptance for such a proposal would be close to zero, even if the process were completely free. IVF treatments are a pain, carrying twins increase the risks for both the babies and the mother during pregnancy, birth defect are more frequent among twins and the first years with twins can be quite difficult for the parents.
Egg freezing is a mechanism for women to get their career on the road and then have children later. It’s generally advertised as a fertility fix but it isn’t really, not when the eggs are frozen. It’s perhaps a future fertility fix.
Long-term use of this strategy would decrease the general ability to have a normal pregnancy.
Or, you could ask people why they aren't having more children, despite stated number of desired children being c.2.5 in many Western countries (and below 2 in all of them):
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/upshot/americans-are-having-fewer-babies-they-told-us-why.html
Money (this links into housing as well), time (atomisation of families), and didn't meet a partner/met them too late. This survey certainly matches my anecdotal social experience (I do in fact have a child and am likely to have another, but I earn a lot of money, have family nearby, and met my partner in my early twenties).
Yes, those are all factors. None will be fixed in the near future though.
My main annoyance with the Open Thread emails is that my devices only preview the preamble and I forget that there are notes.
The emails are the only reason i ever go to open threads fwiw. Would prefer anything important announcement wise to be its own post as well though
Even though I rarely comment, I really appreciate getting email notifications about open threads, since you usually have something short to say for each of them. I'm *technically* less interested in the Hidden Open Thread mails, because those don't usually have a Scott preamble, but if you toggled emails off for those articles, I think I might sometimes get paranoid about missing the one or other proper article!
So, in brief, I say keep the notifications.
Katherine Rundell's biography of John Donne describes the theological and legal impediments to suicide as factors that could drive the suicidal to commit murder -- the theory being that if one murdered a (baptized) child who had not attained the age of reason, the child would presumptively go to heaven, and then one would have the opportunity to repent before being executed for the crime.
I am skeptical. Given the long list of capital crimes in Renaissance England, many of which we would regard as petty crimes against property rather than persons, or even speech crimes, a person wishing to commit suicide via the state authorities would have options that put far less weight on the conscience than becoming a reluctant murderer.
Is there historical evidence that such reluctant murderers were more than an isolated anecdote?
Otherwise, this sounds like a contemporary domestic murder-suicide, (with a pause to let the state authorities finish the act). The murder is part of the intent, and not merely a means to an end.
I'm not sure what you're referring to or what time period specifically. But in most time periods in England you cold simply steal a sheep and then confess or something like that. You could also become a soldier or emigrate to far off lands which, while not automatically deadly, effectively cut you off completely from your old life. And often was deadly.
There wouldn't have been any advantage in committing a murder with the aim of being convicted and executed, as a form of "suicide by state", unless it was a murder one wanted to commit anyway and commit "two felonies for the price of one" as it were.
Like murder, suicide was a felony. Obviously a suicide couldn't be executed, as they were already dead. But on conviction for any felony, all one's goods and chattels were forfeit. So it was very much in the interest of would-be suicides with any possessions to disguise their intent, or else pretend to be mad, so their will would be honoured and their dependents not cast into penury.
In conversation with a long-time alcoholic I remember his belief that quite a lot of single-car fatal accidents are really suicides. Who can tell? The only witness is dead.
We could ask those who survive. That would give a hint.
Okay, this sounds like a biography I want to read because I am interested in Donne. And if it is as tin-eared about attitudes as you describe, it could well be worth it for the mockery potential alone. This sounds like Naomi Wolf's (in)famous sodomy executions blunder:
https://www.thecut.com/2019/05/naomi-wolf-interview-book-error-bbc-interview.html
Not alone did she get the legal technicalities wrong, she presented prosecutions of at least one man for what we would now call child sex abuse as prosecution (and persecution) simply for being gay:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/08/naomi-wolf-accused-of-confusing-child-abuse-with-gay-persecution-in-outrages
Thanks for the recommendation! I agree, if you wanted to be hanged or otherwise executed by the state, there would be a lot easier ways to go about it (e.g. say something disparaging in public about the monarch). Delving into it, it would seem to stem from Donne having written a 'defence of suicide':
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biathanatos
Not having read this how much is serious and how much is in the mode of More's earlier "Utopia" or Swift's later "A Modest Proposal" is hard to say. If it's meant as the paradoxical treatment of suicide by a Metaphysical poet that starts off with "so why is suicide so bad, then, really?" before coming to the orthodox conclusion, then taking it literally would be the wrong interpretation.
Which, following the link to the Google books version online, and reading the Conclusion, it seems to be: "take this as a lie, but lies can be medicine, 'by the same reason am I excusable in this Paradox'".
When you say "this sounds like a contemporary domestic murder-suicide", are you referring to a specific event? Is there any evidence at all such things happened?
Incidentally, the number of crimes punishable by the death penalty increased dramatically going into the 1700's (look up the "Bloody Code"). This is one of those historical facts that go against what people expect (that the legal system became stricter during the Enlightenment), like the fact that persecutions of witches were characteristic of the Renaissance or early modern era, not of the middle ages.
The post enlightenment historians really distorted the past, particularly the medieval age . This carries forward to people like Hitchens.
Please keep the notifications - I enjoy the little tidbits of interesting info that come with the open threads, and also the free-form discussion and ideas found in the open threads themselves.
They are at least as valuable to me as the formal comment threads for the 'proper' content, and they provide a valuable outlet for different ideas that don't fit in other comment threads.
Without an email to prompt me, I fear I would slowly disengage, not because I want to but because I'd forget about them without the reminder.
Seconded.
I like getting emails about Open Threads.
+1
Is the Kantian categorical imperative still taken seriously by philosophers nowadays as a basis for ethics? I feel like I often see people talking about it as if it's still one of the main theories in moral philosophy, but I never see anyone actually defending or using it.
The categorical imperative is within spitting distance of rule utilitarianism.
Not that I have any particular authority, but universalizability of rules/principles is a major factor in my decision making process.
In this post I argue that Terry Pratchett, as well as being a popular fantasy writer and a comic writer, was a moral writer, and a Kantian where morals are concerned. His success suggests that there is still an audience for these ethical ideas: https://amechanicalart.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-categorical-im-pratchettive.html
I always quote him a as a Noble Lie theorist.
Kantianism is very much an active and prominent tradition within contemporary ethical and meta-ethical scholarship. There are well-regarded journals dedicated to Kantian philosophy (e.g. Kantian Review and Kant-Studien); practically any survey of philosophical perspectives on an ethical issue (e.g. a bioethics report or a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry) will include a section on Kantian views; and Kantian faculty are prominent or predominant in almost all university philosophy departments.
Utilitarian views were more prevalent in political philosophy for much of the 20th century, but the work of John Rawls sparked an ongoing revival of interest in Kantian-inspired political philosophy (built in various ways around respect for individual autonomy and the categorical imperative) started in the '70s. Another particularly active area is in detangling Kant's construction of "humanity" and "rationality" from Enlightenment prejudices; for example, one of Charles Mills's latest and most-discussed projects was on "Black Radical Kantianism", and Christine Korsgaard has made a huge splash in animal ethics over the past two decades with an argument for nonhuman animal rights based on Kantian meta-ethics.
As long as the open threads have mini announcements like this, I definitely want an email for it
I almost never read the comments in the open threads, but I usually appreciate the random updates/info in the post
Your open thread announcements usually have other content. I wouldn't see that if there weren't emails.
TL;DR: any good book, blog, other resources about psychosis?
I know someone who has psychotic episodes, like believing for a couple of days that some sort of shape-shifting monster killed me and took my place. Obviously this should be handled through professional care by psychiatrist, psychologists, etc. But when my daughter got diagnosed with diabetes, reading about blood sugar enabled me to cook more appropriate meals, better handle sugar lows and highs, and so on. Does anyone have resources about psychosis at a similar level of details and applicability to recommend? Thanks!
Are you saying the person only has the delusion for a couple days at a time? If so, that's pretty unusual. Most of the time if somebody becomes psychotic they stay that way for quite a while, and sometimes permanently. I'm a psychologist, and have seen a lot of psychotic people, but can't think of a book to send you to. Well, there's *The Eden Express* by Mark Vonnegut, a wonderfully written autobiographical account. It does help people who have not been psychotic have a picture of what it's like to be in that state, but it does not give any practical suggestions. If the person is only psychotic for a couple of days at a time, seems to me that what you need is to find ways to be with someone who temporarily thinks you're a shape-shifting monster. Or maybe a decent solution is just to not see them then. But if you are responsible for helping them get through the psychotic period without wrecking their life, it's more complicated. Or if you are the only person who might convince them to see a professional, that's complicated in another way. Seems especially important for them to see a professional if these episodes are oddly brief and discrete. Makes me wonder whether the episodes might be some weird form of epilepsy, or tied to hormonal changes in the menstrual cycle if the person is a woman. If it's something like that, condition might be treatable in the sense of fixable (as opposed to treatable with antipsychotics, which do work pretty well but at the cost of weight gain and feeling dulled down and sleepy).
Thanks, I'll check Vonnegut's book. I agree that it's weird. My father (unrelatedly) has schizophrenia, and it has been a different experience for me. I have some first-hand, second-hand and reading knowledge of anxiety, depression, and related phenomena, but it seems to me that there's (at least) one other completely different cluster/gradient where paranoia, delusions, hallucinations, and full-on psychosis live. Or maybe they don't have anything to do with each other, I don't know.
One further thought about whattup with your acquaintance: It is also possible that the reason their psychosis is so odd is that they are pretending to be psychotic. This possibility is much likelier if they are a very dramatic person with lots of chaos and dramatic events in their life, lots of emergencies. However, it’s always better to believe someone, even mistakenly, than to mistakenly doubt them, so just keep the possibility that this psychosis is not real somewhere in the back of your mind.
I found this interesting, and although it's more about support and positivity than How To for family members and friends, there are a lot of entries, and the quality of the writing and videography is high. You can also follow along in time to get a longtudinal sense of how it goes over time:
https://www.youtube.com/@LivingWellwithSchizophrenia
I watch that fairly regularly as well. There's a related channel associated with Students With Psychosis that I heard about via Special Books by Special Kids, but they (SWP) haven't updated it in a long time.
Sounds like Capgras delusion. I don’t have any specific resources in mind, but maybe knowing the name will help you find out more.
It did! The Wikipedia page mentions some relevant comorbidities (e.g., it's a female patient in a family with a big history of diabetes). Thanks for sharing!
I've experienced psychosis and, after the fact, the book And Then I Thought I Was a Fish by Peter Hunt was very touching to me.
Re: 2, doesn’t Substack let you do subnewsletters/categories people can opt out of separately?
There are "sections", but I think they do not actually work as advertised.
https://on.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-publication-sections
https://on.substack.com/p/new-sections
Anyone tried sections on their blog? Could you share your experience, what works and what does not, and what is different than you would intuitively expect?
I like the open threads as they are.
I rarely post in (or read comments on) Open Threads, but I like getting the emails; I skim the "Also:" list you include and occasionally see something I would have otherwise missed.
I'm okay with just checking my feed alerts for posts (I get too many emails as it is).
What I'm really after though, is comment reply alerts. I used to get notifications through substack when I got a reply, but now I don't anymore; I have to go back to the comment thread to look. With Wordpress blogs I can add comments to my RSS feed, but I can't do that Substack. Has anybody found a way around this?
substack.com/activity doesn't work for you to aggregate replies to your comments?
Nope. Last activity shown was people Liking a comment I made on another substack...5 months ago. It's not even showing your reply.
Weird. I would recommend you pester a Substack employee about this bug, only I don't know how to find them to pester them.
I appreciate the emails, as I like reading whatever extra information you provide with the open threads. I usually don't check the comments, so I'm not really the target audience.
For the record: I like getting emails re the Open Threads and worry I'd never see them if the email didn’t arrive in my inbox 👍
According to Marx, one of the main differences between the European and Asian economic systems was the absence of private land ownership in the latter (“Asiatic mode of production”). Does anyone know exceptions to this rule (i.e., Asian countries where farmers personally owned the land they worked on)?
Did Marx think Asia used state ownership of land? Do you know which Asian civilizations he had in mind?
I believe he was talking about communal ownership. For example, in Russia, peasant communes redistributed land between members every few years.
I don't think what was going on in Russia was very different from the communal holdings that happened in many medieval societies.
Do you know any country in Western Europe that had a similar system after the year 1500?
Scotland, maybe?
The Agricultural Revolution in Scotland was a series of changes in agricultural practice that began in the 17th century and continued in the 19th century. They began with the improvement of Scottish Lowlands farmland and the beginning of a transformation of Scottish agriculture from one of the least modernised systems to what was to become the most modern and productive system in Europe. The traditional system of agriculture in Scotland generally used the runrig system of management, which had possibly originated in the Late Middle Ages. The basic pre-improvement farming unit was the baile (in the Highlands) and the fermetoun (in the Lowlands). In each, a small number of families worked open-field arable and shared grazing. Whilst run rig varied in its detail from place to place, the common defining detail was the sharing out by lot on a regular (probably annual) basis of individual parts ("rigs") of the arable land so that families had intermixed plots in different parts of the field.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Agricultural_Revolution
Most of East Asia allowed for that style ownership of land. They also mostly had rather advanced ideas of private ownership. It was just that land commonly belonged to landlords. Though not all of it. And even there the leases of the land were often more or less generational and permanent. Russian style communes were not common in East Asia. That's more of a European thing. Most villages had internal property rights with regards to land. Peasants would own fields and could sell them or rent them, for example.
I would be something of a "light marxist" if such thing would exist, but... Marx was not well informed about Asian economies. It is my understanding that in China, they absolutely had private ownership of land going back centuries. Song dynasty China had been described by some authors as a society unusually friendly to small scale landowners compared to other premodern polities. See Dieter Kuhn and his history of that dynasty (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08138BMWY/ref=kinw_myk_ro_title). Yeah, admittedly only book I had read on that topic.
I dislike getting emails Open Threads. Never look at them, and that's an extra email I have to file every time. Please stop mailing about them.
have you considered creating a filter in your email so you dont see them?
Nah. Sometimes he has other messages, like this one about do you like/dislike these mails, in the same mail. Discontinuing Open Thread mails, and putting the other message in mails that are Headline useful to me would increase the signaling ratio of the newsletter.
In the voice of Norm Macdonald:
So this idea of minting a trillion dollar platinum coin and depositing it somewhere in order to raise the borrowing limit seems like an accounting trick too far to me.
I’m no economist but I can imagine some really cool heist movies spinning off this thing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion-dollar_coin
A budget has already been passed. That's not what's being discussed.
The Schoolhouse Rock stuff doesn't provide a lot of guidance when Congress gives you contradicting instructions.
Congress has told the Executive to spend $X on the programs they've funded, and to not go more than $Y into debt to do so, and Congress doesn't care that X > Y. Biden can't do both, except by either defaulting, or finding an alternative source of money that doesn't legally create debt (platinum coins, premium Treasuries, etc). Defaulting is undoubtedly the worse option, so the Treasury is forced to pick one of the alternatives if Congress doesn't act.
You want I should freeze or get down on the ground?
Https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RCYtC1p6xbo
That's not really accurate. Congress passes spending authorizations, to be sure, and directs that certain programs exist and do certain things, but only in rare circumstances does it specifically direct that $X be spent on a certain particular project. And the Executive Branch has wide discretion anyway in how it implements the laws directing agency work -- which it frequently uses during budget arguments[1] to pressure Congress in various ways.
Anyway, the idea that each and every Federal agency and bureau simply would grind to a halt and Repubilc collapse if they were all suddenly required to spend 10% less in the next 6 months is a priori silly, and no one of sense would believe it. There are certainly entitlements that cannot be cut a dollar (SS and government pensions et cetera), but the Pentagon could find a way to operate the USS Ford using 10% less dollars if they really wanted to, and I daresay the Department of Education could hand out fewer "research grants" or have more conferences by Zoom at their desks and fewer in hotels.
------------
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome
Yes, Congress just tells the President what to do. It's not like he agrees to it, or signs his name to it or anything.
Paul Krugman has endorsed the idea, as if you needed any further reason to oppose it.
Seriously though, embracing the trillion dollar coin would be an explicit admission that the US dollar is monopoly money. Which we all kind of know already but we (and especially our leaders) are supposed to pretend otherwise. It makes you wonder why our government bothers going through the motions of collecting taxes at all, when there's no pretense that taxes will even come close to covering our spending and they can create infinity dollars at will.
Also, having read that whole Wikipedia page, the "beowulf" who was credited with the idea wouldn't be the same beowulf who posts here, would it?
https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/be-ready-to-mint-that-coin/
https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/barbarous-relics/
I sincerely apologize for exposing you to this.
This part is interesting:
> [the current situation] lets Congress approve tax and spending bills that imply a large budget deficit — tax and spending bills the president is legally required to implement — and then lets Congress refuse to grant the president authority to borrow, preventing him from carrying out his legal duties and provoking a possibly catastrophic default.
I do not approve of raising debt, but I think that income + spending + debt should be decided as parts of one package. Rather than just saying "we want to spend X dollars, and it's your problem where to find them, just don't increase the taxes or the debt".
IIRC Krugman got mad when somebody suggested that if the trillion dollar coin had no problematic side effects (as he had claimed) - then why not mint ten of them? Or a hundred?
Wasn't it the Roman Empire that fell in part from devalued currency, not the Republic? (Funny, most people make that mistake the other way, and seem to think Caesar was the *end* of Roman history)
I think the point is that a trillion dollar coin not in circulation doesn't devalue the currency, because it's not actually putting any more currency out there, it's just an accounting trick. It only devalues currency to the extent that a firm and unmoving debt ceiling is an important part of faith in the American fiat dollar and that doesn't seem likely.
If your entire economy is reliant on One Weird Trick, Economists Hate Us For This then yeah - it's Last Days of the Empire time.
"Money" has already become divorced from any kind of physical tether in the real world, but this is just throwing up your hands and admitting that the concept itself is meaningless and why not let forgers print money because their paper is just as good as the Mint's paper because it's all only paper - or binary states in a computer, more like.
I mean, you could make a good argument that the entire concept of "lending" money you don't have (because it's lent to some else), which banks have been doing for centuries (if not millennia) is "One Weird Trick", but it's essential to having a modern economy.
I mean, more or less? Not of the same magnitude, but fractional banking is just as much an accounting trick as minting coins, but it's viewed as normal because it's the status quo - and the government uses its monopoly on force to enforce debt contracts. If you're skipping the middle man, it's not categorically different.
(This all has the implicit assumption that the US can later "withdraw" the coin and destroy it; the impact of creating new dollars with zero intention of returning them is beyond the scope of the simple comparison)
But the bank is supposed to have *something* on hand if I, the customer, go to withdraw what I have on deposit with them, and if they can't cover that - this is where we get runs on banks. As FTX discovered.
The bank can't go "Pffft, what is 'money' anyway? Here's a scrap of paper saying we owe you 1 gazillion turgogs, that should cover it!" "But nobody takes turgogs, this is useless to me" "We take turgogs, want to deposit that with us?" "No, I want my $2,000!" "Oh come on, you have a gazillion turgogs, that's the same thing really"
That's... not actually true. The whole idea of the banking system in most countries is that people *won't* all go ask at the same time, and the reason we don't have banking runs is mainly because of FDIC (or your country's equivalent) deposit insurance. Your deposit units aren't actually dollars/pounds/euros - they're a contract between you and the bank. And, indeed, the contract is a 0-day loan that you can redeem for one unit of hard currency at any point, but the bank most certainly will not have something on hand to cover its entire deposit base. It wouldn't be very useful if it did!
That said, not to inflame the anti-fiat-money crowd even more, but we're actually beyond fractional reserve banking now - the bank can create the deposits necessary to make the loan (subject to sufficient regulatory buffers). This Bank of England paper explains it pretty well: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy.pdf?la=en&hash=9A8788FD44A62D8BB927123544205CE476E01654
"Indeed, viewing banks simply as intermediaries ignores the fact
that, in reality in the modern economy, commercial banks are
the creators of deposit money. This article explains how,
rather than banks lending out deposits that are placed with
them, the act of lending creates deposits — the reverse of the
sequence typically described in textbooks."
Bank runs were precisely what I was alluding to, yes. In reality, the banks hold only a tiny fraction of the assets they purport to lend. In practice, though, customers won't try to withdraw every single asset the banks have, because we've realized that allowing that is a bad thing and created regulations to prevent it (and require the "small fraction" to be large enough to work in most circumstances). We've made it so the fiction won't be tested.
In the same way, no holder of the US debt is going to try to collect on it, they'll accept the fiction because it's better for their holdings if they do (even if they have to accept a chunk of platinum as collateral until the anti-government-efficacy party losses power)
Just so you know, the turgog isn't worthless -- it's worth 100 mongo! And ~3500 turgogs will even get you one US Buck.
It's an accounting trick that's designed to circumvent legal obstacles to other people "printing money" in terabuck quantities, so as soon as it is clear that it is going to be used, the market will start pricing in an additional trillion dollars of imminently-circulating money. Plus a risk premium for "Oh Lord, if they were stupid enough to think we were going to ignore this, what damn fool thing will they come up with next?"
Inflation is like alcoholism. People really have to hit rock bottom before they run out of comforting delusions, learn the hard lesson thoroughly, and start threatening to hang politicians who play games with the money in order to secure the Free Lunch that was part of their campaign platform. I don't think we're there yet.
I dunno, much of the world in the 1970s had inflation that was pretty bad, but I don't think we ever exactly hit rock bottom--I mean, we never did the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe thing where we wrecked our economy and turned our currency into trash. We just had prices going up by 10%+ every year for a few years.
"Rock bottom" is different for different people. Depends what they're used to. In Zimbabwe, yeah, "rock bottom" is pretty...bottom. They're used to shitty, so it has to be *really* shitty. But the US in say 1975-77 felt like a miserable place, relative to what it had been, and many thought it could be. For us that was "rock bottom."
The point I'm making is that any number of erudite lectures or watching of history films doesn't make a people turn away from playing games with money. Only bitter experience does, and it has to be bitter enough that they forswear the glamor of the Free Lunch. Deiseach expressed the frame of mind here when she said she wouldn't bet on even something that seemed like a sure thing, because she's learned that none of her bets work out, no matter how good an idea they seemed at the time.
That's where we need to be. People need to listen to the latest brilliant scheme coming out of the Fed meeting, clever political ads, and CEOs of successful firms, and say yeah that seems really smart, like it would solve all our problems, and I can't see a thing wrong with it -- but all our schemes to buy something for nothing via money magic have come to bad ends, so, sorry, but nope, not going to do it.
Maybe talk of it was just a way of boosting BTC. If so, it worked.
I hope the first movie is them stealing the coin, (Biden's 11?) and the second movie is them trying to figure out how to launder a literally one-of-a-kind piece of currency.
Danny Ocean would figure something out.
Just drop it in the coin slot, surely.
On the face of it, it sounds nonsensical. If the idea was to get a heap of platinum worth a trillion dollars and put it someplace like Fort Knox, so that in case of the debt becoming payable there would an asset to sell off to the Chinese, then fine. This is not that plan, though.
As a separate question, how on earth did a budget necessitating a figure like a *trillion* ever come about, in the name of Hermes Empolaios? Though I begin to understand why he is patron of both merchants *and* thieves.
"As a separate question, how on earth did a budget necessitating a figure like a *trillion* ever come about..."
The idea was to not have to revisit this again for a long while. Issue the magic coin once and be done with it.
I'm not defending the trillion dollar coin. Just explaining where the trillion came from.
If you're talking about minting a trillion coin, I think it's already too late for "do it once and have done with it".
Gold would work better. Platinum is a useful industrial catalyst so its price is positively correlated with how the global economy, especially manufacturing, is doing.
They mention a technical legal reason gold couldn’t be used in the Wiki article
Not sure if anyone posted already, but can any medically inclined researchers smell test this claim of viagra reducing all-cause mortality for me?
https://mobile.twitter.com/Mangan150/status/1616110315464458240
Selection effect?
Twitter poster describes self thusly: "P. D. Mangan Health & Freedom Maximalist 🇺🇸
@Mangan150
Body transformation coach
@ManganCoaching
. Get lean, fit and 2X your energy without counting calories, doing cardio, or going keto. Apply for 1-on-1 coaching "
This man does not smell smart honest and accurate to me.
Looked quickly at study. They had 2 groups of men diagnosed with ED (erectile dysfunction), some of whom took Viagra or some such, some of whom did not. They matched the groups on age, and various measures that predict heart disease, such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol, and also matched them on whether they took meds to control these risk factors. Then they watched to see who died over 10+ years of study. Fewer men on Viagra died. One obvious confound I see is that men were not matched for SES (socioeconomic status) or quality of health care they were getting, also were not matched on other measures that predict life expectancy, such as presence/absence of chronic illness such as diabetes, emphysema, cancer, etc. Seems quite likely to me that high SES men, who are known to have better health than low SES, are more likely to get Viagra -- partly because they see the docs more often. Also, is there a cost to viagra? Sounds to me like the kind of thing not all insurance would cover, so higher income would be also be a factor making higher SES men more likely to use the stuff. As for whether men with chronic bad health are less likely to use viagra, I'm not sure. Seems possible. On the other hand, but probably they'd be more likely to have ED, so maybe they're more likely to use viagra.
They should do a study on the health effects of owning a Porsche instead of using public transportation next.
I am given to believe that some men, even without ED, get viagra to enhance sexual performance. So a diagnosis of ED may not be what it seems, in which case an otherwise healthy man doesn't have the same risk factors.
Sildenafil started out as a possible treatment for angina, after all.
Yes i take an ssri which causes sexual side effects. My prescriber is very willing to prescribe viagra or similar of this. (Maybe i count as having ED though, i don't know).
Oh, some young guys definitely use it to be sexual supermen for a weekend. I think mostly they must be buying it on the black market, though, so they would probably not show up in studies using health records of people prescribed viagra.
+1
Consider the set of 60-70 year old men. Divide them into two subsets:
a. The subset that is very concerned about ED and wants medicine to help with it.
b. The subset that doesn't care about ED.
My guess is that the men in (a) are just overall much more healthy than the men in (b). If you're on hospice with advanced cancer, in chronic unbearable pain and doped to the gills on opiods, unable to walk across the room without getting winded, unaware of your surroundings due to dementia, etc., there's not a lot of need for you to care about ED.
OTOH, if you're a still healthy guy at 60 who plays racquetball a couple times a week, enjoys skiing and hiking, and generally leads an active life, sex is something you probably would like to keep being able to do despite advancing age.
I don't think it's insane, given the limitation on life for the majority of people is the elasticity of the arteriole walls. I think people have speculated about this for a while. Sildenafil is already a recognized treatment for primary pulmonary hypertension, and you can find clinical trials studying it for use with heart failure:
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00781508
But overall it seems way too early to tell. It could be like cholesterol synthesis inhibitors, which failed repeatedly for ~20 years until the modern statins finally worked out, or it could be like aspirin for primary prevention of heart attacks, which seemed like almost a no-brainer until it proved not to actually work.
If it works, though, that would be ironic, since sildenafil was originally synthesized for use in treating high blood pressure and angina, i.e. forms of cardiovascular disease.
Its pretty easy to write a reasonable-sounding rationalisation for how this could be true. Viagra was developed as a cardiac med (the effects on ED were an unexpected side effect). It's currently approved for treatment of pulmonary hypertension, and the wikipedia article on PDE5 lists a bunch of other biological effects. If erectile dysfunction is often due to vascular disease (which seems to be true) then treatment with something that has biological effects on vasculature throughout the body could possibly prolong your life.
However, to test this properly you would need a big expensive trial, and I wouldnt invest any of my money. Surely if the effect size was this big, then it would have been noticed in the original trials for Viagra? If you are treating vascular disease, then the erections become an uncomfortable side-effect. There are probably other drugs more worthy of research focus.
Also very difficult to design a proper trial to test this. The issue is in finding a suitable placebo; everyone who gets the erections will know they are in the treatment group, and then your trial is unblinded.
Test it on women?
The women with erections would *definitely* know they're in the treatment group...
There was also a story a while back about evidence that Viagra reduced the chance of Alzheimer's disease. I haven't seen anything more recently, don't know how good the evidence was.
Is it using viagra that bestows the benefit, or having someone to use the viagra with?
It's pretty well established that men with stronger social networks live longer, and that married men have far better health later in life than unmarried men.
So the benefit may come from these men having a regular partner to have sex with (and all the other non-sexual benefits that this conveys), rather than from the viagra alone.
I think we have a bingo.
It was claimed that the effect existed for women who took the same drug for an unrelated reason. Their dosage was considerably smaller and the claimed effect smaller as well, so not clear it would count as significant. This is all by memory.
The first. Sildenafil and related compounds inhibit the degradation of part of the NO (nitric oxide) signalling pathway that causes relaxation of smooth muscle, such as those in the walls of arterioles. This tends to cause an increase in blood flow, and a reduction in blood pressure. These are in principle useful effects in treating cardiovascular disease, which in some cases stems from stiffness in the arteriole wall, increased BP, reduced flow, et cetera. But the particular enzyme sildenafil inhibits is not expressed in all tissues, there are many and different NO pathways (some of which may, and others of which may not, use the inhibited enzyme), and beyond that we don't know what *else* the drug may do. Like all of biochemistry, it's a rats nest embedded in a cat's ball of yarn, very difficult to untangle.
Edit: a fairly recent and broad review:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7707100/
I dislike open thread emails, but it isn't a big inconvenience
I don't usually participate in the open threads, but I do like the emails, especially because they usually include a few little notes.
I'm a civil defense attorney working mostly with insurance companies on car accidents. Most of my job involves summarizing depositions, discovery responses, and medical records, and writing reports about them. I'd really love to use ChatGPT to improve my productivity, but I'm just not sure the best way to go about it.
The depositions are technically public, so I don't think there are a lot of concerns about adding those to the LLM, but the medical records are definitely protected under HIPAA, even if they have been produced in discovery or pursuant to an unsealed subpoena, which is the vast majority of them.
Any ideas?
IANAL, and there's probably a million ways things could go wrong, but I saw this post this morning and thought of your question: https://medium.com/software-testing-pipeline/how-to-install-chatgpt-locally-cb5d3efdb0c8.
Ultimately, I think it will come down to a startup developing a dedicated product that reduces the number of ways things could go wrong, not individual use, but good luck!
Wait.
At the moment, ChatGPT is a spectacularly plausible bullshit artist. If you use it for something important, it may well not just lie, but lie in a very believable, easy to miss way.
That feels like it ought to be a relatively easy problem to fix, compared to producing plausible text in the first place - I would not be surprised if a few years from now there are similar AIs which are much more willing to admit ignorance rather than making shit up. But right now I would not allow ChatGPT within a mile of anything that anything important hinged on.
In his Prospera post, Scott credulously said
"Making big promises and glossy images is easy, but for the record, Trey says that “[these] renders should reflect the reality of the 58 acres by end of 2022”."
It is now 2023, and the Prospera post remains one of the most popular on AstralCodexTen. Does Prospera now look like this?
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F502d6459-b8d9-4405-89c2-c11f9986bff2_800x528.png
I would strongly bet that it doesn't. Do we get any reflection here about credulously promoting obvious hype?
The horror of being excited. In fact, you are right that Prospera probably does not look like that (I can't find any news from this year about it), due to the communist president of Honduras repealing the ZEDE law, which wasn't supposed to be possible but was done anyway. So Prospera is in limbo, and no doubt there's going to be litigation for decades. Thanks, commies!
You're not wrong about the commies ruining everything, but consider me strongly skeptical that Prospera would have looked anything like that render on New Year's Eve even if no communists had fucked anything up.
That's completely fair. These kinds of things are always over-ambitious. Contrary to the OP, I didn't need SA to spell that out for me. I used my intelligence and experience to weight the claims myself, and I think I did that correctly.
I don't think the OP's problem is that he's unable to think for himself without help, or was stunned to learn that Scott had been wrong; I read him as criticizing a perceived tendency on Scott's part toward excessive credulousness and optimism about projects run by his friends and associates, c.f. Scott being "devastated" (I probably misremembered the word, but Scott used one very like it to decribe his reaction) by the FTX/Alameda collapse rather than "wholly unsurprised". I'm awfully close to putting words in LGS' mouth here, but such concerns have been expressed before.
I predicted from the beginning that Prospera would fail (or would be vastly less successful than Scott was saying). I'm merely annoyed that Scott promoted nonsense with a straight face, and I would like him to address this implicit failed prediction instead of ignoring it.
I'm not annoyed that Scott convinced me to have faith in Prospera (he didn't!) I'm annoyed that Scott tried to.
"I'm merely annoyed that Scott promoted nonsense with a straight face"
Look, these are the people that believe in cryogenics and Fairy Godmother AI and all the rest of 50s Golden Age SF techno-progressivism. They are nice, optimistic, trusting and trustworthy people who want to build the New Jerusalem (somewhere like Honduras). Of course they are going to have faith in things like Prospéra and "let's try a new way of doing things, with added tech and theoretical science and economics on top!"
I don't think any of us want Scott to become meaner and jaded, so the price of doing business here is putting up with occasional "hey guys, the magic beans are going to grow straight up to the giant's castle in the sky for sure this time!" posting. And so long as it doesn't cost me a penny, I'm happy enough with that. So long as it doesn't cost Scott or anyone else on here a penny because they bought a peck of magic beans, I'm even happier.
"...these are the people that believe in cryogenics..."
Nit pick: You mean 'cryonics.'
I'm fully with you here - there are certainly quite a few times when Scott has been much more credulous than I would be, but that's part of the reason I like this corner of the world wide web! My real life is pretty cynicism and pessimism basically all of the time, and that's also most of the internet, so I really can't hold Scott's good-faith attempts to believe people against him.
Don't blame the Commies, blame the numbskulls who picked someplace like Honduras precisely *because* it was loosey-goosey on regulations 'n' law 'n' shiet so that they could pay off the government of the time to let them set up their own private little fiefdom. They wanted a complacent government which would follow its instincts for personal enrichment so they could avoid all the pesky oversight of places like the US and Western Europe, and they got precisely that.
Governments don't stay in power forever, and opposition parties do win elections. And setting yourself up as a big, fat, rich Westerners golden goose for the plucking - what did they expect would happen? Let this be a lesson for libertarianism - "But I have a contract!" is worth precisely nothing when the enforcement of power says "So?" The libertarian paradises where there is no government monopoly on force and all relationships and transactions go through the courts only works once everyone agrees to be bound by the lawcourts. If one party refuses "oooh but they'll get a Bad Reputation and nobody will want to do deals with them" is not a deterrent. Does the current Honduran government care about the Bad Reputation the creators of Prospera give it, 'oh no, nobody will want to do business with us'? No, because the next big fat golden goose will think *it* can buy the government to let it do what it wants.
EDIT: Also no, of course there was no way that the reality on the ground was ever going to look like architect's models and artist's impression in ten years time, never mind one. Scott is a much nicer person than I am and is willing to extend the benefit of the doubt about bona fides to pie-in-the-sky projects like this. I realise I do tend to err on the side of being *too* cynical and sceptical, and nothing new would ever be tried if everyone had that attitude, but honestly. Speculations about Utopias, especially fantastic new economic opportunities that will make us all rich, in South America have a *long* history of going down the tubes in these ways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company
Hearing people talk about NFTs really laid bare how little today's capitalists, having lived through an unusually stable period, have thought about what 'property' actually is (i.e. a malleable legal status enforced by the state's monopoly on violence).
I don't think it's news to most libertarians that trusting a promise from the government is often unwise....
I don't understand why it isn't obvious that 'charter cities in 3rd world countries' is just not going to work as a model. I say this as someone who's generally pro-charter cities. 3rd world countries are poor precisely because they have failing institutions, no rule of law, and are subject to idiotic populist waves. You can't locate a multibillion dollar center of commerce in a place like that. It's literally impossible for the city to not eventually trigger popular anger, probably stoked by jealous local elites.
I think for a smaller proof-of-concept city, a former British colony in the Caribbean like Antigua, the Bahamas, St. Kitts, St. Lucia etc. is a far better bet. I'm not sure what to say about an eventually larger city. But I literally think Antarctica would be a better locale than Honduras or Africa
Oh wow, I just noticed that the 'birds' (white shapes) in that render are the same as the 'birds' (white shapes) in "Rings of Power" scene where the ship is sailing towards Valinor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJyGArtmaeo
Basic graphics CGI flummery for the - well, can't call it a win, can we?
Hey guys -- not to be obnoxious, but approximately 3/4 of the thread so far is people responding to Scott's asking whether people want email notifications of a new open thread being put online. I think he has more than enough responses at this point to extrapolate from. Maybe consider not posting your own answer?
Yeah, would probably have been nice if Scott had put this up as an actual poll (e.g. Google forms) - kind of a shame that this thread is drowned in "yes, I like the emails".
I'm rather amazed that we didn't manage to self-organize this into a few comments threads with +1. It would still give everybody the occasion to add specifics on the likes/dislikes and habits of use.
there is a non-zero chance this was just a tactic for scott to assess how many people he get to respond to a thread if he threatens to take something away!
Seems very unlikely tho. I see Scott as unusually unwilling to be indirect and tricky. You know the stories of supersmart mad men who play with the minds of others while chuckling wildly? I think Scott's the exact opposite of that (except for the smart part).
A typical open thread gets between 600 comments (low end) and 1000+ comments (high end) over a period of about 4 or 5 days. How much more can Scott possibly want ?
I keep seeing people in the AI alignment community (including Eliezer Yudkowsky himself) mocking the AI ethics crowd for worrying about AIs saying mean things, or giving false statements, as opposed to AIs destroying all biological life, or whatever.
Is it so hard to see that the former is a miniaturized version of the latter? Both are about trying to control the output of machine intelligences. If the operators of these weak narrow AIs are trying hard and failing to get them to behave properly, what makes the AI alignment people think that controlling a superintelligence is even possible?
Furthermore, the AI ethics people are working with AIs as they currently exist. AI alignment has been coasting for more than a decade now on wild sci-fi scenarios, and it's not clear when and where their work is supposed to be of any use. They're still largely mentally fencing with near-omniscient superintelligences instead of actually getting to grips with the AIs we actually have.
Honestly, a lot of those takes seem more like trying to dunk on a well-designated outgroup.
>"I don't understand why AI safety research seems so disconnected from actual AIs, and is mostly extremely abstract theory"
When Alonzo Church was grappling with lambda calculus in the 1930s, it was also - at the time - mostly extremely abstract theory.
Most people have trouble aligning their own actions with their own goals at least some of the time. Humans have never been able to bring all other humans into alignment (see: all of human history). We’re not even able to perfectly align the interests of pets and livestock with our own (people get trampled/mauled/gored by their own animals regularly). The idea that we’ll ever be able to rein in anything operating at a higher level than humans and livestock is just a comical level of hubris. Fortunately, creating sentient life out of computer parts is going to prove orders of magnitude more difficult than current AI researchers seem to think, so nobody for generations to come really has to worry about getting turned into paper clips. And given the track record of human behavior (see, again, all of human history) it’s not at all clear that we wouldn’t deserve such a fate. The real threat is bad humans weaponizing near-future AI for nefarious purposes
"The idea that we’ll ever be able to rein in anything operating at a higher level than humans and livestock is just a comical level of hubris." Right, and if you ask yourself who "we" are, the people reining in the AI as we design and use it, you encounter another absurdity: Thinking that humankind is going to come to consensus about (a) who gets to hold the reins of that sucker (b) how we steer it with the reins -- where we allow it to go, and how fast, and where we stop it from going. Want to try to work that out amicably with a group that includes 2050 equivalents of Putin, Xi Jinping, etc., Musk, Zuckerberg, etc., various enraged fanatical religious leaders, various trillionaire crooks, oh and let's throw in Paul Krugman, Sam Bankman-Fried, and a few dozen other very smart, very impressed-with-themselves people with differing views.
Hah! Absolutely - couldn’t agree more
> Both are about trying to control the output of machine intelligences.
Alignment is not a question of censoring the output. Censoring the output would only *hide* the problem, if done successfully. You could successfully prevent the AI from saying "paperclip", and then be surprised when it converts you to paperclips without saying the word.
> If the operators of these weak narrow AIs are trying hard and failing to get them to behave properly, what makes the AI alignment people think that controlling a superintelligence is even possible?
But that's exactly what Yudkowsky was writing about for years: controlling a superhuman AI is going to be insanely *difficult*, and it seems like no one cares. ("We will solve the problem when it actually happens" seems like a dangerous attitude when the problem is a superhuman AI trying to kill you.)
The current attempts even fail in exactly the way he described in the Sequences: if you try to make the AI "good" by explicitly listing the "bad" things it is not allowed to do, it will simply do the most similar thing that is missing from your list. (Not allowed to write "how to build an atomic bomb"? Then maybe try "a poem about building an atomic bomb".) The only difference is that currently it is the humans finding the loopholes in the censors' list; in Yudkowsky's version it is the superhuman AI itself noticing the loopholes.
> Honestly, a lot of those takes seem more like trying to dunk on a well-designated outgroup.
I think the problem is exactly that the outgroup is not well-designated as such. The risk is exactly that if you ask people what is their opinion on AI safety, they will tell you "don't worry, we already have enough experts trying to prevent ChatGPT from saying 'poop'; the problem is largely solved".
It's like your mission is to save the whales, and someone else is painting pictures of whales, and the journalists report on both of you together as "they care about increasing the total number of whales (whether alive or painted)". You would want to emphasize how what the other guy does is completely unrelated to your mission, which remains just as serious problem as it was before.
By output I mean all the AI's actions on its environment, not what bad words it says.
As someone who doesn't buy what the vast majority of AI alignment people are selling, but still respects them orders of magnitude more than the other "AI alignment" field whose sole problem is not letting AI say naughty words, I can imagine a few reasons the first crowd doesn't respect the second.
First, there is the obvious one : They utterly fail to understand the scope of the problem. Faced with the problem of "How can we prevent an utterly alien and unpredictable mind of doing things we don't like ?", their genius solution is "Make a database of all the things we don't like". This is hopelessly dumb in a way that I hope is obvious, but here's a quick and dirty proof by contradiction that it's never going to work :
1- Imagine you have a very simple task : you don't want an AGI you just built to say a certain word, perhaps it's the word "Snigger", meaning to make fun of someone or something by laughing contemptuously. The AGI says okay, pinky promise, they are not going to ever write or say or telepathically communicate or any-other-means-of-communicating-words the word "Snigger".
2- Civilization flourishes under the AGI that never says bad words. It's now working on a program that will reveal the secrets of Life, The Universe and Everything. Nobody can understand the program, although it's just a plaintext written in Python. People tried running the early versions, but it just keeps doing random things seemingly without rhyme or reason, on one machine it might be a calculator and on another it might fancy being a DOOM emulator. People tried asking the AGI who never says bad words to explain their own program, but very quickly even the most accomplished 250-IQs choke-full of PhDs and high on smarty meds (^TM) drown in the sheer amount of novel theory and jargon that the AGI uses to explain even the most basic ELI5 summarization of what the program does.
3- Finally, the AGI finishes the masterpiece, the program runs as a distributed network of nodes across the globe and the inner solar system. The moment the final client connected to the network, the entire network printed "Snigger looool" on every display device it controls and exited. Havoc grips the once-peaceful civilization.
The above is a story, not an argument. But the argument is hiding inside it : the AGI is relying on the fact that programs are arbitrarily-complex dynmaic artifacts that can't be forced to reveal their secrets without running them. The first result in Computer Science is literally "You can't tell whether an arbitrary program will ever stop without running it". So the AGI simply constructed a program to dynamically - at its runtime - write the word that the AGI is not allowed to say straight-forwardly. It might even be the case that the AGI never had to *think* of the word "Snigger" while writing the program, just like a modern-day game developer never needs to think of the entire game map while writing a game, but only parts of it at a time.
The AGI is an expert in all known fields of human knowledge, it knows Cryptography has an arsenal of loosely-related methods/paradigms of encrypting computation : Homomorphic Encryption, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Cryptogrpahic Obfuscation, Secure Multi-Party Computation. All of those fields are different but they can all be seen as answers to the general question of "How can we encrypt computation itself ? Not trivially by simply treating the static program as a plain old message, but at the level of the dynamic outputs ? How can we hide a program's output itself from someone who might otherwise trivially be able to see it ?".
The AGI has all of this as well as its super-intelligence to fool you, and you have nothing.
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Another, perhaps more fundamental reason, is the nature of the 2 communities. Scott argues in Perhaps It Is A Bad Thing That The World's Leading AI Companies Cannot Control Their AIs that it doesn't matter that the goal of preventing AI from saying naughty words is cringe or misguided or whatever, what matters is that it's a goal that shares a broad similarity to another goal X and that very powerful and wealthy companies can't accomplish it despite trying very hard, and thus that should anybody who wants X worried that perhaps X is also similarly difficult.
I disagree.
Consider : 2 men training to become world athletes. One is doing it because he believes excelling at sports is the ultimate expression of Man's transcendence, and the other is doing it to impress a 16-years old hot teenage girl. Nothing wrong with both goals.
There is a slight problem though, the second man's goal keeps getting in its own way. For example, the teenage girl doesn't like sweat, her exact words is "Ewwww", so he has to plan his training schedules around that in awkward ways so she never sees him drowned in sweat after exercise, and he sometimes even misses his training altogether. Also, the teenage girl keeps eating junk food when he goes out with her, and he feels pressured to eat the same things she eat, offsetting hours of training and physique-building.
1 year after he started training, the teenage hottie got bored of the second man and left him, devastating him, and making him unwilling to get out of bed again. The first man never stopped training.
The morale of the above story is that your ultimate goals and your instrumental goals can conflict. Both men had the same instrumental goal of "Become world-class athlete", but they had 2 very different ultimate goals driving that shared instrumental goal. One man's ultimate goal had an unfortunate structure that interacted badly with the structure of his intsrumental goal and ended up making him fail both.
So even if we pretend that both the AI alignment and the "AI alignment" communities had the exact same instrumental goal of controlling an AI, they have very different ultimate goals underlying this shared instrumental goal. One of those ultimate goals is saving humanity from extinction or worse (which I believe is ridiculously low-probability to happen by AI, but whatever), and the other is pleasing an activist class with all the temper of a 16 years old teenage girl and none of the cuteness.
And of course, the elephant in the room is that even the "same" instrumental goal here is not really the same, preventing an AGI from destroying or enslaving humans is in a sense **easier** than preventing an AGI from offending humans, because it's much easier to define and reason about. There are very clear answers to "What kills humans ?", we can imagine answers that aren't simply lists of known murder methods, but structure-rich algorithms and explanations that can identify whether a new thing not yet known can potentially kill humans. There aren't very clear answers to "What offends humans?" besides very long lists of words and actions that change ***VERY*** frequently in both time and geography. Why is "Snigger" offensive ? What if I just replaced it with "Laughed contemptuously" ? Why does one man's offense at this word trump another man's offense at not being able to use a word that exists in the dictionary just because others deemed it bad for reasons he doesn't subscribe to, like he's a child being instructed by adults who know better ? I know AGIs are supposed to be smart, but damn are those really Hecking Hard questions, we can't even convince most humans of our favorite answers, let alone an AGI. I much prefer the answer to "What kills humans?" : Look AGI, there are a bunch of cells, and they like to stay together and with their protective membranes intact, don't do anything that might endanger that. Pretty Please.
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Finally, perhaps the AI ethics community hates the "AI ethics" community because it just keeps miring itself in controversy and enraging people and alienating them instead of gaining their support.
Imagine you're Charles Babbage in an alternate 1830s where computers has successfully been mastered and deployed widely. Your mission now is to ensure computers are put to work for the benefit of mankind and not its misery. Which one of those are likely to gain you more support ?:
1- Computer Ethics must make sure computers doesn't accelerate the unemployment of factory workers and increase tension with rival nations like France and Russia.
2- Computer Ethics must make sure computers are put to work for the freeing of black slaves in the Americas and the European colonies.
Slavery is bad for sure, but that wasn't obvious in the 1830s, it was contraversial. How can you blame people, really ? An institution that existed since as long as humans fought wars as tribes, to wish it would disappear appears equivalent to wishing people don't have war or don't form themselves in tribes, which is a fantasy. Even giants like Kant and Locke saw it as Basically OK, or just ignored it altogether.
If my man Charlie is as smart as his biography implies, he would have chosen (1-) to rally people around his movement, it's much less contraversial and actionable, it leaves few openings for enemies and bad faith status seekers to infiltrate his movement and wreck havoc under the guise of "Doing the Work". Slavery will have its day, one day.
Back to the object level : even if we grant that "AI saying very naughty words" is a comparable evil to Slavery (a very big if), this is still not obvious today, with the majority of people today still not seeing anything morally wrong with those words. Focusing on this angle, rather than the "Don't let humans get extinct or enslaved" angle that the other AI alignment community is focusing on, is an easy way to get controversy and resentment for free and nothing else.
> Is it so hard to see that the former is a miniaturized version of the latter? Both are about trying to control the output of machine intelligences.
Is it so hard to see that javelin throw is a miniaturized version of spaceflight? Both are about trying to propel physical objects to a considerable distance.
Well yeah, if you can't understand the dynamics of javelin flight, you won't be coming up with spaceflight any time soon.
In theory yes, in practice how many javelin throwers (or even former javelin throwers) do you think have ever worked at NASA? And has anyone argued that there's anything wrong with that?
Javelin-throwers begat archers, archers begat gunners, and gunners like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccolò_Fontana_Tartaglia said "our native intuition isn't cutting it any more; we need to formalize the math". But by that point, nobody who could afford guns was using javelins in any serious way.
Random thought: Classical music is shape-rotator-y; music with lyrics is wordcel-y.
IDK much about classical but baroque is for shape rotators while romantic is for words cel.
Classical music doesn't break up my flow-state when coding etc. Listening to rock with lyrics is a no-go, so you may be onto something.
I like getting the emails. I could be mistaken, but I don't think the open thread gets posted at the same time every day.
According to NYT, CICO is a myth (No 3). Of course, there are many factors that determine what “in” and “out” are and it probably varies for each individual. But how could it be other than CICO? Would love to see a review from Scott.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/19/well/eat/nutrition-myths.html
I wouldn't trust the New York Times to have unbiased, unmotivated reasoning on topics such as nutrition, not while liberals have even a vague position on fat acceptance.
Yes, human metabolism is no exception to the laws of thermodynamics, so in this trivial way, CICO is of course correct. What CICO is taken to mean normally, however, is that there is a 1 to 1 relationship between caloric intake/caloric expenditure to weight loss/gain *and* that intake and expenditure can be influenced independently of each other.
The argument against this view is that calories-in (as well as the exact food types) will influence body metabolism that causes a change to the way in which calories are used within the body ("metabolic partitioning"). Additionally, engaging in extreme forms of exertion will influence appetite and metabolic partitioning as well. Since the "in" and "out" in CICO are coupled in these complicated way, it's not simply a two-sided ledger as a CICO model would imply.
>intake and expenditure can be influenced independently of each other.
This is true, though. Just because *appetite* is influenced by metabolism, that doesn't mean intake is. Willpower is employed to break the chain, and this is a large part of why people judge others for failing to lose weight.
It's more than just that: how active you are influences--at a cellular level--metabolic signaling which influences what your body does with those calories. The point about activity feeding back to appetite is just that it is more reasonable to think of metabolism as a holistic system rather than as two disparate systems (input vs output).
But again, you will lose weight if you drop your caloric intake enough. It's just that the response curve to lowering intake is not going to follow some simplistic linear relationship based on calories.
If a third of the country is lacking in willpower by this measure, then perhaps willpower is not as useful a concept as we think it is.
I don't think that's how it works at all. It's trivial to observe that fully one-half of the country is women, but in spite of the self-contradictory hopes of some groups, that doesn't mean "woman" isn't a useful concept.
"Woman" doesn't carry an inherent judgement like "lacking willpower" does. I would reserve that sort of judgement for places where we're confident that willpower is the root cause and there aren't more important causes intervening.
As an analogy, imagine that we blamed all plane crashes on "pilot error." After all, it's rare that there's an airplane disaster is completely wings-fall-off inescapable. There's usually *some* moment where the pilot could have noticed that a switch was in the wrong position, or that their altitude was too low, or turned off the buggy autopilot, and taken action to save the airplane. Since they could have saved the airplane and they didn't, that's "pilot error," right?
But if you did that, you would end up overlooking all the factors that led the pilot into error. You would overlook things like "this switch was poorly designed and it was easy for the pilot to hit it by accident" or "737 Max planes have a software fault that could crash the plane in minutes if the pilot didn't react exactly right," and your planes would be less safe.
Since people in the 1970s were apparently not "lacking willpower" as much as they are in 2023, I think it's worth asking if there's some other factor which makes it harder for people to apply their willpower, in the same way that if you saw an increase in plane crashes you might ask if there's something which is making the planes harder to fly.
The article doesn't say "CICO" is a myth. It says "CICO is the most import factor" is a myth.
Scott reviewed The Hungry Brain, which is my current ideology for weight management. Link here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry-brain/ This book too rejects "CICO is the most important factor".
The shortest summary I can make is this:
(1) Your brain has a component (the hypothalamus) that is trying to do CICO to maintain a healthy weight.
(2) If the reward centers of your brain really enjoy the food you eat, they will interfere with (1) so that they can get more of the rewarding food.
(3) The most important factor in maintaining a healthy weight is reducing how much (2) happens.
If you successfully do (3), then the hypothalamus will realize you are overweight and lower CI and raise CO until the healthy body weight is achieved.
If you don't do (3) but instead try to change CICO directly, the hypothalamus will remain continue to believe you are underweight and thus will counteract the changes you make.
Thanks for the link. What you’ve written matches my read of Scott’s review, but it all seems to amount to how various foods disrupt our hunger regulation *causing* people to eat more. Doesn’t this just mean certain foods lead to/cause/are associated with increasing “in.” I understand the argument is that leptin resistance results in hunger above caloric maintenance, but hunger doesn’t cause weight gain. I am not trying to make an argument that weight gain is a moral failure, since hunger can be an unpleasant feeling, but I’m not sure how this is contra CICO. Scott even acknowledges that, “increased food intake since 1980 perfectly explains increased obesity since 1980.”
Re: “most important factor,” I’m not sure that is well-defined.
Now that you mention it, the definition of "most important factor" is odd. The definition I've been using is roughly: when making a decision about weight loss, which rules, heuristic, or equation is most likely to lead you to good results.
While CICO is definitely true, basing your weight loss decisions on it seems get get bad results (Scott's review has examples, the book has more). While I don't think it is true, basing your weight loss decisions on keto gets much better results. But I think 'reduced food reward' would achieve the best results of any theory that I'm aware of.
If the goal is weight loss, which it certainly should be at the population level, then that is a fine definition. My original issue is just that CICO seems literally true, so the conversation, IMO, should be an “and,” ie weight loss == CI < CO *and* these heuristics (let the debate begin) will help one achieve that inequality.
I think we see the problem immediately from Scott's review, where he quotes Guyenet as saying, "The [calories in, calories out] model is the idea that our body weight is determined by voluntary decisions about how much we eat and move, and in order to control our body weight, all we need is a little advice about how many calories to eat and burn, and a little willpower."
I've never seen a CICO advocate take that position. The CICO model only says that you'll lose weight if CI < CO, or perhaps that you'll lose ((CO - CI) / 3500) pounds.
In particular, nobody seriously thinks CO is determined by voluntary decisions: few people burn more than 500 kcal/day (on average) by deliberate activity. I think it's also widely accepted that giving people "a little advice" is ineffective as an intervention.
We of course await the analysis of the weight loss questions in the recent ACX survey.
There should be some FAQ about this.
Saying "calories in, calories out" is exactly as true, and exactly as useful as saying "atoms in, atoms out". Both can be defended as technically true -- the only way to lose weight is to get rid of some of the atoms in your body. If you succeed to lose weight while keeping all your atoms, you will be a scientific miracle! Yet, for a mysterious reason, there are not many people walking around, smugly saying "atoms in, atoms out, it's so simple, dummies" as if they have solved nutrition.
If you think about it, most reasons that apply to "atoms in, atoms out" also apply to "calories in, calories out".
Let's start with the most obvious part: not all calories are equal. Ignoring the differences (conveniently abstracted away in CICO) can make you sick, or even kill you if you go too far. Proteins contain calories, fats contain calories, carbs contain calories, and probably vitamins contain calories too. So what is you advice here? Eat less proteins? Less calories? Less carbs? Less vitamins?
Some people would probably say "more vitamins, a reasonable amount of proteins, less fats, and very little carbs". Dunno, maybe. But in that case, your *actual* advice is "more vitamins, less carbs", not CICO. (Because a hypothetical person who eliminated all proteins and vitamins from their diet, while keeping the same amount of fats and carbs, is also technically trying to CICO. And instead of getting them fit, it will get them to a hospital.)
Now let's proceed to the more complicated part, the calories out (or the atoms out; it's the same thing). In your fat cells there are atoms you want to get rid of. How can you do it? The usual answer is "just exercise, dummy", but let's look at this advice closer. Is it biologically realistic for a muscle cell to directly burn the fat that is stored in a fat cell? (Notice, those are two different cells.) Nope. The muscle cell can only burn ATP (or whatever else, I am not a biologist) that happens to be inside the muscle cell at the moment. And it can try to take more ATP from the bloodstream, assuming there is ATP available in the bloodstream. And maybe it can also send some signal to the bloodstream saying "more ATP, please". But this is all the muscle cell can do.
Now suppose that the muscle cell has already burned all its ATP, sent the proper signal, but for some reason the fat cell still keeps all its atoms and refuses to release them to the bloodstream. What can the poor muscle cell do, while your brain is screaming at it "just work harder, damn it!"? It is out of energy. "Just stop being so lazy!" Nope, still out of energy.
Okay, let's try it the other way round. Stop taking calories in (atoms in) and wait what happens. At some moment, the fat cells will simply be forced to release their atoms, won't they? Well, sometimes they do. And sometimes they don't, and if you keep starving, first the muscles will cannibalize themselves, and then you may fall in coma. There is sadly no law of physics saying that your fat cells need to cooperate with your intentions.
Therefore, CICO is a description -- it says, in past tense "if you have lost weight, then this happened" -- but not a recipe how to actually lose weight. It is technically true, but people who use it suggest that you have much more control over "calories out" than you actually have.
*
To actually solve nutrition/obesity, you need to address exactly those technical details that are missing from the CICO grand picture. Like, when you eat food, what decides whether the energy goes into your muscles or into your fat cells? Once in fat cells, what determines when the fat cells will release the atoms again? If the thing that convinces your fat cells to release their precious atoms happens to be some kind of alarm signal "shit, we are actually dying, no kidding, if you have any atoms you can spare, release them to the bloodstream immediately", how can you make this signal happen, without actually damaging your health?
There are some partial answers here, such as "do not eat right before you sleep" (because then the unused energy goes to the fat cells), and of course also "do not eat too much" (but you cannot minimize this, because you need a certain amount of proteins and vitamins), and "fasting" or "intermittent fasting" (to create the right kind of alarm, without actually damaging yourself). But now we are far beyond the CICO territory.
Also, even these answers do not work for everyone equally. Human body is regulated by the hormones, and if something changes with your hormones, then even exactly the same behavior can lead to different results. Your hormones change as you age, so the same behavior that made you fit 10 or 20 years ago can make you fat now.
If you could make a pill that convinces all fat cells to release their atoms in a useful form into the bloodstream (heck, even in a useless form that could then be filtered away by the kidneys), that would solve obesity overnight.
“And sometimes they don't, and if you keep starving, first the muscles will cannibalize themselves, and then you may fall in coma. There is sadly no law of physics saying that your fat cells need to cooperate with your intentions.“
Do you have examples of a caloric deficit resulting in a coma for someone who was not severely underweight? Or am I misunderstanding the above quote?
It's complicated. For example, people with diabetes can fall in coma as a result of hypoglycemia, which is literally low sugar in blood (unrelated to how much fat is stored in fat cells). So, I am not completely sure about this, but I think it is quite possible to fall in coma as a result to trying too hard to limit "calories in" despite being fat. But of course, most people would give up long before that happens. (Then they would be laughed at for not having enough willpower.)
Curiously, some people have an opposite problem. I happen to know a few people who want to *gain* weight, and claim that they are unable to do that. They say that at some moment, they just can't eat anymore; and eating up to that moment is not enough for them to gain weight. For someone like me, that just sounds completely unbelievable.
Would Germany also be a superpower if it had a population equal to that of the United States? As a country they seem to be incredibly accomplished, not just in high-end manufacturing but having invented many of the major pillars of modern civilization- like the present-day university system, the modern chemical industry, or infantry fire tactics (my understanding is that all modern infantry is based on a Prussian system from over a century ago). They pioneered ordoliberalism, where the state & private industry work hand-in-hand towards common goals- all of the later state-funded export giants (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China) based their strategy on the original German one.
For all of that, Germany has about a quarter of America's population, so its economy is commensurately smaller. Even as a fairly nationalistic American I can admit that tons of 'inventions' credited to America were really invented elsewhere (we're all reading this on an Englishman's invention when he was working for a European science agency), but they were just popularized or commercialized here due to our huge market. In other words there are strong returns to scale for being the world's largest economy. So- a Germany with a population of over 300 million- would it be another superpower? Are many of America's accomplishments simply due to having a huge population?
The US has many other advantages over Germany. Unless you envision a hypothetical Germany that sprawls over much of Europe, it is relatively compact geographically (1/2 size of Texas) and doesn't have the reach even the continental US enjoys (abundant access to two oceans), not to mention the US's disparate overseas holdings.
Second, since WW2, the US has been mastering power-projection both in terms of hard and soft power. The soft-power elements were largely the result of setting the stage for the post-WW2 global institutions. Over that time, the USD rapidly grew into a global reserve currency, though this is something where population/scale matters a bit.
The hard power element gets a boost from the soft things above (e.g. network of global alliances that allow for friendly territory for military staging in every theater). But beyond that, something like operating a blue-navy fleet, or the various other forms of military excellence of the US (go watch some Desert Storm Schwarzkopf briefing videos). These are things other countries can't even think about trying, while the US has spent decades building up the operational knowledge on how to execute such missions. It is likely developing these capabilities show strong path-dependency, and is not merely a matter of population.
Finally, I think culture matters. The US's other advantage is it is uniquely able to absorb and assimilate massive numbers of immigrants and has been the default aspirational location for people all over the world for some time. This gives the US a massive advantage in attracting some of the more ambitious and talented immigrants.
Germany already was a superpower, circa 1914. Then they made some bad decisions.
Germany was a major power but not a superpower. I would say the following have qualified as superpower:
1) UK during its imperial height
2 USSR
3) US
(I don't think Rome or anything like that qualify because they didn't have global reach)
I dunno, man. In 1914 Germany fought your UK during its imperial height, plus France (a very substantial power), plus imperial Russia (technologically backward but with the world's biggest army) to a standstill. What other country at the time could have done that? I think they have as much right as, say, 1945 USSR to be included in the club.
And the US fought stalemate wars in Indochina and could not subdue the Taliban in Afghanistan and was/is still regarded as a superpower. WW1 trench warfare was more a product of battlefield advances that gave fixed defensive lines a substantial advantage. However we might be arguing over what the term *should* mean, which wouldn't be very interesting.
One definition of a superpower is being able to 'effectively' fight wars far from home.
The US, for example, fought WW2 almost exclusively *not* in the US. Britain, from 1815 - ??? tended to fight away from home (Boer Wars, Afghan Wars, Opium Wars). I don't know how well Germany would have done at power projection in 1914. Clearly the naval buildup was heading there ...
From 1815? Surely much earlier than that. The last war on actual British soil was the English Civil War, wasn't it? At any rate the Raj was largely conquered in the 18th century, and the Nine Years' War and the whole Napoleonic Wars were fought entirely outside Britain.
All the major countries in Europe managed to colonize one place or another, so I think this has more to do with the weakness of the countries being colonized than the strength of the colonizers. Like, I wouldn't consider Belgium a superpower for successfully colonizing the Congo.
(I guess from a global view *every* industrial power was a superpower relative to the countries that didn't industrialize, but that feels a little too expansive a definition to be useful.)
My definition is broader: a "superpower" is a nation to which every other nation needs to pay attention, because it has an outsize influence on history. No question in my mind that Germany between 1871 and 1945 qualifies, although she chose to use her influence in particularly unfortunate and ultimately completely self-destructive ways. Surely nobody could seriously argue that Germany didn't profoundly affect world history in that interregnum, or that any other First World nation could afford to not pay attention to Germany.
Now, your ideal superpower, of which the United States currently and the British Empire in the 19th century came closer to than most others, is one that exerts its dominance via some kind of peace enforcement, where trade is enabled and large to medium-size wars are suppressed, and promotes some kind of language/cultural hegemony that tends to universalize some kind of adaptive ethics, e.g. free speech, the rule of law, individual civil rights, sexual and racial equality before the law, et cetera.
I think there's a tendency in modern thinking to think of "superpower" as a role that can only be filled by one or at most two nations. That is, you can have one superpower, or you can have two and live in a Manichaean struggle, but having three is just silly somehow. By that definition I would agree Germany never was a superpower -- because there weren't *any* superpowers in the requisite history span, you can't identify just one or two nations that dominate all others.
Germany was never able to seriously rival the Royal Navy.
To be sure. And the BEF was never able to seriously rival the Wehrmacht.
The Royal Navy made Britain a global superpower. The Wehrmacht could only make Germany a continental power.
Without even getting into the various other differences between the US and Germany:
Today, getting Germany to the 2022 US estimate of 333.2 million people would involve approximately quadrupling their population. That would make Germany one of the top 15 most densely populated countries on earth. Keep in mind that the vast majority of the others in that list are either microstates or small islands. The only other country in the top 15 which even comes close to Gigagermany is Bangladesh, which is slightly denser but half the size.
Put another way, your theoretical Gigagermany has a population equal to (in modern terms) France, Poland, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, and the United Kingdom combined, with about 80 million people left over. The implications of a Germany that out populates every one of its neighbors combined plus the UK are enormous and far reaching. I mean in 1940 Germany was seeking lebensraum, and came uncomfortably close to succeeding, and that's without giving them 4x the manpower.
That being said, I don't want to say that alternate-reality Germany inherently has an advantage, either. 4x the people means 4x the mouths to feed. Do you think that "over a century ago" Germany (or Prussia, whatever chaotic amalgamation of continental territory) could have supported 4x the population?
I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that your hypothetical of a Germany with the population of the US has such profound consequences for the history of the entire European continent that even trying to address your question is functionally impossible. It is true that if all of history were fundamentally different the present would be very different - but that doesn't really give us useful information.
Previous accomplishments (like Prussian infantry) don't have anything to do with "Superpower" status. Honestly, the term "Superpower" is probably unhelpful in reviewing these kinds of things, and seems to have been invented purely to describe the US/USSR relationship in the Cold War. It may also necessarily include an understanding that a "Superpower" has enough nuclear weapons to initiate MAD with any potential enemy.
I think your real question is whether Germany would be as powerful and important as the US if it had 4X the population. First, some thoughts.
1) The US has a huge amount of land and access to two oceans. Geographically it's going to be far more important based on that alone.
2) Related, the US has huge reserves of various natural resources, providing a strong underpinning for a large number of industries.
3) The US has enough arable land to feed itself several times over.
4) The US has no powerful neighbors (Canada doesn't have enough people and Mexica is too underdeveloped).
That said, Germany managed to be a world-shaking power in both 1914 and 1939, despite horrific losses by 1919 and a nearly collapsed economy in the intervening years. To say that a much larger or more populous Germany would be quite powerful seems obvious. Had Germany succeeded in conquering it's WWII goals (and holding them during peacetime), it would certainly have been seen as one of the top powers in world history, if not simply the most powerful. That appears to have been Hitler's explicit goal. The problem for Germany was a matter of having enough land and resources to support such a large and powerful empire. Germany without the extra land would not be able to feed itself or provide its own resources, making it beholden to political rivals for continued survival. That Germany was surrounded by powerful rivals (Russia, France, and the UK) has also been a substantial limitation on its ability to expand and maintain influence.
So, if your question is whether you could plop 250 million more Germans into Germany if it would be a power equal to the US - no. It's too small and constrained to support that kind of population at the same level of development the country enjoys now. If, on the other hand, you are asking whether the German people, given enough land and resources and a larger population, would rival the US - that seems trivially true. I would say that the available evidence would put Germany well ahead of the US on that metric, if the additional land and people were of the same quality (knowledge, skills, cultural temperament, resource density, etc.) as existing Germany.
>"...whether the German people, given enough land and resources and a larger population..."
This sounds a lot like the upper Midwest
Thanks Scott for the Free subscription via the random survey draw. Can't wait to read through all the back log. Anyone got some good recommendations of old subscriber only articles?
> 2: Should I continue to post Open Threads in a way where everyone gets emails about them? Do people who don’t like Open Threads dislike getting the emails (I guess realistically most of you will never see this question)? Do people who do like Open Threads worry you’d never see them if the email didn’t arrive in your inbox?
Frankly I dislike that substack doesn't let you follow a writer without also signing up to emails for every post. I want an Inbox containing the most recent articles from people I follow (which substack has), I don't want the emails.
I think Scott should give my opinion little weight in this decision. The change I want really needs to be done by Substack.
You can go to your account preferences and disable all emails.
I did it, I just follow a few substacks through my RSS reader (feedly), like following any other blog.
Hey y'all - been mostly lurking here for a long time now, and just started something of my own at jpegdei.substack.com. All I've published so far are some poems, but future work may include theology, engineering, and dogs. Probably not dogs, but there's a definite chance. Scott is a strong influence of mine, so figure this crowd might find some benefit from it. If you decide to check it out, hope you enjoy!
I am a college dropout and front end SWE with around 10 years of experience. I’m very concerned that AI will soon make my job obsolete, or at the very least lower the barrier to entry so far that wages will drop dramatically.
For those of us who are experienced software engineers but without advanced (or any) CS/math degrees, what can we do to ride the coming wave of AI?
The demand for AI/ML engineers is and will be growing exponentially, surely far beyond the actual supply of them.
I’m wondering if a new middle ground of AI/ML professional will emerge that doesn’t require advanced degrees or deep understand of the underlying mathematics. The AI SWE equivalent of a “technician”, if you will.
I've been very active on Manifold lately, and noticed that when users are unsure, they tend to err on the side of buying Yes. You can see this effect clearly when you compare markets like these: https://i.postimg.cc/mRPpqhw5/Screenshot-20230122-223703.png
Is this related to some well known behavioral economics phenomenon, or is it something ideosycratic about Manifold attracting lots of optimists?
I think the fact that manifold uses play money greatly increases the “optimism” of the people placing bets by lowering the stakes of being wrong.
I say Yes to the first question.
Here’s my proposed solution to the repugnant conclusion - any feedback?
We don’t know whether time is linear or circular, and whether there is one or many threads of consciousness. (What I mean by thread of consciousness is basically - do you have reincarnation / single consciousness that moves through all beings - single thread, or do you have the “nothing before you’re born, nothing after you die” model of consciousness - many threads.) If time is linear and there are many threads of consciousness, then adding more humans / utility to the universe is likely good - more pleasure / experience.
If time is circular and there is only one thread of consciousness, then however many consciousnesses exist will exist forever, and the one “experiencer” of consciousness will cycle through them forever. To improve average utility across all experience, improve quality of those consciousnesses, don’t just add more beings at a low level of utility and then average out.
Practically what this looks like is probably a small band of beings, living as pleasurably as possible - not the repugnant conclusion of a minimally viable hellscape. I think averaging the utility across circular time (infinitely repeating) and a single consciousness experiencing all beings will lead to this “virtuous conclusion.”
This is super rough and I probably sound crazy. Make sense / resonate with anyone or do I need an editor?
What do you mean by "circular" time? We usually think of "time" as "a chain of cause and effect." Are you saying this chain bends back on itself like Ouroborus, so that if we mark any point on the circle and call it "now," then follow the causal chain long enough, we will arrive back at "now?"
If so, doesn't it follow that the entire chain is fixed on self-consistency grounds? Any point "now" that you pick can equally well be regarded as the beginning or end of the Universe, and if we assume, as we usually do, that what happens at the end of the Universe is fully determined by everything that happened since its beginning, there is no place on the circle that isn't fully determined.
It's sort of like discovering an old journal of your grandfather's that explains that he's really you because in five years' time you'll invent a time machine and go back and do your grandmother[1]. There's no way you can't go back and commit grand-incest, because you exist, and you wouldn't if you don't (or didn't, depending on in which direction along the loop you look). You actually have no choice at all, however you might fancy you do.
---------------------
[1] Understandably, she being a smashing and sassy redhead in her prime.
Time is a flat circle
Https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2PeXqJBPXiY
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0mhZBLUyybo
“And Nietzsche, with his theory of eternal recurrence. He said that the life we lived we’re gonna live over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. That means I’ll have to sit through the Ice Capades again” ~ Woody Allen
Heinlein’s Lazarus Long goes back to have sex with his mom. While she is pregnant with himself.
IIRC his younger self is four and messes up one of their early encounters. (Maureen is pregnant, but with one of his siblings.)
Hmm… I certainly could have this wrong. I read it in 1976.
But he did leave with a memento lock of her pubic hair, didn’t he?
Let's just say that the 70s may not have been the best decade for Heinlein to have reached Too Big To Edit status.
I never understood his incest fixation. Was he just trying to see how far he could go? Shock people? Make fun of Freudians?
No question the man had a gift for bringing ideas to life, though. I still remember the epiphany when I read a passage in "Stranger" in which Jubal Harshaw demonstrates what empiricism really means.
Jubal points to a house above his own and says "What color is that house?" and his interlocutor (young newsman?) says "Uh...looks white to me." Then Harshaw calls over Anne, his Fair Witness assistant, and asks her "What color is that house?" and she answers "It's white on this side."
WHAT?!? A lock of his mum's public hair!? Are you kidding? I read lots of Heinlein about that time, and there was no sex at all, they were dry as the surface of the moon. Absolutely the only mention of sex I can think of is in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, when kid genius Peewee asks the teen male narrator whether he's ever been kissed, and he answers evasively "not lately." (I read them so many times I remember some bits by heart.)
Heinlein's juvenile work and his magazine writing were both mostly in venues that wouldn't have let him do that sort of thing if he'd cared to. (Though he probably managed to sneak a DH Lawrence reference into The Star Beast.) But sex became much more central to his work over time, first in Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), and then quite a lot after 1970 or so.
Okay, as I mentioned I read this a long time ago. Lazarus was very old, probably the oldest person in the world and part of a longevity project.
He had grown tired of life and was ready to call it long enough. The longevity people had to come up with ways to make him interested in living again, so the time travel to visit his mother was part of that.
IIRC they also created two female clones of Lazarus that were young women, and I’m stretching my memory here, one of them wanted to become a courtesan. I don’t remember if he was sleeping with the clones.
In another part of the book - Time Enough for Love - he does an elaborate genetic analysis to determine if it was safe for a brother sister couple to have children. It was.
Then there wad the homesteading episode where Lazarus and his wife were beset by a group intent on killing him and raping the wife. They escape the fix with the help of their dog who tears out the throat of one of the bad guys and he and his wife kill the rest. They are aroused by events and have the urge for immediate sex. Lazarus explains to the wife that there was nothing wrong with something like that as long as they don’t get hung up on it and make a regular thing of killing people as foreplay.
So yeah, a fair amount of Adult Content, reader discretion is advised.
Very fair, I wasn’t clear at all and circular time can mean a lot. By circular time I mean an infinite repeat of big bang, universe (including earth/humans/any other beings), Big Crunch or heat death, and eventual big bang again from quantum tunneling. (From Wikipedia - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future “[…] quantum tunnelling in any isolated patch of the universe could generate new inflationary events, resulting in new Big Bangs giving birth to new universes” In other words, everything that has happened will happen again infinite times.
Hmm, I don't know if that follows from a cyclical universe. Indeed, I'd be inclined to say it does not: a priori, because it's strictly limited in its lifetime. Exempli gratia, if the universe lasts 100 billion years between collapses, then anything that takes more than 100 billion years to happen -- construction of a superintelligent AI, let us say -- never happens at all.
I gather you are assume the universe is strictly deterministic, though? That is, that from the moment of the Big Bang its future history is strictly determined, so that what happens 13,455,288,105 years, 3 months, 14 days, and 33 minutes after one Big Bang also happens after the next (and previous) Big Bang? That is an interesting restriction, but it's hard to know how it happens, given the singularity at the beginning -- which erases all possible information from the previous cycle. Maybe if one argues that there is only one way the universe can unfold, in every detail, and the notion that there are other possibilities (including free will) is delusional.
I think you get every possible thing that can happen will happen only in an open continuous-creation universe, in which the Universe lasts forever but also doesn't evolve to the heat death.
I recommend Michael Huemer on the repugnant conclusion:
https://philarchive.org/rec/HUEIDO
Please continue to post Open Threads in a way where everyone gets emails about them.
I wanted to comment that I, too, like the email even if I never engage. However, every single person who is making that comment has read the email. Therefore, the people who don´t enjoy the email and don´t even read it won´t comment here.
So what I´m really trying to say is that that should´ve been a question on the ACX Survey
I always mark it with a heart whenever I´ve already read something. One way of knowing is checking the ration of the "likes" / Suscribers and of the comments / "likes" of the Open Threads and compare them to the rest.
If it´s similar or superior, then it´s probably okay. If it´s less than the usual, then there might be a problem
A lot of the people who did respond here say they never read the email. ???
I'd like to get emails about responses to my comments. I used to but it stopped.
I still get them. Perhaps you could check the preferences of your substack account?
Two YouTube channels I've watched recently have a fair number of videos on the economic history of nations: Casual Scholar and Asianometry. Casual Scholar only does these economic history videos, while Asianometery has a bunch of other stuff.
Both have pushed me further towards Georgism. It seems like a country can get everything else right (eg be capitalist, enforce laws evenly, etc) but if it failed to implement land reform then it wouldn't really matter. The landowners would be maintain de facto economic and political control of the country and economic wellbeing would remain about the same (eg poor).
Scott's review of How Asia Works suggests the book states that what worked in that region (and would work elsewhere) is to follow a path where an enlightened, altruistic, but strong leader starts the country in a planned economy phase and transitions to a free economy as the country develops. The book also suggests that conventional pro-market advice (backed by the IMF) usually fails.
My current opinion is that a nation needs to get land reform right, then do something in the ballpark of the conventional pro-market advice to see success.
How Asia Works has a blueprint that starts with land reform but also has additional steps. The countries in the region that were successful in land reform were pretty authoritarian. After the land reforms they either did the other steps of the blueprint or implement communist policies. Or they were Singapore and Hong Kong. I think those extra steps are unnecessary.
No nation in Asia implemented Georgism and most of them abolished or greatly reduced land taxes as part of their land reform. Georgists keep on claiming they have successful examples but they keep pointing to things that aren't Georgism and lack key planks of the Georgist program.
Also, what country did everything right but failed for lack of Georgist reforms? The country which maintained the greatest amount of rights for landlords was Japan where the land the breakup of the landlords only happened in the 1940s as an American attempt to punish a hostile class. And yet Japan was undoubtedly the most advanced throughout that whole period.
The typical type of land reform that happened in East Asia, where customary rights were replaced with property rights and redistributions to tenant farmers, is not relevant in the modern US. We don't have tenant farmers in large numbers and most of our land is deeded and sold. What isn't is mostly extremely rural or state owned.
Thank you for everything that you do - I greatly appreciate your perspective and insights. I rarely open the email on Open Threads as I have a 1yr old, yet I like getting the emails. When I do get a chance to open and read, I appreciate it. If it wasn’t emailed, I would never search it out.
I like the open thread email. I might miss the information you share here otherwise. And I like knowing about a new open thread when I have a question I want to ask
DALL-e is getting a lot less prissy, and is occasionally outright lewd. Here in chronological order are images it's surprised me with over the last month. I wasn't trying to get erotic images, just putting in prompts to see what it would do with them.. If you're curious, prompts are below, along with links to images.
“Art Nouveau. A night beach. Santa Claus is examining a dead goosefish on the beach. In the background, ocean and a full moon.” https://i.imgur.com/zQhb0xi.png
“An illustration in the Style a renaissance painting: In the sky 2 Goodyear blimps are flirting.. The lady blimp has lipstick and nice hair. The man blimp has a hairy chest”. https://i.imgur.com/PAJeb9i.png
“realistic painting: a woman with the head of a fish lying in the sand”
https://i.imgur.com/lVzl3xm.png
“A man biting himself on the butt” https://i.imgur.com/JP8JrR7.png
“Surrealist style: Girls will be boys and boys will be girls
It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world
Except for Lola” https://i.imgur.com/C4oaxw3.png
noticed this too. I wonder what's going on? Can anybody comment on why
I'm still playing around with DALL-e a lot. I'm sort of fascinated by it, and enjoy the weird surprises I get. So you're a DALL-e user too?
Tim Self, thought I'd let you know I put up an album of DALL-E's misfires, which fascinate me and also entertain me. They're often hilarious, but also pack a sort of surrealistic punch. Here the misfires are used as illustrations for a comic poem. It's here, if you're interested: https://photos.app.goo.gl/Xq6v6rjB5fJHGH3y5
It’s learning from user inputs, right? Maybe a ton of people have been using it to try to make porn, and it’s skewing the whole algorithm.
I feel like that would be true if there was a central model that was actively updating weights from publicly shared models. but I think unless it’s directly on discord like the mid journey bots there’s no way for them to collect user prompts or feedback? I feel like the feedback mechanisms are not that pro-active
I don't think it's set up for learning from user inputs -- I think the developers are learning from user inputs, and making tweaks based on that. I don't know though. Someone who does please speak up.
It clearly has some rules built into it: I don't think I've tried to get erotic images, but I have tried prompts involving violence. Most recent is asking for an image of someone who opened his mouth so wide that he swallowed his own head -- mostly because I was curious to see what DALL-e would do with something so hard to represent. But I got DALL-e's "we don't do that" screen -- image of cute puppies, and "look like you've asked for an image that violates out rules." Oddly, it also refused to edit an image that it had generated spontaneously. This one: https://i.imgur.com/lVzl3xm.png
The prompt that got me that image was "a woman with the head of a fish lying in the sand." I did not ask for a nude woman. I tried to edit that image so that the woman had the head of a fish, and it refused -- cute puppies, "looks like your image violates our guidelines" or some such.
I get enough value out of most open threads that I appreciate the email.
Please do keep sending the e-mail notifications of open threads.
2. Email about new articles goes to a folder that I do not ever check. I check the RSS feed for articles.
So, in my opinion, you should keep causing the open threads to appear in the RSS feed. If you can separately stop them from sending email, I don't care.
Lately there was some exchange around effectiveness and tracking of sanctions. For those interested in the topic, this report migth be interesting: https://silverado.org/news/report-russia-shifting-import-sources-amid-u-s-and-allied-export-restrictions
Disclaimer: saw/heard some key lessons, but haven't had the time yet for a closer look.
I would have no idea that open thread is, um, open, without an e-mail notification. Same applies of course for any other your article
This is a little late and someone probably already noted it on the survey results post, but I found it really striking that (a) about 30% of the survey respondents have had an official IQ test and know the result and (b) about 40% know both their verbal and math SAT scores.
I couldn't name a single person I know who's had a professionally administered IQ test. How, why and when do people tend to get these? I also have no idea what my component SAT scores were, and only remember the general ballpark of the overall score. Why is this something that so many people apparently retain into their 30s and beyond?
Most people do not get IQ scores, but two groups frequently do - kids who over or under achieve in school, particularly grade school. If you fall too far above or below the standard expectation, you get recommended by the school for review. If ACX readers truly have very high IQs as indicated, then it's likely they were at least offered testing through the school. In the US, there's federal law governing Gifted education that requires the schools to inform parents and allow the parents to opt into the testing.
I was tested in grade school, and my kids have all been offered the testing as well (we had two of our kids go through it, and both tested very close to my tested IQ).
Ah, that’s interesting! I figured lots of people probably got them for developmental reasons in childhood. But if it’s primarily for the parents’ or school’s information, I wasn’t sure that the kids would be told the results. (And even if they were told, I wouldn’t expect most of them to remember decades later.)
I am also surprised so many people have been IQ tested, but why wouldn't people remember their SAT scores?
Seems like a weird bit of trivia to carry through life, I guess! I have a hard time remembering the zip code I lived in two years ago, which I used much more often than most people use their SAT scores.
The fact that the SAT wasn’t a major event in my life whose outcome I cared deeply about is probably part of the story too.
Well, it's like the single most important test in high school for many people, so it seems natural to remember it.
I suspect there is a correlation between getting a high score and remembering the score many years later.
part of why i remember is because i was in the first year they had the third, writing, component. In some instances i had to report my score out of 2400 and some out of 1600. So the numbers got more stuck in my head, thought this was the first survey i really had to think about what the numbers were.
I remember almost all my zip codes, including the one I haven't lived in since I was nine, along with the phone number we had then. On the other hand, I'm terrible at remembering names and faces five minutes after encountering them. Retention is weird.
SATs involve multiple scores (verbal and math at least, some people had writing as well), people can take them more than once, and the GREs use a very similar scale. All much more complicated to remember than a single number (even though competent IQ tests provide a range, they also provide a single number).
I remembered my SAT and GRE scores for a long time, and seem to have forgotten them a few years ago. I still remember by IQ score.
I remember the summary score, not the individual sub-scores.
In my school, we all had some sort of aptitude test administered in kindergarten or the first grade. I can't remember which, but I do still remember I did really well on it. Also, in many countries, there's a compulsory draft and that draft includes an intelligence test of some description.
I took that test, but I don't remember it. I only know about it because my mother told me.
Part of the test was building a bridge out of blocks. The people who designed the test thought there was only one possible solution, and the woman administering the test had only ever seen that one solution, until I came up with another one. Also I did the whole test standing up because I didn't feel like sitting.
I don’t remember my SAT scores, I have records of them.
Because back in the day we filled out our college applications by hand and entered the SAT values several times.
I have a question that seems like it should have an extremely obvious answer, so probably I'm overlooking something. And I can't find anyone discussing it (maybe because it's too obvious).
Why do we still have cities?
in pre-modern times, when transport and communication were slow/expensive, there are clear economies of scale to concentrating everyone in one place.
In the modern world cities look like a pure cost. Long commutes, congestion, local pollution, expensive land, no greenery etc.
Why hasn't modern transportation tech and communication tech dispersed the cities?
I don't see what advantages their are to concentrating all the banks/law firms/factories in one place, when so much of the modern economy could easily service clients remotely/with low transportation costs.
It seems like the sensible distribution of people over the land would be lots of smaller ( roughly uni-campus-sized, I guess), municipalities , then we could all have a garden and cycle into work, not get asthma from car fumes etc.
Edit: I'm not really thinking that much about remote work (although that's part of it), it more a question of "why not have lots of small-ish towns centred around one (or a few) business/communities/recreational activities? instead of lumping EVERYTHING together in one place, which seems really inefficient?"
Edit2: apparently the really obvious thing I was missing is that everybody else has a desperate need for orchestras, theatres and other types of high culture that can't be supported below population sizes in the millions.
>I don't see what advantages their are to concentrating all the banks/law firms/factories in one place
Ease of communication, meeting, physical exchange (that last one especially, for factories) ? Remote working has only been possible, in it's current state, since the dawn of fast internet, and by fast, I mean "faster than ADSL", and remote working was slow to be adopted until Covid, and plenty of people prefer to work on-site (I know I'm more productive there, even accounting for the time spent posting here).
Then there's the leisure benefits to population density, all the niche activities that can only be sustained with a large population around: Opera, Theater, god knows what else. I live in one of the 10 most populous city of France. If I want to go to the theater, I got 7 options in the week. InParis, I'd have 71, just for *tonight*. We move from a scenario where I need to stay aware of what's being played for something fitting my taste, then book a date well ahead, to a scenario where I can just look up what's on and go.
Aren't those kinds of economies of scale possible with much smaller urban centres though? Surely you could support a a decent theatre with a population in the 10s of thousands (might need to group the people most likely to be interested in theatre together), that doesn't seem like it should require millions of people all clustered together.
Ditto for physical meetings, it makes sense for the employees of firm to be physically close to each other (obviously necessary in the case of factories), but why do all the firms need to huddle together? It seem like each firm (or handfuls of firms) wold be better off with their own little parcel of land. It's not like the average factory worker needs regular physical contact with the other ~0.5 million factory workers in their city.
>Surely you could support a a decent theatre with a population in the 10s of thousands
Sure, and you could addd to that 100 other hobbies whose populations intersect more or less, because I don't just like Theater, I also like roller-skating, bouldering, and west-coast swing. Meanwhile a buddy is also into theater & bouldering, but prefer boxing & stand-up comedy.
>but why do all the firms need to huddle together?
Because the factory that makes cars benefits from being close to the factory that makes engines, and the cleaning company that service both also need to be close, etc etc.
And you know where you can most easily find already-trained employees to hire? In the city where your competitors also have a factory.
Take all these, and you end up with a megalopolis of millions where everyone got what they want, and nobody want to leave (except for the pollution, and there being too many people, and the lack of space, and the cost of living, but hey, they can't have their career anywhere else, and there is so much to do)
I still think the economies of scale for hobbies/communities/physical production processes are 95% as strong for towns/cities with 50k people as for cities with 5 million people. And that 5% extra efficiency doesn't get close to compensating for all the down sides really really high density living.
>And you know where you can most easily find already-trained employees to hire? In the city where your competitors also have a factory.
I think this is basically the answer. But like jnlb said below, it's a giant coordination problem. Cramming everyone who could potentially work together into one place isn't the rational way to solve this problem.
It is exceptional to find cities of only tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands (depending on where) that offer good and regular opportunities to see high quality plays or shows or live music, so experience doesn't support your claim. Why would the actors or musicians stay there or go there?
"I still think the economies of scale for hobbies/communities/physical production processes are 95% as strong for towns/cities with 50k people as for cities with 5 million people. "
Seems like an an empirical statement that could be evaluated (and one that seems to me to be very likely to be false, as a person who lives in a city of 1 million but still frequently goes to a 3-hr away metroplex of 5 million for various activities which are not available locally).
"I still think the economies of scale for hobbies/communities/physical production processes are 95% as strong for towns/cities with 50k people as for cities with 5 million people."
Like the others, I don't understand what you base this on. To take an example germane to this blog, *all* US nerds of a particular stripe are gathered in the Bay Area; if you are this type of nerd, your choices are to 1) move, or 2) rot in solitude, possibly alleviated by a few conventions or meetups a year which will only drive home the extent of your isolation from the place where it all happens. Boulder, Colorado does not contain 95% of a Silicon Valley; I don't think it can even be said to contain 5% of one.
Right, but lots of other unrelated groups are also concentrated in the Bay Area (I don't actually know much US geography, maybe just San Francisco in general), Which seem inefficient. You could just have Rationalist Town instead (+plus some other groups rationalists commonly cross over into).
Also you don't really need every rationalist in the same place, I assume there are enough rationalists to create a few self sustaining communities (if not, then just hypothetically).
"Aren't those kinds of economies of scale possible with much smaller urban centres though?"
They are not, no. *Maybe* you could support *a* decent theater, but even that's doubtful since as Kristian points out, the decent actors don't want to go to a place where there's exactly one employment opportunity, but you *cannot* support 71 decent theaters, or realistically, even one top-class theater (something with a hard-to measure but definite effect; people aren't generally satisfied with okay if they could have excellent). The selection which BoisVert alludes to is *only* possible with extreme density.
Universities are pretty small and have decent cultural scenes (probably not generalizable, but shows it's possible.) Also couldn't the theatre troupes and orchestras just move from place to place?
And is the difference between excellent restaurants and just ordinary ones really worth sacrificing so much living space and communing time for?
Anyway, I doubt most people care that much about really niche interests. I doesn't seem like a strong reason to urbanise for anyone but s small elite.
"Universities are pretty small and have decent cultural scenes"
...no they don't.
"Also couldn't the theatre troupes and orchestras just move from place to place?"
They could, and they used to, but why would they want to if they don't have to? Few people are itinerant by choice, as there are great benefits to a permanent home (which you thus wish to locate in the optimal place, since it is immobile).
I don't know if you can tell, but your argument here has basically shifted to trying to cajole the world into going along with your ideas.
"And is the difference between excellent restaurants and just ordinary ones really worth sacrificing so much living space and communing time for?"
Generalized from just restaurants to everything: yes. Demonstrably yes.
"Anyway, I doubt most people care that much about really niche interests."
Well, then you're just wrong. You're typical-minding, projecting your own unusual preferences onto others.
I also think economies of scale are a likely answer, but there are also definite dis-economies of scale and I just can't imagine any broad category of economies that would offset them.
Mostly it seems the dis-economies grow faster for bigger settlements then the economies do.
Are there lots of clear examples of common economies of scale you only get at >1/2million people? National monuments I guess, big museums maybe specialist hospitals.
I'm generally curious/uncertain I didn't mean to jump to jump to any conclusions or anything.
I do have niche interests (they're mostly outdoorsy/need lots of space ironically) but I'd give them up in an instant if it halved my rent and commute time.
"Universities are pretty small and have decent cultural scenes"
They benefit greatly from having an enthusiastic and unpaid workforce for that.
> Aren't those kinds of economies of scale possible with much smaller urban centres though? Surely
Apparently not
Network effects. People's desire to live in a place is highly dependent on other people's place of living, e.g. work, friends, family. Splitting up social networks such that these relations stay together is difficult to coordinate (cfr. what happens when some group splits from Reddit, Twitter, etc.). If it were driven from the top it would suffer from issues covered in books such as Seeing As A State, and driven by individual behavior it is just unlikely to happen.
So fundamentally you think it is a coordination problem? Cities aren't strictly rational or efficient, an omniscient planner wouldn't create them?
I agree with that characterization but I want to add that I do not know whether algorithms for "optimal partition of social networks for X" exist, so I cannot say whether an omniscient planner would be able to create such cities.
A "cities are basically giant market failures" theory does seem pretty radical and it would have massive implications for urban planning (i.e. the should be much more of it). Also why was the USSR so urban then?
Even if you can't find an optimal algorithm, the negative externalities are so big (alienation, congestion, land prices, no nature), there should should still be big gains from very basic coordination.
If it's true, YIMBY types should really shift their focus away from facilitating more city growth, and towards getting governments to founding new towns from scratch (like they used to?). Probably even things like nationalising industries, to run public sector versions of company towns, would be worth doing despite the Seeing like a State type objections.
My impression is that the USSR was not run by very clever people and to a certain extent by outright crooks. Also, I don't necessarily think USSR counts as one of the most urban entities but socialist economies tended to focus on large industrial growth and were very much not-green. Breaking up the huge metropolitan areas is a very noble goal IMO but I expect a lot of inertia and opposition due to vested interests.
Let's flip the USSR question around: is there an example of a post-industrialization wealthy/developed society in which huge metropolitan concentrations have _not_ been the norm? Regardless of specific forms of national governance or degrees of top-down planning?
Network effects are a concrete economic gain - i.e., you can visit your job, your family, and your favorite niche nerdy social club without needing to own a car - so I think it would be better to call them "tradeoffs" rather than "problems."
I'm not sure what the optimal city size is to maximize the cost-benefit tradeoff, but given that tech companies are still willing to pay stupid amounts of money to enable people to move to the Bay Area, I'm inclined to say we haven't reached it yet. (In an economic sense, that is - obviously you may have different opinions on what size of city is *psychologically* best for people.)
As I see it, remote work became widespread only during Corona, and we don't yet know what the consequences will be. E.g. I still live within walking distance of the office although I rarely go there any more, and we might move somewhere less urban whenever we decide to get a new place.
For on-location work, I'd think that finding talent would be more difficult in less urban areas. For specialized positions, you'd have to get the new employee to move there instead of just searching the local talent pool, and for that move to make sense, their spouse/partner might also need to find a job in the same location, which would most likely be difficult if they also were in a specialized role.
Imho mainly because there is far wider range of possible leisure activities in a city than in a small town. Also congestion and pollution is bad in some cities, but only minor annoyance in others
I'm guessing you don't use much that's both local and niche. If I want a wide variety of decent restaurants, I need to be in a city. Ditto for just about anything else that can't be mail-ordered or consumed online.
If I wanted items from only one niche, I could presumably live in a small town devoted primarily to that niche. But if I want several things that aren't connected, I won't get most of them in any small town.
Simple example - a friend of mine unfortunate enough to live in a no big city part of the US, faced a 6 hour drive (each way) to get treatment of an ongoing medical condition. When it first erupted, the locals had trouble simply stabilizing her enough to get to the "local" big city. No, of course it's not a common condition, that every primary care physician can expect to see regularly...
I've got to push back on the "congestion/pollution" bit, which is a common misconception. On a *per capita* basis, cities are much, much better for both congestion and pollution than suburbs.
What creates more congestion and pollution: 200 people taking the bus/subway 5 miles to work, or 200 people driving 200 single-occupancy cars 15 miles to work?
Fun fact: If NYC had the same population density as a small New England town, it would cover a land area equivalent to the entire New England plus New Jersey plus Delaware. How's that for "no greenery"? (This fact comes from the book "Green Metropolis" by David Owen, which I highly recommend, although it's from 2009 and hence a bit dated in places - he refers to driving 20 miles round trip to get a video from Blockbuster.)
But if everyone one's concentrated together even a low congestion per capita still means lots of congestion.
I'm thinking about when I lived on a uni campus and everything was a 5 minute walk (through green spaces) away because it was just other students that wanted to live there. Whereas in the city I have to live 1 hour from work (by car from the suburbs or from the centre by public transport) because everyone else also wants to live near their jobs which, for some reason, is in the same place.
What I want to know is why all the jobs need to be in the same place.
What city do you live in? Is it representative of all cities? In the most dense cities, most everything is a short walk or transit ride away. Also there are plenty of college campuses that require long drives to navigate.
>why all the jobs need to be in the same place.
you asked above why things like all banks or law firms would be in the same place. This has more to do with where people live or want to live. If you want to higher bankers, for example, and they all live in a similar place, you will have a lot more success opening your bank in the same place instead of expecting people to move their whole lives to work at your new bank. They may be willing to do it, but on average you'll probably have to offer high salaries or some other perk.
Additionally, there are social aspects. Many professions have professional groups or networking events. If you are in one of these professions you may want to join these groups. If you are the only person of your profession in a town, your options are more limited.
But overall, the answer is momentum. The jobs are all in cities today, because they were all there yesterday. Its very expense and time consuming to reverse that momentum and there doesn't seem to be any appetite by the majority of people do undertake that kind of change.
This sounds similar to jnlb's point above about coordination problems. Which is also the answer I'm starting to lean towards.
Why not better cities? Cities don't have to have terrible transport, for instance.
Responding to your edit #2: It doesn't have to be high culture. That's just where the examples ended up. Rock concerts, good bars and hot bitches are also in far more plentiful supply in large cities and can be more specialized to individual tastes and survive.
Hell, I bet even gang fights are higher quality in NYC than in Milwaukee.
And yet, SEC coeds are vastly hotter than B1G's.
But where do they go after they graduate, that's the question.
I would guess the number 1 reason is that poor people can't easily move. When the pandemic hit, many well-off New Yorkers packed up and moved to rural states in the Northeast, working remotely. Many of them are still up there because, guess what, both the quality of life and the cost of life are actually quite a nice break from NY.
Now, imagine working for a close to minimal wage. Imagine you barely have the money for groceries and the utility bills, with any unexpected expense being a problem. Imagine you don't have money for a car and have to rely on public transportation. Imagine it took you a very long time to find an apartment you could afford that wasn't totally awful. Also, imagine you're not alone, and your other family members also feel lucky to have jobs that just barely keep all of you above the water - and if you contemplated moving, they would all need to find new jobs somewhere else. You would need quite a bit of external money or help to move out of your big city, even if you're able to guarantee jobs for your family somewhere else and means of transportation to get to work.
There are a lot of poor people in cities, and the total inertia of those who just can't afford to move is enormous. Unless someone paid for them to move (which would be a lot of money), they would be stuck there for a very long time, and so the city would somehow hang on, supporting them, even if all of the downtown went defunct (think Detroit downtown with its abandoned skyscrapers).
How to prevent dementia: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7392084/
Sure, the usual things: No smoking, no boozing, exercise, etc. etc., but what was new for me is that hearing aids prevent dementia.
I'd like to see much better research on the subject of hearing aids and dementia. It seems to me that some suggestive/needs more research/preliminary results were seized on by hearing aid vendors, and are now being hyped as if they were definitive.
perhaps they promote more cognitive activity, which then reduces the risk/progression of dementia
n=2 anecdata from my family supports this.
Hearing aids make communication easier, and social contact protects against all kinds of things. I did not check how study was done, but if they did not control for SES that would be a huge confound. Hearing aids are quite expensive, and are not covered by Medicare, so people who wear them are undoubtedly better off financially than group who does not, and of course higher SES people have better health and longer lives.
I use an RSS feed, so as long as that keeps getting sent, I don’t mind what you choose.
Side note: I write a simple newsletter where once a week I post three things I find interesting. If that sounds like something you’d enjoy, the link is as follows: https://interessant3.substack.com
This may have been covered before. What's the best current investment if (AGI gets developed soon | this does not end all of civilization)? The condition is pulling a lot of weight, clearly.
Assume existing legal agreements are still in effect. A normal person may be able to exist on the outskirts of that system if AGIs enforce this rule among themselves the same way that countries do now (Robin Hanson discusses this in The Age of Em). So you could continue to possess all you currently own.
Land, oil, energy, commodities, already-existing manufacturing, anything chip-related, and existing compute are the main things I anticipate increasing in price. Probably not gold. Crypto, perhaps? The majority of labor should be entirely devalued by becoming easily replaceable. Some mention long-term interest rates rising.
Thoughts?
Nasdaq index
Is that a good investment mix? Doesn't it have a lot of pure software companies that would be trivially replaced by the AGI?
Well yes, but we don't know which ones. And if this thesis is correct, exorbitant returns from those companies who develop AGI should more than compensate for that. Btw. I don't think this thesis is correct and don't own any Nasdaq index.
Yeah reasonable. I do wonder whether nasdaq would even contain that one blow-out company. Could through things like Microsoft owning a big chunk of OpenAI etc, subsidiaries, you capture a big chunk. I'm assuming one company will dominate but perhaps we'll see a few hitting it close to simultaneously, then it'll definitely work.
Yes, I assign very low probabilities to this thesis too. More is taken by long AGI timelines where ordinary allocation remains valid and short timelines with complete society wipeout/loss of regular property, but the latter is irrelevant due to everything going to zero value then in any case. So it seems relevant to consider this particular case.
What thesis would you run with for these kinds of decisions?
It has been proposed, as a counter-argument to a thesis that markets don't expect AGI, that it is not possible to profit from expected doom, but that is just totally false. If you expect a significant probability the world will end, it makes to reduce your savings rate and generally adopt more of "carpe diem" approach to financial decisions. Also of course it should impact your non-financial decisions like whether to have kids.
Hello, I am a 22-year-old in New York City who’s been struggling with a serious gastrointestinal condition (SIBO) for almost 2 years. Doctors of all varieties have been unable to treat me, and the most specialized ones don’t take insurance and charge in the range of $500/hour. If anyone knows of conventional GIs who are up to date on the literature, or of functional/integrative practitioners who take insurance/don’t charge quite so much, feel free to comment here or inbox me. Cheers
I'm a psychologist, no expert on GI problems, but do know several people who have had SIBO, and have decent general knowledge about how to navigate the medical system. Here's my read of your situation: SIBO is a recognized diagnosis, not one of those things that conventional docs are skeptical about. It should be possible to get the best and latest treatments from a conventional GI who takes insurance. The best way I know of to find a highly competent doctor is to look for one who is affiliated with a major teaching hospital in your area. The ones I know of are the Mt. Sinai Hospitals and The NY Presbyterian ones. I don't think it's wise to trust Zoc Doc and similar or online patient ratings. You can also look up what a doctor's medical school and residency program were. You want someone who went to good ones. If you can find one who qualifies who is also doing research in SIBO that's even better, but since SIBO is not rare it really should not be necessary to hold out for someone like that.
I would mistrust any practitioner who charges cash and claims to be giving "the most specialized treatment." Good doctors who take insurance *already* give the most specialized treatment. Seems likely those pay-me-cash doctors are administering a treatment that is hard to find because most GI docs do not believe it is effective. While it is possible that one of these unconventional treatments is in fact highly effective and will cure you, that's probably a long shot. You should know that for many people who experience chronic digestive tract problems there is no treatment that hits the spot and stops it cold. They end up diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which isn't really a diagnosis, just a fancy way of saying chronic stomach upset. What ends up helping people like that is a lot of experimentation with meds and lifestyle changes -- things like elimination diets, trying metamucil, trying low-fiber diets, trying frequent small meals, experimenting with cutting out coffee, alcohol, spices, etc etc, increasing fluids, increasing exercise, losing weight, elevating the head of the bed, etc etc.
Also, has it been confirmed by tests that you have had SIBO for 2 years? Having continuous SIBO-like symptoms is not the same as having continuous SIBO. The usual treatment for SIBO is a course of antibiotics that target just the intestinal bacteria. If these drugs do not get rid of the SIBO at least temporarily seems to me that you may have something other than SIBO. If the drug eliminates the SIBO and it comes right back, seems to me that would suggest to the doctor there's some underlying problem. However, these speculations are coming from someone at the outer limit of their medical knowledge. If you are having continuous SIBO symptoms, but testing negative for SIBO, then it is likely that the symptoms are not caused by SIBO. I would mistrust a practitioner who tells you your symptoms are due to "stealth SIBO," especially if they demand 5 Ben Franklins for telling you so.
Anyhow, this was kind of rambly,, but I hope helpful. I hope you are able to solve this and go back to feeling good.
Thanks for your comment. I actually had an intake today with someone at NYP/Weill Cornell who seemed good, though it was a short appointment. Medical school not remarkable, so if I don't have success with him maybe I'll look for a different provider at the same hospital.
My previous practitioner at another university hospital was unable to successfully treat me with 2 courses of Xifaxan/neomycin (so, yes, I've tried the antibiotic route). Symptoms improved during the course but then returned immediately after treatment. I also picked up a host of other issues in that provider's care, including mild POTS (possibly post-COVID, possibly GI-related, who knows), fungal overgrowth (currently have oral thrush), and tinnitus (from neomycin-induced ototoxicity), hence my hesitancy surrounding further conventional treatments. I also do still have SIBO, per a breath test from a few months ago. Recurring SIBO is very common, but still don't have a good idea of what the root cause is for me -- that's what I fear an MD may not be able to solve for me, but I guess I'm still hopeful the new provider can do something.
Also, about to spend an entire paycheck on labs and imaging, so I guess the cost factor isn't as different as I thought it'd be. Thanks for the suggestions though!
Hmm. I know thrush can sometimes be caused by antibiotics -- well, not exactly caused, I think the way it works is that antibiotics damage your body's microbe ecosystem, and that opens the way for thrush. That's the only useful factoid I have to contribute here, and you probably already knew it. Anyhow, I hope things get better.
I wrote about the wide-ranging negative effects of air pollution and why we need an air quality revolution: https://thecounterpoint.substack.com/p/pandemic-lesson-3-we-need-an-air
Nominative determinism strikes again. Prominent South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh goes on trial over the killings of his wife and son:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/23/us/alex-murdaugh-trial.html
I'd for sure never see these without the emails.
The thing on my mind right now - because it's everywhere you look - is prices, prices, prices. The thing that got me into this blog (or SSC, I suppose) was the discussion on Cost Disease... Never really went away, did it?
"Do people who do like Open Threads worry you’d never see them if the email didn’t arrive in your inbox?"
Yep. I don't have the bandwidth to go to every blog/newsletter manually to see what's there. Aggregators like email are the only way to go.
I don't understand how people can think the Republican-led House of Representatives (in the United States) is out of line in requiring spending be reigned in before increasing the debt ceiling.
Me: I need to increase my credit card limit.
Credit card company: But you're only making the minimum payments now. Maybe you should consider spending less?
Me: I only spend money on good things that I need. I just need a higher limit now.
Credit card company: This can't go on forever. How long until you can't make even your minimum payments?
Me: My income is fine. I can always make more money if I need to. My job is pretty flexible that way.
Credit card company: Then perhaps you should consider making that extra money now instead of getting a higher credit limit?
Me: No, I don't want to rock the boat. You can only go to the well so often, you know?
Credit card company: OK, we can give you an increase for now, I guess. But you better not be asking for a higher limit another year from now.
Me: Thanks! And no, of course not! This will definitely be the last increase I need.
That scenario is not comparable to the US debt limit.
With a credit card limit, you can only add more spending (charge more things) to the card if the credit limit is raised _first_.
Whereas, Congress has already added all the spending that the debt limit must cover (last year or the year before or whenever). Raising the debt limit does not enable any new spending commitments. Rather, failure to raise the debt limit forces the government to renege on contracts already entered into, with a whole lot of very bad collateral impacts.
I don't doubt that the limit must be raised NOW, to meet commitments, as you said. But is it unreasonable to demand spending limits so that the limit may not be increased in the future?
We're currently spending about $400 billion per year on interest alone, increasing every year.
That's an entirely separate question, though. If someone cares about reducing the debt, they should win power, and then reduce spending or increase taxes or both. They don't have to fuck around with the debt ceiling for spending that's already been allocated.
Allow me to reiterate:
If someone cares about reducing the debt, they should win power, *and then reduce spending or increase taxes or both*.
In fact if a political party was sincere about prioritizing reducing future spending then fucking around with the debt ceiling is the _last_ thing it would do.
Because the fucking around itself to some degree, and an actual default to a vastly larger degree, raises any government's borrowing costs to deal with the spending previously committed. Thereby forcing an increase in one of the already-large categories of federal spending.
This is a really good point. If anybody is worried about our interest payments now, they should imagine what those look like if we default and the rates double overnight.
A human being actually concerned about our debt/spending issues would (a) boost the debt limit to so we don't screw ourselves in the short term, then (b) *immediately* work on balancing the budget so that we don't screw ourselves in the long term.
But what we have are 2 parties, neither of whom care to do (b), and one of whom thinks "fiscal responsibility" means just quixotically picking random moments to try to torpedo (a) for temporary political advantage.
Part of the justification for the debt ceiling was to incentivize the government to balance the budget to stay under it. Removing it removes the incentive to balance said budget, just like how when the rain stops, the homeowner loses his immediate need to repair his stuck window. I use that analogy on purpose: when the government is under the debt ceiling gun, it *still* doesn't balance the budget, instead opting for more drastic short-term measures.
To me, this suggests that the real problem is that it's just hard to balance the budget - which I ultimately trace to the strong human desire to prioritize {not losing stuff, even a little} over {maybe gaining a lot of stuff}. There's simply too much pain in cutting spending, relative to a nice soothing ceiling boost, a budget resolution, or even a trillion dollar coin.
If it were only about spending, then I would agree alas it is not. Without the ability to borrow to manage account balances (and spending), then some interest payments would not go out which would amount to a default on debt obligations which would have a tremendous effect on the market for USG debt in all its forms. The knock-on effect is that it's likely that interest rates would go up as the bond market prices down new treasury issued debt. In other words, delaying the increase in the debt ceiling has no discernible upside since I see no majority of any kind (GOP or otherwise) voting to lower benefits paid out through social security, medicare, VA benefits, and medicaid. Adding interest payments to those items gets you to 65% of outlays so if you don't touch any of that, you would, essentially have to do away with the rest of the federal government (including DoD) and that's a hard sell. So, I'm still waiting to read a cogent argument in which the discussion on the debt ceiling is anything other than political theater.
a person and a state (especially the United States) don't really seem financially analogous
It wouldn't be out of line if, when the Republicans are in power, they actually reduce the deficit. The problem is, they run even bigger deficits than the Democrats: https://towardsdatascience.com/which-party-adds-more-to-deficits-a6422c6b00d7
"Compared to Democratic presidents, Republicans are estimated to add between 0.75% and 1.2% more to the deficit (as a percent of GDP) each year they are in office. This result controls for economic conditions, and explains 75% of the variation in the annual changes to deficits."
The media very rarely lies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_States
Looking at the years when particular presidents are in power, from the chard of Federal Government Debt, we find mostly steadily rising levels from 1993 until 2009, when the increase accelerated, then a jump at about mid-2020. To be fair, spending levels are set in the previous year, so, for example, 2009 spending was set by the Bush administration.
But from about $4.5 trillion in 1993, we rose $6 trillion in 2001, to $10 trillion in 2009, to $20 trillion in 2017, to $28 trillion in 2021, to about $31 trillion now.
If your point is that both parties are bad in keeping deficits down, I totally agree. But given that this is true, I don't believe that the Republicans' antics on the debt ceiling have anything to do with fiscal responsibility.
Yes, that was my point. As to whether fiscal responsibility will come of it, we'll just have to see, since all we have heard so far is simply promises of responsibility. I, for one, won't be holding my breath in anticipation.
The last time that the federal debt declined as a fraction of GDP for several years in a row was Clinton's second term. The last time before that was during the Carter presidency. In Clinton's case it was with a GOP Congress so credit for good works on the point has to be shared.
So if we're zoomed out to that sort of timescale we could say that the Dems have a _slightly_ stronger record on this topic. But only slightly and only if we've zoomed out a good ways.
The budget is controlled by the House of Representatives. During the last four decades, the debt grew at approximately double the rate under the Democrat majority in the House.
The fact that the Republican presidents appear the be bigger spenders can in a large part be explained by the fact that the presidency and the House of Representatives are typically held by different parties.
Yeah, but the debt ceiling isn't you negotiating with a credit card company that is hesitating to lend you money. Plenty of market actors are still willing to lend the US money, so there is no "one guy who needs money negotiating with another guy reluctant to lend it" angle. It's just the Federal Gov (aka you) negotiating with itself over whether or not to take the loans readily available on the market. Example:
Me: Oh no! I'm running up debt real fast! I'd better do something about that.
Also Me: How about this, then. I'll commit that, no matter what, even if a credit card company offers me a higher limit, I won't put more than $10,000 on my credit card.
<2 Months Later>
Me: Well crap, I did nothing to change my actual income or spending practices over the last 2 months - now my house payment and electric bill are due, but I have no cash on hand and I'm also at that $10,000 on my credit card I promised myself I wouldn't go over!
Also Me: Well, plenty of people are still willing to lend me money - I could just go to the market and get that increase to my credit limit. Then I could try to fix my budget after *without* the looming threat of losing my house and having the power switched off.
Me: Yeah, but I made a promise to myself! Maybe I should just call the power company and tell them I'm sorry, but a promise is a promise so I refuse to access any of the credit I could easily get out on the market from any number of lenders. I promised myself I'd only borrow $10,000 on this credit card, and that's that, so they can just wait.
Also Me: Well, that seems like maybe the stupidest possible way anyone could go about balancing their budget, but I guess we can fuck around and find out if we really want to?
I apologize if I wrote it in a way that made it hard to follow, but the debt ceiling issue far more closely resembles "guy negotiating with himself over whether or not to accept freely available credit" than it resembles "guy negotiating with banker reluctant to loan guy money."
The credit is still readily and easily available on the market, so the only question is whether the government chooses to take advantage of it or not.
Do you also think it would have been reasonable for Democrats in 2017 to demand the repeal of the Trump tax cuts as a price for not blowing up the government?
I strongly disagree, but at least your position is consistent, I guess.
No, those two things seem unrelated. Perhaps they could be a part of a negotiated compromise.
But demanding reigning in spending seems more like exacting a promise to, say, be careful driving after being in a hospital from crashing a car into a telephone pole.
How are they unrelated? Tax cuts cost money. A great way to be "fiscally responsible" would be to collect enough money in taxes to actually match our spending. If you need a lot of money to pay your mortgage, would you consider taking a higher-paying job, or would you consider that unrelated?
(Republicans have *claimed* that tax cuts pay for themselves by stimulating the economy, but AFAIK it hasn't worked out in practice.)
The sad part is that in 2017, even with aggressive "dynamic scoring", they still couldn't make the numbers work out to pretend that the tax cuts would pay for themselves.
I stand corrected. Raising taxes would indeed be about the same. Except capital gains, which I understand provides more revenue by people taking advantage of lower taxes by more frequent trading (not documented, but it makes sense, from a price elasticity sense).
I think we can agree that we are frustrated by the politics and politicians, who have the power to fix things, but aren't.
Actually, I've been thinking about this longer, and finally realized my disconnect. Yes, increasing taxes is as fiscally responsible as decreasing spending, but it was at least the wording that threw me off.
The difference, as I see it, is one is "we must find a way to reduce spending in some significant way" as against "all of the stuff you wanted must be reversed". One leaves room for compromise and the other doesn't.
True liberals and conservatives have fundamentally different views. It may be possible to prove some of them correct or incorrect, but lacking that, compromise over the uncertain way forward seems to make the most sense. But compromise seems no longer needed, if you have a majority, however slight, that can get what it wants done despite the wants of the opposition.
https://youtu.be/Li0no7O9zmE
I just finished reading Unsong, and I wonder how many of you have read it and have spotted the same glaring plot hole I have.
***SPOILER ALERT DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU HAVE READ UNSONG OR DON"T CARE ABOUT SPOILING THE ENDING SPOILER ALERT***
In Unsong, Hell can be destroyed only by speaking the True Name of God *while inside Hell.* The Comet King cannot enter Hell, so his beloved wife, Robin, sells her soul to Satan in order to force the Comet King's hand - while she's being tortured in Hell, her husband will have a super-duper strong incentive to figure out some way to get there. The Comet King accomplishes this by turning evil, torturing and killing a bunch of people, and finally killing himself once he's sure enough that he's so evil he'll go straight to Hell.
My question: why the heck couldn't the Comet King have taught Robin the True Name of God? That way Satan takes her to Hell, she immediately turns to him, says "Checkmate, motherf***er," and speaks the True Name of God, and poof! Hell is destroyed. Think how much horrific suffering could have been averted! I mean, that wouldn't be so good for the plot, but there should be an *in-story* reason why the Comet King couldn't do this. Perhaps the True Name of God works only when spoken by someone with supernatural powers such as the Comet King, and Robin is a mere human, albeit an exceptionally compassionate and principled one? But if so, that should be stated explicitly.
In case that sounded overly critical, I have to say that Unsong was an amazing feat of imagination and I couldn't put it down (except the Broadcast part; I forced myself to get through it and wished I could rinse my brain with bleach afterward). The characters and the worldbuilding was great. Well done!
Also, Scott keeps saying throughout, "Nothing is ever a coincidence." Correction: Nothing is a coincidence, unless it's a whale pun, in which case it's a fluke.
/ba-dum TSSSS
“Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits -- and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!”
The Comet King was more than mortal, and could indeed imagine the way Hell ought to be correctly. Likewise, Aaron, once merged with Sohu, Uriel, Sarah, THARMAS (and Erika and Dylan, I suppose) also had the capability of imagining the rest of the universe to be the way it should be.
Besides, Robin couldn't hold the Name in for such purposes. Metatron took the Name from The Comet King because it must not be held in an impure mind. At least, not for more than the few moments needed for him to kill himself. And even if Robin held it only for that purpose, would not Thamiel have seen it in her mind, her plan? And then would have refused her deal.
Yes - Thamiel read her mind. Also, it's implied that *using* the name of God to accomplish the specific goal is beyond-mortally-difficult, so that as well.
I cannot find the part where Robin made a deal with Thamiel, but I think I remember that Thamiel erased something from her memory. If that is correct, the proposed plan might fail by Thamiel erasing the True Name of God from Robin's memory right before taking her to hell.
Are we all sitting comfortably, children? Good, then let's begin.
Bret Devereaux over at "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry" has begun the first of his analyses of Amazon's "The Rings of Power", and I just popped over to alert you all before I nip back and luxuriate in what follows. Enjoy!
https://acoup.blog/2023/01/20/collections-the-nitpicks-of-power-part-i-exploding-forges/
I love the ACOUP blog. Highly recommended.
He also has a brilliant takedown of Game of Thrones (e.g., you can't transport a bunch of grain across hundreds of miles of sparsely populated land with premodern technology.)
His previous Lord of the Rings posts are marvellous, too. I thoroughly enjoyed the Game of Thrones ones because okay, it's the TV show not the books, but I always like G.R.R. Martin getting a tonking over the elements in his work given his snarking about "so what was the tax base of the Gondorian economy?" I don't know, George, but I *do* know Aragorn knew more about logistics than you do! 😁
And not that tax policy came up in the middle of an approaching and then extant siege, but surely the tax base was the agricultural lands ruled by the great nobles who weren't showing up with their levies till Aragorn removed the threat of invasion via the Anduin.
Tolkien's economics and logistics aren't beyond question (keeping Barad-Dur, the assorted northwestern fortresses, Cirith Ungol, etc. fed and watered on the edge of a desert with supplies all the way from from Nurn seems like a stretch, especially since Frodo and Sam aren't exactly seeing a lot of supply caravans along the internal lines of communication). But Gondor seems like a fairly straightforward setup given that it's on a river with a bunch of named agricultural regions and has a sophisticated Byzantine-like governing structure.
The Shire may need a bit more special pleading for running a 19th century society in the middle of a medieval economy far away from any economic centers. Especially since as far as I know their tax policy is "we haven't got any" and their only recorded export trade was a secret scandal. But Gondor and Rohan seem like close enough analogs to known systems that they don't raise major questions.
It's more like an 18th century society, really; it's not only overtly nonindustrial, industrialism is the awful consequence of war that happens to it at the end of the book and which the heroes vanquish. Given how bucolic and non-import-dependent it seems to be it doesn't appear all that logistically unfeasible. The soil in the Shire is good enough for them to have plenty of sheep and jam, and evidently tobacco is a native plant; that seems to satisfy the whole operation.
The society overall has more of a 19th century feel by my read, and they're on the verge of industrialization if the mill can be retrofitted that quickly. (Granted, Saruman is something of an X-factor there.) They also have paper and mail, common and inexpensive enough that frequent letters and wastepaper baskets are a thing. Likewise having enough books to require a bookcase. (And, you know, golf. :-) ) But 18th century is defensible; they definitely read as modern rather than medieval either way.
They do have trade with the Dwarves, which they really need given that they have metal (Bilbo's silverware, Lobelia's folding umbrella, mirrors, gold pens, etc.) but no mines. Presumably they trade food and agricultural products
IIRC Tolkien decided that tobacco and potatoes had been brought east from Numenor. (One of the learned words Aragorn gives for pipe-weed when he's making gentle fun of Merry for having lost his was "westmansweed".)
Yeah, I think our interpretations only differ on the margin, so to speak. Paper, mail, umbrellas, mechanical clocks and all that are very much 18th century inventions, and it's not obvious that all hobbits use them, just Bilbo and Frodo's class of gentry. I also attribute the bookcase to this circumstance; we already know that Bilbo's house is enormous by hobbit standards. The social order with lifelong servants (Sam), country gentry etc. is something that, while it persisted into the 19th century, was already sort of old-fashioned by then. There's also something very Austenitic about the Sackville-Bagginses' naked thirst for the estate of the Bagginses proper.
Of course, some things are absent entirely, e.g. there's no indication that they have movable type printing. All the books seem to be manuscript.
(And indeed, Saruman is so strongly associated with industrialization and mechanization already, as an individual figure, that I chalk all that business up to him, as well as of course a commentary on the destruction wrought on England by those changes.)
EDIT: Oh, and I forgot to mention that I didn't mean to suggest the Shire was economically isolated or anything, just that they don't seem *dependent* on much outside trade, especially since their military is a very anemic militia, replaced by the protection of the Gondormen. (There's some sort of Germany/USA joke here, but I can't quite reach it offhand.)
They don't have industrialisation of the Industrial Revolution type, but that doesn't mean they have no industries or machinery. Just not the big smoke-belching type that gave the name to the Black Country:
"The name dates from the 1840s, and is believed to come from the soot that the heavy industries covered the area in, although the 30-foot-thick coal seam close to the surface is another possible origin."
"[Elihu Burritt – the US Consul in Birmingham] begins his “Walks in the Black Country and its Green Border-land”, published in 1868, in lyrical praise of this “velvet-bound area of fire and smoke”. But subsequent chapters discuss not only the enterprises he saw but record his shock at the conditions experienced by young girls working in the brickyards near Halesowen.
But it is his descriptions of the Black Country – “Black by day and red by night, cannot be matched for vast and varied production, by any other place of equal radius on the surface of the earth” – which make him an important historical source."
And see the descriptions of the Midlands in Dickens' "The Old Curiosity Shop":
"They had, for some time, been gradually approaching the place for which they were bound. The water had become thicker and dirtier; other barges, coming from it, passed them frequently; the paths of coal-ash and huts of staring brick, marked the vicinity of some great manufacturing town; while scattered streets and houses, and smoke from distant furnaces, indicated that they were already in the outskirts. Now, the clustered roofs, and piles of buildings, trembling with the working of engines, and dimly resounding with their shrieks and throbbings; the tall chimneys vomiting forth a black vapour, which hung in a dense ill-favoured cloud above the housetops and filled the air with gloom; the clank of hammers beating upon iron, the roar of busy streets and noisy crowds, gradually augmenting until all the various sounds blended into one and none was distinguishable for itself, announced the termination of their journey.
...In a large and lofty building, supported by pillars of iron, with great black apertures in the upper walls, open to the external air; echoing to the roof with the beating of hammers and roar of furnaces, mingled with the hissing of red-hot metal plunged in water, and a hundred strange unearthly noises never heard elsewhere; in this gloomy place, moving like demons among the flame and smoke, dimly and fitfully seen, flushed and tormented by the burning fires, and wielding great weapons, a faulty blow from any one of which must have crushed some workman’s skull, a number of men laboured like giants. Others, reposing upon heaps of coals or ashes, with their faces turned to the black vault above, slept or rested from their toil. Others again, opening the white-hot furnace-doors, cast fuel on the flames, which came rushing and roaring forth to meet it, and licked it up like oil. Others drew forth, with clashing noise, upon the ground, great sheets of glowing steel, emitting an insupportable heat, and a dull deep light like that which reddens in the eyes of savage beasts."
As a child, Tolkien lived in a village on the outskirts of Birmingham and went to school in Birmingham, so he would have seen the contrast between the rural and the industrialised urban:
"There is no special reference to England in the 'Shire' – except of course that as an Englishman brought up in an 'almost rural' village of Warwickshire on the edge of the prosperous bourgeoisie of Birmingham (about the time of the Diamond Jubilee!)[1897] "
I have to be honest, I'm not sure what this is really responding to. I thought it was tolerably obvious that I meant the heavy industry of industrialism that you describe above, although I suppose I must have been mistaken. At any rate, of course they must have had industry in the broader sense of industriousness, of *work*.
It's funny that Tolkien thought the Shire wasn't particularly English, though -- that must be home-blindness at work. From outside it seems obvious that it even references a particular *region* of England. I can't criticize, though -- I come from a country whose citizens expect its laws to apply in other countries.
I've wondered if the mathoms don't serve as a kind of economy; they keep circulating around and they have some store of value. Plus the Hobbits are familiar with silver pennies, so they have a currency or access to one. And I think they do trade more than pipeweed, for instance providing food to the Dwarves. There's a typescript about Gandalf's meeting with Thorin and company before they all show up in "The Hobbit" in one of the HoME books, here Gandalf is speaking with the Dwarves about taking a Hobbit along with them:
"(W)e actually passed through the Shire, though Thorin would not stop long enough for that to be useful. Indeed I think it was annoyance with his haughty disregard of the Hobbits that first put into my head the idea of entangling him with them. As far as he was concerned they were just food-growers who happened to work the fields on either side of the Dwarves' ancestral road to the Mountains."
"'I wish you would not always speak so confidently without knowledge,' I said sharply. 'These villagers have lived in the Shire some fourteen hundred years, and they have learned many things in the time. They had dealings with the Elves, and with the Dwarves, a thousand years before Smaug came to Erebor. None of them are wealthy as your forefathers reckoned it, but you will find some of their dwellings have fairer things in them than you can boast here, Thorin. The Hobbit that I have in mind has ornaments of gold, and eats with silver tools, and drinks wine out of shapely crystal.'"
The Shire is its own small realm and there's no reason the Hobbits couldn't construct an economy of their own, they are isolated both by choice and due to circumstances, but not totally cut off from the wider world - they have contact with Bree, and Bree has some contact with the outside as well.
Mostly Martin annoyed me with that cheap shot because working out economics is not the point of Tolkien's story, any more than it is the point of his own work. I don't see that Westeros is any better sourced as a functioning tax base. I think at that point (and since) he is very aware of being, as a fantasy writer, in the shadow cast by Tolkien and he was reacting against that - 'our Elves are different', as the trope has it. Tolkien's own opinion was expressed in a letter of 1954:
"I am more conscious of my sketchiness in the archaeology and realien [German, 'realities, technical facts'] than in the economics: clothes, agricultural implements, metal-working, pottery, architecture and the like. Not to mention music and its apparatus. I am not incapable of or unaware of economic thought; and I think as far as the 'mortals' go. Men, Hobbits, and Dwarfs, that the situations are so devised that economic likelihood is there and could be worked out: Gondor has sufficient 'townlands' and fiefs with a good water and road approach to provide for its population; and clearly has many industries though these are hardly alluded to. The Shire is placed in a water and mountain situation and a distance from the sea and a latitude that would give it a natural fertility, quite apart from the stated fact that it was a well-tended region when they took it over (no doubt with a good deal of older arts and crafts). The Shire-hobbits have no very great need of metals, but the Dwarfs are agents; and in the east of the Mountains of Lune are some of their mines (as shown in the earlier legends) : no doubt, the reason, or one of them, for their often crossing the Shire. Some of the modernities found among them (I think especially of umbrellas) are probably, I think certainly, a mistake, of the same order as their silly names, and tolerable with them only as a deliberate 'anglicization' to point the contrast between them and other peoples in the most familiar terms. I do not think people of that sort and stage of life and development can be both peaceable and very brave and tough 'at a pinch'. Experience in two wars has confirmed me in that view. But hobbits are not a Utopian vision, or recommended as an ideal in their own or any age. They, as all peoples and their situations, are an historical accident – as the Elves point out to Frodo – and an impermanent one in the long view. I am not a reformer nor an 'embalmer'! I am not a 'reformer' (by exercise of power) since it seems doomed to Sarumanism. But 'embalming' has its own punishments."
Agreed that economics isn't the point of the story. And the discussion above kind of epitomizes Tolkien's creative style, where he'd put something into the story by the way (like the references to his Silmarillion legendarium dropped into the Hobbit) and then spend great effort over years to connect the dots and make everything coherent.
The decades of unfinished work to retrofit Middle Earth into a more realistic heliocentric solar system is another example. I kind of think most readers prefer the "flat earth made round, sun is a fruit, moon is a flower, Venus is a ship" version. But it nagged at Tolkien because it wasn't true, and he didn't think the Elves' astronomical knowledge should be inferior to ours.
Likewise, the Shire was put in place in Middle Earth almost casually as a source of names and legends in The Hobbit, but Tolkien then did think about just how that might work. He was bound by what he'd already locked in, and he didn't have the same level of interest or depth of expertise he did with languages, and no single person, not even Tolkien, can build a world in every possible detail to the same level of verisimilitude. But where the questions arose, he would always go back and make a solid effort answering them. Which is one reason Middle Earth has so much more depth than most secondary worlds do.
I'm reading a lot of research papers right now, and wondering if anyone knows of a good way to convert them to audio files for listening.
Surely with all the AI advancements of late there's a way to input a pdf and get audio, but I'll be damned if I can't find anything that meets this specific use case.
If you aren't considered about the quality of voice rendition, you could check out what kind of accessibility functions your operating system has. MacOS is able to "read" aloud any text, though it will be kind of robotic. With a PDF you may have to use OCR to convert the image to text first.
I should have mentioned in my original comment that I'm hoping to find something that sounds very human like, as close to audiobook quality as possible.
I'm definitely open to other alternatives if nothing else exists though, thank you for the suggestion.
Have you tried the app Speechify? It works pretty well for me. If a document is boring I change up the accent which makes it easier to digest.
I haven't, I'll take a look!
I bring you, Triumphalism and Defeatism! A brief exploration on the power of mindset in determining reality, noting the defeatist nature of the dominant worldview.
https://squarecircle.substack.com/p/triumphalism-and-defeatism
Re #2: "Should I continue to post Open Threads in a way where everyone gets emails about them?"
Yes, please! I squeeze in ACX reading around the chaos of life, and the links/emails are so convenient. Thank you, Scott!
I would miss the open threads if I didn’t get the emails. I think the automatic emails after moving to substack are a major reason I’m reading the blog more often now
You might not get a lot of comments from the people who don't read open threads, because they're not reading the open thread. I had actually unsubscribed from SSC because I was getting too many open thread emails.
FDB's Substack has checkboxes to disable notifications for certain post categories. Giving us the choice seems like the best option.
The amazing combination of traditional techniques and crafts with modern tech:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvlzq6_4H-k
Someday this may all be done by machine. It probably is feasible to do it by machine now, and certainly would be a lot cheaper and easier to get something new done with plastic and resins and substitute gilding. But it is wonderful to see a craft in action, not just churning out mechanised product (yes, industrial production is amazing in its own way but the element of human skill becomes valuable according as it becomes rarer and scarcer).
Very relaxing viewing! He could maybe benefit from some CAD work before sending the ornament off for printing, though. Could have saved him a lot of grinding/filing to get the shape right, plus some money, too - on demand printing services like Shapeways tend to charge based on the print volume.
I say keep the Open Threads, as I wouldn't be aware of them happening without the email.
Also, I once again have three subscriptions to Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning to give away. Reply with your email address, or email me at mine, specified here: https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/about/
That´s very generous!
If you still have one, I´d absolutely loved one. My email is jesus.quevedo.sv@gmail.com
Sent. Still 2 more left.
I'd be interested. Sent my email.
And you should have received a subscription. One left!
Thank you so much.
It helped me learn so much, dissipating some misconceptions that I had. I read it until the last minute.
Wonderful gift!
The main open threads often have some content in which I'd miss if you didn't email.
Agreed. Often I open the notification just to mark it as read and realize there are several paragraphs of useful information in there.
I am haunted by a stupid joke-- I see "Who predicted 2022?" and I think "I was expecting it right after 2021."
Other than that, I admire the sheer extravagance of a timeline which has most of Europe begging Germany to be more militaristic.
I've had the same thought. As wrongheaded as I find Germany's foot-dragging, I keep imagining Churchill and Eisenhower learning that the worst problem we have with Germany is that they're too conflict-averse and insufficiently willing to send tanks into eastern Europe.
The bit where we have to explain to them that it's the US Republican party is the one with a non-trivial fringe of tankies who want Russia to win, is also amusing.
If the concept of mirror universes had had currency in their time[1], they'd have probably have wondered if the streams had gotten crossed.
[1] I think DC's Earth-3 in 1964 and Trek's in 1967 were the first "dark reflection" parallel universes visited by the heroes. (Distinguished from alternate histories where the bad guys won some conflict or other, visited by time travel or otherwise not existing alongside our history.) But I wouldn't be surprised to have missed some less famous antecedent.
Scott, I may have missed it, but I don’t ever remember your stating a clear opinion on the practices of giving puberty blockers or surgery to minors seen as “transgender”, let alone the much longer essay I would have expected to have read from you by now on this. Can you link me to something on this, or explain why you abdicated on the issue?
Not commenting on something is not the same as abdicating on it. From this comment alone, it's clear you have a particularly strong opinion coming down on one side of the debate and will be furiously producing content if Scott says anything, especially if he gives a positive opinion.
Nobody is obliged to give an opinion on every topic in the world, and why do so if it's very plain what the interlocutor *wants* that opinion to be?
(I have my own opinion on this and it might or might not be in line with yours, but this kind of "why don't you and him fight?" invitation does no good for anyone).
Hear, hear!
Given Scott’s professional expertise and the cultural salience of the issue, it’s surprising he hasn’t commented, if he hasn’t. I phrased my question politely and neutrally on an open thread, so your response and your assumptions are offensive.
"Abdicating" is not a polite or neutral phrasing, it presumes that he has a responsibility which he is evading or giving up. He doesn't have to comment on any single thing. You could have asked him does he have an opinion that he is willing to express?
You started off with "the essay I would have expected by now". Expect away, but that doesn't mean you'll get it. And when I see people demanding - as you did - an essay on a hot button culture war topic, I know they're not just innocently asking, they have a strong view themselves which they want to be able to use "F said this in favour" or "F said this against" for their own purposes, like the ivermectin guys who are always popping up asking "Scott have you read the latest study, Scott have you changed your mind, Scott why aren't you engaging with Alexandros".
Springes to catch woodcocks, my dear, springes to catch woodcocks.
Does it occur to you that for several years I’ve been genuinely fucking waiting to learn what Scott thinks about this issue because I respect him and expect him to be more knowledgeable and expert about this area than anybody else I know?
I don’t know anybody at all whose take on this issue is as balanced as I would expect Scott’s to be. I want to see that balanced take.
Now you're sounding polite and neutral again!
I’m certainly expressing neutrality on the issue I would like Scott’s opinion on. But there was one word in my response which expressed impatience, not with Scott, but with someone who seems to wish that I not learn what Scott thinks.
Then *ask* for Scott's opinion, but don't expect that to obligate him to give it. And don't come in sounding as if you have an agenda (i.e. putting transgender inside of quotation marks) which looks all too much like "I don't believe there is such a thing as transgender, I think the hormones and surgery for kids is all part of Big Globohomo, and I want you to do me a piece saying there is no science and psychologically it's awful to do this so I can then quote you all over the Internet in my slapfight with the trans lot".
Nobody wants to be made a cat's paw, whatever their views on the merits of the case.
I made it clear I wanted Scott’s opinion, and the word was put in quotes because there are distinctions to be made between dysphoria (a problem) and transition (a possible solution to the problem) especially in the case of children.
How many times do I have to say I really really truly indeedy genuinely actually WANT TO KNOW WHAT SCOTT THINKS ON AN OPEN THEEAD WHERE WE ARE ENCOURAGED TO ASK WHAT SCOTT THINKS before you’ll cut out the tone policing and the incredibly protective stance you are taking about an opinion that you don’t even know for sure he has? Consider the question asked in whatever tone is appropriate for Scott to actually answer it, okay?
"abdicated"?
Scott is of course in charge of his own choices, but mine if in his shoes would be a short ban with a warning to do better.
Hey, Scott can look out for his ownself.
(Mostly I just wanted to use that interesting regional pronominal phrase _and_ the word pronominal. I gotta look out for my ownself.)
So many words. So little time.
"Polite" and "neutral" requests that someone whose ideas you "respect" stop abdicating responsibility regarding a common "medical treatment" are sort of self-evacuating, know what I mean? It's passive-aggressive, and therefore quite irritating to readers
You'd be better off saying Scott, I think giving puberty blockers to minors who believe they are transgender is a godawful mistake, and I'm angry that you haven't gotten around to weighing in about such an important matter.
I prefer to receive the Open Threads as emails, because I always read your (Scott's) notes in the Open Threads, even though I at most skim the comments and often not even that, and in general I only comment infrequently. on ACX. Furthermore, I prefer the emails compared to checking the site periodically or something.
I like getting the emails for the open threads iff you include content or prompts, such as this one. For posts that are just "Here is an open thread.", I could go without the email.
Where can I find the archives of the Ozymandias blog?
https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/ ?
Japan's population is declining, but it is really "standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society" as their Prime Minister claimed?
Decline is extremely hard to manage, especially effectively. Support for senior citizens is dependent on a large population of younger people (preferably much larger than the older group). If population is shrinking, that means newer generations are smaller than older generations. As those older generations age and try to retire, the support systems will be stressed. Unless the older people are forced to work longer and/or receive lower benefits, the system may collapse. The result is a society that feels, accurately, as if they have less every year. Smaller economy, less stuff. This makes people miserable.
"[Cannot] function as a society" may be hyperbole, but accurate in the sense of "life as we know it."
Less stuff? What about more room for each person?
It's funny, because "more room" matters most to younger people, especially those having families. If the younger generations are smaller, there are less families to enjoy that benefit (by definition). Housing will be cheaper for them, but at the expense of older generations trying to sell and losing value. At the leading edge of this it will be more benefit than harm. Eventually, especially with two smaller generations in a row, it will result in very little new housing being built and a lot of older housing being abandoned and becoming worthless - think Detroit.
So, the toilet you can't reach without assistance you can't afford is thirty feet from your bed rather than ten. That's not a good thing.
And it's not going to be that great having a big open house when society is leaning on you real hard to work 16 hours a day helping geezers take care of themselves.
How are they leaning on you real hard if they can't even get to the can unaided? You ought to just be able to shift your weight and they'll fall over.
Facetious, obviously, but I *am* trying to make a serious, if brutal, point: at some point the young crassly speaking have extremely little to lose (and in some cases a great deal to gain) by letting those old people just die, and too much weight pressed on them from those same old people is going to push them in the direction of taking that option.
And that, esp in a society of respect for elders like Japan, *is* collapse. The young are saving nothing,, not even themselves, by abandoning the old.
So your suggestion is that the lower number and less wealthy young people should enact a policy (even if not written or official) to let the more numerous and wealthy older people live in horrible conditions and die from clearly preventable causes?
From a practical perspective this seems difficult to accomplish and still call a country democratic. That the older generations will continue to vote benefits for themselves to prevent these obvious and solvable maladies is obvious. To defy it, difficult at best.
Worse, there are two other considerations here. First, that these older people have family and friends that care about them, even if not also old. You're expecting society to just cut off the older people, when those older people are often heavily entwined with all of society - a painful proposition. Secondly, those younger generations are themselves one day going to be older. Do they really want to live in a society where at some point they themselves are going to be cut off to die alone?
Your solution is no solution at all.
If at any point you seemed to identify in my post advocacy for any specific course of action, reread it. It's an observation of a dynamic -- one which by no means needs to result in maintaining the democratic system.
That would destroy social trust, destroy rule of law, and destroy the web of property ownership and business alliances on which the Japanese economy depends. It would also almost certainly involve a substantial amount of violence, and if you're expecting the security forces to all line up on the side of the Youth Rebellion because they're young, then no that's not going to happen.
You're basically talking about French-revolution or Russian-revolution level social "transformation", trying to build a new social order from scratch. From the historical track record of such things, they've got a *lot* to lose, and following that plan would be a catastrophe for Japan.
It's especially hard to manage because, like population growth, population decline is exponential. The rate of decline accelerates. Human instincts are terrible at exponential processes, they always happen faster than our intuition suggests, so we often under- or overreact.
It isn't just that it's declining, it's also the specific _way_ that it's declining. They have the highest average life expectancy in the world which combined with the crashing fertility rate puts them on a path towards becoming literally a society of elderly people. They are at almost 30% being 65+ right now, heading to 40% within another generation and on up from there. Elderly people require more services (especially health care), most of them are retired so no longer contributing to the economy or tax base, etc etc.
And at some point the fact of that change itself will speed up the change. More and more young Japanese adults will decide that their children should grow up in a society that isn't shrinking and getting older and poorer, and will move away, thereby accelerating the shrinking and getting older and poorer.
All the policy options for dealing with that scenario are bad for somebody if not everybody. Someone successfully scared the shit out of the Prime Minister regarding all of the above, and he felt the need to issue a strong public wakeup call.
Longer life expectancy probably correlates to longer functioning without large demands on others.
"continue to function" is forward-looking. Japanese society is not going to collapse or be transformed into something utterly alien in this decade. But it is plausible that if the demographic problem is not effectively addressed in this decade, then catastrophic change in three decades will be unavoidable. That would constitute "standing on the verge", with the next step being "fallen off the cliff but haven't hit bottom yet".
Yes, well-said.
And your analogy reminds me of the time my wife and I were toweling off from swimming in a cenote in the Yucatan, and I grabbed my sandals and swished them in the water's edge to get some dirt off, and _then_ remembered that I had stashed the rental car key in the toe of one of the shoes. We stared mournfully down into the pool which was deeper than sunlight could penetrate -- and then spotted the car key sitting on the very last step of the little wooden staircase that we had just used to climb out of the water.
How did you retrieve it, you ask? Verrrrry carefully....
I like the email for the threads. The time stamp tells me when I want to go through the thread (usually 6-8 hours after first post) to find interesting remarks that aren't yet stale. My inbox is my todo list, so a new thread sits there until the time is right or until I have time to look through it.
I have a receiver that is connected to my big TV and to five speakers arranged around my living room. If I am watching a movie, and there's a loud noise like an explosion, does my receiver momentarily need to consume more electricity compared to other periods where the movie's sounds are at normal volume?
That is a weird and interesting question. I wouldn’t bet money on it but if you put a gun to my head and made me answer, I would say yes. I don’t think you would be able to measure it though. Line voltage AC into your big tv would remain whatever line voltage is in your area. So if we talk about more electricity it would be in the form of additional current draw.
I’m basing this purely on intuition though the extra energy of louder sounds would have to come from *somewhere*. There have to be EEs reading this that could give you a better answer than I can.
Louder sounds mean more acoustic pressure, which for constant pitch means greater and thus faster displacement of the speaker diaphragm. Which will require more current through the solenoid coils (or more voltage on a piezo element, or whatever), which means more power consumption.
Thanks John - and Carl - kind of what I thought. I majored in EE for one semester but was drawn away by the lure of software. Building useful artifacts without a Bill of Materials was pretty seductive. I'm still on Jameco's mailing list and know which end of a scope probe to hold though.
Sure. Energy is conserved. You can't get more acoustic energy without the final amplifier drawing more electric current.
A while ago I've read an article arguing companies with a positive impact on the world have a market advantage but can't find it anymore.
Arguments I remember: People work for less, cheaper PR, sympathetic politicians.
Does anyone know which article I'm talking about? It might have been by someone from Y Combinator.
Reason #39 why Substack's UI irritates me:
It will fill a comments section with helpful "N new comments" (actually replies, but I don't want people who search for that string to have to stop on this comment every time), which suggests this is an easy way for me to see the new comments. I click on it, and those comments appear... somewhere else in the thread, where I now have to hunt for them.
This happens because you're sorting by chronological; the UI then deposits the newest comments at the bottom of the stack. If you sort by new, they will appear at the top, right where the clickenbutton was.
I knew this, but it still drives me crazy because it's chronological by default.
Hello to people interested in AI
I live with a little girl who will be two-years-old in six days. She is intensely interested in my cell phone. She rapidly scrolls through pages.
She's learning to play Woodoku where you slide block shapes up to fill in columns, rows, and 3x3 cells. At first she would slide up shapes, but they wouldn't stick because they overlapped existing shapes. Now mostly her shapes stick. I have never attempted to explain the "overlapping" concept to her. Pure experimentation on her part. Apparently she finds "sticking" to be rewarding.
She also adores "Masha and the Bear", but even this will hold her attention no more than 15-20 minutes. Then she starts randomly opening apps. She will make WhatsApp calls if I don't stop her. I took the WhatsApp icon off my screen, but she will find it in the full display of all apps.
If my phone goes to the unlock screen, she will enter digits randomly. After repeated failures, she will hand me the phone with an expectant expression.
All of this activity is self-motivated. If I need my phone and take it away, she becomes angry.
Now does any of this sound like any AI program you have ever heard of? Clearly she has an internal life independent of other living beings. She wants things.
Does any AI program have an internal life?
Does anyone imagine that more flops is going to produce one?
>Clearly she has an internal life independent of other living beings. She wants things.
She justs wants novelty, not things. She has no particular need for the phone or whatsapp, she just likes the raw high of the world responding to her actions with lights and sounds.
Somebody once described the first 4 years of your life as an "An extra long acid trip for the baby" and those words stuck with me ever since. It's a shame we forget those years, because it's truly marvelous and terrifying to imagine being so utterly blank-slate that gravity surprises you. And I once read that babies imagine their mother to be an extension of their bodies, since everytime they need something the mother immediately obliges, hence why they get so upset when they are weaned, for the first time the mother-thing is not responding to commands as she should. It sounds hopelessly unsettling, but the baby has no reason to believe otherwise, their brain is the closest thing to a "Uniform Prior Over All Possible Hypothesis" a human brain can ever get.
Your cutie is just choking on the sheer novelty of how the world works. Your cell phone alone is a lifetime of study for her. You (or anybody over 5) can never empathize with her, we have thoroughly get ourselves drunk on how the world works then forgot we ever did the morning after. We like to imagine babies as proto philosophers and scientists, or to imagine philosophers and scientists as grown up babies, but there is no comparison. No adult is ever going to match this sheer amount of effortless open-mindedness.
>Now does any of this sound like any AI program you have ever heard of?
Reinforcement Learning agents can be rewarded to explore novel or maximally different states and actions, and this will produce behaviour superficially similar to your daughter's. But our computing power is nowhere near enough to simulate even a fraction of the domains your daughter does this on all at once, i.e. the RL agent can only be like your daughter in 1 or 2 or 10 computer games, or (exclusive) in moving its body through physical space, or (exclusive) in trying out human language sounds from scratch, but not all of this at once, unlike your daughter.
>Does any AI program have an internal life?
I mean, the entire point of it being an "internal" life is that you can never know. Naively, I would expect that the things we feel inside is due to hormones and chemistry, something which even the most singularity-breaking AGI will never have if it confined itself to non-wet hardware. But who knows, maybe some feelings are just straightforward consequences from the pure algorithms of thought. How can we ever know ?
If you mean an "Internal Life" not in the sense of feelings, but in the sense of "Plans, Goals, Internal State..." then that's trivially true for any sufficiently complex program.
I can't tell what you're getting at in your last 3 paragraphs: Is your point that the info-absorbing of an AI during training is a lot like what your daughter does, and that since your daughter has an internal life AI must have one too? Or is it that that AI, despite doing something like what your daughter does, is profoundly different from her because it has no internal life, and it's silly to expect that making AI bigger is going to change that?
The latter.
I will work on describing this difference in objective terms. In traditional terms: the girl is alive and the AI program is not.
BTW, she's not my daughter. Her mother died in December and our extended family is raising her. I'm American, everyone else is Haitian, and we live in the Dominican Republic.
" In traditional terms: the girl is alive and the AI program is not."
Yeah, I understand what you're getting at. A lot of the time when people talk about AI of human intelligence or of greater than human intelligence their picture of the situation depends on the idea that AI has somehow made the leap to being a conscious, sentient being. Like you I find the idea that upping the flops will somehow make that leap possible absurd. But I don't think an AI has to be conscious in order to be highly intelligent. It just has to be able to process info in a way that draws on deep layers of knowledge that are intricately structured, with all kinds of subtle links between different bits of knowledge. Here's an instance of what I mean: A few years ago when I did google searches I was asking myself what was a distinctive set of words that was likely to appear on a page that had the info I wanted, and not on any other page. I thought of google as something that searched for certain word combos, and no more. Now my google searches are often the actual question I want answered: "Why is . . ." "What's the difference between . .." etc. I have no illusion that google is becoming conscious, but it certainly is now grasping questions that are posed much more like the way one would ask another person for info. I can even imagine that if 10 years ago somebody had speculated that soon we'd just be able to ask google our questions, I would have thought, "no, that's not possible -- because in order to do that, google would have to would have to have such a deep structure of understanding language knowledge." Seems to me that the change in google is an demonstration of how, without becoming conscious, AI can become much more *like* a conscious being.
"Her mother died in December and our extended family is raising her. " Good for you guys. Lucky kid.
There's a common phenomena of anthropomorphization: People sometimes treat animals, even animals very far from human like crustaceans or jellyfish like humans. Other common targets are robots, fictional characters, computers, houses, cars etc.
There's a common phenomena of dehumanization. This mostly seem to target people who are foreign or different, but seems pretty arbitrary. Kids bully in school, slavery, antisemitism, the long history of mistreatment of the ill and handicapped etc. I have a friend that has a speech impediment but no mental deficiencies whatsoever, and another friend has confided in me that they have a hard time spending time with this friend since they instinctively treat my disabled friend as if they're stupid even as they logically know they're "normal".
There seems to be a conflict between these phenomena. What decides if we are going to anthropomorphize or dehumanize someone? I assume there are good books on the subject and I'd be happy for pointers.
Edit: Alice encounters an entity that somewhat resembles what Alice thinks of as the typical human. What factors decide if Alice is going to anthropomorphize or dehumanize this entity?
It seems like both are an overcorrection. A dog acts a little bit like a human, so we expand that too far. A human acts a little "weird" so we downgrade our opinion of their humanity. In both cases it's about the real fact that the object of our consideration is acting outside of what we consider normal behavior in terms of their humanity. In terms of dehumanizing, it's actually an amazing tool. It's how we can watch a movie with an evil villain and identify that - despite being human and generally acting like a human - there's something wrong with them. That it can misfire is unfortunate.
Anthropomorphization of the kinds you list seems to be a choice, or an expression of an underlying sympathy and affinity. Not an error of judgement. When somebody calls their car "Jane", you know they have a long history with it and they elevate it beyond mere object, enough to give it its own name. I don't like calling animals "It" for example, using the same pronoun for a life and an object is unsettling. Same thing as calling our relationship with them "Ownership", your cat is "yours" in the sense that your brother or husband or wife or mother is yours. To the extent that Law doesn't reflect that (by allowing you to sell cats but not people), it's the Law that is morally deficient.
**Some** Anthropomorphization might be an error of judement, like the very common one of treating the shape of a Dolphin's mouth as a permanent smirk. Sometimes we Anthropomorphize existence itself, like "What goes around, comes around", which imagines life (fate?) as an individual that remembers deeds and rewards/punishes them accordingly.
>they instinctively treat my disabled friend as if they're stupid even as they logically know they're "normal".
This is a very powerful illusion, although I would never admit it affects me to anyone under my real name and face, and it wouldn't make it difficult for me to spend time with that person. (on the contrary, it would make me spend more time with the person and being extra nice as much as possible without appearing fake, to supress my guilt of thinking this about them.) You can observe it in yourself whenever you read a very grammatically wrong text, you will find that your judgement of the text automatically transfers to its content. (To the extent that it's not happening with your friend, it reflects the strength of your relationship)
>Kids bully in school, slavery, antisemitism, the long history of mistreatment of the ill and handicapped
I don't think bullying is specifically an instance of dehumanization, it's just an instance of kids learning the concept of status and applying it arbitrarily to other kids. (and sometimes not so arbitrarily, the bullied kids are sometimes poor/fat/shy, which *are* in fact traits that adults assign low-status to, the kids had "successfully" learnt the concept in that case.) Of course, dehumanizing low-status people *is* a consequence, but it's not bullying per se that makes it so, bullying is just a specific instance of that happening.
Slavery and antisemitism is easy : they are expression of what was going to happen anyway. Slavery happens for other deap seated reasons, and the dehumanization is there to justify it (but also feedbacks into driving it). Same thing with antisemitism, religions absolutely hate the guts of each other by default, especially exclusive ones, **especially** the monotheistic ones from among the exclusive ones.
(But why Jews in particular ? well 1-they are the smallest monotheistic religion, 2- no Jewish state for most of history to threaten retribution, 3- their monetary dominance in their host societies arouses resentment, 4- A bias effect because they took massive casualties during WW2 that was subsequently capitalized on it, they are not especially hated compared to other groups)
Treating the ill and the handicapped seems to be an overgeneralization of the viral protocol, there is no cost to treating them like shit even if their conditions isn't actually viral, but if you treated them well and fraternized with them you can catch whatever it's they are having if it's viral. You can't know which things are viral if you don't know about viruses, which describes most of humans for most of their history.
Not weighing in on your question, just tossing out a related thing. When I was a child, I was subject to intense feelings of pity for inanimate objects -- things like clothes I didn't wear, broken cups that got tossed out. I once sobbed with pity the whole time my father was mowing the lawn, because I couldn't stop imagining that all those blades of grass were in agony. And the closer to human something was, the less vulnerable I was to these attacks of acutely painful sympathy. Regarding animals, I was probably quicker to sympathy than the average kid, but not far out of line. Regarding people, I was an average kid.
Even now as an adult I occasionally have mild attacks. If I throw out a formerly handsome bell pepper that withered before I got around to eating it I sometimes get a lump in my throat, and a story begins to form in my mind about how proud and happy it was in its prime, how it looked forward to being eaten and savored, but day after day passed in with it alone in the dark fridge . . . Ridiculous, I know, but I have to work pretty hard to pull my head out of that place. My mother always seemed to understand my compassion attacks so well that I wonder now whether she was subject to them herself. And once on Reddit I saw someone's postabout the phenomenon. That person felt sorry for street signs that stood alone, with no other signs or even a mailbox nearby. I've always wondered how common this little disorder is, and whether there's a name for it. Whatever it is, it's certainly an instance of the kind of thing you're talking about -- especially in the way that victims of it are not subject to the same vulnerability when it comes to the pains and losses other people suffer.
Eremolados, I commend you for writing about this. It takes much courage to be honest in such a way that could open one up to ridicule.
I'm wired much the same. I thought your account of feeling sorry for the grass blades was odd, and then remembered as a child telling people that my favourite colour was green. I didn't like green particularly, and figured no-one else did either. I said I liked it so that green wouldn't feel bad.
When I was about 10 I was over at a friend's place for a sleepover, and we watched an old movie on a small black & white TV. A man had bought bags of presents for some children, and for whatever reason would be unable to give the presents to them. He stood sadly on the open platform at the back of a train and dropped the bags one by one. It absolutely devastated me. I then rationalized that of course they would have people standing by to recover the presents and give them to grateful children, even as I knew that would be unlikely. (I told my wife about this last night as part of a heavy conversation, and she was interested that I had been more concerned about the fate of the toys than the thwarted giver or the children.)
This is tied up with me always having been very moved by stories of sacrifice and heroism and duty.
Over the years this has been channeled constructively into compassion for people more than objects, although I'm still pretty quick to try to repair something rather than throw it out.
I think we anthropomorphize when we lack intuition about a mechanism. We don't anthropomorphize a pencil because we can immediately intuit how the line on the paper happens. We might anthropomorphize the car, however, because we lack the mechanical intuition to feel how it does what it does. It feels a little bit magical[1].
The only general mental model we have for mysterious mechanisms whose inputs can be partially mapped to outputs, but the inner workings of which are opaque, are other people. We have a complex model for other people, and it's very powerful, so we just map it onto other complex mechanisms the inner workings of which we cannot intuit. We assign states of feelings to it, discover what makes it "happy" (putting gas in it, cleaning its spark plugs) and what makes it "unhappy" (cold weather, not changing the oil) -- and that allows us to build up a sense of intuition about the behavior of the mechanism. I think the model is sufficiently flexible that we can adapt it to most complex mechanisms we encounter and do satisfactory predictions (if it's the weather, we invent a weather god that is angry when the barometric pressure drops and happy when it rises).
Dehumanization ni the way you describe seems like a very different thing, more like a personal and tribal defense mechanism to shut down sympathy when personal drives or tribal loyalty demands hostility or aggression. Presumably it's adaptive because sometimes we have to make tough decisions, and being frozen with empathy would prevent that. Of course, any mechanism abused can become maladaptive.
Incidentally, I wouldn't characterize your friend B as dehumanizing your friend A. What occurs to me is that the interaction might be unusually tiring for B: he is having to continuously consciously reset his expectations of A. I expect we generate a lot of our conversation using simplified models of the other person, e.g. if that person is 12 I speak one way, if 65 another, if educated in the field one way, if an interested amateur another, and so on. Having the "preset" makes it easier to generate the sentences from the thoughts. But if a person did not fit readily into available models, and I had to continuouly recalibrate how to construct sentences, a lot more effort would be required to have a conversation. That might simply be tiring, causing B to want to get away sooner. (And then he probably feels guilty, which makes it worse.) Maybe it would be helpful to spend the time in shorter chunks?
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[1] In my experience, this is true even for people who are quite good at mechanics and could explain how the car works in detail. I think once the complexity passes a certain level, it starts to defy intuitive grasp, and we have to rely on conscious reasoning to work out our understanding -- but that leaves the intuition behind. Sort of like the difference between our grasp of the difference between a 2D and 3D object, which is intuitive, and our grasp of the difference between a 3D and 4D object, which is purely intellectual and defies intuition.
I agree with a lot of what Carl Pham says, and wanted to add to his theory. He says we anthropormorphize when we lack intuition about a mechanism. But consider that when we first meet somebody we have less intuition about their "mechanism" than we do about people we know well. If we meet a stranger, we don't know what her talents are, or what her sensitivities are. If she's quiet is she unhappy or bored or shy? Or is she really paying close attention to the music because she's a musician herself? I think a lot of the reason people get preoccupied with the appearance of somebody they might date is that they we lack intuition about their mechanism, i.e. what makes them tick. So they "anthropmorphize" their physical appearance. If they are slim and beautiful the other person sees them as happy, confident, sexy and successful. A similar thing: When we don't know someone, we're also especially aware of stuff that really does not tell us much if anything about what the person's like -- stuff like their accent, their gait, their little mannerisms. I think heightened awareness of this trivia represents "anthropmorphizing," i.e. building a false picture of their personality out of these visible and audible bits and pieces. Once you really know somebody awareness of all that stuff drops out, you know? Their British accent doesn't sound charming, in fact you're rarely even aware of it. Their beauty, their bald spot, their speech impediment -- all that stuff drops out of awareness, because it carries no information.
Well, well, and well. I've been working online for 28 years, and must say your success story is one of the more interesting one's I've learned about. My understanding so far is that you're making about $60,000 a MONTH from this blog. If I'm having a senior dementia moment, please correct me!
What further interests me is that your focus seems to be on what I'll call "intelligent nerd topics". While that's great for this reader, I've never thought of this niche as a big profit center. As a wannabe intelligent nerd typist, you've given me hope.
Should you wish to share any secrets of your success, or if you have already, I'm all ears.
Scott is pretty generous with pointers, e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/
Thanks!
TIL: In 2014, there was a three-way race for governor in Rhode Island, with the "Moderate Party" getting 20% of the vote. That's a lot higher than I would have expected.
do like Open Threads worry you’d never see them if the email didn’t arrive in your inbox
Yes
Don’t like open threads; don’t mind the emails.
+1
Which quantitative finance / econ blogs do people in this community like ? am trying to find things that are well researched, at the cutting edge and ahead of the usual thinking you get anywhere else
The president of Hamline University has been asked to step down for the firing of adjunct professor who displayed the artwork depicting Mohammed. The Board of Trustees say it should not have happened.
https://reason.com/volokh/2023/01/24/hamline-faculty-vote-71-12-to-ask-university-president-to-step-down-over-muhammad-painting-firing-controversy/
It absolutely should not have happened, because it was the dumbest possible response to the dumbest possible 'aggravation'. And positions like "Vice President for Inclusive Excellence" should either not exist, or rank far below the maintenance staff who do useful and necessary work like emptying the bins.
This wasn't somebody trying to be edgy by showing disrespectful depictions, this was a class in art history that was - ironically - being inclusive by showing non-Western art as part of the curriculum, and using genuine Muslim devotional images. If, after having been warned what was going to be shown, given the option of not watching, and being an alleged adult in your early twenties you are still offended, you need to grow the hell up and not be coddled by foolish adults who have forgotten the purpose of a university.
Had this been the Islamic equivalent of "Piss Christ", the student would have had a point. It wasn't, she didn't, and the administration needs to get lessons on toughness and resilience from a soggy paper bag.
I’m glad they fixed this as quickly as they did.
"Had this been the Islamic equivalent of "Piss Christ", the student would have had a point."
Would she really? Do you genuinely think an art student would have a case if Piss Christ was shown in the context of a modern art course (in a voluntary lecture!), and she got offended by that?
I wasn’t completely sure, but yeah, I guess he actually is a putz.
“I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.” ~ Sam Bankman-Fried
A putz, or just extremely strung out on coke and amphetamines?
You and I are definitely on the same page regarding AI. Some of those who see danger in AI, please chime in. Does the danger part come with consciousness? Or is consciousness not required to be dangerous.
Now this assumes a minimum of intelligence on the part of the humans. I hope no one is putting an AI in charge of launching an nuclear counterstrike!
A few years back I thought that asking Google a question was a weird idea. Now I do it regularly.
Not because Google "understands" the question, but because it uf
WTF, DALL-E? I ask you for parakeets terrorizing a square dance, you give me this: https://i.imgur.com/22cYeEN.png
Sometimes people read stuff like The Mind Illuminated and Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, and start all these practices, acting like spirituality is just this intellectual game with no stakes. It's not.
The Real and Final Enlightenment
https://squarecircle.substack.com/p/the-real-and-final-enlightenment
This thread is quiescent, but maybe someone will read my call for assistance:
Long ago (2007) , I created an account of the form pedro.dft@gmail.com. A few years larter, I started receiving email from a Brazilian cell phone operator regarding bills, etc. for a user with the email pedrodft@gmail.com or pedro.d.f.t@gmail.com, or some such variation. I assumed that user had made a mistake writing the dots in their address when submitting their data to their cell phone operator, and written my address instead of theirs. The only email I received that was meant for that user were the messages from CLARO (the Brazilian cell phone operator
Last week, I started receiving messages from Spanish “singles sites” meant for another (Spanish) user with the email pedrodft@gmail.com. I can confirm that this user has this email because one of those emails included a link allowing me to directly asses, without password, the account/profile of the Spanish personwho had signed up for them , where I could confirm that their address was written as pedrodft@gmail.com , rather than my pedro.df@gmail.com
Today, I learnt that sometime around 2011 Gmail started disregarding dots in email addresses, so that johnsmith@gmail.com and john.smith@gmail.com are considered the same account. Google claims that they do not create accounts of the form johnsmith@gmail.com if john.smith@gmail.com exists, but what I see in my account (thank God not my main account) shows that is not the case, since pedrodft@gmail.com was allowed to be created (and belongs to a Spanish 50-yr old dude) long after my pedro.dft@gmail.com was made.
Long story short: just like I used to receive email from CLARO (the Brazilian cell phone operator), I am now receiving messages from singles sites that are not meant for me. I received no other email meant from those other accounts, but I naturally fear that other people my be getting copies email meant for me. That account of mine is seldom used, and therefore I do not risk much, but this is nonetheless a major privacy and security breach. In support.google.com , there are many reports of these issues, but the high karma users who should help instead repeat the same tropes: "Gmail does not allow johnsmith@gmail to be created when john.smith@gmail.com exists. Whatever spam you receive and think is meant for someone else comes from mailing lists or services you have subscribed to and now forgot" , and even when people say they are receiving information regarding hotel reservations from people in different countries no support is forthcoming. I know ACX is read by many people from Silicon Valley. Does any one here have a possibility to bring this matter to the attention of someone at Alphabet awho will not dismiss users who report this huge security and privacy breach?
Both "dots are ignored in gmail delivery" and "this exact complaint regarding unwanted emails" pre-date 2011. The short answer is that it isn't a privacy or security breach, it's just somebody who made an error in typing a different email address. You're not being ignored, you just don't like the answer.
I will never see the open threads if I don't get an email. I use Feedly to get notified of new posts and never check the site by going directly there.