I started a blog (never to be paywalled) where I'm publicly sharing parts of my journey to use forecasting techniques to try and mitigate global catastrophic risks.
If this sounds interesting to you, please come check it out. I'd love to interact with other people about this topic, and I'm very much trying to make it a useful resource for you.
Meetup at my house this week, 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, 92660
Saturday, 2/4/23, 2 pm
Activities (all activities are optional)
A) Two conversation starter topics this week will be. (see questions on page 2)
1) Janus' Simulators - by Scott Alexander - Astral Codex Ten
2) Twelve Virtues of Rationality - LessWrong
B) We will also have the card game Predictably Irrational. Feel free to bring your favorite games or distractions.
C) We usually walk and talk for about an hour after the meeting starts. There are two easy-access mini-malls nearby with hot takeout food available. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zipcode 92660.
D) Share a surprise! Tell the group about something that happened that was unexpected or changed how you look at the universe.
E) Make a prediction and give a probability and end condition.
F) Contribute ideas to the group's future direction: topics, types of meetings, activities, etc.
Conversation Starter Readings:
These readings are optional, but if you do them, think about what you find interesting, surprising, useful, questionable, vexing, or exciting.
1) Janus' Simulators - by Scott Alexander - Astral Codex Ten
I recently ran across the idea that part of what's wrong with (STEM?) academe is the winner-take-all system for getting credit of discoveries. It's plausible that this makes useful collaboration less likely, but I can't imagine how to do a better job of rewarding collaboration. What might help?
I don't have a solution, but suggest the wording "enable collaboration" rather than "reward collaboration". Rewards usually take the form of institutional or governmental incentive programs to subsidize one way of doing work over another way of doing work.
Hopefully most people reading this are smart enough to understand that use of anonymous sources is routine across all sorts of stories, political persuasions, time periods, etc. This is the kind of dunk that only works if you don't actually click on the link or stop to think about it for two seconds.
What is the right way to think about menopausal therapy? There is a big piece published February 1, 2023, in the NYT. It argues that the establishment has been too conservative about treatment. Has anyone done a rationalist, statistically literate, literature review, cost benefit, all things considered, deep dive into this issue? Thanks!
This only works if you strip all context from Kanye and this comment. Kanye has made many anti semitic remarks that echo a lot of anti-semitic tropes or conspiracies about jews and jews controlling the media/financial markets/world. He also appeared on Alex Jones with Nick Fuentes who is a white supremacist.
Well, like I said right at the start, what he said is basically insane. If there is anything to what he said it is that we could collectively process Hitler better.
I have some issues with this line of thought. Firstly, if you truly believe in infinite compassionate forgiveness like in some forms of Christianity then before you get to Hitler I want to see you practicing that on everyone less noxious than Hitler. Which is most people. If you are already such a saint that no person alive is not embraced by your love then maybe I'll listen to your thoughts on forgiving historical monsters. But what most often happens is that Hitler is just your far group so forgiving him is easier than your out group. (As is the case with Kanye.) And that's not special or moral. It's just saying that you mainly care about injustices done to people you care about. Which is the default.
Secondly, if you were not among Hitler's victims then you cannot forgive him. Even in that sort of infinite compassion model. No wrong was done to you. And you cannot forgive someone on someone else's behalf. This is a common form of mischief where someone who wasn't a victim does a sort of stolen valor enlightenment where they forgive someone for crimes they never suffered. It's literally, "You suffered greatly but I have decided to forgive your abusers." Jesus said to forgive your enemies. He didn't say to forgive other people's enemies. Not only is that not helpful, it's not hard.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, defending Hitler like this is highly correlated with ongoing noxious behaviors. Kanye spent a long time ranting about Netanyahu and Israel and Jewish executives in the entertainment industry. He has openly called for a reckoning where Jews are forced to admit their crimes against the United States. He is running for President alongside an open Holocaust denier. These things would all be obnoxious even if Hitler had never existed. And asking us to simply ignore or forget the fact that this correlation exists is just an extremely isolated demand for rigor.
When I read the piece I was not smirking. I wasn't even upset really. You're typical of a certain kind of parochial view that thinks it is enlightened. Your moral superiority is facile and entirely unearned. Not because no one could earn it but because you, it seems, have not.
Sorry if I came across as saying I myself am a saint. I don't really believe that. I can't actually show whether I practice forgiveness in my life through a blog post though. Actually, wouldn't doing that be, in itself, rather narcissistic?
I disagree that only Hitler's victims can forgive him. What Hitler did outrages everyone, and that is why it is possible for everyone to forgive him.
About Kanye, like I said at the start, he is insane. I did not at all mount a defense of all of Kanye, not even of the specific stuff he said about Hitler.
Really, the post is not about me, or whether I am perfect. It's about whether the reader, and society, wants to hold on to their resentment and outrage against Hitler. It's a very simple point and you dodged it entirely.
> I wasn't even upset really.
Yeeaaahhh, you say that, but then you typed all of that out, and launched a personal attack on me to boot (whereas I didn't do that to the reader, an exhortation to be better is not an attack), and none of this strikes me as dispassionate.
> You're typical of a certain kind of parochial view that thinks it is enlightened. Your moral superiority is facile and entirely unearned. Not because no one could earn it but because you, it seems, have not.
Hmmm, so the actual morally enlightened view here is to forever hold on to our outrage against Hitler? Is this your claim?
>Sorry if I came across as saying I myself am a saint. I don't really believe that.
Jesus could take the sins of the world on him because he considered himself the son of God. Even a lowly bodhisattva is a god descended from heaven. The act of taking on collective or social sins and forgiving them is an extremely heavy act. And notably one which even people like Amida or Jesus would only do for those who voluntarily asked them to. You seem to go beyond where even they would.
> I disagree that only Hitler's victims can forgive him. What Hitler did outrages everyone, and that is why it is possible for everyone to forgive him.
So you believe, for example, that you can in some meaningful sense forgive Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine? And that it would not be presumptuous of you to forgive him?
This is what I meant by mischief. The socialization of specific pain which is then given up to earn points by forgiving people who never actually harmed you. A sort of stolen valor.
> Really, the post is not about me, or whether I am perfect. It's about whether the reader, and society, wants to hold on to their resentment and outrage against Hitler. It's a very simple point and you dodged it entirely.
As I said in my previous post, letting go of that outrage is not something you can do. Your issue is your assumption that you are in a position of such centrality that you can. I do not think you are in such a position.
You can, of course, decide you will personally have no negative thoughts about Hitler regardless of the wishes of his victims. But that is equivalent to simply not caring about them.
> none of this strikes me as dispassionate.
It's not dispassionate. I'm just neither smug nor upset. I think you're arrogant and blind. What I'm feeling is a sense of exhaustion. To take a counter-example, Gandhi said something somewhat similar and while I don't agree with him either the specific arguments he made struck me very differently from yours. But then Gandhi understood this better than you seem to.
> Hmmm, so the actual morally enlightened view here is to forever hold on to our outrage against Hitler? Is this your claim?
> The act of taking on collective or social sins and forgiving them is an extremely heavy act.
But that is not being suggested. I don't even understand what it means. I am just pointing out that we carry around outrage at Hitler, and that we should collectively drop it. That's all forgiving means, not some super secret esoteric thing. Outrage and hate are not respectable emotions that we have to tread on eggshells around.
> So you believe, for example, that you can in some meaningful sense forgive Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine? And that it would not be presumptuous of you to forgive him?
> This is what I meant by mischief. The socialization of specific pain which is then given up to earn points by forgiving people who never actually harmed you. A sort of stolen valor.
Well, I can certainly not be seething at Putin, not be outraged at Putin. That's what forgiving means. That's not presumptuous, it's just making your soul a better place. And it doesn't deserve a medal, again, it's just about not letting your mind be a sunless place, making it shine like the sun instead. So I don't see the stolen valor comparison, as the exercise is not about striking a pose.
> Your issue is your assumption that you are in a position of such centrality that you can.
I am certainly in a position to police the contents of my soul and so are you. And I don't see how being outraged at Hitler helps anyone, not even the victims, so what exactly is the point?
> I think you're arrogant and blind.
Looking clearly at the ugly thing that is outrage and deciding to drop it is not blindness.
> But then Gandhi understood this better than you seem to.
Yeah, I am just beginning to write. I am still learning how to express myself in a non-triggering manner, but it's a tricky balancing act between doing that and successfully challenging the reader's worldview.
> No.
Ok, so instead of making forgiveness seem like some impossible cosmic duty as opposed to a basic spiritual task and resorting to the ad hominem fallacy, how about you try a positive exercise and tell me what is the morally enlightened position on Hitler.
By the way, did you read The Great Divorce? I feel like I am talking to the collared tragedian.
Agree intellectually, though I sure can't pull it off emotionally. But, seeing the phrase "few would attempt to mount a defense of outrage," I feel like trying to.
The defense is this: hatred is not its own entity, it's a spectrum of passion and the inverse of love. They both have the same underlying drive of passion about the world state; to hate a thing is to love its opposite, the stronger the one the stronger the other. To decrease hatred, one must decrease passion toward the world state entirely, and likewise decrease love for its inverse.
Now, the more common approach is not to decrease hatred as a whole, but to try to redirect it somewhere less offensive. Instead of reducing hatred for your hated category, you attempt to move targets out of that category; you should remember Hitler was a real person, and so you shouldn't hate him completely like you would hate a fictional villain like Joffrey Baratheon. But, we're getting near the point where no living person was alive for Hitler; he may have been real in the '40's, but nowadays he's fiction, like Attila the Hun or the Sheriff of Nottingham. Why shouldn't we hate fictional villains?
Do you want to live in a world where you see people toss starved corpses into a body trench, and it DOESN'T outrage you?
I can get behind that yin-yang view in an abstract way. We're animals, and have evolved some things that were good for the species but make life messy for individuals, like sex, love, and hate. The high-modernist impulse is to eliminate all these things, as Sparta and Plato sought to eliminate love, as the woke movement wishes to eliminate sex, to make life more legible and "perfectible". I think that (A) these things are too deeply embedded in our psychology to root out without really advanced genetic technology, and (B) the desire to simplify the human mind to better-conform with Plato's metaphysics of simplicity and perfection, if undertaken as an engineering program, would inevitably strip away everything of value. Trying to peel away the layers of irrationality and emotion to get at the pure rationalist core of humanity is an ancient project. But it's like peeling away the layers of an onion to get at the "true" onion. There is no "heart of the onion"; there is no pure rational core of humanity. And if there were, it would be unable to want or enjoy anything, as pleasure and dislike themselves comprise the fundamental irrationality that Platonists wish to strip away.
I think we shouldn't reduce the question to a binary "Hate is OK / Hate is bad", but consider the context. Hate is especially destructive in politics. This destructiveness isn't all inherent in hate. What does so much damage is when hate closes the mind. Perhaps it's possible, at least for some people, to hate with one's eyes open.
I think the most-destructive aspect of hating the Nazis is the facile dismissal of their philosophy, of why they did what they did. Nazism was defeated, but never rebutted. When I tried to find out why the Nazis did what they did, I found little academic scholarship. Nazi scholarship is almost entirely focused on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, and not even on the crucial question, Why did they pick the Jews to hate?
The reason is illuminating: they hated the Jews for exactly the same reason Marxists hate the bourgeoisie. The words "Jews" and "bourgeoisie" were synonymous to the Nazis. It wasn't Judaism they hated, but money, finance, free trade, individualism, gradualism, toleration, niceness, personal happiness in small things, and the way these things together always destroy traditional, medievalist, authoritarian hierarchies. This is why the Catholic Church has always allied with fascists. It, too, hates the "bourgeoisie", the individualism and market capitalism which brought its rule of Europe to an end.
The Nazis are different from the communists in that, while you can easily show that the foundations of Marxist ideology are stupid and its predictions empirically don't work, you can't easily show that the Nazis were *incorrect* in their fundamentals, which weren't false theories of economy and society (as with Marxists), but simply values. They valued above all emotion, action, "authenticity", and art. They were not the culmination of the Enlightenment (as Baudrillard idiotically claimed), but of Romanticism, and the inherently romantic historicism of Hegelianism. By failing to inquire into Nazi motivation, we failed to inoculate philosophy against the excesses of Romanticism and Hegelianism--which is the only way to prevent Nazism from rising again.
We also thus failed to notice the strong resemblance between the Nazis and Marxists. The labels "left" and "right" today are used to mislead people into believing that the center is midway between them, whereas in fact Nazism and Marxism are brothers, differing only in their choice of race-based or class-based hatred. When we draw the political map as being between left and right, ordinary people aren't even on the map.
(Re. the original question about hate: Can we renounce romance, in its most-general sense, because it gave us Nazism? I think not.)
There's also the problem of things tainted because the Nazis liked them. Representational art, for instance. Modern art and modernist music annihilated all other forms partly because he Nazis hated them. This is a very poor reason to destroy an art form, especially as the Nazis were much, much better-educated about art than their Allied counterparts were, and also than they themselves were about the issues they made such great mistakes in, such as philosophy and race.
Very interesting, thank you. I think we are, however, very far from the point where such a nuanced view of the Nazis can be aired in the consensus. Sounds like it could get you in trouble even if sequestered in obscure corners of academia.
> which is the only way to prevent Nazism from rising again.
Wouldn't you agree that in our cynical, ironical, technocratic times, the political energy for something like Nazism just isn't there? Sure, maybe some people can get riled up (see Trump, BLM) for some time but without support from the elites, they can do nothing.
> There is no "heart of the onion"; there is no pure rational core of humanity.
Well, I wasn't arguing about there being something like that, just about dropping outrage and hate because they are ugly and poison for one. There doesn't need to be some kind of ideal of perfection for one to see that, just the notion that one could be better.
> Perhaps it's possible, at least for some people, to hate with one's eyes open.
I'm not sure. To hate with one's eyes open would necessarily mean being aware of the burden that hatred is, that to hate is to suffer. And at that point, it becomes a pressing question to ask why should one carry that burden. And I am sure some philosopher could write a thorough case on why hatred is necessary, but at that point, one would just be questioning whether the philosopher is a real world instance of unaligned intelligence.
Re. "Sure, maybe some people can get riled up (see Trump, BLM) for some time but without support from the elites, they can do nothing." --
The woke movement is well-funded by the elites. For instance, the Influence Watch overview of BLM (https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/black-lives-matter-foundation/) shows that it was funded in 2016 by the leftist trust fund Thousand Currents, which is in turn funded by left-leaning trust funds, including the Kellogg Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the Wallace Global Fund, the NoVo Foundation, and the Libra Foundation.
BLM was next funded by the Tides Institute, a leftist middleman that funnels money from big foundations to leftist activists so that the foundation remains anonymous. The Tides Institute alone gives out on the order of a billion dollars per year.
If you've followed the various scandals about woke madness in Fairfax County, VA, that all happened because the Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP), which is funded by the Ford and Casey foundations, began in 2012 to study the power structures of Fairfax, produced a 2015 strategy document for activists pushing racial equity and nothing else (Luke Rosiak 2022, Race to the Bottom, chapter 14, citing https://www.racialequityalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/GARE-Resource_Guide.pdf). The activist middleman-funding group PolicyLink used that work to push through in 2017 a policy called "One Fairfax", which requires that racial equity be a factor in every decision by the Fairfax School Board and Board of Supervisors. CSSP then produced a 2018 strategy document (https://cssp.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/One-Fairfax-FINAL.pdf). These documents are actually quite innocuous, and leave out all of the tactics used on the ground to push policies through, which Rosiak says included using police to keep white parents out of school board meetings, having teachers assign participating in leftist protests to grade-school children as homework, and breaking various laws about school board procedure. The Teachers' Union cooperated with it because the equity agenda calls for eliminating standardized tests, which would also eliminate the ability to judge teacher performance. The Teachers' Union hates evaluating teachers. They prefer everything be based on seniority.
The Giving USA Foundation estimated that American individuals, bequests, foundations and corporations gave $449.64 billion to charities in 2019. That's 12% of US 2019 federal revenues – more than $1000 per American, and very nearly $4000 per household. That means that charity-directed activism is one of the biggest sectors of America's yearly budget, on a par with education and interest on the federal debt; and an order of magnitude more than is spent directly on political campaigns. Essentially all charity-funded activism is leftist; some of it is far left.
I recently visited the websites of 12 of the biggest charitable trust-fund foundations, with a total of $121 billion in endowments. I counted them as "woke" if at least half of their featured ongoing projects were either focused on gender or racial equity, or provided benefits only to non-whites. 11 of the 12 counted as "woke", the exception being the Pew Charitable Trusts. Only one of the dozens of projects about "equity" even mentioned wealth inequity. The Hewlett, Kellogg, Rockefeller, and Duke foundations excluded white males entirely from all of the photos on their home page.
According to the AP News article "Black Lives Matter opens up about its finances", "According to an upcoming report by Candid and the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, 35% of the $20.2 billion in U.S. funding dollars from corporations, foundations, public charities and high-net-worth individuals to address COVID-19 was explicitly designated for communities of color." (Yes, I'm embedding "accordings", bcoz the AP News didn't give the name of the CDP report, so I can't easily find it.)
AFAIK, there is no corresponding vast network of philanthropists funding centrist or conservative political activism. I don't think I could be wrong--there just isn't enough money left over in the US for such a hidden network to exist.
Ok, so the wokes are much better supported than conservatives (though I suspect they would dispute that). But I don't think what we need is for conservatives to be better supported, that's just falling into the binary. I am not quite sure what we need, politically, but I am sure we will need love, cheesy as it may sound. It's something I am interested in developing through my writing.
Because hatred isn't good and beautiful, and so, there is no point to having it in your soul.
> Do you want to live in a world where you see people toss starved corpses into a body trench, and it DOESN'T outrage you?
Well, if you can do something to stop it, I think of the Jedi Knight ideal in this instance, which is dispassionate action. If you can't, then there is no point to the outrage. You could instead feel pity for the state of advanced delusion and illness those shovelling are in.
Because there are far more of the sick and the deluded than there are literal demons. And even demonhood is, again, just very advanced delusion.
I recall someone had created an ACX comment search tool, I think it was based on ElasticSearch. Anyone know if that still exists / have the link? Google is really failing me, here.
Any chance you'd consider turning on likes for comments? I understand the downsides but the comment sections are getting so full bc there are so many of us only children/former precocious needs who love to hear ourselves talk it's getting hard to find the best content.
Yes, it can make a community bad if ppl vote up comments bc they pithily 'own' the other side but I trust the ssc community more than that.
Likes just encourage circlejerks and preaching to the choir and discourage real debate. Even people with the best intentions can't resist dynamics like that. Of course people are going to have wildly different views about what "the best content" even is.
Also, likes are technically supported, they're just not shown in the UI. Sometimes you'll get notifications about people liking your posts and that's why.
Dumb newbie question: I'm diving into the world of startup funding, and I'm struggling to understand how angel investors have a business model.
If I buy a Mars bar, I can sell it on (and get its socially mediated economic value) or I can unwrap and eat the thing (and get its intrinsic value.) I assume there are existing terms for this distinction; I don't know what they are.
If I buy shares in someone's company, and I give them £10k on the hope of a "10x 5 year exit" (jargon I learned all of five minutes ago) then I now have some pieces of paper, and the company's "valuation" - the money you'd get if you liquidated all its assets - has increased by £10k.
Excepting any dividends, which I have no power to force the company to issue, (and which I've just been told is not what investors are interested in), my shares are just worthless pieces of paper.
In five years, the company has grown 10x as big, and therefore my share of it is now worth £100k.
But the only way to get that value out is to liquidate the company and take my share - and I have no power to force that to happen either.
So my shares are still worthless.
I'm guessing my "exit" is selling the shares on. They are "valued" at £100k, so I sell them to you for that amount and make my exit. That's the socially mediated economic value of the shares.
But there's no intrinsic value to the shares - you can't unwrap them and eat them. You get whatever dividends the company may or may not choose to issue, and that's it. The £100k valuation is entirely conceptual.
You can borrow against the paper value of the shares. If you or your firm owns $100mil worth of stripe shares, a bank may give you $50mil in cash as a loan with the shares as the collateral. (this is also true for executives or others that own large amount of stock in a company - public or private. a bank, like goldman,may give you a loan at say 1% interest that you use to fund your life instead of selling the securities)
Thanks, but that doesn't answer my question of why those shares have value to borrow against in the first place. Lapras answered me down in the comments - basically I'd heard a bunch of stuff at once and had been lead to believe that dividends were a triviality, when actually they're what gives the shares their value. The intrinsic value of shares is that you expect that, one day, the company will pay you money because you have them.
In the world of venture-backed technology companies, the word you are looking for is 'exit'. An exit is an event that allows investors to cash in their shares for hard currency. The kind of exit that VC's are looking for is a 'liquidity event', which in practice usually means the company either goes public, or (more frequently) is acquired by a public company.
Once your shares are publicly traded, you can easily sell them for cash because shares are constantly being bought and sold at a publicly known price per share.
In practice, investors usually have influence over the company's decisions regarding if and when to sell the company or take it public. Except in rare cases, after a few rounds of investment the investors will collectively own more than 50% of the shares, and as long as they work together they can force the company to do what they want, as they normally have the majority of seats on the board of directors.
These are the basics; there are nuances such as proxy fights, cashing out early investors, and misalignment of interests between early and later investors.
If I understand you correctly, would it be a faux pas for a CEO to telegraph a lack of interest in future investment (ie, implying he will likely keep control of the company and leave an angel investor without a route to control him)?
Also, what kind of interests does an early investor have that a later one doesn't? Why aren't they both solely interested in maximising the promise of future dividends (which then cascade down to set the value of an IPO or acquisition)?
I still need to learn a lot about how to structure a company and what are the rules and forces at play. I want to get to grips with the world a bit better before I try to play in it - at which point, on a practical level, I'll be mainly interested in not making obvious mistakes.
> leave an angel investor without a route to control him
Normally startup investors get a seat on the board along with their investment.
> Also, what kind of interests does an early investor have that a later one doesn't?
Just spitballing, but they could have different liquidation preferences. E.g. it might be the case that Investor A gets paid out first and Investor B doesn't get a cent unless the company sells for at least $300m. In that case, A and B might have different opinions about selling the company for $250m.
Startup investments are normally for preferred stock, which has special benefits like liquidation preferences that mean they get their money first before common stock holders get anything.
Because if the company becomes big and successful, eventually it *will* issue dividends and/or stock buybacks (which are economically equivalent to dividends). The stock price is basically just a prediction market on the net present value of future dividends/buybacks, and thus rises with the company's fortunes. It's the same reason that anyone buys *any* stock.
So in this light, Amazon having a policy of not issuing dividends and sinking all profits back into the company was okay - because there was the understanding that they would one day reverse it (at which point the pot would be much, much bigger.)
I still feel like it doesn't fully add up, without some kind of solid expectation for how much dividends will eventually get paid out.
Eg, if the CEO (with a controlling share) is Ebenezer Scrooge and he only wants to give out £100 a year in dividends, doesn't that tie the value of the shares to f(£100/year), completely irrespective of the company's £1bn "valuation"?
And if that's true, wouldn't similar considerations apply to a CEO who expresses any kind of desire to keep the company in the family, or to use its proceeds for philanthropy?
A) Activist investors can step in and force the company to return cash to shareholders. You see this happen from time to time
B) The CEO has a fiduciary duty to shareholders
C) Usually the CEO is a large shareholder and thus has a personal financial incentive as well.
> And if that's true, wouldn't similar considerations apply to a CEO who expresses any kind of desire to keep the company in the family, or to use its proceeds for philanthropy?
There are examples of that happening, but normally if the company is kept in the family, it means they didn't sell stock to outsiders in the first place, so who cares? There's also some cases of weird dodges where the company promises to pay the first $X of profits back to shareholders and then devote everyone above that to philanthropy (I think OpenAI did something like that).
Re: A: What mechanism does an investor (or anyone else) have to force a CEO to do something that he doesn't want to do?
Re: B: I've just googled the word "fiduciary" and I'm guessing that one answer to A might be "sue him" for being in breach of his duty. But then they talked about having to prove the claim and prove the damages and I wondered how easy it is to do in practice - is this common or relatively rare?
Re: C: Yeah, I get that. I'm brand new and sort of leaping around between edge cases. Until I get a better feel for everything I'll be just as interested in "this is theoretically possible but no one would ever want to do it" situations as "real world" ones.
In a typical publicly traded corporation, the board has the power to replace the CEO. The kind of edge cases you are asking about would only apply in scenarios where the CEO (and allies) own over 50% of the shares. There are companies like that, but in general they don't sell their shares on a stock exchange for this very reason -- seasoned investors won't invest in a company structured that way; market analysts won't recommend them.
And before you even ask - the board can usually be replaced if shareholders representing > 50% of stock get together and force a vote.
The dynamics you seem concerned about do play out in cases where activist shareholders band together to force change in companies they feel are mis-managed and where the board is considered too beholden to existing management.
It's also worth nothing that proxy fights are annoying and expensive, so usually what happens is that the mere *threat* of a proxy fight forces leadership to listen to the activists, much like how the threat of a lawsuit is often almost as good as actually suing.
That's not quite right true. Some companies will never do this and their shares still won't be worthless. It's because *counterfactualy* if the shares ever sunk far below the value of the company there would be dividends/stock buyback/hostile tackover.
It would be interesting to find out what would happen to share value if a majority of votes (eg via special shares with extra votes) were owned by a trust whose bylaws prohibited it from ever accepting a takeover, voting for dividends or stock buyback.
I'm pretty sure all for-profit companies will eventually either A: issue dividends or dividend equivalents, B: go bankrupt, or C: sell out to someone (who will themselves eventually do one of A, B, or C). Unless bankruptcy is certain, the expected dividends will have a net present value, and that anchors the stock price.
It may be anchored by a long and flexible cable while bouncing around in an erratic current, to be sure.
Anyone read "Protocol" by Alexander Galloway? I got it for free from someone who didn't want it. It's old (2006), but the the thesis makes it seem like it would be an interesting read, at least from a historical POV:
"Is the Internet a vast arena of unrestricted communication and freely exchanged information or a regulated, highly structured virtual bureaucracy? In Protocol, Alexander Galloway argues that the founding principle of the Net is control, not freedom, and that the controlling power lies in the technical protocols that make network connections (and disconnections) possible."
I'm curious what the people here guesstimate the odds are of a Republican president getting elected in the US sometime within the next 20 years if we assume that nothing catastrophically world-changing such as WWIII happens. (What about within the next 50 years?)
I think that the expected number of Republican presidents in the next 20 years is pretty close to 5/2, but that the probability of at least one Republican is rather more than 31/32, because those elections will be anticorrelated. Perhaps as much as 99%?
Upcoming election in 2024? No idea, it depends who the Republicans put up and who the Democrats put up.
2028? I'd give them a better chance. Guesstimating 60%, higher if there's been a Democrat elected in 2024 - voters generally like a change when one party has been in power for a while.
So within 20 years about 80%, depending on the candidate put up, the opposition, the economy, the global situation and probably is Mars in Leo during the dark of the moon on the vernal equinox.
Ultimately for any political party to have six successive electoral victories would be astronomically unlikely, and I think there's only about a one-in-twenty-five chance that some political party other than the Republicans or Democrats wins an election before 2043.
I think your ~4% chance of a new party displacing the Republican Party before the Republican Party wins another presidency sounds high, I'd reduce that by an order of magnitude at least.
I think just about the only way you'd see one of the 2 major US political parties go that long without a presidential victory would be if it straight up fragmented and died out like the Whig Party, and while possible that seems very unlikely to me.
Then again, the Liberals were riding high in the UK until they weren't. So it does happen. Though we would need to see a strong third party coming up for that, unless the Republicans and/or the Democrats do fission into smaller parties due to inability to keep *everyone* in the one tent.
I doubt it's as high as 1 in 25 if we're talking about a national election, unfortunately.
Regarding the GOP specifically, I agree with your reaction about the 20 years. Not even the New Deal Democrats during the Depression+WWII won 6 consecutive presidential elections. You gotta go back to the early days of the Republic -- when a _much_ smaller portion of citizens were eligible voters, it took weeks just to get a letter from DC to Boston, there wasn't anything approaching real-time news media, etc -- to find a 7-election winning streak.
This month, I'm going to do Austebruary (Austerity February, in the spirit of Veganuary or Dry January). My grocery bill has bloated to about double what it was 4-5 years ago (granted, there's another person in the family now), and I feel like it's time to reset the hedonic treadmill. So, the budget for the month is $200 for the household, plus the considerable amount of food already in the fridge and cabinets. Normally, we spend around $800 on food/drinks/coffee/alcohol, not extremely profligate but not frugal.
New unit is the AUS (austere) = kcal of food / $ spent.
Rice, peanut butter, oats > 1000 AUS,
Bread, dried beans, whole milk ~ 500 AUS
Stay tuned for Manic March, in which we blow up the budget and have a lot of fun.
What about flour? Home made bread is easy, inexpensive, and a luxury food. It costs about .50/lb or a little less if you buy 25 lb bags at Costco, so more than 3000 AUS.
There is a book, _Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day_, that describes an approach to bread baking that avoid long time requirements, with lots of recipes.
A couple of open threads ago, in a discussion of to what degree charitable donations are tax dodges, there was mention of donated easements on land being a particular example. I commented that it _has_ been an abused practice but that the combination of formal accreditation of conservation land trusts, and new federal legislation regarding the actual tax deduction, was in the process of dealing with the problem.
I mention that again here just because the Charitable Conservation Easement Program Integrity Act recently passed into law as an addition to the year's omnibus federal spending bill. It was the product of some years of work to arrive at bipartisan agreement and is a relatively rare (nowadays) example of achieving that. The new law eliminates the most egregious abuses of the donated-easement deduction and toughens the IRS's review of such deductions generally. Here is a basic summary of it:
How many years, if ever, till AI Narration is comparable to the beste voice actors? What do you think about the skepticism put forward here?
"The thing is that the stuff that is required to narrate isn't included in the text. There is nothing for it to reference in the existing content to bring these elements to bear. It is a billion acting decisions made constantly that are not deterministic. And some of it is accreted over the entirety of the read - the development of a relationship and the tone of emotion over 300 pages. How is AI going to do that?
How can an AI decide which voice to use? A human can tag it - and tag things throughout the text to flag them for the AI to perform in a certain way - but pretty quickly that becomes more time consuming/expensive than just paying a narrator to read it."
"I KNOW that AI will get better. It will sound increasingly natural. But I don't think it can act without direction. And once you have to provide it direction with this granularity, that requires non-AI work to provide the context to do that. "
I've been working a lot as a New York "background" actor and the thing I've been wondering is how long until *that* job goes away. Although there's occasionally *some* need for background actors to actually act - bystanders flinching at an explosion, an audience laughing or cheering at the right points in a public speech etc - the vast majority of what background people do is simply populate the world as nondescript individuals. Shoot a daytime outdoor scene in New York City and you need a LOT of people to be walking by - a bit blurry and out of focus - behind or in front or in the general vicinity of the action.
I feel like we're VERY close to a world where you should be able to tell a computer to just automatically add an assortment of generated people to the background of a video scene. A dozen cops walking around a crime scene. A dozen businesspeople sitting at the desks in an office, occasionally getting up and walking to get a coffee or use the restroom or share gossip. A hundred pedestrians milling around Times Square. You'd film the main actors in some open space on their own then tell the computer to "add some background people here". An AI program analyzes the scene, figures out where people might tend to be standing or walking and puts them there. You twiddle a few knobs to add more or fewer people, make them go faster or slower, be dressier or more casual...
SAG members like me get around $200 plus meals for a basic 8-hour day but 8-hour days are rare; you'll make more than double that on a 13-hour day with overtime and penalties and bonuses. There are specific bonuses if the role requires a haircut or if you provide your own police uniform (I own one) or if you had to wait too long for food or if you had to get up too early in the morning or if you got rained on during the shoot or if you had to breathe smoke etcetera. It pays a bit more still if the role requires "special skills" - I like "special skill" roles the best.
Additionally in the current era you have to get a COVID test (at a location provided by production) a day or two prior and are paid $100 to take this COVID test. (Last year I took ~100 COVID tests.)
(To be more precise, the usual union rate is $187/8, meaning you get at least $187 but are paid overtime if it's more than 8 hours. Overtime pays 1.5x after 8 hours and 2x after 10 hours.)
If you're NOT union the usual rate is $165/10, meaning you get paid $165 for the day and don't get any overtime until/unless the shooting day runs more than 10 hours.
Agree with the skepticism. Even with perfect emotional beats from AI, the best voice actors can improvise things, or suggest improvements. So I'm going to say, several hundred years off. You've got to solve psychology first.
It depends on what the narration is for. If it's for interactive media, like a video game, the AI might have a set of goals, plans, and an emotional model, and would track gameworld events and how they affected its emotions based on its goals & plans. This complete and continuous record of every internal microstate of the agent could solve the problem being described.
If it's for static media, like movies, you might be able to use the same system for interactive media to track emotional state through the movie, IF it's all in chronological sequence AND no one in the film is concealing any information from the audience--the latter making most kinds of stories impossible to tell.
Perhaps you could get around the problem of hidden information by running the emotional simulator both forward and backward across the time of the movie, like an alpha pass and a beta pass with a hidden Markov model.
If not, then it's hard for me to envision how to communicate the appropriate mental state to the AI in any way simpler than just having an actor record the voice.
That the things "everyone knows" ain't necessarily so.
That people knew how the freakin' tax system works when it comes to their pay (this may be specifically Irish situation, but holy hannah the amount of people who are working adults employed for years who have no idea how their tax credits etc. work astounds me; I meet it in my job, I see it online - people just glance at their payslip and if it's pretty much the same from week to week they're happy and don't bother finding out what it all means, until the day it changes and then they're 'how come this isn't the same as last week' and you have to explain to them about cumulative tax basis).
That freedom of speech is one of the most important things in the world that you absolutely can't afford to lose - if you do, you end up with a totalitarian society.
I think it is actually. I like to keep it in mind when I think someone is stupid or wrong. Most of the time it’s just the fact that we all see things in our own particular way.
I don’t discount the similarities though. I love the Hindu cosmology that says we are all aspects of the same thing, Brahma. I am you, you are me. It helps to see the differences as less important.
The only way a society can be free and harmonious where every person is heard is for that society to never exceed ~10000 person. Hierarchies and their illegibility and alienation are the inevitable consequence of trying to squeeze together millions and tens of millions of a species that evolved to live with and understand only a scale of 1000.
Yeah, this is just all or nothing thinking. That there is a government does not mean there is no freedom. Hierarchies are morally neutral, they can be good (professor and students, good and evil) and they can be bad (dictatorships).
I graduated from a high school of fewer than 400 students total. It had hierarchies. Not everybody was heard.
I'd have to ponder some more about whether some people shouldn't have been heard and if so how many....but anyway as a practical matter, some people weren't.
Towards the end of the video, that when Julie was deep into Monat, she couldn't grasp arguments about how it was structured so she *couldn't* make money. This is the part which might be of most interest to rationalists. How can you tell when you're capable of using your mind?
Some people were asking about MLMs (multi-level marketing)-- here's a recent example, an interview with a woman who got out.
This is specifically about Monat, a shampoo MLM, but MLMs are pretty similar to each other.
Some highlights-- around 22 minutes, something that was actually able to shock me. They're encouraging their sellers to share their personal history of trauma and offer the MLM as a way of recovery.
Around 32 minutes, they're baptizing people as part of events.
At some point, an explanation that MLMs hijack the belief that effort pays off (true in many parts of life) to hook people into systems where they can't win.
I left an economically depressed area to go to school. People in dire straits seem like the perfect mark for these scams. A lack of hope and widespread innumeracy is fertile ground for grifters. Two people in my extended family got caught up in different versions of MLM. I tried to talk them out of it but couldn’t.
Previously we had a mention of the Catholic Church declaring black cats should be banned, and this came down to a misunderstood meme making the rounds.
Fortuitously, History for Atheists has a video about this up on Youtube:
People have no blinkin' idea of history, that's why I'm perpetually banging on about it here. They mostly get their views from movies, TV shows, and video games. They either never learned it in school, or just zoned out for that lesson.
And don't even get me started on the witchy-poo types. That's its own level of fruitcakeness.
I think Black Death is best documented in Europe. There is some evidence from Middle East and little to none from India and China. Certainly it did not live on in the collective memory of these regions unlike Europe. Did it not spread to these regions and if it did, was it not as bad as in Europe?
There's actually abundant evidence from the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa, and China about the course of the Black Death in those areas. Arabic chronicles say that city of Cairo suffered a massive wave of fatalities leaving only a few survivors. It spread along the North African Arab kingdoms and reached the Iberian Peninsula (Grenada) about the same time it hit the neighboring Christian kingdoms. Wikipedia says it's not well documented in Grenada, but Michael Dols shows it was very well documented, indeed. It's just that the Christians destroyed most of the Arabic archives when they conquered Grenada. But the nobility and scholars of Grenada fled to North Africa, and many of the contemporary accounts found their way into the archives on the other side of the Straits of Gibraltar.
The original theory was that it came from China via India to the Mediterranean. I think it's now pretty clear from the archaeological record that it originated in Central Asia. There was an article in Nature a few years back that about a dig in Central Asia that uncovered a mass graveyard full of plague victims—and genetic testing confirmed they died from Y. pestis. I think some grave markers dated it before the European spread. It's well documented that Baghdad, Damascus, Jerusalem all got hit hard before it spread to across Asia Minor and reached Europe. About the same time it reached Asia Minor it wiped out Cairo and spread along North Africa.
The reason China was offered up as the origin of the Black Death is they experienced it earlier than Europe. But it was the Interior cities of China that experienced the first wave of what the Chinese called the "Great Pestilence" in the early 1330s. These were cities that connected to the Silk Road, so it seems reasonable to think it came out of Central Asia first. A second wave hit Chinese coastal cities starting in 1344 ( a few years before it hit Europe). Then in the 1350s, a third wave hit northern China.
I don't know much about the timing in India, but do know that some European travelers reported a great plague there. Also, it was assumed that the Black Death didn't cross the Sahara. But there's both archaeological and documentary evidence from the kingdoms of West Africa that it did.
There seems to be some contention over did it originate in China or not, and there's a view that it came from the steppes and spread west along trade routes, but only spread east into China much later (e.g. the 19th century outbreak):
The mediaeval European outbreak seems to have been astonishingly deadly. And there are diseases which we don't or can't identify today but which were endemic earlier, such as the "sweating sickness" which killed a lot of people during Tudor times (Thomas Cromwell's wife was sick in the morning and dead before he came home in the evening, for one) but we don't know what exactly it was or why it was so lethal, and why it seemed to die out.
When I think of District Attorneys, I think of people like Janet Reno and Rudy Giuliani and similarly horrible folk in my own region. Are there any good DA's? Why are the famous ones always horrible people? (Some of those famous ones got so with good reputations, so you can't say it's a matter of mere infamy.)
The structure of prosecution in the US is confusing and most people understandably don't understand it. Neither one of your examples was a DA, and Reno wasn't even technically a prosecutor (though she oversaw many). Janet Reno was the Attorney General of the US, i.e., in charge of the Justice Department. Rudy Giuliani was the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which is a federal prosecutor. DAs (who confusingly are not all called DAs) prosecute state crimes. There is a DA for roughly every county in the country. 90% of people don't know the name of the DA for their own county. Famous ones are definitely causing a selection effect. They are famous because of what they did AFTER they were DAs, or because they were DA for about 4 or 5 very high profile places, like Manhattan or Philadelphia.
Also of note, most DAs are elected (unlike US Attorneys) and therefore tend to carry the stink of politics about them, rather than the 'heads down do your job' line prosecutor stereotype.
As far as DAs go, former DA for Manhattan Henry Morgenthau was pretty famous, and he had a sterling reputation.
The not charging this, not charging that, stuff got the most attention, but the really interesting one is the sentencing guideline. At sentencing, in addition to your sentencing recommendation, state the benefits and costs of your recommendation, including the pricetag of the period of incarceration you're asking for.
Well, it's pretty cool if you live in the burbs and violent urban crime is just a story you read about in the Inquirer. Not so much if you live in the city yourself:
Crime is complex - you don't just look at risking crime rates and arbitrarily point the finger at policies you don't like because you don't like them. So if the people closest to the problem still think Krasner's a good DA, despite rising crime rates, maybe they're seeing something you're not?
Sure. Or maybe enough voters in Philly are morons, bought off by their local machine, et cetera. These are the same fools that elected Frank Rizzo, after all. I'm amused that you appeal to their judgment as a source of wisdom.
Careful how much you trash Philly, my friend. A city of 1.5 million people dwarfs one man’s knowledge in aggregate, and the wisdom of crowds being what it is, probably has better judgment on average than most.
So however dumb you say Philadelphia is, it’s probably a good bit smarter than you are.
Also, in all seriousness Gritty might be listening and that thing is as unnatural as it is untethered to the laws of god and man.
Vagaries of the Electoral College system aside, if Matt Gaetz were winning his elections by an 80/20 margin, and one of his critics decided to lead with:
"Matt Gaetz? Pshaw! The only people who like Matt Gaetz are people who don't have to *live* in the Florida 1st District where they have to be represented by him!"
Pointing out the whole 80/20 victory margin thing would seem like a pretty salient counterpoint.
Do you have a preferred alternative? The converse of discretion to not bring charges would appear to be requiring charges to be brought regardless of the prosecutors' own judgment of the best use of their office's limited resources, or the likelihood of conviction. Even if you do think discretion is a problem, that would seem like a cure fantastically more wasteful and expensive than the disease.
...yes? Could the fact that there's not enough time in the world to prosecute everyone who has committed infractions indicate that perhaps there are in fact too many possible infractions? Maybe an omnipresent state where everything is either mandatory or forbidden is not a good idea?
Instead of saying "we're not going to prosecute (some) people for this crime (but we'll totally keep it on the books in case we have to go after someone)" maybe that shouldn't be a crime in the first place?
>>Could the fact that there's not enough time in the world to prosecute everyone who has committed infractions indicate that perhaps there are in fact too many possible infractions?
I mean, that is possible, but by no means certain. Maybe the justice system is overloaded because “too many things which should be legal are illegal,” but it’s equally possible that the strain just comes from lots of people committing lots of crime. If a wave of burglaries rolls through a town and overwhelms its justice system, we wouldn’t say “well maybe that’s just an indicator that burglary shouldn’t be illegal.” Likewise, if we cut the NYPD down to a total staff of four kids, a van, and a dog, one wouldn’t look at the ensuing inability to clear cases and say “must be because too many things are illegal in NYC.”
Lack of sufficient resources to clear criminal cases is a *possible* indicator that “too many things are illegal” but it’s hardly a determinative one.
And besides, even if you cut the criminal code substantially, you’d still need prosecutorial discretion. Plea bargaining, for example, is impossible without the prosecutor having the discretion to say “okay I could charge you with 1st degree manslaughter, but if you plead guilty to 2nd degree manslaughter I will drop that charge.” Take that discretion away, and every single case will need to go all the way through trial, and if you do that your costs per charge skyrocket astronomically.
For example (springboarding off of my conversation with Carl above), Pennsylvania spends about $220 million on criminal courts (https://www.ajmc.com/view/estimated-costs-pennsylvania-criminal-justice-system-from-the-opioid-crisis). That’s the cost with roughly 95% of cases settled by plea bargain rather than going to trial. I’m not unsympathetic to the idea that lots of things are illegal that shouldn’t be, but if you ask PA to eliminate plea bargaining, then just start legalizing things until it can successfully run all of them through its justice system on a $220 million budget, I think you are going to end up having to legalize a *lot* of things that people generally would consider “crime” before you got the budget to balance.
Similarly, “I could charge you as an accomplice, but I won’t if you cooperate and testify against the boss” is another form of prosecutorial discretion. So -poof- goes your ability to flip witnesses to prosecute organized crime.
Same goes for “I could charge you with possession a controlled substance, but I won’t if you enter this supervised rehab program and stay clean for 12 months.” That's going to cost people opportunities to get their lives together.
And what does a discretionless prosecutor do with “I shot him, but it was in self-defense?” If the prosecutor has enough evidence to bring the murder charge, but thinks there’s a 60% chance the self defense claim will prevail, does she have to charge anyway? What if she thinks that percentage is 70%? 90%?
And to top it all off, you have the simple fact that in the absence of discretion, prosecutors will still exercise discretion. They’ll just half-ass some cases while working harder on others – and it’s pretty much impossible to police that.
I see where you’re coming from, but I think that you have to find a way to better distinguish between “discretion” and “abuse of discretion.” Right now it seems like you are conflating the two so tightly that any act of discretion is in and of itself an abuse, and it leaves you in danger of throwing out a whole lot of baby with your bathwater.
" If a wave of burglaries rolls through a town and overwhelms its justice system, we wouldn’t say “well maybe that’s just an indicator that burglary shouldn’t be illegal.”
Except that's already happening. For burglaries and vandalism police already won't bother trying to solve them (unless they can get that smexy hate crime angle), but they will give you a police report so you can file an insurance claim. What we have is that laws get enforced on a political basis -- like that guy who was just acquitted on the (politically popular) FACE act upgrade of a simple assault charge (and which the video proves kind of conclusively he never should have been charged with in the first place). So laws are not now a way of reducing crime, but a way of enforcing political conformity.
And even if they were being enforce in a politically neutral way, if the laws don't actually reduce the crimes they're supposedly preventing, why have them? If having an (unreduced) crime rate better if we're also punishing people? This ties into your point of: "They’ll just half-ass some cases while working harder on others – and it’s pretty much impossible to police that." Humans do not always respond to social engineering in the way they're "supposed" to. Cranking up the number and flexibility of excuses to throw people in cages and take their stuff doesn't actually make them any more effective (unless your actual goal is to make it easier to put people in cages and take their stuff.)
TL;DR: Banning your way to utopia has a long history of failure.
About 30 years ago, Seymour Fischer and Roger Greenberg published "Freud Scientifically Reappraised", where they examine the results of thousands of studies in an attempt to establish the accuracy of Freud's theories. As I recall, in about half of the cases Freud's theories were supported by clinical research.
I found the book difficult to read. The same two authors published a similar work in the seventies, whose title I have forgotten, that was more accessible.
In the late '70s something called Transactional Analysis was popular. IIRC, it featured a Parent, a Child, and a 3rd thing, perhaps a Teacher. It sounded a lot like to recycled Freud to me at the time.
Now there's a counseling technique called IFS (Internal Family Systems). It's said to be the next big thing, and will revolutionize counseling. Without knowing a lot about it, I think it too sounds a bit Freudian.
Many (most) of you will know more about this than I do. Thoughts?
We still take seriously the idea of the subconscious. However, it wasn't actually Freud's idea; he just got credit for it somehow.
I think his ideas about dreams are worthwhile, specifically that a dream is symbolically about some issue that's troubling you. Though in my experience, it's more-often a direct, overt enactment of my worries, than a symbolic mask of them. I guess he probably did more harm than good by insisting everything must be symbolic.
It is necessary to know Freudian theories to understand some 20th-century fiction, like James Joyce's Ulysses IIRC. Large chunks of literature and continental philosophy invoke Freudian ideas, so if you don't know them, you won't understand that literature or philosophy. But understanding of both the stories and the philosophy is helpful mainly to realize why they're dumb and should be taken down from their pedestals.
Regardless of whether anyone *should* take Freud seriously, the prior odds strongly predict that anyone who takes Freud seriously today is a nutcase.
Given how little of modern psychology replicates it may be fruitful to revisit older generations of psychologists whose writings are more akin to philosophy of the mind rather than science. I'm more partial to Jung myself
I'm curious, how do Freud's conceptual machinery enable critical theory ?
The only thing I can think of is that Freud makes a lot of fuss about the Subconscious and how it drives behaviour, and critical theory-ish frameworks posits this as one of the main mechanism of inter-personal racism/misogyny/blah ?
Nah it's just an opportunity to paste in the rote critical-theory bash.
At this point in lots of online places the question posed could be about taking Kant seriously, or alchemy or mercantilism or Quakers, and half the replies will be about critical theory.
Well, critical theory certainly deserve all of that and then some.
That said, let us not jump to conclusions about Argentus. They could have good reasons for linking Freud and critical theory, this an open thread so axe-grinding could have been done in a seperate comment of their own. Maybe this is not axe-grinding.
For a different example, there were a lot of pieces recently claiming that"Fact check: Biden did have the authority to declassify documents as vice president" due to an Obama executive order. If you actually read the executive order you discovered that it gave the VP the power to classify documents and it gave any classifying authority the power to declassify documents he himself had classified. The headlines were truthful if you interpret "declassify documents" as "declassify some documents," but that obviously was not how they were intended to be read, given that nobody was claiming that all classified documents Biden ended up with were ones he himself had declassified.
If you read to the bottom of the article, at least in the later versions, you discovered that the VP did not have the legal power to declassify all documents, although one legal scholar quoted, after conceding that that might be true as a matter of academic constitutional law, said that in recent years people had been acting as if he did. None that I saw mentioned that the fact in the headline, insofar as it was true, was irrelevant.
I read that story. It's not the media lying, it's the authors. And they're not exactly "lying" - they're just using "core rotating" in a different way than people expect.
What I learned from actually reading a few articles about this a few days ago is that everyone assumes that the core rotates at the same rate as the surface of the earth, but in fact its rotation can be a slightly different speed. People have hypothesized for a while that this speed goes from slightly less than the speed of the surface to slightly more than the speed of the surface and back over the course of 70 years or so. The current observation is that this whole thing seems to be precisely on track, as predicted, and is now moving from slightly faster than the surface to slightly slower than the surface.
What makes it fun to talk about is that you can express the whole thing in a rotating coordinate system that tracks the surface. Now the core can be thought of as accelerating a bit for a few decades, and then slowing down and stopping, and then spinning the opposite direction a bit for a few decades, and then slowing down and stopping again.
Once you say it like this, you can avoid saying anything actually false, but you can activate all the ideas people have about how the magnetic field is driven by fluid flow in the center of the earth, and magnetic field reversals are dramatic events that happen every few tens of thousands of years, without actually saying any of that. You just say that the core stops its rotation.
But actually, for most of us, the new information is that the core even *had* a rotation in this coordinate system to begin with - most of us probably assumed that the core went at the same speed as the surface!
I don't think the study authors are at fault; they correctly state what the paper is about in the very first sentence. It's then clear from context that when they talk about rotation, they mean rotation relative to the surface ("differential rotation") rather than absolute rotation.
The fault lies with the headline and article writers who took that statement out of context, where it starts to mean something completely different.
The bar for lying talked about in The Media Very Rarely Lies is much higher than this. It only counts instances where someone knowingly and intentionally lies.
I don't think they'd consider themselves to be lying. It's taken from a direct quote from the study authors, and it's a true statement that happens to be confusing and misleading without context. It has stopped moving relative to us. On top of that, the article itself clarifies the confusing part, which I think excludes it from the category of lying Scott's article was talking about.
My experience is that whenever a news outlet discusses a technical topic with which I’m familiar (aviation, bread, computers, music theory e.g.) every word is incorrect, including “and” and “the.”
I suspect, but cannot prove, that this is true for everyone with any specialized technical knowledge.
The Earth's core has not stopped rotating, that's a ridiculous and bombastic assertion. What the study actually says is that it's no longer rotating faster than the surface is; it has stopped rotating *relative to the surface*.
“The inner core doesn’t come to a full stop,” he said. The study’s finding, he said, “means that the inner core is now more in sync with the rest of the planet than a decade ago when it was spinning a bit faster.”
Yes, they make false claims in the headline and first sentence of the article, then correct themselves deep in the article body to deflect accusations of malpractice. Doesn't make the headline any less false.
The study says "rotation has paused" and "a turning-back", the news says "stopped turning" and "reverse". How much difference is there in that terminology? Layman me sees none.
The difference between those two phrases isn't the issue; the issue is that they're both completely false. The core is still rotating. The linked study is about the fact that the core is now rotating ever so slightly slower than the surface rather than faster.
The study provides the appropriate context for the reader to understand that they're using "rotation" in an atypical way. (It's the very first sentence.)
Most news stories assume the surface of the earth as the reference frame. For example, if there was a story about a person who was traveling across the country, and the story said that they stopped moving, that would mean that they stopped moving relative to the surface of the earth, not that they were stationary in some inertial reference frame while the earth rapidly spun away from them.
This particular story even includes a quotation that seems aimed at clarifying this.
It makes sense to talk about movement relative to the surface of earth for objects that are on the surface, yes. I don't think it makes much sense when that's not the case.
If I saw a headline that said "the ISS has stopped moving", I wouldn't assume that it was now at rest relative to the surface of Earth. Indeed, when people talk about the speed of a ship in orbit, they use its speed relative to the center of Earth, not the surface.
This is further complicated by the fact that while linear motion is relative and there's no such thing as "a still point", rotation is not relative. Objects can be said to be objectively rotating or not rotating, with no reference frame needed.
The most relevant evidence doesn't come from physics though, it comes from the article itself and the reaction to it. Do you really think the person who wrote that headline was trying to convey that the motion of Earth's core had changed by about 1 degree per year relative to in 1970, having absolutely no noticeable effect on humanity? Or do you think they were trying to make people panic with a dramatic headline reminiscent of a disaster movie?
(I wonder now, in the movie The Core, was the plot that the core stopped rotating completely, or stopped relative to the surface? The Wikipedia page doesn't say. I guess the average person's knowledge of geophysics is poor enough that they might see both options as equally cataclysmic. So I guess the headline could be both intended to be accurate while also intended to make people panic.)
Funnily enough, at about 2 minutes into the interview at the top of the article, the reporter themselves indicates that they've misunderstood what happened, by saying "but the surface never rotates in reverse, right?". Also, the graphic they're showing on screen appears to display the surface as rotating and the core as stopped entirely. So no, I don't think it's going to be obvious to most people that the article is talking about motion relative to the surface.
I feel like you're arguing several contradictory things? You started this thread by saying this was an example of the media "outright" lying, but your last paragraph seems to be arguing that they were honestly mistaken, and your fourth paragraph seems to be arguing about the impression they were trying to create. I'm confused about your thesis.
I don't know what was going on in the head of the author, so I can't say for sure that they were lying; it's certainly possible they were mistaken. But I'm pretty sure *someone* who looked at that article knew it was wrong and chose not to correct it. If a media article says something blatantly untrue, the organization as an entity knows it's untrue, and chooses not to fix it, I think that qualifies as "the media lying", even if a particular author was not lying.
I don't think the reporter in the video clip is the one who wrote the article; I was using them as an example of how I think most people would not immediately assume that the title refers to differential rotation.
What I think I was trying to say in my 4th paragraph is that the headline was clearly not written with intent to inform. But I agree that that's different from lying, and probably not relevant here. Apologies.
I think what this comes down to is just whether it's obvious to most people that "rotation" means "rotation relative to the surface". It's not obvious to me; when I saw this statement, my thought process was "the core has stopped rotating completely > that seems implausible > they probably mean relative to the surface". I had to work out the intended meaning from my knowledge of physics, which is knowledge that a lot of people don't have.
Any advice for finding remote positions in AI safety or EA?
I'm a physicist-turned-data-scientist, currently on the job market. My spouse has an extremely stable position, so I have the luxury of working in something less lucrative, but with high impact. I'm open to work in EA or AI, with the caveat that it needs to be a remote-first position. I poked around LW, but didn't see any discussion.
Due to my work I had access to a set of medical data covering 100M people. After reading the original post about it I was curious to its rarity. And found on the order of 10 cases.
So while it no doubt exists in higher numbers a *very* slim number of people have it to the point they seek medical assistance. Out of respect for these people's privacy I didn't investigate other than looking at a count, but I do wonder how much of that was incidental to the original cause of workup.
Unsurprisingly this can be very mild or very severe. I thought it was telling that people who commented on that original post typically mentioned a very mild impact "I can make the lines move if I think/focus in a certain way" type of effect. Meeting the criteria for HPPD? Sure, but definitely not something you'd mention to a physician.
Part of QA/QC involved incidence rates for disease. If the UK has an incidence of 58/1,000 diabetes, that's what I should see in the data. Similarly 1/1,000 for X cancer diagnosis and so on.
Since it makes no sense to build these validations one at a time, there was a table with a list of all diagnosis codes and their count in the data.
Viewing aggregated, de-identified data is not a violation of HIPAA.
Do you think your insurance company doesn't know you had a lipid panel?
> Out of respect for these people's privacy I didn't investigate other than looking at a count
That is about as far as you can go in the US. All of that data needs to be de-identified.
I spent a few years writing software to render medical images. I had a lot of sample image files to work with but they always had to be carefully anonymized.
You're correct it would have been a HIPAA violation to look any more deeply than a de-identified count. No valid medical or business purpose - and even so, the system was set up so it used an internal ID number not linked to anything else. Only time we'd see patient names was sometimes clinical staff would say "Why does John Smith have a diabetes flag" and we'd have to "break glass" to get their internal ID and find out they were in A&E for hyperglycemia 3 weeks ago or similar.
That entire substack is really great. And the series on nuclear power plants was the closest I've ever gotten to an answer about "which regulations could you change that would meaningfully decrease the cost of nuclear power without compromising safety too much".
What I took away from it is that the single biggest one is: rather than a plant being grandfathered to regulatory changes once it is complete/operating, make it grandfathered once construction begins. Apparently it is _very_ common for regulatory changes after a plan is approved and construction has started to result in finished work being ripped out and redone at a much increased cost. This not only just increases the cost of construction but also significantly increases the _length_ of construction, which increases the cost of financing.
We already have a point where a plant no longer has to be changed to meet regulatory changes (within reason I'm sure, if some catastrophic flaw was found, I'm sure even existing plants would need to be updated). Just moving the point in time when that occurs by a few years would make construction quite a bit cheaper on average.
I've really loved the rise of public-facing blogs / newsletters on relatively specialized technical topics. Some of my favorite examples:
- ACOUP (gears-level understanding of premodern military and economic history)
- Admiral Cloudberg (causes and investigations of aircraft crashes)
- Bits About Money (payments technology and business practices)
- Construction Physics (what it says on the label)
- Money Stuff (explaining finance news)
I'm thinking (as a hobby-- I have a day job) of trying to develop enough understanding of an unfamiliar area to do my own writing on it, along similar lines to the examples above. So I'm asking for some brainstorming help: what topic(s) would you enjoy reading a technical but reader-friendly weekly-ish blog about? Only constraint from my side is that it can't require PhD-level expertise or industry-insider knowledge.
I find reading air accident investigator reports wonderfully soothing. All that fear and horror distilled into a calm, rational description of events and recommendations for future avoidance.
I'll point out that the 2 blogs from your list that I have read (and loved) are written by people with graduate level degrees and many years work experience in the subject matter.
What I am saying is, can you write about your day job? I couldn't imagine those blogs being written by people with hobby level knowledge; it would come off as a cringy youtube influencer thing that I actively try to avoid.
I took a stab at doing a professional-knowledge-level blog in my primary area of professional experience, and found the exercise to be interesting and rewarding. And got some nice reader feedback. But after a few months I concluded that doing it well really demanded it being my fulltime job not a side thing, so I stopped.
Also at that time (this was long before Substack existed) the monetizing part was really daunting. Maybe that part is clearer and more plausible now? Though of course there is also more competition...anyway it was more the feeling that a side hobby couldn't help ending up becoming half-assed that made me put down.
Because I think that your comment is a great idea: an older (some 5ish years old now?) non-substack blog is Brulosophy( www.brulosophy.com). It's about home brewing (the beer kind, not the software) and their whole stick is "let's test all the common wisdom/best practices in the home brewing world". They are, for hobbyists, extremely meticulous, and their analytical techniques, while not complicated, are decently rigorous. I think they are a pretty good benchmark for scientific investigation of hobby activities, especially ones where the criteria of success are so subjective.
(In 2022 I got a completely remote job and, living the meme of every Californian, traveled and lived in 5 different cities to see where I wanted to move to. I thought I’d write up what I found)
--Detroit--
I’ve had a lot of people ask why I would even consider Detroit, so let me go over the things Detroit gets right. Go to your map app of choice and look up Grand Circus Park in Detroit and look up what’s around it. In mid-2022 there were multiple nice apartments you could rent for less than $2000 a month within 2 blocks of this park. That means you’re walking distance from the baseball stadium, the football stadium, the opera house, Fox theater, the river, the hockey rink, and multiple outdoor parks. This area is premium; a lot of work has been done to clean up this area, it’s really nice and there’s lots of decent outdoor dining. And I adore the architecture, every other building is this gorgeous turn-of-the-century design that’s just fantastic. You can happily walk around downtown Detroit for hours and just enjoy the beauty. No joke, based just on infrastructure, Detroit was the best city I visited and it wasn’t close. If you want an affordable, walkable urban city, Detroit has it.
Having said that, Detroit is the only city I am not considering moving to because it has the worst vibe of any place I’ve ever been. The city has PTSD and it’s utterly tragic, so let me explain through four stories. First, if you arrive in Detroit on a Saturday, like I did, the city will absolutely enchant you; it’s packed full of people having fun and outdoor festivals and it’s really moving. And then, like around 4PM on Sunday, something will start to feel weird and it’ll bother you and then you’ll look up and…no one is on the street. You’ll look behind you, down three blocks of the urban heart of Detroit, and they’ll be one person walking and two cars on the road, then you’ll look down the street in front of you and they’ll be no one walking and three cars on the road. The city just dies and I’ve got the pictures to prove it.
But if you’re intrepid like me, you go to a local community garden to volunteer, because the urban blight has opened up a ton of land for large urban gardens and they’re actually pretty nice. And I show up and there’s like four old ladies and I figure, alright, that’s a little lame, but at least they’ll talk my ear off and I’ll learn all about Detroit. Dude, no. They didn’t talk. Like, if I asked questions and drove the conversation, they’d tell me some stuff but it was 70% me talking. And then I went to Comerica Park to watch a Tigers game, and the park is fantastic, and I started talking to these two Canadians, they’re super friendly, and I ask them about this, how Detroit is so awesome and yet everyone, especially the people who live there, are so down and closed off. And they laugh and start telling me horror stories about where their grandparents were in the 60’s Detroit race riots and how they just barely survived.
So yeah, that’s the vibe. If you’re from Detroit, I’m sorry, but your old ladies don’t talk, your Canadians tell race riot horror stories, all your restaurants are closed at 7:00 PM on a Wednesday, and there’s a CVS on Woodward Ave that I don’t think was open once in the two weeks I was there. That’s what I mean by vibe; people act like they’re in a warzone and no one wants to live around that.
So, because I know people are going to bring this up, the issue isn’t crime. Detroit has a crime problem, no doubt, but I felt safer in Detroit than I have in Stockton, in Oakland, and in the worse parts of Sacramento, and that’s just in North Cali. I’ve walked the streets at night and I’ve walked from the Eastern Market to the downtown and done things I wouldn’t have felt safe doing in Stockton. Yes, no doubt there are neighborhoods to avoid but I’m not in those neighborhoods and I don’t want to be. People aren’t just avoiding those neighborhoods, they’re avoiding a gorgeous downtown that just isn’t that dangerous and I fundamentally don’t get it. Detroit has a crime problem but it doesn’t have a uniquely bad crime problem and if you’ve lived in one of a half dozen West Coast cities, you’ve experienced the equivalent. This isn’t crime, this is some kind of weird PTSD where really horrible things happened in the past and they just can’t get over it.
So no, I’m not seriously considering Detroit. I wish I were and, to be blunt, it’s not the city, it’s the people. An entire major metropolitan area without optimism, energy, or enthusiasm; who want to be around that?
And in all seriousness, I think the greatest and easiest act of urban renewal you could do in America today is find some way to get 3-5k Californians or Texans or just…normal people into Detroit. Because there’s a real first mover problem. Nobody in their right mind would want to move to Detroit on their own but if there were a couple thousand normal people who do basic stuff like eat out on a Wednesday, so there would be restaurants open on a Wednesday at 7:00 PM, and host basic stuff like board game nights and river walks, then Detroit would be the coolest city I visited and I’d probably be moving there. But Detroit badly, badly, needs a social scene of ordinary happy people and until they find a way to get that, no amount of urban renewal is going to make a difference because it doesn’t matter how pretty the dance floor is if the natives refuse to dance.
I was about to quibble over this; but I think you are right. PTSD is a good approximation of the attitude that many residents of Detroit feel about its history. During the 1920s to the 1950s, Detroit was a happy city with a big story: the businessmen of Detroit had helped put the world on wheels, and then helped the United States manufacture war equipment to win World War II.
From the late 1960s to the modern day, the story has been a city torn apart by crime, depopulated and financially strapped, and with a sense of social distress and opposition between City and Suburb.
I'm a lifelong resident of the "Detroit Metro Area", but I've rarely visited the downtown area more than a few times. If there isn't an event happening in that area, there aren't many reasons to go to the downtown district.
I do have to ask: did you get a chance to see the International Freedom Festival fireworks, in the middle of Summer? It's a collaboration between Detroit and the city of Windsor in Ontario. It's one of the yearly events that draws immense crowds into the downtown area, and is usually a very festive weekend. The fireworks are usually spectacular; I don't recall ever seeing as impressive a fireworks display anywhere else.
Yeah, I wondered about the opposition between suburbs and city. Are there other cities like that? I used to go out with a woman from Oakland County (Detroit suburb for those who don't know) and I was surprised at her feelings towards the city. I grew up in suburban New York and thought of the city as wonderful. Even the Bronx. Even in the 90s. She thought of Wayne County as a place you passed through to get the airport. I just figured suburban kids everywhere thought of the city as the cool place, but apparently not Detroit.
The PTSD point might be true of other rustbelt cities. I was in Reading PA one Sunday and I thought about how beautiful the old buildings were and how cool it was that all the signs talked about the steel manufacturing that happened there and how weird it was that there were like 5 people out on the streets. I had an hour or so to kill before my bus and it took a decent amount of time just to find a place to have a drink.
Anyway, looking forward to the rest of the series. I've always wondered what Salt Lake City was like.
Detroit *used* to be (in the 50s through early 70s) a lively city full of high-earning people, families raising children, people who had hope and energy for the future, and who found their city a friendly Midwestern burg, a place to move to if you had ambition and drive -- all the things you imagine it might become in the future if all those people moved back.
They're not going to. Detroit already had its chance and blew it.
There is a big cultural difference between the northeast and the west coast esp. California that can explain the vibes seeming off to you but the place actually not being bad. I grew up in the northeast and Californians can give really bad vibes to me - I have to actively translate what they are saying to some extent. When I was visiting math grad schools a Russian grad student in California explained it to me as "in New York when they say 'fuck you!' they mean 'hello' and in California when they say 'hello' they mean 'fuck you!'"
I really liked this write-up and would love to see your others! I have also lived in many different cities/areas, and the differences between them is very interesting to me.
I want to see the rest of them too. One thing you can’t pick up in a couple weeks is the annual climate. I love my community for a lot of reasons but summer humidity is really a drag.
I lived in Atlanta for a while, and I now live in a suburb of Cleveland. Restaurants being closed at 7 pm on a Wednesday is weird to me; I didn't know it was like that anywhere.
What do rationalist types mean/what are they referring to when they say “alpha”? As in “There is no alpha left in western interpretations of Buddhism,” from the house party essays. (This is hard to Google because of the more popular slang meaning of “alpha.”)
Yeah. I work in investments and haven't ever heard anyone use it in this slang sense except here. But then, I don't operate in very trendy circles.
To say "there's no alpha left" in the slang sense I take to mean that something is basically played out, what's worth saying or doing has already been done. In investing, alpha represents an *extraordinary* investment return -- even if there's no alpha to be found, you can still expect to generate an *ordinary* return through a passive strategy. I suppose the same analogy to ordinary returns carries here -- it may be that you can still write new books that teach Buddhism to Westerners and perhaps people will find them useful and buy them, but there are no profound new insights to be gained this way.
No, the idea as I read it is that the Bay Aryans are tech-strivers looking for that massive get-rich-quick opportunity, so what they're after is the alpha, the rich strike, the unexploited vein of gold. The joke is that they're also hyped-up cranks who think they can turbo-monetize everything, including Western interpretations of Buddhism.
I guess the idea is that if you cannot get an extraordinary return, you might as well put your money into an index fund, and get the ordinary return will less work. Or look for some other opportunity that might provide an extraordinary return.
I still haven't found a pattern in when hidden and public open threads come around. I get the sense that they happen once or twice a week, and that it may even be tied to something obvious like the day of the week, but I haven't paid enough attention to notice yet. (As far as I know, it hasn't been publicly announced as a schedule.)
For this and other blogs like it I've considered writing something down in advance in a Word document, then pasting it into a post when the thread rolls around.
But I still have to take the time to write the dang thing...
Yes I do. Other times I think of things on a Thursday that I think are super important and relevant, and then by the time OT rolls around I just feel like they aren't worth posting about.
A question for Scott specifically, to help settle a Manifold Market question for me: could you confirm this to be your mastodon account? https://schelling.pt/@scottalexander
Suggestion: Every open thread you say, "95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here." which is good but you could add something like "Recent subscriber only posts include post A and post B. You can see a full list of subscriber only posts here."
The reason I suggest this is that I think many people don't realize that you have a substantial number of subscriber only posts and this would be a non-naggy way to let people know.
Also a list of all your subscriber only posts would be useful to long term readers who become subscribers and want an easy way to browse all the posts they couldn't read before.
I agree with this suggestion. Also, I know Scott is reluctant to plug subscriptions but my suggestion is to be a little more sales-y about them. You are creating a product that people clearly value. We are constantly bombarded by companies emailing us daily. You can remind us to subscribe a couple times a year!
I think that plugging things are always annoying regardless of value. (unless the thing being plugged just so happens to match a need of mine so well that I decide to go get right now)
That said, I think that if you provide anything for free, you always have the right to plug any other thing, subject to a plausible ratio. I think 95% free is a ratio that gives Scott substantially more plugging rights than he is using.
To all the magicbuilding nerds and fans of Brandon Sanderson: I'd like to share an essay I wrote on allomancy! It includes an analysis of the system and an expanded set of allomantic powers I made for fun.
Pretty interesting! I wasn't expecting an expansion out to 5*5, but it makes a lot of sense, the way you put it. And I think you were right to avoid generic space-warping abilities - Allomantic abilities are mostly extremely specialized (except for Rioting/Soothing, arguably).
Just to be clear, I am not asking for advice about whether to let others do as they please. I'm also not looking to explain the CYA phenomenon as it relates to public reliance on expert recommendations for extreme caution around some health issue or other.
I am only interested in hearing from people who can supply research or professional anecdotal evidence to support a claim that giving dogs cooked mammal bones is dangerous, and in particular, that it is so dangerous as to warrant not giving them cooked bones at all.
Why aren't there more music acts like Jojo Mayer's Nerve (https://youtu.be/SIahbUYxdfE) that perform EDM/House/etc. with live instruments? (Or at least, live drumming?) It feels like it should be a sweet spot—all the thumping goodness of the genre/rave experience, but with the added thrill of seeing it created entirely live, the heightened exchanges of energy between the performer and the audience, etc.
But i.e. at like Burning Man this year, there were no acts even remotely like this, just normal DJs, and Nerve themselves don't seem to play at similar festivals or even raves consistently. What gives?
• Maybe people are really there just for a specific aural experience, and don't even really pay attention at all to how the music is being produced. It's not at all like, say, a Beyoncé concert to them, it's more about the drugs they're tripping on, the light shows and the huge subwoofers, the people they're with. (In this case, why hire DJ's at all, then? Or is the position of "DJ" a kind of minimum-viable source brand differentiation?)
• It requires a lot of talent/skill/practice to perform that genre convincingly well. Not only in playing your instrument, but in honing your sound so that your live instrument convincingly mimics the style of electronically-generated music. So maybe the sample size of musicians in general who would even try is small. Moreover, anyone who can play at that level probably finds other kinds of music (Jazz, etc.) more personally appealing to play/build a career on, even if they could make more
• People *would* be more entertained by live musicians and the overall experience would be rated as higher-quality, but not enough to offset the increase in costs. Maybe it's just easier touring with a laptop than schlepping an entire drum kit around the world? This probably entails all kinds of costs that get passed on to venues, who, all things considered, would rather stick with the cheaper, more predictable formula DJs offer.
This is something I've thought about a lot over the years, seriously enough to design and build my own electronic instruments and control surfaces with an eye toward real-time performance rather than studio production. For context I saw a great deal of live music between 1990-2015 or so, mostly punk and indie rock. I also went through several electronic music "phases": EBM synthpop, '90s-era "industrial", and techno/breakbeat/gabber style EDM. (The examples I could list are pretty dated.)
Naturally I sought out live electronic acts, and couldn't help but notice that their stage presence and sound mix were often pretty terrible. Some of the more energetic acts on record had very little going on in person; I think the term of art is "laptop band". I think there are a few factors at play:
1. It can be very difficult to translate between the studio workflow and live performance, even for traditional bands. Electronic acts have enormous flexibility of sound in the studio; for gigging this is either reduced to a subset playable by live musicians, or relies on a lot of automation which limits interactivity and spontaneity.
2. It's difficult to gig with a big pile of delicate, expensive, interconnected synth hardware, so the temptation is strong to consolidate functions into a keyboard or two or even just a laptop. Unfortunately this isn't a very interesting or interactive stage setup. Most performers naturally wire straight into the PA, which doesn't have the acoustic stage presence of e.g. a guitar and amp.
3. The succession of repetitive beats associated with EDM and other uptempo electronic genres is a grueling test for a live musician playing acoustic instruments. Drums in particular are usually reserved for machines ("'cause they don't make mistakes"). I do recall seeing a live psytrance band, Analog Pussy, who did use a drum machine.
Einstürzende Neubauten comes to mind as a classic example of a very synthetic or mechanical sound coupled with an involving stage presence, but I wouldn't call it dance music. They used several handmade acoustic instruments, and I believe they made a joke at one show about giving away their US-bought air compressor after the tour rather than flying it back to Germany.
I have been led to believe that an intentional philosophical precept of the original techno DJ movement was to shift attention from the performer back onto the individual audience member's experience. The DJ's job was to create a soundtrack with narrative development and shifting moods, unobtrusively guiding listeners on their own personal trip. An acoustic live performance analog might be something like a drum circle. I think much modern DJ-ing still falls within this ethos, although I'm not sure it's relevant to superstars like Tiesto or Deadmau5. Moving the focus back to DJ-as-performer seems to miss the point.
I'm excited to check out the acts others have mentioned!
I am super curious about your home-made instruments and control surfaces! If you have a link to photos or info I would love to learn more.
I have recently experimented with live looping using the OP-1 Field, while singing over what I'm playing - just did a live performance last night and it went pretty well! The OP-1 has some limitations, but I was impressed with how capable it was live.
Something I've noticed over time is that usually when someone asks, "Why doesn't anyone <x>", "Why isn't there more <x>", etc, the answer is usually "They already do, you just don't know about it", with "There are constraints that make it infeasible" being a distant second. The world is big, and it's rare to know it so well as to be able to truly assert that people aren't doing X, especially when X is outside your area of expertise, and double especially when you have expertise in some other area, which can fool you into thinking you have comprehensive knowledge about the field of X, too. As Sam pointed out, there are lots of big, well-known acts (even headliner status) that do this already - I'd throw in the Glitch Mob, Kalya Scintilla, Robert deLong, Nils Frahm, Beats Antique, Govinda, Dirtwire, etc. Throw in electronic-influenced bands, like LCD Soundsystem, synth driven jam bands like STS9 or Tipper, and there's quite a diversity of genre-bending live/electronic music out there.
Now, Burning Man is kind of a special case closer to the second type of answer for a few reasons - for one, the logistics are an order of magnitude more difficult than performing at a venue in a city, so the things you note about schlepping all the instruments applies even more-so. Live instrumentation electronic music tends to be a gear-heavy production, with lots of synthesizers, drum machines, amps, mics, instruments, etc. And for two, it's not a music festival, it's a self-produced event where no one is getting paid to perform. For three, the environment is extremely harsh, especially on sensitive gear like wooden-bodied string instruments or certain types of drumheads which can get wrecked by the ultra low humidity, or all the delicate electronics which can be damaged by the inevitable dust infiltration.
So you have a radically more difficult schlepp, for zero pay, on top of the risk of damage to your kit - if you're a working musician, you're literally risking the equipment you need for your livelihood, in return for... well, the things people get out of Burning Man. In that light, perhaps it makes sense that you wouldn't have seen much in that genre out there. Not to say there's none (did you really see every event on playa? Even the ones occurring simultaneously, on opposite sides of the city?), and live instruments and bands do come out (eg the kinds of people who would perform at La Victrola, or Playa Pops), but it's definitely rarer.
I think your last point is most of it. Every musician in a band decreases the revenue per band member - DJs can undercut bands, and still make more than individual band members.
Also, Top DJs when performing arent just hitting play on a setlist - some do, but many don't. They are live mixing sets, adjusting EQs, crossfading, creating transitions, and adjusting the mix; different DJs will be doing different combinations of those things and more. Some will have synths and drum machines running off a synchronized clock, and they can adjust synth settings like filter cutoff, LFO frequenxy, etc. live. In these cases they are essentially a live musician, and their audience can feel the connection between themselves and the performer.
Live musicians emulating EDM is shaving a square peg to fit into a round hole - it can work if thats the niche you're into, but you are probably better off just getting a round peg, or finding a square hole.
Technology and economics have shaped music genres.
A hundred years ago if you wanted to fill a huge dance hall with music you'd need a big band. Then, amplification made it possible for a four-piece rock band to fill the same room while paying far fewer people -- gig payments went down, killing off the big bands.
Then, electronic music made it possible for a single DJ or rapper to make enough music to fill the same room, fewer people again, killing off the rock band.
Next we'll have AI musicians and we won't need human musicians at all.
Long before electronic music existed you could have replaced live musician with recorded music and people's ears would not have known the difference. But people long to connect with a human performer; that is why live gigs have survived the coming of sound reproduction.
Therefore, AI will never replace live musicians.
In fact, live musician is one of the very, very few jobs I can think of that aren't in danger of being taken away from us by robots. Live musicians have already been made superfluous by sound reproduction, if you don't care about the human element. The musicians who survived that, have proven that the human element is necessary, and are therefore here to stay.
I was going to mention Odesza as well, great example of what OP is looking for.
Goes to show that this is a successful niche; these are big artists with many fans - my comment above is to explain why it isn't as common as just a standard DJ set.
> ... psychedelics continue to hallucinate for months or years ...
It's worth noting that in a large portion of cases the symptoms reported are mild, sometimes pleasant, visual changes (e.g., "when I look at monochrome surfaces, they look sparkly"), not hallucinations as in "there's a pink elephant in this room!"
The person I know who has the syndrome has mild visual changes, but is very disturbed by them -- they affect him sort of the way tinnitus affects some people. And they make him worry that he gave himself some permanent brain damage. I'd worry too, in his place.
This is why actual data collection is a good thing.
For example, plenty of people have reported myo/pericarditis from the the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, but when you dig into the data, it turns out the vaccine still mostly makes sense.
The challenge is that the public policy people fail to realize that the sets of people "who would clearly benefit from the vaccine" and "who are at high risk of complicates from the mRNA vaccines" don't overlap much. But acknowledging that would mean that messaging would get more complicated.
The biggest use case is being able to get the experience of hanging out with people without hopping on a plane (assuming the tech ever reaches parity with real life).
In the near term, probably the biggest milestone is if it gets good enough to replace a big monitor setup and let you do all your computer work in VR.
I envy you for even thinking of this question. To me it seems too obvious that letting people who can't go anywhere to go places virtually will be the biggest use case. Think the bedridden, the handicapped, the inhabitants of nursing homes, their caretakers, parents of young kids, the poor - all of us who would like to travel, hang out with friends somewhere nice, go to an event somewhere, and who can't do anything like that. Imagine giving the gift of virtually going places to your relative who's stuck in his nursing home bed until he dies.
Also, think about the blind. For at least some of them this could become their vision. I'm worried that there wouldn't be enough money in this, though, and so it won't happen. (Why on earth isn't every blind person currently wielding a phone with OCR and text-to-speech? Is that because there's not enough money in this to bother making it happen?)
Microsoft has its "Seeing AI" app, which has a bunch of functions intended to be useful in that field. But while I played with it a bit, I'm not vision-impaired (beyond what's correctable by glasses), so I can't really evaluate how well it does.
Following up, this Reddit thread suggests Seeing AI is useful, and gives some other suggestions as well. Notably Be My Eyes, which lets human volunteers assist via video call. (Which seems obviously useful, but I had no idea something like that was available.)
I went through 3 flip phones in that time, and I don't recall any of them having OCR and text-to-speech, though I can't currently check. I do think you might be wrong about "every phone".
But yes, that's exactly my point. OCR and text-to-speech weren't invented yesterday, but, last I asked (it's been a couple years, admitted), a blind person couldn't go grocery-shopping without help. Perhaps there is something now, perhaps there was even something back then, but it looks like there's really not enough effort put into accessibility technologies - presumably because there's not enough money there. I'm afraid the same thing will happen with VR - that those who would benefit most from it wouldn't be able to.
My desk computer, where I search recipes is distant from my kitchen. So I typically take a picture of the recipe with my phone and carry that to the kitchen. The camera software asks me if I want to convert the text to a document.
Does this software exist for visually impaired people? That I don't know
Currently the real value of VR is in enterprise, not consumer. For one, training simulations where the real article would be expensive - think letting an aircraft mechanic practice disassembling an engine. Another area big area is architectural visualization (aka archviz) - because of VR's unique ability to let you truly inhabit a space in a scale accurate way, it's being rapidly adopted for experiencing how a building design would look and feel "in real life", before construction begins. And it's also useful in 3D workflows, eg 3D modelling, CAD, game design, etc, where you can see what you're working on in a scale accurate way, move/place/shape things precisely with your hands, etc.
Well all sorts of other entertainment for one. Walk through the Taj Mahal, stroll the Louvre, bushwack the Amazon, sit in on your favorite sports event or concert or theater... And then all the other stuff people mentioned, education, planning, manufacturing.
When Google Glass first came out, I was in a shop where we had very expensive specialty boards we were reworking. I thought it would be great for doing circuit board debug and repair, being able to see (select specific internal layers) or component labels, and schematic diagrams, whilst looking at the real thing
- Education : Imagine atoms you can walk through, an Ancient Athens you can live in, a neural network (whether a Computer Science or a Biology one) that you can see and trace its activation signals for yourself. Imagine doing all of this collaboratively with students or study partners. Imagine learning a new language and casually strolling into a virtual bar with dozens of natives to chat with you (VR), imagine doing it while in an actual bar having a drink (AR).
- Mind Augmentation : VR\AR\MR (mixed reality) are probably the closest thing you can get to brain-computer interfaces without opening up the brain. This means it has all the potential for Intelligence-Amplification. Perfect eyesight by way of cameras that relay their processed outputs directly into your eye, visualization of non-visual signals (magnetic fields, radar, sonar, etc...) and integrating them into the visual field. (for example, objects behind walls are rendered as wireframes) And of course, you can integrate other people's visual stream as well. A mechanic seeing a car engine in minute details as its running beneath the hood, or an electrician\electrical engineer seeing electricity flowing in real time through the circuits and wires you're manipulating, are 2 applications.
- Empathy Augmentation : In the Black Mirror episode Men Against Fire, a military makes its soldiers see enemies as cockroaches through AR, so they can kill and hunt them more effectively. AR can be used for the opposite as well. Like, a vegetarian plugin that intercepts your visual stream and replaces real animals with cartoon depictions of them intended to arouse sympathy. Would people be arachnophobic if every spider in their world is Lucas (https://www.youtube.com/@lucasthespider) ? Would people eat meat if every cow in their world is a talking and animated presence with humanoid eyes that can explain Peter Singer's arguments against killing animals with a soft feminine voice ?
- Ideological Overlays : More generally, AR and VR can be used to "overlay" an ideology over the real world. Think religious plugins that modify the visual stream to inject angels and demons, or nationalist plugins that depict immigrants as invaders speaking barbarish tongues. Or, perhaps more controversy-inducing, think nationalist Augmented-Empathy plugins that depict immigrants with the same skin color and ethnic features as that of the host country's population, so people who dislike them will like them better. (Why is this wrong, if at all ?) Imagine being able to adjust the phyiscal characteristics of anyone you see as if they're a simcity character.
- Aesthetic Overlays : Like the above but for Aesthetics, like a black-and-white filter to make the world look more like 1950s noir films. Or an oversaturation filter to make the world feel unreal and colorful.
- Subtitled Visual Stream : An end to all language barriers, translation software takes the voices from your physical surroundings, translates them, and either intercepts your audio stream to replace the foreign-language voices or just puts subtitles over your visual stream.
- Annotated Visual Stream : Wikipedia over your eyes, everything and everyone you look at have an "info box" next to it detailing a google search. Can be augmented with your own notes about the subject.
And it goes on and on and on. I think AR\VR\MR should really be called "Constructed Worlds Tech" to convey how utterly revolutionary and disrupting it would be. It's literally putting a computer over your 2 eyeballs, your primary sense organs.
The obvious consequences is that everything a computer can do now, but requires a dedicated "session" of interaction with a seperate device, can be done effortlessly and continuously and in real time when you put that computer over your eyes. But another slightly subtler consequence is that this computer can also do fundamentally new things, because it has access to your visual stream and other sense streams. (Just like personal computers enabled everything mainframes can do and much more, and smartphones enabled everything personal computers can do and much more. Every new generation of computers moves closer to the user, enabling fundamentally new modes of interaction and use.)
I'm not necessarily disagreeing (as much as it depresses me), we already have precedent in how the massively powerful super-computers lying around on our desks and pockets are not being used as "Bicycles for the mind" as was predicted in the 1980s and 1990s, but wasted on advertising and other inane rubbish.
But I interpreted OP's question as "What could *possibly* be this technology applications?", so I just wanted to correct the unfortunate tendency to view VR/AR as toys and argue for how mind-bending and reality-bending they can be. Whether that will turn out to be true is anyone's guess.
"Would people eat meat if every cow in their world is a talking and animated presence with humanoid eyes that can explain Peter Singer's arguments against killing animals with a soft feminine voice ?"
Yes? I don't know why, but this is making me think of the cow in Douglas Adams' work:
I have to say, being made to listen to a cartoon-anthropomorphised cow quoting Peter Singer would make me even *more* eager for it to be killed. "Okay cow, so Singer has a good case about animals. Don't worry, I'll think of you as a two year old human child of mine instead, that makes it perfectly fine to kill you. Oh, and don't worry about possible hypothetical cannibalism if I consume your meat, I'll make sure to swap the meat with someone who had *their* imaginary two year old cow child killed."
I mean, this only works because you have an unsympathetic cartoon avatar in mind, as well as (perhaps) an opposition to the specific kind of argumentation it uses.
But are you saying your sentiments would survive making that Cow as child-like as (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/679058450054081026/), with voice, mannerisms and all ? Making the AI voicing the character detect your ideological leanings (e.g. Christianity) and use them accordingly (e.g. theologian-class bible-based reasoning against killing conscious souls) ?
It's easy to say yes when you can't see it yet. Before the camera and the television, it was also extremly easy to dehumanize people. If the burning vietnamese girl (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc) was ever described in words, in the middle ages for example, the result would plausibly be "Haha barbaric heathens go burny smokey" or "Lies, a bunch of bullshit and lies spread by the barbaric heathens".
But an image of a burned crying child running naked is just that much harder to argue with.
"theologian-class bible-based reasoning against killing conscious souls"
Oh, that one's easy, bruh (or sis): cows don't have souls.
The cartoon cow can be as uncanny valley as you like, but it's a cartoon, it's not a real cow. Even your linked cute cartoon cows are still too animal-like to be anything more than "dinner".
Now, if there were some kind of chimera created that combined human and bovine DNA so that the resulting hybrid creature were somewhere near real human intelligence, that might be a different case. The human DNA is what makes it a grey area. Pure bovine DNA but 'uplifted' on the other hand - might be rational, is still an animal. Again, depending on the level of intelligence in that case, there would be a real argument over should these creatures be possessed of human-equivalent rights.
But a present day cow, that we only see a cutesy cartoon avatar of, a fake creation that is not how a real cow acts or behaves? That's dinner.
The whole premise of this is that the AR/VR headset will do what the animal in question cannot do and is incapable of doing: speaking, being rational, appealing to us, being as neotenous cute as possible, etc. Since the real animal cannot understand Singer's arguments much less recite them off, it is incapable of being the thing presented. It is not a rational being arguing for its life, it is a beast that is produced for food.
Soft-voiced lectures from cows totally are not the way to go. If you really want to get vegetarian mileage outta the headset, make the cow scream when you stick your fork in the steak. Every single time. In fact, once you have whole-body VR, give wearer the sensation of having a fork stuck in their butt (at least for when they're enjoying a rump roast).
Not an expert on Christian theology, but my impression is that everthing there is debated to the Nth degree and back. Are you saying there is not a single theologian who argued for animal souls' sacredness ? That would be weird to my preconceptions.
>a fake creation that is not how a real cow acts or behaves?
Plenty of things we take for granted and base lots of things on are fake. The Mercator projection you learned in school for one. The 2D solar system diagram for another.
Lets look at what we see today, there is a huge opposition to eating cats and dogs even among people that we don't think of as animal rights advocates, but most inner life we attribute to cats and dogs are straight up fiction (the voices, the feelings, the narratives,...). We know this too, but we think it's an accurate enough inference of their internal states to act on. Dogs might not feel "pain" or "sorrow" in the strict pedantic sense, but they feel something that might be approximated as those human feelings. The cow avatar is a similar narrative tool.
It also doesn't have to work on you specifically, if it worked on a sufficient number of others. Where would you get the meat from if all the butchers in a 100-KM radius had a moral epiphany listening to the Cow and now refuse to ever hold the machete again ?
>only see a cutesy cartoon avatar of
No reason that's the only thing you will see, perhaps making the cow more human-like is what will tickle you ? the AI will discover that, and act accordingly.
There is the distinction between the vegetative soul, the sensitive soul (which animals possess) and the rational soul which only humans possess, being made in the image and likeness of God (which does not mean "has two arms and two legs" https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1093.htm)
"Where would you get the meat from if all the butchers in a 100-KM radius had a moral epiphany listening to the Cow and now refuse to ever hold the machete again ?"
In that case, if all the butchers gave up their trade, and there were no meat products at all in the shops (imported from places where butchers still operated), I suppose I'd have to eat - more fish.
perhaps making the cow more human-like is what will tickle you ?"
Absolutely not, in fact it would have the opposite effect. I know what real cows are like, and the more 'human' the cartoon cow was presented as, the more the difference between the fake and the reality would be obvious, and the easier it would be to ignore the fake. You could have a cow like Cow and Chicken, but even though that was probably the best representation of a cow in cartoons, it's not at all like a real cow. Real cows are not bipedal or verbal.
Sure, but why do you think the AI will be trying to convince you to stop eating cows. Surely civil rights for AIs and removing outdated and harmful regulation limiting the materials used for making paperclips will be more pressing concerns.
Cannibalistic peoples practiced cannibalism, they only stopped when they were conquered by Theists who violently stamped it out.
If modern progressives discovered a modern cannibalistic society, would the progressives: celebrate the diversity, ignore that behavior, or violently oppose it?
Contra what everyone else here is saying, I've actually noticed a decided turn away from cultural relativism among contemporary progressives.
Putting it somewhat cynically, the current approach seems to be claiming that all undesirable practices aren't a *truly* traditional part of the culture in question, but a recent result of Western influence.
E.g., I regularly come across progressives condemning anti-gay laws and attitudes in contemporary Africa as genuinely terrible, with no apparent fear of being condemned as racist or culturally imperialist for doing so. However, they often argue that *pre-colonial* African cultures accepted homosexuality, and Victorian colonial governments and missionaries were responsible for changing this.
That's just fargroup stuff, like condemning people for cheering the killing of Bin Laden and then cheering the death of Maggie Thatcher. The people downstate who drive pickup trucks and vote Republican are Deplorables worthy only of abuse; the faraway people who raid the neighboring tribes for slaves to sacrifice to their gods and then eat their remains are Noble Savages.
The Rev. Isaiah Bunter has disappeared into the interior of the Solomon Islands, and it is feared that he may have been devoured by the natives, as there has been a considerable revival of religious customs among the Polynesians.--A real paragraph from a real Paper; only the names altered.
Novelty, perhaps. Or "Me Reacting To The Latest ..." energy.
You can also imagine eco-terrorist groups exploiting vulnerabilities in the devices' software and injecting code against the will of the wearer's. If the devices are as crucial to life as today's smartphones or more, people will continue wearing them even if they are infected with malware.
VR is starting to come online for visualization in manufacturing - it’s easy to design a part or assembly that looks great in CAD but ends up nearly impossible for your builders to actually interact with in life-size.
So if you’ve got a big complicated assembly you need to maintain, you can use VR to say, make sure it’s actually possible to get the necessary tools through the access panels and reach everything you need to work on.
Better training? I mean, flight simulators can be seen as an early crude attempt at VR, and they've been used for decades to train pilots. Depending on how good the VR is, you could imagine using them to study anything from geology to surgery to karate.
AR would be great for this too. Look at equipment and get all they info about it you need overlayed in your vision. Need to replace your timing belt? Here are the steps right in your face. Construction working building a house? Here are the plans, right in front of you, put the wood where it needs to go. etc etc
Telepresence could also be useful for some kinds of work, like tele-operating a robot on the Moon or something.
Also, for letting people virtually visit environments that are very difficult to visit in-person--maybe I can experience something of what it's like to walk around at the bottom of the ocean without actually having to become an expert diver, or experience the top of Everest without being capable of climbing it.
I expect you could use VR in some kind of therapy, e.g., for exposure to limited/safe amounts of things you're phobic about.
"Telepresence could also be useful for some kinds of work, like tele-operating a robot on the Moon or something."
That reminds me of the Zelazny story "Home is the Hangman" which is not without its flaws but a wonderful story, it made an impression on me years ago which has not faded.
An assumption I've seen made, I think, is that GPT-like text generators are capable in principle of generating true and novel information about the physical universe, based strictly on textual I/O. This is because natural language encodes true information about reality, and a sufficiently powerful language-predictor would be able to extract all possible knowledge about reality from words and use it to develop whatever physical theories or technologies it needs to pursue its goals, paperclip-related or otherwise.
If that's the case, then it should also be possible to train a GPT-like generator strictly on text from before 1900 or so, and prompt it to produce the equations of General Relativity. (The same would go for producing Newtonian physics from pre-1650 text, or Kepler's planetary motion from pre-1550 text, and so on.)
Is that a usefully testable prediction? Could GPT-3 or any other near-future GPT accomplish those tasks, sometime before Final Ultimate GPT comes along and generates all possible knowledge instantaneously?
It's certainly testable. You could train a LLM on pre-1900 text and ask it to explain the Michelson-Morley experiment or something.
The assumption you mention I personally find very unlikely to be true. Natural language can encode information about the real world, certainly, but it need not. What it necessarily encodes is our belief in various models of the real world, and these may or may not be correct. Often they are not. For example, one would expect the corpus of medieval text to encode Aristotelian physics, a humoral theory of disease, and alchemical models of chemistry, all of which are briliant, self-consistent, logical, and wrong.
Natural language encodes true information about what some humans want other humans to believe that they believe about the physical universe. Plus lots of fluff. That's not *entirely* uncorrelated with physical reality, but I very much doubt you're going to get a better understanding of reality out of it than was held by the people whose natural-language exchanges you are training on.
But your proposal is at least testable, and I'd be interested in seeing someone try it.
> before Final Ultimate GPT comes along and generates all possible knowledge instantaneously?
Final Ultimate GPT would simply be a model that is perfect at answering the question "Given everything in this training corpus, what's the most likely next token in this string?"
I don't know how good exactly that would be (and I certainly wouldn't have predicted how good GPT-3 would be if you'd asked me ten years ago) but I don't think it's reasonable to expect GPT-* to ever be smarter than its training corpus.
You can imagine genuinely new insights that GPT _could_ have. If one source says that Alice was murdered by a tall thin man with a butterfly tattoo on his right buttock, and a completely unrelated source says that Bob was a tall thin man who happened to get a butterfly tattoo on his right buttock the day before the murder, then maybe it can infer the as-yet-unknown fact that Bob killed Alice. Of course it's just as likely to make tens of thousands of false accusations for every true one.
Has anyone else noticed that DB Cooper looks a lot like Lord Lucan?
""" AlphaFold is not a system which can computationally predict nontrivial behaviors of systems of atoms. Predicting atoms is so hard, just because of how quantum physics works, that we cannot even calculate the boiling point of water to within 10% error. (I talked to an expert in physical chemistry about this—apparently the core of the issue is that protons are actually waves (of course), but if you try to actually simulate them this way you can barely handle, like, one water molecule for one picosecond.)
Simulating physics is not AI—it is just math. The ML AIs we have are terrible at math and can barely multiply three-digit numbers. Maybe the future ones will be more magic—but they will have to build some pretty magic supercomputers, first. And of course, those magic supercomputers will have to be physical systems… """
AI-accelerated simulation and modelling is definitely A Thing[1][2][3][4][5][6], but the crucial observation is that the AI is not "ChatGPT" or any language model, this would be the completely wrong level of abstraction to bring ML to bear on science.
Neural Networks are universal function approximators, approximation is the name of the game in Science and Engineering. ML is not terrible at math, they are just terrible at math done by predicting tokens using probabilities estimated from a dataset that has nothing to do with math. GPT sucks at Chess too, I bet, but AlphaZero doesn't.
There is an entire approach to AI-aided physics that is like "Run a compute-intensive physics simulator to produce lots of data, train a neural network on this data to learn whatever approximation it can of the simulator's mechanism, then use the neural network as a lightweight version of this simulator", and it's a marvelous idea that seems to generate a lot of buzz recently. I'm no expert and time will tell if this approach or others is truly a breakthrough instead of empty hype, I just want to point out that general ML is a real competitive tool in our toolbox and it's only the "Predict The Most Probable Next Word" paradigm that is unsuited to anything but chatbots.
Empty hype. Mostly. The goal of simulation in basic research is rarely to actually predict macroscopic behavior -- they are insufficiently reliable for that. The goal is to test out microscopic models. You input a certain model, run the simulation, see how well it corresponds to macroscopic observation, and use that to go back and refine (or discard) your microscopic model, and you hope this gives you insight into physical reality.
For example, one can argue the whole field of simulations of classical fluid systems was kicked off by the discovery in the late 50s that a fluid of hard spheres, with no attractive forces at all, exhibited a freezing transition in computer simulation. That was pretty surprising -- I daresay most people believed, along with even current basic science and college textbooks, that fluids freeze because the attractive forces between atoms and molecules compel their orderly arrangement when the temperature falls far enough. That turns out not to be true! Fluids freeze because at a certain density the entropy rises (ironically) when objects that repel each other become organized into a lattice. The role of the attractive forces is just to increase the overall density as the temperature falls -- they have, with the exception of ice, diamond, and some other weird materials, little to no role in the formation of the lattice structure itself.
So that's the kind of insight you can get from computer simulations -- but notice the causality runs the opposite of what you might think: you observe what the simulation predicts, for a judicious choice of microscopic parameters, and depending on how that corresponds to reality you learn something about the microscopic model..
The problem with a de novo neural-network representation is that it necessarily abstracts away your microscopic model, so you're not going to learn anything about it by doing more simulations. It kind of short-circuits the whole point.
That said, I am sure there are many useful applications (which is why I said "mostly.") An ML model can readily point you in better directions, by discovering patterns you wouldn't notice on your own. I mean, that's their strong point -- detecting patterns in very high-dimensional data.
I think you're massively overestimating how much information content text has. There is no way a pure text predictor can derive general relativity from raw text. (Unless your idea of a pure text predictor is running a simulation of a human brain matching Einstein's over input.) Kepler's laws are said to be derived from Kepler poring over Tycho Brahe's data, so I think that GPTx does have a chance there, but then again, this data is just a bunch of numbers, why not feed it directly to any neural network as true numbers (instead of pixels or text) and have the network skip directly to the interesting part of figuring out the relation ? What is being gained by representing the numbers as raw text ?
Generally speaking, this article (https://markusstrasser.org/extracting-knowledge-from-literature/) and this blog (https://commoncog.com/tacit-knowledge-is-a-real-thing/) [link is to a specific article, browse the rest of the blog for more] made me pessimistic and skeptical of every worldview that goes "Knowledge can always be encoded in text". I think Knowledge is really brain signals with a very complex and interlocking nature, and only an extremly small subset of those signals can be serialized as text.
Even assuming text is remotely a complete or faithful summary of the thought process underlying it, it wouldn't be possible to usefully reverse-engineer the thought process from the text alone. The Word is just the wrong level of abstraction, mathematicians do not think in words (but in abstract sets and objects), programmers do not think in words (but in algorithms and data structures), physicists do not think in words (but in... I actually have no clue what physicists think in). Only God has the ability to create using Words, the rest of us invent a myriad of hierarchies and conceptual frameworks over words if we want to get any thinking done.
Adding to my general skepticism about "Knowledge as text" ideologies, is that GPTx has a pathetic understanding of text. It's particular way of modeling the text prediction task, as sampling a probability distribution over next words, conditioned over all previous words, is fundamentally a dead-end, with no way to ever incorporate additional information, reasoning, or constraints. For GPTx, words are those mysterious UFOs that can only be understood in relation to each other. It doesn't even operate on words as such, but on vectors that represent them ("embeddings"). I'm not a linguist, but by God is this a bastardization of how language works. It's an interesting spin on NLP that have some potential, but it's so extremly narrow and full of limitations.
So to sum up my view :
- No, a general text predictor in the style of today's language models doesn't really understand language enough to say anything interesting, let alone true and\or intelligent, let alone novel. The impressive-seeming feats it can do now is due to the massive compute and data thrown at it, which can't realistically scale more than 1 order of magnitude more (Compute is already stretched to the limit, how much more time can you spend on training than months ? Data is more plentiful, but it's unlabelled garbage.)
- No, even assuming human-level general language understanding with 0 other reasoning capabilites, extracting higher-level knowledge from raw text alone is impossible for 2 reasons :
1- Text is extremly low level, imagine if I told you I can predict galactic-scale dynamics by modeling every single hydrogen atom in a galaxy with Schrodinger fidelity. This is just impossible to do (with less work than simply manipulating the galaxy you want to simulate directly). Text-to-Science\Math\Programs\Knowledge strikes me as similarly impossible. The representation is just too low-level, your AI will spend ages trying to understand how modus ponens even work, and it will never get good at it.
2- Text is lossy, noisy, and poor-quality rendition of thoughts and brain patterns (true knowledge), so even if you can do the impossible simulation task in (1) you can't do its analogue with text, because atoms fully determine existence (plausibly), while text doesn't fully determine the knowledge it attempts to convey.
>Is that a usefully testable prediction?
I would say yes, pick a surprising-yet-intuitive thing you learned about recently that you're sure is not contained in GPT-3 training set, and see if it can tease it out from the text it already has. I think making sure that the question's answer is not contained in the training set already is tricky but vital.
Here's a random test question off the top of my head :
The linked paper is from 2021, it's approach is extremly simple (yet surprising and novel). I predict GPT-3 would fail miserably if it's training set doesn't contain the paper.
This is a very cool idea and I'm commenting mostly to be notified of future answers. That said, how much pre-1900 text do we have in a readily-consumable format for GPT? My intuition would be "not much compared to more recent text", but I may be wrong.
Is it possible to have daily withdrawal effects from SSRIs?
For background, I have taken Prozac, Paxil, and Celexa with terrific results in the past (my issue is anxiety, particular panic disorder, not depression). I went off SSRIs for a few years when I had my son, and then went back onto Paxil when I started having pretty bad OCD-type anxiety. This anxiety continued without much improvement for two years. I switched to Lexapro with little change.
One thing I have been struggling with for those two years was that around dinner time I would develop low-blood sugar type symptoms. I would shake, feel very anxious, feel dizzy, etc. I went to my doctor and got tested and everything was normal. Having these symptoms every day made my mental anxiety a lot worse.
Two weeks ago, I decided to switch the time I take my medication from before bedtime to lunch time. And now those low-blood sugar symptoms are gone, along with my anxiety. My hypothesis is that these symptoms were occurring as the medication was leaving my system, especially as they will come back if I am an hour or so late in taking my pill.
Has anybody else ever encountered this? I'm just surprised my system has become so sensitive, though I am extremely happy to have that anxiety gone.
Past Drs have suggested taking Lexapro at night instead of in the morning. Didn't apply to me, but they said some of the patient found that to work better for them. I never heard of the symptoms you describe, but I think you are on to something.
What does do you take? Maybe you could try moving up so it lasts longer? Though it sounds like you have something that works for you.
Yeah, I'm on 10mg right now and considering asking my doctor to up the dose. It seems like my body is just working through it too fast (it's especially bad on days where I work out).
Ah thats very interesting. What i have liked about Lexapro is how flexible it is to change doses. I hope you can find a dose/regime that works for you!
"Scientifically" we do not even know what e.g. depression actually is or how *really* SSRIs work. "Scientifically" we do not know many things about human body (whoever thinks we know enough, I am asking you to construct just 1 human cell from molecules). I have seen some SSRI 24-hour period effects that were connected to eating or day-night cycle and were corrected by taking SSRIs in the morning and not evening. Not everyone can effectively listen to their body but if they can, it is good.
I don’t think this makes much sense scientifically or in alignment with my personal experience. The half-life of those meds is quite long. And I definitely notice withdrawal symptoms from SSRI, (very clear brain zaps,) but only if I forget to take them for 3+ days in a row.
Yeah, I agree it doesn't make a lick of a sense, but I don't know what else could be causing this phenomenon. I'd chalk it up to being psychosomatic, except getting the symptoms is what causes me to realize I haven't taken my pill on time. There's some weird metabolic thing going on here that I can't explain.
One of the very common side effects is fatigue. I notice that if I take my dose in the morning, I’m more tired at night compared to when I take it before sleeping.
Maybe for you, the fatigue takes a little while longer to set in.
A few months ago I ran into a weird quandary. My neighbor has a large black lab, and our dog had recently died. We occasionally have a soup or steak bone to dispose of, so I would throw it in the freezer and then offer it to my neighbor when I ran into her. However, the last time I offered, she politely declined, explaining that her vet had advised her that she should never under any circumstances give her dog cooked bones.
This surprised me. My family has had pet dogs from time immemorial. They have always been given ruminant bones, and the bones were always cooked. The only veterinary advice on this subject that I had ever been aware of was that dogs should not be given cooked chicken or turkey long bones, as these could splinter and cause digestive injury, but that necks and cartilaginous stuff was fine. Also, I knew someone whose father in Israel raised dogs and fed them uncooked chicken, including the bones.
Our last dog, a husky Samoyed rescue whose IBD led us to feed her homemade food exclusively, lived to be 17. We gave her cooked beef neck bones probably every two or three days, and cooked chicken necks were a regular part of her daily diet.
So I hopped online and looked up the veterinary advice around bones, and my neighbor is not crazy: it is absolute doctrine that one must never, ever give a dog a cooked bone because the risk of injury is "just not worth it." (This risk/benefit analysis does not appear to have involved consultations with dogs.) Moreover, one should ideally not give a dog raw bones, because the risk of bacterial contamination is also not inconsiderable. In short: really, just don't give your dog bones at all.
From what I can tell, literally no vets allow for the possibility that cooked bones are not dangerous for dogs, but there seems to be nothing solid behind this opinion. I could find no published papers on the question. Nothing quantitative, nothing anecdotal. Like, there's no list of horrific accounts from vets who have had to repair impaled dog esophaguses or stomachs. No accounts of feral dogs living off of food waste showing up in shelters with splintered bones lodged in their throats and bowels.
But perhaps the evidence is just buried in clerical archives sonewhere; i.e., my research into the dangers of bones is hampered by not having access to veterinary journals or other relevant sources.
Has anyone else run across this question and attempted to evaluate the available evidence?
(We have a new rescue, BTW. Guess what cleared up his gingivitis.)
Our vet told us not to give the dog bones for dental reasons. If I remember right, most of the dogs he sees with broken teeth are because they were chewing on bones. I don't know the science on that or if cooking the bones matters, but I err on the side of caution anyway.
Aha! Thanks. That's actually the kind of information I've been looking for.
It makes sense that vets would caution that bones can break a dog's teeth. I bet the risk is particularly high for older dogs. But bones also clean dogs' teeth (and in our experience can help regulate bowel movements, although occasionally dogs also will throw up small amounts of chewed bones).
But there's probably an optimal kind of bone or bone hardness, just as there are better and worse toothbrush and toothpaste options for human beings who want to clean their teeth without wearing away their gums and dental enamel. (I don't see doctors warning people *never* to brush their teeth.)
Our vet recommended these treats called "Greenies" (https://www.greenies.com/) that are supposed to help with that. You can find them in most supermarkets and grocery stores, and there are some cheaper off-brand versions too. Again, I don't know the science or logic of it, but our dog seems to like them and the vet hasn't mentioned dental issues in the time that we've used them.
Yes, we know all about Greenies. Our pets eat Greenies like candy. They are supposed to be full of vitamins, and I'm sure they're fattening. They do nothing whatsoever for anybody's teeth or breath, sorry.
Once more, I just want to reiterate that I am not looking for advice about what to feed or not feed my dog. I'm looking for good research and/or anecdotal data confirming or discounting the belief that all cooked bones are so dangerous for dogs that they should not have them.
Same for pennies. Americans think pennies are poisonous for dogs, British do not. That might be because American pennies are made of zinc and British pennies of steel.
I'm not a vet, but we can probably put some actual numbers to how poisonous chocolate is.
The LD50 of theobromine in dogs is apparently somewhere between 100mg/kg and 500mg/kg (haven't tracked down the original sources due to laziness), with deaths reported as low as 115mg/kg and seizures at 60mg/kg[1][2]. Pure cocoa powder is around 2.1% theobromine by weight[3], so if you run the numbers it takes a couple of hundred grams of 70% dark chocolate to put a 30kg Labrador at risk of death, and half that to give it seizures, e.g. 30kg * 115mg/kg / (2.1% * 70%) = approx. 235 grams.
Which is to say there's a real risk of death if your dog eats a bar or two of chocolate, but a couple of pieces probably won't do much.
Being British, I can confidently assert that we do indeed all think that dogs eating even small amounts of chocolate or raisins are little short of the canine equivalent of Heinrich Himmler chowing down on a cyanide pill!
More seriously, every living variety of cats from domestic tabby cats to the largest lions and tigers, have inherited a genetic defect that first appeared about 25M years ago in their common ancestor and which means they are very poor at dealing with toxins they ingest. Half an aspirin will kill a cat, as will licking off its fur microscopic traces of pollen acquired from brushing past certain plants such as the Tiger Lily.
Also, sorry about the intrusion of American dog culture into British dog culture.
Unless... wait just a minute... is it YOU GUYS? Are guilt ridden dog-besotted Brits the source of American veterinary hypercaution?
And here I was thinking it was all just a natural extension of the ascendant belief among coastal Murcans that pets are in no meaningful respect different from children...
The aspirin thing I don't find implausible at all. Never thought it outlandish, given that cats don't naturally consume, like, concentrated willow bark extract...
But surely the bit about certain death from consuming microscopic traces of pollen from tiger lilies must be a gross exaggeration. Unless we have evidence that cats have also evolved to avoid lilies, the real world just features too many opportunities in too many suburban gardens for abruptly wiping out feral cat populations that somehow thrive in spite of promiscuously pollinating tiger lilies.
> Surely the bit about certain death from consuming microscopic traces of pollen from tiger lilies must be a gross exaggeration.
One would think so, but no, a cat that ingests even the tiniest amount of material from a tiger lily will keel over stone dead from acute kidney failure!
No, that's not what your source says. My emphases added:
""Even small ingestions (such as less than 1-2 petals or leaves) – even the pollen or water from the vase – MAY result in severe, acute kidney failure."
May, not will. (And see subsequent caveat below.)
Lilies have rather large flowers and their leaves are generally not small either, so two leaves or petals as a measure of "small" seems a bit arbitrary, especially when compared with pollen!
One can also totally see why drinking water from a vase with flowers in it could be toxic if the flowers themselves are toxic, since sap from the stems would be leaching into the water.
But pollen? Really? This source doesn't even address quantity where that's concerned, so I think your original claim remains a wild overestimate. Animals can't help encountering pollen outside. If pollen from lilies was *that* toxic, several cats I've had over the years should have been dead from the many lilies growing in my own garden.
And then there's this: "The content of this page is not veterinary advice. A number of factors (amount of substance ingested, size of the animal, allergies, etc.) determine what is toxic to a particular pet."
So it's qualified advice couched in imperative language. (Which may be completely correct--I have no idea.) But a poison control line asserting these cautions is very much like a vet saying you must never give your dog bones. If they aren't citing studies for the particulars, or offering at least their own experiential data, what can we really conclude about things like *pollen*?
I had a friend who used to split whole bunches of grapes with his dog from the time it was a puppy, and the dog developed cataracts before age 2. Which I don't think I've ever seen in another young dog so it feels like there was a connection, but also the warning was never framed to me as "if your dog eats a pound of grapes per week, then after a year maybe he'll get cataracts."
I used to believe that, until I came home one day to find that my dog had consumed an entire bag of miniature Reese's peanut butter cups, and did not seem to suffer any ill effects from it.
As a lifelong dog owner I have come around to concluding that essentially all widely-held factual certainties about Canis domesticus are unscientific in origin. All of the ones I've ever spent any time looking into have turned out to be, put it that way.
And while I've never been a cat owner the above makes me assume that the same is true regarding Felis catus.
We always gave our dogs cooked bones, never chicken though.
The only thing I can see, is sometimes steak bones can be sawn sharp, but dogs end up chewing bones sharp anyway, and wild dogs consume bones they break with their teeth.
Yes, we already know that *people believe that*, but the whole point of the post you are responding to is that it isn't clear what the evidence for this belief is.
Ideally we'd want stats, but since there is no CDC for dogs keeping track of aggregate causes of death and misfortune, we would settle for something like a few salient stories from someone who's been a vet for 30 years. Or similar.
One reason I'm skeptical of the idea is simply that dogs have been eating various kinds of bones for millions of years. Including cooked ones for maybe the past twenty or thirty thousand. If it were really risky, you'd think they would avoid it. It seems a bit like not feeding people sausage because it's a choking hazard ... I mean, yes, people *do* manage to die that way, but the risk/reward tradeoff seems to favor eating it.
Also, my experience with bones is that while the cooked ones may be more *brittle* than the uncooked, dogs will crunch up either type just fine - and the uncooked ones are if anything *more* likely to get some nasty edge when shattered.
I understand that many people have come to believe this. However, my own decades-long personal experience; and that of everyone I know who has had dogs and fed them bones; and that of my family going back to at least my grandparents' generation, is that cooked bones do NOT often splinter in the digestive tract and cause agonizing injuries/death. (In fact, my experience is that cooked ruminant and soft poultry bones do not EVER splinter in the digestive tract etc.)
But empirical evidence is not necessarily universal experience. So if you have verifiable evidence of what you say, I would be very interested in seeing/reading it.
I think you just have to let people make their own decisions when it comes to their dog or their kids. Just say, "oh sorry" and give the bone to someone else. (Or your new dog.)
With store bought dog food available, anything even slightly more dangerous is going to be advised against. There's no positive result for a vet to advise anything else, so they won't.
The funny question would be, what do you think dogs have been eating for thousands of years prior to modern processed dog foods? The answer is dead animals, including the bones. Until recently no one thought it odd to give dogs any and all bones.
Yes, that's my thinking too. But the counter argument is that for thousands of years prior to modern pet food, dogs and their predecessors ate only raw, not cooked animals and bones.
I see no reason to believe that this is true, since dogs have long been known to frequent human refuse piles for food and would surely have availed themselves of the bones of cooked animals ever since wolves first met people. Street dogs around the world today do that as well.
Such animals may not be in the best of health, but given their apparent fecundity, I doubt they are dying or being seriously injured from eating even the splintery bones of Colonel Sanders' global labors.
It is possible that the risk is akin to that of drinking from natural water sources, though. People did that for millions of years and ... it's a risk level that is now generally considered too high. The argument from ancestral environment bounds the risk to some low level I would think, but it's possible that it's still significant enough to be wary of.
I kind of doubt it though.
I fed my dogs both cooked and uncooked bones when I lived on a farm. I admit though that my attitude was maybe a bit callously Darwinian - 'if you can't manage to eat the bones then I guess you just weren't cut out to make it as a dog' (or as Goethe wrote: 'Harte Bissen gibt es zu kauen: Wir müssen erwürgen oder sie verdauen').
I haven’t run into this one specifically but I have run into other things just like it. The short answer is CYA; why explain something to someone who might not listen very well, and run a risk of liability when they kill their dog and blame you for saying it was ok?
I want to share a GPT-3 side project I'm working on called Pickaxe. It lets you put a front-end on top of any useful or clever prompts and turns parts of the prompt into variables so that other people can run it with their own inputs. The prompts are shareable and embeddable. Looking for feedback from early users! All comments welcome: https://beta.pickaxeproject.com
Can anyone give me a good series of arguments against high-skilled immigration in the US? It seems obvious to me that vastly more high-skilled immigration would be a great thing for America- we could offer Green Cards to the best and brightest from every other country around the world. It would help cement America's dominance as the world's technological & scientific power at a time when that's under threat- after all, the US only makes up 4% of the world's population, so just numerically there should be a tremendous number of highly intelligent people in the other 96. My understanding is that the US was not a particularly accomplished country in the sciences before letting in a huge number of European scientists fleeing WW2.
And the 'they won't assimilate' arguments rings hollow to me- both Canada and Australia seem to manage just fine with a higher percent of their population being foreign born.
However, in the interest of intellectual discussion and broadening my horizons (and because I know ACT has a number of right-leaning folks)- I'm open to hearing good arguments against greatly increased high-skilled immigration. To be clear this is not an argument for *low* skilled immigration. Would love to hear the anti perspectives, partially because I genuinely cannot comprehend what they would be
You're focussed on the consumer side, and without doubt importing skilled labor is good for the consumer side, as it keeps wages and prices lower.
But on the producer side it's a different story. Hardly anybody enjoys facing stiffer competition for his job, from people who will work for less. If you propose legislation to fast-track green cards for foreign-born and foreign-trained physicians, expect American physicians to be unhappy with you. If you propose to import loads of skilled Ukrainian programmers who'll hack for 5-diigit salaries, expect American-born Silicon Valley programmers trying to pay back their student loans and also have a life to be a little grumpy.
And it works that way for the proletarian class, too. Importing tons of Central Americans who'll turn wrenches for $20/hour pisses off American-born mechanics who are used to wages 2-3x that. It *really* pisses them off when they perceive (perhaps accurately) that the policies are being driven by the surgeon and Google programmer class who don't feel their own wages threatened, but want to pay less for organic apples or to have their Beemer fixed.
Of course, we're all both consumer and producer. We benefit from high wages as a producer, and suffer from high prices as a consumer. We benefit from low prices as a consumer but suffer from low wages as a producer. Balances must be struck, and depend critically on individual circumstances, which is why there is no final solution to this problem, and has been debated since forever, and will be until forever.
The West is rich and (relatively) peaceful because of its cultural values. Immigration dilutes these cultural values. You can handle a trickle of immigration but not a flood -- as a rule of thumb, we should make sure that immigrants can't go through their lives primarily interacting with people from their own culture.
How do we raise the national IQ without diluting good western values? Emigration, not immigration. Get rid of the people at the bottom, don't try to drown them out by importing more people at the top.
Replace all taxes with a flat per-head fee for staying in the country. For the US (not my country but the one that gets discussed here most frequently), for instance, federally, this would need to be about $29,000 per head per annum. People who can't afford to pay this would not be allowed to remain in the country. This fee would presumably go down over time as the population of "takers" was reduced.
You could make it a per-day fee so that tourists etc would need to pay it too -- an extra $80/day isn't that big a deal for a tourist.
It would probably be possible to make some sort of deal with poorer countries to grant citizenship to deported US citizens who don't have any citizenship elsewhere, for a suitable fee. Buying these citizenships would be expensive at first but eventually you'd settle into a steady state.
I don't feel bad for fellow citizens of my country who can't pay their fees and get kicked out any more than I'd feel bad for fellow members of my country club who can't pay their fees and get kicked out. If you want things you gotta pay for them.
I don't think it's really *dilution* of cultural values. East Asian cultural values are demonstrably about as good as Western European cultural values at making a nation wealthy and peaceful, and a fusion of the two would probably be at least as good as either alone. And if we look south of the border and say that e.g. Latin Ameircan cultural values don't seem all that great on the wealth+prosperity front, OK, but the "cultural values" the rest of us borrow from them are mostly just the food and maybe the music.
The bigger problem is loss of public trust. The West is rich and relatively peaceful in large part because it is a high-trust society (or collection of such). And cultural diversity, especially novel cultural diversity, is harmful to public trust. East Asians may have their own high-trust societies, but they give off "you can trust me on this" vibes on a different frequency than Western Europeans. So they're less likely to trust each other, and more likely to see each other as an outgroup tribe that's trying to put one over on them.
In small doses, that's tolerable. The immigrants will assimilate, we'll learn to trust one another, and until then we'll trust that there's a lot of us and very few of them and they won't be able to do any serious harm. But if you're taking in immigrants faster than you can assimilate them, then you're degrading public trust.
And I don't think anyone has figured out how to *create* high public trust by any means other than "force everyone to adopt the same religion" or "be ruled by the British Empire for a century or two". So maybe err on the side of caution when it comes to doing things that would damage it.
Economically high skilled immigration is far preferable to low skilled immigration. Particularly if you are filling roles that otherwise couldn’t be filled due to a skills shortage. (The old trope that immigrants do jobs that the locals won’t or can’t is actually more true of high end work). Each new job will, being highly paid, add more spend to the economy than if it were not filled, and probably create even more jobs. Ignoring problems common to all kinds of immigration -resource issues like housing and health - there is a problem specifically sourcing high skilled immigration , it could dry up.
The loss of Chinese immigrants and university students, for instance, if the CCP were to curtail migration of its best and brightest, might leave a gaping hole in the US economy that other countries might find hard to fill.
1. With all the talk of "elite over-production" in the United States, importing even more "high-skilled" workers isn't necessarily a good thing.
2. The brain-drain from third-world countries is so large that it is causing such bad economic conditions, political violence, etc. that it is driving "low-skilled immigration" (as well as problems for the people who don't leave those countries).
I don't think anyone is talking about engineers or the like when they talk about "elite over production". They are talking about MFA/Liberal arts majors who go into media and journalism and live on Twitter.
I'm personally skeptical of the whole idea, but I'm _very_ certain that it isn't about the kinds of people who would get here on high skilled visas.
There's an attitude on the right that I think helps account for this, that I'll try to explain. It feels to them like very small legal changes to the leftward produce large effects in everyday policy; while very large legal changes to the rightward produce small effects in everyday policy. So, for example, the Obama Department of Education sent the famous "Dear Colleague" letter (not a court ruling, not a law passed by Congress, just a letter) to colleges, and it resulted in widespread changes to lots of people's everyday life. While, on the other hand, the 50-year Republican campaign against Roe v Wade (a Supreme Court case overturned, arguably second in legal power to a Constitutional amendment) finally resulted in a win for the Republicans, and despite that it seems like the number of actual abortions happening isn't going to be impacted much.
So, from Republicans' perspective, moving the law an inch left results in shifting everyday life a mile left, while moving the law a mile right results in shifting everyday life an inch right. Their expectation is that there's nonprofit, academic, media and business institutional leftist bias that will hugely amplify the effects of even small leftward changes in the law, while resisting and undermining/mitigating even large rightward changes in the law.
From that perspective, it makes sense to oppose increasing high-skilled immigration, even though (my sense is that) most Republicans welcome and support high-skilled immigrants. They feel like it's "the thin end of the wedge" or "the top of the slippery slope".
(I'm not interested in defending this attitude, because I don't think it's correct. It misunderstands the nature of power, the role of law in society, and the identities of the political parties.)
Surely not? The point of the slippery slope is that it's slippery/slopey, and that the *bottom* of it is very bad. In a pure slippery slope argument it might be that half-way down is the most preferable place to stand, but unfortunately you can't stand there because it's not a stable place, you'll always end up at the bottom.
I see lots of issues -- immigration is just one -- as sort or the reverse. There is a slope over there but it starts sloping up above and on the other side of a local maximum.
Having worked in high tech, I do see the benefit. We're absolutely robbing Asia of their very best and brightest minds. If these very smart people weren't brought to work in the US, they'd be starting companies in China/India/Pakistan/etc.
However, immigration (the H1B program) does reduce the value of an engineering degree.
H1B workers are of course eager to come to the US. Their masters degree in India will land them a job paying around US$50/day, whilst if they're in the US, they're earning US$50/hr. Plus the food, water, transportation, everything is very safe compared to Asia. However, as we see in the link, after 15 years or so, two new hires can be had for the price of one older more experienced employee.
TL;DR: H1B immigration reduces the pay for very well educated Americans.
> If these very smart people weren't brought to work in the US, they'd be starting companies in China/India/Pakistan/etc.
Would they really? It seems so from outside: "a smart person came from country X and does awesome things, they could have done exactly the same awesome things at home", but from the perspective of the person running away from X the story is often like: "I got this great opportunity here, which I wouldn't get in my own country".
Poverty means that those people wouldn't get founding at home. Corruption means that at home they would face bureaucratic obstacles, or wouldn't be allowed to study at university, because they don't have the right connections. Maybe the education at home is shitty. They may face at home some local form of sexism or racism or casteism that either does not exist or is much weaker in the country they left for.
Of course it could be both. But I suspect that out of 5 immigrants who do something awesome, maybe 1 could do a comparable thing at home, and 4 just couldn't for various reasons.
You're exactly right. I was in the computer chip side, and you're not gonna make a computer chip with a company of less than ten thousand people. You're not gonna make a computer chip in a country where the power doesn't stay on all day every day (which apparently doesn't happen in India/Pakistan). You're not gonna make a computer chip in a country where you can't get liquid nitrogen, can't get vacuum sealed, double wall stainless piping to handle your liquid nitrogen, a country where your employees won't steal the bench tools to sell on the black market.
Learning from my Indian and Pakistani friends, is that in South West Asia, the power isn't on 24 hours, the water doesn't flow 24 hours, you're not going to get liquid nitrogen on a regular basis, you're not going to get double wall stainless welding, you're not going to get employees who won't walk off with the tools every day.
If you're not getting reliable utilities, reliable supplies, reliable materials, and dedicated workers, you're not going to make computer chips.
It seems that the shortage is not in 'high-skilled' but in skilled trades, since everyone is being encouraged to go to college and get that guaranteed high-paying white collar job.
So you might well want immigrants who are skilled and qualified trades people rather than doctors and computer programmers if you want to keep the roads open and the bridges standing:
I haven't read it, but I'm interested in a review of Garrett Jones' "Culture Transplant", which I think is supposed to address this question (not high-skilled in particular, but more generic note of caution on immigration which isn't necessarily limited to low-skilled)
So I think the most rat-friendly argument is a three-step.
Argument one is basically chain migration. We do not, and realistically cannot, only allow only high-skilled immigration because every single immigrant has the legal right to sponsor their immediate and extended family. And family immigration is, effectively, US immigration. You can check the most recent DHS stats, immediate and extended family is 60-70% of all US immigration whereas all employment based immigration is ~13%. (1) (2) Every new citizen allowed in via employment means 3-5 family members down the line. This is a genuinely difficult problem.
Argument two is basically tractability. The right has been deeply dissatisfied with the immigration situation for decades. Employment based immigration is basically the only tool they have. Washington has made it clear that they cannot/will not control the border or the illegal immigration situation. Among legal immigration, immediate family immigrants are uncapped and essentially unmanageable both from a legal perspective and a PR perspective; no one wants to deny an American citizen's spouse or child the right to join them and even denying parents would be tough. But on extended family, employment, and refugee migration, there the right has, if not traction, at least inertia on its side. Basically, the right doesn't like our immigration policy as a whole, it can't change the illegal immigration situation and it can't change the immediate family situation, so employment gets restricted because that's what it can do.
If you think this leaves room for a grand compromise to fundamentally update our broken immigration system, you'd be right but don't hold your breath. The right has been offering some variation of trading reforming the immigration situation plus some form of amnesty for an end to illegal immigration for some time. The Bush/Corporate right will never back this because they like cheap labor and the Dems will never back this because migration has flipped the Nixon/Reagan California to dark blue and they hope it will do the same for Arizona and Texas.
But basically, I don't think there's any special animus against high-skilled immigration on the right, there's just a general animus against immigration based primarily on illegal immigration. There are real complexities and solutions to solving legal immigration issues, for example you'd probably want to trade more high-skill immigration in exchange for moving "parents" from the immediate family (unlimited) to the extended family (limited) category, but there's no political will to do so and, as far as I can tell, hasn't been since the 80's.
Sorry, I'm not clear from your question whether you're asking why should the US let high skill migrants enter or why they shouldn't.
The arguments for are basically economic and kindness. The arguments against are basically cultural and political.
The economic argument is pretty simple: more smart people=more GDP. The kindness argument is also pretty simple: if you know somebody living in the US, say on a student visa, and they want to move here, it feels mean to tell them no.
The cultural argument is also pretty simple. To the extent there still is a distinctly American culture, allowing millions of people in every year consistently dilutes that culture unless they fully acclimate. The political argument is also pretty simple: most immigrant populations vote for the Democrats, basically because they're either high-skilled and college-educated (read blue) or illegal immigrants. This is distinct from the cultural argument because it's very feasible that Hispanics might flip Republican in the coming decades, or at least a 50-50 voting block, and so might form a core Republican voting block but still wouldn't represent the cultural values of, say, Pat Buchanan or 1930's America.
I'm pro-high skill immigration but I do want to understand the objection, particularly to see if there is a version of my position that is not objection-able.
[I understand you are just gesturing at the objections, not advancing them.]
As for the culture, I agree in principle with that, but feel that likely numbers plus assimilation/exogamy reduce the practical importance.
As for the political, I think this is just a mistake. Some national groups lean left some lean right. (My very unscientific perception is that South Asians lean Left and East Asians lean Right). And again likely numbers make this not at all a practical objection.
I guess in both I'm adopting an "economist" point of view: recognizing that a point of negative marginal value could exist, but thinking that we are far away from that point.
Oh, cool, a factual dispute, at least on the politics.
So, let's start with some acknowledgements that we don't really track immigrant only voting patterns. Maybe if we dug into the ACS data we might be able to find something but I don't "think" ACS does partisan affiliation. So, in fairness, I don't think there are foolproof sources to point to.
Let's also note that there's a lot of partisan stats in this space. It's relatively easy to point to places like the Center for Immigration Studies (1) which will tell you that naturalized immigrants split about 50% Democrat, 30% Republican. I'm not saying those figures are inaccurate.
But, unfortunately, using ethnic groups tends to show pretty consistent results. Asian Americans are probably the premier example. Thanks to things like the Chinese Exclusion Act, we don't really have significant Asian American populations pre-1965, which means most Asian Americans are naturalized immigrants. For example, Pew Research puts naturalized immigrants at 2/3 of the Asian American population (2) and Asian Americans split 72-17 for Democrats. If every single native-born Asian American voted Democrat, that would still show immigrant Asians going for the Dems ~70% of the time.
There's a similar story for Hispanics. It's more complicated because there are long standing Hispanic populations in the US, especially in the Southwest, but Democrats have never been subtle about changing demographics flipping states like Arizona and Texas and pointing, very explicitly, at Hispanic demographics. And, off that Pew link again, Hispanics break for the Dems 63-29. It's not as clear what the specific role of immigrant Hispanics in that is, Pew does note that Mexican immigrants affiliate with the Dems at 59%, but separating out, say, Salvadorian refugees from Hispanics whose great grandparents were at the Alamo, on both sides, is tougher.
But, hopefully avoiding an isolated demand for rigor in an inherently difficult question, the weight of the evidence certainly points to immigrants voting disproportionately for the Dems, usually by 3-1 or 5-1 margin, and looking at specific populations like Asian Americans it looks mathematically impossible for them to be even split amongst the parties.
Before moving on to the cultural and negative marginal value elements, since those tend to be harder to quantify, is that clear on the political aspect? I know some people will point to specific sub-groups, like Vietnamese or Cuban groups, as evidence of some Republican leaning immigrant groups, but I'm not aware of any good-faith effort to show that immigrants split evenly among the parties, much less preferring Republicans.
_I_ do not claim a 50-50 split, just that anything other that an extreme skew D for say and extra million people per year would not make much difference for years and years. And will today's polarizing issues that immigrants may or may not split evenly on be relevant 30 years from now? But that compound economic growth will be.
"My very unscientific perception is that South Asians lean Left and East Asians lean Right"
South Asians (and Hmong) lean left, true. East Asians used to lean right but they have been subject to the same "rotation" in income-education space as everybody else (i.e. they are more educated than average and therefore more Democrat than average), with some exceptions such as Vietnamese and Filipinos (who are more likely to be Republicans).
Though let's note that Canada's immigration system is much less friendly to "family reunification" and as a result a lot higher fraction of their immigrants are "high skilled". But in practice, it seems to be impossible to make any major changes to US immigration law because there are so many highly motivated, but disagreeing factions, so you can't get *any* bill through Congress.
You can make the same argument as for protectionism in trade. Importing skilled labor on mass undermines a country's ability to train it's own human capital to a degree sufficient to compete with the rest of the world.
It was meant as an argument against, but it's a truth from either side. Everyone needs both good (smart) vendors and good (smart) customers. Well at least in my world.
I don't imagine the argument would be much different than it is for low skilled immigration. Increasing the rate is great from the employer's perspective. A talent "shortage" means they have to pay higher wages to entice talent, and they'd rather not - it almost never means "the talent is non-existent here" at the micro level. Increasing the supply of skilled workers means more competition among those on the market for those jobs, consequently employers won't have to hike wages so much to draw in talent. Just supply and demand at work.
From the perspective of those competing for those jobs, that doesn't sound like a great deal. Of course the pitch is that the benefits extend to the economy rather than those specific workers, which we infer benefits the citizens. Having access to global-tier talent can give a country's employers an edge on the world stage, while abundance of skilled workers is thought to eventually manifest jobs through innovation and competition - those are good things that have happened and policymakers want to happen. Necessity is the mother of invention, but what if the necessity is merely "making money"? What if there are diminishing returns to this approach, from the perspective of plebs?
Increasing the population has been a core mechanism through which to boost the GDP - since more people consume things, and GDP is a measure of consumption. Of course Economists even of the left-stripe are quick to point out that increases in GDP don't necessarily benefit people directly, as most of the gains (90%+) have gone directly to the wealthiest. The promise is that they would invest and take risk in new ventures, but they don't necessarily do this. They can just sit on their cash. But it's taken as a given that they would invest, when justifying either greatly expanded or unlimited skilled immigration. If they decide to mostly sit and collect, and enjoy the effect of wage suppression, then the outstanding benefits to a country as a whole seem "modest".
More of a middle-of-the-road perspective because there are obviously benefits to immigration. At the same time, close-to-nil immigration is not a death sentence either. For all the problems Japan might be having, it's been alright with a GDP that has been stagnant for a long time. They do have to recapture replacement-level fertility rates to deal with the inverted population pyramid but policies and change in culture can get them there.
I don't think "there are no downsides, and if there are, the downsides don't matter" carries much weight. I'm not sure if that's what Caplan actually says.
Nice summary. In regards to a difference between low and high-skill immigration, one can note that the people competing for high skill jobs have backup plans or options that pay much higher than the alternatives for low skill individuals. If you can't make six figures for a job because an immigrant was willing to do it cheaper, you can probably make high five figures instead. That certainly doesn't feel good for the person with fewer options, but it's noticeably better than the case of a low skill worker who can't make $12/hour because immigrants are willing to do it for sub-minimum-wage rates. Also of note, there are both more actual low skill immigrants and vastly more *potential* low skill immigrants, just due to the demographics involved (i.e. there are billions more low skilled individuals than high skilled).
I do imagine the argument would be much different than it is for low-skilled immigration. Low-skilled immigration leads to higher crime and increased public spending and is dysgenic. This is not the case for high-skilled immigration.
Those are extra concerns with unfettered rates, but what I meant is just that the concerns I raised equally apply for the low-skilled variant.
A propos, the snarky truism among US liberals is that such workers "do the jobs no one else wants to do". Well, the only reason one might possibly not want to do such jobs is they don't pay well. Which tacitly conveys "it's good that we pay these workers so little", with no cognitive dissonance despite the refrain reserved for "workers in general".
The isolated, transient concern for agribusiness input costs and profit margins that sometimes appears in these discussions is entertaining in its own way...
But this is all a little off topic, since it is specifically high skilled immigration that was mooted. The main thing I would say about that is that it benefits the bottom quintiles of (existing US) society very little, and may actually harm them by increasing competition for things like middle class housing. I think there's no question that it helps 'US greatness', and that the overall benefits to US companies is such that anyone with significant stock holdings is probably also a winner. It likely also improves our long-term prospects with respect to social security obligations, demographic problems (too many old people) and the like.
We just got through a year and a half of seeing how angry people get over temporary supply disruptions and price increases (some caused by labor shortages due to COVID policies cutting off immigration at the border).
I can attest to this in my Corporate America office. Its mostly whites(slightly overrepresented compared to the total US population) and Asians, particularly South Asians(extremely, extremely overrepresented compared to the US population). Blacks and Hispanics are negligible. In my opinion, a lot of of the DEI initiatives with their useless leadership roles is just to keep the non-Asian minorities content.
If we open the high-skilled immigration floodgates, the American elite class would mostly consist of South and East Asians within a generation. Elites should at least be somewhat representative of the people they rule, in terms of ethnicity, religion, values etc. Anything else is a recipe for domestic unrest. This also why I am in favor of affirmative action or maybe even explicit quotas in universities/jobs. If left to pure meritocracy, Harvard(which produces our future elites) would be 80% Asian, 10% Jews and 10% the rest. Not an acceptable outcome in my opinion.
EDIT: So far we have 3 out of an initial pool of 5. Also I think if you sign up you're committing for 1 cycle. That is, to read and give comments once a week for up to 4 other people, with the assumption that you'll get one submission yourself. We'll see where we are at after the cycle and make further plans from there.
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I've been writing a blog but I think I probably need an editor. I'm not sure the best way to go about this because I think I'm unlikely to hire a professional. I'm a little shy about asking friends, and I'm not sure that I have any that are particularly qualified / want to be editing in their spare time. I'm curious if anyone has general advice here. Do most substack writers have editors? Are they friends/ professionals or is something else going on?
One idea I've had is to try to find other people in the same boat as me who are interested in getting feedback on things they've written. A classic writers group. Is anyone interested in joining a group of 2-5 and giving feedback on say 1 member essay a week?
As a result of reading a couple of your blog posts, I'll tentatively say I'm interested. I need to get some stuff on the page for this to be applicable to me but I like the idea. 2-5 seems about right - you could also call it 'three or four'.
I’d be interested too! I’ve written a few things that have (so far) remained in the drafts, but I’d be happy to share them with you and/or talk more. I also really enjoy talking with other writers about their work and work processes.
Can anybody recommend a good overview of the current state of self driving cars?
I'm interested in the legal status in different countries, the definitions of different "levels" of how autonomous they are, what kinds of roads they can drive on, whether progress has generally been faster or slower than people would have guessed, say, 5 years ago, predictions for the future...
Format isn't a deal breaker but my preferences are text > audio > video. Ideally it would be aimed at laypeople but assume its audience is pretty smart.
Most importantly, it needs to stand alone. I've not really been following the field at all, so I want something to bring me up to speed, not something that recaps the last six months but assumes I know what was going on six months ago.
I wrote about how -- according to campaign contributions, party registrations, and survey data -- Democrats outnumber Republicans by about 10:1 in our administrative agencies, and by vastly more at our prestigious cultural institutions (elite universities, elite media companies, Netflix/Twitter/etc, ...). I make the argument that this is because the absurd tenure protections given to our huge deep state produce the sort of employee who cares much more about aligning with cultural causes than about aligning with elected leaders.
I then make the argument that this is basically how single-party states have wielded power: they still had somewhat fair elections, and somewhat reasonable constitutions, and somewhat popular legalized opposition parties, and so forth; but the people in charge of these countries were party apparatchiks (not official heads-of-state), and they wielded power by dominating among employees at cultural institutions and government agencies.
It's worth noting that stereotypically "evil" corporations are no counterweight to this: military contractors, major banks, big pharma, energy companies, etc, all seem pretty much politically balanced between Dem and GOP employees. Intuitively, this is because they optimize on producing particular items, and so don't have the slack to optimize on producing particular cultures; for similar reasons, when they lobby, it's by "corruptly" paying dearly for isolated loopholes, rather than "respectably" pushing extreme/broad ideological campaigns.
>I make the argument that this is because the absurd tenure protections given to our huge deep state produce the sort of employee who cares much more about aligning with cultural causes than about aligning with elected leaders.
I think the fact that an incoming president is not allowed to reward people with civil service jobs for aligning with him is generally considered a feature, not a bug.
Also, since the civil-service/political appointment split has existed since 1881, I find it hard to believe that it's the cause of any modern ideological conflicts.
(Also also, I couldn't get through your essay because it couldn't go more than three sentences without commenting on how evil and hateful liberals are.)
"Also, since the civil-service/political appointment split has existed since 1881, I find it hard to believe that it's the cause of any modern ideological conflicts."
Really?
You can't believe that a 19th C. event could be the (or at least a) cause of modern ideological conflicts? People were just pulling statues down at random, were they?
But more specifically, it wasn't until Wickard v. Fillburn that FedGov had de jure unlimited power and even later for urbanization to be significant enough that the civil service had de facto control over much of the populace.
> I couldn't get through your essay because it couldn't go more than three sentences without commenting on how evil and hateful liberals are.
Chortle! :-)
Normally it's the other way round, with liberals excoriating "deplorable" conservatives!
Much the same applies in the UK these days, although back in the 1880s in the event of the Sovereign's death the Government had to resign and a general election was called, and all senior civil servants also had to resign, and it was touch and go who, if any, would be appointed by the next administration.
But now, "the blob", as the senior civil servants (among others) are called, are blissfully unaffected in any way by Governments coming and going. What's more, as a general election approaches they often start becoming bolshy and passively aggressive, and resistant to even reasonable and urgent requests by their nominal political masters (the ministers). It is probably much the same in the US.
Yes, I understand that many people regard the "professionalization" of the civil service (i.e. its insulation from political accountability) as a good thing; I strongly disagree. But it's worth pointing out that it's been getting much worse, much more recently than 1881. For instance, the Humphrey's Executor decision (in the 1930s) essentially created the idea that agency heads could be protected from presidential removal; at first, this basically only protected a few quasi-judicial administrative boards, but it's been swallowing up ever more of the executive branch ever since.
For example, the CFPB was created in 2011, and was headed by a single appointee, whom the president could not legally fire; until then, independent agencies had been headed by groups of unaccountable commissars, rather than individuals, because then they would be run by appointments from a mix of presidents, and so would presumably be less of a rogue power. Luckily, SCOTUS in 2020 finally rolled back this particular expansion of the deep state for intuitive democratic accountability reasons (in the Seila Law decision), but other than this it's mostly been a steady march of jackbooted thugs claiming ever more of our federal govt since WWII.
Similarly, the MSPB has pretty unilaterally extended MSPB protections (essentially tenure for agency workers) to ever more administrative workers. Or consider the massive rise in the share of federal workers covered by a union during the 1960s (these federal unions mostly focus on protecting members from accountability to the elected govt, not on pay or benefits, because they can't meaningfully affect those).
Or consider the decisions which Trump's judicial appointments pledged to roll back, because they unleashed the deep state. During his confirmation hearings, Kavanaugh stated that the single decision he would most like to overturn was Morrison v Olson, from the late 1980s, which *radically* expanded the protections of administrative branch appointees against removal by the president. Similarly, Gorsuch stated that the decision he'd most like to overturn was Chevron vs NRDC, from the mid 1980s, which created "Chevron Deference," which is almost certainly *the* most crucial part of the deep state's current power (it's the idea that an agency can make whatever regulations are plausibly allowed by law, rather than just those regulations which are clearly demanded by law; think of it like AirBud: "there's no rule that says dogs *can't* play basketball!").
The list goes on and on. In my piece, I describe how party registration data demonstrates that on average since 1990 presidential appointments have been from the party of the relevant president roughly 70% of the time; but the same data also shows that, throughout this period, the civil service (which is not appointed by the president, nor removable by him) has been roughly 70% Dem (with most of the rest being independents, not GOP). If the supposedly professionalized apolitical civil service is always as unanimous in one particular direction as each side's lackeys are in each direction, something's gone very clearly wrong! And this data indicates that the civil service skew is getting steadily worse.
There are other factors. Somebody noticed that there's a strong correlation between getting educated and the psychological trait "openness to experience". That writer doesn't mention it, but it's pretty clear that "openness to experience" is going to correlate well with the conservative-vs.-liberal axis these days. So you expect any institution of advanced education to be automatically biased towards "openness to experience".
The next question is the degree to which staffing by organizations selects for highly educated people. And it seems that administrative agencies have been favoring people with college degrees during my lifetime. It's worth researching whether it was true before that. Also, it's worth noting that some state bureaucracies have recently been eliminating civil service rules requiring college degrees for a lot of position. These changes may be related to the fact that the labor market has been employer-friendly for the past 40 years or so, but is rapidly shifting toward being worker-friendly. It'll be interesting to see if this moves the bias of administrative agencies in a conservative direction.
Cultural institutions tend to be refuges for highly-educated people but pay poorly. Sometimes you have to serve several years as an unpaid intern before being considered for a paying position. So the people hired will be biased toward the highly-educated whose parents are willing to support them in a high-status but poorly-paid position.
So it's not surprising that these two categories of institution are more liberal than the average citizen. And in the zones of the culture where administrative agencies and cultural institutions have power, the norms are likely to be more liberal than the attitudes of the average citizen.
In regard to "single-party states", you're losing me. There is a large menu of Marxist-Leninist states over the past century, and absolutely none of them had "somewhat fair elections, and somewhat reasonable constitutions, and somewhat popular legalized opposition parties". Indeed, if a state has a somewhat popular legalized opposition party, then by definition it is not a "single-party state".
You seem to dislike this state of affairs, but you don't state that very clearly, or precisely what you don't like about it. OTOH, it's hardly surprising in any society the people with more than average power/status aren't statistically the same as the people as a whole.
India was a single party democracy for the first thirty years of independence, arguably a good deal longer. The fact that Congress eventually lost control is some evidence that it was a democracy. Gordon Tullock used to define a democracy as a country where the ruling party had lost power twice — once might be an accident. India eventually met that criterion.
Woke people are not generally more "open" in any meaningful way than unwokes are, and you don't get 10:1 Dem:GOP ratios by merely selecting for vague traits like "openness."
As for Marxist-Leninist states, they absolutely did have (among other things) legal opposition parties; here are two pertinent quotes from the piece to which you're ostensibly responding:
Quote number one:
After all, even East Germany had expansive constitutional rights on paper and—yes, I’m serious—fairly-counted multi-party elections. They used an approval-based voting system, which actually allows for effective constituent bargaining against incumbent politicians on local issues, and was thus quite recently on the ballot in Seattle as an alternative to both ranked-choice voting and first-past-the-post. Basically, East German voters would approve or disapprove of each of the candidates running to nationally represent their local district; each such constituency would usually elect about five representatives, depending on factors like population. Those who received the most approvals would win, so long as they got over half of the voters to support them. The country’s dominant party only won around one quarter of the legislative seats, in each of its nine elections before the wall fell, and also in its final election afterwards (which allocated seats via standard western-style proportional representation). This legislature abolished the senate, and officially controlled both other branches… much as our judicial and executive branches testify before our congress in exchange for official guidance on all forms of power: personnel, provisions, and policy.
But, of course, a clear supermajority of their key administrators joined the Socialist Unity Party, and that was the clear path to promotion… while openly supporting alternative options could get you fired and shunned from influential positions (much as our system allocates administrative power to Democrats, under the watchful eyes of academia, internet platforms, and the news media). For example, in the late 1980s, the SUP alone had well over two million members, while each of the other four main parties only had about 100,000. And—much like our president can’t legally fire the vast majority of his ostensible subordinates, from Fauci to the Fed—their head-of-state only rubber-stamped the one true party’s decisions. Much like their organs of culture, prestige, and information were only independent from this party on paper, our deep state only offers access to favored media, and infiltrates organizations deemed suspect. And so forth.
Consider, for example, that about 80% of East Germany’s workforce worked for “publicly owned enterprises” (VEBs) in 1989. By law, each VEB workplace was managed by its director, its party secretary, and its union chairman, together. The members of a given factory’s party organization would elect their own local secretary, who would then meet every single month with representatives from higher level party committees: they would give him “instructive guidance” on his performance, and then “verify” his party privileges… or not. Likewise, in the late 1980s, roughly 98% of East German workers were members of the country’s only legal trade union federation; they would similarly elect their own workplace chairman, but the union leadership—which was, of course, also dominated by the party—could easily reward those chairmen who followed orders, and remove the rest. The media, the police, and other such politically sensitive positions faced even more smothering partisan incentives.
One could quibble with my comparison here in a few reasonable-seeming ways, but I think the point still stands. For instance, the legislature granted some seats to SUP-affiliated non-party organizations, like the official trade union; however, in practice, these looked more like sinecures for allies than actual offices of power… more like symptoms of than sources for totalitarian control (or else the legislature would have actually exerted authority over the party sometimes, rather than just vice-versa). Further, all parties in the legislature had to join a “national front,” which put forward a single list of candidates for voters to consider: but this front was mostly just synonymous with being on said list, and East German voters could approve or disapprove of the individual candidates on it, much as our voters can tick a box for whichever listed candidate they prefer on our ballots.
Likewise, East Germany officially granted the SUP a “leading role” over its “rival” parties, yet this only seems to have acted as a vague blanket excuse for discretionary purges against undesirables—much as our deep state labels any Republicans who seem insufficiently servile to Democrats as “threats to democracy.” Whenever one association makes itself the arbiter of how “civil rights” can bulldoze the freedom of association, this exact pattern repeats itself, and so it should sound quite familiar. For example, the current German constitution explicitly requires all political parties to maintain certain vague standards of “democracy,” even internally, and empowers their obviously politicized constitutional court to enforce this; and, similarly, US caselaw has long banned all parties from implementing regulations on their own primary elections deemed “undemocratic.” Or consider how the Organization of Islamic Cooperation explicitly clarifies that its member-countries interpret the UN Declaration of Human Rights exclusively through the lens of Sharia law. And how the Chinese constitution subordinates its expansive rights to CCP rule.
My point, of course, isn’t that East Germany was in any sense “good,” nor that modern Germany is anywhere near as totalitarian. Rather, my point is that the eastern bloc’s totalitarianism had very little to do with its election system, or its official constitution, or anything like that. The party ruled by writing your newspaper, and reading your mail, and infesting your workplace; it only placed its people on your ballot and in your legislature to make itself seem somewhat legitimate… and so it’s thrilled when critics focus on reforming election law, or condemning pompous legislators, or amending the paper-thin constitution. But, similarly, my point isn’t that the ruling caste should restrain itself—or at least seem to—from orienting the state apparatus toward its preferred policy platforms: it’s that we should make those apparatchiks do so honestly, by bluntly clarifying the single-party nature of all stable states, including ours. We should give the people a clear list of the names that are actually responsible for this country’s problems. And if we win, it will involve the people hounding this univocal slate of names from power (instead of just barking at well-protected figureheads from irrelevant bickering front groups).
You're clearly wrong on "Woke people are not generally more "open" in any meaningful way than unwokes are", as I can show in a sentence: Woke people are *far* more tolerant of people inventing weird new gender concepts than non-woke people. Now the people who get labeled "woke" (or in the past have labeled themselves woke!) have their own canons of conformity, but they're generally a lot more tolerant of nonconformity relative to what is conceived of as the general standards of society.
If you're complaining that certain institutions filter for ideology in various ways, I'm sure you're correct. But also, they filter in other ways that do significantly correlate with ideology. On top of that, you get snowball effects: Once a social group has certain ideological tendencies, people who share them tend to be attracted to it and prosper more in it, even if there's no set mechanism to increase the ideological tendency. Don't overestimate that there's some great conspiracy that e.g. sorts all the conservative professors into economics and the liberal professors into all the other fields.
In regard to the Marxist-Leninist states having actual multi-party systems, it does seem that I'm wrong, at least as you say, in window-dressing. It's also clear that the US educational system doesn't mention that fact. So when you mention that fact without other preparation, you should flag it as "little-known", "it's actually true" or something like that.
In regard to "We should give the people a clear list of the names that are actually responsible for this country’s problems. And if we win, it will involve the people hounding this univocal slate of names from power", I'm tempted to ask, "What do you mean 'we', white man?" That the lefties have disproportionate power seems clear, and there are aspects of that I don't like, but putting the righties in charge to carry out a great purge doesn't seem to be an obvious improvement to me. Certainly starting with "the people hounding ..." sounds like populism, and that has a long history of putting things in the crapper, whether it starts from the left or the right. We want neither Bolsonaro nor Maduro in charge of things.
Yeah that's all fair (though my main beef with the gender stuff is not its "nonconformity" so much as the conformist demand they make that polite society should "accept" / "normalize" it).
And I should probably do a better job clarifying that my model of the world is also mostly psychological rather than conspiratorial: that there's no smokey room where some supposed central committee of the single-party running our deep state gathers to hash out its plans, and that it would be preferable if there were some such clearly defined organization keeping all our agencies coherent with one another. (The lack of any such coherence is, in part, why we got such a bizarre eviction moratorium during the pandemic: in an organized state, HUD would've been in charge of housing-related aspects of pandemic response, and would've presumably picked a more sensible kind of intervention, but because regulation only belongs to the swift in our system it selects for hysteria, and thus the CDC for some reason ended up unilaterally imposing an extremely interventionist and ill-considered national housing policy).
For example, I think it'd be conspiratorial for me to imagine that bureaucrats greedily connive to push for policies which create more bureaucracy; it of course makes no sense for an individual bureaucrat to join in broad lobbying etc efforts that create more jobs for people like him, in the same way that it's never rational to even vote for your own personal interests in a large election. Rather, I think people's beliefs are highly programmed by their environment, and so they generally come to believe the sorts of things that have successfully expanded such environments in the past (and they obviously also somewhat select into fields which their political opinions already favor granting more power to).
In other words, people in xyz caste observably do vote for policies that would often flatter or benefit that kind of person, even though their voting behavior doesn't cause them to receive any more expected flattery or benefit from the policy outcomes of elections. It seems like the major disagreement here is whether that's mostly because these people were independently predisposed to hold those views, or whether the jarring radicalization we've seen in these agencies as they've become less accountable is because less accountable organizations are better able to do some mix of "selecting true believers" and "programming employees to proselytize." And I think these beliefs take the form of "general disposition toward safetyism" (for example) rather than "x position on y policy is optimal."
My general understanding is that even the Marxist-Leninist states -- even though they had official central committees of their dominant parties -- actually worked somewhat like this too, with intentional politburo coordination being much less relevant for most everyday policies than "well the clique that's durably in charge of this sector always uses this kind of rhetoric and this rhetoric tends to work so it's becoming more relevant." So my point is that psychology still broadly dominates conspiracy, but also that it's: a) more programmable than people often assume; b) more influential on the balance-of-power between social organizations than people often assume; and c) becoming a runaway problem because making these organizations less accountable to external concrete objectives allows factors (a) and (b) to take over everything else within socially relevant orgs.
As for the bit at the end of your comment, I would strongly favor a president with pretty much any policy agenda (from Bernie's to Trump's) as long as they focus on bringing the administrative state to heel. And I think that's often been a broadly popular, generally successful, and politically depolarizing outcome, in our country and abroad. I'd recommend the bit in my essay where I talk about strongmen like Sisi and why I think they're a palatable populist option (I make the case he was "elected" with a much stronger mandate than Morsi, and that this is typical of such cases), and why I think they're the opposite of Party-oriented figures like Maduro (who seized power through party-based anti-populist machinations and drove his country into further polarization and despair). If you're interested in that arg but not the broader essay, I'd recommend clicking the link and word-searching for the section on "Sisi" and "Maduro."
Edit: Also, regarding the bit about flagging surprising facts as "little-known," maybe I should do that more, but I also unfortunately already go on far too long about everything, so I often throw out things I think are surprising and true without the substantiation they deserve. For instance, somewhere in this comment thread I referred to the East German government's opinion polling on its population, which found that they generally supported socialism but viewed the ruling party as corrupt; this sounds like it would be one of those fake propaganda surveys, but it actually turns out that they ran extremely legitimate anonymous polls on their people--and made sure the people polled felt comfortable giving sincere answers--in order to keep abreast of what actual public sentiment was, and kept the results mostly secret for internal planning purposes. But that's a whole other rabbit hole which it would take even longer to go down. Even if I link to sources describing this, most people won't read the link, and so plenty of people who make surprising claims misrepresent the sources they link, so it all ends up seeming somewhat quixotic to me.
Fwiw, while economics is still more conservative than many other academic fields, economists are *extremely* liberal relative to the general US population either by ideological measures or partisan affiliation depending on what you are talking about. The idea that economics is the last conservative bastion in academia is now quite dated. Some people's stereotypes just haven't been updated in a long time.
"Woke" isn't a useful term here, but if by that you mean something like, "socially liberal" then they do tend to score much, much higher on openness to experience measures than social conservatives. They are meaningfully more "open" and saying "nuh uh" would just make me think, "Well, there's your error here."
To the broader point, we have seen a demographic sorting where well-educated, non-rich professionals tend to have an overwhelming preference for center-left politics in the US. This is part of a global phenomenon of demographic sorting, and you see it show up in other nations as well.
Sure, the measures that psychologists call "openness" are correlated with "socially liberal" views; but not in anything like a 10:1 ratio (as we see at typical federal agencies), much less a 20:1 or 100:1 ratio (as we see at institutions like Yale/Harvard, WaPo/NYT, and Twitter/Netflix). Numbers like that are obviously driven by selection on ideology at these institutions.
There's also a psychological scale called "authoritarianism," which mostly just measures conservative social values; but calling conservatives "authoritarian" as a result of such silly pseudoscientific metrics is obviously ludicrous, just as it would be to call wokies "open-minded" based on the "openness" metric. For example, polling data from soon after the 2016 election suggests that over 60% of Clinton voters wouldn’t be friends with Trump supporters, while over 60% of Trump voters would happily befriend Clinton supporters; this disparity in actual personal tolerance replicates in all sorts of similar questions, and has only gotten worse since then.
Plus, of course, it's not like social conservatives are censoring liberals who talk about how red states have worse crime problems than blue states, or how (controlling for race) liberal voters have higher IQs than conservative voters; but you do very obviously face censorship risk from honestly talking about how black criminality drives the red-state/blue-state crime gap, or about black-white IQ differences. That's a more politically relevant proxy for "openness" in my view.
Here's a quote from my piece which I think points out how demographic sorting doesn't explain anywhere near the majority of institutional polarization in this country. College campus faculties are *vastly* more skewed towards Democrats than college students are, *especially* in the politicized fields like social "science" or the humanities. If this recent sudden lurch towards wokeness on campuses was driven by mere selection effects, you'd expect the students to be driving the change, or at least keeping up with the teachers. Quote:
Speaking of tenure: a paper from 2018 by Mitchell Langbert aggregates voting registration data for professors at elite schools, and finds even stronger progressive homogeneity. He tabulates the party affiliations of the nearly 10,000 tenure-track teachers at 50 top-ranked US liberal arts colleges, and gets a sample-wide Democrat-to-Republican ratio of over 10:1. Further, about 80% of the 1,000 total departments at these schools apparently do not employ a single Republican. Even the two military colleges in his sample—West Point and Annapolis—have nearly 1.5 and 2.5 times as many Democrats as Republicans! Even the STEM profs have an overall Dem:GOP ratio that’s over 5:1; meanwhile, the social science faculties reach over 10:1, the humanities are over 30:1, and the “interdisciplinary fields” (like “black studies” or “gender studies”) have zero registered Republicans on staff.
The ratio reaches particularly high among token identity groups; for instance, it’s over 20:1 for women, but just over 5:1 for men. Likewise, it clusters most strongly in the most powerful institutions: among these 50 elite schools, it’s three times higher for the top-ranked quarter than for the bottom-ranked quarter (which are still, of course, quite highly ranked, and quite progressive). And it’s geographically clustered where you’d think—where the ruling class matriculates—with New England reaching more than 25:1. Further, out of the 25 total fields included by Langbert, engineering has the lowest ratio, with only 1.6… which, coincidentally, is exactly the national ratio for all adults with any graduate school experience, which means that the professoriate’s liberal skew cannot be simply due to benign correlates of educational attainment.
Survey data supports the same general conclusion. For example, the Higher Education Research Institute survey finds that—across the decades and across the nation—faculty steadily self-identified as about 40% liberal, 30% moderate, and 30% conservative; then, beginning in the 1990s, there was an explosion in the share of professors identifying as “far left” liberals (especially in the softer subjects), which drove “liberalism” over 60% by 2010… while the conservative share was driven down under 15%. Simultaneously, the number of professors in these radicalizing softer subjects rose as a share of the total: from 2005 to 2015, the fraction of the faculty located in the arts, humanities, and social sciences rose by over 3.5 percentage points. Meanwhile, though STEM departments have remained somewhat politically balanced, they lost over 2.5 percentage points of the overall teaching spots.
Without a primarily political understanding of higher education, this hiring shift might seem quite strange. After all, from 2008 to 2018, the share of undergraduates getting degrees in the humanities fell by about 50%, and the social sciences lost similar amounts of student interest, while majors in STEM have grown commensurately. But, of course, these new hires are being selected for their demographic demagoguery, not their ability to serve students. For instance, during the last decade, the career openings posted on the Academic Jobs Wiki in US history have steadily shifted from 10% up to 35% focused on “African Americans,” and from 20% down to 5% focused on “Early America.”
Some students have, of course, learned to shriek the professoriate’s preferred slogans (with much less tact or subtlety), but shrill kids didn’t cause this change. According to the 2016 HERI survey, the nationwide liberal-to-conservative ratio at colleges and universities was less than 2:1 among incoming freshmen, about 6:1 among professors, and roughly 12:1 among “student-facing” administrators. Note that these coddling administrative jobs have grown much faster in number since 2000 than even the most soft-headed and soft-hearted sorts of professorial seats. Also note that this dataset finds a ratio of well over 25:1 for New England professors, which neatly matches the previously mentioned findings based on party registration.
Other massive surveys—like the 2020-2021 FIRE survey of more than 50,000 students from over 150 top universities—find similar trends: the lib:con ratio for elite undergraduate students is just below 2.5, which is only twice that of the US population in general; similarly, among Ivy League students, there are barely more than five liberals per conservative. The basic pattern seems to be that these children weakly echo what the relevant institutionalized adults around them are doing. For instance, the student gender gap in political ideology and party identification is roughly 15 percentage points, which is nearly five times larger than the general population’s partisan gender gap… but among female students there are only about four Democrats for each Republican, whereas among female professors there are more than twenty (and the professoriate’s gender gap is larger than the student body’s).
One trend worth noting is that this campus radicalization has been disproportionately concentrated among women and non-whites: in the general population, they lean slightly further left than whites and men; but in higher education, they skew vastly further left, and this gap is growing. Likewise, LGBT status also concentrates in universities and liberal arts colleges—with 25% of students at the former and 40% of those at the latter identifying as queer. And other institutions of social control have similarly cultivated these groups as clients. For example, as the number of personnel management workers in the US rose 20-fold from 1950 to 2000, women switched from a small minority to a supermajority of the profession. Women also constitute a supermajority of university administrators, of psychiatrists, and of psychologists… hence, for instance, the recent “epidemic” of disproportionately male “disorders” like autism and ADHD (while correspondingly female-focused vague diagnoses like “hysteria” have become professionally unmentionable). And hence, for similar clientelist reasons, the cultivation of mental illnesses as valid oppressed identities, rather than diseases. And so further hence the tendency of progressives to now identify as mentally ill three times more frequently than conservatives do, under a variety of definitions, according to a paper from 2020 by Emil Kirkegaard.
Openness to experience isn't a measure of interpersonal tolerance. Your willingness to be friends with people who hold noxious views that offend your sensibilities doesn't in of itself tell you how you'd score on openness measures in the Big 5/HEXACO model.
To your main point, there's a trivial mistake in your reasoning about the distribution you'd expect if a given psychological trait is playing a causal role. Even slight preferences can cause large distributive gaps because professions are selective. Think of it this way: Highly selective colleges tend to have populations very high openness to experience scores because they are selecting for traits that happen to strongly correlate with that. They also tend to have very high SAT/ACT scores. You wouldn't expect 1 out of every 10 or whatever to have low scores, because they are deliberately weeding them out. The selectivity is skimming off the high end of the distribution. The general population doesn't matter. And, indeed, professions that draw from them carry that on.
I doubt that openness to experience explains the demographic sorting as a single variable. That's trivially false, in fact. But the way in which you are dismissing it does not work. Aside from this, right now it is the case that if you are well-educated, not wealthy, and not quite religious, you're all but guaranteed to have liberal politics. These are strongly correlated. There doesn't need to be a professional conspiracy to explain that phenomenon. There are other professions that weigh in the opposite direction because of different traits they select for creating a self-reinforcing concentration of conservative politics.
P.S. I did genuinely laugh out loud when I read your argument that openness to experience should be proxy measured by how much ostracism happens when people argue in favor of scientific racism. That was extremely on the nose.
> Among the relevant traits are : tolerance of ambiguity, low dogmatism, need for variety, aesthetic sensitivity, absorption, unconventionality, intellectual curiosity,
So,
- Tolerance of ambiguity : Meaning you don't incessantly scream about "Dog Whistles" and take to twitter to complain about the hidden racism in Super Mario Bros.
- low dogmatism : Meaning you don't have a set of cherished beliefs you're willing to destroy and control other people for (or have them in smaller amounts than typical).
- need for variety : Meaning your social circles are not so cloned from each other that knowing the opinions of one of them can predict the rest almost perfectly.
- intellectual curiosity : Meaning you're able to hold ideas in your head and explore their sources and implications without necessarily agreeing with them, not constantly panicking about "Platforming" allegedly bad ideas.
Any test that assigns a high component on this dimension to wokies is manifestly bullshit.
The first words in the comment to which you’re replying are: ‘Sure, the measures that psychologists call "openness" are correlated with "socially liberal" views.’ I then explain why I am using the word “openness” in a different way than they do. And yet you reply by saying that the things I define as more open are not what the psychologists define as “openness”! If you want my argument to use the word “tolerance” instead of “openness,” you can copy/paste it into a Google doc and find/replace the words accordingly. Hope this helps!
As for the rest: this is rather like those people who argue that cancel culture isn’t “real”; if you really think it’s a conspiracy theory, then there’s not much more I can say to you.
But it’s worth considering why the politicized subjects are so incredibly much more unanimously woke than the less politicized subjects, as I already showed. Are STEM fields just not interested in “openness”? Do all the truly open-minded people just naturally get selected into the university departments of “why black people are always completely good studies”?
On the subject of authoritarianism and conservatism, some time back I had an exchange on my blog with Robert Altemeyer, an academic who had written a book on the subject. I believe I showed that the test for authoritarianism he based his conclusions on was heavily biased in the direction of showing conservatives to be more authoritarian, liberals less, than they actually were. Some here may find the exchange of interest:
There may have been several other such apparently unfair East German policies on paper, but the whole point of single-party rule is that the party gets to do what it wants, and can then get rubber stamps from its front-government’s official organs of power after-the-fact. Learn to spot the difference! And then learn to distinguish between the phases of this one ruling caste. For instance, communist youth groups like the USSR’s Komsomol had been small extremist sects at first, and only then grew influential enough to make their societies more like them; but then they became a boring box for disinterested masses of social climbers to fill out, like student government currently grants our country’s worst sociopaths with slight status benefits. This hollowed-out Komsomol then obediently dissolved itself, when the time came, by becoming the organization which students joined in order to get private funding privileges to form businesses under perestroika. Or, alternatively, consider how almost 40% of college students now identify as LGBTQ at liberal arts colleges.
In my view, there’s only one obvious difference between our manner of actually constituting a government and theirs: East Germans could choose to publicly register their actual votes, and so almost every voter did, to avoid arousing suspicion; in contrast, ever since 1891 we’ve had secret ballots, and so 20th Century communications technologies never got the chance to impose overtly totalitarian control on us. However, there’s less of a difference here than you might think. In East Germany, in order to vote idiosyncratically—rather than just automatically approving of everyone on the National Front’s list—you had to openly discard your standard-issue ballot, and fill out a blank one. Likewise, in the Jackson era, our red and blue parties would hand out their ballots, on red and blue paper, already filled in, and so they could see who voted for which party… and who voted independently.
And voters did actually sometimes vote against individual candidates en masse, or threaten to. The party somewhat allowed its people to protest against particular officials, or particular policies, just so long as they didn’t threaten party rule. In short, East Germans could organize to embarrass ineffectual representatives for failing to uphold socialist values—for instance, if they were too corrupt, or lazy, or incompetent—but could not openly organize against socialism itself; likewise, they could openly protest against low quality coffee rations in the late 1970s, but not against party rule. Much the same is true in China, which lets local protests provide the government with feedback on who deserves promotions or punishments… unless these protesters challenge CCP legitimacy.
Regardless, well over 90% of East German ballots approved the candidates on offer from every party. This indicates that the citizenry did not actually feel very free to disapprove. However, note that approval-voting intuitively works by removing generally unpopular candidates—rather than dividing partisans between thereby polarized candidates—and so we should naturally expect such elections to yield widespread modest favorability (instead of concentrated intense devotion). Further, the party carried out actually anonymous polling of its people, to keep abreast of their actual views, and they seem to have legitimately learned to support their system: for example, in 1983, 91% of students claimed that they were devoted citizens of the GDR; similarly, in 1984, 92% agreed that “socialism will triumph throughout the world.” Many of them viewed their administrative state as corrupt and incompetent, but until the very end fell short of outright condemning their government, even privately. Meanwhile, the average margins of victory in our Senate and House elections are just 20 and 30 percentage points, respectively… though both sets of incumbents admittedly still win well over 90% of the time. Granted, I may be overstating the importance of this distinction, because our system publicly registers our party affiliations, our partisan donations, and all the times we’ve ever voted, and we can’t opt out from sharing this information.
TLDR: The articles that say "Top 5 Best Mutual Funds to Buy!!" are mostly just picking the ones that got lucky in past, and for long-term performance you're better off putting your money in an index fund.
Here is my book DNA, meaning, those texts have shaped my perspective fundamentally, in chronological order. Would be interested in seeing some of yours.
George Orwell, '1984'
Ken Wilber, 'The Good, the True and the Beautiful'
Sun Tzu, 'The Art of War'
Master Eckehart, 'Beati sunt pauperes spiritu'
Plato, 'Collected Works'
Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morality'
An obscure treatise on Germanic graveyards of the Migration period
Dan Barry, 'The Lost Children of Tuam'
John Stuart Mill, 'On Liberty'
Adam Smith, 'The Wealth of Nations'
Julius Caesar, 'De bello civile'
Xenophon, 'Anabasis'
Oliver Sacks, 'The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat'
The Liebig isn't something I would have expected to see on a list like this, and I'd be curious to know why you included it. (If I could choose one book to see you review for the competition next year, it would definitely be that one!)
a, his biography is worth talking about: he was thrown out of school, because he burned things up, his apprenticeship was terminated, because he burned things up, he was invited to become a chemist, because he really liked to burn things up. And in his youth he witnessed Germany´s last failed harvest, grew up with the wish to prevent the next one, and, analyzing the portion of plant ashes, he couldn´t burn up any further, found out, which elements are depleted in infertile soil. thus mineral fertilizer was invented.
b, personal effects: I used to rely on compost as a fertilizer, viewing biomass as a fixed budget, like water flowing from one bucket to another. After Liebigs letters I opened the tap, fed my plants a menu of mineral fertilizers and it was such a pleasure to watch. Now, when I see moss growing on rocks I can´t help but wonder: 'Is your presence facilitating the erosion of apatite? Can I infer its distribution from your growth pattern? Do you hold water to hold potassium?' I also started to see mining as an increase in carrying capacity. It is a natural continuation of the contribution of animals to the biosphere: moving across a larger volume to increase the amount of available elements, first as worms, now as drills.
I've been wondering about what the long-term equilibrium price for housing should be (you can probably guess why that topic's on my mind).
Because houses are durable, persisting goods (i.e. capital goods), shouldn't there be a long-term tendency for the supply to build up over time, and the price to trend downwards?
Obviously demand for finite land also plays into prices, and houses do deteriorate etc.
Could you construct a model of the housing market, maybe one with a stable or falling population size , an infinite land supply (everyone works from home on an endless plain or whatever), inelastic and constant demand, extra durable construction techniques etc.
Could you construct a model like that where the price for houses tends towards zero? One that was reasonably close to reality.
In the long run is there a force pushing house prices down?
Are there any examples of persisting goods where the supply has built up over time and they're essentially free now?
> Could you construct a model of the housing market, maybe one with a stable or falling population size , an infinite land supply (everyone works from home on an endless plain or whatever), inelastic and constant demand, extra durable construction techniques etc.
With all those assumptions thrown in, I feel like the closest real-world analogy would be the car market. If you ignore the location aspect of housing then it looks like cars -- they're valuable objects that deteriorate slowly but retain enough value to be worth buying and selling second hand, most people own at least one for personal use, et cetera. The long term value of a car trends towards zero, apart from certain especially desirable cars.
In the real world as others have pointed out the housing market is mostly a land market.
There's the house itself, which acts in a reasonably normal economic way. I've read that houses deteriorate at about 2% per year, so to maintain their value, you have to put in maintenance.
However, there is the house lot, or the legal right to build a housing unit in that particular location. In a lot of metro areas (I live in Boston), that right is *tightly* rationed, and it is worth a lot more than the house itself. (One house-hunter noted back in the '80s that on one street a standing house was worth less than an empty lot on which a "triple-decker" had stood because the empty lot came with the legal right to build 3 housing units, whereas the standing house was just 1 housing unit.)
Critically, the *location* of that right is very important. One factor is the commuting distance to various types of employment. For middle- and upper-middle-class housing, a very important factor is the high school which the location gives the resident the right to send their children to. In practice, the "quality" of the school is the average socioeconomic status of the students in the school. (Depressingly, that average is significantly correlated with the measured educational "outcomes".)
Since housing within the districts of "good schools" is tightly restricted, upper-middle-class people with children bid for the limited number of housing units, maintaining a high market price for them. This feeds back into maintaining a high socioeconomic status of the children in the school.
I haven't thought about how this plays out in modeling. But as long as the upper-middle-class are intensely competitive for providing their children with "all the advantages", the supply of housing "in places with good schools" will likely remain quite constricted. If the number of such families goes down, the price in such places would initially decline. But then the buyers would have a bit more freedom to jockey where they lived, and what had previously been a set of suburbs with equivalent schools would differentiate into slightly-better and slightly-worse subsets, and price differentiation would follow.
Usually when people talk about the price of housing, what they're talking about is mainly the price of land, not the price of houses. Free houses aren't that unusual, but free land only exists when the tax on land is higher than the yield.
This is the opposite of empirical reality. I'm not aware of any places that give away free structures (unless the structure is so rotted it needs repair) but there's plenty of places in the US that still give away free land.
It's rare to give away free houses because houses are usually very hard to transport and not worth it for anybody. Sometimes you can move a very small wooden-or-similar house in several sections but that's about it.
But there's plenty of places where a vacant lot will sell for the same price as a (old, ordinary) house on the same-sized block, making the land effectively free. A really dumpy house in a nice neighbourhood will have negative value because whoever buys it is just going to knock it down anyway and build a better house.
Of course it's also true that there's places where land is practically free. But those places aren't in cities.
This story does indeed have a house (a mobile home) sold for 1 kroner. But the house was actually worth about 250,000 kroner because it was, a week later, listed for that amount. The 1 kroner sale was a nuisance sale: the person simply didn't want to deal with the transportation. And it was so unusual it got a huge amount of attention. So it's actually contrary to the idea that free houses "aren't that unusual."
In contrast thousands of people and companies each year get free land in the US.
If the highest bid was SEK 1 after an enormous amount of attention, it seems strange to assume that the actual value was SEK 250k on the basis of the current owner's hopes to sell it for that in the future.
Houses are capital goods, but capital goods depreciate. Homes require regular maintenance, especially for older homes. If demand in an area drops, it's no longer economical to build new homes and the supply will decrease over time. I used to live in a small town with house prices below the cost of building supplies. When there was a fire or if a house was vacant too long, it would get town down and not replaced.
A lot of questions like yours are looking at high demand cities like SF or NY. Those markets are badly distorted by the kinds of high income people who would like to live there. If remote work were universal, those places would be far cheaper, as we would essentially have close to your infinite land scenario. In practice not that many, as a percent, can work remotely. Also, not every place is livable - lack of amenities, including internet, lack of enough infrastructure, etc.
Houses that aren't maintained will degrade. This happens slowly with all houses, but very quickly for abandoned houses, including those not lived in temporarily. Some types of issues (like holes in roofs leading to water damage) can damage houses very quickly. At some point the house is worth less than the material and work needed to fix it, in which case it will be torn down.
As far as mechanism, generally the city will condemn it, and someone will pay for it to be torn down to avoid liability of a person getting injured on the property.
Don't forget regulations - there is an absolute minimum price for legally building a house that is not that low, even if the land is free, because there's a minimum size to the house, lots of safety standards, etc.
Don't forget 'location, location, location.' Different areas also change in desirability over time. So very often you see oversupply in one spot and undersupply somewhere else. Basically, it's quite complex because it is not just about general supply and demand, but also about demand in specific locations, as well as desired living standards.
City living is popular right now, so there is a lot of demand for housing in constrained locations.
PS. A capital good is not just defined as being durable, but also used "used in the production of goods or services." This can be (partially) applicable to those who work at home, but you cannot simply call all houses a capital good.
Housing markets are local, and there are plenty of local housing markets in which demand has evaporated and the price of residential real estate is extremely low. See, eg, ghost towns out West, or Detroit proper, where the median price sale price of a home in 2014 was apparently $14,000. https://detroit.curbed.com/2019/1/22/18192222/detroit-home-sale-prices-up-downtown-much-pricier-sales-than-neighborhoods. Though Detroit might still have been working through the effects of the subprime mortgage crisis, so perhaps supply was unusually high (i.e., the supply of homes currently offered for sale). But even in Detroit, prices have rebounded.
Part of the problem with your question is the assumption that the supply will continue to build up over time. Once prices drop low enough, builders will stop building more.
Thanks will check it out. Don't much care about where it comes from tbh.
Liked the game theoretic aspect of the whole dark forest theme, certainly much more believable than Stephenson's Seven Eves (and I generally like Stephenson). The world is ending and people build rockets? Gimme a break...
Seems like a retread of KSR's Ministry for the Future? I guess it could be convergent evolution, but the prion one is explicitly in there, scaring / killing leaders of negative externality companies, etc. as well as the general concept of rogue actors / ecoterrorists taking matters into their own hands after failure of the international order to address existential threats.
I'm hijacking this because you replied to me earlier regarding editing and then (maybe) deleted your comment. Unfortunately for you I still got an email notification. I'd appreciate any feedback on current / future essays you'd be willing to give. Contact me at pelorus.substack@gmail.com if interested.
I've been in a relationship for some years now and I'm reaching the point where it seems like we should either get married and start a family or break up. I'm inclined to the first option (yay!) but it's a decision to take with some consideration. Does anyone know a good exercise or checklist to help me think through this decision? Like, what questions should I consider before I propose? I've seen some lists of topics for couples to discuss together, I'm looking for a list that I can work through alone.
(Inb4: Yes, I will talk to close friends and family. Yes, I will do what my hearth tells me in the end.)
My checklist for a long term mate I wasn't 1000% sure about would be something like the following:
1) How financially/professionally productive/stable is this person likely to be in 10-20 years?
2) How emotionally stable/together is this person likely to be in 10-20 years?
3) How attracted to this person am I likely to be in 10-20 years?
4) Are our visions of our future family size and overall life plan compatible?
If those questions have positive answers then the rest is just details. That said I personally find couples who are together for many years before marrying odd. Though all kinds of relationships can and do work.
I would say in my own personal experience. I proposed to my wife after ~9 months of dating, and we got married after about 18 months together. We had known each other slightly longer. At the time I was not "crazy in love with her", but I had made a subjective evaluation that she was probably likely to be one of my better options for quite some time.
And that has both proved out to be VERY VERY true, and our relationship has mostly only gotten/better stronger with time (with a small hiccup for first year or two after first child). Married now ~14 years.
The best advice I could give my younger self on this issue, I think, would be: know why the other person is interested in marrying *you*. Be sure you're OK with that reason. Is it a reason you find inherently admirable and reasonable, is it realistic (about you), and is it something that, if it takes effort on your part to maintain, you are OK with exerting the effort to maintain (e.g. because it's part of your personal goals anyway)?
You say you're looking for a list you can work through alone, but I would strongly suggest discussing it with your partner as well. Yes, a proposal is supposed to be a surprise, but only sort of - your partner should know that it's on your mind, that you think of them as potentially a lifelong relationship, and you should be confident they're thinking of you the same way.
I think the critical fact for me in deciding to marry my current wife was that I could talk with her about ideas without feeling as though I needed a translator. To generalize that, consider what are the things about yourself that make you happy, make you feel as though you are paying a fair rent on the amount of existence you take up. Is your partner someone who can share those things with you, appreciate them? That isn't sufficient — I can imagine, probably know, people who satisfy that criterion who I would not want to be married to — but it is important and I think the only relevant insight I can offer.
How often do you mentally categorize them as an adversararial vs cooperative
Are there ever times where you're not looking forward to sharing some aspect of your life with them because a) they'll make a bad situation feel worse or b) they will dampen the joy of a good situation
These are good! To add to my reply above, and piggybacking on your thoughts:
Does your SO genuinely share in the happiness you get from other friendships, projects, passions, etc., or do these things make them jealous?
I would add also that a "dealbreaker" mentality isn't helpful... it's going to be up to you to decide whether any particular issues are bad enough to make marriage ill-advised, and the big picture is what really matters.
Proles tend to be more impulsive, acting on "low" "base" instincts like "OMG she has BIG BOOBS" or "I WANT A BABY NOW." Impulsivity, in other words. This has obvious pitfalls in contrast to the SWPL method of what might be called cautionism. The SWPL thinks long and hard about whether their partner is "compatible," looking for books and blog posts to read, establishing a checklist of must-haves, etc. The prole failure mode is having an unplanned pregnancy, the SWPL failure mode is trying to have a kid at 43 and failing.
All told, SWPLism is probably a better way to live your life than proleism, but that's a false choice and you should try to avoid the pitfalls of both. You probably live around SWPLs more than proles, so beware of cautionism.
It's funny that they called Red Delicious prole due to an overly sweet nature, which is the exact opposite of reality. Red Delicious are mealy, dry, and bland due to being bred for size, color, and shelf stability at the expense of flavor. I guess confidently pontificating while factually wrong must be SWPL.
My understanding is that it's been a continuous process of decline - the original cultivar from the early 1900s was actually quite sweet, but as growers bred for size/color/shelf stability, they selected out some important flavor related genes (eg ones that contributed to sweetness/juiciness were lost due to also contributing yellow coloration, which was considered undesirable). There's lots of discussions of this out there if you look for it.
Two thoughts based on the replies I see here based on my limited experience having been married 5 years. First, if you have doubts, that’s not necessarily a red flag to me. Some folks get married on a coin flip and other folks second guess their lunch order. Without knowing more about you, I can’t read into that. If a marriage commitment is your goal and but this isn’t the right relationship for that, there’s no point in giving it another 2 years just to find that out then.
Second, I think an optimization approach to this problem is fundamentally incompatible with human psychology for three reasons:
First, you have imperfect information and people and circumstances change. You can’t really solve for a global optimum based on a limited time window. You may both want kids but what happens if you have fertility issues? What if your spouse develop a medical issue that dramatically changes their ability to work or do the things together you love?
Second, it ignores human loss aversion. It’s painful to think there might be someone better out there if you just waited longer but far worse to know that you has something great with you ex but you threw it away for a chance at something better that didn’t materialize.
Last, it discounts “induced fit”. I’ve found myself enjoying many things that I wouldn’t normally do because I get to do them with my wife. I didn’t chose my kid’s personality but I love it because they are my kid.
This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t find alignment on the big things before getting married (many books with these questions and several good questions in this thread) but just to say that I think a better predictor of marital happiness is if you and your partner are committed to putting in the effort to building and maintaining a relationship together.
I don't know why people are giving you a hard time for considering this decision carefully.
I read somewhere recently that you should marry someone who's a good conversation partner for you, because you'll likely wind up talking to that person more than anyone else for the rest of your life. I thought that was clever.
What are the potential in-laws like, and what is SO's relationship with them like? Those people and those relationships will play a major role in your life if you marry and start a family.
This should be obvious, but it's very important: consider whether the two of you have compatible values, compatible visions of what constitutes a life well lived. Actions often speak louder than words here.
Be on the lookout for pathological/maladaptive behavior patterns. Friends and family can be helpful in noticing these.
How does SO treat people who have totally worn out their patience? How do they deal with these feelings? That will be how you and your kids are treated at some point.
Does SO hold grudges, nurse bitterness and resentment against anyone? If so, they'll have a grudge against you one day, and they'll probably hold one against at least one of your kids too, eventually.
Does SO apologize when they hurt you? Do they forgive you when you hurt them?
How does SO feel about divorce? Is it something they would only consider as a last resort in an extreme situation, or will part of their mind be constantly weighing whether they want to stay with you or bail?
Remember that this decision is always to some extent a leap of faith. You never know what the future will hold, what challenges you'll face together, how each of you will change over time. It's an adventure, not in the sense of like a fun vacation, but in the sense of an epic journey with twists and turns that test you but also offers great rewards. If you go into it with a whole-hearted commitment, you will find yourself free to become part of something bigger than the two of you as individuals, and live a more fruitful and in many ways richer life than you ever could have on your own.
Go for it! (says he who's ~20 yr marriage has now ended.) Kids and grandkids are the meaning of life. It will change your life for the better even if it doesn't work out in the end.
I'm seeing two potential red flags here. One is that you've been together for a long time but haven't decided to get married yet (despite describing that as a "yay!" option). The other is that "break up" is an option still on the table with this specific person, despite seeming to want marriage in general.
So I would start with a question - why haven't you gotten married yet?
The way you describe this situation sounds like you're compatible enough that you've not felt the need to break up, but not compatible enough that marriage is obviously good. Now, that may have more to do with one or both of your perspectives on marriage. Some people value the actual wedding and trapping far less than others. So, "we haven't thought about it much" could be a plausible answer. You should know if that's the case, and that would make the red flags less problematic. If one or both of you really want to be married and this is known to the other partner, that would seriously concern me.
Sorry to start on a downer! I consider marriage to be a very important decision, especially with the intention to have kids.
As for questions to ask yourself and her, here are some that I think are very important:
If there's any disagreement, it would be good to ask your partner why they feel the way they do.
Kids:
-How many, if any, kids do you each want? Close in age, or spread out?
-What religious or anti-religious teaching do you want to share with your children? What moral system do you want to instill in them?
-Should one of you prioritize raising children over a career? Short term, long term, permanent?
-How well do you each deal with stress from lack of sleep and increased responsibilities?
Finance:
-Do you want or need both partners to have careers? What would you do if one career required a move to another city (still relevant if only one person has a career)?
-Do you have shared finances now, and if not would you plan to change that? If not, why not?
-Do you trust your partner's judgement in financial situations and with major purchases? (Specifically, consider each person's perspective if only one of you handled all of the finances and bills of the household - would you be comfortable with the other person having that kind of access?)
First things first, if you are asking like that it's a bad sign. It's one thing to be uncertain about kids or marriage, but normally the other option is "continue as-is for a bit longer".
Secondly, is the issue that one of you wants children and the other one doesn't? Are you in your 30s and worried that it's now or never for kids? (here, nature is rather asymmetric and only the woman's age really matters)
Marriage, fundamentally, is a symbolic thing - it's great to want the ceremony and the legal benefits but the real decision is "do I want to spend the rest of my life with this person".
Kids, on the other hand, are a massive stressor and while every parent says they're worth it in the long run your relationship needs to be rock solid before you start - kids *will not* fix a troubled relationship, don't put kids through that.
The crux of it, in my opinion, is that if you feel you're "settling", you almost certainly shouldn't. The ideal for a relationship is "I can't believe I got so lucky as to be with *her/him*!"
Meh, when I got married I felt I was "settling" for the likely best option I would have for a while. Our marriage/relationship gotten stronger with time and now I would say I am SUPER SUPER SUPER SUPER lucky. I didn't feel nearly that strongly when we got married.
I see several people giving a response among these lines. Being passionately in love is great. But that's not what every successful relationship looks like, and feeling like that now is not a 100% guarantee you'll feel this way later.
Yes, the way the question was phrased is a bit of a red flag. But it can also be a good thing to step out of your emotions for a moment and take a more calculating look at your life situation. Not doing this (i.e. just going along with the positive emotions you're feeling right now) will make you gloss over problems that can become important points of friction down the line. Speaking from experience here.
We don't have enough information to make any kind of real determination, but with the way the OP was phrased, it seems very important to dig into the "are they settling for each other?" question. When my wife and I got married, we both very much wanted to do so. It wasn't really a question at that point, but a matter of when and how - mostly in order to arrange the wedding day.
As Thor mentions, when kids come or other relationship stressors, it will make things harder, not easier. If they are not sure about the relationship now, I would be very concerned about them trying to bring kids into it. If he's happier in the relationship than he's saying, then that's fine too.
I’m just some guy on the internet and free advice is usually worth everything you pay for it, but if you have to think about it, I would say don’t get married now.
“Seems like now is the time to get married or break up” is a really bad sign for future marriage.
You should, after having known and lived with this person for years, have a passionate desire for your significant other to take the relationship to the next level. You might be nervous about getting the event right, but the outcome should not be in doubt.
Imagine yourself as a marathon runner who has been training for years to set a world record. Your mindset should not be “I guess it’s time to run the marathon, or potentially quit running forever.” You should be overwhelmingly focused on how to run the marathon correctly and making sure you begin on the right foot, and you should know that you *want* to begin now because you’ve readied yourself to begin.
If there is a good bit of uncertainty about whether you see yourself with this person, whether your future would be successful, whether you should ask more questions and what those questions should be, etc., then that raises a quite serious doubt in my mind that your relationship to this point has reached a level of maturity where marriage should be considered. If it’s been more than one to two years, then it’s time to get really serious about developing the relationship’s maturity and only if that goes well should you consider marriage.
The Endowement Effect makes us overvalue what we have. To counteract this I've found it useful to imagine I don't have the object or person in question and ask myself how far I would go to acquire it or them. As an example: I don't want to sell my inherited cabin in Bumfuck Nowhere, but if I imagine that I had the value of the cabin in cash instead, I definitely wouldn't buy that cabin either. I don't want to sell my flat, but I'd also buy it again in a heartbeat if I imagine I didn't have it.
I used this technique for my ex (heh) to ask the following questions:
1. Do you want to stay with your partner as is?
2. Imagine you were torn apart by external factors outside the control of either of you, but a year later you unexpectedly got the choice to get back together--would you?
3. Repeat question 2, but add fun modifiers such as having started a new relationship during that year, having to move to a different country, having lost the memories of your shared past, etc.
Caveat: I have no relevant personal experience with marriage.
I once read about a couple who asked their friends and family the following question: "suppose we get married and some time later get a divorce. Why do you think we got that divorce? What is most likely to have gone wrong?" I thought it was clever, since otherwise it seems likely the friends and family will forget or dismiss perceived-as-unlikely bad outcomes, whereas with this question you hopefully learn the most likely bad outcome in their opinion, even if they consider it unlikely overall.
A related question i have wondered for a long time: When i play podcasts or videos on 2x or higher these days, the pitch change is quite minimal. Is there some new processing algorithm being used these days to correct for or eliminate the pitch change?
Some knowledge of the way analog TV works will help. This image [1] shows the amplitude of the television signal across a single line of video. When we speed this up, compressing it in time (which is not, I think, exactly how VCRs fast-forward in practice), we don't just affect the "pitch" of the colors.
At the ends of a single line of video are synchronization mechanisms and other odds and ends like the color burst. An analog video signal is drawn to the screen using an electron beam that sweeps left to right and top to bottom - even if you're speeding through the signal quickly, the electron beam keeps moving at the same rate.
I think that a sped-up signal would look like lines being compressed in length, all scrambled down the screen since they no longer match to the width of the TV. You'd also see black traces between each line - that's the synchronization mechanisms that are usually to the left and right of each line.
One easy way to think about the video signal is, roughly, amplitude = brightness of the line on the screen. Just because a wave is faster doesn't mean it has more amplitude, so the brightness remains unchanged. Color is a bit weirder - it's sent at a different frequency and changes in color are represented as changes in phase. Speeding up the signal probably wouldn't mess with the color too much, but I don't know for certain. I think the audio portion would become higher-pitched, as you'd expect.
Digital TV is entirely different - just speeding up the underlying wave would make the bits come in faster, as long as the receiver remains tuned to match. Possibly the receiver would start dropping packets and you'd get video corruption since they're coming in too fast to handle, but most likely is just that the receiver can't decode the stream at all.
b) If we were to do an analog recording of the electromagnetic wave that is the light arriving at our eye, and then do an analog replay of that faster, it would indeed be blue-shifted. But we don't do that, since that EM wave is around 600 terahertz, and we don't need to, since your eye isn't sensitive to phase of the EM field. (As opposed to your ears, which do detect phase differences in sound between the ears to decode directionalilty.) Instead, we record the momentary intensity of the EM wave, with a low-pass filter that cuts off intensity changes above about 30 hertz (since your eye can't detect changes faster than that).
c) It would be possible to record sound in a similar way. Effectively, you'd be taking short-time sound spectrograms and recording those. Then for reply, you'd reconstruct each spectrogram for even shorter time than was used to record them, but regenerating the recorded frequencies as they were recorded. (Note that this Rube Goldberg process is what we actually do for color TV. But for audio, it's cheaper to record the signal itself.)
What you describe in (c) is roughly how digital tempo shifting without pitch shifting works in reality. In fact, multiple popular audio compression formats also use frequency-domain encodings, and playing those files back at different tempos while preserving pitch (but generally also creating a bunch of artifacting) can be done by altering the behavior of the decoder.
I absolutely love that question and have played with it a bunch on Twitter.
Here's some related questions:
d. Why when we pause audio it becomes silent, while pausing video does not make it become a black screen?
e. What would paused-but-not-silent audio sound like?
f. What are the differences between our aural and visual wave-perception biological apparatuses (apparati?) that makes it so it makes sense that our aural and visual technologies work differently even though they both ultimately just produce waves?
TL;DR when pausing a video tape, the tape stops moving but the VCR heads keep decoding, sending the same image back repeatedly. Anything digital, of course, has memory to store the current frame and can just keep showing that.
Not only do they keep decoding, but the heads also keep *moving*, because of how a vcr works. A VHS tape is actually an analog recording on magnetic tape of an analog tv signal, which are radio waves in the MHz band - thousands of times higher frequency than the highest sound we're capable of hearing. Since storing the signal on tape the same way as we do for audio would require the tape to move at absurd speeds and require literal miles of tape, a VCR instead spins the *read head* vertically across the tape as the tape moves horizontally, so the signal is recorded as diagonal stripes across the tape.
I don't know if you do any audio editing, but Melodyne pretty much allows you to do this - I'm probably going to get the details wrong, but as far as I'm aware it fourier-analyzes the waveform you feed it, so that it knows at any moment what combination of frequencies are sounding, and then you can drag the cursor back and forth along the waveform, or hold it in one place, in which case it just plays all the frequencies that are happening at that moment. So it's a static sound, but exactly what static sound depends entirely on what the music is doing in the selected timeslice.
Fast-forward music compress the waves, hence make it rise in pitch. Fast-forward video don't alter the image, only the time they stay on screen. Video aren't a continuous vibration, they're disjointed pictures in quick successions.
Or to put it another way, it's not the same kind of "acceleration". Imagine that you had a music made of disjointed notes, each 1s long, each starting once the last ended. Then you keep the same notes, but only have them last 0.5s: your music is accelerated, but the pitch is not elevated.
At least for digital videos. I don't know enough of analog screens & magnetic tapes to theorize on them.
"Imagine that you had a music made of disjointed notes, each 1s long, each starting once the last ended. Then you keep the same notes, but only have them last 0.5s: your music is accelerated, but the pitch is not elevated."
That pretty much describes midi files (where the data stored is not audio waves, but a series of note triggers, giving the onset time, pitch, intensity and offset time of the notes, but the notes themselves are played by a synthesizer using whatever sound patches have been selected). Increasing the playback speed of the midi file does not raise the pitch.
Edit: dang - I forgot to click post, and was already ninja'd by the time I noticed.
17 % on Ukrainian victory (up from 15 % on November 20)
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24 without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
47 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (up from 45 % on November 20).
36 % on Ukrainian defeat (down from 40 % on November 20)
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
This update is based on recent decision to supply Ukraine with German and American tanks. Nobody claims that deliveries promised so far are sufficient to ensure Ukrainian victory, but nevertheless, that decision might prove to be an important juncture.
Ukraine’s allies are divided between those who want to supply Ukraine with everything it needs to win the war and those who are... not sure, I guess. Many postcommunist countries and Britain are in the first group (see also The Tallin Pledge: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/joint-statement-the-tallinn-pledge), while Germany and the US are in the second. But the decision to supply tanks increases the likelihood that they will over time move to the first group.
It also imho increases chances that war will continue into 2024; I now think that those is over 50 %.
*Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of 2022, that is.
Some of the listed victory/defeat conditions are stricter towards Ukraine than Russia. If we were back in late Feb 2022, probably the current situation would already count as a victory for Ukraine.
As an example, imagine if Ukraine makes a major breakthrough and reconquers all of Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblast, but is only able to take back half of the territories in Luhans or Donetsk that were lost post Feb 2022, and cannot cross into Crimea, leading to Minsk n ceasefire, but they get accepted into EU. This would resolve as an Ukrainian defeat, but in a strategic sense most would consider it a victory, even if Russians could claim they freed most of Luhansk and protected Crimea.
Not saying it does not make sense, as expectations shifted overtime, but I wanted to make a note on this.
Do you think it is likely that there will be Russian advances with significant gains (e.g., capturing rest of Donetsk and half of another Oblast, possibly Harkov or Dnipropetrovsk), or is the probability you assigned to Ukrainian defeat mostly due to it happening just by Russia not loosing too much before a ceasefire?
Yeah, you are right that this is a slight bug in the model, but I consider it highly unlikely that Ukraine would get into the EU unless its territorial disputes with Russia are settled. Otherwise EU would invite itself into possible direct war situation with Russia, for which there is a little apetite.
I.e. imho in this scenario they would have to formally surrender their claims on Russian occupied territory, and that would turn that scenario into real Ukrainian defeat. If Ukraine would want to increase their chances to get into the EU by ceding Crimea and Donbas, they could have done that before the war. Ukrainians, however, very much do not want to.
Re: your last question - I think both scenarios are possible.
Beating back Russia to the 2014 line and securing a ceasefire there must _surely_ be considered a Ukraine victory?! This would mean a total failure of Russia’s war aims, and just because it could have gone even worse…
Yes, I agree. RH was referring to a scenario when Ukraine would reconquer some of currently occupied territory, but not all of it, though.
Of course I recognize that it would get ridiculous if we would be talking about one village, then I would have to apply common sense and reclassify that situation as Ukrainian victory. Fortunately we are not playing for money so it is no big deal.
Almost 50% of a compromise? It seems that Russia (or at least Putin) clearly wants all of Ukraine, now or later, while Ukraine (or at least Zelenskiy) clearly won't settle for anything less than pre-2014 borders, and likely some Western guarantees of security, since he cannot trust Russia. Of course, if one of the two is out of the picture, the calculus changes quite a bit. Otherwise, there is a clear escalation, now with Western tanks and more artillery on the way, and Russia inching close to a proper mobilization and war-footing economy. It might be unwise to bet against Russia in any protracted conflict, no such bet ever paid off. But also the West cannot let Ukraine lose, so there is a clear impasse there. Basically, I don't see a framework for an agreement, short of one side or the other's outright victory... which is not likely.
Pfft. Russia hasn't won a serious war on its own in 200 years. It feels like some Russians have bullshitted themselves so long about the Great Patriotic War -- that pure Russian sacrifice and stalwartness won it, ignoring for the sake of pride the role of massive American logistical support -- that now they think everything is going to turn out like Stalingrad.
Well, I mean, I think the Ukrainian war *is* going to turn out like Stalingrad. But this time the Russians are playing the role of the Nazis.
I agree with your second sentiment, that, with enough Western tanks and artillery, competent crews and some air support, Ukraine may win a decisive battle like that. Assuming Zelenskyy gets his house in order and stops the graft and theft that was as bad as in Russia and is apparently still not rooted out. I don't have clear odds of that, it depends on whether Putin finds a way to clean his own house, which looks iffy so far.
The first point is... questionable. I think the prevailing sentiment among historians is that Western help in 1943 and on shortened the war by a couple of years or so. Then again, the US would have probably used the nukes on Germany in 1945 if the war outcome was still in doubt. Counterfactuals are a fool's errand though. And yes, Russia did win a few wars, and lost its share, just like any other country still around. They did beat the anti-Bolshevik Western invasion in the early 1920s. The Finnish war was a fiasco, on the other hand. And their help to anti-Franco forces didn't work out. The Chechen war was eventually won. It's a mixed bag.
America's record is not any more impressive, really. Well, the US did make a short work of Granada, I guess. And more recently was successful at destroying ISIL, though far from alone.
See, that's what I mean about delusion. The Soviet Union would never have beaten the Germans without American logistics. Stalin would've crapped his pants again after losing Moscow and cut a deal, and it would have fallen to Patton to go all the way to Berlin and raise a flag over the Reichstag. As for the record not being comparable to the Americans -- ha ha. Who do you think won the war in the Pacific almost entirely by itself? While at the same time supplying the bulk of the forces (and material of course) for Anzio and the drive up the Italian peninsula, and for D-Day and the drive to Berlin from the West?
I have to seriously doubt the USSR could have achieved a total defeat of Germany without US aid. They did stop the 1941 offensive on their own, and maybe they could have fought to a stalemate somewhere between the pre-war borders and the 1942 battle lines -- who knows? But assuming a total defeat of Germany is another matter.
Even with the USSR's manpower advantage, they were still losing the war of attrition prior to Stalingrad (they were taking casualties at around a 2:1 rate, and their manpower advantage was somewhat less than that). And German equipment advantages had a lot to do with that, though tactics/doctrine were another factor. So it's quite possible to imagine an Eastern Front in which the battle lines are largely frozen but the unaided Soviets are bled white at a greater rate, or about the same rate, as the Germans, due to a persistent German materiel advantage.
US aid was vast and did a lot to keep the Soviet economy and military moving -- not just aid in equipment, but in gasoline and other basic commodities. On the other side of the ledger, the contribution of Western strategic bombing has also been assessed upward a few times in recent decades (e.g. Overy, Tooze) -- it didn't crush the German economy, but it prevented German production from reaching anything near its potential and also forced the Luftwaffe to divert a lot of resources west.
Of course, it's still possible to admire the Russian fighting spirit in the war and the sacrifices it entailed, which pale in comparison to any sacrifices made in the West and are rightly something to be proud of. Raw fighting spirit can count for a lot, but in the absence of good equipment, it entails taking a lot of casualties. Which is why supplies and equipment are such a force multiplier for militaries that are rich in spirit but poor in materiel -- Russia in WW2, Ukraine in the present.
Well, Japan had superior equipment relative to China, where most of the fighting happened, but vastly inferior equipment relative to the US. So fair enough, on that front.
I don't see how the calculus changes much materially for Ukraine between accepting the status quo ante and accepting some territorial concessions to Russia. Ukraine's ability to resist another Russian invasion probably didn't have much to do with its control of the territories in question before the war, and those territories are depopulated and economically useless now. Though obviously the propaganda value matters, the loss would sting, perhaps to be compared to the French loss of Alsace-Lorraine, which they weren't happy about but had to accept for almost 50 years.
But I think the idea is that, at some point, people eventually just get tired of the killing, as each day this war continues it's lose-lose for both Russia and Ukraine. The analogy is probably something like Korea, a war that ended in stalemate and went on much longer than it needed to but still shorter than it could have.
Presumably you end up with some sort of agreement in which Ukraine pledges not to join NATO (which, strategically, the West shouldn't want anyway) but does get major Western military and economic aid, and Russian troops give up some, but probably not all, of the territory they've occupied. Or alternatively, you just get a Korea-style armistice, with the battle lines frozen and a commitment to a formal peace to come later, but the formal peace never comes.
In general I agree, but there is a major caveat re: those "depopulated" territories (both those occupied in 2014 and 2022): many of their population are now internal refugees in Ukraine, and they are a powerful political force against compromise peace, since they of course want to get back home.
Also they are not actually depopulated as in "empty"; as far as I know, most inhabitants stayed there.
Good point on the political factor of internal refugees. Though as time goes on those refugees get firmly settled elsewhere and the loss becomes more of a psychic wound than a place they would honestly return to if only Russia left.
"Also they are not actually depopulated as in "empty"; as far as I know, most inhabitants stayed there."
From what I can tell this is probably true, though of course no one's doing a census now and Ukraine apparently hasn't even conducted a census since 2001. But we have to think the younger, better educated segments of the population are disproportionately among those who left, so those places have grown emptier in an economic sense than in raw headcount. And they will only diminish in economic importance as the population ages and infrastructure is destroyed or decays.
I think in this case "compromise" would mean something more of a deadlock, e.g. what we happened between North and South Korea. It is not like any side was really happy with the outcome, but they made a cease-fire as neither had the power to move forward.
Agreed, a compromise is out of the question for both Putin and Zelensky, and at the very least, with steadily increasing weapons delivieries to Ukraine, the percentage should go down, not up.
> It might be unwise to bet against Russia in any protracted conflict, no such bet ever paid off.
That's a bit exaggerated. Russia was forced into peace during WW1 because of heavy losses,
it would probably have lost WW2 if not for Lend-Lease, and the Soviet-Afghan war lasted 10 years and ultimately contributed to the fall of the SU.
> Russia was forced into peace during WW1 because of heavy losses
Actually the story was far more complex. Roughly, there were two revolutions, the Bolsheviks were focused on consolidating power and Trotsky figured out a way to avoid fighting Germany at the same time. It was followed by the Civil War they won by 1922 against the Western "intervention".
> it would probably have lost WW2 if not for Lend-Lease
This is a counterfactual, so there is no way what would have happened in a hypothetical world that is not an actual one, but what you said is what was sold to the US public and is very much a US-centric view.
Russia did indeed lose in 1905 to Japan due to mismanagement (ironically, the invading force ran out of fuel, like in Ukraine) and the lack of political will to fight abroad during dire economic conditions; and by 1990 in Afghanistan (every invader lost in Afghanistan, no exceptions!). How much it contributed to the fall of the SU is a matter of debate. Having watched it unravel from the inside, I saw it as Gorbachev's ineptitude in relaxing restrictions, he started with political reforms instead of economic ones.
>but what you said is what was sold to the US public and is very much a US-centric view.
I'm not from or in the US so I wouldn't know, but you don't have to believe me anyway. Stalin, Khrushchev, Zhukov, and historians both American and Russian are slightly more authorative on the subject, and according to Wikipedia they all say the same thing: If not for Lend Lease, Russia and the rest of Europe would have lost the war. So if that's the US-centric view, that's because it's basically everyone's view. And I included the counterfactual to oppose the view that nobody can win against Russia in a protracted war, which is clearly not the case.
Also no, Afghanistan having fended off every invader ever, no exceptions, is a modern myth. See e.g. an overview by ancient historian Brett Deveraux here:
> Afghanistan isn’t the graveyard of empires. It is the midlife-crisis-car of empires: an overly expensive, not terribly useful thing empires buy when they are bored and not sure what to do with their excess income that is a swiftly regretted embarrassment.
Interesting. I didn't know that lend-lease was that significant.
> 92.7% of the wartime production of railroad equipment by the USSR was supplied by Lend-Lease,[35] including 1,911 locomotives and 11,225 railcars[41] which augmented the existing stocks of at least 20,000 locomotives and half a million railcars.[42]
So... about 5-10% extra in all areas, though a lot more in terms of wartime production, except for tanks, which were mostly Soviet.
It certainly stands to reason that when Lend-Lease ramped up by 1943 or so, it helped the Soviet Army win, or at least win much more decisively.
> If not for Lend Lease, Russia and the rest of Europe would have lost the war.
I can't find independent sources claiming that, it's from Khrushchev's memoirs. A more reasonable view is further down:
> Left to their own devices, Stalin and his commanders might have taken twelve to eighteen months longer to finish off the Wehrmacht; the ultimate result would probably have been the same, except that Soviet soldiers could have waded at France's Atlantic beaches.
As for Afghanistan, the blog article is not disagreeing with the prevailing view that every imperial power in the last few centuries had to back off, once the cost, in lives and money, became too much.
Lend-lease is often underrated because the Soviet Union made most of its own guns, tanks, and planes. But they did that by mostly ignoring things like railroad equipment, supply trucks, high-octane gasoline for those planes, and (smokeless) gunpowder for those guns. Most of *that* stuff came from the US and UK.
This was a sensible choice for Russia. First, because the guns and tanks and planes were pretty good guns and tanks and planes that were very well suited for the environment and doctrine, whereas supply trucks are mostly and high-octane gasoline entirely fungible. And second, because if the Lend-Lease goes away, a tank with a little bit of fuel and ammunition will contribute *something* to your defense whereas a supply truck full of fuel and ammunition is just a gift to the enemy if there isn't a tank ready to receive those supplies.
But it does mean that in the no-lend-lease counterfactual, we're debating whether there would be a rump Soviet Union holding out behind a stalemate line somewhere between Moscow and the Urals, not how long it would have taken for Zhukov's tanks to roll into Berlin. Without *massive* foreign aid, Russia can't materially afford a sustained offensive.
No war can go on forever, especially a hot war. The question is not whether there will be a compromise right now, but what is the most likely resolution to this conflict when it does finally resolve. I agree that neither side is ready or willing to offer necessary concessions at this point, and feel that there is more to be gained (or less lost) from continuing the fight. Some time period in the future, which may be months or years, the sides will be forced to evaluate the real or potential gains from continued fighting and come to the conclusion that it's really not in their best interest to go forward.
As per the original post, it may be that one side has decisively won. It's more likely that neither side has really won, and the only alternative is a compromise. Do you really think the chances of a compromise are 0.0%? That unless one side decisively wins, they will fight forever?
Yes I believe there is close to zero chance for compromise, at least long term. Ukraine is calling for ever more capable kinds of weapon systems (tanks, planes, long range rockets), because they want to go on the offensive again. Russia, meanwhile, is throwing poorly-trained human waves at Ukraine to buy time for rebooting their military training capabilities. Both sides are seeking a decision, just over different timelines.
If the current war ends in any way that leaves Ukraine a sovereign country but without Western security guarantees such as NATO membership, Putin (with his domestic position strengthened as per implication of a mutually beneficial compromise) will rebuild, modernize, and eventually try again. It would be not peace but an extended cease-fire.
Putin might try again, you never know what any man will do, but I think there's a strong case that he won't.
The war was clearly a miscalculation; Ukraine has put up at least 100x the resistance that was anticipated and there's no universe in which the benefits (which were always dubious) now exceed the costs.
Putin seems to still be doing OK domestically, but repeatedly getting your country into pointless quagmires isn't exactly a winning formula for political success. If he was clearly angling to do it again, you have to think the risk of a coup would be very high. Ignoring popular discontent, corrupt Russian elites would much rather extract the excess military spend for themselves than continue fighting pointless wars and rearming the military, and Putin isn't someone with Stalin-like autocratic power to ignore the wishes of his elites forever.
To me the only possible long run is defeat of Russian imperialism AND Ukraine, Russia and Belarus as NATO members.
As much as NATO was about the so called West defense against SU, NATO is and was about keeping Germany, France and England from fighting with each other.
Kaliningrad/Königsberg/Królewiec/Twangste problem is more of a end game tough nut to crack. Derussification and cosmopolitan independence probably required.
Even the break up of the Far East might be necessary to deimperialism Russia. Russia has to figure out whether it is European or just the Golden Horde pretending to be Slavic because Cyril and Methodius quasi civilized them .
As much as I am also against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you come across as very ideological and brainwashed by "The West is a the good guys and Russia is the evil empire" that reminds me of Reagan's slogans. There are no good guys in the world, and the West has as much blood on their hands as anyone.
US screwed Iraq, Afghanistan and a lot of others way harder than the Soviets did. in a perfect world W Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld would have been tried in Hague for war crimes.
I should note that Afghanistan was screwed over by Soviets way harder than by Americans. In fact, it, as well as Iraq and Lybia, were pretty screwed up places even before American interventions.
Those interventions of course totally failed to improve sad condition of those countries, and in the case of Iraq it was done clearly contrary to international law, but, it seems to me, speaking as no-American, that what the Soviets did and what Russians are doing right now is far worse.
You would find examples of American badness comparable to what Russia is doing now, but imho you would have to go back to the Cold war era.
One of the most important lessons one can learn when discussing international politics and history is that saying one person/nation/group/action is bad _does not imply_ that some other person/nation/group/action is good. So, _so_, SO many people have been led astray by the idea that, in order to approve of one thing, they _must_ disapprove of some other group (or vice versa).
Russia, in the current moment, is inarguably a villain that is threatening world order and has committed various atrocities. This implies exactly nothing about any other group.
Reagan was a dope. But the Russians are bad guys. They made a pact with Hitler to divide Poland. And they really could not see the path that Gorbachev made for them out of Stalinism.
"As much blood" what do you mean by that?
Does Russia want to be part of Europe or not? Until the Russian people, stop taking their Murti-Bing pills Russia with be a dead-end and an international blight under Putinism.
The war ends three ways: Putin dead like Hitler, Putin dead like Mussolini, or Putin awaiting trial at the Hague for war crimes like Milošević.
Everyone is bad guys. There is no moral high ground. Russia is bad. America fucked up Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and a lot of other places for no reason. But it has the clout to avoid punishment, Russia no longer does. Everyone looked the other way when they were killing people in Syria, but Ukraine is too high-profile.
As for how the war ends, who knows. I find all three of your options, however tempting, rather unlikely. Musk's plan is an option, provided some reasonable accommodations are made for those displaced in Eastern Ukraine being able to vote in the referendums. If Russia starts pushing back hard, Zelenskyy might be more amenable to giving up on Crimea, in return for security guarantees from both the West and Russia. Or the war may simmer for years, like in Northern Ireland, Middle East, or many other places in the world.
The west is good because it allows maximum to develop everyone's maximal potential. It is not only about economic potential but also artistic, self-expression, ideas that depend on freedom of speech. Russia is worse but some third world countries are even worse. The choice of Ukraine is between bad (but not the worst) and better society. They chose better and Russia doesn't want to allow that therefore they are the bad guys in this story.
Factcheck: Cyril and Methodius were Byzantine missionaries to so called Great Moravia, whose former territory is now divided mainly between Czechia and Slovakia.
They had nothing to do with Russia, except that their adaptation of Greek alphabet was, I think with a detour through further Bulgarian adaptation, used as rough basis for current Russian (and of course also Ukrainian, which is almost the same) alphabet. That is why it is called cyrillic.
I was making the poetic point that Cyril and Methodius introduced written language and civilization to the Slavs as generic description. The Russians being the last of the Slavs to be civilized.
Moscow was not much of anything for many centuries while Kiev flourished.
The Russian imperalistic propaganda has it all backwards. Civilization moved from west (the original slavs whom SS C&M encountered) to east. And north (scandinavians) to south. The "rus" in Kievan Rus' does not stand for "Russian" it just means "people".
I mean, like, that is true, but di*k measuring contest about whose civilization is older is imho totally dumb. Of course even Moscow is far older than, like, New York.
New York as a place may be new but is a product of Europe and cosmopolitanism.
Are the Russians really civilized or not?
Are they really European or not?
They certainly aren't related to ancient African, Middle Eastern, Indian Sub Continent Asian, or China and Asian Pacific civilizations.
The Russians (via Putin and the Chekists) are making a good case that they are just a mimetic variation on the Golden Horde.
It took quite awhile for Germany, France and England to decide that they were going to be civilized. NATO and the EU are enormous factors in the process.
You can't get to modern peaceful social democracy until you rid yourself of imperialism. Imperialism is, as Lenin noted, the last stage of capitalism.
I'm a bit surprised by the direction of your update given that military operations have overall turned out well for Russia during the last couple of months.
Well, but I of course expected that they will turn out that way. If Ukrainians have only 15 % (or, really 17 %) probability of victory, bad news for them are to be expected. Good news are surprising and worth updating on.
A couple of questions to people who think that their religion is compatible with rationality.
What would you consider to be the strongest arguments for the non-normative beliefs of your denomination/creed being true? Why do you think that all the other denominations/creeds don't have comparably strong arguments justifying their beliefs (given that you don't adhere to any of them instead)?
I've yet to be persuaded that rationality is within the ambit of our species. Rationalization, yes, we are the absolute princes of rationalization, and naturally almost any religion is fully compatible with any felt need for rationalizing things.
I'm assuming "non-normative" means something like historical or scientific facts, as opposed to moral teachings.
Before you start to consider the question you're asking, you have to settle a more fundamental question. Can a person's eternal happiness/enlightenment/ethical rightness/etc even be based on historical or scientific facts at all? If you have a person who's not enlightened/eternally happy/ethically righteous/whatever, can there be some historical fact that transitions them from unenlightened to enlightened? Because there's no point arguing over historical and scientific truth in religion otherwise, unless it's just for fun.
And before we can answer whether a historical fact can do it, we should figure out whether *anything* could do it, and what this kind of transition even is in the first place. What would it mean for a person to transition from unenlightenment to enlightenment / ethical evil to ethical good / eternal damnation to eternal felicity?
In such a transition, there must either be an essential discontinuity in the mind/soul/being or not. Either it's a fundamental change, or not. If there is *not* an essential discontinuity, then we're in one kind of epistemic universe: fundamental change isn't possible; Platonic forms stamp their shape on reality and that's it; every choice is actually the unfolding of some genetic/historical/psychological predetermined germ; All is One; Being is Emptiness -- you recognize this kind of philosophy. If there's no possibility of an essential discontinuity in a person's life, the best you can do is work to realize that you're already One with the Universe. I hear meditation is useful to that end; but in any case, the historical facts of one religion or another aren't going to be much use to anybody. It all sounds very Buddhist.
If there *is* an essential discontinuity, then we're in a very different epistemic universe. It's possible for a person to be living one way, then have some kind of encounter or experience, and suddenly be living in a fundamentally different way. The historical truth or falsehood of some fact, or some scientific discovery, might, in this case, actually have some bearing on somebody's enlightenment/eternal happiness/ethical goodness. But if it's an essential discontinuity, then it's essential: It's core to the existence of the being we're talking about. Then the only way to describe it starts to sound ... suspiciously Christian: you have to die to yourself and be born again. The thing that enacted that change upon you sounds less like a historical fact and more like a ... Creator? Because it undoes you at an essential level and rebuilds you on an essentially different basis.
So, for most people who ask questions like this, there's no possible argument or answer that could ever have meaning for them. They're in a kind of atheistic or Buddhist paradigm in which Change is Illusory, All is One and We are The Universe. (Fundamentally, even if they don't realize it.) They lack sufficient inwardness to be changed at an essential level by any kind of encounter they might have. Or, to rephrase the same idea, if science were to prove that reincarnation is real, and happens basically the way Hinduism describes it, most people wouldn't convert to Hinduism. Because when most people ask about these things, they're not putting their soul at stake. They're not willing to be changed in their innermost being by the answer to their question. (And, for atheists or materialists, this is completely fair: they don't believe in an innermost being, after all.)
But if you're one of the very few who has true inwardness, if you're not just arguing to argue, if this is something that genuinely has meaning for you ... then I lifted this entire train of thought from Soren Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments. Kierkegaard's work is strong medicine. But most people have a crisis in their life when they're genuinely questioning the nature of reality and the meaning of their existence, and that's the crisis for which he has medicine.
>Because there's no point arguing over historical and scientific truth in religion otherwise
Of course there is : Because the religion claims those truths as true.
Unless Truth means nothing, then anybody who claims "X is true" should be debated and their claims ascertained. This has nothing to do with happiness or enlightenment or the purpose of religion, this is just how claiming things work.
(Granted, there are some settings and discourses where we claim things that are manifestly non-true, like Literature, Thought Experiments, Jokes, etc..., but all people who make and entertain those claims will happily admit they are non-true in the strict sense. No so for religion.)
>Can a person's eternal happiness/enlightenment/ethical rightness/etc even be based on historical or scientific facts at all?
If there is a combination of experiences that led them into that state then I assume it's fair to call those historical facts?
>Because there's no point arguing over historical and scientific truth in religion otherwise, unless it's just for fun.
I don't see it this way. Religions have it as a part of their belief system that eternal happiness/enlightenment etc. are possible (and make sense as concepts in the first place), and they also make plenty of claims about what we now classify as historical and scientific truths. But no religion appears to have an exceptional track record of having made factual claims that people had gone on to independently verify, so I don't see a good reason to expect their less verifiable claims to be better correlated with truth either.
Agnostic here. I find your question a bit distasteful, if you start off by saying someone's beliefs are non-normative, it sounds like you want to pick a fight and not that you want to understand how they think about things given the context of their religion. (Maybe this is not your intent?) If you want to understand someone better I think you need to start from a different place, one of humility, don't assume what works for you is what is going to work for everyone. I listened to Lex Fridman interview Omar Suleiman (a Muslim scholar), he (Lex) has the perfect tone for these sorts of discussions.
That's probably true. I take non-normative to be outside the norm. Or that which is not normal. But normal depends on your group. What does it mean to you?
Normative is the opposite of descriptive. A descriptive belief is one that involves making a claim about how things are. For example the sky is blue or 1+1=2. A normative belief is one that is about values or what ought to happen. For example Murder is wrong, or we should increase taxes. Xypm was asking for an example of a belief that religious people have that is describing reality differently from nonreligious people, as opposed to a values difference between religious people and nonreligious people.
I guess I'm more confused then, religious people have a view of reality that includes a God. This seems normative to them and non-normative to atheists. Is that right? Non-normative implies your view of reality is screwed up?
A normative belief is an implicit command, a non-normative belief is just a sensor reading.
"There exists a God" is a non-normative belief, it's a sensor reading (whether true or not), an assertion about the state of the world.
"There exists a God worthy of worship" is something of a hybrid, the overall statment is non-normative, it just says that a God of a certain sort exists. But the qualification itself hides some serious normative baggage, since "Worthy" is literally a question of value. This tells us that the normative\non-normative distinction is spectrum-ish and more subtle than the Command\Sensor dichotomy.
"You should worship God" is a normative belief, it's an explicit command.
Almost all the time, people who make normative beliefs will argue for them with non-normative beliefs. For example, "There exists a God such that if you worship Him you will become happy/content/successful, thus you should worship this God", this is a combo of a non-normative belief followed by a normative belief, following each other in a perception-control sequence (noticing something advantageous about the environment, then making a move to take advantage of it). People make it more confusing by sometimes omitting the normative conclusion entirely and leaving it implicit in the non-normative statement.
That link seems to be describing the relation between normative beliefs and psychology rather than what a normative belief is.
The belief in God is always a non-normative belief, whether you think it is true or not. The normative/non-normative distinction is a description of they type of belief. It is independent of the correct/incorrect distinction. For example, the belief that 1+1=2 and the belief that 1+1=3 are both non-normative beliefs. The difference between them is one of correctness.
Guess I'll answer. I'm religious because I know people who have prophetic dreams, and are otherwise influenced to deal with future unforeseen events. (Stuff like spontaneously buying two coffees when they're alone, then running into someone stranded and being able to offer them a coffee.)
I don't believe in other denominations because the blessed folks have their blessings visibly reduced if they pursue those other denominations. Things that were going smoothly for them stop going smoothly until they go back to the first take.
Is that compatible with rationality? Probably not, to the same extent that truth is incompatible with logic. But logic is a shadow of truth, and demanding truth fit into logic has the whole thing backward.
Religious prophecies commonly contradict one another. Is there a rational reason why I should accept your friends' claims and not those of Joseph Smith et. al?
The ones I've heard are very specific and short-term. "If you take this trip, you will be permanently injured, so don't take this trip."
Otherwise, Joseph Smith is dead and is going to be hard-pressed to give you a new prophecy. Also my understanding is Joseph Smith declared martial law to avoid being arrested, a bad sign faithwise.
It should be noted that Joseph Smith dropped martial law and surrendered to the authorities, even though he knew it would mean his death.
I've never seen it argued that faith means you always sit and twiddle your thumbs until God tells you what to do, or that you disregard practical safety or common sense, assuming that whatever happens is meant to be. Most religious people act on their best judgment (or try to), based on the tenets of their religion, having faith that things will turn out right in the end. Then there are specific promptings like you're talking about; things which one acts on in faith even if they don't see the end from the beginning.
And Alexander, I wonder if by "rational" you mean "observable", as in "After studying x number of people, we've found that If you pray to God in this specific way, you always get an answer in this specific manner in this specific time frame". My belief is that spiritual experiences have to be personal, otherwise they're not that spiritual. What proof WOULD it take to get you to change your life from what it is now? If you feel no desire to change, no proof will suffice. If you DO feel a desire to change, well, "See and ye shall find". But what you'll find will be personal to you, and you won't be able to empirically prove it to anyone else.
I'd say that a priori ESP and such are compatible with rationality, but the lack of a plausible evolutionary explanation, and the fact that nobody has of yet convincingly demonstrated such abilities despite significant monetary incentives makes this seem very unlikely.
I mean, if you can demonstrate supernatural effects in the material world, I'd say that that's a serious religious insight and something of great interest to serious rationalists!
It may be true that modern Christianity doesn't make those claims, but there have been plenty of religions that do (IIRC Shinto still does) and even Christianity has flirted with the idea.
Yup, exactly. As soon as you demonstrate them to the satisfaction of science, it's not supernatural anymore; it's been entered into the canon of natural law, and is as natural as anything else.
Why would ESP be supernatural? I mean, if some kind of ESP or psychic powers exist, presumably they follow some set of natural laws, albeit maybe ones we don't understand yet.
Catholic here. Have you ever studied Thomas Aquinas? Maybe first start with JP II encyclical Faith and Reason.
There is essential and long standing Catholic tradition that both faith and reason are necessary and not in conflict. For example: "You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews."
No, but I'm aware of the Natural Law doctrine and read Scott's review of Feser's "The Last Superstition". Further engagement doesn't seem promising.
>Maybe first start with JP II encyclical Faith and Reason
I've taken a look. A sentence towards the end of the introduction, "Sure of her competence as the bearer of the Revelation of Jesus Christ..." implies that the truth of the revelation is to be taken for granted, and from then on the document appears to simply quote the Bible as the authoritative source. Is this the correct impression? If so, it doesn't really engage with my questions.
You've read the whole encyclical (108 paragraphs and 132 footnotes) in 15 minutes?
Come on, you've asked a serious question. Spend some serious effort.
Confucius is on a picnic with students. He says if I've picked up one corner of the picnic blanket, is it unreasonable to expect my students to help with the other corners to spread it out so that we can eat.
The summa was written in a day.
There is a life time of thought and practice involved in both rationality and loving neighbor as yourself.
But work your way back into some original texts instead of textbooks and reviews.
To claim to be aware of whatever you mean by "the natural law doctrine" without actually reading some Aquinas is like saying you know about alcohol because you read a pamphlet in health class, even though you've never actually had a beer.
I embrace both the peasant and the scholar. Pretending to take on the hard mantel of scholar without actual doing the work is worse than just being a peasant, which has rewards of its own.
Well, the thing is, there is in practice an infinite amount of books to read, so one has to prioritise. To me the world doesn't remotely look like anything an omnipotent omnibelevolent intelligent being would make, so my prior on any belief system that postulates this is very low. But not so low that a good pitch couldn't in theory overcome, which is the reason for asking the initial questions. I think that any reasonable doctrine can be summarised in a few paragraphs, from where an interested outsider might decide to investigate further.
1. You're not an omnipotent omnibelevolent [sic] intelligent being so how would you know?
2 "any reasonable doctrine can be summarised [sic ]in a few paragraphs".
Christianity is summarized in a few paragraphs: The apostles' creed (or the Nicene) and the prelude to the parable of good Samaritan. What does the lawyer first ask and actually answer? The second question who is my neighbor sort of overshadows the first part.
Behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tested him, saying, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?"
He said to him, "What is written in the law? How do you read it?"
He answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." **
He said to him, "You have answered correctly. Do this, and you will live."
But he, desiring to justify himself, blah blah blah.
To love God ( and by implication the entire Cosmos) with all your heart, soul and strength is a plea to make "rational inquiry" into the nature of things.
** elsewhere we learn that this commandment to love one another is so encompassing that it includes even loving your enemy and might include laying down your life for a friend.
Now you can be a peasant and stick with the Creed and the full parable of the Good Samaritan and the idea of love (this is perfectly rational and reasonable approach) or you can also be a scholar - which means you are going to have to read some stuff (not just skim it) and think long and hard. The real scholar/philospher will always end up knowing that they don't know. Cf. Socrates.
But rejecting the peasantry AND failing to really embrace the hard work of being a scholar, is a luke warm drink. You can't really half-a$$ it.
That’s interesting but I thought OP was specifically about reasons for non-normative beliefs being true. For example, why do you believe in the Resurrection or in heaven and hell? And why not in the miraculous dictation of the Koran?
The promise of bodily resurrection seems be the only rational solution to the "unfairness"/irrationality of death for a sentient and rational beings.
Or as Lazarus's sister said to Jesus: Death stinks -- what are you going to do about it?
There is no historicity for dictation of Koran or Mormon golden tablets. But the resurrection of Jesus seems to have accepted outside of the community (notwithstanding rejection of theological interpretation of event.)
If there was a Time Machine that definitively showed that the was no resurrection and no incarnation - all good Catholics would become rationalists Jews.
That there is a transcendental (that there is something other than matter) is not falsifiable. But even the physicist understands that the photon is NOT matter and the question of why existence rather than non-existence can't be answered as a materialist.
And then there is the conundrum that Goedel exposes. There are true propositions than can't be proven to be true. That seems for me to be a powerful statement of both the limits of rationality and the power of rationality.
And if there was a time machine to demonstrate that Moses and all the rest of the Jewish patriarchs had had no supernatural encounters, then those rationalist Jews would become rationalist atheists/agnostics?
To be clear, I'm not saying that love and photon are fully rationally explainable as of right now, and may never be. But admitting to having no good explanation is, to me, obviously superiour to postulating a spurious one.
I think he's suggesting that if one attributes the universe to an act of creation, it tends to suggest a single Creator, which points either to monotheism or if a pantheistic religion to one god being much more equal than others, so to speak, because he was the Creator and they weren't.
Of course, one could argue in the alternative for a pantheon in which the gods are co-equal, and designed the universe via a committee, but that does tend to strain the credulity of anyone who's served on a committee.
I understand. That... narrows the options quite a bit, unnecessarily so. It could for example be that the Universe is a well-modularized machine, like a Car. One guy designs the engine, another the wheels, yet another the seats. There is no conflict because the interfaces between the subsystems are so crystal-clear that there is no room for ambiguity or clash of responsibilities.
Or, what about a "Layered" creation model ? God A creates the whole universe and then sort of chills. God B comes along and notices something He would like to add, so he studies God's A code and adds his contribution. Goddess C then comes (because the Pantheon is a healthy progressive gender-balanced institution) and adds the much-needed Speed of Light patch, without which people tended to accelerate to Math.NAN and all sorts of Nonsense happened. Etc...
You can certainly have a heirarchy, but then God A is pretty clearly Zeus, and all the rest are junior Olympians. The actual Greeks get around the obvious narrative problem of banality by having the Top Dog not actually omniscient, so you can sneak around behind Zeus's back to amuse yourself, cuckold him, whatever. But being not actually omniscient is a little bit in tension with the assumption that you have invented the entire cosmos and not fucked up any little corner anywhere.
The modular universe is a trickier. If the interfaces are genuinely obvious, the only thing that comes to mind is that there *is* only one possible overall structure to the universe, more or less as soon as you assume it exists at all, it *has* to look like such-and-such.
But if that's the case -- why would that requirement stop at a high level? Why wouldn't it extend all the way down to the least little detail, such that every aspect of the universe must be the way it is, because nothing else is logically self-consistent, when you work out all the math.
If that's the case, we don't even need a Creator, and all the fine-tuning questions vanish in a puff of incense.
Among respondents who had previously lost at least 10% of their body weight, the mean regain was 58% of the weight lost.
As one might expect, the mean regain was lower for respondents who had lost weight recently. A graph of regain against time is very noisy, but seems to reach a plateau after about 6 years.
For respondents who lost weight at least 6 years ago, the mean regain was 72% of the weight lost. This conceals a lot of variation. 19% of this group had regained less than 10%; 21% had regained 10-50%; 21% had regained 50-100%; 27% had regained 100-150%; 12% had regained >=150%. This is consistent with other evidence that about 20% of people who lose 10% of their body mass are successful in keeping the weight off: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/82/1/222S/4863393. The linked paper is also consistent with the above suggestion that people who successfully keep weight off do so by making some effort.
VI: Weight loss
2,619 respondents answered affirmatively to the question “Have you ever lost 10% of your weight, on purpose, through diet and exercise.” This is 38% of all respondents.
In the main public dataset, Scott has removed the question which asked how people lost weight, but it was included in the dataset attached to the round 1 prediction contest answers. This was presumably an error, so I feel a bit guilty about looking at it, but I had already looked at it before noticing that it was omitted from the main dataset and I can’t unsee it. I don’t recognise anyone (even myself) from their responses and I’m confident that the summary I’m about to provide is fully anonymous.
In that subset, 335 people answered the question about how they lost weight, which was conveniently a sufficiently small number for me to code each response. Reference to “respondents” in the rest of this section are to those 335 respondents.
83% of respondents mentioned diet (either generically or by describing some particular change to their diet). 50% mentioned exercise. 11% mentioned some other factor, often to do with a change in their life circumstances. 9% of respondents mentioned exercise alone, suggesting that at least some people are able to outrun their forks. See https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34519717/ for yet another study confirming that exercise induces some weight loss, but less than expected: the authors conduct a careful analysis with double-labelled water and metabolic chamber observation, but fail to find a clear explanation.
Unfortunately, many respondents wrote something like “diet and exercise” or “I followed a strict diet” without giving any indication of what they did to change their diet. It’s not safe to assume that these people followed the same pattern as people who did identify a particular diet (for example, they may have been more likely to mean portion control and less likely to mean intermittent fasting), but without any information, there’s not much we can say about them.
Of the 204 respondents who mentioned some specific dietary intervention, 37% mentioned counting calories. 19% mentioned fasting (not counting OMD). 14% mentioned following a low-carb diet. 12% mentioned eliminating or reducing sugar consumption. 11% mentioned keto. 7% mentioned portion control. 4% ate one meal a day. 3% mentioned following a high protein diet. 2% mentioned eliminating alcohol consumption. 2% mentioned paleo. 0.5% (i.e. 1 person) mentioned following a whole food diet. 13% mentioned some other specific diet (several mentioned potatoes, which I hadn’t expected when I started coding the responses).
I note that counting calories and low-carb diets are well represented here, as they are in the survey of current dietary restrictions, albeit that there is a difference in relative frequencies. On the other hand, whole foods diets are hardly represented at all, despite 7% of all survey respondents currently being on a whole food diet. There are various possible explanations, but I suspect the obvious one is right: the whole food diet isn’t effective for weight loss (although it may be for other purposes) because it doesn’t restrict overall food intake.
Although keto is only 11% of the weight loss sample, that is still a lot more than the 2% of general respondents who are currently on a ketogenic diet. A possible explanation is that keto is fairly hardcore, so it’s more tempting for people who are trying to lose >=10% of their body mass than people who are aiming for something more modest.
This seems broadly consistent with the results of other studies which tend to show that basically everything works as well as everything else for weight loss (subject of course to a calorie deficit being achieved): see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2763382/ as to macronutrients and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26384657/ as to intermittent fasting vs continuous restriction.
VII: Conclusions
Owning a car is bad for your waistline. Being a vegetarian or vegan is good. More or less any restrictive diet can be effective to lose weight if you stick with it, so you should choose whatever works for you. On the other hand, eating whole foods is unlikely to make you lose weight. Having lost weight, you need to make an effort to maintain: if you revert to your old habits, you’ll revert to your old weight.
I think the BMI question distorted the data, unless you are unusually honest and don't feel judged, if you have high BMI you're not likely to fill in that figure.
Now, what counts as "high" may vary for different people, but I do think that if you're way over whatever counts as normal, and pursuant to the many conversations we've had on here about "hell yeah shaming fat people for their weight is a *great* way to motivate the lazy tubs of lard to get off their fat asses and lose the flab", then you're less likely to slap down a figure that makes people go "you're *what*???"
That sounds right, although a similar problem would arise with any method which relied on voluntary compliance. For example, in HSE, only 32% of eligible households agreed to participate in the survey. The data are weighted to correct for non-response bias, but only so as to match the known distribution of the population by sex and age. Also, some participants declined to allow the nurse to measure their height and weight, and as far as I can see no attempt has been made to adjust for this.
87% of ACX respondents answered the BMI question, FWIW.
Thanks. If people tend to gain weight (at least up to a point) as they get older, ACX respondents might weigh less simply because they tend younger than the general populations (don't they?).
The ACX respondents are unusual in many ways which may be relevant: they are also from many different countries. I provide the information for England (where I live) as a rough point of comparison and because I happen to have it to hand.
I only have the binned ages, but mean age looks to be around 37. A sample of the English population with the same age profile would have mean BMI 26.8 (compared to the actual English mean of 27.4 and actual ACX mean of 25.3).
I feel dumb making the public dataset more restrictive than the prediction one. In the future, feel free to email me asking for the non-public one - this is the sort of good analysis by a single trustworthy-seeming person that I would be happy to give it to as long as you promised not to share it.
> In the future, feel free to email me asking for the non-public one - this is the sort of good analysis by a single trustworthy-seeming person that I would be happy to give it to as long as you promised not to share it.
So, I’ve been looking at the BMI data in the ACX survey.
I: A caveat
We should keep in mind that these are self-reported BMIs. Self-reported BMIs are widely observed to be lower than measured BMIs, because people both over-report height and under-report weight. Overall the Health Survey for England found a mean difference of 1.1 between BMI from self-reported height and weight and BMI from corrected height and weight, but this varies by sex and (particularly) age.
There may also be issues specific to the ACX survey. The question appears in the middle of a long and diverse questionnaire. It seems probable that some respondents did not stop to weigh themselves at the time of answering, but used their last known weight or even guessed their BMI. The reported BMI curve has a sharp peak just below the cut-off for overweight, which seems suspicious.
If the measurements are systematically biased, that won’t matter for comparing different groups, but this won’t necessarily be the case: some people monitor their weight more carefully than others.
II: Distribution
The BMI median and mode (to the nearest integer) are each 24 (12% of respondents had this BMI). The mean is 25 (although this may be distorted by some impossibly small or large responses). The curve looks like an inverted V with a long right tail.
Applying the usual categories, 3% of respondents were underweight (<18.5), 54% were a healthy weight (>=18.5, <25), 30% were overweight (>=25, <30) and 13% were obese (>=30). For brevity, I will henceforth write this as 3/54/30/13. For comparison 38% of English adults were overweight in 2021 and 26% were obese (although only 34% and 20% respectively from self reported heights and weights). For some reason, I am unable to find data on how many English adults were underweight, but I believe it will be c.1%.
III: Associations
The survey asks about various other things, which may or may have been intended as possible factors associated with weight. Of course these only give us correlations and don’t tell us which way (if at all) the causation goes.
Those who have lost 10% of their weight at some time generally report being heavier (1/38/40/22) than those who have not (5/64/23/8).
The many people who never get acid reflux (4/59/27/10) are lighter than the few people who get it frequently and severely (1/41/38/19). Obesity is an important risk factor for GERD: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3920303/.
Respondents tend to indicate that they like carbs more than the average person, so either ACX readers are unusually pro-carb or we are badly calibrated as to how much the average person loves carbs, but in any case the small number of people who dislike carbs are lighter (4/62/26/8) than those who most adore them (3/50/30/16). All the other categories are close to the global average, and I doubt that much is going on here.
People with naturally good vision are a bit lighter (4/60/27/10) than people with any sort of sight correction (3/51/31/15), with no notable variation between laser surgery, glasses or contact lenses.
Those following a calorie-controlled (1/41/39/19) or low-carb (2/45/36/17) diet look heavy. The small number of people following a keto diet (4/41/31/25) have an unusually high proportion of obesity, but the sample size is too small to read much into it. These cases seem readily explicable by the hypothesis that overweight people are more likely to adopt a diet for weight loss.
On the other hand, people following a whole food diet (3/57/26/13) look much the survey population overall.
Burping makes no difference. It’s inclusion here in the survey makes it look as if Scott thought it might, but I’m not sure why. Hypermobility also doesn’t look interesting. Specifically Ehlers-Danlos goes 0/75/25/0, but it’s 24 people, so I don’t read anything into it.
People who own a car (2/48/34/16) are heavier than those who don’t (6/64/22/9). People who commute by car look heavy, but the effect is fully explained by owning a car. People who commute by bike (4/67/23/6) look light. There are 250 people who own a car and commute by bike and they go 2/63/26/9, so that seems potentially a good way of neutralising the effect of car ownership on weight.
IV: Restrictions
Scott asked about various possible dietary restrictions. 65% of respondents left this blank, which either means they observe no dietary restrictions, or they observe a dietary restriction not listed, or they skipped the question. 13% of respondents stated they were vegetarian for this purpose (there was also another question about vegetarianism) and 4% stated they were vegan. 9% stated they counted calories; 8% were on a low-carb diet; 7% were on a whole food diet; 2% were on a ketogenic diet and 1% each were on a paleo, carnivorous or low-fat diet.
It is interesting to note here that the battle against low-fat diets is essentially won. Paleo, carnivorous and ketogenic diets are also rare: in retrospect these could all have usefully been collapsed into “some other dietary restriction”, which would also allow the potato people to announce their presence. Vegetarianism is common, but probably usually practised for ethical rather than health or weight reasons. The common health restrictions seen in this question are calorie counting, low-carb and whole food, in approximately that order. However, there was no option for fasting/OMD, which for other reasons I believe to be fairly common.
Among respondents who were overweight or obese, 65% left the dietary restriction field blank, which perhaps surprisingly is the same proportion as overall. This group were less likely to be vegetarian (9%) or vegan (3%) and more likely to count calories (13%) or be on a low-carb diet (10%).
Among respondents who are now a healthy weight, but who have lost at least 10% of their body weight in the past, only 50% left the dietary restriction field blank. This group was more likely to be vegetarian (16%) or vegan (7%) and also more likely to count calories (14%) or be on a low-carb (13%), whole food (11%) or ketogenic (4%) diet. In fact this group had a higher prevalence of every dietary restriction than either the overweight group or the whole population. The group who are now a healthy weight but did not report having lost weight in the past was slightly more likely to be vegetarian (17%) but otherwise also had a lower prevalence of all restrictions than the former group.
I tend to interpret this as showing that people who have in the past made an effort to become a healthy weight tend also to make an effort to maintain that weight, whereas as people who have always been a healthy weight do not (although they are unusually likely to be vegetarian or vegan).
Among the select group (see below) who lost weight at least 6 years ago and have since regained less than 10% of it, only 44% left the dietary restriction field blank. 15% of this group is vegetarian, 7% is vegan, 16% count calories, 21% are on a low-carb diet and 14% are on a whole food diet.
>Those who have lost 10% of their weight at some time generally report being heavier (1/38/40/22) than those who have not (5/64/23/8).
10% of weight *deliberately*. This is an obvious selection effect; fat people are more likely than thin people to want to lose weight, because losing weight is better for fat people than it is for thin people. People who don't want to lose weight will by definition not deliberately lose weight.
(For instance, I answered "no" despite having lost 10% of my weight before - because it was an accident.)
Agree, especially in institutional settings like corporate cafeterias and schools. Low-fat beliefs are persistent there, and sometimes "whole grain instead of white carbs," but in general it's hard to find food in those settings with tons of butter, saturated fat, etc.
Is there evidence against wholegrain stuff being healthier than refined carbs? I thought that one was correct. (I'm thinking more of general healthiness than effect on weight here, which is more relevant to general recommendations.)
It is probably true that "whole grains > refined carbs," for general health as well as weight loss. My narrow point was that institutional catering (driven by some conventional group of old-school dieticians) seems to be grounded in "whole grains > refined carbs >> dietary fat and animal protein," and they are more committed to reducing that last one among the options presented.
My memory was that the "czar" in America was really a kind of corruption of the word "Commissioner" rather than a direct reference to Tsars (as in Caesar and the german Kaiser). I thought I remembered William Safire column relating thereto. I found the On language column 11/13/1983 * but also he doesn't support my "Commissioner" theory. But he does touch on tsar (dictator) is not or is a czar ( appointed bureaucrat with a lot of autonomy). Bureaucrat+autocrat+ Commissioner? There seemed to be a proliferation of "czars" to try fix problems beginning with Reagan or maybe Nixon which I always associated with a Republican crypto-Caesarism (today or back then maybe we'd say crypto-fascist making the trains run on time reflecting a secret love of Mussolini before he was corrupted by evil Hitler's psychotic version of fascism.) maybe growing out of U of Chicago and esotericism of Leo Strauss.
It just seems to be a very hyperbolic term for a slightly more powerful bureaucrat who supposedly can actually fix a specific problem, that is too big for any other bureaucrat to fix.
Of course, it is probably too big for the czar too.
Programs need to design in the evaluation from the beginning. This means collecting NOW the data that will be needed THEN for the evaluation. Th is seldom done so evaluations are vague and may be nearly useless
I too worked in program evaluation in a (non-US federal) government context when I first finished my schooling. Dreams full of RCTs and everything :(
My sense is that you’re correct RE: program evaluations - by virtue of program design and/or lack of funding/timing - having non-rigorous results.
That being said, I would not be so quick to say they were pointless for some half-baked reasons :
1) program evaluations may not be a nail-in-coffin for ending or changing a program but they can provide some ‘therapy’ on the margins. sometimes, a program was on a cusp of a few changes but needed some ‘coordination’ via the shitty evidence that are interviews or document review.
2) I now work in on the other side and I find it hilarious that how often the spectre of even neutered and low-quality evaluations sometimes hang over the head of program and policy executives and staff - so there appears to be at least some deterrence! (Once again my prior as an evaluator that it would be nil!).
3) sometimes there are changes needed or wanted by management but unpopular with staff or stakeholders needed a quasi-independent report to justify it - like with management consultants.
Did you feel like the evaluations were able to get the full range of answers, or was this a "find a way to say everything's fine and we need more funding" sort of thing?
“ I still think your research programmes were better for the evaluation they got”
I think this is probably the question to ask - not “was the evaluation great” but “does the exercise of performing the evaluation improve the thing being evaluated”.
Even if researching effectiveness is hard, the fact that program directors know that an effectiveness evaluation will take place would push them in a direction of designing their program to survive an effectiveness evaluation.
Makes sense. Like knowing someone is going to inspect your kitchen and shut your restaurant down if they find anything too scary probably really does make you fix at least the obviously broken stuff, even if the health inspectors are not super careful and the laws they operate under are kinda toothless.
I think your scale doesn't go high enough. I would add: Gummi worms - 15; Cheetos - 14; reconstituted chicken nuggets - 13; an ice cream cake - 12; twinkies - 11.
A lot of it is the status-ranking of foods within the class of highly-educated and under-employed Americans. (Those are the "many people" you're discussing.) There's no simple algorithm, because if there was, adhering to the proper diet wouldn't signal that you've spent a lot of time within that class (usually at college). "It took a lot of work for tofu to become politically correct." Poll whichever of your friends are in that class to get the answers you want/need.
Prior to reading the WebMD list, I would have said that I rarely eat processed food. Now I have to confess to olive oil, butter, bacon, ham, cheese, bread, beer, olives and pasteurised milk.
If, indeed, these foods are processed then perhaps the category is not useful.
Does this advice hold for someone with a monotonous diet? For example, at some point Immanuel Kant supposedly requested the same meals every day. Assuming we are only considering things that are at least 5% of daily caloric intake, wouldn't dichotomizing make Kant's diet more nutritious?
One Cheeto per day is quite likely under that arbitrary 5% limit, but I rarely see people eating so little at once. So I doubt that useful nutrition advice will bother to mention, 'It's OK to eat one Cheeto daily.'
Having now read the two original articles, and slept on it, I feel reasonably comfortable making a few comments on them separately from David Friedman's blog post, which is a different beast:
- in climate change analyses, large numbers multiplied by small numbers abound. A lot of his statements of the form "this number might be big" are plausible, but waving your hand in the direction of a valid argument is not the same as doing the math. Obviously, he might have other things to do with his life than spending several months or years calculating each of these numbers (god knows I do!). And he might even be right that the people who are putting in the time to do the math are suspiciously often focusing on numbers going in one direction. But rhetorically, it's just not compelling enough to say so.
- the implicit conclusion is "and therefore we shouldn't put that much effort into fighting climate change". But if you're factoring in the positive externalities of climate change, you should also factor in the positive externalities of the proposed solutions. Reducing air pollution by switching to electric cars and stoves will have massive if diffuse health benefits per se (see how annoying and hard to argue with it is when someone just wave into the general direction of a valid point...). IMO, the problem with fighting climate change is not that it's net negative, it's that the costs of implementation are very concentrated on a few people who can afford lobbyists whereas benefits are all over the place.
- And we're also back to the question of inequality that is missing from Friedman's argument. How do you weight fewer cases of common colds in Canada, which has one of the best healthcare systems in the world versus deadly heatwaves in countries where people can't afford AC? It's like his argument that people can move around. Most refugees go from a poor country to a neighboring poor country, so that won't help them.
More broadly, IMHO, I don't think we don't have anywhere near the level of knowledge necessary to actually calculate the social cost (or benefit) of CO2. I once read a book that convincingly argued that the GDP numbers for poor countries are essentially made up (Poor Numbers by Jerven). When I pressed a grad school colleague doing his thesis in development economics, he ended up barking at me "what would you have us do?!". Economists spout numbers because that's what they do, and that's why people listen to them instead of sociologists or historians. But I do think that anything beyond descriptive consumer behavior and the national accounts of rich countries is essentially SimCity for grown-ups.
My big thing along these lines would be three fold.
1). I agree with him that the science is basically untrustworthy on climate change and that if you spend long enough listening to primary researchers and raising their work it becomes crystal clear they have some VERY strong biases towards looking at costs and not benefits, as well as blowing up the costs to be bigger than they are. Some of that is emotional/religious/ideological. A lot of it is the incentives of the institutions field. I don’t actually think you need to spend millions of hours debunking thousands of papers to come to understands this. You just need to listen to the actual people with an open mind. Their lack of objectivity isn’t just below the surface, it is an elephant in a china shop.
2). I suspect on the very long run, humans will decide we want a warmer earth with a melted Antarctica. It is soooooo much easier to create more habitable world by “terraforming earth”, than terraforming say mars.
3). Nevertheless I am personally in favor of pretty large and immediate action on climate change as I don’t think it is very good/nature/responsible to be making large changes to the planet simply because we cannot help ourselves. We are like WoW addicts posing in their pants because we are too lazy to get up and walk to the bathroom. It is kind of gross/sad.
I was making a lot of these same points regarding climate change 15 years ago? There is a long history of people/organizations involved being extremely careful to count all the costs, even pretty speculative ones, but ignoring potential benefits, or just handwaving them away. Environmentalism is for some, including many scientists, a surrogate religion. There is a lot of apocalyptic maundering about impacts that even if extremely bad, are frankly nowhere near apocalyptic.
Imagine a world with no polar bears? Sometimes that in itself is treated like a world that will no longer be worth living or habitable. Like seals won't have predators and kids will only see them in videos or in zoos, and now the whole civilization will collapse!
There is A LOT more argumentation needed there to get from polar bear extinction (which frankly doesn't seem likely anyway) > human extinction, and it is rarely present.
I think the premise argument that extreme cold is bad and that milder winters are good is incorrect on its face and warrants a tremendous amount of a priori skepticism. Ticks and various other insects and parasites are generally cold-sensitive and kept in check by hard winters -- you'll notice that, as our host has observed in the past, temperate climes see a lot better at fostering civilizations than high parasite-load tropical ones. Who the hell wants a climate more hospitable to leishmaniasis? See also, e.g. https://umaine.edu/podcasts/2021/11/11/s5e8-how-are-ticks-threatening-maines-moose/
Of course, I also consider Dr. Friedman to have an unwarrantedly anthropocentric view of the costs and benefits in any events even as it regards solely internalized costs: the marginal elephant or puffin or polar bear provides me a great more marginal positive utility than the marginal human. We have too many of those already. Conversely, I like snow.
It’s interesting that your concern for moose wellbeing is greater than for the wellbeing of both ticks and humans. Spending trillions of dollars worth of human resources to protect future moose instead of humans who now lack sufficient energy seems like a bad ethical choice.
I would submit that the parents of the humans who reproduced in circumstances in which their children would lack sufficient energy themselves made bad ethical choices under circumstance of presumptively greater ethical duty to their offspring than random strangers, no[1]?
I don't think it's all that weird that my concern for moose is greater than for the wellbeing or either ticks or humans at large. Nobody likes ticks, many people (including me) like charismatic megafauna, reading about conditions in impoverished and overpopulated regions of human habitation makes me sad, and getting the people in those conditions up to Western consumption standards results in the compromise of the wellbeing of the aforementioned charismatic megafauna for the abstract benefit of a fargroup whereas I have no ex ante belief that that it's good a thing that, say, anyone should be living in Afghanistan in the first place regardless of their standard of living. Putative ethical duties to enable other humans' consumption put me in extremely acute Malthusian competition with them -- indeed, "too many humans consuming too many resources and generating externalities" is the reason for being in this whole pickle in the first place. I think in a pure homo economicus sense it's really not particularly odd that I should find the marginal moose to provide positive utility but both the marginal tick and the marginal human to provide negative utility. The marginal human, when paired with any kind of ethical duty to them, is basically a utility monster whose birth I should desire to prevent.
[1] Yes, yes, it's not clear that utilitarianism has a concept of interpersonal duty that distinguishes between parents and randos, but c'mon.
EDIT: also the moose thing is relevant inasmuch as I do like charismatic megafauna but the primary point of that article was about tick populations persisting through winters in Maine because it doesn't get cold enough, and ticks and tick-borne diseases are *also* bad for humans directly.
I sympathize with the point you're making, and the latter paragraph is certainly more a matter of somewhat personal idiosycncrasy, but surely the analysis is in some sense dependent on the tractability of some level of shared-values-ness, and I think "parasites and topical diseases and pests are bad, actually, and mild winters foster them" isn't actually an idiosyncratic position. While I'm broadly skeptical that extreme cold causes more immiseration than extreme heat as a factual claim (though I know Dr. Friedman disagrees) at minimum it would be a consideration that needs to be weighed against, say, the expanding northern range of leishmaniasis or of expanding winter tick populations, which have no human (or really any non-parasite) constituency in favor of them.
Right, that's the factual question--when we sum up the costs and benefits of rising average temperatures, can we clearly determine the sign and at least the approximate magnitude? Some places get longer growing seasons, some places have parasitic diseases move 50 km further from the equator, higher CO2 means crops grow a little better, higher temperatures means more energy for storms, etc. I think David's factual claim is that it is not so easy to determine the sign with a lot of confidence.
And I think Nordhaus' calculations end up suggesting that the magnitude isn't all that huge when you consider the time span, so that it would be relatively easy to spend more on remediation than you gained. As I understand it, that's the basic argument being made by Lomberg, right? AGW is a real problem, we should try to reduce CO2 emissions, but it's not the biggest problem we face and we should be pretty ruthlessly applying cost-benefit logic to addressing it.
I don't know enough to have high confidence in any of these calculations, though. And the fact that most activists don't do cost-benefit analysis and most public voices on AGW are innumerate and technologically illiterate doesn't help, because that's true of basically every issue--the people proposing battery-powered airplanes to reduce CO2 emissions are no dumber than the ones proposing eliminating foreign aid and farm subsidies to balance the budget.
No you're not. Your original message implied that you did not have a fully formed opinion and were interested in getting others' perspective to inform yours. But your later behavior (e.g. having references at the tip of your fingers, shifting topics when you didn't have a counter-argument) show clearly that you came into this conversation for the purpose of convincing others or at least sowing doubts in their mind. I don't care if you're doing so because you genuinely agree with Friedman or because you're paid to do so, I find this obfuscation disingenuous at best. Therefore, as the sharks say, I'm out.
I can't speak for Jayan, but I am more interested in getting critical responses than supporting ones. In particular, I want critical responses to my piece criticizing Rennert. If my criticisms are correct, the fact that the piece was published by Nature and is being seriously considered by the EPA is evidence the field of estimating climate change costs is in very bad shape and nothing published in it should be taken seriously without careful examination. If I am wrong I would like to know it before submitting my criticisms to _Nature_. I have sent the version of my article that I plan to submit to the authors of Rennert for their response, also to the authors of the two articles that feed into Rennert, gotten responses from the lead author of one of the two. I have posted requests for critical comments in several places, am now doing so here. My piece is at:http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Ideas%20I/Climate/Critque%20of%20Rennert%20et%20al.pdf
1. There a lot of big cities in coastal areas, so the fact that the land area lost to sea level rise might be small seems mostly irrelevant. You would have to move millions of people, maybe more, as well as all of the infrastructure that makes these cities so economically valuable. The cost of doing so seems like it would be much larger than the value of additional land for growing food, which is relatively cheap.
2. Similarly, if existing populated areas are rendered uninhabitable, the existence of habitable but empty areas elsewhere seems like it would be a pretty limited comfort to those people who are being displaced. If the net benefit is positive then they could be compensated in some way, but you need to actually have this compensation, which means you're still "taxing" something.
Can you show me the calculations implying that millions of people would be displaced by a meter of sea level rise, which is towards the high end of the IPCC projection for the end of this century?
I don't know what the number is--when I wrote "would" it was probably too strong. My point was more that this paragraph in the blog post from above:
> Compare the map at 0 meters to the map at 1 meter. Even in Bangladesh, usually offered as a country where sea level rise will be catastrophic, the effect is almost invisibly small. The same is true for Miami. I have not looked over the entire world, but the only place I could find where a meter of sea level rise had a large effect was the Nile delta. Another way of looking at the question is to ask how much land is lost worldwide due to coastlines shifting in. My rough estimate is a little more than twenty thousand square kilometers, about the area of New Jersey.
Is not convincing to me; the metric of total area seems completely irrelevant. If you can provide an estimate of such a population, it would be more convincing, in my opinion.
Diking against a meter of sea level rise, with most of a century to do it in, is not a difficult engineering project; the Dutch managed to live below sea level with medieval engineering technology. At present the lowest city in the Netherlands is more than six meters below sea level. So my guess is that very few people in cities, perhaps none, will be flooded out. There will be problems for people living in low lying coastal islands which may not be worth the cost of protecting, due partly to sea level rise and partly to subsidence.
I offered my figure on total loss of land mostly because some people talk as though that will be a serious cost, partly to give some idea of the scale of the problem, which gets commonly exaggerated.
Fair enough. Apologies for being trigger-happy, discussions about climate change are full of bad-faith actors and it can be hard to know which is which. I'll take the time to read Friedman's article and the original article he is referring to (beyond his blog post which is the only thing I read in my last pass) and will get back to the discussion.
" At least that is true for humans, who can adapt to change by growing different crops, adding air conditioning to their houses. Other species can do it by evolution or by changing their range, but that could be a problem for species such as trees that evolve slowly and shift their range slowly. It could be a problem for aquatic species currently adapted to the current pH of the ocean, since increased CO2 absorbed by the ocean lowers its pH. "
Suppose /some/ influence on climate change is due to the demands of local climate control (=="air-conditioning to their houses").
Suppose climate change leads to a larger demand for local climate control.
Suppose we build more houses with more climate control capabilities.
Look on ye thermostat, and despair.
Or to phrase it differently and with more rigour, we might say something like:
" Non-linear externalities are difficult to encode in price information " and something along the lines of "Self referencing non-linear externalities with ambiguous correlation sound hellish to encode in price information". This might sound trite but it's actually relevant for every large scale event with multiple actors. Or, uh, a market.
"Your water heating bill will be $10 this year, unless it's also $10 for every other participant at fair market prices, at which point a bottleneck supply constraint will occur and your actual bill will be your family's servitude for ten generations".
Price information relies on a good flow of reasonable symmetric information in order to allow participants to take actions. Friction, wildly swinging costs and unpredictability all lead to degradation in the efficacies of the very mechanisms that purportedly resolve them.
We tend to offload these risks to some sort of governing central authority that's forced to bear them.
Point the second, feedback processes aren't static
Friedman writes:
" It is hard to see any other a priori reason to expect climate change to make us better or worse off. The earth and its climate were not designed for our convenience, so there is no good reason to believe that their current state is optimal for us. We are not designed for the current climate — over our species history, climate has varied by considerably more than the changes being predicted for global warming. Currently, humans live and prosper over a range of climates much larger than the range that we expect the climate at any particular location to change by. "
This is True. But it's the sort of True that makes me a little personally confused. In that, it's... Like it's truism? Here let me try by way of subject change to elaborate.
Imagine that I suggest changing the rules in chess. The king can now move twice a turn in all directions. Arguing against this, I write: " chess has been played in many forms for a long time. There are presently today people playing chess in different ways. And the rules of the game has varied over time".
We have learned nothing about the nature of chess, or the impact of my proposed rule change and all of this is true but it's also meaningless.
climate has varied considerably over the span of the human species. Right now, it is difficult to estimate the non-static feedback effects of climate varying more. Europe was covered by ice during the ice age. I will propose that such an climate condition today will alter the agricultural futures market for European grain. But likely that's not what Friedman means, because we're not talking ice-age levels of change. Right well, minor temperature increases from atmospheric conditions then. Suppose that desertification of the Sub-saharan greenbands are a genuine problem, but it's also true that the Sarahan Desert might undergo climate cycles that make it vast green grassland. But depletion of fishing stock due to acidification of the ocean will lead to a rise in the price of fish, which may mean more labourers are attracted to the fishing industry which may precipitate a backflow of money to the regions they travel from which could accelerate either the depletion of fishing stock, the movement of migrant labour or the expanding desertification of the Saharan desert due to increased water demands from increased industry.
And your job is to estimate the externalities in the preceding schizophrenic-sounding paragraph. This is just really hard. I think unintentionally Friedman sweeps it aside by stating that climate has changed in the past. It makes the problem neater than it is.
Point the third: "So I'll Just Do The Math, Then!"
Friedman writes:
" There are at least four predictable effects of climate change that appear unambiguously negative: sea level rise, more frequent extreme heat, stronger cyclones, and reduction in ocean pH.[4] There are at least four effects that are unambiguously positive: expansion of habitable areas towards the poles, less frequent extreme cold, fewer cyclones, CO2 fertilization. There are at least two effects that are ambiguous, might make us better off, might make us worse off: longer growing seasons and increased rainfall. We do not know enough to put all of these on a single scale, in part because they have different sorts of costs, but we can at least try to compare positive and negative effects that produce costs or benefits of similar sorts. "
I think stopping the listing at 4, 4, 2 is . . . Odd. Climate change implies changes to the biosphere of the Earth. There are many, many more than about 10 effects, neatly summarised. What about viral spread due to increased temperature allowing for infection-bearing insects and animals to move beyond current habitat? Isolating to variables like this makes the entire thing a little less useful. The Ipcc produces reports that are as long as they are precisely because there's a lot of factors.
Then Friedman writes:
" The first step is to specify the amount of climate change being considered. My estimates are for effects by the end of the century based on IPCC projections, about a 3°C increase in average global temperature and one to three feet of sea level rise, both relative to current values.
Start with sea level rise. That it will continue to happen is a pretty safe assumption. How big is the effect? "
Then Friedman offers some numbers (1 to 3 feet, about 300mm to 900mm), tests it using a neat online tool, takes a harder stance (tests with 1 meter, high end of estimates), and offers some well reasoned opinion based on these facts.
I genuinely appreciate the effort. I also find it to be, at best, kind of slap-dash. Which sounds harsh. But what I mean is this:
His estimates are useless because the thing he is estimating is incredible hard to estimate. He uses Floodmaps and Bangladesh as reasonable datapoints. And they are.
Put, for instance, if we use the Nasa provided Sea-Level tool
Variable model assumptions give a full range of sea level rise in Bangladesh as 0.3 to 2, even 5 at the top end of the low confidence, extreme outlier model. The Ipcc report on coastal flooding dynamics notes that regional factors may shift estimates by 30% from their basic model ( https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/, section 4 )
I absolutely agree with Friedman that 1 meter of sea level change by 2100 does not seem to be catastrophic for Bangladesh[1]. 0.7m seems manageable.
1.3 m seems... bad? 2 meters though? Yikes. 3 meters? /Yikes/. 1 meter with a random freak storm in Summer of 2101 that briefly brings the water level to 3.4 due to climatic conditions (thermal expansion + increased ice melt)? Hooohboy. 0.3 meters? Eh, no biggie.
But relevantly: how do you price this externality in an efficient way, and how do price it when the cost borne by Bangladeshi seaside homes is risk they're taking due to Danish industrial manufacture of bacon?[2]
Just as relevantly, and the devil at the core of all this, and taking Friedman's numbers at face value:
Suppose that increasing global climate change frees up human habitable land on the order of ten million square kilometres. Further suppose we re-house everyone affected by changes in the climate of the present land they live on.
. . . Now precisely what? The climate change doesn't stop just because in 2023 we only have semi-reliable estimates out until 2150.
Making a few average estimates and concluding that the rise in sea level is offset by increases is a little wrongheaded as they don't easily compare. You're building a million new homes with a million new airconditioners and that'll. . . Accelerate the feedback process. This kind of thing isn't easy to solve that way.
But as Friedman writes:
" If you are looking at a complicated problem with a lot of judgement calls and know what conclusion you want to reach, you can usually reach it. "
Yeah. That. . . That's why all of this is *really* hard.
[1]"catastrophic" for the country. even 1 meter on Floodmaps looks like it floods thousands of people's homes, but that's not so bad.
I live 20 feet from the sea. Some people tell me I’m
in trouble by 2030(!) and others by 2050. Even David says that every foot of increase extends the sea inland by 100ft, at least in America. Buried in the NASA reports is the actual sea level increase - which is 3.4mm a year and has been for a while, which isn’t worrying at all to me, Im guessing my front door is about 10ft above sea level.
I am admittedly not in the US, where the coasts seem to be surprisingly low level.
I appreciate the response, and I also giggled for a few minutes. Yes. I. . . Probably am the kind of writer that one needs to read a few times. I apologize for any difficulties that accrues from my habit of randomly veering off into snarky asides, and I commend you on making your way through things nonetheless!
Also reading my response back now, I feel it's harsher in tone than I actually intend. I should note that I've read Friedman's works and genuinely enjoyed them. If I come across as disparaging him, it's poor phrasing on my part. I'm more gesturing vaguely at the inherent difficulty in answering the kind of questions he strives to answer with the methodology he wants to use to answer them.
This is not to say I don't think these questions are answerable. I actually believe that we can arrive at good, reasonably economic answers to the questions of costs, benefits and utilities in relation to climate change. The framing just sometimes embed certain thoughts that then drive things towards conclusions I don't align with.
As one example, in the post, Friedman mentions the past fear of population explosions. It's my understanding this is intended as a statement that being certain of the cost/benefit of population increases is hard.
( I'm helped a little here in Friedman himself writing: " I don't even know if population growth has net positive or negative effects, only that the effects couldn't be as negative as was widely claimed fifty years ago because what happened since then was the opposite of the predictions." a little further down this thread. Mind reading authors is so much easier when they just tell you what they actually mean! Hurrah! )
I absolutely agree with him, it's a difficult question to answer. I'm not a domain expert, but I've done enough economics to at least understand there's things like the Solow-Swan model and a lot of debate about them. I also agree with him that fevered 70'ies sci-fi about how we'd all be eating soylent green soon (it's MADE of PEOPLE) were overblown.
But I think in even including the line of argument about population in an essay about climate change, we're already off the wrong path. After all, it embeds a subtle point about the danger of assuming negative externalities and forecasting. But it also just seems . . . A little off?
For three reasons.
The first: It's an example of a crisis that did not manifest because the argument behind them were never completely coherent. But also because thousands of people took action to reduce the impact. The Green Revolution of the 1960'ies ended up overshadowing it, because in general it turned out most fevered dreams of famine were not accounting for rapid advances in agriculture. So using it as a point against being wary of the costs of climate change is a bit strange. It's an example of people identifying a problem (famine), massive development in reducing it (agriculture) and consistent worldwide effort. So by that line, of course the crisis never manifested. We got /really/ interested in making sure it didn't! Ozone layer depletion and the worldwide ban on certain chemicals, fishing quotas and laws against nuclear proliferation meaningfully all reduce the negative consequences of the things that people were fearing before we then introduced measures to reduce it.
Point the second:
Hey uh wait are we talking about the negative externalities of *population growth* and *college dorms playing loud music* or the negative externalities of *continent wide famines*. Those... Those don't seem the same? How did we go from "estimates of population growth were wrong" to "Ehrlic's famine didn't happen" to "this makes estimating the costs of things hard" to
" Most of the people working on climate change know that the respectable position, the one that will get their articles published, their research funded, earn the approval of their peers, is to be against it "
. . . Uuuuuuhhhhhh. There's some, uhm. Some logic missing here? I think we skipped a few steps when difficult estimates of population growth help underpin an argument about careerism and a subtle dig that most published climate science is only "most published climate science" because of some genteel level groupthink effort.
Hang on, are we talking "costs are hard to estimate" or are we talking "overblown model dangers have constrained our economic policies and I detest this quiet agreement among scientists/publishers to reduce our future gdp growth due to their percieved green revolution! Bring on the fossil fuels!". I mean I jest and exaggerate a little but one of those two things is nothing like the other so what are they doing in the same essay?
Point the third:
The sad weird half-truth horror world is also this. Please take numbers here with a grain of salt. I'm not a domain expert, I just work in a field that means I have to browse through a lot of EU and UN reports.
Friedman writes that Ehrlics famine never manifested. calories per capita have gone up, Friedman is right. But is this an argument in any way related to climate change externalities? consider:
Does this mean that "Ehrlich's famine" did or did not manifest? Or put differently, when Friedman writes:
" The book The Population Bomb, published by Paul and Anne Ehrlich in 1968, confidently predicted unstoppable mass famine in the 1970’s, hundreds of millions of people starving to death due to overpopulation. [...] Not everyone agreed that things were that bad but almost everyone involved in the controversy agreed that population growth, if not greatly reduced, was going to be a major problem making poor countries poorer [...] Ehrlich’s famine did not happen. [...] But the effect could not have been as negative as the expert opinion of the sixties and seventies claimed since what happened was the opposite of their predictions."
Is he right or wrong?
For extra credits, define whether the answer to the above question matters to the people who experienced the African famines of the 1970ies and 1980ies, and then go browse UN report on the food security situation in west africa at the time (Eg: "expert opinion) (Don't do this, it's sad)
For extra, extra credits, consider whether the African famines of the 1960ies, 1970ies, 1980ies, 1990ies and so on reasonably categorise as "hundreds of millions starving" and then link this to proposed measures for or against climate change mitigation today by embedding the transaction costs of our activities via proposed regulatory mechanisms. Tally up the number of lives lost contra $$ spent. (Don't do *this*, it's worse)
Incidentally, worldwide famine was decreasing up until 2017 and has been increasing since. Pandemic and war I grant are outside context problems, but still. Food crisis.
And to round all the way back around... Friedman writes:
" The mechanism works for voluntary transactions, since you won’t sell me your labor or your goods unless I pay at least what they are worth to you. It does not work for involuntary transactions. "
Yes. But what if one measures costs in $$ and the other measures costs in "absolute amount of misery?". This hypothetical steel-mill releasing carcinogenic materials into the groundwater really only decreases the utility of everyone in the nearby village by some slight fractional percentage. And most people don't even get cancer. And maybe we can cure cancer in the future anyway. And so I propose most doctors writing about the dangers of cancer over-estimate their estimates of it because that's how they get published.
. . . Hang on, that last sentence doesn't seem to flow from the premises that got us here. Weird how that works.
Just skimming it in a minute, seems like a standard anti-climate argument.
"Pigouvian taxes are cool. But what if it's hard to price the externality? People thought increasing population had a negative externality in the past, they started population controls, turned out they were wrong. Climate change has lots of possible positive effects that don't get enough attention, and we're making the same mistake." Then he thought experiments some ways things could go better. But not much content and no model. tldr: Maybe climate change isn't so bad or even positive?
I don’t think those costs are measurable, nor that companies can in fact change their CO2 emissions entirely yet, which means that this ends up as a consumer tax.
If things that put more CO2 into the atmosphere cost more, people will in general buy less of them, which leads to less CO2 being put into the atmosphere. I don't know how to correctly determine the price of CO2, but making damaging stuff cost more is exactly what we want--we want everyone to price in the externality in their decisions.
The right amount of CO2 emissions is not zero--for example, air travel is probably going to be burning kerosene for the forseeable future, and trying to switch over to hydrogen fuel cells or something is not going to work. For that matter, right now, solar and wind pretty much have to be paired with gas turbines or diesel generators or some such fast-responding power source to keep the lights on all the time.
Trying to have some regulatory agency decide which CO2 emitting things will be allowed and forbidden requires them to know everyone's internal costs and available tradeoffs. Pricing CO2 emissions lets the individual people and companies with the right information decide when to burn fossil fuels vs do something else.
They can always change consumption by reducing activity, and yes it _is_ a consumer tax: exactly proportional to the harm the consumers are causing to others not involved in their transaction.
Additionally, the tax is still exactly as effective in changing behavior if it gives back, which can even be done in a progressive manner.
I don't believe that carbon taxes are 100% of the solution, bit they are by far the biggest, easiest solution that we are leaving on the ground
Yeh? The problem I have with (consumer) polluter pays is that the rich can afford to pay and the poor cannot. Carbon taxes on airline fuels won’t reduce the use of private jets, except marginally - the millionaire who rents rather than the billionaire who owns. However the guy who takes a trip a year might have to stop. Some European greens realise this and want taxes to apply to frequent flyers.
If he is right about CO2 emissions being good for the Earth, it just flips the tax if you can price in that positive. You'd want to tax non carbon sources so you can incentive burning more carbon even if it were more expensive than other energy sources.
I don't say that CO2 emissions are good for the Earth, as I think should be obvious to anyone who reads what I wrote. What I say is that we don't know if they are good or bad for the Earth, and the confident claim that they are very bad for the Earth is not justified. I don't even know if population growth has net positive or negative effects, only that the effects couldn't be as negative as was widely claimed fifty years ago because what happened since then was the opposite of the predictions.
Ignorance that will be reduced over time is an argument against costly action in either direction.
> increase in usable land especially in Canada and Russia etc
This point has been made elsewhere in this thread, but unless "Canada and Russia etc" have a plan to distribute the gains to other nations who have lost from the changes, this is not much of a positive net effect for the world as a whole, and certainly not for any individual country not located in or near the Acrtic.
The vaunted increases in usable land are likely to be small benefits. Useful, valuable land is fertile and near coasts or navigable rivers. Land that has been under ice or over permafrost is poor quality for any of the things humans normally use land for.
Zhang and Cai I have read ( many years ago, when I was more interested) and found to be, as you say, more detailed and more measured. Note that this paper does NOT forecast large benefits.
Ramankutty 2002 is way out of date. Superficial analyses (it is implied that Zabel 2014 is such) are not to be given much weight imo.
I’m a (behavioral) economist with a keen interest in climate change. There are many things wrong IMO with his positions, I’ll just point out a couple of obvious ones:
1) the opposition between markets and dictature is a false dichotomy. Democracy and other forms of community-based decision making are at least one other possibility to solve the coordination problem. And for example, solving all the coordination problems required to get someone on the Moon was not done by a price-based market but by an organization closer to a “dictature” in his dichotomy.
2) there are massive distributional issues with climate change, which he glosses over like neoliberal economics glosses over all distributional issues. Canadians will get fewer colds and better agricultural yields while the desertification of west Africa will impoverish some of the poorest people on Earth. The math gets even uglier you use marginal utility instead of hand-wavy macroeconomics and assumes decreasing marginal utility with income (which economists do except when it’s inconvenient to their preferred solution)
Thank you. I spotted the fallacy of the excluded middle in that piece but decided not to bother commenting, mostly because I wasn't able to come up with a decent way of phrasing the comment. (Much better to give examples of missing alternatives than to play "name the fallacy", which would probably have just been taken as rude.)
I started a blog (never to be paywalled) where I'm publicly sharing parts of my journey to use forecasting techniques to try and mitigate global catastrophic risks.
If this sounds interesting to you, please come check it out. I'd love to interact with other people about this topic, and I'm very much trying to make it a useful resource for you.
https://damienlaird.substack.com/
We are having another South Bay SSC meetup this Sunday:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html
OC LW/ACX Saturday (2/4/23) Chat GPT simulates safety and 12 virtues of rationality Hi Folks!
I am glad to announce the 17th of a continuing series of Orange County ACX/LW meetups. Meeting this Saturday and most Saturdays.
Contact me, Michael, at michaelmichalchik@gmail.com with questions or requests.
Meetup at my house this week, 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, 92660
Saturday, 2/4/23, 2 pm
Activities (all activities are optional)
A) Two conversation starter topics this week will be. (see questions on page 2)
1) Janus' Simulators - by Scott Alexander - Astral Codex Ten
2) Twelve Virtues of Rationality - LessWrong
B) We will also have the card game Predictably Irrational. Feel free to bring your favorite games or distractions.
C) We usually walk and talk for about an hour after the meeting starts. There are two easy-access mini-malls nearby with hot takeout food available. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zipcode 92660.
D) Share a surprise! Tell the group about something that happened that was unexpected or changed how you look at the universe.
E) Make a prediction and give a probability and end condition.
F) Contribute ideas to the group's future direction: topics, types of meetings, activities, etc.
Conversation Starter Readings:
These readings are optional, but if you do them, think about what you find interesting, surprising, useful, questionable, vexing, or exciting.
1) Janus' Simulators - by Scott Alexander - Astral Codex Ten
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/janus-simulators
Audio: https://sscpodcast.libsyn.com/janus-simulators
Are we teaching Chat GPT and other “safety trained” AI’s to hide their actual nature behind a veneer of propriety?
Are we teaching machines to bypass or danger sense?
When a true AGI with agency comes along, will it be able to use our safety training of chatgpt and other similar systems to hack human preferences?
10 questions to think about from Chat GPT:
How did the early AI alignment pioneers approach aligning AI systems?
What are the three motivational systems speculated by the AI alignment pioneers?
How does Janus' concept of a "simulator" differ from the original concepts of "agent", "genie" or "oracle"?
How does GPT-3's architecture give it the ability to simulate different characters or genres?
How does Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) impact GPT's abilities as a "simulator"?
What is the difference between an agent, a genie and an oracle in the context of AI alignment?
How did the early AI alignment pioneers like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Bostrom approach the field in the absence of AIs worth aligning?
What is Janus' view on language models like GPT-3 in terms of their alignment considerations?
How does the notion of "simulator" differ from other motivational systems for AIs like agent, genie or oracle?
How does GPT-3's "simulating" a character differ from simply answering a question truthfully?
2) Twelve Virtues of Rationality - LessWrong
Can you name any others? Do you disagree with any of these?
ChatGPT
How do you cultivate curiosity in your life and why is it important?
How do you approach relinquishing beliefs that may be proven false?
Can you give an example of how lightness in decision-making can be valuable?
How can one maintain evenness in evaluating different viewpoints and arguments?
Why is argumentation an important aspect of rationality?
How does empiricism play a role in shaping our beliefs and understanding of the world?
How does simplicity aid in our quest for knowledge and truth?
Can you share how humility contributes to our growth as rational individuals?
How do you strive for perfectionism in your thought process and decision-making?
Why is precision crucial in rational thinking and problem solving?
How does ongoing scholarship enhance our rationality?
How can one cultivate the "nameless" virtue of rationality and what does it mean?
Is anyone else getting spammed by a come on of this form?
“Astral Codex Ten replied to your comment on Janus' Simulators.
I bring you good tidings Let’s converse ㈩𝟏𝟕𝟖𝟔𝟔𝟑𝟐𝟑𝟓𝟐𝟕“
The spammer is doing a comment and delete thing so I get the email but can’t report the comment.
It was Condex for me. Presumably Codex had already been blocked.
How do you know? My spam came through as from "Astral Codex X."
I got it from ‘Astral Codex Ten’. Yug got it from Astral Condex Ten’.
It seems like the source name is being modified in small ways to avoid being blocked.
At least someone is on it.
Yes, I just received my spam. What's a good way to handle this?
Yes, I was too.
"Leave a text I’ve got something beneficial to share with you ㈩𝟏𝟕𝟖𝟔𝟔𝟑𝟐𝟑𝟓𝟐𝟕"
I recently ran across the idea that part of what's wrong with (STEM?) academe is the winner-take-all system for getting credit of discoveries. It's plausible that this makes useful collaboration less likely, but I can't imagine how to do a better job of rewarding collaboration. What might help?
I don't have a solution, but suggest the wording "enable collaboration" rather than "reward collaboration". Rewards usually take the form of institutional or governmental incentive programs to subsidize one way of doing work over another way of doing work.
You might be amused to know who the New York Times does believe deserves anonymity: Trump allies building opposition-research files on DeSantis for praising the vaccine. https://twitter.com/jonathanvswan/status/1620574175328088064
Hopefully most people reading this are smart enough to understand that use of anonymous sources is routine across all sorts of stories, political persuasions, time periods, etc. This is the kind of dunk that only works if you don't actually click on the link or stop to think about it for two seconds.
Sorry, that looks risky.
What is the right way to think about menopausal therapy? There is a big piece published February 1, 2023, in the NYT. It argues that the establishment has been too conservative about treatment. Has anyone done a rationalist, statistically literate, literature review, cost benefit, all things considered, deep dive into this issue? Thanks!
You might enjoy the AAFP (American Academy of Family Physicians) review article on it. https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/issues/2016/1201/p884.html
Thank You Sophia, that is an excellent lead!
I wrote something I never saw anyone remark on about Kanye West and Hitler:
Kanye West is Onto Something with Hitler: https://squarecircle.substack.com/p/kanye-west-is-onto-something-with
This only works if you strip all context from Kanye and this comment. Kanye has made many anti semitic remarks that echo a lot of anti-semitic tropes or conspiracies about jews and jews controlling the media/financial markets/world. He also appeared on Alex Jones with Nick Fuentes who is a white supremacist.
Well, like I said right at the start, what he said is basically insane. If there is anything to what he said it is that we could collectively process Hitler better.
I have some issues with this line of thought. Firstly, if you truly believe in infinite compassionate forgiveness like in some forms of Christianity then before you get to Hitler I want to see you practicing that on everyone less noxious than Hitler. Which is most people. If you are already such a saint that no person alive is not embraced by your love then maybe I'll listen to your thoughts on forgiving historical monsters. But what most often happens is that Hitler is just your far group so forgiving him is easier than your out group. (As is the case with Kanye.) And that's not special or moral. It's just saying that you mainly care about injustices done to people you care about. Which is the default.
Secondly, if you were not among Hitler's victims then you cannot forgive him. Even in that sort of infinite compassion model. No wrong was done to you. And you cannot forgive someone on someone else's behalf. This is a common form of mischief where someone who wasn't a victim does a sort of stolen valor enlightenment where they forgive someone for crimes they never suffered. It's literally, "You suffered greatly but I have decided to forgive your abusers." Jesus said to forgive your enemies. He didn't say to forgive other people's enemies. Not only is that not helpful, it's not hard.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, defending Hitler like this is highly correlated with ongoing noxious behaviors. Kanye spent a long time ranting about Netanyahu and Israel and Jewish executives in the entertainment industry. He has openly called for a reckoning where Jews are forced to admit their crimes against the United States. He is running for President alongside an open Holocaust denier. These things would all be obnoxious even if Hitler had never existed. And asking us to simply ignore or forget the fact that this correlation exists is just an extremely isolated demand for rigor.
When I read the piece I was not smirking. I wasn't even upset really. You're typical of a certain kind of parochial view that thinks it is enlightened. Your moral superiority is facile and entirely unearned. Not because no one could earn it but because you, it seems, have not.
Sorry if I came across as saying I myself am a saint. I don't really believe that. I can't actually show whether I practice forgiveness in my life through a blog post though. Actually, wouldn't doing that be, in itself, rather narcissistic?
I disagree that only Hitler's victims can forgive him. What Hitler did outrages everyone, and that is why it is possible for everyone to forgive him.
About Kanye, like I said at the start, he is insane. I did not at all mount a defense of all of Kanye, not even of the specific stuff he said about Hitler.
Really, the post is not about me, or whether I am perfect. It's about whether the reader, and society, wants to hold on to their resentment and outrage against Hitler. It's a very simple point and you dodged it entirely.
> I wasn't even upset really.
Yeeaaahhh, you say that, but then you typed all of that out, and launched a personal attack on me to boot (whereas I didn't do that to the reader, an exhortation to be better is not an attack), and none of this strikes me as dispassionate.
> You're typical of a certain kind of parochial view that thinks it is enlightened. Your moral superiority is facile and entirely unearned. Not because no one could earn it but because you, it seems, have not.
Hmmm, so the actual morally enlightened view here is to forever hold on to our outrage against Hitler? Is this your claim?
>Sorry if I came across as saying I myself am a saint. I don't really believe that.
Jesus could take the sins of the world on him because he considered himself the son of God. Even a lowly bodhisattva is a god descended from heaven. The act of taking on collective or social sins and forgiving them is an extremely heavy act. And notably one which even people like Amida or Jesus would only do for those who voluntarily asked them to. You seem to go beyond where even they would.
> I disagree that only Hitler's victims can forgive him. What Hitler did outrages everyone, and that is why it is possible for everyone to forgive him.
So you believe, for example, that you can in some meaningful sense forgive Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine? And that it would not be presumptuous of you to forgive him?
This is what I meant by mischief. The socialization of specific pain which is then given up to earn points by forgiving people who never actually harmed you. A sort of stolen valor.
> Really, the post is not about me, or whether I am perfect. It's about whether the reader, and society, wants to hold on to their resentment and outrage against Hitler. It's a very simple point and you dodged it entirely.
As I said in my previous post, letting go of that outrage is not something you can do. Your issue is your assumption that you are in a position of such centrality that you can. I do not think you are in such a position.
You can, of course, decide you will personally have no negative thoughts about Hitler regardless of the wishes of his victims. But that is equivalent to simply not caring about them.
> none of this strikes me as dispassionate.
It's not dispassionate. I'm just neither smug nor upset. I think you're arrogant and blind. What I'm feeling is a sense of exhaustion. To take a counter-example, Gandhi said something somewhat similar and while I don't agree with him either the specific arguments he made struck me very differently from yours. But then Gandhi understood this better than you seem to.
> Hmmm, so the actual morally enlightened view here is to forever hold on to our outrage against Hitler? Is this your claim?
No.
> The act of taking on collective or social sins and forgiving them is an extremely heavy act.
But that is not being suggested. I don't even understand what it means. I am just pointing out that we carry around outrage at Hitler, and that we should collectively drop it. That's all forgiving means, not some super secret esoteric thing. Outrage and hate are not respectable emotions that we have to tread on eggshells around.
> So you believe, for example, that you can in some meaningful sense forgive Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine? And that it would not be presumptuous of you to forgive him?
> This is what I meant by mischief. The socialization of specific pain which is then given up to earn points by forgiving people who never actually harmed you. A sort of stolen valor.
Well, I can certainly not be seething at Putin, not be outraged at Putin. That's what forgiving means. That's not presumptuous, it's just making your soul a better place. And it doesn't deserve a medal, again, it's just about not letting your mind be a sunless place, making it shine like the sun instead. So I don't see the stolen valor comparison, as the exercise is not about striking a pose.
> Your issue is your assumption that you are in a position of such centrality that you can.
I am certainly in a position to police the contents of my soul and so are you. And I don't see how being outraged at Hitler helps anyone, not even the victims, so what exactly is the point?
> I think you're arrogant and blind.
Looking clearly at the ugly thing that is outrage and deciding to drop it is not blindness.
> But then Gandhi understood this better than you seem to.
Yeah, I am just beginning to write. I am still learning how to express myself in a non-triggering manner, but it's a tricky balancing act between doing that and successfully challenging the reader's worldview.
> No.
Ok, so instead of making forgiveness seem like some impossible cosmic duty as opposed to a basic spiritual task and resorting to the ad hominem fallacy, how about you try a positive exercise and tell me what is the morally enlightened position on Hitler.
By the way, did you read The Great Divorce? I feel like I am talking to the collared tragedian.
Agree intellectually, though I sure can't pull it off emotionally. But, seeing the phrase "few would attempt to mount a defense of outrage," I feel like trying to.
The defense is this: hatred is not its own entity, it's a spectrum of passion and the inverse of love. They both have the same underlying drive of passion about the world state; to hate a thing is to love its opposite, the stronger the one the stronger the other. To decrease hatred, one must decrease passion toward the world state entirely, and likewise decrease love for its inverse.
Now, the more common approach is not to decrease hatred as a whole, but to try to redirect it somewhere less offensive. Instead of reducing hatred for your hated category, you attempt to move targets out of that category; you should remember Hitler was a real person, and so you shouldn't hate him completely like you would hate a fictional villain like Joffrey Baratheon. But, we're getting near the point where no living person was alive for Hitler; he may have been real in the '40's, but nowadays he's fiction, like Attila the Hun or the Sheriff of Nottingham. Why shouldn't we hate fictional villains?
Do you want to live in a world where you see people toss starved corpses into a body trench, and it DOESN'T outrage you?
I can get behind that yin-yang view in an abstract way. We're animals, and have evolved some things that were good for the species but make life messy for individuals, like sex, love, and hate. The high-modernist impulse is to eliminate all these things, as Sparta and Plato sought to eliminate love, as the woke movement wishes to eliminate sex, to make life more legible and "perfectible". I think that (A) these things are too deeply embedded in our psychology to root out without really advanced genetic technology, and (B) the desire to simplify the human mind to better-conform with Plato's metaphysics of simplicity and perfection, if undertaken as an engineering program, would inevitably strip away everything of value. Trying to peel away the layers of irrationality and emotion to get at the pure rationalist core of humanity is an ancient project. But it's like peeling away the layers of an onion to get at the "true" onion. There is no "heart of the onion"; there is no pure rational core of humanity. And if there were, it would be unable to want or enjoy anything, as pleasure and dislike themselves comprise the fundamental irrationality that Platonists wish to strip away.
I think we shouldn't reduce the question to a binary "Hate is OK / Hate is bad", but consider the context. Hate is especially destructive in politics. This destructiveness isn't all inherent in hate. What does so much damage is when hate closes the mind. Perhaps it's possible, at least for some people, to hate with one's eyes open.
I think the most-destructive aspect of hating the Nazis is the facile dismissal of their philosophy, of why they did what they did. Nazism was defeated, but never rebutted. When I tried to find out why the Nazis did what they did, I found little academic scholarship. Nazi scholarship is almost entirely focused on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, and not even on the crucial question, Why did they pick the Jews to hate?
The reason is illuminating: they hated the Jews for exactly the same reason Marxists hate the bourgeoisie. The words "Jews" and "bourgeoisie" were synonymous to the Nazis. It wasn't Judaism they hated, but money, finance, free trade, individualism, gradualism, toleration, niceness, personal happiness in small things, and the way these things together always destroy traditional, medievalist, authoritarian hierarchies. This is why the Catholic Church has always allied with fascists. It, too, hates the "bourgeoisie", the individualism and market capitalism which brought its rule of Europe to an end.
The Nazis are different from the communists in that, while you can easily show that the foundations of Marxist ideology are stupid and its predictions empirically don't work, you can't easily show that the Nazis were *incorrect* in their fundamentals, which weren't false theories of economy and society (as with Marxists), but simply values. They valued above all emotion, action, "authenticity", and art. They were not the culmination of the Enlightenment (as Baudrillard idiotically claimed), but of Romanticism, and the inherently romantic historicism of Hegelianism. By failing to inquire into Nazi motivation, we failed to inoculate philosophy against the excesses of Romanticism and Hegelianism--which is the only way to prevent Nazism from rising again.
We also thus failed to notice the strong resemblance between the Nazis and Marxists. The labels "left" and "right" today are used to mislead people into believing that the center is midway between them, whereas in fact Nazism and Marxism are brothers, differing only in their choice of race-based or class-based hatred. When we draw the political map as being between left and right, ordinary people aren't even on the map.
(Re. the original question about hate: Can we renounce romance, in its most-general sense, because it gave us Nazism? I think not.)
There's also the problem of things tainted because the Nazis liked them. Representational art, for instance. Modern art and modernist music annihilated all other forms partly because he Nazis hated them. This is a very poor reason to destroy an art form, especially as the Nazis were much, much better-educated about art than their Allied counterparts were, and also than they themselves were about the issues they made such great mistakes in, such as philosophy and race.
Very interesting, thank you. I think we are, however, very far from the point where such a nuanced view of the Nazis can be aired in the consensus. Sounds like it could get you in trouble even if sequestered in obscure corners of academia.
> which is the only way to prevent Nazism from rising again.
Wouldn't you agree that in our cynical, ironical, technocratic times, the political energy for something like Nazism just isn't there? Sure, maybe some people can get riled up (see Trump, BLM) for some time but without support from the elites, they can do nothing.
> There is no "heart of the onion"; there is no pure rational core of humanity.
Well, I wasn't arguing about there being something like that, just about dropping outrage and hate because they are ugly and poison for one. There doesn't need to be some kind of ideal of perfection for one to see that, just the notion that one could be better.
> Perhaps it's possible, at least for some people, to hate with one's eyes open.
I'm not sure. To hate with one's eyes open would necessarily mean being aware of the burden that hatred is, that to hate is to suffer. And at that point, it becomes a pressing question to ask why should one carry that burden. And I am sure some philosopher could write a thorough case on why hatred is necessary, but at that point, one would just be questioning whether the philosopher is a real world instance of unaligned intelligence.
Re. "Sure, maybe some people can get riled up (see Trump, BLM) for some time but without support from the elites, they can do nothing." --
The woke movement is well-funded by the elites. For instance, the Influence Watch overview of BLM (https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/black-lives-matter-foundation/) shows that it was funded in 2016 by the leftist trust fund Thousand Currents, which is in turn funded by left-leaning trust funds, including the Kellogg Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the Wallace Global Fund, the NoVo Foundation, and the Libra Foundation.
BLM was next funded by the Tides Institute, a leftist middleman that funnels money from big foundations to leftist activists so that the foundation remains anonymous. The Tides Institute alone gives out on the order of a billion dollars per year.
If you've followed the various scandals about woke madness in Fairfax County, VA, that all happened because the Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP), which is funded by the Ford and Casey foundations, began in 2012 to study the power structures of Fairfax, produced a 2015 strategy document for activists pushing racial equity and nothing else (Luke Rosiak 2022, Race to the Bottom, chapter 14, citing https://www.racialequityalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/GARE-Resource_Guide.pdf). The activist middleman-funding group PolicyLink used that work to push through in 2017 a policy called "One Fairfax", which requires that racial equity be a factor in every decision by the Fairfax School Board and Board of Supervisors. CSSP then produced a 2018 strategy document (https://cssp.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/One-Fairfax-FINAL.pdf). These documents are actually quite innocuous, and leave out all of the tactics used on the ground to push policies through, which Rosiak says included using police to keep white parents out of school board meetings, having teachers assign participating in leftist protests to grade-school children as homework, and breaking various laws about school board procedure. The Teachers' Union cooperated with it because the equity agenda calls for eliminating standardized tests, which would also eliminate the ability to judge teacher performance. The Teachers' Union hates evaluating teachers. They prefer everything be based on seniority.
The Giving USA Foundation estimated that American individuals, bequests, foundations and corporations gave $449.64 billion to charities in 2019. That's 12% of US 2019 federal revenues – more than $1000 per American, and very nearly $4000 per household. That means that charity-directed activism is one of the biggest sectors of America's yearly budget, on a par with education and interest on the federal debt; and an order of magnitude more than is spent directly on political campaigns. Essentially all charity-funded activism is leftist; some of it is far left.
I recently visited the websites of 12 of the biggest charitable trust-fund foundations, with a total of $121 billion in endowments. I counted them as "woke" if at least half of their featured ongoing projects were either focused on gender or racial equity, or provided benefits only to non-whites. 11 of the 12 counted as "woke", the exception being the Pew Charitable Trusts. Only one of the dozens of projects about "equity" even mentioned wealth inequity. The Hewlett, Kellogg, Rockefeller, and Duke foundations excluded white males entirely from all of the photos on their home page.
According to the AP News article "Black Lives Matter opens up about its finances", "According to an upcoming report by Candid and the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, 35% of the $20.2 billion in U.S. funding dollars from corporations, foundations, public charities and high-net-worth individuals to address COVID-19 was explicitly designated for communities of color." (Yes, I'm embedding "accordings", bcoz the AP News didn't give the name of the CDP report, so I can't easily find it.)
AFAIK, there is no corresponding vast network of philanthropists funding centrist or conservative political activism. I don't think I could be wrong--there just isn't enough money left over in the US for such a hidden network to exist.
Ok, so the wokes are much better supported than conservatives (though I suspect they would dispute that). But I don't think what we need is for conservatives to be better supported, that's just falling into the binary. I am not quite sure what we need, politically, but I am sure we will need love, cheesy as it may sound. It's something I am interested in developing through my writing.
> Why shouldn't we hate fictional villains?
Because hatred isn't good and beautiful, and so, there is no point to having it in your soul.
> Do you want to live in a world where you see people toss starved corpses into a body trench, and it DOESN'T outrage you?
Well, if you can do something to stop it, I think of the Jedi Knight ideal in this instance, which is dispassionate action. If you can't, then there is no point to the outrage. You could instead feel pity for the state of advanced delusion and illness those shovelling are in.
Because there are far more of the sick and the deluded than there are literal demons. And even demonhood is, again, just very advanced delusion.
I recall someone had created an ACX comment search tool, I think it was based on ElasticSearch. Anyone know if that still exists / have the link? Google is really failing me, here.
Any chance you'd consider turning on likes for comments? I understand the downsides but the comment sections are getting so full bc there are so many of us only children/former precocious needs who love to hear ourselves talk it's getting hard to find the best content.
Yes, it can make a community bad if ppl vote up comments bc they pithily 'own' the other side but I trust the ssc community more than that.
I'd like to count likes. Dislikes, too, if that's an option.
How about a participation trophy?
🏆
I don't care about seeing the likes. I just want a way to sort through the comments for the best ones.
I was just pullIng your leg a bit.
Likes just encourage circlejerks and preaching to the choir and discourage real debate. Even people with the best intentions can't resist dynamics like that. Of course people are going to have wildly different views about what "the best content" even is.
Also, likes are technically supported, they're just not shown in the UI. Sometimes you'll get notifications about people liking your posts and that's why.
Dumb newbie question: I'm diving into the world of startup funding, and I'm struggling to understand how angel investors have a business model.
If I buy a Mars bar, I can sell it on (and get its socially mediated economic value) or I can unwrap and eat the thing (and get its intrinsic value.) I assume there are existing terms for this distinction; I don't know what they are.
If I buy shares in someone's company, and I give them £10k on the hope of a "10x 5 year exit" (jargon I learned all of five minutes ago) then I now have some pieces of paper, and the company's "valuation" - the money you'd get if you liquidated all its assets - has increased by £10k.
Excepting any dividends, which I have no power to force the company to issue, (and which I've just been told is not what investors are interested in), my shares are just worthless pieces of paper.
In five years, the company has grown 10x as big, and therefore my share of it is now worth £100k.
But the only way to get that value out is to liquidate the company and take my share - and I have no power to force that to happen either.
So my shares are still worthless.
I'm guessing my "exit" is selling the shares on. They are "valued" at £100k, so I sell them to you for that amount and make my exit. That's the socially mediated economic value of the shares.
But there's no intrinsic value to the shares - you can't unwrap them and eat them. You get whatever dividends the company may or may not choose to issue, and that's it. The £100k valuation is entirely conceptual.
So why on Earth do you buy them from me?
You can borrow against the paper value of the shares. If you or your firm owns $100mil worth of stripe shares, a bank may give you $50mil in cash as a loan with the shares as the collateral. (this is also true for executives or others that own large amount of stock in a company - public or private. a bank, like goldman,may give you a loan at say 1% interest that you use to fund your life instead of selling the securities)
Thanks, but that doesn't answer my question of why those shares have value to borrow against in the first place. Lapras answered me down in the comments - basically I'd heard a bunch of stuff at once and had been lead to believe that dividends were a triviality, when actually they're what gives the shares their value. The intrinsic value of shares is that you expect that, one day, the company will pay you money because you have them.
In the world of venture-backed technology companies, the word you are looking for is 'exit'. An exit is an event that allows investors to cash in their shares for hard currency. The kind of exit that VC's are looking for is a 'liquidity event', which in practice usually means the company either goes public, or (more frequently) is acquired by a public company.
Once your shares are publicly traded, you can easily sell them for cash because shares are constantly being bought and sold at a publicly known price per share.
In practice, investors usually have influence over the company's decisions regarding if and when to sell the company or take it public. Except in rare cases, after a few rounds of investment the investors will collectively own more than 50% of the shares, and as long as they work together they can force the company to do what they want, as they normally have the majority of seats on the board of directors.
These are the basics; there are nuances such as proxy fights, cashing out early investors, and misalignment of interests between early and later investors.
Thanks for this insight.
If I understand you correctly, would it be a faux pas for a CEO to telegraph a lack of interest in future investment (ie, implying he will likely keep control of the company and leave an angel investor without a route to control him)?
Also, what kind of interests does an early investor have that a later one doesn't? Why aren't they both solely interested in maximising the promise of future dividends (which then cascade down to set the value of an IPO or acquisition)?
I still need to learn a lot about how to structure a company and what are the rules and forces at play. I want to get to grips with the world a bit better before I try to play in it - at which point, on a practical level, I'll be mainly interested in not making obvious mistakes.
> leave an angel investor without a route to control him
Normally startup investors get a seat on the board along with their investment.
> Also, what kind of interests does an early investor have that a later one doesn't?
Just spitballing, but they could have different liquidation preferences. E.g. it might be the case that Investor A gets paid out first and Investor B doesn't get a cent unless the company sells for at least $300m. In that case, A and B might have different opinions about selling the company for $250m.
Startup investments are normally for preferred stock, which has special benefits like liquidation preferences that mean they get their money first before common stock holders get anything.
Because if the company becomes big and successful, eventually it *will* issue dividends and/or stock buybacks (which are economically equivalent to dividends). The stock price is basically just a prediction market on the net present value of future dividends/buybacks, and thus rises with the company's fortunes. It's the same reason that anyone buys *any* stock.
Thanks for this explanation.
So in this light, Amazon having a policy of not issuing dividends and sinking all profits back into the company was okay - because there was the understanding that they would one day reverse it (at which point the pot would be much, much bigger.)
I still feel like it doesn't fully add up, without some kind of solid expectation for how much dividends will eventually get paid out.
Eg, if the CEO (with a controlling share) is Ebenezer Scrooge and he only wants to give out £100 a year in dividends, doesn't that tie the value of the shares to f(£100/year), completely irrespective of the company's £1bn "valuation"?
And if that's true, wouldn't similar considerations apply to a CEO who expresses any kind of desire to keep the company in the family, or to use its proceeds for philanthropy?
A) Activist investors can step in and force the company to return cash to shareholders. You see this happen from time to time
B) The CEO has a fiduciary duty to shareholders
C) Usually the CEO is a large shareholder and thus has a personal financial incentive as well.
> And if that's true, wouldn't similar considerations apply to a CEO who expresses any kind of desire to keep the company in the family, or to use its proceeds for philanthropy?
There are examples of that happening, but normally if the company is kept in the family, it means they didn't sell stock to outsiders in the first place, so who cares? There's also some cases of weird dodges where the company promises to pay the first $X of profits back to shareholders and then devote everyone above that to philanthropy (I think OpenAI did something like that).
Re: A: What mechanism does an investor (or anyone else) have to force a CEO to do something that he doesn't want to do?
Re: B: I've just googled the word "fiduciary" and I'm guessing that one answer to A might be "sue him" for being in breach of his duty. But then they talked about having to prove the claim and prove the damages and I wondered how easy it is to do in practice - is this common or relatively rare?
Re: C: Yeah, I get that. I'm brand new and sort of leaping around between edge cases. Until I get a better feel for everything I'll be just as interested in "this is theoretically possible but no one would ever want to do it" situations as "real world" ones.
In a typical publicly traded corporation, the board has the power to replace the CEO. The kind of edge cases you are asking about would only apply in scenarios where the CEO (and allies) own over 50% of the shares. There are companies like that, but in general they don't sell their shares on a stock exchange for this very reason -- seasoned investors won't invest in a company structured that way; market analysts won't recommend them.
And before you even ask - the board can usually be replaced if shareholders representing > 50% of stock get together and force a vote.
The dynamics you seem concerned about do play out in cases where activist shareholders band together to force change in companies they feel are mis-managed and where the board is considered too beholden to existing management.
It's also worth nothing that proxy fights are annoying and expensive, so usually what happens is that the mere *threat* of a proxy fight forces leadership to listen to the activists, much like how the threat of a lawsuit is often almost as good as actually suing.
That's not quite right true. Some companies will never do this and their shares still won't be worthless. It's because *counterfactualy* if the shares ever sunk far below the value of the company there would be dividends/stock buyback/hostile tackover.
It would be interesting to find out what would happen to share value if a majority of votes (eg via special shares with extra votes) were owned by a trust whose bylaws prohibited it from ever accepting a takeover, voting for dividends or stock buyback.
I'm pretty sure all for-profit companies will eventually either A: issue dividends or dividend equivalents, B: go bankrupt, or C: sell out to someone (who will themselves eventually do one of A, B, or C). Unless bankruptcy is certain, the expected dividends will have a net present value, and that anchors the stock price.
It may be anchored by a long and flexible cable while bouncing around in an erratic current, to be sure.
Anyone read "Protocol" by Alexander Galloway? I got it for free from someone who didn't want it. It's old (2006), but the the thesis makes it seem like it would be an interesting read, at least from a historical POV:
"Is the Internet a vast arena of unrestricted communication and freely exchanged information or a regulated, highly structured virtual bureaucracy? In Protocol, Alexander Galloway argues that the founding principle of the Net is control, not freedom, and that the controlling power lies in the technical protocols that make network connections (and disconnections) possible."
I'm curious what the people here guesstimate the odds are of a Republican president getting elected in the US sometime within the next 20 years if we assume that nothing catastrophically world-changing such as WWIII happens. (What about within the next 50 years?)
I think that the expected number of Republican presidents in the next 20 years is pretty close to 5/2, but that the probability of at least one Republican is rather more than 31/32, because those elections will be anticorrelated. Perhaps as much as 99%?
I agree. Knowing what I know now, I would have to toss a coin.
Upcoming election in 2024? No idea, it depends who the Republicans put up and who the Democrats put up.
2028? I'd give them a better chance. Guesstimating 60%, higher if there's been a Democrat elected in 2024 - voters generally like a change when one party has been in power for a while.
So within 20 years about 80%, depending on the candidate put up, the opposition, the economy, the global situation and probably is Mars in Leo during the dark of the moon on the vernal equinox.
Also, the path of the economy and when a potential recession begins and ends will be a major factor in 2024.
20 years: 96
Ultimately for any political party to have six successive electoral victories would be astronomically unlikely, and I think there's only about a one-in-twenty-five chance that some political party other than the Republicans or Democrats wins an election before 2043.
I think your ~4% chance of a new party displacing the Republican Party before the Republican Party wins another presidency sounds high, I'd reduce that by an order of magnitude at least.
+1
I think just about the only way you'd see one of the 2 major US political parties go that long without a presidential victory would be if it straight up fragmented and died out like the Whig Party, and while possible that seems very unlikely to me.
Then again, the Liberals were riding high in the UK until they weren't. So it does happen. Though we would need to see a strong third party coming up for that, unless the Republicans and/or the Democrats do fission into smaller parties due to inability to keep *everyone* in the one tent.
I doubt it's as high as 1 in 25 if we're talking about a national election, unfortunately.
Regarding the GOP specifically, I agree with your reaction about the 20 years. Not even the New Deal Democrats during the Depression+WWII won 6 consecutive presidential elections. You gotta go back to the early days of the Republic -- when a _much_ smaller portion of citizens were eligible voters, it took weeks just to get a letter from DC to Boston, there wasn't anything approaching real-time news media, etc -- to find a 7-election winning streak.
This month, I'm going to do Austebruary (Austerity February, in the spirit of Veganuary or Dry January). My grocery bill has bloated to about double what it was 4-5 years ago (granted, there's another person in the family now), and I feel like it's time to reset the hedonic treadmill. So, the budget for the month is $200 for the household, plus the considerable amount of food already in the fridge and cabinets. Normally, we spend around $800 on food/drinks/coffee/alcohol, not extremely profligate but not frugal.
New unit is the AUS (austere) = kcal of food / $ spent.
Rice, peanut butter, oats > 1000 AUS,
Bread, dried beans, whole milk ~ 500 AUS
Stay tuned for Manic March, in which we blow up the budget and have a lot of fun.
What about flour? Home made bread is easy, inexpensive, and a luxury food. It costs about .50/lb or a little less if you buy 25 lb bags at Costco, so more than 3000 AUS.
Good value for $ but my work schedule isn't very good for bread baking :(
There is a book, _Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day_, that describes an approach to bread baking that avoid long time requirements, with lots of recipes.
A couple of open threads ago, in a discussion of to what degree charitable donations are tax dodges, there was mention of donated easements on land being a particular example. I commented that it _has_ been an abused practice but that the combination of formal accreditation of conservation land trusts, and new federal legislation regarding the actual tax deduction, was in the process of dealing with the problem.
I mention that again here just because the Charitable Conservation Easement Program Integrity Act recently passed into law as an addition to the year's omnibus federal spending bill. It was the product of some years of work to arrive at bipartisan agreement and is a relatively rare (nowadays) example of achieving that. The new law eliminates the most egregious abuses of the donated-easement deduction and toughens the IRS's review of such deductions generally. Here is a basic summary of it:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/28/spending-bill-to-prevent-abuse-of-tax-incentives-for-land-conservation.html
Fascinating!
How many years, if ever, till AI Narration is comparable to the beste voice actors? What do you think about the skepticism put forward here?
"The thing is that the stuff that is required to narrate isn't included in the text. There is nothing for it to reference in the existing content to bring these elements to bear. It is a billion acting decisions made constantly that are not deterministic. And some of it is accreted over the entirety of the read - the development of a relationship and the tone of emotion over 300 pages. How is AI going to do that?
How can an AI decide which voice to use? A human can tag it - and tag things throughout the text to flag them for the AI to perform in a certain way - but pretty quickly that becomes more time consuming/expensive than just paying a narrator to read it."
"I KNOW that AI will get better. It will sound increasingly natural. But I don't think it can act without direction. And once you have to provide it direction with this granularity, that requires non-AI work to provide the context to do that. "
I've been working a lot as a New York "background" actor and the thing I've been wondering is how long until *that* job goes away. Although there's occasionally *some* need for background actors to actually act - bystanders flinching at an explosion, an audience laughing or cheering at the right points in a public speech etc - the vast majority of what background people do is simply populate the world as nondescript individuals. Shoot a daytime outdoor scene in New York City and you need a LOT of people to be walking by - a bit blurry and out of focus - behind or in front or in the general vicinity of the action.
I feel like we're VERY close to a world where you should be able to tell a computer to just automatically add an assortment of generated people to the background of a video scene. A dozen cops walking around a crime scene. A dozen businesspeople sitting at the desks in an office, occasionally getting up and walking to get a coffee or use the restroom or share gossip. A hundred pedestrians milling around Times Square. You'd film the main actors in some open space on their own then tell the computer to "add some background people here". An AI program analyzes the scene, figures out where people might tend to be standing or walking and puts them there. You twiddle a few knobs to add more or fewer people, make them go faster or slower, be dressier or more casual...
How much does a background actor get paid?
SAG members like me get around $200 plus meals for a basic 8-hour day but 8-hour days are rare; you'll make more than double that on a 13-hour day with overtime and penalties and bonuses. There are specific bonuses if the role requires a haircut or if you provide your own police uniform (I own one) or if you had to wait too long for food or if you had to get up too early in the morning or if you got rained on during the shoot or if you had to breathe smoke etcetera. It pays a bit more still if the role requires "special skills" - I like "special skill" roles the best.
Additionally in the current era you have to get a COVID test (at a location provided by production) a day or two prior and are paid $100 to take this COVID test. (Last year I took ~100 COVID tests.)
(To be more precise, the usual union rate is $187/8, meaning you get at least $187 but are paid overtime if it's more than 8 hours. Overtime pays 1.5x after 8 hours and 2x after 10 hours.)
If you're NOT union the usual rate is $165/10, meaning you get paid $165 for the day and don't get any overtime until/unless the shooting day runs more than 10 hours.
Thanks. That’s all interesting stuff!
A Union gig you say? I know a bit about those.
Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union at an Arrow shirt factory in high school.
United Steel Workers of America Local 1938 for about a decade just out of high school.
Live better. Work Union!
The best? a decade or two. Pretty good? Probably within the year or maybe next year.
Agree with the skepticism. Even with perfect emotional beats from AI, the best voice actors can improvise things, or suggest improvements. So I'm going to say, several hundred years off. You've got to solve psychology first.
It depends on what the narration is for. If it's for interactive media, like a video game, the AI might have a set of goals, plans, and an emotional model, and would track gameworld events and how they affected its emotions based on its goals & plans. This complete and continuous record of every internal microstate of the agent could solve the problem being described.
If it's for static media, like movies, you might be able to use the same system for interactive media to track emotional state through the movie, IF it's all in chronological sequence AND no one in the film is concealing any information from the audience--the latter making most kinds of stories impossible to tell.
Perhaps you could get around the problem of hidden information by running the emotional simulator both forward and backward across the time of the movie, like an alpha pass and a beta pass with a hidden Markov model.
If not, then it's hard for me to envision how to communicate the appropriate mental state to the AI in any way simpler than just having an actor record the voice.
I have a pretty big idea that is built around asking people the following question:
What do you wish that everyone knew?
Well? What is your answer to that question?
That the things "everyone knows" ain't necessarily so.
That people knew how the freakin' tax system works when it comes to their pay (this may be specifically Irish situation, but holy hannah the amount of people who are working adults employed for years who have no idea how their tax credits etc. work astounds me; I meet it in my job, I see it online - people just glance at their payslip and if it's pretty much the same from week to week they're happy and don't bother finding out what it all means, until the day it changes and then they're 'how come this isn't the same as last week' and you have to explain to them about cumulative tax basis).
...kung fu.
Fantastic answer. I fully endorse this.
That freedom of speech is one of the most important things in the world that you absolutely can't afford to lose - if you do, you end up with a totalitarian society.
We are all so very different.
Is that better than "we are all so very similar"?
I think it is actually. I like to keep it in mind when I think someone is stupid or wrong. Most of the time it’s just the fact that we all see things in our own particular way.
I don’t discount the similarities though. I love the Hindu cosmology that says we are all aspects of the same thing, Brahma. I am you, you are me. It helps to see the differences as less important.
“First, do no harm” is an excellent rule that will keep you out of a lot of trouble.
The only way a society can be free and harmonious where every person is heard is for that society to never exceed ~10000 person. Hierarchies and their illegibility and alienation are the inevitable consequence of trying to squeeze together millions and tens of millions of a species that evolved to live with and understand only a scale of 1000.
Yeah, this is just all or nothing thinking. That there is a government does not mean there is no freedom. Hierarchies are morally neutral, they can be good (professor and students, good and evil) and they can be bad (dictatorships).
I grew up in a small town of perhaps 15000 people. It has hierarchies. Not everybody was heard. Most shouldn’t have been heard.
I graduated from a high school of fewer than 400 students total. It had hierarchies. Not everybody was heard.
I'd have to ponder some more about whether some people shouldn't have been heard and if so how many....but anyway as a practical matter, some people weren't.
Towards the end of the video, that when Julie was deep into Monat, she couldn't grasp arguments about how it was structured so she *couldn't* make money. This is the part which might be of most interest to rationalists. How can you tell when you're capable of using your mind?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLQptxV8hkQ&ab_channel=AlwaysMarco
Some people were asking about MLMs (multi-level marketing)-- here's a recent example, an interview with a woman who got out.
This is specifically about Monat, a shampoo MLM, but MLMs are pretty similar to each other.
Some highlights-- around 22 minutes, something that was actually able to shock me. They're encouraging their sellers to share their personal history of trauma and offer the MLM as a way of recovery.
Around 32 minutes, they're baptizing people as part of events.
At some point, an explanation that MLMs hijack the belief that effort pays off (true in many parts of life) to hook people into systems where they can't win.
I left an economically depressed area to go to school. People in dire straits seem like the perfect mark for these scams. A lack of hope and widespread innumeracy is fertile ground for grifters. Two people in my extended family got caught up in different versions of MLM. I tried to talk them out of it but couldn’t.
Previously we had a mention of the Catholic Church declaring black cats should be banned, and this came down to a misunderstood meme making the rounds.
Fortuitously, History for Atheists has a video about this up on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp3ob6Z95II
Did the Church ban cats and so cause the Black Death? Find out!
People have no blinkin' idea of history, that's why I'm perpetually banging on about it here. They mostly get their views from movies, TV shows, and video games. They either never learned it in school, or just zoned out for that lesson.
And don't even get me started on the witchy-poo types. That's its own level of fruitcakeness.
I think Black Death is best documented in Europe. There is some evidence from Middle East and little to none from India and China. Certainly it did not live on in the collective memory of these regions unlike Europe. Did it not spread to these regions and if it did, was it not as bad as in Europe?
There's actually abundant evidence from the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa, and China about the course of the Black Death in those areas. Arabic chronicles say that city of Cairo suffered a massive wave of fatalities leaving only a few survivors. It spread along the North African Arab kingdoms and reached the Iberian Peninsula (Grenada) about the same time it hit the neighboring Christian kingdoms. Wikipedia says it's not well documented in Grenada, but Michael Dols shows it was very well documented, indeed. It's just that the Christians destroyed most of the Arabic archives when they conquered Grenada. But the nobility and scholars of Grenada fled to North Africa, and many of the contemporary accounts found their way into the archives on the other side of the Straits of Gibraltar.
The original theory was that it came from China via India to the Mediterranean. I think it's now pretty clear from the archaeological record that it originated in Central Asia. There was an article in Nature a few years back that about a dig in Central Asia that uncovered a mass graveyard full of plague victims—and genetic testing confirmed they died from Y. pestis. I think some grave markers dated it before the European spread. It's well documented that Baghdad, Damascus, Jerusalem all got hit hard before it spread to across Asia Minor and reached Europe. About the same time it reached Asia Minor it wiped out Cairo and spread along North Africa.
The reason China was offered up as the origin of the Black Death is they experienced it earlier than Europe. But it was the Interior cities of China that experienced the first wave of what the Chinese called the "Great Pestilence" in the early 1330s. These were cities that connected to the Silk Road, so it seems reasonable to think it came out of Central Asia first. A second wave hit Chinese coastal cities starting in 1344 ( a few years before it hit Europe). Then in the 1350s, a third wave hit northern China.
I don't know much about the timing in India, but do know that some European travelers reported a great plague there. Also, it was assumed that the Black Death didn't cross the Sahara. But there's both archaeological and documentary evidence from the kingdoms of West Africa that it did.
A lot of such Reddit tier pop history just regurgitates Anti-Christian nonsense.
There seems to be some contention over did it originate in China or not, and there's a view that it came from the steppes and spread west along trade routes, but only spread east into China much later (e.g. the 19th century outbreak):
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/23/asia/plague-china-history-intl-hnk-scli/index.html
The mediaeval European outbreak seems to have been astonishingly deadly. And there are diseases which we don't or can't identify today but which were endemic earlier, such as the "sweating sickness" which killed a lot of people during Tudor times (Thomas Cromwell's wife was sick in the morning and dead before he came home in the evening, for one) but we don't know what exactly it was or why it was so lethal, and why it seemed to die out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweating_sickness
When I think of District Attorneys, I think of people like Janet Reno and Rudy Giuliani and similarly horrible folk in my own region. Are there any good DA's? Why are the famous ones always horrible people? (Some of those famous ones got so with good reputations, so you can't say it's a matter of mere infamy.)
The structure of prosecution in the US is confusing and most people understandably don't understand it. Neither one of your examples was a DA, and Reno wasn't even technically a prosecutor (though she oversaw many). Janet Reno was the Attorney General of the US, i.e., in charge of the Justice Department. Rudy Giuliani was the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which is a federal prosecutor. DAs (who confusingly are not all called DAs) prosecute state crimes. There is a DA for roughly every county in the country. 90% of people don't know the name of the DA for their own county. Famous ones are definitely causing a selection effect. They are famous because of what they did AFTER they were DAs, or because they were DA for about 4 or 5 very high profile places, like Manhattan or Philadelphia.
Also of note, most DAs are elected (unlike US Attorneys) and therefore tend to carry the stink of politics about them, rather than the 'heads down do your job' line prosecutor stereotype.
As far as DAs go, former DA for Manhattan Henry Morgenthau was pretty famous, and he had a sterling reputation.
Didn't he try to deindustrialise Germany one time?
Hah yes, I meant Robert. Henrys being his father and his grandfather.
Larry Krasner over in Philadelphia is pretty cool. Former civil rights attorney, and dropped this instruction to the prosecutor's office on his first day on the job: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4415817-Philadelphia-DA-Larry-Krasner-s-Revolutionary-Memo
The not charging this, not charging that, stuff got the most attention, but the really interesting one is the sentencing guideline. At sentencing, in addition to your sentencing recommendation, state the benefits and costs of your recommendation, including the pricetag of the period of incarceration you're asking for.
Well, it's pretty cool if you live in the burbs and violent urban crime is just a story you read about in the Inquirer. Not so much if you live in the city yourself:
https://www.axios.com/local/philadelphia/2022/09/20/philadelphia-homicide-violent-crime
Good point. Maybe we ask the City of Philadelphia what it thinks.
https://whyy.org/articles/philly-da-larry-krasner-cruises-to-reelection-victory/
Crime is complex - you don't just look at risking crime rates and arbitrarily point the finger at policies you don't like because you don't like them. So if the people closest to the problem still think Krasner's a good DA, despite rising crime rates, maybe they're seeing something you're not?
Sure. Or maybe enough voters in Philly are morons, bought off by their local machine, et cetera. These are the same fools that elected Frank Rizzo, after all. I'm amused that you appeal to their judgment as a source of wisdom.
Careful how much you trash Philly, my friend. A city of 1.5 million people dwarfs one man’s knowledge in aggregate, and the wisdom of crowds being what it is, probably has better judgment on average than most.
So however dumb you say Philadelphia is, it’s probably a good bit smarter than you are.
Also, in all seriousness Gritty might be listening and that thing is as unnatural as it is untethered to the laws of god and man.
Vagaries of the Electoral College system aside, if Matt Gaetz were winning his elections by an 80/20 margin, and one of his critics decided to lead with:
"Matt Gaetz? Pshaw! The only people who like Matt Gaetz are people who don't have to *live* in the Florida 1st District where they have to be represented by him!"
Pointing out the whole 80/20 victory margin thing would seem like a pretty salient counterpoint.
"Prosecutor discretion" is a euphemism for "good ol' boys network."
Feeling sympathetic to the (current) beneficiary) doesn't mean it's fair.
Do you have a preferred alternative? The converse of discretion to not bring charges would appear to be requiring charges to be brought regardless of the prosecutors' own judgment of the best use of their office's limited resources, or the likelihood of conviction. Even if you do think discretion is a problem, that would seem like a cure fantastically more wasteful and expensive than the disease.
...yes? Could the fact that there's not enough time in the world to prosecute everyone who has committed infractions indicate that perhaps there are in fact too many possible infractions? Maybe an omnipresent state where everything is either mandatory or forbidden is not a good idea?
Instead of saying "we're not going to prosecute (some) people for this crime (but we'll totally keep it on the books in case we have to go after someone)" maybe that shouldn't be a crime in the first place?
>>Could the fact that there's not enough time in the world to prosecute everyone who has committed infractions indicate that perhaps there are in fact too many possible infractions?
I mean, that is possible, but by no means certain. Maybe the justice system is overloaded because “too many things which should be legal are illegal,” but it’s equally possible that the strain just comes from lots of people committing lots of crime. If a wave of burglaries rolls through a town and overwhelms its justice system, we wouldn’t say “well maybe that’s just an indicator that burglary shouldn’t be illegal.” Likewise, if we cut the NYPD down to a total staff of four kids, a van, and a dog, one wouldn’t look at the ensuing inability to clear cases and say “must be because too many things are illegal in NYC.”
Lack of sufficient resources to clear criminal cases is a *possible* indicator that “too many things are illegal” but it’s hardly a determinative one.
And besides, even if you cut the criminal code substantially, you’d still need prosecutorial discretion. Plea bargaining, for example, is impossible without the prosecutor having the discretion to say “okay I could charge you with 1st degree manslaughter, but if you plead guilty to 2nd degree manslaughter I will drop that charge.” Take that discretion away, and every single case will need to go all the way through trial, and if you do that your costs per charge skyrocket astronomically.
For example (springboarding off of my conversation with Carl above), Pennsylvania spends about $220 million on criminal courts (https://www.ajmc.com/view/estimated-costs-pennsylvania-criminal-justice-system-from-the-opioid-crisis). That’s the cost with roughly 95% of cases settled by plea bargain rather than going to trial. I’m not unsympathetic to the idea that lots of things are illegal that shouldn’t be, but if you ask PA to eliminate plea bargaining, then just start legalizing things until it can successfully run all of them through its justice system on a $220 million budget, I think you are going to end up having to legalize a *lot* of things that people generally would consider “crime” before you got the budget to balance.
Similarly, “I could charge you as an accomplice, but I won’t if you cooperate and testify against the boss” is another form of prosecutorial discretion. So -poof- goes your ability to flip witnesses to prosecute organized crime.
Same goes for “I could charge you with possession a controlled substance, but I won’t if you enter this supervised rehab program and stay clean for 12 months.” That's going to cost people opportunities to get their lives together.
And what does a discretionless prosecutor do with “I shot him, but it was in self-defense?” If the prosecutor has enough evidence to bring the murder charge, but thinks there’s a 60% chance the self defense claim will prevail, does she have to charge anyway? What if she thinks that percentage is 70%? 90%?
And to top it all off, you have the simple fact that in the absence of discretion, prosecutors will still exercise discretion. They’ll just half-ass some cases while working harder on others – and it’s pretty much impossible to police that.
I see where you’re coming from, but I think that you have to find a way to better distinguish between “discretion” and “abuse of discretion.” Right now it seems like you are conflating the two so tightly that any act of discretion is in and of itself an abuse, and it leaves you in danger of throwing out a whole lot of baby with your bathwater.
" If a wave of burglaries rolls through a town and overwhelms its justice system, we wouldn’t say “well maybe that’s just an indicator that burglary shouldn’t be illegal.”
Except that's already happening. For burglaries and vandalism police already won't bother trying to solve them (unless they can get that smexy hate crime angle), but they will give you a police report so you can file an insurance claim. What we have is that laws get enforced on a political basis -- like that guy who was just acquitted on the (politically popular) FACE act upgrade of a simple assault charge (and which the video proves kind of conclusively he never should have been charged with in the first place). So laws are not now a way of reducing crime, but a way of enforcing political conformity.
And even if they were being enforce in a politically neutral way, if the laws don't actually reduce the crimes they're supposedly preventing, why have them? If having an (unreduced) crime rate better if we're also punishing people? This ties into your point of: "They’ll just half-ass some cases while working harder on others – and it’s pretty much impossible to police that." Humans do not always respond to social engineering in the way they're "supposed" to. Cranking up the number and flexibility of excuses to throw people in cages and take their stuff doesn't actually make them any more effective (unless your actual goal is to make it easier to put people in cages and take their stuff.)
TL;DR: Banning your way to utopia has a long history of failure.
Should anyone take Freud seriously anymore?
About 30 years ago, Seymour Fischer and Roger Greenberg published "Freud Scientifically Reappraised", where they examine the results of thousands of studies in an attempt to establish the accuracy of Freud's theories. As I recall, in about half of the cases Freud's theories were supported by clinical research.
I found the book difficult to read. The same two authors published a similar work in the seventies, whose title I have forgotten, that was more accessible.
In the late '70s something called Transactional Analysis was popular. IIRC, it featured a Parent, a Child, and a 3rd thing, perhaps a Teacher. It sounded a lot like to recycled Freud to me at the time.
Now there's a counseling technique called IFS (Internal Family Systems). It's said to be the next big thing, and will revolutionize counseling. Without knowing a lot about it, I think it too sounds a bit Freudian.
Many (most) of you will know more about this than I do. Thoughts?
We still take seriously the idea of the subconscious. However, it wasn't actually Freud's idea; he just got credit for it somehow.
I think his ideas about dreams are worthwhile, specifically that a dream is symbolically about some issue that's troubling you. Though in my experience, it's more-often a direct, overt enactment of my worries, than a symbolic mask of them. I guess he probably did more harm than good by insisting everything must be symbolic.
It is necessary to know Freudian theories to understand some 20th-century fiction, like James Joyce's Ulysses IIRC. Large chunks of literature and continental philosophy invoke Freudian ideas, so if you don't know them, you won't understand that literature or philosophy. But understanding of both the stories and the philosophy is helpful mainly to realize why they're dumb and should be taken down from their pedestals.
Regardless of whether anyone *should* take Freud seriously, the prior odds strongly predict that anyone who takes Freud seriously today is a nutcase.
I’m doubtful anyone should’ve taken him seriously to begin with, but his theories certainly haven’t aged well.
Given how little of modern psychology replicates it may be fruitful to revisit older generations of psychologists whose writings are more akin to philosophy of the mind rather than science. I'm more partial to Jung myself
I'm curious, how do Freud's conceptual machinery enable critical theory ?
The only thing I can think of is that Freud makes a lot of fuss about the Subconscious and how it drives behaviour, and critical theory-ish frameworks posits this as one of the main mechanism of inter-personal racism/misogyny/blah ?
Nah it's just an opportunity to paste in the rote critical-theory bash.
At this point in lots of online places the question posed could be about taking Kant seriously, or alchemy or mercantilism or Quakers, and half the replies will be about critical theory.
Well, critical theory certainly deserve all of that and then some.
That said, let us not jump to conclusions about Argentus. They could have good reasons for linking Freud and critical theory, this an open thread so axe-grinding could have been done in a seperate comment of their own. Maybe this is not axe-grinding.
RE: The media rarely lying: Here's an article that I expect most people would consider to contain an outright lie rather than just misrepresentation.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/25/world/earth-core-turning-scli-scn-intl/index.html
For a different example, there were a lot of pieces recently claiming that"Fact check: Biden did have the authority to declassify documents as vice president" due to an Obama executive order. If you actually read the executive order you discovered that it gave the VP the power to classify documents and it gave any classifying authority the power to declassify documents he himself had classified. The headlines were truthful if you interpret "declassify documents" as "declassify some documents," but that obviously was not how they were intended to be read, given that nobody was claiming that all classified documents Biden ended up with were ones he himself had declassified.
If you read to the bottom of the article, at least in the later versions, you discovered that the VP did not have the legal power to declassify all documents, although one legal scholar quoted, after conceding that that might be true as a matter of academic constitutional law, said that in recent years people had been acting as if he did. None that I saw mentioned that the fact in the headline, insofar as it was true, was irrelevant.
Does that count as lying?
I read that story. It's not the media lying, it's the authors. And they're not exactly "lying" - they're just using "core rotating" in a different way than people expect.
What I learned from actually reading a few articles about this a few days ago is that everyone assumes that the core rotates at the same rate as the surface of the earth, but in fact its rotation can be a slightly different speed. People have hypothesized for a while that this speed goes from slightly less than the speed of the surface to slightly more than the speed of the surface and back over the course of 70 years or so. The current observation is that this whole thing seems to be precisely on track, as predicted, and is now moving from slightly faster than the surface to slightly slower than the surface.
What makes it fun to talk about is that you can express the whole thing in a rotating coordinate system that tracks the surface. Now the core can be thought of as accelerating a bit for a few decades, and then slowing down and stopping, and then spinning the opposite direction a bit for a few decades, and then slowing down and stopping again.
Once you say it like this, you can avoid saying anything actually false, but you can activate all the ideas people have about how the magnetic field is driven by fluid flow in the center of the earth, and magnetic field reversals are dramatic events that happen every few tens of thousands of years, without actually saying any of that. You just say that the core stops its rotation.
But actually, for most of us, the new information is that the core even *had* a rotation in this coordinate system to begin with - most of us probably assumed that the core went at the same speed as the surface!
I don't think the study authors are at fault; they correctly state what the paper is about in the very first sentence. It's then clear from context that when they talk about rotation, they mean rotation relative to the surface ("differential rotation") rather than absolute rotation.
The fault lies with the headline and article writers who took that statement out of context, where it starts to mean something completely different.
The bar for lying talked about in The Media Very Rarely Lies is much higher than this. It only counts instances where someone knowingly and intentionally lies.
You don't think that headline writer knew that the core is in fact still rotating?
I don't think they'd consider themselves to be lying. It's taken from a direct quote from the study authors, and it's a true statement that happens to be confusing and misleading without context. It has stopped moving relative to us. On top of that, the article itself clarifies the confusing part, which I think excludes it from the category of lying Scott's article was talking about.
Scott clarifies what he means by lying in section 8 of this post: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-061
This falls in category 5 or 6 (or maybe even 3 or 4), but Scott is only arguing that the media rarely does what's described in category 7.
This is a stricter definition of lying than most of us use. I think "The Media Very Rarely Lies" article really should have made that clearer.
I'll bite: what's the lie? I see a lot of "according to a study, this may be happening" and little else.
The study surely exists, and "there might be (unspecified) changes in detectable behavior in earth's core" certainly sounds plausible.
My experience is that whenever a news outlet discusses a technical topic with which I’m familiar (aviation, bread, computers, music theory e.g.) every word is incorrect, including “and” and “the.”
I suspect, but cannot prove, that this is true for everyone with any specialized technical knowledge.
https://loricism.fandom.com/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_Effect
The Earth's core has not stopped rotating, that's a ridiculous and bombastic assertion. What the study actually says is that it's no longer rotating faster than the surface is; it has stopped rotating *relative to the surface*.
From the article:
“The inner core doesn’t come to a full stop,” he said. The study’s finding, he said, “means that the inner core is now more in sync with the rest of the planet than a decade ago when it was spinning a bit faster.”
Yes, they make false claims in the headline and first sentence of the article, then correct themselves deep in the article body to deflect accusations of malpractice. Doesn't make the headline any less false.
The study says "rotation has paused" and "a turning-back", the news says "stopped turning" and "reverse". How much difference is there in that terminology? Layman me sees none.
The difference between those two phrases isn't the issue; the issue is that they're both completely false. The core is still rotating. The linked study is about the fact that the core is now rotating ever so slightly slower than the surface rather than faster.
Then the objection is to the wording of the study, which the news has accurately conveyed.
The study provides the appropriate context for the reader to understand that they're using "rotation" in an atypical way. (It's the very first sentence.)
The article removed that context.
Oh, yes.
I have seen so many sloppy science articles in the mainstream press that errors like confusing "reverse" and "slow down" no longer attract my ire.
Most news stories assume the surface of the earth as the reference frame. For example, if there was a story about a person who was traveling across the country, and the story said that they stopped moving, that would mean that they stopped moving relative to the surface of the earth, not that they were stationary in some inertial reference frame while the earth rapidly spun away from them.
This particular story even includes a quotation that seems aimed at clarifying this.
It makes sense to talk about movement relative to the surface of earth for objects that are on the surface, yes. I don't think it makes much sense when that's not the case.
If I saw a headline that said "the ISS has stopped moving", I wouldn't assume that it was now at rest relative to the surface of Earth. Indeed, when people talk about the speed of a ship in orbit, they use its speed relative to the center of Earth, not the surface.
This is further complicated by the fact that while linear motion is relative and there's no such thing as "a still point", rotation is not relative. Objects can be said to be objectively rotating or not rotating, with no reference frame needed.
The most relevant evidence doesn't come from physics though, it comes from the article itself and the reaction to it. Do you really think the person who wrote that headline was trying to convey that the motion of Earth's core had changed by about 1 degree per year relative to in 1970, having absolutely no noticeable effect on humanity? Or do you think they were trying to make people panic with a dramatic headline reminiscent of a disaster movie?
(I wonder now, in the movie The Core, was the plot that the core stopped rotating completely, or stopped relative to the surface? The Wikipedia page doesn't say. I guess the average person's knowledge of geophysics is poor enough that they might see both options as equally cataclysmic. So I guess the headline could be both intended to be accurate while also intended to make people panic.)
Funnily enough, at about 2 minutes into the interview at the top of the article, the reporter themselves indicates that they've misunderstood what happened, by saying "but the surface never rotates in reverse, right?". Also, the graphic they're showing on screen appears to display the surface as rotating and the core as stopped entirely. So no, I don't think it's going to be obvious to most people that the article is talking about motion relative to the surface.
I feel like you're arguing several contradictory things? You started this thread by saying this was an example of the media "outright" lying, but your last paragraph seems to be arguing that they were honestly mistaken, and your fourth paragraph seems to be arguing about the impression they were trying to create. I'm confused about your thesis.
I don't know what was going on in the head of the author, so I can't say for sure that they were lying; it's certainly possible they were mistaken. But I'm pretty sure *someone* who looked at that article knew it was wrong and chose not to correct it. If a media article says something blatantly untrue, the organization as an entity knows it's untrue, and chooses not to fix it, I think that qualifies as "the media lying", even if a particular author was not lying.
I don't think the reporter in the video clip is the one who wrote the article; I was using them as an example of how I think most people would not immediately assume that the title refers to differential rotation.
What I think I was trying to say in my 4th paragraph is that the headline was clearly not written with intent to inform. But I agree that that's different from lying, and probably not relevant here. Apologies.
I think what this comes down to is just whether it's obvious to most people that "rotation" means "rotation relative to the surface". It's not obvious to me; when I saw this statement, my thought process was "the core has stopped rotating completely > that seems implausible > they probably mean relative to the surface". I had to work out the intended meaning from my knowledge of physics, which is knowledge that a lot of people don't have.
Any advice for finding remote positions in AI safety or EA?
I'm a physicist-turned-data-scientist, currently on the job market. My spouse has an extremely stable position, so I have the luxury of working in something less lucrative, but with high impact. I'm open to work in EA or AI, with the caveat that it needs to be a remote-first position. I poked around LW, but didn't see any discussion.
Re: HPPD
Due to my work I had access to a set of medical data covering 100M people. After reading the original post about it I was curious to its rarity. And found on the order of 10 cases.
So while it no doubt exists in higher numbers a *very* slim number of people have it to the point they seek medical assistance. Out of respect for these people's privacy I didn't investigate other than looking at a count, but I do wonder how much of that was incidental to the original cause of workup.
Unsurprisingly this can be very mild or very severe. I thought it was telling that people who commented on that original post typically mentioned a very mild impact "I can make the lines move if I think/focus in a certain way" type of effect. Meeting the criteria for HPPD? Sure, but definitely not something you'd mention to a physician.
Hmmm…
Are these people in the US? If so, how did you circumvent HIPPA privacy laws?
If my cardiologist wants to see the lipid panel from my annual physical, I have to sign and date a form giving permission.
Part of QA/QC involved incidence rates for disease. If the UK has an incidence of 58/1,000 diabetes, that's what I should see in the data. Similarly 1/1,000 for X cancer diagnosis and so on.
Since it makes no sense to build these validations one at a time, there was a table with a list of all diagnosis codes and their count in the data.
Viewing aggregated, de-identified data is not a violation of HIPAA.
Do you think your insurance company doesn't know you had a lipid panel?
> Out of respect for these people's privacy I didn't investigate other than looking at a count
That is about as far as you can go in the US. All of that data needs to be de-identified.
I spent a few years writing software to render medical images. I had a lot of sample image files to work with but they always had to be carefully anonymized.
You're correct it would have been a HIPAA violation to look any more deeply than a de-identified count. No valid medical or business purpose - and even so, the system was set up so it used an internal ID number not linked to anything else. Only time we'd see patient names was sometimes clinical staff would say "Why does John Smith have a diabetes flag" and we'd have to "break glass" to get their internal ID and find out they were in A&E for hyperglycemia 3 weeks ago or similar.
https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/goolsbee-and-syverson-on-construction
This article has some nice insights into cost disease in the construction industry.
Interesting. I wonder how much of this could be attributed to increases in the size/scope of building codes
That entire substack is really great. And the series on nuclear power plants was the closest I've ever gotten to an answer about "which regulations could you change that would meaningfully decrease the cost of nuclear power without compromising safety too much".
Could you summarize the answer for us?
What I took away from it is that the single biggest one is: rather than a plant being grandfathered to regulatory changes once it is complete/operating, make it grandfathered once construction begins. Apparently it is _very_ common for regulatory changes after a plan is approved and construction has started to result in finished work being ripped out and redone at a much increased cost. This not only just increases the cost of construction but also significantly increases the _length_ of construction, which increases the cost of financing.
We already have a point where a plant no longer has to be changed to meet regulatory changes (within reason I'm sure, if some catastrophic flaw was found, I'm sure even existing plants would need to be updated). Just moving the point in time when that occurs by a few years would make construction quite a bit cheaper on average.
I've really loved the rise of public-facing blogs / newsletters on relatively specialized technical topics. Some of my favorite examples:
- ACOUP (gears-level understanding of premodern military and economic history)
- Admiral Cloudberg (causes and investigations of aircraft crashes)
- Bits About Money (payments technology and business practices)
- Construction Physics (what it says on the label)
- Money Stuff (explaining finance news)
I'm thinking (as a hobby-- I have a day job) of trying to develop enough understanding of an unfamiliar area to do my own writing on it, along similar lines to the examples above. So I'm asking for some brainstorming help: what topic(s) would you enjoy reading a technical but reader-friendly weekly-ish blog about? Only constraint from my side is that it can't require PhD-level expertise or industry-insider knowledge.
I find reading air accident investigator reports wonderfully soothing. All that fear and horror distilled into a calm, rational description of events and recommendations for future avoidance.
I already follow four of those, but had never heard of Admiral Cloudberg. Thanks for the rec.
I'll point out that the 2 blogs from your list that I have read (and loved) are written by people with graduate level degrees and many years work experience in the subject matter.
What I am saying is, can you write about your day job? I couldn't imagine those blogs being written by people with hobby level knowledge; it would come off as a cringy youtube influencer thing that I actively try to avoid.
I took a stab at doing a professional-knowledge-level blog in my primary area of professional experience, and found the exercise to be interesting and rewarding. And got some nice reader feedback. But after a few months I concluded that doing it well really demanded it being my fulltime job not a side thing, so I stopped.
Also at that time (this was long before Substack existed) the monetizing part was really daunting. Maybe that part is clearer and more plausible now? Though of course there is also more competition...anyway it was more the feeling that a side hobby couldn't help ending up becoming half-assed that made me put down.
Because I think that your comment is a great idea: an older (some 5ish years old now?) non-substack blog is Brulosophy( www.brulosophy.com). It's about home brewing (the beer kind, not the software) and their whole stick is "let's test all the common wisdom/best practices in the home brewing world". They are, for hobbyists, extremely meticulous, and their analytical techniques, while not complicated, are decently rigorous. I think they are a pretty good benchmark for scientific investigation of hobby activities, especially ones where the criteria of success are so subjective.
There is a nice movie for kids made recently in Czechia, my kids enjoyed it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Even_Mice_Belong_in_Heaven
(In 2022 I got a completely remote job and, living the meme of every Californian, traveled and lived in 5 different cities to see where I wanted to move to. I thought I’d write up what I found)
--Detroit--
I’ve had a lot of people ask why I would even consider Detroit, so let me go over the things Detroit gets right. Go to your map app of choice and look up Grand Circus Park in Detroit and look up what’s around it. In mid-2022 there were multiple nice apartments you could rent for less than $2000 a month within 2 blocks of this park. That means you’re walking distance from the baseball stadium, the football stadium, the opera house, Fox theater, the river, the hockey rink, and multiple outdoor parks. This area is premium; a lot of work has been done to clean up this area, it’s really nice and there’s lots of decent outdoor dining. And I adore the architecture, every other building is this gorgeous turn-of-the-century design that’s just fantastic. You can happily walk around downtown Detroit for hours and just enjoy the beauty. No joke, based just on infrastructure, Detroit was the best city I visited and it wasn’t close. If you want an affordable, walkable urban city, Detroit has it.
Having said that, Detroit is the only city I am not considering moving to because it has the worst vibe of any place I’ve ever been. The city has PTSD and it’s utterly tragic, so let me explain through four stories. First, if you arrive in Detroit on a Saturday, like I did, the city will absolutely enchant you; it’s packed full of people having fun and outdoor festivals and it’s really moving. And then, like around 4PM on Sunday, something will start to feel weird and it’ll bother you and then you’ll look up and…no one is on the street. You’ll look behind you, down three blocks of the urban heart of Detroit, and they’ll be one person walking and two cars on the road, then you’ll look down the street in front of you and they’ll be no one walking and three cars on the road. The city just dies and I’ve got the pictures to prove it.
But if you’re intrepid like me, you go to a local community garden to volunteer, because the urban blight has opened up a ton of land for large urban gardens and they’re actually pretty nice. And I show up and there’s like four old ladies and I figure, alright, that’s a little lame, but at least they’ll talk my ear off and I’ll learn all about Detroit. Dude, no. They didn’t talk. Like, if I asked questions and drove the conversation, they’d tell me some stuff but it was 70% me talking. And then I went to Comerica Park to watch a Tigers game, and the park is fantastic, and I started talking to these two Canadians, they’re super friendly, and I ask them about this, how Detroit is so awesome and yet everyone, especially the people who live there, are so down and closed off. And they laugh and start telling me horror stories about where their grandparents were in the 60’s Detroit race riots and how they just barely survived.
So yeah, that’s the vibe. If you’re from Detroit, I’m sorry, but your old ladies don’t talk, your Canadians tell race riot horror stories, all your restaurants are closed at 7:00 PM on a Wednesday, and there’s a CVS on Woodward Ave that I don’t think was open once in the two weeks I was there. That’s what I mean by vibe; people act like they’re in a warzone and no one wants to live around that.
So, because I know people are going to bring this up, the issue isn’t crime. Detroit has a crime problem, no doubt, but I felt safer in Detroit than I have in Stockton, in Oakland, and in the worse parts of Sacramento, and that’s just in North Cali. I’ve walked the streets at night and I’ve walked from the Eastern Market to the downtown and done things I wouldn’t have felt safe doing in Stockton. Yes, no doubt there are neighborhoods to avoid but I’m not in those neighborhoods and I don’t want to be. People aren’t just avoiding those neighborhoods, they’re avoiding a gorgeous downtown that just isn’t that dangerous and I fundamentally don’t get it. Detroit has a crime problem but it doesn’t have a uniquely bad crime problem and if you’ve lived in one of a half dozen West Coast cities, you’ve experienced the equivalent. This isn’t crime, this is some kind of weird PTSD where really horrible things happened in the past and they just can’t get over it.
So no, I’m not seriously considering Detroit. I wish I were and, to be blunt, it’s not the city, it’s the people. An entire major metropolitan area without optimism, energy, or enthusiasm; who want to be around that?
And in all seriousness, I think the greatest and easiest act of urban renewal you could do in America today is find some way to get 3-5k Californians or Texans or just…normal people into Detroit. Because there’s a real first mover problem. Nobody in their right mind would want to move to Detroit on their own but if there were a couple thousand normal people who do basic stuff like eat out on a Wednesday, so there would be restaurants open on a Wednesday at 7:00 PM, and host basic stuff like board game nights and river walks, then Detroit would be the coolest city I visited and I’d probably be moving there. But Detroit badly, badly, needs a social scene of ordinary happy people and until they find a way to get that, no amount of urban renewal is going to make a difference because it doesn’t matter how pretty the dance floor is if the natives refuse to dance.
Very interesting take on Detroit - looking forward to reading about the other cities you checked out!
> The city has PTSD and it's utterly tragic...
I was about to quibble over this; but I think you are right. PTSD is a good approximation of the attitude that many residents of Detroit feel about its history. During the 1920s to the 1950s, Detroit was a happy city with a big story: the businessmen of Detroit had helped put the world on wheels, and then helped the United States manufacture war equipment to win World War II.
From the late 1960s to the modern day, the story has been a city torn apart by crime, depopulated and financially strapped, and with a sense of social distress and opposition between City and Suburb.
I'm a lifelong resident of the "Detroit Metro Area", but I've rarely visited the downtown area more than a few times. If there isn't an event happening in that area, there aren't many reasons to go to the downtown district.
I do have to ask: did you get a chance to see the International Freedom Festival fireworks, in the middle of Summer? It's a collaboration between Detroit and the city of Windsor in Ontario. It's one of the yearly events that draws immense crowds into the downtown area, and is usually a very festive weekend. The fireworks are usually spectacular; I don't recall ever seeing as impressive a fireworks display anywhere else.
Yeah, I wondered about the opposition between suburbs and city. Are there other cities like that? I used to go out with a woman from Oakland County (Detroit suburb for those who don't know) and I was surprised at her feelings towards the city. I grew up in suburban New York and thought of the city as wonderful. Even the Bronx. Even in the 90s. She thought of Wayne County as a place you passed through to get the airport. I just figured suburban kids everywhere thought of the city as the cool place, but apparently not Detroit.
The PTSD point might be true of other rustbelt cities. I was in Reading PA one Sunday and I thought about how beautiful the old buildings were and how cool it was that all the signs talked about the steel manufacturing that happened there and how weird it was that there were like 5 people out on the streets. I had an hour or so to kill before my bus and it took a decent amount of time just to find a place to have a drink.
Anyway, looking forward to the rest of the series. I've always wondered what Salt Lake City was like.
It might take a while to find a place to have a drink there.
Detroit *used* to be (in the 50s through early 70s) a lively city full of high-earning people, families raising children, people who had hope and energy for the future, and who found their city a friendly Midwestern burg, a place to move to if you had ambition and drive -- all the things you imagine it might become in the future if all those people moved back.
They're not going to. Detroit already had its chance and blew it.
This is a very interesting writeup, thanks for posting it.
Really thought provoking.
Interesting, I would love to read about the other cities you tried!
There is a big cultural difference between the northeast and the west coast esp. California that can explain the vibes seeming off to you but the place actually not being bad. I grew up in the northeast and Californians can give really bad vibes to me - I have to actively translate what they are saying to some extent. When I was visiting math grad schools a Russian grad student in California explained it to me as "in New York when they say 'fuck you!' they mean 'hello' and in California when they say 'hello' they mean 'fuck you!'"
I grew up in the Southeast and live in California and I haven't noticed any difference.
I think you omitted the other 4 cities.
I've only got Salt Lake City and half of Vegas written up. If no one cares for these, I probably won't bother.
It's worth the bother!
Thanks everybody, I'm really encouraged. I think I'll submit the SLC writeup in the next open thread.
Great! I live a bit north of SLC but might like to move down there some day. I’m curious about your take.
Great post, thanks for making it! Looking forward to any future installments.
I really liked this write-up and would love to see your others! I have also lived in many different cities/areas, and the differences between them is very interesting to me.
Please do continue
I want to see the rest of them too. One thing you can’t pick up in a couple weeks is the annual climate. I love my community for a lot of reasons but summer humidity is really a drag.
I liked it!
Closed at 7:00 pm is NOT normal for Houston.
Yea it certainly isn't for Chicago either.
I lived in Atlanta for a while, and I now live in a suburb of Cleveland. Restaurants being closed at 7 pm on a Wednesday is weird to me; I didn't know it was like that anywhere.
What do rationalist types mean/what are they referring to when they say “alpha”? As in “There is no alpha left in western interpretations of Buddhism,” from the house party essays. (This is hard to Google because of the more popular slang meaning of “alpha.”)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_(finance)
Yeah. I work in investments and haven't ever heard anyone use it in this slang sense except here. But then, I don't operate in very trendy circles.
To say "there's no alpha left" in the slang sense I take to mean that something is basically played out, what's worth saying or doing has already been done. In investing, alpha represents an *extraordinary* investment return -- even if there's no alpha to be found, you can still expect to generate an *ordinary* return through a passive strategy. I suppose the same analogy to ordinary returns carries here -- it may be that you can still write new books that teach Buddhism to Westerners and perhaps people will find them useful and buy them, but there are no profound new insights to be gained this way.
No, the idea as I read it is that the Bay Aryans are tech-strivers looking for that massive get-rich-quick opportunity, so what they're after is the alpha, the rich strike, the unexploited vein of gold. The joke is that they're also hyped-up cranks who think they can turbo-monetize everything, including Western interpretations of Buddhism.
I guess the idea is that if you cannot get an extraordinary return, you might as well put your money into an index fund, and get the ordinary return will less work. Or look for some other opportunity that might provide an extraordinary return.
Does anybody else think up a bunch of things to say here on like thursday and then completely forget what they were by the time the OT rolls around?
‘bout time to come up with a great comment. :)
I still haven't found a pattern in when hidden and public open threads come around. I get the sense that they happen once or twice a week, and that it may even be tied to something obvious like the day of the week, but I haven't paid enough attention to notice yet. (As far as I know, it hasn't been publicly announced as a schedule.)
I think it has something to do with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
For this and other blogs like it I've considered writing something down in advance in a Word document, then pasting it into a post when the thread rolls around.
But I still have to take the time to write the dang thing...
Yes I do. Other times I think of things on a Thursday that I think are super important and relevant, and then by the time OT rolls around I just feel like they aren't worth posting about.
Haha, all the time. There should be a feature to write your comment so that it appears when a new Open Thread is posted. :D
A question for Scott specifically, to help settle a Manifold Market question for me: could you confirm this to be your mastodon account? https://schelling.pt/@scottalexander
Thanks Mingyuan!
Thank you Mingyuan--you did such a great job over the years.
Yes, thank you so much for all the wonderful work! And I was delighted to see you a few months ago in person :-)
Suggestion: Every open thread you say, "95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here." which is good but you could add something like "Recent subscriber only posts include post A and post B. You can see a full list of subscriber only posts here."
The reason I suggest this is that I think many people don't realize that you have a substantial number of subscriber only posts and this would be a non-naggy way to let people know.
Also a list of all your subscriber only posts would be useful to long term readers who become subscribers and want an easy way to browse all the posts they couldn't read before.
I agree with this suggestion. Also, I know Scott is reluctant to plug subscriptions but my suggestion is to be a little more sales-y about them. You are creating a product that people clearly value. We are constantly bombarded by companies emailing us daily. You can remind us to subscribe a couple times a year!
I think that plugging things are always annoying regardless of value. (unless the thing being plugged just so happens to match a need of mine so well that I decide to go get right now)
That said, I think that if you provide anything for free, you always have the right to plug any other thing, subject to a plausible ratio. I think 95% free is a ratio that gives Scott substantially more plugging rights than he is using.
To all the magicbuilding nerds and fans of Brandon Sanderson: I'd like to share an essay I wrote on allomancy! It includes an analysis of the system and an expanded set of allomantic powers I made for fun.
https://rightmakesright.substack.com/p/magic-systems-workshop-allomancy
Let me know what you think!
I love your ideas, they fit very well with allomancy!
Thanks! I had a lot of fun coming up with them :)
Pretty interesting! I wasn't expecting an expansion out to 5*5, but it makes a lot of sense, the way you put it. And I think you were right to avoid generic space-warping abilities - Allomantic abilities are mostly extremely specialized (except for Rioting/Soothing, arguably).
Rioting/soothing are extremely general and rather overpowered but Sanderson does not really realise that.
Just to be clear, I am not asking for advice about whether to let others do as they please. I'm also not looking to explain the CYA phenomenon as it relates to public reliance on expert recommendations for extreme caution around some health issue or other.
I am only interested in hearing from people who can supply research or professional anecdotal evidence to support a claim that giving dogs cooked mammal bones is dangerous, and in particular, that it is so dangerous as to warrant not giving them cooked bones at all.
I'm guessing this was meant to be a reply rather than a standalone comment?
Why aren't there more music acts like Jojo Mayer's Nerve (https://youtu.be/SIahbUYxdfE) that perform EDM/House/etc. with live instruments? (Or at least, live drumming?) It feels like it should be a sweet spot—all the thumping goodness of the genre/rave experience, but with the added thrill of seeing it created entirely live, the heightened exchanges of energy between the performer and the audience, etc.
But i.e. at like Burning Man this year, there were no acts even remotely like this, just normal DJs, and Nerve themselves don't seem to play at similar festivals or even raves consistently. What gives?
• Maybe people are really there just for a specific aural experience, and don't even really pay attention at all to how the music is being produced. It's not at all like, say, a Beyoncé concert to them, it's more about the drugs they're tripping on, the light shows and the huge subwoofers, the people they're with. (In this case, why hire DJ's at all, then? Or is the position of "DJ" a kind of minimum-viable source brand differentiation?)
• It requires a lot of talent/skill/practice to perform that genre convincingly well. Not only in playing your instrument, but in honing your sound so that your live instrument convincingly mimics the style of electronically-generated music. So maybe the sample size of musicians in general who would even try is small. Moreover, anyone who can play at that level probably finds other kinds of music (Jazz, etc.) more personally appealing to play/build a career on, even if they could make more
• People *would* be more entertained by live musicians and the overall experience would be rated as higher-quality, but not enough to offset the increase in costs. Maybe it's just easier touring with a laptop than schlepping an entire drum kit around the world? This probably entails all kinds of costs that get passed on to venues, who, all things considered, would rather stick with the cheaper, more predictable formula DJs offer.
This is something I've thought about a lot over the years, seriously enough to design and build my own electronic instruments and control surfaces with an eye toward real-time performance rather than studio production. For context I saw a great deal of live music between 1990-2015 or so, mostly punk and indie rock. I also went through several electronic music "phases": EBM synthpop, '90s-era "industrial", and techno/breakbeat/gabber style EDM. (The examples I could list are pretty dated.)
Naturally I sought out live electronic acts, and couldn't help but notice that their stage presence and sound mix were often pretty terrible. Some of the more energetic acts on record had very little going on in person; I think the term of art is "laptop band". I think there are a few factors at play:
1. It can be very difficult to translate between the studio workflow and live performance, even for traditional bands. Electronic acts have enormous flexibility of sound in the studio; for gigging this is either reduced to a subset playable by live musicians, or relies on a lot of automation which limits interactivity and spontaneity.
2. It's difficult to gig with a big pile of delicate, expensive, interconnected synth hardware, so the temptation is strong to consolidate functions into a keyboard or two or even just a laptop. Unfortunately this isn't a very interesting or interactive stage setup. Most performers naturally wire straight into the PA, which doesn't have the acoustic stage presence of e.g. a guitar and amp.
3. The succession of repetitive beats associated with EDM and other uptempo electronic genres is a grueling test for a live musician playing acoustic instruments. Drums in particular are usually reserved for machines ("'cause they don't make mistakes"). I do recall seeing a live psytrance band, Analog Pussy, who did use a drum machine.
Einstürzende Neubauten comes to mind as a classic example of a very synthetic or mechanical sound coupled with an involving stage presence, but I wouldn't call it dance music. They used several handmade acoustic instruments, and I believe they made a joke at one show about giving away their US-bought air compressor after the tour rather than flying it back to Germany.
I have been led to believe that an intentional philosophical precept of the original techno DJ movement was to shift attention from the performer back onto the individual audience member's experience. The DJ's job was to create a soundtrack with narrative development and shifting moods, unobtrusively guiding listeners on their own personal trip. An acoustic live performance analog might be something like a drum circle. I think much modern DJ-ing still falls within this ethos, although I'm not sure it's relevant to superstars like Tiesto or Deadmau5. Moving the focus back to DJ-as-performer seems to miss the point.
I'm excited to check out the acts others have mentioned!
I am super curious about your home-made instruments and control surfaces! If you have a link to photos or info I would love to learn more.
I have recently experimented with live looping using the OP-1 Field, while singing over what I'm playing - just did a live performance last night and it went pretty well! The OP-1 has some limitations, but I was impressed with how capable it was live.
Something I've noticed over time is that usually when someone asks, "Why doesn't anyone <x>", "Why isn't there more <x>", etc, the answer is usually "They already do, you just don't know about it", with "There are constraints that make it infeasible" being a distant second. The world is big, and it's rare to know it so well as to be able to truly assert that people aren't doing X, especially when X is outside your area of expertise, and double especially when you have expertise in some other area, which can fool you into thinking you have comprehensive knowledge about the field of X, too. As Sam pointed out, there are lots of big, well-known acts (even headliner status) that do this already - I'd throw in the Glitch Mob, Kalya Scintilla, Robert deLong, Nils Frahm, Beats Antique, Govinda, Dirtwire, etc. Throw in electronic-influenced bands, like LCD Soundsystem, synth driven jam bands like STS9 or Tipper, and there's quite a diversity of genre-bending live/electronic music out there.
Now, Burning Man is kind of a special case closer to the second type of answer for a few reasons - for one, the logistics are an order of magnitude more difficult than performing at a venue in a city, so the things you note about schlepping all the instruments applies even more-so. Live instrumentation electronic music tends to be a gear-heavy production, with lots of synthesizers, drum machines, amps, mics, instruments, etc. And for two, it's not a music festival, it's a self-produced event where no one is getting paid to perform. For three, the environment is extremely harsh, especially on sensitive gear like wooden-bodied string instruments or certain types of drumheads which can get wrecked by the ultra low humidity, or all the delicate electronics which can be damaged by the inevitable dust infiltration.
So you have a radically more difficult schlepp, for zero pay, on top of the risk of damage to your kit - if you're a working musician, you're literally risking the equipment you need for your livelihood, in return for... well, the things people get out of Burning Man. In that light, perhaps it makes sense that you wouldn't have seen much in that genre out there. Not to say there's none (did you really see every event on playa? Even the ones occurring simultaneously, on opposite sides of the city?), and live instruments and bands do come out (eg the kinds of people who would perform at La Victrola, or Playa Pops), but it's definitely rarer.
I think your last point is most of it. Every musician in a band decreases the revenue per band member - DJs can undercut bands, and still make more than individual band members.
Also, Top DJs when performing arent just hitting play on a setlist - some do, but many don't. They are live mixing sets, adjusting EQs, crossfading, creating transitions, and adjusting the mix; different DJs will be doing different combinations of those things and more. Some will have synths and drum machines running off a synchronized clock, and they can adjust synth settings like filter cutoff, LFO frequenxy, etc. live. In these cases they are essentially a live musician, and their audience can feel the connection between themselves and the performer.
Live musicians emulating EDM is shaving a square peg to fit into a round hole - it can work if thats the niche you're into, but you are probably better off just getting a round peg, or finding a square hole.
> Every musician in a band decreases the revenue per band member
Oh hell yeah, this goes way back.
I remember when Loren Michaels held up a certified check for $3,000 to get the Beatles to do SNL. They could split the money any way that wanted to.
If they wanted to give Ringo a little less, Loren didn’t want to get into the middle of it.
Technology and economics have shaped music genres.
A hundred years ago if you wanted to fill a huge dance hall with music you'd need a big band. Then, amplification made it possible for a four-piece rock band to fill the same room while paying far fewer people -- gig payments went down, killing off the big bands.
Then, electronic music made it possible for a single DJ or rapper to make enough music to fill the same room, fewer people again, killing off the rock band.
Next we'll have AI musicians and we won't need human musicians at all.
Long before electronic music existed you could have replaced live musician with recorded music and people's ears would not have known the difference. But people long to connect with a human performer; that is why live gigs have survived the coming of sound reproduction.
Therefore, AI will never replace live musicians.
In fact, live musician is one of the very, very few jobs I can think of that aren't in danger of being taken away from us by robots. Live musicians have already been made superfluous by sound reproduction, if you don't care about the human element. The musicians who survived that, have proven that the human element is necessary, and are therefore here to stay.
I go to a good amount of electronic music shows and I see this decently often.
Rufus du Soul
ISOxo
Bison
Griz
Big Gigantic
Odesza
Chemical Brothers
These are all examples from the past 12 months.
I was going to mention Odesza as well, great example of what OP is looking for.
Goes to show that this is a successful niche; these are big artists with many fans - my comment above is to explain why it isn't as common as just a standard DJ set.
> ... psychedelics continue to hallucinate for months or years ...
It's worth noting that in a large portion of cases the symptoms reported are mild, sometimes pleasant, visual changes (e.g., "when I look at monochrome surfaces, they look sparkly"), not hallucinations as in "there's a pink elephant in this room!"
The person I know who has the syndrome has mild visual changes, but is very disturbed by them -- they affect him sort of the way tinnitus affects some people. And they make him worry that he gave himself some permanent brain damage. I'd worry too, in his place.
Unlike my roommate's girlfriend who almost crashed her car dodging from a hallucination.
This is why actual data collection is a good thing.
For example, plenty of people have reported myo/pericarditis from the the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, but when you dig into the data, it turns out the vaccine still mostly makes sense.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4329970
Which is simply to say: "X happens" and "X is something to greatly worry about" are two different claims.
The challenge is that the public policy people fail to realize that the sets of people "who would clearly benefit from the vaccine" and "who are at high risk of complicates from the mRNA vaccines" don't overlap much. But acknowledging that would mean that messaging would get more complicated.
Yes, I agree that this has been a major problem with public health handling of the issue.
Apart from gaming, pornography, and improving the experience of virtual meetings, what are some of potential use cases for VR/AR in the future?
Virtual production, pre-visualization, location scouting and related for the entertainment industry
The biggest use case is being able to get the experience of hanging out with people without hopping on a plane (assuming the tech ever reaches parity with real life).
In the near term, probably the biggest milestone is if it gets good enough to replace a big monitor setup and let you do all your computer work in VR.
Remotely controlling robots to access inhospitable locations, such as inside nuclear reactors or walking around on deep ocean sea beds.
Similar but remotely controlling robots to engage in combat, either recreationally or to clobber out of control rioters for example.
I envy you for even thinking of this question. To me it seems too obvious that letting people who can't go anywhere to go places virtually will be the biggest use case. Think the bedridden, the handicapped, the inhabitants of nursing homes, their caretakers, parents of young kids, the poor - all of us who would like to travel, hang out with friends somewhere nice, go to an event somewhere, and who can't do anything like that. Imagine giving the gift of virtually going places to your relative who's stuck in his nursing home bed until he dies.
Also, think about the blind. For at least some of them this could become their vision. I'm worried that there wouldn't be enough money in this, though, and so it won't happen. (Why on earth isn't every blind person currently wielding a phone with OCR and text-to-speech? Is that because there's not enough money in this to bother making it happen?)
Btw, you don't even necessarily need OCR. There's "be my eyes" app.
Pair of blind + disabled might make a good couping for some things.
I'm pretty sure every phone since the past 10 years has OCR and text-to-speech.
Now, whether or not this is rolled into a software package friendly to the vision impaired is another matter.
Microsoft has its "Seeing AI" app, which has a bunch of functions intended to be useful in that field. But while I played with it a bit, I'm not vision-impaired (beyond what's correctable by glasses), so I can't really evaluate how well it does.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/seeing-ai
Following up, this Reddit thread suggests Seeing AI is useful, and gives some other suggestions as well. Notably Be My Eyes, which lets human volunteers assist via video call. (Which seems obviously useful, but I had no idea something like that was available.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/wln3vh/what_are_your_must_have_apps_on_apple_or_android/
I went through 3 flip phones in that time, and I don't recall any of them having OCR and text-to-speech, though I can't currently check. I do think you might be wrong about "every phone".
But yes, that's exactly my point. OCR and text-to-speech weren't invented yesterday, but, last I asked (it's been a couple years, admitted), a blind person couldn't go grocery-shopping without help. Perhaps there is something now, perhaps there was even something back then, but it looks like there's really not enough effort put into accessibility technologies - presumably because there's not enough money there. I'm afraid the same thing will happen with VR - that those who would benefit most from it wouldn't be able to.
My desk computer, where I search recipes is distant from my kitchen. So I typically take a picture of the recipe with my phone and carry that to the kitchen. The camera software asks me if I want to convert the text to a document.
Does this software exist for visually impaired people? That I don't know
Currently the real value of VR is in enterprise, not consumer. For one, training simulations where the real article would be expensive - think letting an aircraft mechanic practice disassembling an engine. Another area big area is architectural visualization (aka archviz) - because of VR's unique ability to let you truly inhabit a space in a scale accurate way, it's being rapidly adopted for experiencing how a building design would look and feel "in real life", before construction begins. And it's also useful in 3D workflows, eg 3D modelling, CAD, game design, etc, where you can see what you're working on in a scale accurate way, move/place/shape things precisely with your hands, etc.
Well all sorts of other entertainment for one. Walk through the Taj Mahal, stroll the Louvre, bushwack the Amazon, sit in on your favorite sports event or concert or theater... And then all the other stuff people mentioned, education, planning, manufacturing.
When Google Glass first came out, I was in a shop where we had very expensive specialty boards we were reworking. I thought it would be great for doing circuit board debug and repair, being able to see (select specific internal layers) or component labels, and schematic diagrams, whilst looking at the real thing
An entirely new world.
- Education : Imagine atoms you can walk through, an Ancient Athens you can live in, a neural network (whether a Computer Science or a Biology one) that you can see and trace its activation signals for yourself. Imagine doing all of this collaboratively with students or study partners. Imagine learning a new language and casually strolling into a virtual bar with dozens of natives to chat with you (VR), imagine doing it while in an actual bar having a drink (AR).
- Mind Augmentation : VR\AR\MR (mixed reality) are probably the closest thing you can get to brain-computer interfaces without opening up the brain. This means it has all the potential for Intelligence-Amplification. Perfect eyesight by way of cameras that relay their processed outputs directly into your eye, visualization of non-visual signals (magnetic fields, radar, sonar, etc...) and integrating them into the visual field. (for example, objects behind walls are rendered as wireframes) And of course, you can integrate other people's visual stream as well. A mechanic seeing a car engine in minute details as its running beneath the hood, or an electrician\electrical engineer seeing electricity flowing in real time through the circuits and wires you're manipulating, are 2 applications.
- Empathy Augmentation : In the Black Mirror episode Men Against Fire, a military makes its soldiers see enemies as cockroaches through AR, so they can kill and hunt them more effectively. AR can be used for the opposite as well. Like, a vegetarian plugin that intercepts your visual stream and replaces real animals with cartoon depictions of them intended to arouse sympathy. Would people be arachnophobic if every spider in their world is Lucas (https://www.youtube.com/@lucasthespider) ? Would people eat meat if every cow in their world is a talking and animated presence with humanoid eyes that can explain Peter Singer's arguments against killing animals with a soft feminine voice ?
- Ideological Overlays : More generally, AR and VR can be used to "overlay" an ideology over the real world. Think religious plugins that modify the visual stream to inject angels and demons, or nationalist plugins that depict immigrants as invaders speaking barbarish tongues. Or, perhaps more controversy-inducing, think nationalist Augmented-Empathy plugins that depict immigrants with the same skin color and ethnic features as that of the host country's population, so people who dislike them will like them better. (Why is this wrong, if at all ?) Imagine being able to adjust the phyiscal characteristics of anyone you see as if they're a simcity character.
- Aesthetic Overlays : Like the above but for Aesthetics, like a black-and-white filter to make the world look more like 1950s noir films. Or an oversaturation filter to make the world feel unreal and colorful.
- Subtitled Visual Stream : An end to all language barriers, translation software takes the voices from your physical surroundings, translates them, and either intercepts your audio stream to replace the foreign-language voices or just puts subtitles over your visual stream.
- Annotated Visual Stream : Wikipedia over your eyes, everything and everyone you look at have an "info box" next to it detailing a google search. Can be augmented with your own notes about the subject.
And it goes on and on and on. I think AR\VR\MR should really be called "Constructed Worlds Tech" to convey how utterly revolutionary and disrupting it would be. It's literally putting a computer over your 2 eyeballs, your primary sense organs.
The obvious consequences is that everything a computer can do now, but requires a dedicated "session" of interaction with a seperate device, can be done effortlessly and continuously and in real time when you put that computer over your eyes. But another slightly subtler consequence is that this computer can also do fundamentally new things, because it has access to your visual stream and other sense streams. (Just like personal computers enabled everything mainframes can do and much more, and smartphones enabled everything personal computers can do and much more. Every new generation of computers moves closer to the user, enabling fundamentally new modes of interaction and use.)
My take. VR/AR will be very very niche. Next to None of those things will happen.
There’s been very little technology that’s impressed me since the iPhone (which I bought the first day). ChatGPT is impressive though.
You can *already* do real time captions and translation in AR, and I'm sure the tech is only going to get better.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing (as much as it depresses me), we already have precedent in how the massively powerful super-computers lying around on our desks and pockets are not being used as "Bicycles for the mind" as was predicted in the 1980s and 1990s, but wasted on advertising and other inane rubbish.
But I interpreted OP's question as "What could *possibly* be this technology applications?", so I just wanted to correct the unfortunate tendency to view VR/AR as toys and argue for how mind-bending and reality-bending they can be. Whether that will turn out to be true is anyone's guess.
"Would people eat meat if every cow in their world is a talking and animated presence with humanoid eyes that can explain Peter Singer's arguments against killing animals with a soft feminine voice ?"
Yes? I don't know why, but this is making me think of the cow in Douglas Adams' work:
https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Ameglian_Major_Cow
I have to say, being made to listen to a cartoon-anthropomorphised cow quoting Peter Singer would make me even *more* eager for it to be killed. "Okay cow, so Singer has a good case about animals. Don't worry, I'll think of you as a two year old human child of mine instead, that makes it perfectly fine to kill you. Oh, and don't worry about possible hypothetical cannibalism if I consume your meat, I'll make sure to swap the meat with someone who had *their* imaginary two year old cow child killed."
I mean, this only works because you have an unsympathetic cartoon avatar in mind, as well as (perhaps) an opposition to the specific kind of argumentation it uses.
But are you saying your sentiments would survive making that Cow as child-like as (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/679058450054081026/), with voice, mannerisms and all ? Making the AI voicing the character detect your ideological leanings (e.g. Christianity) and use them accordingly (e.g. theologian-class bible-based reasoning against killing conscious souls) ?
It's easy to say yes when you can't see it yet. Before the camera and the television, it was also extremly easy to dehumanize people. If the burning vietnamese girl (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc) was ever described in words, in the middle ages for example, the result would plausibly be "Haha barbaric heathens go burny smokey" or "Lies, a bunch of bullshit and lies spread by the barbaric heathens".
But an image of a burned crying child running naked is just that much harder to argue with.
Remember Happy Tree Friends? Or South Park? No sympathetic cartoon dying violently is going to stop me eating meat.
"theologian-class bible-based reasoning against killing conscious souls"
Oh, that one's easy, bruh (or sis): cows don't have souls.
The cartoon cow can be as uncanny valley as you like, but it's a cartoon, it's not a real cow. Even your linked cute cartoon cows are still too animal-like to be anything more than "dinner".
Now, if there were some kind of chimera created that combined human and bovine DNA so that the resulting hybrid creature were somewhere near real human intelligence, that might be a different case. The human DNA is what makes it a grey area. Pure bovine DNA but 'uplifted' on the other hand - might be rational, is still an animal. Again, depending on the level of intelligence in that case, there would be a real argument over should these creatures be possessed of human-equivalent rights.
But a present day cow, that we only see a cutesy cartoon avatar of, a fake creation that is not how a real cow acts or behaves? That's dinner.
The whole premise of this is that the AR/VR headset will do what the animal in question cannot do and is incapable of doing: speaking, being rational, appealing to us, being as neotenous cute as possible, etc. Since the real animal cannot understand Singer's arguments much less recite them off, it is incapable of being the thing presented. It is not a rational being arguing for its life, it is a beast that is produced for food.
Soft-voiced lectures from cows totally are not the way to go. If you really want to get vegetarian mileage outta the headset, make the cow scream when you stick your fork in the steak. Every single time. In fact, once you have whole-body VR, give wearer the sensation of having a fork stuck in their butt (at least for when they're enjoying a rump roast).
>bruh, cows don't have souls
Not an expert on Christian theology, but my impression is that everthing there is debated to the Nth degree and back. Are you saying there is not a single theologian who argued for animal souls' sacredness ? That would be weird to my preconceptions.
>a fake creation that is not how a real cow acts or behaves?
Plenty of things we take for granted and base lots of things on are fake. The Mercator projection you learned in school for one. The 2D solar system diagram for another.
Lets look at what we see today, there is a huge opposition to eating cats and dogs even among people that we don't think of as animal rights advocates, but most inner life we attribute to cats and dogs are straight up fiction (the voices, the feelings, the narratives,...). We know this too, but we think it's an accurate enough inference of their internal states to act on. Dogs might not feel "pain" or "sorrow" in the strict pedantic sense, but they feel something that might be approximated as those human feelings. The cow avatar is a similar narrative tool.
It also doesn't have to work on you specifically, if it worked on a sufficient number of others. Where would you get the meat from if all the butchers in a 100-KM radius had a moral epiphany listening to the Cow and now refuse to ever hold the machete again ?
>only see a cutesy cartoon avatar of
No reason that's the only thing you will see, perhaps making the cow more human-like is what will tickle you ? the AI will discover that, and act accordingly.
There is the distinction between the vegetative soul, the sensitive soul (which animals possess) and the rational soul which only humans possess, being made in the image and likeness of God (which does not mean "has two arms and two legs" https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1093.htm)
"Where would you get the meat from if all the butchers in a 100-KM radius had a moral epiphany listening to the Cow and now refuse to ever hold the machete again ?"
In that case, if all the butchers gave up their trade, and there were no meat products at all in the shops (imported from places where butchers still operated), I suppose I'd have to eat - more fish.
perhaps making the cow more human-like is what will tickle you ?"
Absolutely not, in fact it would have the opposite effect. I know what real cows are like, and the more 'human' the cartoon cow was presented as, the more the difference between the fake and the reality would be obvious, and the easier it would be to ignore the fake. You could have a cow like Cow and Chicken, but even though that was probably the best representation of a cow in cartoons, it's not at all like a real cow. Real cows are not bipedal or verbal.
"Are you saying there is not a single theologian who argued for animal souls' sacredness?"
There probably are somewhere, but they've got an uphill battle, considering the Bible declares cows as animals to be eaten. https://biblia.com/bible/kjv1900/leviticus/11/3
Sure, but why do you think the AI will be trying to convince you to stop eating cows. Surely civil rights for AIs and removing outdated and harmful regulation limiting the materials used for making paperclips will be more pressing concerns.
Cannibalistic peoples practiced cannibalism, they only stopped when they were conquered by Theists who violently stamped it out.
If modern progressives discovered a modern cannibalistic society, would the progressives: celebrate the diversity, ignore that behavior, or violently oppose it?
Contra what everyone else here is saying, I've actually noticed a decided turn away from cultural relativism among contemporary progressives.
Putting it somewhat cynically, the current approach seems to be claiming that all undesirable practices aren't a *truly* traditional part of the culture in question, but a recent result of Western influence.
E.g., I regularly come across progressives condemning anti-gay laws and attitudes in contemporary Africa as genuinely terrible, with no apparent fear of being condemned as racist or culturally imperialist for doing so. However, they often argue that *pre-colonial* African cultures accepted homosexuality, and Victorian colonial governments and missionaries were responsible for changing this.
They would feed you to the cannibals, Michael.
Probably something like: "We do not approve of the behavior per se, but anyone who mentions it is only doing so because of racist motives."
That's just fargroup stuff, like condemning people for cheering the killing of Bin Laden and then cheering the death of Maggie Thatcher. The people downstate who drive pickup trucks and vote Republican are Deplorables worthy only of abuse; the faraway people who raid the neighboring tribes for slaves to sacrifice to their gods and then eat their remains are Noble Savages.
"I'm picturing the Ford Foundation donating millions to a NGO that was sending pith-helmeted missionaries to the cannibals to be eaten"
Back in 1915, it was called "a considerable revival of religious customs" 😂
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poems_(Chesterton,_1915)/The_Higher_Unity
The Higher Unity by G. K. Chesterton
The Rev. Isaiah Bunter has disappeared into the interior of the Solomon Islands, and it is feared that he may have been devoured by the natives, as there has been a considerable revival of religious customs among the Polynesians.--A real paragraph from a real Paper; only the names altered.
It was Isaiah Bunter
Who sailed to the world's end,
And spread religion in a way
That he did not intend.
He gave, if not the gospel-feast,
At least a ritual meal;
And in a highly painful sense
He was devoured with zeal.
And who are we (as Henson says)
That we should close the door?
And should not Evangelicals
All jump at shedding Gore?
And many a man will melt in man,
Becoming one, not two,
When smacks across the startled earth
The Kiss of Kikuyu.
When Man is the Turk, and the Atheist,
Essene, Erastian, Whig,
And the Thug and the Druse and the Catholic
And the crew of the Captain's gig.
> The "we do not approve of the behavior" part would also have to be dragged out of them like you were pulling a tooth.
They would tell you this openly in private, with "...but I do not want to discuss this publicly, because I do not want to seem like a racist."
Spare the cows, eat the vegans? That might be an interesting bargain! 😁
George is a humanitarian - he only eats real humans!
Presumably your social credit score increases with each regime-approved plugin you use. Does that count as "voluntarily"?
They didn't read page 741 of the EULA that came with their AR glasses.
Novelty, perhaps. Or "Me Reacting To The Latest ..." energy.
You can also imagine eco-terrorist groups exploiting vulnerabilities in the devices' software and injecting code against the will of the wearer's. If the devices are as crucial to life as today's smartphones or more, people will continue wearing them even if they are infected with malware.
VR is starting to come online for visualization in manufacturing - it’s easy to design a part or assembly that looks great in CAD but ends up nearly impossible for your builders to actually interact with in life-size.
So if you’ve got a big complicated assembly you need to maintain, you can use VR to say, make sure it’s actually possible to get the necessary tools through the access panels and reach everything you need to work on.
I'm still tempted to make an NX plugin that lets you use red/cyan 3d glasses to see depth.
It's already in use for manufacturing/assembling.
Better training? I mean, flight simulators can be seen as an early crude attempt at VR, and they've been used for decades to train pilots. Depending on how good the VR is, you could imagine using them to study anything from geology to surgery to karate.
AR would be great for this too. Look at equipment and get all they info about it you need overlayed in your vision. Need to replace your timing belt? Here are the steps right in your face. Construction working building a house? Here are the plans, right in front of you, put the wood where it needs to go. etc etc
Telepresence could also be useful for some kinds of work, like tele-operating a robot on the Moon or something.
Also, for letting people virtually visit environments that are very difficult to visit in-person--maybe I can experience something of what it's like to walk around at the bottom of the ocean without actually having to become an expert diver, or experience the top of Everest without being capable of climbing it.
I expect you could use VR in some kind of therapy, e.g., for exposure to limited/safe amounts of things you're phobic about.
"Telepresence could also be useful for some kinds of work, like tele-operating a robot on the Moon or something."
That reminds me of the Zelazny story "Home is the Hangman" which is not without its flaws but a wonderful story, it made an impression on me years ago which has not faded.
I saw a 360 video documentary of North Korea in VR which was really interesting, and that's definitely hard to visit.
An assumption I've seen made, I think, is that GPT-like text generators are capable in principle of generating true and novel information about the physical universe, based strictly on textual I/O. This is because natural language encodes true information about reality, and a sufficiently powerful language-predictor would be able to extract all possible knowledge about reality from words and use it to develop whatever physical theories or technologies it needs to pursue its goals, paperclip-related or otherwise.
If that's the case, then it should also be possible to train a GPT-like generator strictly on text from before 1900 or so, and prompt it to produce the equations of General Relativity. (The same would go for producing Newtonian physics from pre-1650 text, or Kepler's planetary motion from pre-1550 text, and so on.)
Is that a usefully testable prediction? Could GPT-3 or any other near-future GPT accomplish those tasks, sometime before Final Ultimate GPT comes along and generates all possible knowledge instantaneously?
It's certainly testable. You could train a LLM on pre-1900 text and ask it to explain the Michelson-Morley experiment or something.
The assumption you mention I personally find very unlikely to be true. Natural language can encode information about the real world, certainly, but it need not. What it necessarily encodes is our belief in various models of the real world, and these may or may not be correct. Often they are not. For example, one would expect the corpus of medieval text to encode Aristotelian physics, a humoral theory of disease, and alchemical models of chemistry, all of which are briliant, self-consistent, logical, and wrong.
Natural language encodes true information about what some humans want other humans to believe that they believe about the physical universe. Plus lots of fluff. That's not *entirely* uncorrelated with physical reality, but I very much doubt you're going to get a better understanding of reality out of it than was held by the people whose natural-language exchanges you are training on.
But your proposal is at least testable, and I'd be interested in seeing someone try it.
> before Final Ultimate GPT comes along and generates all possible knowledge instantaneously?
Final Ultimate GPT would simply be a model that is perfect at answering the question "Given everything in this training corpus, what's the most likely next token in this string?"
I don't know how good exactly that would be (and I certainly wouldn't have predicted how good GPT-3 would be if you'd asked me ten years ago) but I don't think it's reasonable to expect GPT-* to ever be smarter than its training corpus.
You can imagine genuinely new insights that GPT _could_ have. If one source says that Alice was murdered by a tall thin man with a butterfly tattoo on his right buttock, and a completely unrelated source says that Bob was a tall thin man who happened to get a butterfly tattoo on his right buttock the day before the murder, then maybe it can infer the as-yet-unknown fact that Bob killed Alice. Of course it's just as likely to make tens of thousands of false accusations for every true one.
Has anyone else noticed that DB Cooper looks a lot like Lord Lucan?
The short answer is "no". I think I can get away with quoting Yarvin in the comments here: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/do-not-punch-rationalists
""" AlphaFold is not a system which can computationally predict nontrivial behaviors of systems of atoms. Predicting atoms is so hard, just because of how quantum physics works, that we cannot even calculate the boiling point of water to within 10% error. (I talked to an expert in physical chemistry about this—apparently the core of the issue is that protons are actually waves (of course), but if you try to actually simulate them this way you can barely handle, like, one water molecule for one picosecond.)
Simulating physics is not AI—it is just math. The ML AIs we have are terrible at math and can barely multiply three-digit numbers. Maybe the future ones will be more magic—but they will have to build some pretty magic supercomputers, first. And of course, those magic supercomputers will have to be physical systems… """
AI-accelerated simulation and modelling is definitely A Thing[1][2][3][4][5][6], but the crucial observation is that the AI is not "ChatGPT" or any language model, this would be the completely wrong level of abstraction to bring ML to bear on science.
Neural Networks are universal function approximators, approximation is the name of the game in Science and Engineering. ML is not terrible at math, they are just terrible at math done by predicting tokens using probabilities estimated from a dataset that has nothing to do with math. GPT sucks at Chess too, I bet, but AlphaZero doesn't.
There is an entire approach to AI-aided physics that is like "Run a compute-intensive physics simulator to produce lots of data, train a neural network on this data to learn whatever approximation it can of the simulator's mechanism, then use the neural network as a lightweight version of this simulator", and it's a marvelous idea that seems to generate a lot of buzz recently. I'm no expert and time will tell if this approach or others is truly a breakthrough instead of empty hype, I just want to point out that general ML is a real competitive tool in our toolbox and it's only the "Predict The Most Probable Next Word" paradigm that is unsuited to anything but chatbots.
[1] https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/06/learning-accurate-physics-simulator-via.html
[2] https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2022/09/26/artificial-intelligence-reduces-a-100000-equation-quantum-physics-problem-to-only-four-equations/
[3] https://physicsbaseddeeplearning.org/intro.html
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23901729
[5] https://datascience.uchicago.edu/research/learned-emulators-of-physics-simulations/
[6] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19448-8
Empty hype. Mostly. The goal of simulation in basic research is rarely to actually predict macroscopic behavior -- they are insufficiently reliable for that. The goal is to test out microscopic models. You input a certain model, run the simulation, see how well it corresponds to macroscopic observation, and use that to go back and refine (or discard) your microscopic model, and you hope this gives you insight into physical reality.
For example, one can argue the whole field of simulations of classical fluid systems was kicked off by the discovery in the late 50s that a fluid of hard spheres, with no attractive forces at all, exhibited a freezing transition in computer simulation. That was pretty surprising -- I daresay most people believed, along with even current basic science and college textbooks, that fluids freeze because the attractive forces between atoms and molecules compel their orderly arrangement when the temperature falls far enough. That turns out not to be true! Fluids freeze because at a certain density the entropy rises (ironically) when objects that repel each other become organized into a lattice. The role of the attractive forces is just to increase the overall density as the temperature falls -- they have, with the exception of ice, diamond, and some other weird materials, little to no role in the formation of the lattice structure itself.
So that's the kind of insight you can get from computer simulations -- but notice the causality runs the opposite of what you might think: you observe what the simulation predicts, for a judicious choice of microscopic parameters, and depending on how that corresponds to reality you learn something about the microscopic model..
The problem with a de novo neural-network representation is that it necessarily abstracts away your microscopic model, so you're not going to learn anything about it by doing more simulations. It kind of short-circuits the whole point.
That said, I am sure there are many useful applications (which is why I said "mostly.") An ML model can readily point you in better directions, by discovering patterns you wouldn't notice on your own. I mean, that's their strong point -- detecting patterns in very high-dimensional data.
I think you're massively overestimating how much information content text has. There is no way a pure text predictor can derive general relativity from raw text. (Unless your idea of a pure text predictor is running a simulation of a human brain matching Einstein's over input.) Kepler's laws are said to be derived from Kepler poring over Tycho Brahe's data, so I think that GPTx does have a chance there, but then again, this data is just a bunch of numbers, why not feed it directly to any neural network as true numbers (instead of pixels or text) and have the network skip directly to the interesting part of figuring out the relation ? What is being gained by representing the numbers as raw text ?
Generally speaking, this article (https://markusstrasser.org/extracting-knowledge-from-literature/) and this blog (https://commoncog.com/tacit-knowledge-is-a-real-thing/) [link is to a specific article, browse the rest of the blog for more] made me pessimistic and skeptical of every worldview that goes "Knowledge can always be encoded in text". I think Knowledge is really brain signals with a very complex and interlocking nature, and only an extremly small subset of those signals can be serialized as text.
Even assuming text is remotely a complete or faithful summary of the thought process underlying it, it wouldn't be possible to usefully reverse-engineer the thought process from the text alone. The Word is just the wrong level of abstraction, mathematicians do not think in words (but in abstract sets and objects), programmers do not think in words (but in algorithms and data structures), physicists do not think in words (but in... I actually have no clue what physicists think in). Only God has the ability to create using Words, the rest of us invent a myriad of hierarchies and conceptual frameworks over words if we want to get any thinking done.
Adding to my general skepticism about "Knowledge as text" ideologies, is that GPTx has a pathetic understanding of text. It's particular way of modeling the text prediction task, as sampling a probability distribution over next words, conditioned over all previous words, is fundamentally a dead-end, with no way to ever incorporate additional information, reasoning, or constraints. For GPTx, words are those mysterious UFOs that can only be understood in relation to each other. It doesn't even operate on words as such, but on vectors that represent them ("embeddings"). I'm not a linguist, but by God is this a bastardization of how language works. It's an interesting spin on NLP that have some potential, but it's so extremly narrow and full of limitations.
So to sum up my view :
- No, a general text predictor in the style of today's language models doesn't really understand language enough to say anything interesting, let alone true and\or intelligent, let alone novel. The impressive-seeming feats it can do now is due to the massive compute and data thrown at it, which can't realistically scale more than 1 order of magnitude more (Compute is already stretched to the limit, how much more time can you spend on training than months ? Data is more plentiful, but it's unlabelled garbage.)
- No, even assuming human-level general language understanding with 0 other reasoning capabilites, extracting higher-level knowledge from raw text alone is impossible for 2 reasons :
1- Text is extremly low level, imagine if I told you I can predict galactic-scale dynamics by modeling every single hydrogen atom in a galaxy with Schrodinger fidelity. This is just impossible to do (with less work than simply manipulating the galaxy you want to simulate directly). Text-to-Science\Math\Programs\Knowledge strikes me as similarly impossible. The representation is just too low-level, your AI will spend ages trying to understand how modus ponens even work, and it will never get good at it.
2- Text is lossy, noisy, and poor-quality rendition of thoughts and brain patterns (true knowledge), so even if you can do the impossible simulation task in (1) you can't do its analogue with text, because atoms fully determine existence (plausibly), while text doesn't fully determine the knowledge it attempts to convey.
>Is that a usefully testable prediction?
I would say yes, pick a surprising-yet-intuitive thing you learned about recently that you're sure is not contained in GPT-3 training set, and see if it can tease it out from the text it already has. I think making sure that the question's answer is not contained in the training set already is tricky but vital.
Here's a random test question off the top of my head :
- Can offline Reinforcement Learning be modeled as a Sequence Labelling task ? Sketch an approach to how it can be done. (The answer is yes : https://paperswithcode.com/paper/reinforcement-learning-as-one-big-sequence)
The linked paper is from 2021, it's approach is extremly simple (yet surprising and novel). I predict GPT-3 would fail miserably if it's training set doesn't contain the paper.
This is a very cool idea and I'm commenting mostly to be notified of future answers. That said, how much pre-1900 text do we have in a readily-consumable format for GPT? My intuition would be "not much compared to more recent text", but I may be wrong.
Is it possible to have daily withdrawal effects from SSRIs?
For background, I have taken Prozac, Paxil, and Celexa with terrific results in the past (my issue is anxiety, particular panic disorder, not depression). I went off SSRIs for a few years when I had my son, and then went back onto Paxil when I started having pretty bad OCD-type anxiety. This anxiety continued without much improvement for two years. I switched to Lexapro with little change.
One thing I have been struggling with for those two years was that around dinner time I would develop low-blood sugar type symptoms. I would shake, feel very anxious, feel dizzy, etc. I went to my doctor and got tested and everything was normal. Having these symptoms every day made my mental anxiety a lot worse.
Two weeks ago, I decided to switch the time I take my medication from before bedtime to lunch time. And now those low-blood sugar symptoms are gone, along with my anxiety. My hypothesis is that these symptoms were occurring as the medication was leaving my system, especially as they will come back if I am an hour or so late in taking my pill.
Has anybody else ever encountered this? I'm just surprised my system has become so sensitive, though I am extremely happy to have that anxiety gone.
Past Drs have suggested taking Lexapro at night instead of in the morning. Didn't apply to me, but they said some of the patient found that to work better for them. I never heard of the symptoms you describe, but I think you are on to something.
What does do you take? Maybe you could try moving up so it lasts longer? Though it sounds like you have something that works for you.
Yeah, I'm on 10mg right now and considering asking my doctor to up the dose. It seems like my body is just working through it too fast (it's especially bad on days where I work out).
Ah thats very interesting. What i have liked about Lexapro is how flexible it is to change doses. I hope you can find a dose/regime that works for you!
"Scientifically" we do not even know what e.g. depression actually is or how *really* SSRIs work. "Scientifically" we do not know many things about human body (whoever thinks we know enough, I am asking you to construct just 1 human cell from molecules). I have seen some SSRI 24-hour period effects that were connected to eating or day-night cycle and were corrected by taking SSRIs in the morning and not evening. Not everyone can effectively listen to their body but if they can, it is good.
Ok man
I don’t think this makes much sense scientifically or in alignment with my personal experience. The half-life of those meds is quite long. And I definitely notice withdrawal symptoms from SSRI, (very clear brain zaps,) but only if I forget to take them for 3+ days in a row.
Yeah, I agree it doesn't make a lick of a sense, but I don't know what else could be causing this phenomenon. I'd chalk it up to being psychosomatic, except getting the symptoms is what causes me to realize I haven't taken my pill on time. There's some weird metabolic thing going on here that I can't explain.
One of the very common side effects is fatigue. I notice that if I take my dose in the morning, I’m more tired at night compared to when I take it before sleeping.
Maybe for you, the fatigue takes a little while longer to set in.
I have one subscription to Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning to give away. Reply with an email address, or email me at mine https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/about
A few months ago I ran into a weird quandary. My neighbor has a large black lab, and our dog had recently died. We occasionally have a soup or steak bone to dispose of, so I would throw it in the freezer and then offer it to my neighbor when I ran into her. However, the last time I offered, she politely declined, explaining that her vet had advised her that she should never under any circumstances give her dog cooked bones.
This surprised me. My family has had pet dogs from time immemorial. They have always been given ruminant bones, and the bones were always cooked. The only veterinary advice on this subject that I had ever been aware of was that dogs should not be given cooked chicken or turkey long bones, as these could splinter and cause digestive injury, but that necks and cartilaginous stuff was fine. Also, I knew someone whose father in Israel raised dogs and fed them uncooked chicken, including the bones.
Our last dog, a husky Samoyed rescue whose IBD led us to feed her homemade food exclusively, lived to be 17. We gave her cooked beef neck bones probably every two or three days, and cooked chicken necks were a regular part of her daily diet.
So I hopped online and looked up the veterinary advice around bones, and my neighbor is not crazy: it is absolute doctrine that one must never, ever give a dog a cooked bone because the risk of injury is "just not worth it." (This risk/benefit analysis does not appear to have involved consultations with dogs.) Moreover, one should ideally not give a dog raw bones, because the risk of bacterial contamination is also not inconsiderable. In short: really, just don't give your dog bones at all.
From what I can tell, literally no vets allow for the possibility that cooked bones are not dangerous for dogs, but there seems to be nothing solid behind this opinion. I could find no published papers on the question. Nothing quantitative, nothing anecdotal. Like, there's no list of horrific accounts from vets who have had to repair impaled dog esophaguses or stomachs. No accounts of feral dogs living off of food waste showing up in shelters with splintered bones lodged in their throats and bowels.
But perhaps the evidence is just buried in clerical archives sonewhere; i.e., my research into the dangers of bones is hampered by not having access to veterinary journals or other relevant sources.
Has anyone else run across this question and attempted to evaluate the available evidence?
(We have a new rescue, BTW. Guess what cleared up his gingivitis.)
Our vet told us not to give the dog bones for dental reasons. If I remember right, most of the dogs he sees with broken teeth are because they were chewing on bones. I don't know the science on that or if cooking the bones matters, but I err on the side of caution anyway.
Aha! Thanks. That's actually the kind of information I've been looking for.
It makes sense that vets would caution that bones can break a dog's teeth. I bet the risk is particularly high for older dogs. But bones also clean dogs' teeth (and in our experience can help regulate bowel movements, although occasionally dogs also will throw up small amounts of chewed bones).
But there's probably an optimal kind of bone or bone hardness, just as there are better and worse toothbrush and toothpaste options for human beings who want to clean their teeth without wearing away their gums and dental enamel. (I don't see doctors warning people *never* to brush their teeth.)
Our vet recommended these treats called "Greenies" (https://www.greenies.com/) that are supposed to help with that. You can find them in most supermarkets and grocery stores, and there are some cheaper off-brand versions too. Again, I don't know the science or logic of it, but our dog seems to like them and the vet hasn't mentioned dental issues in the time that we've used them.
Yes, we know all about Greenies. Our pets eat Greenies like candy. They are supposed to be full of vitamins, and I'm sure they're fattening. They do nothing whatsoever for anybody's teeth or breath, sorry.
Once more, I just want to reiterate that I am not looking for advice about what to feed or not feed my dog. I'm looking for good research and/or anecdotal data confirming or discounting the belief that all cooked bones are so dangerous for dogs that they should not have them.
There's also the American belief that chocolate is a deadly poison for dogs, which is not shared in Britain.
Same for pennies. Americans think pennies are poisonous for dogs, British do not. That might be because American pennies are made of zinc and British pennies of steel.
I'm not a vet, but we can probably put some actual numbers to how poisonous chocolate is.
The LD50 of theobromine in dogs is apparently somewhere between 100mg/kg and 500mg/kg (haven't tracked down the original sources due to laziness), with deaths reported as low as 115mg/kg and seizures at 60mg/kg[1][2]. Pure cocoa powder is around 2.1% theobromine by weight[3], so if you run the numbers it takes a couple of hundred grams of 70% dark chocolate to put a 30kg Labrador at risk of death, and half that to give it seizures, e.g. 30kg * 115mg/kg / (2.1% * 70%) = approx. 235 grams.
Which is to say there's a real risk of death if your dog eats a bar or two of chocolate, but a couple of pieces probably won't do much.
[1] https://aspcapro.org/sites/default/files/m-toxbrief_0201.pdf
[2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17415349.1997.11012885
[3] I'm not going to pretend; I just looked it up on Wikipedia, but 2.1% seems credible
Also grapes and raisins. (What do the British think?) A friend of mine had her dog's stomach pumped because he *might* have eaten a raisin.
Before I ever heard of grape and raisin lethality, we had a dog who would catch grapes midair, one after another.
Being British, I can confidently assert that we do indeed all think that dogs eating even small amounts of chocolate or raisins are little short of the canine equivalent of Heinrich Himmler chowing down on a cyanide pill!
More seriously, every living variety of cats from domestic tabby cats to the largest lions and tigers, have inherited a genetic defect that first appeared about 25M years ago in their common ancestor and which means they are very poor at dealing with toxins they ingest. Half an aspirin will kill a cat, as will licking off its fur microscopic traces of pollen acquired from brushing past certain plants such as the Tiger Lily.
Also, sorry about the intrusion of American dog culture into British dog culture.
Unless... wait just a minute... is it YOU GUYS? Are guilt ridden dog-besotted Brits the source of American veterinary hypercaution?
And here I was thinking it was all just a natural extension of the ascendant belief among coastal Murcans that pets are in no meaningful respect different from children...
The aspirin thing I don't find implausible at all. Never thought it outlandish, given that cats don't naturally consume, like, concentrated willow bark extract...
But surely the bit about certain death from consuming microscopic traces of pollen from tiger lilies must be a gross exaggeration. Unless we have evidence that cats have also evolved to avoid lilies, the real world just features too many opportunities in too many suburban gardens for abruptly wiping out feral cat populations that somehow thrive in spite of promiscuously pollinating tiger lilies.
> Surely the bit about certain death from consuming microscopic traces of pollen from tiger lilies must be a gross exaggeration.
One would think so, but no, a cat that ingests even the tiniest amount of material from a tiger lily will keel over stone dead from acute kidney failure!
https://www.petpoisonhelpline.com/poison/tiger-lily/
No, that's not what your source says. My emphases added:
""Even small ingestions (such as less than 1-2 petals or leaves) – even the pollen or water from the vase – MAY result in severe, acute kidney failure."
May, not will. (And see subsequent caveat below.)
Lilies have rather large flowers and their leaves are generally not small either, so two leaves or petals as a measure of "small" seems a bit arbitrary, especially when compared with pollen!
One can also totally see why drinking water from a vase with flowers in it could be toxic if the flowers themselves are toxic, since sap from the stems would be leaching into the water.
But pollen? Really? This source doesn't even address quantity where that's concerned, so I think your original claim remains a wild overestimate. Animals can't help encountering pollen outside. If pollen from lilies was *that* toxic, several cats I've had over the years should have been dead from the many lilies growing in my own garden.
And then there's this: "The content of this page is not veterinary advice. A number of factors (amount of substance ingested, size of the animal, allergies, etc.) determine what is toxic to a particular pet."
So it's qualified advice couched in imperative language. (Which may be completely correct--I have no idea.) But a poison control line asserting these cautions is very much like a vet saying you must never give your dog bones. If they aren't citing studies for the particulars, or offering at least their own experiential data, what can we really conclude about things like *pollen*?
I had a friend who used to split whole bunches of grapes with his dog from the time it was a puppy, and the dog developed cataracts before age 2. Which I don't think I've ever seen in another young dog so it feels like there was a connection, but also the warning was never framed to me as "if your dog eats a pound of grapes per week, then after a year maybe he'll get cataracts."
I used to believe that, until I came home one day to find that my dog had consumed an entire bag of miniature Reese's peanut butter cups, and did not seem to suffer any ill effects from it.
As a lifelong dog owner I have come around to concluding that essentially all widely-held factual certainties about Canis domesticus are unscientific in origin. All of the ones I've ever spent any time looking into have turned out to be, put it that way.
And while I've never been a cat owner the above makes me assume that the same is true regarding Felis catus.
We always gave our dogs cooked bones, never chicken though.
The only thing I can see, is sometimes steak bones can be sawn sharp, but dogs end up chewing bones sharp anyway, and wild dogs consume bones they break with their teeth.
Cooked bones often splinter in the digestive tract and cause agonizing injuries/death.
Yes, we already know that *people believe that*, but the whole point of the post you are responding to is that it isn't clear what the evidence for this belief is.
Ideally we'd want stats, but since there is no CDC for dogs keeping track of aggregate causes of death and misfortune, we would settle for something like a few salient stories from someone who's been a vet for 30 years. Or similar.
One reason I'm skeptical of the idea is simply that dogs have been eating various kinds of bones for millions of years. Including cooked ones for maybe the past twenty or thirty thousand. If it were really risky, you'd think they would avoid it. It seems a bit like not feeding people sausage because it's a choking hazard ... I mean, yes, people *do* manage to die that way, but the risk/reward tradeoff seems to favor eating it.
Also, my experience with bones is that while the cooked ones may be more *brittle* than the uncooked, dogs will crunch up either type just fine - and the uncooked ones are if anything *more* likely to get some nasty edge when shattered.
I understand that many people have come to believe this. However, my own decades-long personal experience; and that of everyone I know who has had dogs and fed them bones; and that of my family going back to at least my grandparents' generation, is that cooked bones do NOT often splinter in the digestive tract and cause agonizing injuries/death. (In fact, my experience is that cooked ruminant and soft poultry bones do not EVER splinter in the digestive tract etc.)
But empirical evidence is not necessarily universal experience. So if you have verifiable evidence of what you say, I would be very interested in seeing/reading it.
Thanks.
For an idiosyncratic definition of "often."
Exactly.
I think you just have to let people make their own decisions when it comes to their dog or their kids. Just say, "oh sorry" and give the bone to someone else. (Or your new dog.)
With store bought dog food available, anything even slightly more dangerous is going to be advised against. There's no positive result for a vet to advise anything else, so they won't.
The funny question would be, what do you think dogs have been eating for thousands of years prior to modern processed dog foods? The answer is dead animals, including the bones. Until recently no one thought it odd to give dogs any and all bones.
Oh, good point. Kinda a regulatory capture going on.
Yes, that's my thinking too. But the counter argument is that for thousands of years prior to modern pet food, dogs and their predecessors ate only raw, not cooked animals and bones.
I see no reason to believe that this is true, since dogs have long been known to frequent human refuse piles for food and would surely have availed themselves of the bones of cooked animals ever since wolves first met people. Street dogs around the world today do that as well.
Such animals may not be in the best of health, but given their apparent fecundity, I doubt they are dying or being seriously injured from eating even the splintery bones of Colonel Sanders' global labors.
It has a lot to do with how big your dog is, or rather, how hard your dog can bite.
The bones one gets from rack of lamb, say, are ok for a small dog but I wouldn’t give that bone to a dog that could crunch it.
Poultry is ok until it dries out; then I would think about it.
It is possible that the risk is akin to that of drinking from natural water sources, though. People did that for millions of years and ... it's a risk level that is now generally considered too high. The argument from ancestral environment bounds the risk to some low level I would think, but it's possible that it's still significant enough to be wary of.
I kind of doubt it though.
I fed my dogs both cooked and uncooked bones when I lived on a farm. I admit though that my attitude was maybe a bit callously Darwinian - 'if you can't manage to eat the bones then I guess you just weren't cut out to make it as a dog' (or as Goethe wrote: 'Harte Bissen gibt es zu kauen: Wir müssen erwürgen oder sie verdauen').
LOL.
Yes, I am attempting to suss out the modernity-adjusted cooked bone risk.
I haven’t run into this one specifically but I have run into other things just like it. The short answer is CYA; why explain something to someone who might not listen very well, and run a risk of liability when they kill their dog and blame you for saying it was ok?
My take.
I want to share a GPT-3 side project I'm working on called Pickaxe. It lets you put a front-end on top of any useful or clever prompts and turns parts of the prompt into variables so that other people can run it with their own inputs. The prompts are shareable and embeddable. Looking for feedback from early users! All comments welcome: https://beta.pickaxeproject.com
Can anyone give me a good series of arguments against high-skilled immigration in the US? It seems obvious to me that vastly more high-skilled immigration would be a great thing for America- we could offer Green Cards to the best and brightest from every other country around the world. It would help cement America's dominance as the world's technological & scientific power at a time when that's under threat- after all, the US only makes up 4% of the world's population, so just numerically there should be a tremendous number of highly intelligent people in the other 96. My understanding is that the US was not a particularly accomplished country in the sciences before letting in a huge number of European scientists fleeing WW2.
And the 'they won't assimilate' arguments rings hollow to me- both Canada and Australia seem to manage just fine with a higher percent of their population being foreign born.
However, in the interest of intellectual discussion and broadening my horizons (and because I know ACT has a number of right-leaning folks)- I'm open to hearing good arguments against greatly increased high-skilled immigration. To be clear this is not an argument for *low* skilled immigration. Would love to hear the anti perspectives, partially because I genuinely cannot comprehend what they would be
You're focussed on the consumer side, and without doubt importing skilled labor is good for the consumer side, as it keeps wages and prices lower.
But on the producer side it's a different story. Hardly anybody enjoys facing stiffer competition for his job, from people who will work for less. If you propose legislation to fast-track green cards for foreign-born and foreign-trained physicians, expect American physicians to be unhappy with you. If you propose to import loads of skilled Ukrainian programmers who'll hack for 5-diigit salaries, expect American-born Silicon Valley programmers trying to pay back their student loans and also have a life to be a little grumpy.
And it works that way for the proletarian class, too. Importing tons of Central Americans who'll turn wrenches for $20/hour pisses off American-born mechanics who are used to wages 2-3x that. It *really* pisses them off when they perceive (perhaps accurately) that the policies are being driven by the surgeon and Google programmer class who don't feel their own wages threatened, but want to pay less for organic apples or to have their Beemer fixed.
Of course, we're all both consumer and producer. We benefit from high wages as a producer, and suffer from high prices as a consumer. We benefit from low prices as a consumer but suffer from low wages as a producer. Balances must be struck, and depend critically on individual circumstances, which is why there is no final solution to this problem, and has been debated since forever, and will be until forever.
IQ is important. Culture is even more important.
The West is rich and (relatively) peaceful because of its cultural values. Immigration dilutes these cultural values. You can handle a trickle of immigration but not a flood -- as a rule of thumb, we should make sure that immigrants can't go through their lives primarily interacting with people from their own culture.
How do we raise the national IQ without diluting good western values? Emigration, not immigration. Get rid of the people at the bottom, don't try to drown them out by importing more people at the top.
How do you propose to get people at the bottom to emigrate?
Do you have any sense of loyalty to them as your fellow-citizens?
Replace all taxes with a flat per-head fee for staying in the country. For the US (not my country but the one that gets discussed here most frequently), for instance, federally, this would need to be about $29,000 per head per annum. People who can't afford to pay this would not be allowed to remain in the country. This fee would presumably go down over time as the population of "takers" was reduced.
You could make it a per-day fee so that tourists etc would need to pay it too -- an extra $80/day isn't that big a deal for a tourist.
It would probably be possible to make some sort of deal with poorer countries to grant citizenship to deported US citizens who don't have any citizenship elsewhere, for a suitable fee. Buying these citizenships would be expensive at first but eventually you'd settle into a steady state.
I don't feel bad for fellow citizens of my country who can't pay their fees and get kicked out any more than I'd feel bad for fellow members of my country club who can't pay their fees and get kicked out. If you want things you gotta pay for them.
Humans are peaceful, (mostly) because we self domesticated ourselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-domestication I'm not saying culture is not important.
I don't think it's really *dilution* of cultural values. East Asian cultural values are demonstrably about as good as Western European cultural values at making a nation wealthy and peaceful, and a fusion of the two would probably be at least as good as either alone. And if we look south of the border and say that e.g. Latin Ameircan cultural values don't seem all that great on the wealth+prosperity front, OK, but the "cultural values" the rest of us borrow from them are mostly just the food and maybe the music.
The bigger problem is loss of public trust. The West is rich and relatively peaceful in large part because it is a high-trust society (or collection of such). And cultural diversity, especially novel cultural diversity, is harmful to public trust. East Asians may have their own high-trust societies, but they give off "you can trust me on this" vibes on a different frequency than Western Europeans. So they're less likely to trust each other, and more likely to see each other as an outgroup tribe that's trying to put one over on them.
In small doses, that's tolerable. The immigrants will assimilate, we'll learn to trust one another, and until then we'll trust that there's a lot of us and very few of them and they won't be able to do any serious harm. But if you're taking in immigrants faster than you can assimilate them, then you're degrading public trust.
And I don't think anyone has figured out how to *create* high public trust by any means other than "force everyone to adopt the same religion" or "be ruled by the British Empire for a century or two". So maybe err on the side of caution when it comes to doing things that would damage it.
I'm curious how public trust now compares to say, the late 19th century.
Also, how did things go in turn of the century Argentina?
Economically high skilled immigration is far preferable to low skilled immigration. Particularly if you are filling roles that otherwise couldn’t be filled due to a skills shortage. (The old trope that immigrants do jobs that the locals won’t or can’t is actually more true of high end work). Each new job will, being highly paid, add more spend to the economy than if it were not filled, and probably create even more jobs. Ignoring problems common to all kinds of immigration -resource issues like housing and health - there is a problem specifically sourcing high skilled immigration , it could dry up.
The loss of Chinese immigrants and university students, for instance, if the CCP were to curtail migration of its best and brightest, might leave a gaping hole in the US economy that other countries might find hard to fill.
1. With all the talk of "elite over-production" in the United States, importing even more "high-skilled" workers isn't necessarily a good thing.
2. The brain-drain from third-world countries is so large that it is causing such bad economic conditions, political violence, etc. that it is driving "low-skilled immigration" (as well as problems for the people who don't leave those countries).
I don't think anyone is talking about engineers or the like when they talk about "elite over production". They are talking about MFA/Liberal arts majors who go into media and journalism and live on Twitter.
I'm personally skeptical of the whole idea, but I'm _very_ certain that it isn't about the kinds of people who would get here on high skilled visas.
There's an attitude on the right that I think helps account for this, that I'll try to explain. It feels to them like very small legal changes to the leftward produce large effects in everyday policy; while very large legal changes to the rightward produce small effects in everyday policy. So, for example, the Obama Department of Education sent the famous "Dear Colleague" letter (not a court ruling, not a law passed by Congress, just a letter) to colleges, and it resulted in widespread changes to lots of people's everyday life. While, on the other hand, the 50-year Republican campaign against Roe v Wade (a Supreme Court case overturned, arguably second in legal power to a Constitutional amendment) finally resulted in a win for the Republicans, and despite that it seems like the number of actual abortions happening isn't going to be impacted much.
So, from Republicans' perspective, moving the law an inch left results in shifting everyday life a mile left, while moving the law a mile right results in shifting everyday life an inch right. Their expectation is that there's nonprofit, academic, media and business institutional leftist bias that will hugely amplify the effects of even small leftward changes in the law, while resisting and undermining/mitigating even large rightward changes in the law.
From that perspective, it makes sense to oppose increasing high-skilled immigration, even though (my sense is that) most Republicans welcome and support high-skilled immigrants. They feel like it's "the thin end of the wedge" or "the top of the slippery slope".
(I'm not interested in defending this attitude, because I don't think it's correct. It misunderstands the nature of power, the role of law in society, and the identities of the political parties.)
Generally slippery slope arguments have to rely on the first step itself being just a little be bad (otherwise it is not on the "slope" at all).
Surely not? The point of the slippery slope is that it's slippery/slopey, and that the *bottom* of it is very bad. In a pure slippery slope argument it might be that half-way down is the most preferable place to stand, but unfortunately you can't stand there because it's not a stable place, you'll always end up at the bottom.
I see lots of issues -- immigration is just one -- as sort or the reverse. There is a slope over there but it starts sloping up above and on the other side of a local maximum.
Having worked in high tech, I do see the benefit. We're absolutely robbing Asia of their very best and brightest minds. If these very smart people weren't brought to work in the US, they'd be starting companies in China/India/Pakistan/etc.
However, immigration (the H1B program) does reduce the value of an engineering degree.
https://tinyurl.com/3xvzat4h
H1B workers are of course eager to come to the US. Their masters degree in India will land them a job paying around US$50/day, whilst if they're in the US, they're earning US$50/hr. Plus the food, water, transportation, everything is very safe compared to Asia. However, as we see in the link, after 15 years or so, two new hires can be had for the price of one older more experienced employee.
TL;DR: H1B immigration reduces the pay for very well educated Americans.
The comeback on that is that they could in principle be starting innovative new firms, but in practice they would be frustrated.
> If these very smart people weren't brought to work in the US, they'd be starting companies in China/India/Pakistan/etc.
Would they really? It seems so from outside: "a smart person came from country X and does awesome things, they could have done exactly the same awesome things at home", but from the perspective of the person running away from X the story is often like: "I got this great opportunity here, which I wouldn't get in my own country".
Poverty means that those people wouldn't get founding at home. Corruption means that at home they would face bureaucratic obstacles, or wouldn't be allowed to study at university, because they don't have the right connections. Maybe the education at home is shitty. They may face at home some local form of sexism or racism or casteism that either does not exist or is much weaker in the country they left for.
Of course it could be both. But I suspect that out of 5 immigrants who do something awesome, maybe 1 could do a comparable thing at home, and 4 just couldn't for various reasons.
"just couldn't for various reasons."
You're exactly right. I was in the computer chip side, and you're not gonna make a computer chip with a company of less than ten thousand people. You're not gonna make a computer chip in a country where the power doesn't stay on all day every day (which apparently doesn't happen in India/Pakistan). You're not gonna make a computer chip in a country where you can't get liquid nitrogen, can't get vacuum sealed, double wall stainless piping to handle your liquid nitrogen, a country where your employees won't steal the bench tools to sell on the black market.
Learning from my Indian and Pakistani friends, is that in South West Asia, the power isn't on 24 hours, the water doesn't flow 24 hours, you're not going to get liquid nitrogen on a regular basis, you're not going to get double wall stainless welding, you're not going to get employees who won't walk off with the tools every day.
If you're not getting reliable utilities, reliable supplies, reliable materials, and dedicated workers, you're not going to make computer chips.
Software they can swing.
It seems that the shortage is not in 'high-skilled' but in skilled trades, since everyone is being encouraged to go to college and get that guaranteed high-paying white collar job.
So you might well want immigrants who are skilled and qualified trades people rather than doctors and computer programmers if you want to keep the roads open and the bridges standing:
https://www.portseattle.org/blog/port-addresses-skilled-worker-shortage-construction-trades
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/drilling-into-the-skilled-trades-shortage-stanley-black--deckers-inaugural-makers-index-reveals-few-students-likely-to-consider-a-career-in-the-trades-outdated-perceptions-key-drivers-301517854.html
https://www.industrialskilledtrades.com/skilled-labor-shortage-2022-1#chapter-1
I haven't read it, but I'm interested in a review of Garrett Jones' "Culture Transplant", which I think is supposed to address this question (not high-skilled in particular, but more generic note of caution on immigration which isn't necessarily limited to low-skilled)
So I think the most rat-friendly argument is a three-step.
Argument one is basically chain migration. We do not, and realistically cannot, only allow only high-skilled immigration because every single immigrant has the legal right to sponsor their immediate and extended family. And family immigration is, effectively, US immigration. You can check the most recent DHS stats, immediate and extended family is 60-70% of all US immigration whereas all employment based immigration is ~13%. (1) (2) Every new citizen allowed in via employment means 3-5 family members down the line. This is a genuinely difficult problem.
Argument two is basically tractability. The right has been deeply dissatisfied with the immigration situation for decades. Employment based immigration is basically the only tool they have. Washington has made it clear that they cannot/will not control the border or the illegal immigration situation. Among legal immigration, immediate family immigrants are uncapped and essentially unmanageable both from a legal perspective and a PR perspective; no one wants to deny an American citizen's spouse or child the right to join them and even denying parents would be tough. But on extended family, employment, and refugee migration, there the right has, if not traction, at least inertia on its side. Basically, the right doesn't like our immigration policy as a whole, it can't change the illegal immigration situation and it can't change the immediate family situation, so employment gets restricted because that's what it can do.
If you think this leaves room for a grand compromise to fundamentally update our broken immigration system, you'd be right but don't hold your breath. The right has been offering some variation of trading reforming the immigration situation plus some form of amnesty for an end to illegal immigration for some time. The Bush/Corporate right will never back this because they like cheap labor and the Dems will never back this because migration has flipped the Nixon/Reagan California to dark blue and they hope it will do the same for Arizona and Texas.
But basically, I don't think there's any special animus against high-skilled immigration on the right, there's just a general animus against immigration based primarily on illegal immigration. There are real complexities and solutions to solving legal immigration issues, for example you'd probably want to trade more high-skill immigration in exchange for moving "parents" from the immediate family (unlimited) to the extended family (limited) category, but there's no political will to do so and, as far as I can tell, hasn't been since the 80's.
(1) https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2022-07/2202_0405_plcy_lawful_permanent_residents_fy2021_0.pdf
(2) https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2018/lawful_permanent_residents_2018.pdf (included because the covid period is abnormal
That's insightful, but still does not answer the question. Why add more skill base/highly educated immigrant even if we also get their family members?
Sorry, I'm not clear from your question whether you're asking why should the US let high skill migrants enter or why they shouldn't.
The arguments for are basically economic and kindness. The arguments against are basically cultural and political.
The economic argument is pretty simple: more smart people=more GDP. The kindness argument is also pretty simple: if you know somebody living in the US, say on a student visa, and they want to move here, it feels mean to tell them no.
The cultural argument is also pretty simple. To the extent there still is a distinctly American culture, allowing millions of people in every year consistently dilutes that culture unless they fully acclimate. The political argument is also pretty simple: most immigrant populations vote for the Democrats, basically because they're either high-skilled and college-educated (read blue) or illegal immigrants. This is distinct from the cultural argument because it's very feasible that Hispanics might flip Republican in the coming decades, or at least a 50-50 voting block, and so might form a core Republican voting block but still wouldn't represent the cultural values of, say, Pat Buchanan or 1930's America.
I'm pro-high skill immigration but I do want to understand the objection, particularly to see if there is a version of my position that is not objection-able.
[I understand you are just gesturing at the objections, not advancing them.]
As for the culture, I agree in principle with that, but feel that likely numbers plus assimilation/exogamy reduce the practical importance.
As for the political, I think this is just a mistake. Some national groups lean left some lean right. (My very unscientific perception is that South Asians lean Left and East Asians lean Right). And again likely numbers make this not at all a practical objection.
I guess in both I'm adopting an "economist" point of view: recognizing that a point of negative marginal value could exist, but thinking that we are far away from that point.
Oh, cool, a factual dispute, at least on the politics.
So, let's start with some acknowledgements that we don't really track immigrant only voting patterns. Maybe if we dug into the ACS data we might be able to find something but I don't "think" ACS does partisan affiliation. So, in fairness, I don't think there are foolproof sources to point to.
Let's also note that there's a lot of partisan stats in this space. It's relatively easy to point to places like the Center for Immigration Studies (1) which will tell you that naturalized immigrants split about 50% Democrat, 30% Republican. I'm not saying those figures are inaccurate.
But, unfortunately, using ethnic groups tends to show pretty consistent results. Asian Americans are probably the premier example. Thanks to things like the Chinese Exclusion Act, we don't really have significant Asian American populations pre-1965, which means most Asian Americans are naturalized immigrants. For example, Pew Research puts naturalized immigrants at 2/3 of the Asian American population (2) and Asian Americans split 72-17 for Democrats. If every single native-born Asian American voted Democrat, that would still show immigrant Asians going for the Dems ~70% of the time.
There's a similar story for Hispanics. It's more complicated because there are long standing Hispanic populations in the US, especially in the Southwest, but Democrats have never been subtle about changing demographics flipping states like Arizona and Texas and pointing, very explicitly, at Hispanic demographics. And, off that Pew link again, Hispanics break for the Dems 63-29. It's not as clear what the specific role of immigrant Hispanics in that is, Pew does note that Mexican immigrants affiliate with the Dems at 59%, but separating out, say, Salvadorian refugees from Hispanics whose great grandparents were at the Alamo, on both sides, is tougher.
But, hopefully avoiding an isolated demand for rigor in an inherently difficult question, the weight of the evidence certainly points to immigrants voting disproportionately for the Dems, usually by 3-1 or 5-1 margin, and looking at specific populations like Asian Americans it looks mathematically impossible for them to be even split amongst the parties.
Before moving on to the cultural and negative marginal value elements, since those tend to be harder to quantify, is that clear on the political aspect? I know some people will point to specific sub-groups, like Vietnamese or Cuban groups, as evidence of some Republican leaning immigrant groups, but I'm not aware of any good-faith effort to show that immigrants split evenly among the parties, much less preferring Republicans.
(1) https://cis.org/Report/Immigration-Political-Realignment-and-Demise-Republican-Political-Prospects
(2) https://www.pewresearch.org/2020/09/23/the-changing-racial-and-ethnic-composition-of-the-u-s-electorate/
_I_ do not claim a 50-50 split, just that anything other that an extreme skew D for say and extra million people per year would not make much difference for years and years. And will today's polarizing issues that immigrants may or may not split evenly on be relevant 30 years from now? But that compound economic growth will be.
"My very unscientific perception is that South Asians lean Left and East Asians lean Right"
South Asians (and Hmong) lean left, true. East Asians used to lean right but they have been subject to the same "rotation" in income-education space as everybody else (i.e. they are more educated than average and therefore more Democrat than average), with some exceptions such as Vietnamese and Filipinos (who are more likely to be Republicans).
Though let's note that Canada's immigration system is much less friendly to "family reunification" and as a result a lot higher fraction of their immigrants are "high skilled". But in practice, it seems to be impossible to make any major changes to US immigration law because there are so many highly motivated, but disagreeing factions, so you can't get *any* bill through Congress.
You can make the same argument as for protectionism in trade. Importing skilled labor on mass undermines a country's ability to train it's own human capital to a degree sufficient to compete with the rest of the world.
And it would be equally specious. :)
Well it's a brain drain on the rest of the world. Less smart people there to help the other countries make 'smart' decisions.
Is that a pro or a con?
It was meant as an argument against, but it's a truth from either side. Everyone needs both good (smart) vendors and good (smart) customers. Well at least in my world.
I don't imagine the argument would be much different than it is for low skilled immigration. Increasing the rate is great from the employer's perspective. A talent "shortage" means they have to pay higher wages to entice talent, and they'd rather not - it almost never means "the talent is non-existent here" at the micro level. Increasing the supply of skilled workers means more competition among those on the market for those jobs, consequently employers won't have to hike wages so much to draw in talent. Just supply and demand at work.
From the perspective of those competing for those jobs, that doesn't sound like a great deal. Of course the pitch is that the benefits extend to the economy rather than those specific workers, which we infer benefits the citizens. Having access to global-tier talent can give a country's employers an edge on the world stage, while abundance of skilled workers is thought to eventually manifest jobs through innovation and competition - those are good things that have happened and policymakers want to happen. Necessity is the mother of invention, but what if the necessity is merely "making money"? What if there are diminishing returns to this approach, from the perspective of plebs?
Increasing the population has been a core mechanism through which to boost the GDP - since more people consume things, and GDP is a measure of consumption. Of course Economists even of the left-stripe are quick to point out that increases in GDP don't necessarily benefit people directly, as most of the gains (90%+) have gone directly to the wealthiest. The promise is that they would invest and take risk in new ventures, but they don't necessarily do this. They can just sit on their cash. But it's taken as a given that they would invest, when justifying either greatly expanded or unlimited skilled immigration. If they decide to mostly sit and collect, and enjoy the effect of wage suppression, then the outstanding benefits to a country as a whole seem "modest".
More of a middle-of-the-road perspective because there are obviously benefits to immigration. At the same time, close-to-nil immigration is not a death sentence either. For all the problems Japan might be having, it's been alright with a GDP that has been stagnant for a long time. They do have to recapture replacement-level fertility rates to deal with the inverted population pyramid but policies and change in culture can get them there.
I don't think "there are no downsides, and if there are, the downsides don't matter" carries much weight. I'm not sure if that's what Caplan actually says.
Nice summary. In regards to a difference between low and high-skill immigration, one can note that the people competing for high skill jobs have backup plans or options that pay much higher than the alternatives for low skill individuals. If you can't make six figures for a job because an immigrant was willing to do it cheaper, you can probably make high five figures instead. That certainly doesn't feel good for the person with fewer options, but it's noticeably better than the case of a low skill worker who can't make $12/hour because immigrants are willing to do it for sub-minimum-wage rates. Also of note, there are both more actual low skill immigrants and vastly more *potential* low skill immigrants, just due to the demographics involved (i.e. there are billions more low skilled individuals than high skilled).
That's all true.
I do imagine the argument would be much different than it is for low-skilled immigration. Low-skilled immigration leads to higher crime and increased public spending and is dysgenic. This is not the case for high-skilled immigration.
Those are extra concerns with unfettered rates, but what I meant is just that the concerns I raised equally apply for the low-skilled variant.
A propos, the snarky truism among US liberals is that such workers "do the jobs no one else wants to do". Well, the only reason one might possibly not want to do such jobs is they don't pay well. Which tacitly conveys "it's good that we pay these workers so little", with no cognitive dissonance despite the refrain reserved for "workers in general".
The isolated, transient concern for agribusiness input costs and profit margins that sometimes appears in these discussions is entertaining in its own way...
But this is all a little off topic, since it is specifically high skilled immigration that was mooted. The main thing I would say about that is that it benefits the bottom quintiles of (existing US) society very little, and may actually harm them by increasing competition for things like middle class housing. I think there's no question that it helps 'US greatness', and that the overall benefits to US companies is such that anyone with significant stock holdings is probably also a winner. It likely also improves our long-term prospects with respect to social security obligations, demographic problems (too many old people) and the like.
We just got through a year and a half of seeing how angry people get over temporary supply disruptions and price increases (some caused by labor shortages due to COVID policies cutting off immigration at the border).
I can attest to this in my Corporate America office. Its mostly whites(slightly overrepresented compared to the total US population) and Asians, particularly South Asians(extremely, extremely overrepresented compared to the US population). Blacks and Hispanics are negligible. In my opinion, a lot of of the DEI initiatives with their useless leadership roles is just to keep the non-Asian minorities content.
If we open the high-skilled immigration floodgates, the American elite class would mostly consist of South and East Asians within a generation. Elites should at least be somewhat representative of the people they rule, in terms of ethnicity, religion, values etc. Anything else is a recipe for domestic unrest. This also why I am in favor of affirmative action or maybe even explicit quotas in universities/jobs. If left to pure meritocracy, Harvard(which produces our future elites) would be 80% Asian, 10% Jews and 10% the rest. Not an acceptable outcome in my opinion.
EDIT: So far we have 3 out of an initial pool of 5. Also I think if you sign up you're committing for 1 cycle. That is, to read and give comments once a week for up to 4 other people, with the assumption that you'll get one submission yourself. We'll see where we are at after the cycle and make further plans from there.
--
I've been writing a blog but I think I probably need an editor. I'm not sure the best way to go about this because I think I'm unlikely to hire a professional. I'm a little shy about asking friends, and I'm not sure that I have any that are particularly qualified / want to be editing in their spare time. I'm curious if anyone has general advice here. Do most substack writers have editors? Are they friends/ professionals or is something else going on?
One idea I've had is to try to find other people in the same boat as me who are interested in getting feedback on things they've written. A classic writers group. Is anyone interested in joining a group of 2-5 and giving feedback on say 1 member essay a week?
As a result of reading a couple of your blog posts, I'll tentatively say I'm interested. I need to get some stuff on the page for this to be applicable to me but I like the idea. 2-5 seems about right - you could also call it 'three or four'.
Cool. You can contact me at pelorus.substack at gmail.
Just checking - did you get my email?
Will do, probably tomorrow. Also, yes to the idea of committing to one cycle of critiquing/submitting and then seeing where we're at.
I’d be interested too! I’ve written a few things that have (so far) remained in the drafts, but I’d be happy to share them with you and/or talk more. I also really enjoy talking with other writers about their work and work processes.
saulsmunn at gmail dot com :)
Did my email get to you?
Can anybody recommend a good overview of the current state of self driving cars?
I'm interested in the legal status in different countries, the definitions of different "levels" of how autonomous they are, what kinds of roads they can drive on, whether progress has generally been faster or slower than people would have guessed, say, 5 years ago, predictions for the future...
Format isn't a deal breaker but my preferences are text > audio > video. Ideally it would be aimed at laypeople but assume its audience is pretty smart.
Most importantly, it needs to stand alone. I've not really been following the field at all, so I want something to bring me up to speed, not something that recaps the last six months but assumes I know what was going on six months ago.
Many thanks in advance.
Interested in this as well
I wrote about how -- according to campaign contributions, party registrations, and survey data -- Democrats outnumber Republicans by about 10:1 in our administrative agencies, and by vastly more at our prestigious cultural institutions (elite universities, elite media companies, Netflix/Twitter/etc, ...). I make the argument that this is because the absurd tenure protections given to our huge deep state produce the sort of employee who cares much more about aligning with cultural causes than about aligning with elected leaders.
I then make the argument that this is basically how single-party states have wielded power: they still had somewhat fair elections, and somewhat reasonable constitutions, and somewhat popular legalized opposition parties, and so forth; but the people in charge of these countries were party apparatchiks (not official heads-of-state), and they wielded power by dominating among employees at cultural institutions and government agencies.
It's worth noting that stereotypically "evil" corporations are no counterweight to this: military contractors, major banks, big pharma, energy companies, etc, all seem pretty much politically balanced between Dem and GOP employees. Intuitively, this is because they optimize on producing particular items, and so don't have the slack to optimize on producing particular cultures; for similar reasons, when they lobby, it's by "corruptly" paying dearly for isolated loopholes, rather than "respectably" pushing extreme/broad ideological campaigns.
Link: https://cebk.substack.com/p/the-united-states-is-a-one-party
>I make the argument that this is because the absurd tenure protections given to our huge deep state produce the sort of employee who cares much more about aligning with cultural causes than about aligning with elected leaders.
I think the fact that an incoming president is not allowed to reward people with civil service jobs for aligning with him is generally considered a feature, not a bug.
Also, since the civil-service/political appointment split has existed since 1881, I find it hard to believe that it's the cause of any modern ideological conflicts.
(Also also, I couldn't get through your essay because it couldn't go more than three sentences without commenting on how evil and hateful liberals are.)
"Also, since the civil-service/political appointment split has existed since 1881, I find it hard to believe that it's the cause of any modern ideological conflicts."
Really?
You can't believe that a 19th C. event could be the (or at least a) cause of modern ideological conflicts? People were just pulling statues down at random, were they?
But more specifically, it wasn't until Wickard v. Fillburn that FedGov had de jure unlimited power and even later for urbanization to be significant enough that the civil service had de facto control over much of the populace.
> I couldn't get through your essay because it couldn't go more than three sentences without commenting on how evil and hateful liberals are.
Chortle! :-)
Normally it's the other way round, with liberals excoriating "deplorable" conservatives!
Much the same applies in the UK these days, although back in the 1880s in the event of the Sovereign's death the Government had to resign and a general election was called, and all senior civil servants also had to resign, and it was touch and go who, if any, would be appointed by the next administration.
But now, "the blob", as the senior civil servants (among others) are called, are blissfully unaffected in any way by Governments coming and going. What's more, as a general election approaches they often start becoming bolshy and passively aggressive, and resistant to even reasonable and urgent requests by their nominal political masters (the ministers). It is probably much the same in the US.
Yes, I understand that many people regard the "professionalization" of the civil service (i.e. its insulation from political accountability) as a good thing; I strongly disagree. But it's worth pointing out that it's been getting much worse, much more recently than 1881. For instance, the Humphrey's Executor decision (in the 1930s) essentially created the idea that agency heads could be protected from presidential removal; at first, this basically only protected a few quasi-judicial administrative boards, but it's been swallowing up ever more of the executive branch ever since.
For example, the CFPB was created in 2011, and was headed by a single appointee, whom the president could not legally fire; until then, independent agencies had been headed by groups of unaccountable commissars, rather than individuals, because then they would be run by appointments from a mix of presidents, and so would presumably be less of a rogue power. Luckily, SCOTUS in 2020 finally rolled back this particular expansion of the deep state for intuitive democratic accountability reasons (in the Seila Law decision), but other than this it's mostly been a steady march of jackbooted thugs claiming ever more of our federal govt since WWII.
Similarly, the MSPB has pretty unilaterally extended MSPB protections (essentially tenure for agency workers) to ever more administrative workers. Or consider the massive rise in the share of federal workers covered by a union during the 1960s (these federal unions mostly focus on protecting members from accountability to the elected govt, not on pay or benefits, because they can't meaningfully affect those).
Or consider the decisions which Trump's judicial appointments pledged to roll back, because they unleashed the deep state. During his confirmation hearings, Kavanaugh stated that the single decision he would most like to overturn was Morrison v Olson, from the late 1980s, which *radically* expanded the protections of administrative branch appointees against removal by the president. Similarly, Gorsuch stated that the decision he'd most like to overturn was Chevron vs NRDC, from the mid 1980s, which created "Chevron Deference," which is almost certainly *the* most crucial part of the deep state's current power (it's the idea that an agency can make whatever regulations are plausibly allowed by law, rather than just those regulations which are clearly demanded by law; think of it like AirBud: "there's no rule that says dogs *can't* play basketball!").
The list goes on and on. In my piece, I describe how party registration data demonstrates that on average since 1990 presidential appointments have been from the party of the relevant president roughly 70% of the time; but the same data also shows that, throughout this period, the civil service (which is not appointed by the president, nor removable by him) has been roughly 70% Dem (with most of the rest being independents, not GOP). If the supposedly professionalized apolitical civil service is always as unanimous in one particular direction as each side's lackeys are in each direction, something's gone very clearly wrong! And this data indicates that the civil service skew is getting steadily worse.
There are other factors. Somebody noticed that there's a strong correlation between getting educated and the psychological trait "openness to experience". That writer doesn't mention it, but it's pretty clear that "openness to experience" is going to correlate well with the conservative-vs.-liberal axis these days. So you expect any institution of advanced education to be automatically biased towards "openness to experience".
The next question is the degree to which staffing by organizations selects for highly educated people. And it seems that administrative agencies have been favoring people with college degrees during my lifetime. It's worth researching whether it was true before that. Also, it's worth noting that some state bureaucracies have recently been eliminating civil service rules requiring college degrees for a lot of position. These changes may be related to the fact that the labor market has been employer-friendly for the past 40 years or so, but is rapidly shifting toward being worker-friendly. It'll be interesting to see if this moves the bias of administrative agencies in a conservative direction.
Cultural institutions tend to be refuges for highly-educated people but pay poorly. Sometimes you have to serve several years as an unpaid intern before being considered for a paying position. So the people hired will be biased toward the highly-educated whose parents are willing to support them in a high-status but poorly-paid position.
So it's not surprising that these two categories of institution are more liberal than the average citizen. And in the zones of the culture where administrative agencies and cultural institutions have power, the norms are likely to be more liberal than the attitudes of the average citizen.
In regard to "single-party states", you're losing me. There is a large menu of Marxist-Leninist states over the past century, and absolutely none of them had "somewhat fair elections, and somewhat reasonable constitutions, and somewhat popular legalized opposition parties". Indeed, if a state has a somewhat popular legalized opposition party, then by definition it is not a "single-party state".
You seem to dislike this state of affairs, but you don't state that very clearly, or precisely what you don't like about it. OTOH, it's hardly surprising in any society the people with more than average power/status aren't statistically the same as the people as a whole.
India was a single party democracy for the first thirty years of independence, arguably a good deal longer. The fact that Congress eventually lost control is some evidence that it was a democracy. Gordon Tullock used to define a democracy as a country where the ruling party had lost power twice — once might be an accident. India eventually met that criterion.
Woke people are not generally more "open" in any meaningful way than unwokes are, and you don't get 10:1 Dem:GOP ratios by merely selecting for vague traits like "openness."
As for Marxist-Leninist states, they absolutely did have (among other things) legal opposition parties; here are two pertinent quotes from the piece to which you're ostensibly responding:
Quote number one:
After all, even East Germany had expansive constitutional rights on paper and—yes, I’m serious—fairly-counted multi-party elections. They used an approval-based voting system, which actually allows for effective constituent bargaining against incumbent politicians on local issues, and was thus quite recently on the ballot in Seattle as an alternative to both ranked-choice voting and first-past-the-post. Basically, East German voters would approve or disapprove of each of the candidates running to nationally represent their local district; each such constituency would usually elect about five representatives, depending on factors like population. Those who received the most approvals would win, so long as they got over half of the voters to support them. The country’s dominant party only won around one quarter of the legislative seats, in each of its nine elections before the wall fell, and also in its final election afterwards (which allocated seats via standard western-style proportional representation). This legislature abolished the senate, and officially controlled both other branches… much as our judicial and executive branches testify before our congress in exchange for official guidance on all forms of power: personnel, provisions, and policy.
But, of course, a clear supermajority of their key administrators joined the Socialist Unity Party, and that was the clear path to promotion… while openly supporting alternative options could get you fired and shunned from influential positions (much as our system allocates administrative power to Democrats, under the watchful eyes of academia, internet platforms, and the news media). For example, in the late 1980s, the SUP alone had well over two million members, while each of the other four main parties only had about 100,000. And—much like our president can’t legally fire the vast majority of his ostensible subordinates, from Fauci to the Fed—their head-of-state only rubber-stamped the one true party’s decisions. Much like their organs of culture, prestige, and information were only independent from this party on paper, our deep state only offers access to favored media, and infiltrates organizations deemed suspect. And so forth.
Consider, for example, that about 80% of East Germany’s workforce worked for “publicly owned enterprises” (VEBs) in 1989. By law, each VEB workplace was managed by its director, its party secretary, and its union chairman, together. The members of a given factory’s party organization would elect their own local secretary, who would then meet every single month with representatives from higher level party committees: they would give him “instructive guidance” on his performance, and then “verify” his party privileges… or not. Likewise, in the late 1980s, roughly 98% of East German workers were members of the country’s only legal trade union federation; they would similarly elect their own workplace chairman, but the union leadership—which was, of course, also dominated by the party—could easily reward those chairmen who followed orders, and remove the rest. The media, the police, and other such politically sensitive positions faced even more smothering partisan incentives.
One could quibble with my comparison here in a few reasonable-seeming ways, but I think the point still stands. For instance, the legislature granted some seats to SUP-affiliated non-party organizations, like the official trade union; however, in practice, these looked more like sinecures for allies than actual offices of power… more like symptoms of than sources for totalitarian control (or else the legislature would have actually exerted authority over the party sometimes, rather than just vice-versa). Further, all parties in the legislature had to join a “national front,” which put forward a single list of candidates for voters to consider: but this front was mostly just synonymous with being on said list, and East German voters could approve or disapprove of the individual candidates on it, much as our voters can tick a box for whichever listed candidate they prefer on our ballots.
Likewise, East Germany officially granted the SUP a “leading role” over its “rival” parties, yet this only seems to have acted as a vague blanket excuse for discretionary purges against undesirables—much as our deep state labels any Republicans who seem insufficiently servile to Democrats as “threats to democracy.” Whenever one association makes itself the arbiter of how “civil rights” can bulldoze the freedom of association, this exact pattern repeats itself, and so it should sound quite familiar. For example, the current German constitution explicitly requires all political parties to maintain certain vague standards of “democracy,” even internally, and empowers their obviously politicized constitutional court to enforce this; and, similarly, US caselaw has long banned all parties from implementing regulations on their own primary elections deemed “undemocratic.” Or consider how the Organization of Islamic Cooperation explicitly clarifies that its member-countries interpret the UN Declaration of Human Rights exclusively through the lens of Sharia law. And how the Chinese constitution subordinates its expansive rights to CCP rule.
My point, of course, isn’t that East Germany was in any sense “good,” nor that modern Germany is anywhere near as totalitarian. Rather, my point is that the eastern bloc’s totalitarianism had very little to do with its election system, or its official constitution, or anything like that. The party ruled by writing your newspaper, and reading your mail, and infesting your workplace; it only placed its people on your ballot and in your legislature to make itself seem somewhat legitimate… and so it’s thrilled when critics focus on reforming election law, or condemning pompous legislators, or amending the paper-thin constitution. But, similarly, my point isn’t that the ruling caste should restrain itself—or at least seem to—from orienting the state apparatus toward its preferred policy platforms: it’s that we should make those apparatchiks do so honestly, by bluntly clarifying the single-party nature of all stable states, including ours. We should give the people a clear list of the names that are actually responsible for this country’s problems. And if we win, it will involve the people hounding this univocal slate of names from power (instead of just barking at well-protected figureheads from irrelevant bickering front groups).
You're clearly wrong on "Woke people are not generally more "open" in any meaningful way than unwokes are", as I can show in a sentence: Woke people are *far* more tolerant of people inventing weird new gender concepts than non-woke people. Now the people who get labeled "woke" (or in the past have labeled themselves woke!) have their own canons of conformity, but they're generally a lot more tolerant of nonconformity relative to what is conceived of as the general standards of society.
If you're complaining that certain institutions filter for ideology in various ways, I'm sure you're correct. But also, they filter in other ways that do significantly correlate with ideology. On top of that, you get snowball effects: Once a social group has certain ideological tendencies, people who share them tend to be attracted to it and prosper more in it, even if there's no set mechanism to increase the ideological tendency. Don't overestimate that there's some great conspiracy that e.g. sorts all the conservative professors into economics and the liberal professors into all the other fields.
In regard to the Marxist-Leninist states having actual multi-party systems, it does seem that I'm wrong, at least as you say, in window-dressing. It's also clear that the US educational system doesn't mention that fact. So when you mention that fact without other preparation, you should flag it as "little-known", "it's actually true" or something like that.
In regard to "We should give the people a clear list of the names that are actually responsible for this country’s problems. And if we win, it will involve the people hounding this univocal slate of names from power", I'm tempted to ask, "What do you mean 'we', white man?" That the lefties have disproportionate power seems clear, and there are aspects of that I don't like, but putting the righties in charge to carry out a great purge doesn't seem to be an obvious improvement to me. Certainly starting with "the people hounding ..." sounds like populism, and that has a long history of putting things in the crapper, whether it starts from the left or the right. We want neither Bolsonaro nor Maduro in charge of things.
Yeah that's all fair (though my main beef with the gender stuff is not its "nonconformity" so much as the conformist demand they make that polite society should "accept" / "normalize" it).
And I should probably do a better job clarifying that my model of the world is also mostly psychological rather than conspiratorial: that there's no smokey room where some supposed central committee of the single-party running our deep state gathers to hash out its plans, and that it would be preferable if there were some such clearly defined organization keeping all our agencies coherent with one another. (The lack of any such coherence is, in part, why we got such a bizarre eviction moratorium during the pandemic: in an organized state, HUD would've been in charge of housing-related aspects of pandemic response, and would've presumably picked a more sensible kind of intervention, but because regulation only belongs to the swift in our system it selects for hysteria, and thus the CDC for some reason ended up unilaterally imposing an extremely interventionist and ill-considered national housing policy).
For example, I think it'd be conspiratorial for me to imagine that bureaucrats greedily connive to push for policies which create more bureaucracy; it of course makes no sense for an individual bureaucrat to join in broad lobbying etc efforts that create more jobs for people like him, in the same way that it's never rational to even vote for your own personal interests in a large election. Rather, I think people's beliefs are highly programmed by their environment, and so they generally come to believe the sorts of things that have successfully expanded such environments in the past (and they obviously also somewhat select into fields which their political opinions already favor granting more power to).
In other words, people in xyz caste observably do vote for policies that would often flatter or benefit that kind of person, even though their voting behavior doesn't cause them to receive any more expected flattery or benefit from the policy outcomes of elections. It seems like the major disagreement here is whether that's mostly because these people were independently predisposed to hold those views, or whether the jarring radicalization we've seen in these agencies as they've become less accountable is because less accountable organizations are better able to do some mix of "selecting true believers" and "programming employees to proselytize." And I think these beliefs take the form of "general disposition toward safetyism" (for example) rather than "x position on y policy is optimal."
My general understanding is that even the Marxist-Leninist states -- even though they had official central committees of their dominant parties -- actually worked somewhat like this too, with intentional politburo coordination being much less relevant for most everyday policies than "well the clique that's durably in charge of this sector always uses this kind of rhetoric and this rhetoric tends to work so it's becoming more relevant." So my point is that psychology still broadly dominates conspiracy, but also that it's: a) more programmable than people often assume; b) more influential on the balance-of-power between social organizations than people often assume; and c) becoming a runaway problem because making these organizations less accountable to external concrete objectives allows factors (a) and (b) to take over everything else within socially relevant orgs.
As for the bit at the end of your comment, I would strongly favor a president with pretty much any policy agenda (from Bernie's to Trump's) as long as they focus on bringing the administrative state to heel. And I think that's often been a broadly popular, generally successful, and politically depolarizing outcome, in our country and abroad. I'd recommend the bit in my essay where I talk about strongmen like Sisi and why I think they're a palatable populist option (I make the case he was "elected" with a much stronger mandate than Morsi, and that this is typical of such cases), and why I think they're the opposite of Party-oriented figures like Maduro (who seized power through party-based anti-populist machinations and drove his country into further polarization and despair). If you're interested in that arg but not the broader essay, I'd recommend clicking the link and word-searching for the section on "Sisi" and "Maduro."
Edit: Also, regarding the bit about flagging surprising facts as "little-known," maybe I should do that more, but I also unfortunately already go on far too long about everything, so I often throw out things I think are surprising and true without the substantiation they deserve. For instance, somewhere in this comment thread I referred to the East German government's opinion polling on its population, which found that they generally supported socialism but viewed the ruling party as corrupt; this sounds like it would be one of those fake propaganda surveys, but it actually turns out that they ran extremely legitimate anonymous polls on their people--and made sure the people polled felt comfortable giving sincere answers--in order to keep abreast of what actual public sentiment was, and kept the results mostly secret for internal planning purposes. But that's a whole other rabbit hole which it would take even longer to go down. Even if I link to sources describing this, most people won't read the link, and so plenty of people who make surprising claims misrepresent the sources they link, so it all ends up seeming somewhat quixotic to me.
Fwiw, while economics is still more conservative than many other academic fields, economists are *extremely* liberal relative to the general US population either by ideological measures or partisan affiliation depending on what you are talking about. The idea that economics is the last conservative bastion in academia is now quite dated. Some people's stereotypes just haven't been updated in a long time.
"Woke" isn't a useful term here, but if by that you mean something like, "socially liberal" then they do tend to score much, much higher on openness to experience measures than social conservatives. They are meaningfully more "open" and saying "nuh uh" would just make me think, "Well, there's your error here."
To the broader point, we have seen a demographic sorting where well-educated, non-rich professionals tend to have an overwhelming preference for center-left politics in the US. This is part of a global phenomenon of demographic sorting, and you see it show up in other nations as well.
Sure, the measures that psychologists call "openness" are correlated with "socially liberal" views; but not in anything like a 10:1 ratio (as we see at typical federal agencies), much less a 20:1 or 100:1 ratio (as we see at institutions like Yale/Harvard, WaPo/NYT, and Twitter/Netflix). Numbers like that are obviously driven by selection on ideology at these institutions.
There's also a psychological scale called "authoritarianism," which mostly just measures conservative social values; but calling conservatives "authoritarian" as a result of such silly pseudoscientific metrics is obviously ludicrous, just as it would be to call wokies "open-minded" based on the "openness" metric. For example, polling data from soon after the 2016 election suggests that over 60% of Clinton voters wouldn’t be friends with Trump supporters, while over 60% of Trump voters would happily befriend Clinton supporters; this disparity in actual personal tolerance replicates in all sorts of similar questions, and has only gotten worse since then.
Plus, of course, it's not like social conservatives are censoring liberals who talk about how red states have worse crime problems than blue states, or how (controlling for race) liberal voters have higher IQs than conservative voters; but you do very obviously face censorship risk from honestly talking about how black criminality drives the red-state/blue-state crime gap, or about black-white IQ differences. That's a more politically relevant proxy for "openness" in my view.
Here's a quote from my piece which I think points out how demographic sorting doesn't explain anywhere near the majority of institutional polarization in this country. College campus faculties are *vastly* more skewed towards Democrats than college students are, *especially* in the politicized fields like social "science" or the humanities. If this recent sudden lurch towards wokeness on campuses was driven by mere selection effects, you'd expect the students to be driving the change, or at least keeping up with the teachers. Quote:
Speaking of tenure: a paper from 2018 by Mitchell Langbert aggregates voting registration data for professors at elite schools, and finds even stronger progressive homogeneity. He tabulates the party affiliations of the nearly 10,000 tenure-track teachers at 50 top-ranked US liberal arts colleges, and gets a sample-wide Democrat-to-Republican ratio of over 10:1. Further, about 80% of the 1,000 total departments at these schools apparently do not employ a single Republican. Even the two military colleges in his sample—West Point and Annapolis—have nearly 1.5 and 2.5 times as many Democrats as Republicans! Even the STEM profs have an overall Dem:GOP ratio that’s over 5:1; meanwhile, the social science faculties reach over 10:1, the humanities are over 30:1, and the “interdisciplinary fields” (like “black studies” or “gender studies”) have zero registered Republicans on staff.
The ratio reaches particularly high among token identity groups; for instance, it’s over 20:1 for women, but just over 5:1 for men. Likewise, it clusters most strongly in the most powerful institutions: among these 50 elite schools, it’s three times higher for the top-ranked quarter than for the bottom-ranked quarter (which are still, of course, quite highly ranked, and quite progressive). And it’s geographically clustered where you’d think—where the ruling class matriculates—with New England reaching more than 25:1. Further, out of the 25 total fields included by Langbert, engineering has the lowest ratio, with only 1.6… which, coincidentally, is exactly the national ratio for all adults with any graduate school experience, which means that the professoriate’s liberal skew cannot be simply due to benign correlates of educational attainment.
Survey data supports the same general conclusion. For example, the Higher Education Research Institute survey finds that—across the decades and across the nation—faculty steadily self-identified as about 40% liberal, 30% moderate, and 30% conservative; then, beginning in the 1990s, there was an explosion in the share of professors identifying as “far left” liberals (especially in the softer subjects), which drove “liberalism” over 60% by 2010… while the conservative share was driven down under 15%. Simultaneously, the number of professors in these radicalizing softer subjects rose as a share of the total: from 2005 to 2015, the fraction of the faculty located in the arts, humanities, and social sciences rose by over 3.5 percentage points. Meanwhile, though STEM departments have remained somewhat politically balanced, they lost over 2.5 percentage points of the overall teaching spots.
Without a primarily political understanding of higher education, this hiring shift might seem quite strange. After all, from 2008 to 2018, the share of undergraduates getting degrees in the humanities fell by about 50%, and the social sciences lost similar amounts of student interest, while majors in STEM have grown commensurately. But, of course, these new hires are being selected for their demographic demagoguery, not their ability to serve students. For instance, during the last decade, the career openings posted on the Academic Jobs Wiki in US history have steadily shifted from 10% up to 35% focused on “African Americans,” and from 20% down to 5% focused on “Early America.”
Some students have, of course, learned to shriek the professoriate’s preferred slogans (with much less tact or subtlety), but shrill kids didn’t cause this change. According to the 2016 HERI survey, the nationwide liberal-to-conservative ratio at colleges and universities was less than 2:1 among incoming freshmen, about 6:1 among professors, and roughly 12:1 among “student-facing” administrators. Note that these coddling administrative jobs have grown much faster in number since 2000 than even the most soft-headed and soft-hearted sorts of professorial seats. Also note that this dataset finds a ratio of well over 25:1 for New England professors, which neatly matches the previously mentioned findings based on party registration.
Other massive surveys—like the 2020-2021 FIRE survey of more than 50,000 students from over 150 top universities—find similar trends: the lib:con ratio for elite undergraduate students is just below 2.5, which is only twice that of the US population in general; similarly, among Ivy League students, there are barely more than five liberals per conservative. The basic pattern seems to be that these children weakly echo what the relevant institutionalized adults around them are doing. For instance, the student gender gap in political ideology and party identification is roughly 15 percentage points, which is nearly five times larger than the general population’s partisan gender gap… but among female students there are only about four Democrats for each Republican, whereas among female professors there are more than twenty (and the professoriate’s gender gap is larger than the student body’s).
One trend worth noting is that this campus radicalization has been disproportionately concentrated among women and non-whites: in the general population, they lean slightly further left than whites and men; but in higher education, they skew vastly further left, and this gap is growing. Likewise, LGBT status also concentrates in universities and liberal arts colleges—with 25% of students at the former and 40% of those at the latter identifying as queer. And other institutions of social control have similarly cultivated these groups as clients. For example, as the number of personnel management workers in the US rose 20-fold from 1950 to 2000, women switched from a small minority to a supermajority of the profession. Women also constitute a supermajority of university administrators, of psychiatrists, and of psychologists… hence, for instance, the recent “epidemic” of disproportionately male “disorders” like autism and ADHD (while correspondingly female-focused vague diagnoses like “hysteria” have become professionally unmentionable). And hence, for similar clientelist reasons, the cultivation of mental illnesses as valid oppressed identities, rather than diseases. And so further hence the tendency of progressives to now identify as mentally ill three times more frequently than conservatives do, under a variety of definitions, according to a paper from 2020 by Emil Kirkegaard.
Openness to experience isn't a measure of interpersonal tolerance. Your willingness to be friends with people who hold noxious views that offend your sensibilities doesn't in of itself tell you how you'd score on openness measures in the Big 5/HEXACO model.
To your main point, there's a trivial mistake in your reasoning about the distribution you'd expect if a given psychological trait is playing a causal role. Even slight preferences can cause large distributive gaps because professions are selective. Think of it this way: Highly selective colleges tend to have populations very high openness to experience scores because they are selecting for traits that happen to strongly correlate with that. They also tend to have very high SAT/ACT scores. You wouldn't expect 1 out of every 10 or whatever to have low scores, because they are deliberately weeding them out. The selectivity is skimming off the high end of the distribution. The general population doesn't matter. And, indeed, professions that draw from them carry that on.
I doubt that openness to experience explains the demographic sorting as a single variable. That's trivially false, in fact. But the way in which you are dismissing it does not work. Aside from this, right now it is the case that if you are well-educated, not wealthy, and not quite religious, you're all but guaranteed to have liberal politics. These are strongly correlated. There doesn't need to be a professional conspiracy to explain that phenomenon. There are other professions that weigh in the opposite direction because of different traits they select for creating a self-reinforcing concentration of conservative politics.
P.S. I did genuinely laugh out loud when I read your argument that openness to experience should be proxy measured by how much ostracism happens when people argue in favor of scientific racism. That was extremely on the nose.
>Openness to experience
What a bullshit and meaningless term lol. "The Science[^TM] proves my tribe is based" ok.
The first item in the ScienceDirect overview (https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/openness-to-experience) quotes an article saying :
> Among the relevant traits are : tolerance of ambiguity, low dogmatism, need for variety, aesthetic sensitivity, absorption, unconventionality, intellectual curiosity,
So,
- Tolerance of ambiguity : Meaning you don't incessantly scream about "Dog Whistles" and take to twitter to complain about the hidden racism in Super Mario Bros.
- low dogmatism : Meaning you don't have a set of cherished beliefs you're willing to destroy and control other people for (or have them in smaller amounts than typical).
- need for variety : Meaning your social circles are not so cloned from each other that knowing the opinions of one of them can predict the rest almost perfectly.
- intellectual curiosity : Meaning you're able to hold ideas in your head and explore their sources and implications without necessarily agreeing with them, not constantly panicking about "Platforming" allegedly bad ideas.
Any test that assigns a high component on this dimension to wokies is manifestly bullshit.
The first words in the comment to which you’re replying are: ‘Sure, the measures that psychologists call "openness" are correlated with "socially liberal" views.’ I then explain why I am using the word “openness” in a different way than they do. And yet you reply by saying that the things I define as more open are not what the psychologists define as “openness”! If you want my argument to use the word “tolerance” instead of “openness,” you can copy/paste it into a Google doc and find/replace the words accordingly. Hope this helps!
As for the rest: this is rather like those people who argue that cancel culture isn’t “real”; if you really think it’s a conspiracy theory, then there’s not much more I can say to you.
But it’s worth considering why the politicized subjects are so incredibly much more unanimously woke than the less politicized subjects, as I already showed. Are STEM fields just not interested in “openness”? Do all the truly open-minded people just naturally get selected into the university departments of “why black people are always completely good studies”?
On the subject of authoritarianism and conservatism, some time back I had an exchange on my blog with Robert Altemeyer, an academic who had written a book on the subject. I believe I showed that the test for authoritarianism he based his conclusions on was heavily biased in the direction of showing conservatives to be more authoritarian, liberals less, than they actually were. Some here may find the exchange of interest:
https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2007/07/loaded-dice-professor-altemeyers.html
""In North America people who submit to the established authorities to extraordinary degrees often turn out to be political conservatives,"
Well, covid certainly put paid to THAT.
And here's quote number two:
There may have been several other such apparently unfair East German policies on paper, but the whole point of single-party rule is that the party gets to do what it wants, and can then get rubber stamps from its front-government’s official organs of power after-the-fact. Learn to spot the difference! And then learn to distinguish between the phases of this one ruling caste. For instance, communist youth groups like the USSR’s Komsomol had been small extremist sects at first, and only then grew influential enough to make their societies more like them; but then they became a boring box for disinterested masses of social climbers to fill out, like student government currently grants our country’s worst sociopaths with slight status benefits. This hollowed-out Komsomol then obediently dissolved itself, when the time came, by becoming the organization which students joined in order to get private funding privileges to form businesses under perestroika. Or, alternatively, consider how almost 40% of college students now identify as LGBTQ at liberal arts colleges.
In my view, there’s only one obvious difference between our manner of actually constituting a government and theirs: East Germans could choose to publicly register their actual votes, and so almost every voter did, to avoid arousing suspicion; in contrast, ever since 1891 we’ve had secret ballots, and so 20th Century communications technologies never got the chance to impose overtly totalitarian control on us. However, there’s less of a difference here than you might think. In East Germany, in order to vote idiosyncratically—rather than just automatically approving of everyone on the National Front’s list—you had to openly discard your standard-issue ballot, and fill out a blank one. Likewise, in the Jackson era, our red and blue parties would hand out their ballots, on red and blue paper, already filled in, and so they could see who voted for which party… and who voted independently.
And voters did actually sometimes vote against individual candidates en masse, or threaten to. The party somewhat allowed its people to protest against particular officials, or particular policies, just so long as they didn’t threaten party rule. In short, East Germans could organize to embarrass ineffectual representatives for failing to uphold socialist values—for instance, if they were too corrupt, or lazy, or incompetent—but could not openly organize against socialism itself; likewise, they could openly protest against low quality coffee rations in the late 1970s, but not against party rule. Much the same is true in China, which lets local protests provide the government with feedback on who deserves promotions or punishments… unless these protesters challenge CCP legitimacy.
Regardless, well over 90% of East German ballots approved the candidates on offer from every party. This indicates that the citizenry did not actually feel very free to disapprove. However, note that approval-voting intuitively works by removing generally unpopular candidates—rather than dividing partisans between thereby polarized candidates—and so we should naturally expect such elections to yield widespread modest favorability (instead of concentrated intense devotion). Further, the party carried out actually anonymous polling of its people, to keep abreast of their actual views, and they seem to have legitimately learned to support their system: for example, in 1983, 91% of students claimed that they were devoted citizens of the GDR; similarly, in 1984, 92% agreed that “socialism will triumph throughout the world.” Many of them viewed their administrative state as corrupt and incompetent, but until the very end fell short of outright condemning their government, even privately. Meanwhile, the average margins of victory in our Senate and House elections are just 20 and 30 percentage points, respectively… though both sets of incumbents admittedly still win well over 90% of the time. Granted, I may be overstating the importance of this distinction, because our system publicly registers our party affiliations, our partisan donations, and all the times we’ve ever voted, and we can’t opt out from sharing this information.
I recently did an analysis of long-term mutual fund performance compared to the market, in case anyone's interested in this topic:
https://mikesaintantoine.substack.com/p/what-do-psychic-animals-and-mutual
TLDR: The articles that say "Top 5 Best Mutual Funds to Buy!!" are mostly just picking the ones that got lucky in past, and for long-term performance you're better off putting your money in an index fund.
Anyone want to meet up in Lviv?
Not especially - I live in the South of France. But...... my real name is Benjamin and my Grandmother was born in Lviv. :)
Here is my book DNA, meaning, those texts have shaped my perspective fundamentally, in chronological order. Would be interested in seeing some of yours.
George Orwell, '1984'
Ken Wilber, 'The Good, the True and the Beautiful'
Sun Tzu, 'The Art of War'
Master Eckehart, 'Beati sunt pauperes spiritu'
Plato, 'Collected Works'
Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morality'
An obscure treatise on Germanic graveyards of the Migration period
Dan Barry, 'The Lost Children of Tuam'
John Stuart Mill, 'On Liberty'
Adam Smith, 'The Wealth of Nations'
Julius Caesar, 'De bello civile'
Xenophon, 'Anabasis'
Oliver Sacks, 'The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat'
Jaak Panksepp, 'The Archaeology of Mind'
Jeffrey Gray, 'Consciousness'
Justus Liebig, 'Letters on Modern Agriculture'
Nick Lane, 'Transformer'
Tarzan of the Jungle and the Hardy Boys, as a boy. They taught me to read.
Back home in the geriatric phase, Musonius Rufus, Lectures and Fragments -- on the ongoing culture wars.
Fun idea! I enjoyed reminiscing about all the books that’ve influenced me over the years. Here’s my “book DNA” (loosely chronological).
- Childhood/Youth
The Boxcar Children, Gertrude Chandler Warner
Conan stories, Robt. E. Howard (paperbacks w/Frazetta covers)
Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
The Great Comic Book Heroes, Jules Feiffer (first edition hardback with reprints of several Golden Age comics included)
Alice stories, Lewis Carroll
The Giant Under the Snow, John Gordon
Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle
Shang-Chi Master of Kung Fu comic book series (Moench/Gulacy run)
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; Stranger in a Strange Land, Robt. Heinlein
Macbeth; Hamlet, Wm. Shakespeare
The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
Tom Sawyer; Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Masque of the Red Death, E.A. Poe
- Adolescence
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; The Painted Word; Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, Tom Wolfe
The Story of O., Pauline Reage
The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot
Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter
The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
V.; The Crying of Lot 49; Gravity’s Rainbow, Thos. Pynchon
Catch-22, Jos. Heller
- Young adulthood
almost every book by Italian Calvino
almost all the stories by J.L. Borges
The Fractal Geometry of Nature, Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
In the Shadow of Man; Through a Window, Jane Goodall
I tried chronological like the OP, to the best of my memory.
I notice "early" does not always translate to "most important".
I also notice that many seminal ideas I retained were not from books, but rather from people, television (e.g. Nova), and other sources.
Jean George, _My Side of the Mountain_
Mark Twain, _The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_
various, _The Boy Scout Handbook_
Isaac Asimov, _Adding a Dimension_
James Fixx, _Games for the Superintelligent_
Martin Gardner, _Aha! Insight_
Isaac Asimov, _The Neutrino_
Robert Heinlein, _Starship Troopers_
Tom Clancy, _The Sum of All Fears_
Robert Heinlein, _The Past Through Tomorrow_
Halliday and Resnick, _Fundamentals of Physics_
Kim Stanley Robinson, _Red Mars_
James Gleick, _Genius_
John Lewis, _Mining the Sky_
Neil Postman, _How to Watch TV News_
Ayn Rand, _Atlas Shrugged_
John Conway, Richard Guy, _The Book of Numbers_
David Friedman, _The Machinery of Freedom_
Thomas Sowell, _Basic Economics_
Carl Sagan, _Contact_
Michael Loux, _Metaphysics_
John Steinbeck, _Of Mice and Men_
Neal Stephenson, _Seveneves_
Robert Heinlein
Herman Hesse
A. Solzhenitsyn
Ursula Le Guin
Robert Feynman
Edward Purcell
Oh, Martin Gardner
Dang I forgot JRR Tolkien. (reading other lists)
Is Robert Feynman related to the famouns physicist?
Grin... Richard Feynman of course.
The Liebig isn't something I would have expected to see on a list like this, and I'd be curious to know why you included it. (If I could choose one book to see you review for the competition next year, it would definitely be that one!)
a, his biography is worth talking about: he was thrown out of school, because he burned things up, his apprenticeship was terminated, because he burned things up, he was invited to become a chemist, because he really liked to burn things up. And in his youth he witnessed Germany´s last failed harvest, grew up with the wish to prevent the next one, and, analyzing the portion of plant ashes, he couldn´t burn up any further, found out, which elements are depleted in infertile soil. thus mineral fertilizer was invented.
b, personal effects: I used to rely on compost as a fertilizer, viewing biomass as a fixed budget, like water flowing from one bucket to another. After Liebigs letters I opened the tap, fed my plants a menu of mineral fertilizers and it was such a pleasure to watch. Now, when I see moss growing on rocks I can´t help but wonder: 'Is your presence facilitating the erosion of apatite? Can I infer its distribution from your growth pattern? Do you hold water to hold potassium?' I also started to see mining as an increase in carrying capacity. It is a natural continuation of the contribution of animals to the biosphere: moving across a larger volume to increase the amount of available elements, first as worms, now as drills.
That's wonderful, thank you!
Camus - The Fall
Carol Shields - The Stone Diaries
Derek Parfit - Reasons and Persons
Allie Brosh - Hyperbole and a Half
David Deutsch - The Beginning of Infinity
I have been listening to The Beginning of Infinity and I love it. Insights on nearly every page.
I've been wondering about what the long-term equilibrium price for housing should be (you can probably guess why that topic's on my mind).
Because houses are durable, persisting goods (i.e. capital goods), shouldn't there be a long-term tendency for the supply to build up over time, and the price to trend downwards?
Obviously demand for finite land also plays into prices, and houses do deteriorate etc.
Could you construct a model of the housing market, maybe one with a stable or falling population size , an infinite land supply (everyone works from home on an endless plain or whatever), inelastic and constant demand, extra durable construction techniques etc.
Could you construct a model like that where the price for houses tends towards zero? One that was reasonably close to reality.
In the long run is there a force pushing house prices down?
Are there any examples of persisting goods where the supply has built up over time and they're essentially free now?
sry if it's a bit of a vague scattered question.
> Could you construct a model of the housing market, maybe one with a stable or falling population size , an infinite land supply (everyone works from home on an endless plain or whatever), inelastic and constant demand, extra durable construction techniques etc.
With all those assumptions thrown in, I feel like the closest real-world analogy would be the car market. If you ignore the location aspect of housing then it looks like cars -- they're valuable objects that deteriorate slowly but retain enough value to be worth buying and selling second hand, most people own at least one for personal use, et cetera. The long term value of a car trends towards zero, apart from certain especially desirable cars.
In the real world as others have pointed out the housing market is mostly a land market.
There's the house itself, which acts in a reasonably normal economic way. I've read that houses deteriorate at about 2% per year, so to maintain their value, you have to put in maintenance.
However, there is the house lot, or the legal right to build a housing unit in that particular location. In a lot of metro areas (I live in Boston), that right is *tightly* rationed, and it is worth a lot more than the house itself. (One house-hunter noted back in the '80s that on one street a standing house was worth less than an empty lot on which a "triple-decker" had stood because the empty lot came with the legal right to build 3 housing units, whereas the standing house was just 1 housing unit.)
Critically, the *location* of that right is very important. One factor is the commuting distance to various types of employment. For middle- and upper-middle-class housing, a very important factor is the high school which the location gives the resident the right to send their children to. In practice, the "quality" of the school is the average socioeconomic status of the students in the school. (Depressingly, that average is significantly correlated with the measured educational "outcomes".)
Since housing within the districts of "good schools" is tightly restricted, upper-middle-class people with children bid for the limited number of housing units, maintaining a high market price for them. This feeds back into maintaining a high socioeconomic status of the children in the school.
I haven't thought about how this plays out in modeling. But as long as the upper-middle-class are intensely competitive for providing their children with "all the advantages", the supply of housing "in places with good schools" will likely remain quite constricted. If the number of such families goes down, the price in such places would initially decline. But then the buyers would have a bit more freedom to jockey where they lived, and what had previously been a set of suburbs with equivalent schools would differentiate into slightly-better and slightly-worse subsets, and price differentiation would follow.
Usually when people talk about the price of housing, what they're talking about is mainly the price of land, not the price of houses. Free houses aren't that unusual, but free land only exists when the tax on land is higher than the yield.
This is the opposite of empirical reality. I'm not aware of any places that give away free structures (unless the structure is so rotted it needs repair) but there's plenty of places in the US that still give away free land.
It's rare to give away free houses because houses are usually very hard to transport and not worth it for anybody. Sometimes you can move a very small wooden-or-similar house in several sections but that's about it.
But there's plenty of places where a vacant lot will sell for the same price as a (old, ordinary) house on the same-sized block, making the land effectively free. A really dumpy house in a nice neighbourhood will have negative value because whoever buys it is just going to knock it down anyway and build a better house.
Of course it's also true that there's places where land is practically free. But those places aren't in cities.
Your empirical reality clearly differs from mine. Here's one example of a house sold for a symbolic amount: https://www.hemhyra.se/nyheter/tva-lagenheter-saldes-for-en-krona-nu-saljs-de-igen-for-en-halv-miljon/
This story does indeed have a house (a mobile home) sold for 1 kroner. But the house was actually worth about 250,000 kroner because it was, a week later, listed for that amount. The 1 kroner sale was a nuisance sale: the person simply didn't want to deal with the transportation. And it was so unusual it got a huge amount of attention. So it's actually contrary to the idea that free houses "aren't that unusual."
In contrast thousands of people and companies each year get free land in the US.
> So it's actually contrary to the idea that free houses "aren't that unusual."
Mobile homes are a special case because you can move them. The price for a liveable home that can be moved to another location won't be zero.
But most houses are not (economically) moveable so their value can easily be zero or even negative.
If the highest bid was SEK 1 after an enormous amount of attention, it seems strange to assume that the actual value was SEK 250k on the basis of the current owner's hopes to sell it for that in the future.
Equal, not higher. If it's higher, the land isn't free; it's negatively-priced i.e. you have to pay people to take it.
Houses are capital goods, but capital goods depreciate. Homes require regular maintenance, especially for older homes. If demand in an area drops, it's no longer economical to build new homes and the supply will decrease over time. I used to live in a small town with house prices below the cost of building supplies. When there was a fire or if a house was vacant too long, it would get town down and not replaced.
A lot of questions like yours are looking at high demand cities like SF or NY. Those markets are badly distorted by the kinds of high income people who would like to live there. If remote work were universal, those places would be far cheaper, as we would essentially have close to your infinite land scenario. In practice not that many, as a percent, can work remotely. Also, not every place is livable - lack of amenities, including internet, lack of enough infrastructure, etc.
What type of entity would tear down the house that was vacant too long, and on what formal basis?
Houses that aren't maintained will degrade. This happens slowly with all houses, but very quickly for abandoned houses, including those not lived in temporarily. Some types of issues (like holes in roofs leading to water damage) can damage houses very quickly. At some point the house is worth less than the material and work needed to fix it, in which case it will be torn down.
As far as mechanism, generally the city will condemn it, and someone will pay for it to be torn down to avoid liability of a person getting injured on the property.
Thanks that clarifies a lot! :) 🙂
Also abandoned houses attract problems. Homeless people, crime, runaway children etc.
Don't forget regulations - there is an absolute minimum price for legally building a house that is not that low, even if the land is free, because there's a minimum size to the house, lots of safety standards, etc.
Don't forget 'location, location, location.' Different areas also change in desirability over time. So very often you see oversupply in one spot and undersupply somewhere else. Basically, it's quite complex because it is not just about general supply and demand, but also about demand in specific locations, as well as desired living standards.
City living is popular right now, so there is a lot of demand for housing in constrained locations.
PS. A capital good is not just defined as being durable, but also used "used in the production of goods or services." This can be (partially) applicable to those who work at home, but you cannot simply call all houses a capital good.
Housing markets are local, and there are plenty of local housing markets in which demand has evaporated and the price of residential real estate is extremely low. See, eg, ghost towns out West, or Detroit proper, where the median price sale price of a home in 2014 was apparently $14,000. https://detroit.curbed.com/2019/1/22/18192222/detroit-home-sale-prices-up-downtown-much-pricier-sales-than-neighborhoods. Though Detroit might still have been working through the effects of the subprime mortgage crisis, so perhaps supply was unusually high (i.e., the supply of homes currently offered for sale). But even in Detroit, prices have rebounded.
Part of the problem with your question is the assumption that the supply will continue to build up over time. Once prices drop low enough, builders will stop building more.
I recently finished the 3 body trilogy and quite liked it. Now I am looking for recommendations in a similar vein...
I then read Liu's "Ball Lightning" and liked it.
Have you read project hail Mary? Probably the closest to the style.
Project Hail Mary is great. No 3 body problem, but very good and something I could read very successfully with a 9 year old.
A second vote for Broken Stars. Some really impactful stories in there.
Thanks will check it out. Don't much care about where it comes from tbh.
Liked the game theoretic aspect of the whole dark forest theme, certainly much more believable than Stephenson's Seven Eves (and I generally like Stephenson). The world is ending and people build rockets? Gimme a break...
In that vein I really enjoyed the game theory aspects of "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
I wrote a short story about a meeting of EA rogue actors, if you’re looking for a quick light read! “Doing Chaotic Good Better”
https://solquy.substack.com/p/12623-doing-chaotic-good-better
Seems like a retread of KSR's Ministry for the Future? I guess it could be convergent evolution, but the prion one is explicitly in there, scaring / killing leaders of negative externality companies, etc. as well as the general concept of rogue actors / ecoterrorists taking matters into their own hands after failure of the international order to address existential threats.
I haven't heard of that one before! Thanks for the rec, I will put it on my reading list :)
+1, that was a fun read!
+1 would recommend this, this blog is great
Not sure if I'm allowed to do this (please delete if not) but wanted to plug my travel substack, Mzungu (https://mzungu.substack.com).
A sprinkling of wanderlust into your inbox!
P.S. Love the blog, Scott, I read every single one.
The official rule (from Open Thread 208) is to limit yourself to self-promotion 2x per year, outside of the (infrequent) "Classifieds" open threads.
I will endorse https://mzungu.substack.com/p/the-moleskine-notebooks-mt-fuji as "content dissimilar to Scott's blogposts that people here will like".
I'm hijacking this because you replied to me earlier regarding editing and then (maybe) deleted your comment. Unfortunately for you I still got an email notification. I'd appreciate any feedback on current / future essays you'd be willing to give. Contact me at pelorus.substack@gmail.com if interested.
Very kind, thank you!
I was wondering what a travel substance was, but it seems you mean "Substack"!
Ah yes - that's exactly what I meant! Thanks for spotting it, have fixed it.
I've been in a relationship for some years now and I'm reaching the point where it seems like we should either get married and start a family or break up. I'm inclined to the first option (yay!) but it's a decision to take with some consideration. Does anyone know a good exercise or checklist to help me think through this decision? Like, what questions should I consider before I propose? I've seen some lists of topics for couples to discuss together, I'm looking for a list that I can work through alone.
(Inb4: Yes, I will talk to close friends and family. Yes, I will do what my hearth tells me in the end.)
The Marriage Decision: Everything Forever or Nothing Ever Again
-> https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/marriage-decision.html
This is exactly what I'm looking for. Thank you!
My checklist for a long term mate I wasn't 1000% sure about would be something like the following:
1) How financially/professionally productive/stable is this person likely to be in 10-20 years?
2) How emotionally stable/together is this person likely to be in 10-20 years?
3) How attracted to this person am I likely to be in 10-20 years?
4) Are our visions of our future family size and overall life plan compatible?
If those questions have positive answers then the rest is just details. That said I personally find couples who are together for many years before marrying odd. Though all kinds of relationships can and do work.
I would say in my own personal experience. I proposed to my wife after ~9 months of dating, and we got married after about 18 months together. We had known each other slightly longer. At the time I was not "crazy in love with her", but I had made a subjective evaluation that she was probably likely to be one of my better options for quite some time.
And that has both proved out to be VERY VERY true, and our relationship has mostly only gotten/better stronger with time (with a small hiccup for first year or two after first child). Married now ~14 years.
My preference was similar to yours, but hers was not. I spent about six years persuading her of the virtues of long term contracting.
We are about to have our fortieth anniversary.
The best advice I could give my younger self on this issue, I think, would be: know why the other person is interested in marrying *you*. Be sure you're OK with that reason. Is it a reason you find inherently admirable and reasonable, is it realistic (about you), and is it something that, if it takes effort on your part to maintain, you are OK with exerting the effort to maintain (e.g. because it's part of your personal goals anyway)?
You say you're looking for a list you can work through alone, but I would strongly suggest discussing it with your partner as well. Yes, a proposal is supposed to be a surprise, but only sort of - your partner should know that it's on your mind, that you think of them as potentially a lifelong relationship, and you should be confident they're thinking of you the same way.
I think the critical fact for me in deciding to marry my current wife was that I could talk with her about ideas without feeling as though I needed a translator. To generalize that, consider what are the things about yourself that make you happy, make you feel as though you are paying a fair rent on the amount of existence you take up. Is your partner someone who can share those things with you, appreciate them? That isn't sufficient — I can imagine, probably know, people who satisfy that criterion who I would not want to be married to — but it is important and I think the only relevant insight I can offer.
Do they make you better or do they make you worse
Do you make them better or make them worse
Do you think they will be a good parent
How often do you mentally categorize them as an adversararial vs cooperative
Are there ever times where you're not looking forward to sharing some aspect of your life with them because a) they'll make a bad situation feel worse or b) they will dampen the joy of a good situation
These are good! To add to my reply above, and piggybacking on your thoughts:
Does your SO genuinely share in the happiness you get from other friendships, projects, passions, etc., or do these things make them jealous?
I would add also that a "dealbreaker" mentality isn't helpful... it's going to be up to you to decide whether any particular issues are bad enough to make marriage ill-advised, and the big picture is what really matters.
This reminds me of an old post from Roissy, prole v SWPL:
https://heartiste.org/2010/12/29/prole-vs-swpl/
Proles tend to be more impulsive, acting on "low" "base" instincts like "OMG she has BIG BOOBS" or "I WANT A BABY NOW." Impulsivity, in other words. This has obvious pitfalls in contrast to the SWPL method of what might be called cautionism. The SWPL thinks long and hard about whether their partner is "compatible," looking for books and blog posts to read, establishing a checklist of must-haves, etc. The prole failure mode is having an unplanned pregnancy, the SWPL failure mode is trying to have a kid at 43 and failing.
All told, SWPLism is probably a better way to live your life than proleism, but that's a false choice and you should try to avoid the pitfalls of both. You probably live around SWPLs more than proles, so beware of cautionism.
It's funny that they called Red Delicious prole due to an overly sweet nature, which is the exact opposite of reality. Red Delicious are mealy, dry, and bland due to being bred for size, color, and shelf stability at the expense of flavor. I guess confidently pontificating while factually wrong must be SWPL.
My understanding is that it's been a continuous process of decline - the original cultivar from the early 1900s was actually quite sweet, but as growers bred for size/color/shelf stability, they selected out some important flavor related genes (eg ones that contributed to sweetness/juiciness were lost due to also contributing yellow coloration, which was considered undesirable). There's lots of discussions of this out there if you look for it.
>now everybody hates them, not sure why.
Options have improved. Apples are one of those areas where technology helps. University of Minnesota does great work with Apples.
Two thoughts based on the replies I see here based on my limited experience having been married 5 years. First, if you have doubts, that’s not necessarily a red flag to me. Some folks get married on a coin flip and other folks second guess their lunch order. Without knowing more about you, I can’t read into that. If a marriage commitment is your goal and but this isn’t the right relationship for that, there’s no point in giving it another 2 years just to find that out then.
Second, I think an optimization approach to this problem is fundamentally incompatible with human psychology for three reasons:
First, you have imperfect information and people and circumstances change. You can’t really solve for a global optimum based on a limited time window. You may both want kids but what happens if you have fertility issues? What if your spouse develop a medical issue that dramatically changes their ability to work or do the things together you love?
Second, it ignores human loss aversion. It’s painful to think there might be someone better out there if you just waited longer but far worse to know that you has something great with you ex but you threw it away for a chance at something better that didn’t materialize.
Last, it discounts “induced fit”. I’ve found myself enjoying many things that I wouldn’t normally do because I get to do them with my wife. I didn’t chose my kid’s personality but I love it because they are my kid.
This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t find alignment on the big things before getting married (many books with these questions and several good questions in this thread) but just to say that I think a better predictor of marital happiness is if you and your partner are committed to putting in the effort to building and maintaining a relationship together.
I don't know why people are giving you a hard time for considering this decision carefully.
I read somewhere recently that you should marry someone who's a good conversation partner for you, because you'll likely wind up talking to that person more than anyone else for the rest of your life. I thought that was clever.
What are the potential in-laws like, and what is SO's relationship with them like? Those people and those relationships will play a major role in your life if you marry and start a family.
This should be obvious, but it's very important: consider whether the two of you have compatible values, compatible visions of what constitutes a life well lived. Actions often speak louder than words here.
Be on the lookout for pathological/maladaptive behavior patterns. Friends and family can be helpful in noticing these.
How does SO treat people who have totally worn out their patience? How do they deal with these feelings? That will be how you and your kids are treated at some point.
Does SO hold grudges, nurse bitterness and resentment against anyone? If so, they'll have a grudge against you one day, and they'll probably hold one against at least one of your kids too, eventually.
Does SO apologize when they hurt you? Do they forgive you when you hurt them?
How does SO feel about divorce? Is it something they would only consider as a last resort in an extreme situation, or will part of their mind be constantly weighing whether they want to stay with you or bail?
Remember that this decision is always to some extent a leap of faith. You never know what the future will hold, what challenges you'll face together, how each of you will change over time. It's an adventure, not in the sense of like a fun vacation, but in the sense of an epic journey with twists and turns that test you but also offers great rewards. If you go into it with a whole-hearted commitment, you will find yourself free to become part of something bigger than the two of you as individuals, and live a more fruitful and in many ways richer life than you ever could have on your own.
Go for it! (says he who's ~20 yr marriage has now ended.) Kids and grandkids are the meaning of life. It will change your life for the better even if it doesn't work out in the end.
I'm seeing two potential red flags here. One is that you've been together for a long time but haven't decided to get married yet (despite describing that as a "yay!" option). The other is that "break up" is an option still on the table with this specific person, despite seeming to want marriage in general.
So I would start with a question - why haven't you gotten married yet?
The way you describe this situation sounds like you're compatible enough that you've not felt the need to break up, but not compatible enough that marriage is obviously good. Now, that may have more to do with one or both of your perspectives on marriage. Some people value the actual wedding and trapping far less than others. So, "we haven't thought about it much" could be a plausible answer. You should know if that's the case, and that would make the red flags less problematic. If one or both of you really want to be married and this is known to the other partner, that would seriously concern me.
Sorry to start on a downer! I consider marriage to be a very important decision, especially with the intention to have kids.
As for questions to ask yourself and her, here are some that I think are very important:
If there's any disagreement, it would be good to ask your partner why they feel the way they do.
Kids:
-How many, if any, kids do you each want? Close in age, or spread out?
-What religious or anti-religious teaching do you want to share with your children? What moral system do you want to instill in them?
-Should one of you prioritize raising children over a career? Short term, long term, permanent?
-How well do you each deal with stress from lack of sleep and increased responsibilities?
Finance:
-Do you want or need both partners to have careers? What would you do if one career required a move to another city (still relevant if only one person has a career)?
-Do you have shared finances now, and if not would you plan to change that? If not, why not?
-Do you trust your partner's judgement in financial situations and with major purchases? (Specifically, consider each person's perspective if only one of you handled all of the finances and bills of the household - would you be comfortable with the other person having that kind of access?)
First things first, if you are asking like that it's a bad sign. It's one thing to be uncertain about kids or marriage, but normally the other option is "continue as-is for a bit longer".
Secondly, is the issue that one of you wants children and the other one doesn't? Are you in your 30s and worried that it's now or never for kids? (here, nature is rather asymmetric and only the woman's age really matters)
Marriage, fundamentally, is a symbolic thing - it's great to want the ceremony and the legal benefits but the real decision is "do I want to spend the rest of my life with this person".
Kids, on the other hand, are a massive stressor and while every parent says they're worth it in the long run your relationship needs to be rock solid before you start - kids *will not* fix a troubled relationship, don't put kids through that.
The crux of it, in my opinion, is that if you feel you're "settling", you almost certainly shouldn't. The ideal for a relationship is "I can't believe I got so lucky as to be with *her/him*!"
Meh, when I got married I felt I was "settling" for the likely best option I would have for a while. Our marriage/relationship gotten stronger with time and now I would say I am SUPER SUPER SUPER SUPER lucky. I didn't feel nearly that strongly when we got married.
I see several people giving a response among these lines. Being passionately in love is great. But that's not what every successful relationship looks like, and feeling like that now is not a 100% guarantee you'll feel this way later.
Yes, the way the question was phrased is a bit of a red flag. But it can also be a good thing to step out of your emotions for a moment and take a more calculating look at your life situation. Not doing this (i.e. just going along with the positive emotions you're feeling right now) will make you gloss over problems that can become important points of friction down the line. Speaking from experience here.
We don't have enough information to make any kind of real determination, but with the way the OP was phrased, it seems very important to dig into the "are they settling for each other?" question. When my wife and I got married, we both very much wanted to do so. It wasn't really a question at that point, but a matter of when and how - mostly in order to arrange the wedding day.
As Thor mentions, when kids come or other relationship stressors, it will make things harder, not easier. If they are not sure about the relationship now, I would be very concerned about them trying to bring kids into it. If he's happier in the relationship than he's saying, then that's fine too.
I'm very happy in the relationship and I haven't said otherwise anywhere.
Hmm, interesting. Then whence the doubt?
I'm genuinely very glad to hear that.
I’m just some guy on the internet and free advice is usually worth everything you pay for it, but if you have to think about it, I would say don’t get married now.
“Seems like now is the time to get married or break up” is a really bad sign for future marriage.
You should, after having known and lived with this person for years, have a passionate desire for your significant other to take the relationship to the next level. You might be nervous about getting the event right, but the outcome should not be in doubt.
Imagine yourself as a marathon runner who has been training for years to set a world record. Your mindset should not be “I guess it’s time to run the marathon, or potentially quit running forever.” You should be overwhelmingly focused on how to run the marathon correctly and making sure you begin on the right foot, and you should know that you *want* to begin now because you’ve readied yourself to begin.
If there is a good bit of uncertainty about whether you see yourself with this person, whether your future would be successful, whether you should ask more questions and what those questions should be, etc., then that raises a quite serious doubt in my mind that your relationship to this point has reached a level of maturity where marriage should be considered. If it’s been more than one to two years, then it’s time to get really serious about developing the relationship’s maturity and only if that goes well should you consider marriage.
The Endowement Effect makes us overvalue what we have. To counteract this I've found it useful to imagine I don't have the object or person in question and ask myself how far I would go to acquire it or them. As an example: I don't want to sell my inherited cabin in Bumfuck Nowhere, but if I imagine that I had the value of the cabin in cash instead, I definitely wouldn't buy that cabin either. I don't want to sell my flat, but I'd also buy it again in a heartbeat if I imagine I didn't have it.
I used this technique for my ex (heh) to ask the following questions:
1. Do you want to stay with your partner as is?
2. Imagine you were torn apart by external factors outside the control of either of you, but a year later you unexpectedly got the choice to get back together--would you?
3. Repeat question 2, but add fun modifiers such as having started a new relationship during that year, having to move to a different country, having lost the memories of your shared past, etc.
Caveat: I have no relevant personal experience with marriage.
I once read about a couple who asked their friends and family the following question: "suppose we get married and some time later get a divorce. Why do you think we got that divorce? What is most likely to have gone wrong?" I thought it was clever, since otherwise it seems likely the friends and family will forget or dismiss perceived-as-unlikely bad outcomes, whereas with this question you hopefully learn the most likely bad outcome in their opinion, even if they consider it unlikely overall.
That sounds clever if people answer sincerely, but a question VERY unlikely to solicit honest responses.
Here's a riddle for you.
When we play audio on fast-forward - and as far as I know that extends to both analogue and digital formats - its pitch rises.
On the other hand, when we play video on fast-forward (again, both digital and analogue) it doesn't become blue-shifted.
a. Why?
b. Is it possible to record video in such a way that it does become blue-shifted when played fast?
c. Is it possible to record sound in such a way that it doesn't become high-pitched when played fast?
A related question i have wondered for a long time: When i play podcasts or videos on 2x or higher these days, the pitch change is quite minimal. Is there some new processing algorithm being used these days to correct for or eliminate the pitch change?
Some knowledge of the way analog TV works will help. This image [1] shows the amplitude of the television signal across a single line of video. When we speed this up, compressing it in time (which is not, I think, exactly how VCRs fast-forward in practice), we don't just affect the "pitch" of the colors.
At the ends of a single line of video are synchronization mechanisms and other odds and ends like the color burst. An analog video signal is drawn to the screen using an electron beam that sweeps left to right and top to bottom - even if you're speeding through the signal quickly, the electron beam keeps moving at the same rate.
I think that a sped-up signal would look like lines being compressed in length, all scrambled down the screen since they no longer match to the width of the TV. You'd also see black traces between each line - that's the synchronization mechanisms that are usually to the left and right of each line.
One easy way to think about the video signal is, roughly, amplitude = brightness of the line on the screen. Just because a wave is faster doesn't mean it has more amplitude, so the brightness remains unchanged. Color is a bit weirder - it's sent at a different frequency and changes in color are represented as changes in phase. Speeding up the signal probably wouldn't mess with the color too much, but I don't know for certain. I think the audio portion would become higher-pitched, as you'd expect.
Digital TV is entirely different - just speeding up the underlying wave would make the bits come in faster, as long as the receiver remains tuned to match. Possibly the receiver would start dropping packets and you'd get video corruption since they're coming in too fast to handle, but most likely is just that the receiver can't decode the stream at all.
[1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/eue8i.png
b) If we were to do an analog recording of the electromagnetic wave that is the light arriving at our eye, and then do an analog replay of that faster, it would indeed be blue-shifted. But we don't do that, since that EM wave is around 600 terahertz, and we don't need to, since your eye isn't sensitive to phase of the EM field. (As opposed to your ears, which do detect phase differences in sound between the ears to decode directionalilty.) Instead, we record the momentary intensity of the EM wave, with a low-pass filter that cuts off intensity changes above about 30 hertz (since your eye can't detect changes faster than that).
c) It would be possible to record sound in a similar way. Effectively, you'd be taking short-time sound spectrograms and recording those. Then for reply, you'd reconstruct each spectrogram for even shorter time than was used to record them, but regenerating the recorded frequencies as they were recorded. (Note that this Rube Goldberg process is what we actually do for color TV. But for audio, it's cheaper to record the signal itself.)
What you describe in (c) is roughly how digital tempo shifting without pitch shifting works in reality. In fact, multiple popular audio compression formats also use frequency-domain encodings, and playing those files back at different tempos while preserving pitch (but generally also creating a bunch of artifacting) can be done by altering the behavior of the decoder.
I absolutely love that question and have played with it a bunch on Twitter.
Here's some related questions:
d. Why when we pause audio it becomes silent, while pausing video does not make it become a black screen?
e. What would paused-but-not-silent audio sound like?
f. What are the differences between our aural and visual wave-perception biological apparatuses (apparati?) that makes it so it makes sense that our aural and visual technologies work differently even though they both ultimately just produce waves?
A good answer for d) is here: https://www.quora.com/How-can-your-VCR-display-an-image-while-paused
TL;DR when pausing a video tape, the tape stops moving but the VCR heads keep decoding, sending the same image back repeatedly. Anything digital, of course, has memory to store the current frame and can just keep showing that.
And early generation VCRs *didn't* do that, and couldn't do freeze frame. Our first did go to a black screen when paused.
>VCR heads keep decoding,
Not only do they keep decoding, but the heads also keep *moving*, because of how a vcr works. A VHS tape is actually an analog recording on magnetic tape of an analog tv signal, which are radio waves in the MHz band - thousands of times higher frequency than the highest sound we're capable of hearing. Since storing the signal on tape the same way as we do for audio would require the tape to move at absurd speeds and require literal miles of tape, a VCR instead spins the *read head* vertically across the tape as the tape moves horizontally, so the signal is recorded as diagonal stripes across the tape.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfuARMCyTvg
>e. What would paused-but-not-silent audio sound like?
The very specific and annoying sound of old programs freezing and the sound doing a fraction of a second loop?
I don't know if you do any audio editing, but Melodyne pretty much allows you to do this - I'm probably going to get the details wrong, but as far as I'm aware it fourier-analyzes the waveform you feed it, so that it knows at any moment what combination of frequencies are sounding, and then you can drag the cursor back and forth along the waveform, or hold it in one place, in which case it just plays all the frequencies that are happening at that moment. So it's a static sound, but exactly what static sound depends entirely on what the music is doing in the selected timeslice.
Fast-forward music compress the waves, hence make it rise in pitch. Fast-forward video don't alter the image, only the time they stay on screen. Video aren't a continuous vibration, they're disjointed pictures in quick successions.
Or to put it another way, it's not the same kind of "acceleration". Imagine that you had a music made of disjointed notes, each 1s long, each starting once the last ended. Then you keep the same notes, but only have them last 0.5s: your music is accelerated, but the pitch is not elevated.
At least for digital videos. I don't know enough of analog screens & magnetic tapes to theorize on them.
Old school video tapes used to play audio as too fast forwarded and it was high pitched and squeaky.
"Imagine that you had a music made of disjointed notes, each 1s long, each starting once the last ended. Then you keep the same notes, but only have them last 0.5s: your music is accelerated, but the pitch is not elevated."
That pretty much describes midi files (where the data stored is not audio waves, but a series of note triggers, giving the onset time, pitch, intensity and offset time of the notes, but the notes themselves are played by a synthesizer using whatever sound patches have been selected). Increasing the playback speed of the midi file does not raise the pitch.
Edit: dang - I forgot to click post, and was already ninja'd by the time I noticed.
We have a way of encoding music in that way: MIDI!
It works at the "note" level of abstraction, instead of the actual sound waves, so playing it faster does not raise the pitch.
I write a simple newsletter where I share three interesting things, once a week.
https://interessant3.substack.com
If you want people to click your link to interesting things you may want to give an example
This is another update to my long-running attempt at predicting the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Previous update is here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-251/comment/10609726
17 % on Ukrainian victory (up from 15 % on November 20)
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24 without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
47 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (up from 45 % on November 20).
36 % on Ukrainian defeat (down from 40 % on November 20)
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
This update is based on recent decision to supply Ukraine with German and American tanks. Nobody claims that deliveries promised so far are sufficient to ensure Ukrainian victory, but nevertheless, that decision might prove to be an important juncture.
Ukraine’s allies are divided between those who want to supply Ukraine with everything it needs to win the war and those who are... not sure, I guess. Many postcommunist countries and Britain are in the first group (see also The Tallin Pledge: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/joint-statement-the-tallinn-pledge), while Germany and the US are in the second. But the decision to supply tanks increases the likelihood that they will over time move to the first group.
It also imho increases chances that war will continue into 2024; I now think that those is over 50 %.
*Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of 2022, that is.
Some of the listed victory/defeat conditions are stricter towards Ukraine than Russia. If we were back in late Feb 2022, probably the current situation would already count as a victory for Ukraine.
As an example, imagine if Ukraine makes a major breakthrough and reconquers all of Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblast, but is only able to take back half of the territories in Luhans or Donetsk that were lost post Feb 2022, and cannot cross into Crimea, leading to Minsk n ceasefire, but they get accepted into EU. This would resolve as an Ukrainian defeat, but in a strategic sense most would consider it a victory, even if Russians could claim they freed most of Luhansk and protected Crimea.
Not saying it does not make sense, as expectations shifted overtime, but I wanted to make a note on this.
Do you think it is likely that there will be Russian advances with significant gains (e.g., capturing rest of Donetsk and half of another Oblast, possibly Harkov or Dnipropetrovsk), or is the probability you assigned to Ukrainian defeat mostly due to it happening just by Russia not loosing too much before a ceasefire?
Yeah, you are right that this is a slight bug in the model, but I consider it highly unlikely that Ukraine would get into the EU unless its territorial disputes with Russia are settled. Otherwise EU would invite itself into possible direct war situation with Russia, for which there is a little apetite.
I.e. imho in this scenario they would have to formally surrender their claims on Russian occupied territory, and that would turn that scenario into real Ukrainian defeat. If Ukraine would want to increase their chances to get into the EU by ceding Crimea and Donbas, they could have done that before the war. Ukrainians, however, very much do not want to.
Re: your last question - I think both scenarios are possible.
Beating back Russia to the 2014 line and securing a ceasefire there must _surely_ be considered a Ukraine victory?! This would mean a total failure of Russia’s war aims, and just because it could have gone even worse…
Yes, I agree. RH was referring to a scenario when Ukraine would reconquer some of currently occupied territory, but not all of it, though.
Of course I recognize that it would get ridiculous if we would be talking about one village, then I would have to apply common sense and reclassify that situation as Ukrainian victory. Fortunately we are not playing for money so it is no big deal.
Almost 50% of a compromise? It seems that Russia (or at least Putin) clearly wants all of Ukraine, now or later, while Ukraine (or at least Zelenskiy) clearly won't settle for anything less than pre-2014 borders, and likely some Western guarantees of security, since he cannot trust Russia. Of course, if one of the two is out of the picture, the calculus changes quite a bit. Otherwise, there is a clear escalation, now with Western tanks and more artillery on the way, and Russia inching close to a proper mobilization and war-footing economy. It might be unwise to bet against Russia in any protracted conflict, no such bet ever paid off. But also the West cannot let Ukraine lose, so there is a clear impasse there. Basically, I don't see a framework for an agreement, short of one side or the other's outright victory... which is not likely.
Pfft. Russia hasn't won a serious war on its own in 200 years. It feels like some Russians have bullshitted themselves so long about the Great Patriotic War -- that pure Russian sacrifice and stalwartness won it, ignoring for the sake of pride the role of massive American logistical support -- that now they think everything is going to turn out like Stalingrad.
Well, I mean, I think the Ukrainian war *is* going to turn out like Stalingrad. But this time the Russians are playing the role of the Nazis.
I agree with your second sentiment, that, with enough Western tanks and artillery, competent crews and some air support, Ukraine may win a decisive battle like that. Assuming Zelenskyy gets his house in order and stops the graft and theft that was as bad as in Russia and is apparently still not rooted out. I don't have clear odds of that, it depends on whether Putin finds a way to clean his own house, which looks iffy so far.
The first point is... questionable. I think the prevailing sentiment among historians is that Western help in 1943 and on shortened the war by a couple of years or so. Then again, the US would have probably used the nukes on Germany in 1945 if the war outcome was still in doubt. Counterfactuals are a fool's errand though. And yes, Russia did win a few wars, and lost its share, just like any other country still around. They did beat the anti-Bolshevik Western invasion in the early 1920s. The Finnish war was a fiasco, on the other hand. And their help to anti-Franco forces didn't work out. The Chechen war was eventually won. It's a mixed bag.
America's record is not any more impressive, really. Well, the US did make a short work of Granada, I guess. And more recently was successful at destroying ISIL, though far from alone.
See, that's what I mean about delusion. The Soviet Union would never have beaten the Germans without American logistics. Stalin would've crapped his pants again after losing Moscow and cut a deal, and it would have fallen to Patton to go all the way to Berlin and raise a flag over the Reichstag. As for the record not being comparable to the Americans -- ha ha. Who do you think won the war in the Pacific almost entirely by itself? While at the same time supplying the bulk of the forces (and material of course) for Anzio and the drive up the Italian peninsula, and for D-Day and the drive to Berlin from the West?
I have to seriously doubt the USSR could have achieved a total defeat of Germany without US aid. They did stop the 1941 offensive on their own, and maybe they could have fought to a stalemate somewhere between the pre-war borders and the 1942 battle lines -- who knows? But assuming a total defeat of Germany is another matter.
Even with the USSR's manpower advantage, they were still losing the war of attrition prior to Stalingrad (they were taking casualties at around a 2:1 rate, and their manpower advantage was somewhat less than that). And German equipment advantages had a lot to do with that, though tactics/doctrine were another factor. So it's quite possible to imagine an Eastern Front in which the battle lines are largely frozen but the unaided Soviets are bled white at a greater rate, or about the same rate, as the Germans, due to a persistent German materiel advantage.
US aid was vast and did a lot to keep the Soviet economy and military moving -- not just aid in equipment, but in gasoline and other basic commodities. On the other side of the ledger, the contribution of Western strategic bombing has also been assessed upward a few times in recent decades (e.g. Overy, Tooze) -- it didn't crush the German economy, but it prevented German production from reaching anything near its potential and also forced the Luftwaffe to divert a lot of resources west.
Of course, it's still possible to admire the Russian fighting spirit in the war and the sacrifices it entailed, which pale in comparison to any sacrifices made in the West and are rightly something to be proud of. Raw fighting spirit can count for a lot, but in the absence of good equipment, it entails taking a lot of casualties. Which is why supplies and equipment are such a force multiplier for militaries that are rich in spirit but poor in materiel -- Russia in WW2, Ukraine in the present.
> Raw fighting spirit can count for a lot, but in the absence of good equipment, it entails taking a lot of casualties.
Wasn't this basically Imperial Japan's strategy?
Well, Japan had superior equipment relative to China, where most of the fighting happened, but vastly inferior equipment relative to the US. So fair enough, on that front.
I don't see how the calculus changes much materially for Ukraine between accepting the status quo ante and accepting some territorial concessions to Russia. Ukraine's ability to resist another Russian invasion probably didn't have much to do with its control of the territories in question before the war, and those territories are depopulated and economically useless now. Though obviously the propaganda value matters, the loss would sting, perhaps to be compared to the French loss of Alsace-Lorraine, which they weren't happy about but had to accept for almost 50 years.
But I think the idea is that, at some point, people eventually just get tired of the killing, as each day this war continues it's lose-lose for both Russia and Ukraine. The analogy is probably something like Korea, a war that ended in stalemate and went on much longer than it needed to but still shorter than it could have.
Presumably you end up with some sort of agreement in which Ukraine pledges not to join NATO (which, strategically, the West shouldn't want anyway) but does get major Western military and economic aid, and Russian troops give up some, but probably not all, of the territory they've occupied. Or alternatively, you just get a Korea-style armistice, with the battle lines frozen and a commitment to a formal peace to come later, but the formal peace never comes.
In general I agree, but there is a major caveat re: those "depopulated" territories (both those occupied in 2014 and 2022): many of their population are now internal refugees in Ukraine, and they are a powerful political force against compromise peace, since they of course want to get back home.
Also they are not actually depopulated as in "empty"; as far as I know, most inhabitants stayed there.
Good point on the political factor of internal refugees. Though as time goes on those refugees get firmly settled elsewhere and the loss becomes more of a psychic wound than a place they would honestly return to if only Russia left.
"Also they are not actually depopulated as in "empty"; as far as I know, most inhabitants stayed there."
From what I can tell this is probably true, though of course no one's doing a census now and Ukraine apparently hasn't even conducted a census since 2001. But we have to think the younger, better educated segments of the population are disproportionately among those who left, so those places have grown emptier in an economic sense than in raw headcount. And they will only diminish in economic importance as the population ages and infrastructure is destroyed or decays.
Russia lost in Afghanistan, in World War I, the 1905 war against Japan, and arguably the Cold War.
Don't forget the Crimean War.
I think in this case "compromise" would mean something more of a deadlock, e.g. what we happened between North and South Korea. It is not like any side was really happy with the outcome, but they made a cease-fire as neither had the power to move forward.
Yep, or like what happened after previous Russo-Ukrainian war in 2015. Many wars ended similarly.
Agreed, a compromise is out of the question for both Putin and Zelensky, and at the very least, with steadily increasing weapons delivieries to Ukraine, the percentage should go down, not up.
> It might be unwise to bet against Russia in any protracted conflict, no such bet ever paid off.
That's a bit exaggerated. Russia was forced into peace during WW1 because of heavy losses,
it would probably have lost WW2 if not for Lend-Lease, and the Soviet-Afghan war lasted 10 years and ultimately contributed to the fall of the SU.
> Russia was forced into peace during WW1 because of heavy losses
Actually the story was far more complex. Roughly, there were two revolutions, the Bolsheviks were focused on consolidating power and Trotsky figured out a way to avoid fighting Germany at the same time. It was followed by the Civil War they won by 1922 against the Western "intervention".
> it would probably have lost WW2 if not for Lend-Lease
This is a counterfactual, so there is no way what would have happened in a hypothetical world that is not an actual one, but what you said is what was sold to the US public and is very much a US-centric view.
Russia did indeed lose in 1905 to Japan due to mismanagement (ironically, the invading force ran out of fuel, like in Ukraine) and the lack of political will to fight abroad during dire economic conditions; and by 1990 in Afghanistan (every invader lost in Afghanistan, no exceptions!). How much it contributed to the fall of the SU is a matter of debate. Having watched it unravel from the inside, I saw it as Gorbachev's ineptitude in relaxing restrictions, he started with political reforms instead of economic ones.
>but what you said is what was sold to the US public and is very much a US-centric view.
I'm not from or in the US so I wouldn't know, but you don't have to believe me anyway. Stalin, Khrushchev, Zhukov, and historians both American and Russian are slightly more authorative on the subject, and according to Wikipedia they all say the same thing: If not for Lend Lease, Russia and the rest of Europe would have lost the war. So if that's the US-centric view, that's because it's basically everyone's view. And I included the counterfactual to oppose the view that nobody can win against Russia in a protracted war, which is clearly not the case.
Also no, Afghanistan having fended off every invader ever, no exceptions, is a modern myth. See e.g. an overview by ancient historian Brett Deveraux here:
https://acoup.blog/2021/08/27/fireside-friday-august-27-2021/
My favourite quote from that article:
> Afghanistan isn’t the graveyard of empires. It is the midlife-crisis-car of empires: an overly expensive, not terribly useful thing empires buy when they are bored and not sure what to do with their excess income that is a swiftly regretted embarrassment.
Interesting. I didn't know that lend-lease was that significant.
> 92.7% of the wartime production of railroad equipment by the USSR was supplied by Lend-Lease,[35] including 1,911 locomotives and 11,225 railcars[41] which augmented the existing stocks of at least 20,000 locomotives and half a million railcars.[42]
So... about 5-10% extra in all areas, though a lot more in terms of wartime production, except for tanks, which were mostly Soviet.
It certainly stands to reason that when Lend-Lease ramped up by 1943 or so, it helped the Soviet Army win, or at least win much more decisively.
> If not for Lend Lease, Russia and the rest of Europe would have lost the war.
I can't find independent sources claiming that, it's from Khrushchev's memoirs. A more reasonable view is further down:
> Left to their own devices, Stalin and his commanders might have taken twelve to eighteen months longer to finish off the Wehrmacht; the ultimate result would probably have been the same, except that Soviet soldiers could have waded at France's Atlantic beaches.
As for Afghanistan, the blog article is not disagreeing with the prevailing view that every imperial power in the last few centuries had to back off, once the cost, in lives and money, became too much.
Lend-lease is often underrated because the Soviet Union made most of its own guns, tanks, and planes. But they did that by mostly ignoring things like railroad equipment, supply trucks, high-octane gasoline for those planes, and (smokeless) gunpowder for those guns. Most of *that* stuff came from the US and UK.
This was a sensible choice for Russia. First, because the guns and tanks and planes were pretty good guns and tanks and planes that were very well suited for the environment and doctrine, whereas supply trucks are mostly and high-octane gasoline entirely fungible. And second, because if the Lend-Lease goes away, a tank with a little bit of fuel and ammunition will contribute *something* to your defense whereas a supply truck full of fuel and ammunition is just a gift to the enemy if there isn't a tank ready to receive those supplies.
But it does mean that in the no-lend-lease counterfactual, we're debating whether there would be a rump Soviet Union holding out behind a stalemate line somewhere between Moscow and the Urals, not how long it would have taken for Zhukov's tanks to roll into Berlin. Without *massive* foreign aid, Russia can't materially afford a sustained offensive.
In 1943, or 2023.
No war can go on forever, especially a hot war. The question is not whether there will be a compromise right now, but what is the most likely resolution to this conflict when it does finally resolve. I agree that neither side is ready or willing to offer necessary concessions at this point, and feel that there is more to be gained (or less lost) from continuing the fight. Some time period in the future, which may be months or years, the sides will be forced to evaluate the real or potential gains from continued fighting and come to the conclusion that it's really not in their best interest to go forward.
As per the original post, it may be that one side has decisively won. It's more likely that neither side has really won, and the only alternative is a compromise. Do you really think the chances of a compromise are 0.0%? That unless one side decisively wins, they will fight forever?
Yes I believe there is close to zero chance for compromise, at least long term. Ukraine is calling for ever more capable kinds of weapon systems (tanks, planes, long range rockets), because they want to go on the offensive again. Russia, meanwhile, is throwing poorly-trained human waves at Ukraine to buy time for rebooting their military training capabilities. Both sides are seeking a decision, just over different timelines.
If the current war ends in any way that leaves Ukraine a sovereign country but without Western security guarantees such as NATO membership, Putin (with his domestic position strengthened as per implication of a mutually beneficial compromise) will rebuild, modernize, and eventually try again. It would be not peace but an extended cease-fire.
Putin might try again, you never know what any man will do, but I think there's a strong case that he won't.
The war was clearly a miscalculation; Ukraine has put up at least 100x the resistance that was anticipated and there's no universe in which the benefits (which were always dubious) now exceed the costs.
Putin seems to still be doing OK domestically, but repeatedly getting your country into pointless quagmires isn't exactly a winning formula for political success. If he was clearly angling to do it again, you have to think the risk of a coup would be very high. Ignoring popular discontent, corrupt Russian elites would much rather extract the excess military spend for themselves than continue fighting pointless wars and rearming the military, and Putin isn't someone with Stalin-like autocratic power to ignore the wishes of his elites forever.
To me the only possible long run is defeat of Russian imperialism AND Ukraine, Russia and Belarus as NATO members.
As much as NATO was about the so called West defense against SU, NATO is and was about keeping Germany, France and England from fighting with each other.
Kaliningrad/Königsberg/Królewiec/Twangste problem is more of a end game tough nut to crack. Derussification and cosmopolitan independence probably required.
Even the break up of the Far East might be necessary to deimperialism Russia. Russia has to figure out whether it is European or just the Golden Horde pretending to be Slavic because Cyril and Methodius quasi civilized them .
As much as I am also against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you come across as very ideological and brainwashed by "The West is a the good guys and Russia is the evil empire" that reminds me of Reagan's slogans. There are no good guys in the world, and the West has as much blood on their hands as anyone.
The West is a mixed bag, and Russia *is* an evil empire (just ask people living in countries next to Russia).
There may be no good guys in the world, but there definitely are a few bad guys.
US screwed Iraq, Afghanistan and a lot of others way harder than the Soviets did. in a perfect world W Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld would have been tried in Hague for war crimes.
I should note that Afghanistan was screwed over by Soviets way harder than by Americans. In fact, it, as well as Iraq and Lybia, were pretty screwed up places even before American interventions.
Those interventions of course totally failed to improve sad condition of those countries, and in the case of Iraq it was done clearly contrary to international law, but, it seems to me, speaking as no-American, that what the Soviets did and what Russians are doing right now is far worse.
You would find examples of American badness comparable to what Russia is doing now, but imho you would have to go back to the Cold war era.
One of the most important lessons one can learn when discussing international politics and history is that saying one person/nation/group/action is bad _does not imply_ that some other person/nation/group/action is good. So, _so_, SO many people have been led astray by the idea that, in order to approve of one thing, they _must_ disapprove of some other group (or vice versa).
Russia, in the current moment, is inarguably a villain that is threatening world order and has committed various atrocities. This implies exactly nothing about any other group.
Reagan was a dope. But the Russians are bad guys. They made a pact with Hitler to divide Poland. And they really could not see the path that Gorbachev made for them out of Stalinism.
"As much blood" what do you mean by that?
Does Russia want to be part of Europe or not? Until the Russian people, stop taking their Murti-Bing pills Russia with be a dead-end and an international blight under Putinism.
The war ends three ways: Putin dead like Hitler, Putin dead like Mussolini, or Putin awaiting trial at the Hague for war crimes like Milošević.
Everyone is bad guys. There is no moral high ground. Russia is bad. America fucked up Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and a lot of other places for no reason. But it has the clout to avoid punishment, Russia no longer does. Everyone looked the other way when they were killing people in Syria, but Ukraine is too high-profile.
As for how the war ends, who knows. I find all three of your options, however tempting, rather unlikely. Musk's plan is an option, provided some reasonable accommodations are made for those displaced in Eastern Ukraine being able to vote in the referendums. If Russia starts pushing back hard, Zelenskyy might be more amenable to giving up on Crimea, in return for security guarantees from both the West and Russia. Or the war may simmer for years, like in Northern Ireland, Middle East, or many other places in the world.
The west is good because it allows maximum to develop everyone's maximal potential. It is not only about economic potential but also artistic, self-expression, ideas that depend on freedom of speech. Russia is worse but some third world countries are even worse. The choice of Ukraine is between bad (but not the worst) and better society. They chose better and Russia doesn't want to allow that therefore they are the bad guys in this story.
Factcheck: Cyril and Methodius were Byzantine missionaries to so called Great Moravia, whose former territory is now divided mainly between Czechia and Slovakia.
They had nothing to do with Russia, except that their adaptation of Greek alphabet was, I think with a detour through further Bulgarian adaptation, used as rough basis for current Russian (and of course also Ukrainian, which is almost the same) alphabet. That is why it is called cyrillic.
Yeah Ok.
I was making the poetic point that Cyril and Methodius introduced written language and civilization to the Slavs as generic description. The Russians being the last of the Slavs to be civilized.
Moscow was not much of anything for many centuries while Kiev flourished.
The Russian imperalistic propaganda has it all backwards. Civilization moved from west (the original slavs whom SS C&M encountered) to east. And north (scandinavians) to south. The "rus" in Kievan Rus' does not stand for "Russian" it just means "people".
I mean, like, that is true, but di*k measuring contest about whose civilization is older is imho totally dumb. Of course even Moscow is far older than, like, New York.
Age is not the question.
New York as a place may be new but is a product of Europe and cosmopolitanism.
Are the Russians really civilized or not?
Are they really European or not?
They certainly aren't related to ancient African, Middle Eastern, Indian Sub Continent Asian, or China and Asian Pacific civilizations.
The Russians (via Putin and the Chekists) are making a good case that they are just a mimetic variation on the Golden Horde.
It took quite awhile for Germany, France and England to decide that they were going to be civilized. NATO and the EU are enormous factors in the process.
You can't get to modern peaceful social democracy until you rid yourself of imperialism. Imperialism is, as Lenin noted, the last stage of capitalism.
Which protracted conflicts are you thinking of? Seems to me like such a bet should have paid off in the Soviet–Afghan war, the Cold War and WW1.
I'm a bit surprised by the direction of your update given that military operations have overall turned out well for Russia during the last couple of months.
Well, but I of course expected that they will turn out that way. If Ukrainians have only 15 % (or, really 17 %) probability of victory, bad news for them are to be expected. Good news are surprising and worth updating on.
What do you think will happen in Bakhmut?
I don't know, but in any case, credible experts are unanimous that loss of it would not be that important.
A couple of questions to people who think that their religion is compatible with rationality.
What would you consider to be the strongest arguments for the non-normative beliefs of your denomination/creed being true? Why do you think that all the other denominations/creeds don't have comparably strong arguments justifying their beliefs (given that you don't adhere to any of them instead)?
I've yet to be persuaded that rationality is within the ambit of our species. Rationalization, yes, we are the absolute princes of rationalization, and naturally almost any religion is fully compatible with any felt need for rationalizing things.
Of course Rationality is within our capabilities, MiniMax is Perfect Rationality, and a single person can program it in 1/2 an hour.
An impoverished definition of the word, but sure OK. By the same definition, my dog is a rational animal since I can teach it to sit for a treat.
I'm assuming "non-normative" means something like historical or scientific facts, as opposed to moral teachings.
Before you start to consider the question you're asking, you have to settle a more fundamental question. Can a person's eternal happiness/enlightenment/ethical rightness/etc even be based on historical or scientific facts at all? If you have a person who's not enlightened/eternally happy/ethically righteous/whatever, can there be some historical fact that transitions them from unenlightened to enlightened? Because there's no point arguing over historical and scientific truth in religion otherwise, unless it's just for fun.
And before we can answer whether a historical fact can do it, we should figure out whether *anything* could do it, and what this kind of transition even is in the first place. What would it mean for a person to transition from unenlightenment to enlightenment / ethical evil to ethical good / eternal damnation to eternal felicity?
In such a transition, there must either be an essential discontinuity in the mind/soul/being or not. Either it's a fundamental change, or not. If there is *not* an essential discontinuity, then we're in one kind of epistemic universe: fundamental change isn't possible; Platonic forms stamp their shape on reality and that's it; every choice is actually the unfolding of some genetic/historical/psychological predetermined germ; All is One; Being is Emptiness -- you recognize this kind of philosophy. If there's no possibility of an essential discontinuity in a person's life, the best you can do is work to realize that you're already One with the Universe. I hear meditation is useful to that end; but in any case, the historical facts of one religion or another aren't going to be much use to anybody. It all sounds very Buddhist.
If there *is* an essential discontinuity, then we're in a very different epistemic universe. It's possible for a person to be living one way, then have some kind of encounter or experience, and suddenly be living in a fundamentally different way. The historical truth or falsehood of some fact, or some scientific discovery, might, in this case, actually have some bearing on somebody's enlightenment/eternal happiness/ethical goodness. But if it's an essential discontinuity, then it's essential: It's core to the existence of the being we're talking about. Then the only way to describe it starts to sound ... suspiciously Christian: you have to die to yourself and be born again. The thing that enacted that change upon you sounds less like a historical fact and more like a ... Creator? Because it undoes you at an essential level and rebuilds you on an essentially different basis.
So, for most people who ask questions like this, there's no possible argument or answer that could ever have meaning for them. They're in a kind of atheistic or Buddhist paradigm in which Change is Illusory, All is One and We are The Universe. (Fundamentally, even if they don't realize it.) They lack sufficient inwardness to be changed at an essential level by any kind of encounter they might have. Or, to rephrase the same idea, if science were to prove that reincarnation is real, and happens basically the way Hinduism describes it, most people wouldn't convert to Hinduism. Because when most people ask about these things, they're not putting their soul at stake. They're not willing to be changed in their innermost being by the answer to their question. (And, for atheists or materialists, this is completely fair: they don't believe in an innermost being, after all.)
But if you're one of the very few who has true inwardness, if you're not just arguing to argue, if this is something that genuinely has meaning for you ... then I lifted this entire train of thought from Soren Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments. Kierkegaard's work is strong medicine. But most people have a crisis in their life when they're genuinely questioning the nature of reality and the meaning of their existence, and that's the crisis for which he has medicine.
>Because there's no point arguing over historical and scientific truth in religion otherwise
Of course there is : Because the religion claims those truths as true.
Unless Truth means nothing, then anybody who claims "X is true" should be debated and their claims ascertained. This has nothing to do with happiness or enlightenment or the purpose of religion, this is just how claiming things work.
(Granted, there are some settings and discourses where we claim things that are manifestly non-true, like Literature, Thought Experiments, Jokes, etc..., but all people who make and entertain those claims will happily admit they are non-true in the strict sense. No so for religion.)
>Can a person's eternal happiness/enlightenment/ethical rightness/etc even be based on historical or scientific facts at all?
If there is a combination of experiences that led them into that state then I assume it's fair to call those historical facts?
>Because there's no point arguing over historical and scientific truth in religion otherwise, unless it's just for fun.
I don't see it this way. Religions have it as a part of their belief system that eternal happiness/enlightenment etc. are possible (and make sense as concepts in the first place), and they also make plenty of claims about what we now classify as historical and scientific truths. But no religion appears to have an exceptional track record of having made factual claims that people had gone on to independently verify, so I don't see a good reason to expect their less verifiable claims to be better correlated with truth either.
Agnostic here. I find your question a bit distasteful, if you start off by saying someone's beliefs are non-normative, it sounds like you want to pick a fight and not that you want to understand how they think about things given the context of their religion. (Maybe this is not your intent?) If you want to understand someone better I think you need to start from a different place, one of humility, don't assume what works for you is what is going to work for everyone. I listened to Lex Fridman interview Omar Suleiman (a Muslim scholar), he (Lex) has the perfect tone for these sorts of discussions.
I think you must be confused about what non-normative means. It isn't an insult. He is asking about a specific aspect of their belief system.
That's probably true. I take non-normative to be outside the norm. Or that which is not normal. But normal depends on your group. What does it mean to you?
Normative is the opposite of descriptive. A descriptive belief is one that involves making a claim about how things are. For example the sky is blue or 1+1=2. A normative belief is one that is about values or what ought to happen. For example Murder is wrong, or we should increase taxes. Xypm was asking for an example of a belief that religious people have that is describing reality differently from nonreligious people, as opposed to a values difference between religious people and nonreligious people.
Hmm I get this for normative belief, https://people.umass.edu/aizen/nb.html Is that right?
I guess I'm more confused then, religious people have a view of reality that includes a God. This seems normative to them and non-normative to atheists. Is that right? Non-normative implies your view of reality is screwed up?
A normative belief is an implicit command, a non-normative belief is just a sensor reading.
"There exists a God" is a non-normative belief, it's a sensor reading (whether true or not), an assertion about the state of the world.
"There exists a God worthy of worship" is something of a hybrid, the overall statment is non-normative, it just says that a God of a certain sort exists. But the qualification itself hides some serious normative baggage, since "Worthy" is literally a question of value. This tells us that the normative\non-normative distinction is spectrum-ish and more subtle than the Command\Sensor dichotomy.
"You should worship God" is a normative belief, it's an explicit command.
Almost all the time, people who make normative beliefs will argue for them with non-normative beliefs. For example, "There exists a God such that if you worship Him you will become happy/content/successful, thus you should worship this God", this is a combo of a non-normative belief followed by a normative belief, following each other in a perception-control sequence (noticing something advantageous about the environment, then making a move to take advantage of it). People make it more confusing by sometimes omitting the normative conclusion entirely and leaving it implicit in the non-normative statement.
That link seems to be describing the relation between normative beliefs and psychology rather than what a normative belief is.
The belief in God is always a non-normative belief, whether you think it is true or not. The normative/non-normative distinction is a description of they type of belief. It is independent of the correct/incorrect distinction. For example, the belief that 1+1=2 and the belief that 1+1=3 are both non-normative beliefs. The difference between them is one of correctness.
Guess I'll answer. I'm religious because I know people who have prophetic dreams, and are otherwise influenced to deal with future unforeseen events. (Stuff like spontaneously buying two coffees when they're alone, then running into someone stranded and being able to offer them a coffee.)
I don't believe in other denominations because the blessed folks have their blessings visibly reduced if they pursue those other denominations. Things that were going smoothly for them stop going smoothly until they go back to the first take.
Is that compatible with rationality? Probably not, to the same extent that truth is incompatible with logic. But logic is a shadow of truth, and demanding truth fit into logic has the whole thing backward.
Religious prophecies commonly contradict one another. Is there a rational reason why I should accept your friends' claims and not those of Joseph Smith et. al?
The ones I've heard are very specific and short-term. "If you take this trip, you will be permanently injured, so don't take this trip."
Otherwise, Joseph Smith is dead and is going to be hard-pressed to give you a new prophecy. Also my understanding is Joseph Smith declared martial law to avoid being arrested, a bad sign faithwise.
It should be noted that Joseph Smith dropped martial law and surrendered to the authorities, even though he knew it would mean his death.
I've never seen it argued that faith means you always sit and twiddle your thumbs until God tells you what to do, or that you disregard practical safety or common sense, assuming that whatever happens is meant to be. Most religious people act on their best judgment (or try to), based on the tenets of their religion, having faith that things will turn out right in the end. Then there are specific promptings like you're talking about; things which one acts on in faith even if they don't see the end from the beginning.
And Alexander, I wonder if by "rational" you mean "observable", as in "After studying x number of people, we've found that If you pray to God in this specific way, you always get an answer in this specific manner in this specific time frame". My belief is that spiritual experiences have to be personal, otherwise they're not that spiritual. What proof WOULD it take to get you to change your life from what it is now? If you feel no desire to change, no proof will suffice. If you DO feel a desire to change, well, "See and ye shall find". But what you'll find will be personal to you, and you won't be able to empirically prove it to anyone else.
I'd say that a priori ESP and such are compatible with rationality, but the lack of a plausible evolutionary explanation, and the fact that nobody has of yet convincingly demonstrated such abilities despite significant monetary incentives makes this seem very unlikely.
I don't think coincidences and so-called ESP have a thing to with either serious religious insights NOR serious rationality.
I mean, if you can demonstrate supernatural effects in the material world, I'd say that that's a serious religious insight and something of great interest to serious rationalists!
It may be true that modern Christianity doesn't make those claims, but there have been plenty of religions that do (IIRC Shinto still does) and even Christianity has flirted with the idea.
Supernatural effects cannot be demonstrated in the material world. That's what makes them supernatural.
Yup, exactly. As soon as you demonstrate them to the satisfaction of science, it's not supernatural anymore; it's been entered into the canon of natural law, and is as natural as anything else.
Why would ESP be supernatural? I mean, if some kind of ESP or psychic powers exist, presumably they follow some set of natural laws, albeit maybe ones we don't understand yet.
Catholic here. Have you ever studied Thomas Aquinas? Maybe first start with JP II encyclical Faith and Reason.
There is essential and long standing Catholic tradition that both faith and reason are necessary and not in conflict. For example: "You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews."
>Have you ever studied Thomas Aquinas
No, but I'm aware of the Natural Law doctrine and read Scott's review of Feser's "The Last Superstition". Further engagement doesn't seem promising.
>Maybe first start with JP II encyclical Faith and Reason
I've taken a look. A sentence towards the end of the introduction, "Sure of her competence as the bearer of the Revelation of Jesus Christ..." implies that the truth of the revelation is to be taken for granted, and from then on the document appears to simply quote the Bible as the authoritative source. Is this the correct impression? If so, it doesn't really engage with my questions.
You've read the whole encyclical (108 paragraphs and 132 footnotes) in 15 minutes?
Come on, you've asked a serious question. Spend some serious effort.
Confucius is on a picnic with students. He says if I've picked up one corner of the picnic blanket, is it unreasonable to expect my students to help with the other corners to spread it out so that we can eat.
The summa was written in a day.
There is a life time of thought and practice involved in both rationality and loving neighbor as yourself.
I'll freely admit I'm a great books snob.
But work your way back into some original texts instead of textbooks and reviews.
To claim to be aware of whatever you mean by "the natural law doctrine" without actually reading some Aquinas is like saying you know about alcohol because you read a pamphlet in health class, even though you've never actually had a beer.
I embrace both the peasant and the scholar. Pretending to take on the hard mantel of scholar without actual doing the work is worse than just being a peasant, which has rewards of its own.
Well, the thing is, there is in practice an infinite amount of books to read, so one has to prioritise. To me the world doesn't remotely look like anything an omnipotent omnibelevolent intelligent being would make, so my prior on any belief system that postulates this is very low. But not so low that a good pitch couldn't in theory overcome, which is the reason for asking the initial questions. I think that any reasonable doctrine can be summarised in a few paragraphs, from where an interested outsider might decide to investigate further.
1. You're not an omnipotent omnibelevolent [sic] intelligent being so how would you know?
2 "any reasonable doctrine can be summarised [sic ]in a few paragraphs".
Christianity is summarized in a few paragraphs: The apostles' creed (or the Nicene) and the prelude to the parable of good Samaritan. What does the lawyer first ask and actually answer? The second question who is my neighbor sort of overshadows the first part.
Behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tested him, saying, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?"
He said to him, "What is written in the law? How do you read it?"
He answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." **
He said to him, "You have answered correctly. Do this, and you will live."
But he, desiring to justify himself, blah blah blah.
To love God ( and by implication the entire Cosmos) with all your heart, soul and strength is a plea to make "rational inquiry" into the nature of things.
** elsewhere we learn that this commandment to love one another is so encompassing that it includes even loving your enemy and might include laying down your life for a friend.
Now you can be a peasant and stick with the Creed and the full parable of the Good Samaritan and the idea of love (this is perfectly rational and reasonable approach) or you can also be a scholar - which means you are going to have to read some stuff (not just skim it) and think long and hard. The real scholar/philospher will always end up knowing that they don't know. Cf. Socrates.
But rejecting the peasantry AND failing to really embrace the hard work of being a scholar, is a luke warm drink. You can't really half-a$$ it.
That’s interesting but I thought OP was specifically about reasons for non-normative beliefs being true. For example, why do you believe in the Resurrection or in heaven and hell? And why not in the miraculous dictation of the Koran?
The promise of bodily resurrection seems be the only rational solution to the "unfairness"/irrationality of death for a sentient and rational beings.
Or as Lazarus's sister said to Jesus: Death stinks -- what are you going to do about it?
There is no historicity for dictation of Koran or Mormon golden tablets. But the resurrection of Jesus seems to have accepted outside of the community (notwithstanding rejection of theological interpretation of event.)
If there was a Time Machine that definitively showed that the was no resurrection and no incarnation - all good Catholics would become rationalists Jews.
That there is a transcendental (that there is something other than matter) is not falsifiable. But even the physicist understands that the photon is NOT matter and the question of why existence rather than non-existence can't be answered as a materialist.
And then there is the conundrum that Goedel exposes. There are true propositions than can't be proven to be true. That seems for me to be a powerful statement of both the limits of rationality and the power of rationality.
And if there was a time machine to demonstrate that Moses and all the rest of the Jewish patriarchs had had no supernatural encounters, then those rationalist Jews would become rationalist atheists/agnostics?
Maybe? But then there is love and the photon.
Abraham and Isaac sitting on fence,
the first thing we need is a left hand monkey wrench.
To be clear, I'm not saying that love and photon are fully rationally explainable as of right now, and may never be. But admitting to having no good explanation is, to me, obviously superiour to postulating a spurious one.
Hmm, why would pantheism imply a discrete beginning for the universe and stuff existing before the big bang (anymore than monotheism does) ?
I think he's suggesting that if one attributes the universe to an act of creation, it tends to suggest a single Creator, which points either to monotheism or if a pantheistic religion to one god being much more equal than others, so to speak, because he was the Creator and they weren't.
Of course, one could argue in the alternative for a pantheon in which the gods are co-equal, and designed the universe via a committee, but that does tend to strain the credulity of anyone who's served on a committee.
lol, if a committee designed our universe, they would still be discussing a good name and good day to meet.
I understand. That... narrows the options quite a bit, unnecessarily so. It could for example be that the Universe is a well-modularized machine, like a Car. One guy designs the engine, another the wheels, yet another the seats. There is no conflict because the interfaces between the subsystems are so crystal-clear that there is no room for ambiguity or clash of responsibilities.
Or, what about a "Layered" creation model ? God A creates the whole universe and then sort of chills. God B comes along and notices something He would like to add, so he studies God's A code and adds his contribution. Goddess C then comes (because the Pantheon is a healthy progressive gender-balanced institution) and adds the much-needed Speed of Light patch, without which people tended to accelerate to Math.NAN and all sorts of Nonsense happened. Etc...
You can certainly have a heirarchy, but then God A is pretty clearly Zeus, and all the rest are junior Olympians. The actual Greeks get around the obvious narrative problem of banality by having the Top Dog not actually omniscient, so you can sneak around behind Zeus's back to amuse yourself, cuckold him, whatever. But being not actually omniscient is a little bit in tension with the assumption that you have invented the entire cosmos and not fucked up any little corner anywhere.
The modular universe is a trickier. If the interfaces are genuinely obvious, the only thing that comes to mind is that there *is* only one possible overall structure to the universe, more or less as soon as you assume it exists at all, it *has* to look like such-and-such.
But if that's the case -- why would that requirement stop at a high level? Why wouldn't it extend all the way down to the least little detail, such that every aspect of the universe must be the way it is, because nothing else is logically self-consistent, when you work out all the math.
If that's the case, we don't even need a Creator, and all the fine-tuning questions vanish in a puff of incense.
Thank you for the correction. I shall endeavor to remember, although I ask pardon in advance if I forget.
(See previous comment for I-IV.)
V: Regain
Among respondents who had previously lost at least 10% of their body weight, the mean regain was 58% of the weight lost.
As one might expect, the mean regain was lower for respondents who had lost weight recently. A graph of regain against time is very noisy, but seems to reach a plateau after about 6 years.
For respondents who lost weight at least 6 years ago, the mean regain was 72% of the weight lost. This conceals a lot of variation. 19% of this group had regained less than 10%; 21% had regained 10-50%; 21% had regained 50-100%; 27% had regained 100-150%; 12% had regained >=150%. This is consistent with other evidence that about 20% of people who lose 10% of their body mass are successful in keeping the weight off: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/82/1/222S/4863393. The linked paper is also consistent with the above suggestion that people who successfully keep weight off do so by making some effort.
VI: Weight loss
2,619 respondents answered affirmatively to the question “Have you ever lost 10% of your weight, on purpose, through diet and exercise.” This is 38% of all respondents.
In the main public dataset, Scott has removed the question which asked how people lost weight, but it was included in the dataset attached to the round 1 prediction contest answers. This was presumably an error, so I feel a bit guilty about looking at it, but I had already looked at it before noticing that it was omitted from the main dataset and I can’t unsee it. I don’t recognise anyone (even myself) from their responses and I’m confident that the summary I’m about to provide is fully anonymous.
In that subset, 335 people answered the question about how they lost weight, which was conveniently a sufficiently small number for me to code each response. Reference to “respondents” in the rest of this section are to those 335 respondents.
83% of respondents mentioned diet (either generically or by describing some particular change to their diet). 50% mentioned exercise. 11% mentioned some other factor, often to do with a change in their life circumstances. 9% of respondents mentioned exercise alone, suggesting that at least some people are able to outrun their forks. See https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34519717/ for yet another study confirming that exercise induces some weight loss, but less than expected: the authors conduct a careful analysis with double-labelled water and metabolic chamber observation, but fail to find a clear explanation.
Unfortunately, many respondents wrote something like “diet and exercise” or “I followed a strict diet” without giving any indication of what they did to change their diet. It’s not safe to assume that these people followed the same pattern as people who did identify a particular diet (for example, they may have been more likely to mean portion control and less likely to mean intermittent fasting), but without any information, there’s not much we can say about them.
Of the 204 respondents who mentioned some specific dietary intervention, 37% mentioned counting calories. 19% mentioned fasting (not counting OMD). 14% mentioned following a low-carb diet. 12% mentioned eliminating or reducing sugar consumption. 11% mentioned keto. 7% mentioned portion control. 4% ate one meal a day. 3% mentioned following a high protein diet. 2% mentioned eliminating alcohol consumption. 2% mentioned paleo. 0.5% (i.e. 1 person) mentioned following a whole food diet. 13% mentioned some other specific diet (several mentioned potatoes, which I hadn’t expected when I started coding the responses).
I note that counting calories and low-carb diets are well represented here, as they are in the survey of current dietary restrictions, albeit that there is a difference in relative frequencies. On the other hand, whole foods diets are hardly represented at all, despite 7% of all survey respondents currently being on a whole food diet. There are various possible explanations, but I suspect the obvious one is right: the whole food diet isn’t effective for weight loss (although it may be for other purposes) because it doesn’t restrict overall food intake.
Although keto is only 11% of the weight loss sample, that is still a lot more than the 2% of general respondents who are currently on a ketogenic diet. A possible explanation is that keto is fairly hardcore, so it’s more tempting for people who are trying to lose >=10% of their body mass than people who are aiming for something more modest.
This seems broadly consistent with the results of other studies which tend to show that basically everything works as well as everything else for weight loss (subject of course to a calorie deficit being achieved): see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2763382/ as to macronutrients and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26384657/ as to intermittent fasting vs continuous restriction.
VII: Conclusions
Owning a car is bad for your waistline. Being a vegetarian or vegan is good. More or less any restrictive diet can be effective to lose weight if you stick with it, so you should choose whatever works for you. On the other hand, eating whole foods is unlikely to make you lose weight. Having lost weight, you need to make an effort to maintain: if you revert to your old habits, you’ll revert to your old weight.
I think the BMI question distorted the data, unless you are unusually honest and don't feel judged, if you have high BMI you're not likely to fill in that figure.
Now, what counts as "high" may vary for different people, but I do think that if you're way over whatever counts as normal, and pursuant to the many conversations we've had on here about "hell yeah shaming fat people for their weight is a *great* way to motivate the lazy tubs of lard to get off their fat asses and lose the flab", then you're less likely to slap down a figure that makes people go "you're *what*???"
At least so far as I was concerned, anyway.
That sounds right, although a similar problem would arise with any method which relied on voluntary compliance. For example, in HSE, only 32% of eligible households agreed to participate in the survey. The data are weighted to correct for non-response bias, but only so as to match the known distribution of the population by sex and age. Also, some participants declined to allow the nurse to measure their height and weight, and as far as I can see no attempt has been made to adjust for this.
87% of ACX respondents answered the BMI question, FWIW.
Thanks. If people tend to gain weight (at least up to a point) as they get older, ACX respondents might weigh less simply because they tend younger than the general populations (don't they?).
The ACX respondents are unusual in many ways which may be relevant: they are also from many different countries. I provide the information for England (where I live) as a rough point of comparison and because I happen to have it to hand.
I only have the binned ages, but mean age looks to be around 37. A sample of the English population with the same age profile would have mean BMI 26.8 (compared to the actual English mean of 27.4 and actual ACX mean of 25.3).
Thanks for doing this!
I feel dumb making the public dataset more restrictive than the prediction one. In the future, feel free to email me asking for the non-public one - this is the sort of good analysis by a single trustworthy-seeming person that I would be happy to give it to as long as you promised not to share it.
The potato stuff is because of Slime Mold Time Mold, another blog close by in the blogosphere which urges people to try it: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/07/12/lose-10-6-pounds-in-four-weeks-with-this-one-weird-trick-discovered-by-local-slime-hive-mind-doctors-grudgingly-respect-them-hope-to-become-friends/
> In the future, feel free to email me asking for the non-public one - this is the sort of good analysis by a single trustworthy-seeming person that I would be happy to give it to as long as you promised not to share it.
I hope you would delete the e-mails though.
I think I would just give the minimum amount necessary for the specific task - in this case, the diet questions.
Thanks, sounds great!
So, I’ve been looking at the BMI data in the ACX survey.
I: A caveat
We should keep in mind that these are self-reported BMIs. Self-reported BMIs are widely observed to be lower than measured BMIs, because people both over-report height and under-report weight. Overall the Health Survey for England found a mean difference of 1.1 between BMI from self-reported height and weight and BMI from corrected height and weight, but this varies by sex and (particularly) age.
There may also be issues specific to the ACX survey. The question appears in the middle of a long and diverse questionnaire. It seems probable that some respondents did not stop to weigh themselves at the time of answering, but used their last known weight or even guessed their BMI. The reported BMI curve has a sharp peak just below the cut-off for overweight, which seems suspicious.
If the measurements are systematically biased, that won’t matter for comparing different groups, but this won’t necessarily be the case: some people monitor their weight more carefully than others.
II: Distribution
The BMI median and mode (to the nearest integer) are each 24 (12% of respondents had this BMI). The mean is 25 (although this may be distorted by some impossibly small or large responses). The curve looks like an inverted V with a long right tail.
Applying the usual categories, 3% of respondents were underweight (<18.5), 54% were a healthy weight (>=18.5, <25), 30% were overweight (>=25, <30) and 13% were obese (>=30). For brevity, I will henceforth write this as 3/54/30/13. For comparison 38% of English adults were overweight in 2021 and 26% were obese (although only 34% and 20% respectively from self reported heights and weights). For some reason, I am unable to find data on how many English adults were underweight, but I believe it will be c.1%.
III: Associations
The survey asks about various other things, which may or may have been intended as possible factors associated with weight. Of course these only give us correlations and don’t tell us which way (if at all) the causation goes.
Those who have lost 10% of their weight at some time generally report being heavier (1/38/40/22) than those who have not (5/64/23/8).
The many people who never get acid reflux (4/59/27/10) are lighter than the few people who get it frequently and severely (1/41/38/19). Obesity is an important risk factor for GERD: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3920303/.
Respondents tend to indicate that they like carbs more than the average person, so either ACX readers are unusually pro-carb or we are badly calibrated as to how much the average person loves carbs, but in any case the small number of people who dislike carbs are lighter (4/62/26/8) than those who most adore them (3/50/30/16). All the other categories are close to the global average, and I doubt that much is going on here.
People with naturally good vision are a bit lighter (4/60/27/10) than people with any sort of sight correction (3/51/31/15), with no notable variation between laser surgery, glasses or contact lenses.
Vegetarians (5/67/22/5) and vegans (6/70/19/5) both look light. This is consistent with previous results, e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5466943/, https://www.nature.com/articles/0802300.
Those following a calorie-controlled (1/41/39/19) or low-carb (2/45/36/17) diet look heavy. The small number of people following a keto diet (4/41/31/25) have an unusually high proportion of obesity, but the sample size is too small to read much into it. These cases seem readily explicable by the hypothesis that overweight people are more likely to adopt a diet for weight loss.
On the other hand, people following a whole food diet (3/57/26/13) look much the survey population overall.
Burping makes no difference. It’s inclusion here in the survey makes it look as if Scott thought it might, but I’m not sure why. Hypermobility also doesn’t look interesting. Specifically Ehlers-Danlos goes 0/75/25/0, but it’s 24 people, so I don’t read anything into it.
People who own a car (2/48/34/16) are heavier than those who don’t (6/64/22/9). People who commute by car look heavy, but the effect is fully explained by owning a car. People who commute by bike (4/67/23/6) look light. There are 250 people who own a car and commute by bike and they go 2/63/26/9, so that seems potentially a good way of neutralising the effect of car ownership on weight.
IV: Restrictions
Scott asked about various possible dietary restrictions. 65% of respondents left this blank, which either means they observe no dietary restrictions, or they observe a dietary restriction not listed, or they skipped the question. 13% of respondents stated they were vegetarian for this purpose (there was also another question about vegetarianism) and 4% stated they were vegan. 9% stated they counted calories; 8% were on a low-carb diet; 7% were on a whole food diet; 2% were on a ketogenic diet and 1% each were on a paleo, carnivorous or low-fat diet.
It is interesting to note here that the battle against low-fat diets is essentially won. Paleo, carnivorous and ketogenic diets are also rare: in retrospect these could all have usefully been collapsed into “some other dietary restriction”, which would also allow the potato people to announce their presence. Vegetarianism is common, but probably usually practised for ethical rather than health or weight reasons. The common health restrictions seen in this question are calorie counting, low-carb and whole food, in approximately that order. However, there was no option for fasting/OMD, which for other reasons I believe to be fairly common.
Among respondents who were overweight or obese, 65% left the dietary restriction field blank, which perhaps surprisingly is the same proportion as overall. This group were less likely to be vegetarian (9%) or vegan (3%) and more likely to count calories (13%) or be on a low-carb diet (10%).
Among respondents who are now a healthy weight, but who have lost at least 10% of their body weight in the past, only 50% left the dietary restriction field blank. This group was more likely to be vegetarian (16%) or vegan (7%) and also more likely to count calories (14%) or be on a low-carb (13%), whole food (11%) or ketogenic (4%) diet. In fact this group had a higher prevalence of every dietary restriction than either the overweight group or the whole population. The group who are now a healthy weight but did not report having lost weight in the past was slightly more likely to be vegetarian (17%) but otherwise also had a lower prevalence of all restrictions than the former group.
I tend to interpret this as showing that people who have in the past made an effort to become a healthy weight tend also to make an effort to maintain that weight, whereas as people who have always been a healthy weight do not (although they are unusually likely to be vegetarian or vegan).
Among the select group (see below) who lost weight at least 6 years ago and have since regained less than 10% of it, only 44% left the dietary restriction field blank. 15% of this group is vegetarian, 7% is vegan, 16% count calories, 21% are on a low-carb diet and 14% are on a whole food diet.
(Continued in another comment)
>Those who have lost 10% of their weight at some time generally report being heavier (1/38/40/22) than those who have not (5/64/23/8).
10% of weight *deliberately*. This is an obvious selection effect; fat people are more likely than thin people to want to lose weight, because losing weight is better for fat people than it is for thin people. People who don't want to lose weight will by definition not deliberately lose weight.
(For instance, I answered "no" despite having lost 10% of my weight before - because it was an accident.)
Thanks!
"It is interesting to note here that the battle against low-fat diets is essentially won. "
Among rationalists. I expect they're still very widespread among the general population.
Agree, especially in institutional settings like corporate cafeterias and schools. Low-fat beliefs are persistent there, and sometimes "whole grain instead of white carbs," but in general it's hard to find food in those settings with tons of butter, saturated fat, etc.
Is there evidence against wholegrain stuff being healthier than refined carbs? I thought that one was correct. (I'm thinking more of general healthiness than effect on weight here, which is more relevant to general recommendations.)
It is probably true that "whole grains > refined carbs," for general health as well as weight loss. My narrow point was that institutional catering (driven by some conventional group of old-school dieticians) seems to be grounded in "whole grains > refined carbs >> dietary fat and animal protein," and they are more committed to reducing that last one among the options presented.
What, if anything, does it mean that modern Czars are always subservient to a larger organization and never on top?
That they aren't really czars? Its jsut a word people use to signify "this isn't your normal civil servant".
My memory was that the "czar" in America was really a kind of corruption of the word "Commissioner" rather than a direct reference to Tsars (as in Caesar and the german Kaiser). I thought I remembered William Safire column relating thereto. I found the On language column 11/13/1983 * but also he doesn't support my "Commissioner" theory. But he does touch on tsar (dictator) is not or is a czar ( appointed bureaucrat with a lot of autonomy). Bureaucrat+autocrat+ Commissioner? There seemed to be a proliferation of "czars" to try fix problems beginning with Reagan or maybe Nixon which I always associated with a Republican crypto-Caesarism (today or back then maybe we'd say crypto-fascist making the trains run on time reflecting a secret love of Mussolini before he was corrupted by evil Hitler's psychotic version of fascism.) maybe growing out of U of Chicago and esotericism of Leo Strauss.
I don't know.
* https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/13/magazine/on-language.html
Thanks! :)
It just seems to be a very hyperbolic term for a slightly more powerful bureaucrat who supposedly can actually fix a specific problem, that is too big for any other bureaucrat to fix.
Of course, it is probably too big for the czar too.
"A few months ago, I said I’d write a response to Alexandros Marinos’ rebuttal to my ivermectin piece within a certain amount of time."
Why is the rebuttal not linked?
I've edited in a link. It's https://doyourownresearch.substack.com/p/the-potemkin-argument-index
Thank you!
Not yet
Programs need to design in the evaluation from the beginning. This means collecting NOW the data that will be needed THEN for the evaluation. Th is seldom done so evaluations are vague and may be nearly useless
I too worked in program evaluation in a (non-US federal) government context when I first finished my schooling. Dreams full of RCTs and everything :(
My sense is that you’re correct RE: program evaluations - by virtue of program design and/or lack of funding/timing - having non-rigorous results.
That being said, I would not be so quick to say they were pointless for some half-baked reasons :
1) program evaluations may not be a nail-in-coffin for ending or changing a program but they can provide some ‘therapy’ on the margins. sometimes, a program was on a cusp of a few changes but needed some ‘coordination’ via the shitty evidence that are interviews or document review.
2) I now work in on the other side and I find it hilarious that how often the spectre of even neutered and low-quality evaluations sometimes hang over the head of program and policy executives and staff - so there appears to be at least some deterrence! (Once again my prior as an evaluator that it would be nil!).
3) sometimes there are changes needed or wanted by management but unpopular with staff or stakeholders needed a quasi-independent report to justify it - like with management consultants.
Did you feel like the evaluations were able to get the full range of answers, or was this a "find a way to say everything's fine and we need more funding" sort of thing?
I think it's a 'bad equilibrium' type of thing, and it's like almost everywhere, not only in publicly funded research.
I still think your research programmes were better for the evaluation they got, than they would have been without. Not sure what to say beyond that.
“ I still think your research programmes were better for the evaluation they got”
I think this is probably the question to ask - not “was the evaluation great” but “does the exercise of performing the evaluation improve the thing being evaluated”.
Even if researching effectiveness is hard, the fact that program directors know that an effectiveness evaluation will take place would push them in a direction of designing their program to survive an effectiveness evaluation.
Makes sense. Like knowing someone is going to inspect your kitchen and shut your restaurant down if they find anything too scary probably really does make you fix at least the obviously broken stuff, even if the health inspectors are not super careful and the laws they operate under are kinda toothless.
Here is a podcast hosted by doctors that directly addresses this question: https://soundcloud.com/user-344313169/episode-192-processed-foods
I think your scale doesn't go high enough. I would add: Gummi worms - 15; Cheetos - 14; reconstituted chicken nuggets - 13; an ice cream cake - 12; twinkies - 11.
It's really just nitrites that you should avoid. E.g. cured meats.
A lot of it is the status-ranking of foods within the class of highly-educated and under-employed Americans. (Those are the "many people" you're discussing.) There's no simple algorithm, because if there was, adhering to the proper diet wouldn't signal that you've spent a lot of time within that class (usually at college). "It took a lot of work for tofu to become politically correct." Poll whichever of your friends are in that class to get the answers you want/need.
I was wondering about this just last night.
Prior to reading the WebMD list, I would have said that I rarely eat processed food. Now I have to confess to olive oil, butter, bacon, ham, cheese, bread, beer, olives and pasteurised milk.
If, indeed, these foods are processed then perhaps the category is not useful.
The more useful category is perhaps ultraprocessed. You can look at the NOVA classification system for a definition
Tl;dr: the dose makes the poison. Dichotomizing food into good or bad is not recommended.
Does this advice hold for someone with a monotonous diet? For example, at some point Immanuel Kant supposedly requested the same meals every day. Assuming we are only considering things that are at least 5% of daily caloric intake, wouldn't dichotomizing make Kant's diet more nutritious?
One Cheeto per day is quite likely under that arbitrary 5% limit, but I rarely see people eating so little at once. So I doubt that useful nutrition advice will bother to mention, 'It's OK to eat one Cheeto daily.'
See this WebMD article: https://www.webmd.com/diet/what-are-processed-foods
Having now read the two original articles, and slept on it, I feel reasonably comfortable making a few comments on them separately from David Friedman's blog post, which is a different beast:
- in climate change analyses, large numbers multiplied by small numbers abound. A lot of his statements of the form "this number might be big" are plausible, but waving your hand in the direction of a valid argument is not the same as doing the math. Obviously, he might have other things to do with his life than spending several months or years calculating each of these numbers (god knows I do!). And he might even be right that the people who are putting in the time to do the math are suspiciously often focusing on numbers going in one direction. But rhetorically, it's just not compelling enough to say so.
- the implicit conclusion is "and therefore we shouldn't put that much effort into fighting climate change". But if you're factoring in the positive externalities of climate change, you should also factor in the positive externalities of the proposed solutions. Reducing air pollution by switching to electric cars and stoves will have massive if diffuse health benefits per se (see how annoying and hard to argue with it is when someone just wave into the general direction of a valid point...). IMO, the problem with fighting climate change is not that it's net negative, it's that the costs of implementation are very concentrated on a few people who can afford lobbyists whereas benefits are all over the place.
- And we're also back to the question of inequality that is missing from Friedman's argument. How do you weight fewer cases of common colds in Canada, which has one of the best healthcare systems in the world versus deadly heatwaves in countries where people can't afford AC? It's like his argument that people can move around. Most refugees go from a poor country to a neighboring poor country, so that won't help them.
More broadly, IMHO, I don't think we don't have anywhere near the level of knowledge necessary to actually calculate the social cost (or benefit) of CO2. I once read a book that convincingly argued that the GDP numbers for poor countries are essentially made up (Poor Numbers by Jerven). When I pressed a grad school colleague doing his thesis in development economics, he ended up barking at me "what would you have us do?!". Economists spout numbers because that's what they do, and that's why people listen to them instead of sociologists or historians. But I do think that anything beyond descriptive consumer behavior and the national accounts of rich countries is essentially SimCity for grown-ups.
My big thing along these lines would be three fold.
1). I agree with him that the science is basically untrustworthy on climate change and that if you spend long enough listening to primary researchers and raising their work it becomes crystal clear they have some VERY strong biases towards looking at costs and not benefits, as well as blowing up the costs to be bigger than they are. Some of that is emotional/religious/ideological. A lot of it is the incentives of the institutions field. I don’t actually think you need to spend millions of hours debunking thousands of papers to come to understands this. You just need to listen to the actual people with an open mind. Their lack of objectivity isn’t just below the surface, it is an elephant in a china shop.
2). I suspect on the very long run, humans will decide we want a warmer earth with a melted Antarctica. It is soooooo much easier to create more habitable world by “terraforming earth”, than terraforming say mars.
3). Nevertheless I am personally in favor of pretty large and immediate action on climate change as I don’t think it is very good/nature/responsible to be making large changes to the planet simply because we cannot help ourselves. We are like WoW addicts posing in their pants because we are too lazy to get up and walk to the bathroom. It is kind of gross/sad.
I was making a lot of these same points regarding climate change 15 years ago? There is a long history of people/organizations involved being extremely careful to count all the costs, even pretty speculative ones, but ignoring potential benefits, or just handwaving them away. Environmentalism is for some, including many scientists, a surrogate religion. There is a lot of apocalyptic maundering about impacts that even if extremely bad, are frankly nowhere near apocalyptic.
Imagine a world with no polar bears? Sometimes that in itself is treated like a world that will no longer be worth living or habitable. Like seals won't have predators and kids will only see them in videos or in zoos, and now the whole civilization will collapse!
There is A LOT more argumentation needed there to get from polar bear extinction (which frankly doesn't seem likely anyway) > human extinction, and it is rarely present.
So I am in broad agreement with the post.
I think the premise argument that extreme cold is bad and that milder winters are good is incorrect on its face and warrants a tremendous amount of a priori skepticism. Ticks and various other insects and parasites are generally cold-sensitive and kept in check by hard winters -- you'll notice that, as our host has observed in the past, temperate climes see a lot better at fostering civilizations than high parasite-load tropical ones. Who the hell wants a climate more hospitable to leishmaniasis? See also, e.g. https://umaine.edu/podcasts/2021/11/11/s5e8-how-are-ticks-threatening-maines-moose/
Of course, I also consider Dr. Friedman to have an unwarrantedly anthropocentric view of the costs and benefits in any events even as it regards solely internalized costs: the marginal elephant or puffin or polar bear provides me a great more marginal positive utility than the marginal human. We have too many of those already. Conversely, I like snow.
It’s interesting that your concern for moose wellbeing is greater than for the wellbeing of both ticks and humans. Spending trillions of dollars worth of human resources to protect future moose instead of humans who now lack sufficient energy seems like a bad ethical choice.
I would submit that the parents of the humans who reproduced in circumstances in which their children would lack sufficient energy themselves made bad ethical choices under circumstance of presumptively greater ethical duty to their offspring than random strangers, no[1]?
I don't think it's all that weird that my concern for moose is greater than for the wellbeing or either ticks or humans at large. Nobody likes ticks, many people (including me) like charismatic megafauna, reading about conditions in impoverished and overpopulated regions of human habitation makes me sad, and getting the people in those conditions up to Western consumption standards results in the compromise of the wellbeing of the aforementioned charismatic megafauna for the abstract benefit of a fargroup whereas I have no ex ante belief that that it's good a thing that, say, anyone should be living in Afghanistan in the first place regardless of their standard of living. Putative ethical duties to enable other humans' consumption put me in extremely acute Malthusian competition with them -- indeed, "too many humans consuming too many resources and generating externalities" is the reason for being in this whole pickle in the first place. I think in a pure homo economicus sense it's really not particularly odd that I should find the marginal moose to provide positive utility but both the marginal tick and the marginal human to provide negative utility. The marginal human, when paired with any kind of ethical duty to them, is basically a utility monster whose birth I should desire to prevent.
[1] Yes, yes, it's not clear that utilitarianism has a concept of interpersonal duty that distinguishes between parents and randos, but c'mon.
EDIT: also the moose thing is relevant inasmuch as I do like charismatic megafauna but the primary point of that article was about tick populations persisting through winters in Maine because it doesn't get cold enough, and ticks and tick-borne diseases are *also* bad for humans directly.
It's probably useful to distinguish the values differences from the factual question differences like this.
I sympathize with the point you're making, and the latter paragraph is certainly more a matter of somewhat personal idiosycncrasy, but surely the analysis is in some sense dependent on the tractability of some level of shared-values-ness, and I think "parasites and topical diseases and pests are bad, actually, and mild winters foster them" isn't actually an idiosyncratic position. While I'm broadly skeptical that extreme cold causes more immiseration than extreme heat as a factual claim (though I know Dr. Friedman disagrees) at minimum it would be a consideration that needs to be weighed against, say, the expanding northern range of leishmaniasis or of expanding winter tick populations, which have no human (or really any non-parasite) constituency in favor of them.
Given the choice to save a penguin from certain death, or a human what would you choose.
Right, that's the factual question--when we sum up the costs and benefits of rising average temperatures, can we clearly determine the sign and at least the approximate magnitude? Some places get longer growing seasons, some places have parasitic diseases move 50 km further from the equator, higher CO2 means crops grow a little better, higher temperatures means more energy for storms, etc. I think David's factual claim is that it is not so easy to determine the sign with a lot of confidence.
And I think Nordhaus' calculations end up suggesting that the magnitude isn't all that huge when you consider the time span, so that it would be relatively easy to spend more on remediation than you gained. As I understand it, that's the basic argument being made by Lomberg, right? AGW is a real problem, we should try to reduce CO2 emissions, but it's not the biggest problem we face and we should be pretty ruthlessly applying cost-benefit logic to addressing it.
I don't know enough to have high confidence in any of these calculations, though. And the fact that most activists don't do cost-benefit analysis and most public voices on AGW are innumerate and technologically illiterate doesn't help, because that's true of basically every issue--the people proposing battery-powered airplanes to reduce CO2 emissions are no dumber than the ones proposing eliminating foreign aid and farm subsidies to balance the budget.
"Interested to see responses to (https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/my-first-post-done-again) David Friedman on climate change."
No you're not. Your original message implied that you did not have a fully formed opinion and were interested in getting others' perspective to inform yours. But your later behavior (e.g. having references at the tip of your fingers, shifting topics when you didn't have a counter-argument) show clearly that you came into this conversation for the purpose of convincing others or at least sowing doubts in their mind. I don't care if you're doing so because you genuinely agree with Friedman or because you're paid to do so, I find this obfuscation disingenuous at best. Therefore, as the sharks say, I'm out.
I can't speak for Jayan, but I am more interested in getting critical responses than supporting ones. In particular, I want critical responses to my piece criticizing Rennert. If my criticisms are correct, the fact that the piece was published by Nature and is being seriously considered by the EPA is evidence the field of estimating climate change costs is in very bad shape and nothing published in it should be taken seriously without careful examination. If I am wrong I would like to know it before submitting my criticisms to _Nature_. I have sent the version of my article that I plan to submit to the authors of Rennert for their response, also to the authors of the two articles that feed into Rennert, gotten responses from the lead author of one of the two. I have posted requests for critical comments in several places, am now doing so here. My piece is at:http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Ideas%20I/Climate/Critque%20of%20Rennert%20et%20al.pdf
1. There a lot of big cities in coastal areas, so the fact that the land area lost to sea level rise might be small seems mostly irrelevant. You would have to move millions of people, maybe more, as well as all of the infrastructure that makes these cities so economically valuable. The cost of doing so seems like it would be much larger than the value of additional land for growing food, which is relatively cheap.
2. Similarly, if existing populated areas are rendered uninhabitable, the existence of habitable but empty areas elsewhere seems like it would be a pretty limited comfort to those people who are being displaced. If the net benefit is positive then they could be compensated in some way, but you need to actually have this compensation, which means you're still "taxing" something.
Can you show me the calculations implying that millions of people would be displaced by a meter of sea level rise, which is towards the high end of the IPCC projection for the end of this century?
I don't know what the number is--when I wrote "would" it was probably too strong. My point was more that this paragraph in the blog post from above:
> Compare the map at 0 meters to the map at 1 meter. Even in Bangladesh, usually offered as a country where sea level rise will be catastrophic, the effect is almost invisibly small. The same is true for Miami. I have not looked over the entire world, but the only place I could find where a meter of sea level rise had a large effect was the Nile delta. Another way of looking at the question is to ask how much land is lost worldwide due to coastlines shifting in. My rough estimate is a little more than twenty thousand square kilometers, about the area of New Jersey.
Is not convincing to me; the metric of total area seems completely irrelevant. If you can provide an estimate of such a population, it would be more convincing, in my opinion.
Diking against a meter of sea level rise, with most of a century to do it in, is not a difficult engineering project; the Dutch managed to live below sea level with medieval engineering technology. At present the lowest city in the Netherlands is more than six meters below sea level. So my guess is that very few people in cities, perhaps none, will be flooded out. There will be problems for people living in low lying coastal islands which may not be worth the cost of protecting, due partly to sea level rise and partly to subsidence.
I offered my figure on total loss of land mostly because some people talk as though that will be a serious cost, partly to give some idea of the scale of the problem, which gets commonly exaggerated.
Fair enough. Apologies for being trigger-happy, discussions about climate change are full of bad-faith actors and it can be hard to know which is which. I'll take the time to read Friedman's article and the original article he is referring to (beyond his blog post which is the only thing I read in my last pass) and will get back to the discussion.
Point the first, systemic thinking is hard.
Friedman writes:
" At least that is true for humans, who can adapt to change by growing different crops, adding air conditioning to their houses. Other species can do it by evolution or by changing their range, but that could be a problem for species such as trees that evolve slowly and shift their range slowly. It could be a problem for aquatic species currently adapted to the current pH of the ocean, since increased CO2 absorbed by the ocean lowers its pH. "
Suppose /some/ influence on climate change is due to the demands of local climate control (=="air-conditioning to their houses").
Suppose climate change leads to a larger demand for local climate control.
Suppose we build more houses with more climate control capabilities.
Look on ye thermostat, and despair.
Or to phrase it differently and with more rigour, we might say something like:
" Non-linear externalities are difficult to encode in price information " and something along the lines of "Self referencing non-linear externalities with ambiguous correlation sound hellish to encode in price information". This might sound trite but it's actually relevant for every large scale event with multiple actors. Or, uh, a market.
"Your water heating bill will be $10 this year, unless it's also $10 for every other participant at fair market prices, at which point a bottleneck supply constraint will occur and your actual bill will be your family's servitude for ten generations".
Price information relies on a good flow of reasonable symmetric information in order to allow participants to take actions. Friction, wildly swinging costs and unpredictability all lead to degradation in the efficacies of the very mechanisms that purportedly resolve them.
We tend to offload these risks to some sort of governing central authority that's forced to bear them.
Point the second, feedback processes aren't static
Friedman writes:
" It is hard to see any other a priori reason to expect climate change to make us better or worse off. The earth and its climate were not designed for our convenience, so there is no good reason to believe that their current state is optimal for us. We are not designed for the current climate — over our species history, climate has varied by considerably more than the changes being predicted for global warming. Currently, humans live and prosper over a range of climates much larger than the range that we expect the climate at any particular location to change by. "
This is True. But it's the sort of True that makes me a little personally confused. In that, it's... Like it's truism? Here let me try by way of subject change to elaborate.
Imagine that I suggest changing the rules in chess. The king can now move twice a turn in all directions. Arguing against this, I write: " chess has been played in many forms for a long time. There are presently today people playing chess in different ways. And the rules of the game has varied over time".
We have learned nothing about the nature of chess, or the impact of my proposed rule change and all of this is true but it's also meaningless.
climate has varied considerably over the span of the human species. Right now, it is difficult to estimate the non-static feedback effects of climate varying more. Europe was covered by ice during the ice age. I will propose that such an climate condition today will alter the agricultural futures market for European grain. But likely that's not what Friedman means, because we're not talking ice-age levels of change. Right well, minor temperature increases from atmospheric conditions then. Suppose that desertification of the Sub-saharan greenbands are a genuine problem, but it's also true that the Sarahan Desert might undergo climate cycles that make it vast green grassland. But depletion of fishing stock due to acidification of the ocean will lead to a rise in the price of fish, which may mean more labourers are attracted to the fishing industry which may precipitate a backflow of money to the regions they travel from which could accelerate either the depletion of fishing stock, the movement of migrant labour or the expanding desertification of the Saharan desert due to increased water demands from increased industry.
And your job is to estimate the externalities in the preceding schizophrenic-sounding paragraph. This is just really hard. I think unintentionally Friedman sweeps it aside by stating that climate has changed in the past. It makes the problem neater than it is.
Point the third: "So I'll Just Do The Math, Then!"
Friedman writes:
" There are at least four predictable effects of climate change that appear unambiguously negative: sea level rise, more frequent extreme heat, stronger cyclones, and reduction in ocean pH.[4] There are at least four effects that are unambiguously positive: expansion of habitable areas towards the poles, less frequent extreme cold, fewer cyclones, CO2 fertilization. There are at least two effects that are ambiguous, might make us better off, might make us worse off: longer growing seasons and increased rainfall. We do not know enough to put all of these on a single scale, in part because they have different sorts of costs, but we can at least try to compare positive and negative effects that produce costs or benefits of similar sorts. "
I think stopping the listing at 4, 4, 2 is . . . Odd. Climate change implies changes to the biosphere of the Earth. There are many, many more than about 10 effects, neatly summarised. What about viral spread due to increased temperature allowing for infection-bearing insects and animals to move beyond current habitat? Isolating to variables like this makes the entire thing a little less useful. The Ipcc produces reports that are as long as they are precisely because there's a lot of factors.
Then Friedman writes:
" The first step is to specify the amount of climate change being considered. My estimates are for effects by the end of the century based on IPCC projections, about a 3°C increase in average global temperature and one to three feet of sea level rise, both relative to current values.
Start with sea level rise. That it will continue to happen is a pretty safe assumption. How big is the effect? "
Then Friedman offers some numbers (1 to 3 feet, about 300mm to 900mm), tests it using a neat online tool, takes a harder stance (tests with 1 meter, high end of estimates), and offers some well reasoned opinion based on these facts.
I genuinely appreciate the effort. I also find it to be, at best, kind of slap-dash. Which sounds harsh. But what I mean is this:
His estimates are useless because the thing he is estimating is incredible hard to estimate. He uses Floodmaps and Bangladesh as reasonable datapoints. And they are.
Put, for instance, if we use the Nasa provided Sea-Level tool
( https://sealevel.nasa.gov/ipcc-ar6-sea-level-projection-tool ) we can check the assumed sea level rise across a variety of scenarios with a timeline that extends out further than Friedmans' cutoff at 2100.
Variable model assumptions give a full range of sea level rise in Bangladesh as 0.3 to 2, even 5 at the top end of the low confidence, extreme outlier model. The Ipcc report on coastal flooding dynamics notes that regional factors may shift estimates by 30% from their basic model ( https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/, section 4 )
I absolutely agree with Friedman that 1 meter of sea level change by 2100 does not seem to be catastrophic for Bangladesh[1]. 0.7m seems manageable.
1.3 m seems... bad? 2 meters though? Yikes. 3 meters? /Yikes/. 1 meter with a random freak storm in Summer of 2101 that briefly brings the water level to 3.4 due to climatic conditions (thermal expansion + increased ice melt)? Hooohboy. 0.3 meters? Eh, no biggie.
But relevantly: how do you price this externality in an efficient way, and how do price it when the cost borne by Bangladeshi seaside homes is risk they're taking due to Danish industrial manufacture of bacon?[2]
Just as relevantly, and the devil at the core of all this, and taking Friedman's numbers at face value:
Suppose that increasing global climate change frees up human habitable land on the order of ten million square kilometres. Further suppose we re-house everyone affected by changes in the climate of the present land they live on.
. . . Now precisely what? The climate change doesn't stop just because in 2023 we only have semi-reliable estimates out until 2150.
Making a few average estimates and concluding that the rise in sea level is offset by increases is a little wrongheaded as they don't easily compare. You're building a million new homes with a million new airconditioners and that'll. . . Accelerate the feedback process. This kind of thing isn't easy to solve that way.
But as Friedman writes:
" If you are looking at a complicated problem with a lot of judgement calls and know what conclusion you want to reach, you can usually reach it. "
Yeah. That. . . That's why all of this is *really* hard.
[1]"catastrophic" for the country. even 1 meter on Floodmaps looks like it floods thousands of people's homes, but that's not so bad.
[2] I'm Danish.
I live 20 feet from the sea. Some people tell me I’m
in trouble by 2030(!) and others by 2050. Even David says that every foot of increase extends the sea inland by 100ft, at least in America. Buried in the NASA reports is the actual sea level increase - which is 3.4mm a year and has been for a while, which isn’t worrying at all to me, Im guessing my front door is about 10ft above sea level.
I am admittedly not in the US, where the coasts seem to be surprisingly low level.
I appreciate the response, and I also giggled for a few minutes. Yes. I. . . Probably am the kind of writer that one needs to read a few times. I apologize for any difficulties that accrues from my habit of randomly veering off into snarky asides, and I commend you on making your way through things nonetheless!
Also reading my response back now, I feel it's harsher in tone than I actually intend. I should note that I've read Friedman's works and genuinely enjoyed them. If I come across as disparaging him, it's poor phrasing on my part. I'm more gesturing vaguely at the inherent difficulty in answering the kind of questions he strives to answer with the methodology he wants to use to answer them.
This is not to say I don't think these questions are answerable. I actually believe that we can arrive at good, reasonably economic answers to the questions of costs, benefits and utilities in relation to climate change. The framing just sometimes embed certain thoughts that then drive things towards conclusions I don't align with.
As one example, in the post, Friedman mentions the past fear of population explosions. It's my understanding this is intended as a statement that being certain of the cost/benefit of population increases is hard.
( I'm helped a little here in Friedman himself writing: " I don't even know if population growth has net positive or negative effects, only that the effects couldn't be as negative as was widely claimed fifty years ago because what happened since then was the opposite of the predictions." a little further down this thread. Mind reading authors is so much easier when they just tell you what they actually mean! Hurrah! )
I absolutely agree with him, it's a difficult question to answer. I'm not a domain expert, but I've done enough economics to at least understand there's things like the Solow-Swan model and a lot of debate about them. I also agree with him that fevered 70'ies sci-fi about how we'd all be eating soylent green soon (it's MADE of PEOPLE) were overblown.
But I think in even including the line of argument about population in an essay about climate change, we're already off the wrong path. After all, it embeds a subtle point about the danger of assuming negative externalities and forecasting. But it also just seems . . . A little off?
For three reasons.
The first: It's an example of a crisis that did not manifest because the argument behind them were never completely coherent. But also because thousands of people took action to reduce the impact. The Green Revolution of the 1960'ies ended up overshadowing it, because in general it turned out most fevered dreams of famine were not accounting for rapid advances in agriculture. So using it as a point against being wary of the costs of climate change is a bit strange. It's an example of people identifying a problem (famine), massive development in reducing it (agriculture) and consistent worldwide effort. So by that line, of course the crisis never manifested. We got /really/ interested in making sure it didn't! Ozone layer depletion and the worldwide ban on certain chemicals, fishing quotas and laws against nuclear proliferation meaningfully all reduce the negative consequences of the things that people were fearing before we then introduced measures to reduce it.
Point the second:
Hey uh wait are we talking about the negative externalities of *population growth* and *college dorms playing loud music* or the negative externalities of *continent wide famines*. Those... Those don't seem the same? How did we go from "estimates of population growth were wrong" to "Ehrlic's famine didn't happen" to "this makes estimating the costs of things hard" to
" Most of the people working on climate change know that the respectable position, the one that will get their articles published, their research funded, earn the approval of their peers, is to be against it "
. . . Uuuuuuhhhhhh. There's some, uhm. Some logic missing here? I think we skipped a few steps when difficult estimates of population growth help underpin an argument about careerism and a subtle dig that most published climate science is only "most published climate science" because of some genteel level groupthink effort.
Hang on, are we talking "costs are hard to estimate" or are we talking "overblown model dangers have constrained our economic policies and I detest this quiet agreement among scientists/publishers to reduce our future gdp growth due to their percieved green revolution! Bring on the fossil fuels!". I mean I jest and exaggerate a little but one of those two things is nothing like the other so what are they doing in the same essay?
Point the third:
The sad weird half-truth horror world is also this. Please take numbers here with a grain of salt. I'm not a domain expert, I just work in a field that means I have to browse through a lot of EU and UN reports.
Friedman writes that Ehrlics famine never manifested. calories per capita have gone up, Friedman is right. But is this an argument in any way related to climate change externalities? consider:
In absolute terms, according to reports you can source from WHO and ngos working against hunger, current worldwide estimates of people suffering food insecurity or hunger is on the scale of hundreds of millions. 820 million or so? Here's a media release from WHO dated July last year ( https://www.who.int/news/item/06-07-2022-un-report--global-hunger-numbers-rose-to-as-many-as-828-million-in-2021 ). Our World in Data have numbers similar. (https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment)
Now I propose a philosophical query:
Does this mean that "Ehrlich's famine" did or did not manifest? Or put differently, when Friedman writes:
" The book The Population Bomb, published by Paul and Anne Ehrlich in 1968, confidently predicted unstoppable mass famine in the 1970’s, hundreds of millions of people starving to death due to overpopulation. [...] Not everyone agreed that things were that bad but almost everyone involved in the controversy agreed that population growth, if not greatly reduced, was going to be a major problem making poor countries poorer [...] Ehrlich’s famine did not happen. [...] But the effect could not have been as negative as the expert opinion of the sixties and seventies claimed since what happened was the opposite of their predictions."
Is he right or wrong?
For extra credits, define whether the answer to the above question matters to the people who experienced the African famines of the 1970ies and 1980ies, and then go browse UN report on the food security situation in west africa at the time (Eg: "expert opinion) (Don't do this, it's sad)
For extra, extra credits, consider whether the African famines of the 1960ies, 1970ies, 1980ies, 1990ies and so on reasonably categorise as "hundreds of millions starving" and then link this to proposed measures for or against climate change mitigation today by embedding the transaction costs of our activities via proposed regulatory mechanisms. Tally up the number of lives lost contra $$ spent. (Don't do *this*, it's worse)
Incidentally, worldwide famine was decreasing up until 2017 and has been increasing since. Pandemic and war I grant are outside context problems, but still. Food crisis.
And to round all the way back around... Friedman writes:
" The mechanism works for voluntary transactions, since you won’t sell me your labor or your goods unless I pay at least what they are worth to you. It does not work for involuntary transactions. "
Yes. But what if one measures costs in $$ and the other measures costs in "absolute amount of misery?". This hypothetical steel-mill releasing carcinogenic materials into the groundwater really only decreases the utility of everyone in the nearby village by some slight fractional percentage. And most people don't even get cancer. And maybe we can cure cancer in the future anyway. And so I propose most doctors writing about the dangers of cancer over-estimate their estimates of it because that's how they get published.
. . . Hang on, that last sentence doesn't seem to flow from the premises that got us here. Weird how that works.
Just skimming it in a minute, seems like a standard anti-climate argument.
"Pigouvian taxes are cool. But what if it's hard to price the externality? People thought increasing population had a negative externality in the past, they started population controls, turned out they were wrong. Climate change has lots of possible positive effects that don't get enough attention, and we're making the same mistake." Then he thought experiments some ways things could go better. But not much content and no model. tldr: Maybe climate change isn't so bad or even positive?
Pigouvian taxes aren’t really a solution in many cases. Are carbon taxes really used to extract carbon from the atmosphere.
I don’t think those costs are measurable, nor that companies can in fact change their CO2 emissions entirely yet, which means that this ends up as a consumer tax.
If things that put more CO2 into the atmosphere cost more, people will in general buy less of them, which leads to less CO2 being put into the atmosphere. I don't know how to correctly determine the price of CO2, but making damaging stuff cost more is exactly what we want--we want everyone to price in the externality in their decisions.
The right amount of CO2 emissions is not zero--for example, air travel is probably going to be burning kerosene for the forseeable future, and trying to switch over to hydrogen fuel cells or something is not going to work. For that matter, right now, solar and wind pretty much have to be paired with gas turbines or diesel generators or some such fast-responding power source to keep the lights on all the time.
Trying to have some regulatory agency decide which CO2 emitting things will be allowed and forbidden requires them to know everyone's internal costs and available tradeoffs. Pricing CO2 emissions lets the individual people and companies with the right information decide when to burn fossil fuels vs do something else.
They can always change consumption by reducing activity, and yes it _is_ a consumer tax: exactly proportional to the harm the consumers are causing to others not involved in their transaction.
Additionally, the tax is still exactly as effective in changing behavior if it gives back, which can even be done in a progressive manner.
I don't believe that carbon taxes are 100% of the solution, bit they are by far the biggest, easiest solution that we are leaving on the ground
Yeh? The problem I have with (consumer) polluter pays is that the rich can afford to pay and the poor cannot. Carbon taxes on airline fuels won’t reduce the use of private jets, except marginally - the millionaire who rents rather than the billionaire who owns. However the guy who takes a trip a year might have to stop. Some European greens realise this and want taxes to apply to frequent flyers.
If he is right about CO2 emissions being good for the Earth, it just flips the tax if you can price in that positive. You'd want to tax non carbon sources so you can incentive burning more carbon even if it were more expensive than other energy sources.
I don't say that CO2 emissions are good for the Earth, as I think should be obvious to anyone who reads what I wrote. What I say is that we don't know if they are good or bad for the Earth, and the confident claim that they are very bad for the Earth is not justified. I don't even know if population growth has net positive or negative effects, only that the effects couldn't be as negative as was widely claimed fifty years ago because what happened since then was the opposite of the predictions.
Ignorance that will be reduced over time is an argument against costly action in either direction.
> increase in usable land especially in Canada and Russia etc
This point has been made elsewhere in this thread, but unless "Canada and Russia etc" have a plan to distribute the gains to other nations who have lost from the changes, this is not much of a positive net effect for the world as a whole, and certainly not for any individual country not located in or near the Acrtic.
There is a global market for grain and agricultural products, why assume Canada or even Russia would hoard their increased production?
The vaunted increases in usable land are likely to be small benefits. Useful, valuable land is fertile and near coasts or navigable rivers. Land that has been under ice or over permafrost is poor quality for any of the things humans normally use land for.
"Large" benefits is overclaiming.
I don't know about that; Canada and Russia are BIG. Small benefits multiplied by a large enough factor become substantial.
Zhang and Cai I have read ( many years ago, when I was more interested) and found to be, as you say, more detailed and more measured. Note that this paper does NOT forecast large benefits.
Ramankutty 2002 is way out of date. Superficial analyses (it is implied that Zabel 2014 is such) are not to be given much weight imo.
I’m a (behavioral) economist with a keen interest in climate change. There are many things wrong IMO with his positions, I’ll just point out a couple of obvious ones:
1) the opposition between markets and dictature is a false dichotomy. Democracy and other forms of community-based decision making are at least one other possibility to solve the coordination problem. And for example, solving all the coordination problems required to get someone on the Moon was not done by a price-based market but by an organization closer to a “dictature” in his dichotomy.
2) there are massive distributional issues with climate change, which he glosses over like neoliberal economics glosses over all distributional issues. Canadians will get fewer colds and better agricultural yields while the desertification of west Africa will impoverish some of the poorest people on Earth. The math gets even uglier you use marginal utility instead of hand-wavy macroeconomics and assumes decreasing marginal utility with income (which economists do except when it’s inconvenient to their preferred solution)
Thank you. I spotted the fallacy of the excluded middle in that piece but decided not to bother commenting, mostly because I wasn't able to come up with a decent way of phrasing the comment. (Much better to give examples of missing alternatives than to play "name the fallacy", which would probably have just been taken as rude.)