Can someone that understands the AGI doomerism perspective explain why recent innovations in AI have made people so concerned about superintelligent AGI in the near future?
Like, I don't understand how a super smart AGI trained on past and present data could somehow generate:
1) endless innovations
2) iteratively improve itself
It seems to me that superintelligent AGI would need to be fundamentally different from GPT-4 or PaLM-E, as the their knowledge is mostly constrained by their training data and RLHF. Superintelligent AGI, however, I'm guessing would need to be capable of generating new knowledge itself, but it does not look like we're anywhere close to this right now.
What am I missing here? Why should I be terrified?
It is a mistake to think that LLMs behavior is limited by the data they are trained on. Regurgitating data is not a good way to reduce the training loss, not when training doesn't involve training against multiple full rounds of training data. I don't know the current stats, but I remember reading somewhere that initial GPT-3 training didn't even get through a single complete iteration of its massive training data.
So with pure regurgitation not available, what it has to do is encode the data in such a way that makes predictions possible, i.e. predictive coding. This means modelling the data in a way that captures meaningful relationships among tokens so that prediction is a tractable computational problem. But it is this style of synthesis that gives LLMs all their emergent capabilities. Innovation to some extent is just novel combinations of existing units. LLMs are good at this as their model of language and structure allows it to essentially iterate over the space of meaningful combinations of words.
What LLMs are not good at are generations that require active computations as opposed to just picking contextually relevant words. Where contextual relevance isn't sufficient to generate the best token, e.g. when candidate generations must be evaluated by some more abstract criteria, LLMs basically just guess. This is because each generation has a fixed computation budget and so anything that requires deploying extra computational resources beyond the fixed window will be a failure.
But I doubt this computational limitation will last very long. It's easy to imagine a system that is trained with the ability to enter a self-directed computational loop where it iterates over a candidate generation until it is satisfied with the result (or a limit is reached). Such a system will be significantly more powerful than current LLMs, but Transformers would still be a significant component of it.
I don't think you should be terrified of current LLMs. The terrifying thing is that LLMs are just about the dumbest thing you can do with Transformers and they perform far beyond anyone's expectations. When people imagine AGI, they probably imagine some super complex, intricately arranged collection of many heterogeneous subsystems backed by decades of CS and mathematical theory. But LLMs have completely demolished the idea that complex architectures are required for complex intelligent-seeming behavior. If LLMs are just about the dumbest thing we can do with Transformers, it is plausible that slightly less dumb architectures will reach AGI. The terrifying thing is there may not be any AGI alarm before it is unleashed on the world.
Why are LLMs "the dumbest thing you can do with Transformers"?
Is it because it just because the architecture is fairly novel and we haven't figured out what else we could do with it yet? In the same way that simple binary classification with a perceptron was probably the dumbest thing you could do with something that had the potential to become a neural network?
Yeah, its mainly because Transformers are so new and the simple "stack them X deep and Y wide" paradigm continues to pay dividends with no end in sight. But eventually the functional improvements with further scaling will slow enough that folks will start looking for more complicated architectures.
Smarter (more honest?) people agree that deep learning is unlikely to lead to AGI directly. But the success of these tools is leading to billions of dollars being poured into AI development and it is being done in a 'race' between competitors, not a careful controlled research program adequately evaluating risks at all stages.
A few years ago I had no worries about AGI because (as far as I could see) no company was trying to build an AGI and moreover, there was no clear business case for it. Special-purpose AIs are tailored to specific business needs, so that's what I expected people to build. But for some reason we now have multiple large corporations explicitly working toward AGI.
And while Large Language Models or deepfakes or image generators aren't AGIs, they look like they could be adapted to become subsystems of AGIs or, at the very least, tools that AGIs use. LLMs in particular showed me that simulating human speech was much easier than I thought. After decades of linguists trying to understand how human language works, somebody just came up with a new algorithm and suddenly machines converse like us now! Language was something that AGI would have to master in order to be dangerous. Now it seems that language simply isn't a barrier. What's next? Cloud servers that pretend to be human, complete with a human face and voice? Indeed, they can probably have any face and any voice.
The number I would like and don't have is how many wet markets there are in the world with whatever features, probably selling wild animals, make the Wuhan market a candidate for the origin of Covid. If it is the only one, then Covid appearing in Wuhan from it is no odder a coincidence than Covid appearing in the same city where the WIV was researching bat viruses. If it was one of fifty or a hundred (not necessarily all in China), then the application of Bayes' Theorem implies a posterior probability for the lab leak theory much higher than whatever the prior was.
My understanding is that they are common throughout China, but I don't have a number. Where I am in Papua-New Guinea, wild animals, live and dead, including fruit bats, are frequently sold at markets all over the country. There are probably at least hundreds of such markets, but they are smaller than the one in Wuhan.
Hey folks, I'm visiting the Bay Area soon for a conference, and I'm staying two weeks, so enough time to do non-conference things. My dates are the 17th of March to the 31st - are there any rationalist meetups I could attend?
If you'd rather not say them publicly, my email is my first name followed by my surname (both of which are in my username) followed by the numeral 1 followed by @gmail.com
I have been putting together an argument in favour of expecting AI to have a slow takeoff. Part 1 of the argument, though presented in a way that is seemingly unrelated to AI, can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk6uHi_Rdm4
The British government is among the most dedicated in the world when it comes to keeping its people safe… from thinking the wrong thoughts. Which is why it runs “Prevent,” a program to prevent terrorism by encouraging people to rat out their neighbors to counter-terrorism police for wrong-think, as well as using behavioral analysis to pre-identify dangerous extremists to monitor. Recently some documents from Prevent became public as part of an official review, and, as Douglass Murray reports here, the factors designated evidence of “extremism” are rather interesting…
"When I first saw these documents I felt a sort of white-hot anger. But then I read on and saw that these same taxpayer-funded fools provide lists of other books shared by people who have sympathies with the ‘far-right and Brexit’. Key signs that people have fallen into this abyss include watching the Kenneth Clark TV series Civilisation, The Thick of It and Great British Railway Journeys. I need to stress again that I am not making this up. This has all been done on your dime and mine in order to stop ‘extremism’ in these islands.
There is also a reading list of historical texts which produce red flags to RICU. These include Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, as well as works by Thomas Carlyle and Adam Smith. Elsewhere RICU warns that radicalisation could occur from books by authors including C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Aldous Huxley and Joseph Conrad. I kid you not, though it seems that all satire is dead, but the list of suspect books also includes 1984 by George Orwell..."
Obviously, the (ongoing?) thing where various UK government agencies and departments conspired to cover up thousands of British girls being raped by Muslim grooming gangs so as not to be "racist" is far more egregious than this, but the point is that the utter asininity of designating something as completely anodyne as "Great British Railway Journeys" as "white supremacist" shows what an active hatred the British deep state has for white Britons and their history/culture, not to mention the fact that the Prevent program has bizarrely focused on "far-right" "terrorists" over radical Islamicists in a way that cannot conceivably be justified by the actual prevelance of terrorist activies by these respective ideological groups.
You are a 20 year old who was born to a single mom as the result of rape. You love your mother dearly. You live in a country where abortion on demand is legal, but she choose not to have you aborted. The traumatic effects of the rape are still with your mother 20 years later and are awful for her.
One day, you are transported back in time to the day your mother was raped, and have the opportunity to stop it.
Do you do so, eliminating yourself from existence in the process?
Is this anything more than asking should a child sacrifice their life for their parent? I think most parents would *not* want their child to do that, and for those that do their child probably wouldn't be willing.
Um, due to, you know, events, I have an emergency update to my Russo-Ukrainian war forecast, posted without explanation of either methodology or reasons. Previous update (with methodology) here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-261/comment/12342095. Current probabilities:
This is in reaction to various reports about possible pro-Ukrainian motive in blowing up Nord Stream pipelines, coming from at least two directions (NYT and several German media outlets).
So far there is no evidence that perpetrators had links to Ukrainian government, but mere existence of such reports of course significantly increases the probabilty that such links will be found in the future. Probably not in a sense that Zelensky ordered the pipelines to be blown up, more like Ukranian government supporting some shady actors to generally blow Russian stuff up and those actors being very dumb.
> New intelligence reviewed by U.S. officials suggests that a pro-Ukrainian group carried out the attack[...]
> U.S. officials declined to disclose the nature of the intelligence, how it was obtained or any details of the strength of the evidence it contains.[...]
> Officials who have reviewed the intelligence said they believed the saboteurs were most likely Ukrainian or Russian nationals[...]
As usual, Oliver Alexander[2] seems to offer the best information. He started by debunking Hersh[3] and has had the best working theory which proposes that the attacks deliberately targeted only NS1, not NS2 (suggesting a pro-Russian attacker), and that the Greek ship Minerva Julie (owned by a company with links to Russia) has something to do with the attacks.[4] He addresses the corpus of articles on this story as follows[5]:
> The Zeit article and overall story leaves many unanswered questions including several of the points that are used to point at a pro-Ukrainian group. It is stated that the group has been professionally trained and used very high quality fake passports during the operation to protect their identity. At the same time though the boat charter was reportedly paid for by a Polish company owned by two Ukrainians leaving a very direct link back to Ukraine. It is also stated that the yacht was returned “uncleaned” after the charter, which undoubtably aided the authorities in finding explosive residue inside the boat on the table. For a highly sophisticated operation carried out with focus on secrecy and apparent subterfuge, why did the team involved decide to be so careless at this pivotal final moment as to not clean the yacht prior to returning it?
> The Times wrote another piece where they state that the explosives were driven from Poland into Germany. Why would the group acquire explosives in Poland and then risk transporting it over the border to Germany and sail of out Rostock? It would have been safer and logistically easier to set sail from a Polish marina which is also closer to Bornholm and the site of the Nord Stream sabotage. This adds a large amount of increased complexity and risk for no logical reason.
> Depending on the amount of explosives used in the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline, the size of the vessel can also be questioned. In the article by The New York Times, they mentioned a previous quote from the investigation that stated that up to 500kg of explosives was used at each Nord Stream 1 site. If this is true, that would make the use of a Bavaria Cruiser 50 to perform this sabotage very unlikely. Transporting this amount of explosive on a 15m yacht along with 6 people and large amount of tanks and equipment for the dives would be close to impossible[...]
> The story also makes no mention of the Greek flagged crude oil carrier the Minerva Julie which circled the area around the Nord Stream 1 explosion sites between the 5th and 13th September. Coincidentally the exact same time as the “Andromeda” would have been in the area[...]. Using the “Andromeda” to transport the team and possible supplies and meet up with the Minerva Julie sounds like a more plausible scenario to me.
> Additionally, the locations of the Nord Stream 1 explosions are in some of the deepest water in the area[...]. Why would a non-state actor operating off a 50 foot yacht decide to place the explosives at the most difficult and time-consuming location? [...]there would be hundreds of more accessible locations along the pipes for the saboteurs to place the explosive charges. [...]blowing the pipeline towards the deepest point in the area reduces the amount of the pipeline that is flooded and as a result makes it easier and cheaper to repair. The group chose the most difficult area to perform the dive where the damage would be the easiest to repair.
The analysis seems strong enough to reject the idea that a small pro-Ukrainian group did it, and it would be irrational for the Ukrainian state to attack its allies' energy supply by destroying NS1 (but not NS2![6] Getting NS2 online would be a propaganda victory for Putin!) I don't know of *anyone* who would rationally destroy NS1, but I do know of one man who had the power to do it and is known for being belligerent, rash and somewhat foolish as of late.
Let me just say that it is imho a mistake to rely too much on a heuristic "it would be irrational to do it, so they didn't do it". People are often stupid.
As I said, "I don't know of *anyone* who would rationally destroy NS1", but I know of someone with a recent history of belligerent, rash, foolish decisions—and it's not Zelenskyy. This same person apparently wanted NS1 off, since he turned it off more than three weeks before the explosions (on Aug 31, 2022)[1][2].
One can of course ask why you'd blow up a pipeline that's already off (and this question applies *no matter* who blew it up). The case for Putin:
(1) avoiding blame is very important to his regime, and if mysterious U.S. forces blew up the pipeline, he can't be blamed for harming Russia's economy
(2) Russian propaganda likes to have a continuous supply of scapegoats such as mysterious U.S. forces
(3) Putin has spent 10+ years trying to sow division in the West, so he got what he wanted: westerners arguing over who blew it up. This also helps explain why Russia pretended they turned off the gas only due to mechanical issues: because some people *would* believe that story, sowing conflict among talking heads
(4) Putin seems to have a distinct, if lukewarm, interest in not appearing to blatantly ignore its contracts. While he gives off all kinds of red flags that Russia can't be trusted, he's 100% committed to pretending that it can. I'm not sure if keeping the gas off was a breach of contract—Google is silent on that—but Putin is the sort of guy who wants to say "we kept our gas contract, but the U.S. interfered" and have as many people as possible believe it. And not that it matters, but Russia's suspension of NS1 was arguably illegal under international law[3].
Wow, great comment. Thanks for reply! As an aside I did oppo research for a political candidate and I obviously never did anything illegal but I was considering doing quasi illegal things like seeing if someone graduated from a college (with Santos they did it and the college cooperated while when I did it with a different college they quickly directed me to a service and hung up on me). But with the service you needed to pay for the information and I was going to get a prepaid credit card and put the address of the 3rd candidate in the race and then just give the information to a local reporter.
Got it - that makes sense. If Ukrainians, whether state sponsored or rogue actors, were behind blowing up the pipeline, it won't undermine Western support for Ukraine in one fell swoop, but it'll definitely chip away at it, and if that goes so goes the war.
3) After the Founding King dies, all his powers pass to the Founding Queen.
4) Once she dies, an election is held to assign a replacement head of the Royal Family. Only people who are descended from the Founding King and Founding Queen, and who share at least 12.5% of their DNA can run for the office or hold office. The same requirement exists for all top political positions outside the monarchy, like Parliament, the Supreme Court, and heads of government agencies, including the military.
5) Anyone who shares at least 6.25% of their DNA with the Founding King and Founding Queen can vote in the election.
6) It's common and accepted for people sharing 6.25% or more of their DNA with the Founders to clone themselves once they get old. There is a social imperative to keep the voting/leadership population pure and continually expanding in size. There's also an imperative to use genetic engineering to make each generation smarter, healthier, and more competent than the last.
7) Large numbers of people who have less than 6.25% of the Founders' DNA also live in the country, and they have all the same rights except for voting for politicians and holding high public office.
I thought up this idea recently, and think it carries some advantages over existing systems. For one, since the Head of the Royal Family is elected, it reduces the odds of a truly bad leader getting the post, which has been the Achilles' Heel of monarchies based on birth order. Also, the blood quantum requirements would help ensure that the leadership caste was unified, preventing the society from getting too fractious. Add in a culture of genetic improvement and fecundity, and you eventually get a caste with thousands or even millions of highly competent members who could fill out the ranks of national leadership with lots of people to spare.
I mean, historically elective monarchies haven't turned out great... They typically involve a lot more social and political convulsion at the time of succession, and monarchs always tend to try and turn them into some kind of primogeniture, which makes pretty unstable...
Kind of a rationalist in-joke. He's well-known among students of the right for advocating monarchy, as well as for having an extremely verbose prose style, and his followers have some overlap with rationalists, though not as much as people who don't like rationalists like to say.
Nor do I think you understand how the heritability of genetic markers works.
How many and which alleles are you going to use to determine royal relatedness? Half of the DNA from the King and Queen will NOT be passed on to their children. And assume inheriting half of their parent’s DNA does *not* mean the kids are inheriting half royal genetic markers, because the royalty marker alleles will get randomly shuffled out of the deck with each subsequent generation. If you're only using a couple of markers, the odds are not astronomically high that a bunch of their grandchildren may not share any of those royalty markers, because only 1/4 of the king and queen's genes are handed down to their grandkids. 1/8th to the great-grandkids. If you're using a bunch of different alleles as markers that will increase the likelihood of some group of descendants meeting your candidate and elector requirements. But as the generations pass, the royal genetic markers may go extinct.
However, from the perspective of progress of rationalistic thought, I think that these trends may underestimate the more meaningful shift. If someone is concerned with religion leading people to think and act in ways that are irrational, then it doesn't really matter which box someone ticks off on a survey - it matters how they actually think and act.
My impression is that in the 1990s, belief in the supernatural played a much larger role in people's actual behavior, than today - even more than the aforementioned trend might imply.
For example, I think it used to not be uncommon for police to consult with psychics to try to solve crimes (I can't find numbers on the frequency of such occurrences - there was a notable case of "the St. Louis Jane Doe" in 1994 when the police mailed a vital piece of evidence in a murder case to a psychic and never got it back). And psychics, like Sylvia Browne, in general seemed to have occupied a much more significant role in the 90s and aughts.
Horoscopes are still popular, but it seems like they have mostly been relegated to the realm of fun and games, rather than being consulted for serious things like solving murders.
Instead, is seems like even religious people increasingly act in ways that are consistent with naturalistic explanations of the world.
Conversely, there may be a trend of non-religious people increasingly adopting ways of thought and action that are less consistent with naturalism, and more consistent with dogmatism or religion. For example, David Friedman notes that a priori rejection of sex differences in human behavior is not what one would expect on the basis of belief in evolution, and would be more consistent with a divine religious model, but is probably more common among those who would not tick off a box like "Christian."
Still, it seems like the overall trend in actual meaningful behavior towards naturalism, although I can't think of the best metrics to study that.
For example, Church attendance would be an obvious proxy, but it's not really what I'm interested in. People can attend Church for a variety of reasons, and even nod along with everything not disingenuously, but nevertheless behave in ways that are consistent with naturalism. For example, if they had a sick child, they may pray for the child, but it would not occur to them to pray instead of seeking actual medical treatment. Praying doesn't have much of a cost, so it isn't a great proxy for measuring how deeply someone believes something. I think mailing off evidence in a murder case to a psychic, is a much better indicator of deeply believing in the supernatural - and more interesting for me, is the sort of concerning behavior that I would hope is eliminated.
I assume that the consultation of psychics in criminal investigations was mostly a cover for parallel construction. That is, the police had obtained useful information through some means that wouldn't hold up in court, like a confidential informant who won't testify or some illegal means. They would work with a "psychic" to get a "tip" that they should look in a specific place for a clue, which the police already knew was in that location.
Nowadays, investigators either have more leeway in how they bring in information from parallel construction, or the norm has become to use better communication skills and incorporate the parallel construction more tactfully.
There was a period of time where it seemed like every high-profile criminal who "got away" was very fortunately found within the week during a "routine traffic stop" -- just as an example of one of the modern ways that parallel construction is brought into a case without a psychic.
Well as someone who was already early middle age in 1990, my impression is that the role of the supernatural plays no bigger or smaller role in the decisions people make in 2023 than it did then.
Indeed, I'm kind of horrified how easily you came to that conclusion. It speaks to how difficult it is to understand what it was like to actually live in some period of history just by examining your vague received impressions from schooling and the Zeitgeist, and a few online records. Imagine how the future will misunderstand us! Yikes.
I almost agree. I am certainly much more *aware* of how much magical thinking, conspiracy ideation and bad reasoning is going on nowadays. In 1990 the media was mostly run by reasonable-sounding folks, and I didn't grasp that most people were different than me epistemologically.
To the extent there's something to this, my parents entertained supernatural ideas then, and still do today. I think rationality improves one child at a time, one funeral at a time.
Shortly before the fall of communism, I remember Czechoslovakian television broadcasting a healing session of Soviet psychic, Kashpirovsky. The idea was that all citizens would be remotely healed by watching him on TV.
A possible explanation is that the late Soviet regime really sucked at providing "meaning" for the masses, and believing in psychic powers was less dangerous than e.g. believing in politically incorrect ideas, so the supernatural was tolerated as long as it wasn't religious.
It is also possible that most people considered Kashpirovsky absurd, they just did not say it out loud, because one simply does not say his opinions out loud in socialism. But there still had to be enough people thinking it was a good idea to make it run on TV.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. Can you clarify whether your recollection matches mine as far as the prominence and respectability given to psychics in previous decades, with law enforcement consulting them as I mentioned, and with the influence of figures like Sylvia Browne? Have you noticed a decline in this regard?
I'm not Carl but FWIW I do notice a decline in this regard in the US. Not in the public's susceptibility to believe absurdities or to panic about those beliefs, though. Just that the absurdities aren't as supernatural as they used to be. I don't see a big reason to think supernatural beliefs couldn't come right back, though. Plenty of people sacrifice good science on the altar of political affiliation, as you point out, and it seems possible for that dynamic to tip over into something like the religious fervor of the past.
Thanks for your comment. I noted that such trends reflect a trend away from naturalistic thinking with my reference to David Friedman. Upon further reflection, though, I'm not sure whether on the balance thinking has moved towards naturalistic explanations and away from supernatural ones, given the competing trends away from certain non-naturalistic ones (e.g. psychics) but towards others, such as the ideologies you listed.
Perhaps (and I know I'm not suggesting anything novel here) the rise of the latter was to some degree related to the decline of the former.
Is there even a clear line between naturalistic and supernaturalistic explanations? It seems to me that pseudoscience often pretends to be science. They may believe in magic, but they still abuse scientific words such as "magnetism", "energy", "quantum". Like they believe that their models are naturalistic and scientific... it just happens that the "scientific establishment" wants to silence them.
And similarly, the woke people believe that science is 100% on their side. They believe that the scientific results that disagree with them, are factually wrong. I mean, this is basically the entire premise of RationalWiki.
I agree with you there. 2023 seems way more "religious" to me than the 90s did, in the sense of people having to be constantly aware of what dogmas there are which are Not To Be Questioned and having to self-censor themselves so they don't accidentally utter a blasphemy and be hauled in front of the Inquisition[1].
Indeed, I don't think I've seen a lower ebb in rationalism and live-and-let-live attitudes in my entire lifetime. It might compare with wartime 40s or maybe the 30s, but I don't have personal memories of those times.
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[1] Although they're definitely not the old "religions" -- Christianity, Islam, etc. They're all new religions, which don't even call themselves a religion, but which are marked out by the same unquestioning faith in dogma, policing of language, and intolerance of heresy of the old religions at their worst. Maybe alll new religious-style cults are severely intolerant at their beginning, and only mellow with age and bitter experience.
Ummm....I share the overall view that today's "woke" progressivism is a religion in both substance and style. But the idea that 2023 seems more "religious" overall than the 1990s kind of made me LOL. (I graduated into the adult workforce in the mid-1980s, just for context.)
Not for the USA as a whole, not by a long shot....I am regularly startled today by how much weaker religious influence (of the classical flavors) plays in the median American's life compared to 30 years ago. And in our civic culture as well. Given the rise of wokism I'd roughly assess the overall religiosity of American life and culture today as roughly the same as when I was a young adult.
(Which for me as a secular person is a disappointing and frankly dispiriting thing to conclude.)
Sure, but the modern version of "religion" is akin to to the worst excesses of Spanish Christianity in the 1300s or Islam in the 600s. Far more dogmatic, intolerant, and mindless than the classic religions have become.
Worse, the modern "religions" seem to focus the bulk of their energies on policing the faithful for heresy, and relatively little on actually helping out. At least the Jesuits ran some very fine colleges. I've yet to see any of the modern quasi-theistic cults strip off their vestments, take off their pointy hats, roll up their sleeves and get down in the trenches and start feeding the hungry, teaching the ignorant, caring for the sick and leprous, or dig wells for the indigent in malarial-infested hellholes.
It used to be that kind of selfless unpaid (or low paid) labor in service of the disadvantaged was the sine qua non to lecture the better off about their iniquities. Nowadays it's not. Maybe it's just that we've streamlined everything in the 21st century. No need to work in a soup kitchen for 15 years to earn the right to call shame on the Pharisees, now you can get right to the point.
"akin to to the worst excesses of Spanish Christianity in the 1300s or Islam in the 600s" -- oh for pete's sake....this type of absurd hyperbole is really not helpful in pushing back against woke-ism. Is extremely unhelpful in fact.
"Far more dogmatic, intolerant, and mindless than the classic religions have become."
I take it that you don't have any friends or relatives or co-workers whose families are conservative Evangelical or Latino Pentecostal or Hasidim? Or who are Afghan refugees who fled the Taliban? Or for that matter are followers of Black churches led by ministers who preached this past Sunday that gay people are an abomination and should be put to death? (While typing this I am sitting two offices away from a member of such a congregation.)
"the modern "religions" seem to focus the bulk of their energies on policing the faithful for heresy, and relatively little on actually helping out" -- absolutely true. And that is exactly how lots of secular Americans, me included, viewed a lot of the Abrahamic faiths long before any of this woke nonsense arose. We arrived at that view from, in many cases, plenty of firsthand exposure/experience....e.g. I have probably a dozen friends in my age bracket whose childhood experiences with Catholic-school nuns and priests left them crystal clear that no child of theirs would ever attend a Catholic school.
"It used to be that kind of selfless unpaid (or low paid) labor in service of the disadvantaged was the sine qua non to lecture the better off about their iniquities. Nowadays it's not."
Are you under the impression that today's woke activists don't volunteer in soup kitchens or tutors in inner cities or helping refugees find housing and etc.? They do, many of them, as I know from lots of firsthand experience. And like with the Catholic nuns and priests that doesn't make their dogmatic hectoring of other people any more right than if they didn't.
Try it yourself. Walk into the most passionate evangelical church, and tell them in coarse words you deny every dogma they have, think it's all rubbish and arises fromcontemptible tribal motives, and then see what happens. Try it even in the presense of your local Chief of Police and US Representative and CEO of the corporation where you work, all true believers.
Now go into your HR office at work and do the same thing with the current shibboleths. Tell them all this DEI stuff is completely bullshit, you think women aren't as often programmers because the female mind just can't handle the complexity. Tell them you think blacks are just naturally more violent, and maybe not as smart, and *that's* why they end up in jail more often.
Compare 'n' contrast what happens to you, and get back to me. If the answer is "huh...pretty much the same thing....I got a lot of frosty looks, some heated argument, and then went on my way...nothing much else" then you won't seem like a bullshit apologist.
>this type of absurd hyperbole is really not helpful in pushing back against woke-ism
Agreed. Sure woke is religion, but there's bad, and there's bad. The comparison of the modern-day woke dogmatism to medieval religion, makes a mockery of the horrors of medieval religion. Tens of thousands were brutally murdered by the Spanish Inquisition, and at least thousands were killed in the early Islamic conquests (I would assume tens of thousands, if not more.)
It's not fun to fear losing your job over saying something politically incorrect, but it's very different from being burned alive.
Ok, so what's the current thinking on nicotine? If someone starts chewing nicotine gum, will it have a net health benefit or harm? And what if they just do it a couple times a week in order to avoid addiction? Or use it on non-coffee days (for people who don't want to build caffeine tolerance.)
It's hard to find research on this, and I fear that it's just politically incorrect to study possible benefit of nicotine usage.
My personal, not very scientific experience from chewing nicotine gum regularly for about a year just to see if it had any beneficial effects on attention, alertness etc. was that it was 1) surprisingly not addictive at all (could stop and start seemingly at will, no anxiety or compulsion to buy more if I ran out) and 2) that it didn't have any spectacular mental effects at all except that when layered with caffeine it gave a slightly more distinct and pleasant boost in alertness, so anecdotal coffee and cigs memes checked out. I was buying packs of 144 at 4mg dosage per gum tab which would usually last a month, so it was about 20mg per day consistently assuming I was absorbing most of it.
On the other hand my experience from starting to smoke joints regularly later on was that it produced cravings and other symptoms of addiction almost immediately, despite the prior exposure to plenty of nicotine from all the gum chewing. The difference: route of administration, dosage over time curve, social effects, multiple drug interactions, interaction with habit and routine, some other weird crap? I have absolutely no idea.
I am also curious of this. I hear many people promoting how great it can be, but these people are often part of the bio-hacking community or other groups that are prone to non-science backed fads. From real doctors, i have heard skepticism or warnings against nicotine for this purpose. But i havent looked into it very much.
"“a cessation of all armed conflict between governments, measurable as zero annual wartime deaths."
Mmm. That still leaves a lot of violent conflict like drug cartels, African warlord bans, and the likes running around doing what amount to small-scale civil wars, but since they're not *governments* that doesn't get measured either. I think that for most people suffering the risk of violent death and living under uncertain and catastrophic conditions, it's not because their government is fighting government B, it's because their government is itself tyrannical or too weak to enforce law and order.
Agreed. These problems seem likely all to require different strategies. This survey was scoped specific to inter-government armed conflict, which, even if it were somehow achieved, would still leave us with plenty of other problems, some of which would remain deadly, violent, and horrible.
How much will the US be on the hook for once the Ukraine war is over? I'm already seeing talk of something like a marshall plan for Ukraine (assuming that Russia loses, which again, is assumed only until it is time to demand more weapon shipments to ukraine), with estimates that it will take half a trillion dollars to fix ukraine already (and a lot more by the time this the war is over).
Obviously this won't all come from the US, but it's hard to imagine we won't be footing the lion's share of the bill in some form or other.
It's bad enough that Zelesnkyy and his western cronies would rather another hundred thousand young ukrainian men be killed or disabled to avoid Zelesnkyy losing a single inch of clay under his control, but by refusing to even entertain the notion of settling for anything but an INCREASE in territory comapred with the start of the war, he's basically saying that Americans will have to pay hundreds of billions of dollars for some shithole regions that were generating a tiny fraction of this money in GDP and tax revenue before the war even started.
Your second paragraph is simply false; it's easy to imagine the EU picking up the lion's share of the reconstruction. Not *guaranteed* to happen that way, but trivially imagineable.
Your third paragraph, makes pretty much every sensible and decent person want to not engage with any of this.
You've posted this nonsense several times before and repetition isn't making it any less nonsensical. This forum isn't Twitter or Truth or Facebook or whatever if it is that you're used to.
I have never posted about the US paying to rebuild Ukraine before on ACX and it's really pathetic to say this crap every time you see something you disagree with. Is being a "good faith" "rationalist" about shouting down everyone who isn't as left wing as you?
If you really want good faith engagement, I'd recommend less contempt in your initial posts. When you lead with contempt ("western cronies" "some shithole regions"), contempt is usually (and unsurprisingly) what you'll get back.
Plenty of the people giving you guff in this thread would probably engage constructively on some variation of "what do you think the costs of rebuilding Ukraine will be, and how much do you think the US should/ultimately will contribute" if the question were less contemptuously posed (or at the very least they wouldn't all rush in to dunk on you).
Actually, the EU is much likelier to foot the lion's share of the reconstruction bill. Not only because Ukraine is in Europe but also because the EU has more economic muscles than the US. While USA's foreign aid budget for 2020 was $39B the EU's was €83B. To rebuild Ukraine, Europe does not have to do anything except divert its foreign aid budget to Ukraine for a couple of years (admittedly, this will not happen since the current foreign aid spending has too many supporters, meaning new financing will have to be found).
You also seem to have some curious hangup on Ukraine's president. In case you missed it he has no say whatsoever in peace and war. The Russians have explicitly said that they do not negotiate with Ukraine, only with Nato.
I find it difficult to imagine that you are asking in good faith, because you already wrote similar things in the past, so whatever explanations you get now, you already got them all in the past repeatedly. And you will probably post this again in the next Open Thread. And the next one. And the next one.
Maybe, try trolling some other forum with less intelligent audience?
Apparently for many people (including rationalists) the mainstream explanation that Russia's war on Ukraine is morally wrong is too simplistic that they want to find some other viewpoint. But what else can we suggest? At this time Russia is actively attacking Ukraine. If Ukraine stops actively resisting (with many casualties on its side), Russian forces will not stop at Donbas but will take over Kyiv and possibly the rest of Ukraine and it will cease to exist as an independent country.
It is what happens if Ukraine loses and not what people think that Ukraine just gives up their claims for the Crimea and Donbas.
I don't believe that Ukraine will lose because I believe that Ukrainians will fight till the last man. If the world doesn't help Ukraine, that's going to happen and the human loss on Ukrainian side will be much higher.
If the world helps Ukraine, the most likely outcome is that Russia stops attacking and sending their young men to senseless deaths. They can stop doing that at any moment even if they decide to keep the Crimea as their own.
Yep. And in the US the irony (though totally expected) is that people most likely to believe Ukraine should just give Russia some territory to make peace are the same people who scream about protecting US borders. Almost like their "patriotism" is totally performative and their beliefs are totally formed by whatever media they are consuming. When exposed to true patriotism and heroism, like displayed in Ukraine, the mask falls and they can only respond by rejecting it as illogical or causing unnecessary deaths. Its just pathetic.
I care first and foremost about America, not about Ukraine. In the same way, I expect Ukrainians to put their own interests ahead of America's. I admire the Ukrainians' bravery and patriotism, but Americans have the right to decide the limits of American support. If Ukraine decides they want Crimea back, say, it is perfectly logical for American patriots to advocate discontinuing military aid because the risk of nuclear escalation is too high.
The Americans do not have the right to decide the limits of American support to Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, etc. We signed and ratified a treaty on that point. That being the case, it would be foolish of us to pass on the opportunity to destroy the army most likely to invade those countries, at a bargain price, in favor of a daft plan where we instead signal to that army's commander in chief that we aren't really going to stop him from invading anyone he damn well pleases.
The Americans do have the right to be foolish, as long as they're willing to back it up with American boots on the ground in whatever quantity it takes if and when the Russians invade Lithuania. I king of prefer the plan where it is Ukrainian boots kicking Russian ass.
Well hold on there, it is entirely possible to be passionate about protecting your own borders and not a give a crap about Ukraine protecting theirs. There's nothing logically inconsistent about thinking that protecting our own borders is the plain duty of our government -- but that we do *not* have the obligation to protect the borders of some other country. The US Federal Government is not the World Cop. You may agree or not agree with this as a policy choice, but it's neither hypocritical nor inconsistent.
Yes that explains why someone wouldn't want the US to be involved in Ukraine, but it doesn't justify encouraging Ukraine to take a deal which that someone wouldn't take themselves if it were about their country.
1) I care nothing for people who are not me (or people I like/people in my country)
2) Ukraine is not my country and what happens locally there does not affect me.
3) There is a non-negligible chance that a war between Russia and Ukraine will result in nuclear weapons being used.
4) Nuclear weapons could affect me.
5) Russia will only use nuclear weapons if threatened.
6) Ukraine cannot threaten Russia without outside support.
7) Don't support Ukraine, to avoid the chance of nuclear war.
Given that logic, someone could absolutely encourage Ukraine to just give in, to avoid a worse outcome for people in a different country. This is typically called appeasement, and is not new.
Depends. If someone said "the Ukrainians should make such-and-such a deal to I don't have to hear about them again," there's nothing logically inconsistent about that. I can wish for all smokers to commit suicide so my insurance rates are lower. It's not very nice, or empathic, but it's not logically inconsistent. Other people are other people, not me.
If someone said "If I were Ukrainian, I would cut this deal because it's best for my country," then you probably have to look at their reasoning. It could be they are recognizing some asymmetry, some way (of the many plausible ways) in which Ukraine is in a different situation than the US, or it could be they're just bullshitting, that the real reason is that they just want Ukraine as a problem to go away, and they aren't really putting themselves in Ukrainian shoes.
If they dont care then they shouldn't root for Ukraine to take a deal that gives away Ukraine land. Wanting the US to not being involved =/= Ukraine should take a deal.
Just take germany as an example. "Investing" in WW2 against it was a goldmine. Economic recovery through war industry, binding a whole countires industry to you for nearly a century, having a political and military subordinate state in the center of an important region and gaining a long lasting international standing as 'the good guy' (americans tend to underestimate how very powerfull this is)
Looking at it right now, Ukraine has similliar potential if handled right. Europe has a long history of war. We tend to remeber for generations, the ones who helped us and who deceived us.
No you don't. How long after 1945 did France and Germany become best buddies? Not even a full generation. Further back, England and France have swung from deadly enemies to allies neck snappingly fast. Since we gained our statehood in 1776 the shifting alliances and friendship/enemy list in Europe has generally baffled us -- which is why isolationism from your intramural squabbles has been -- and remains -- a powerful strand of feeling in the United States.
Even today, there's a big chunk of people who think "Why the hell are we AGAIN trying to sort out Europe's inability to get its shit together and decide who hates who, and who is friends with who?" It's not like the Eurozone as a whole lacks the population or resources to deal with Ukraine and Russia itself. You have just chosen to outsource anything that requires actual and nontrivial military force to the United States since 1945.
The notion America should dictate what is best for Ukraine is every bit as bad as the foreign policy of George W Bush. Zelensky is the duly elected leader of a sovereign nation and he knows what is best for Ukraine and as Americans we believe some causes are worth fighting and dying for…and not only did France help us one of our national heroes is Lafayette who had no intention of ever becoming an American.
Yeah, it's the Ukrainian's choice if they want to lay down their lives to defend their homeland, and all polls I've seen show that they overwhelmingly want to do so. It's our choice to say that we support their cause and are willing to help less Ukrainians die trying to defend their home.
What are your thoughts about the report that Ukrainians sabotaged the pipeline?? I personally thought it was obvious Putin did it because he benefited with a few more weeks of juiced prices and with Hurricane Ian in the Gulf the potential price spike could have been much bigger had the hurricane hit Louisiana. Furthermore, NS2 was left operable which meant the potential for more windfall profits was left open. And high natural gas prices inflict pain on average Europeans but with NS sabotaged Putin’s hands are clean and he says he can provide Europe with cheap gas whenever their leaders allow it.
America has made out like a bandit thanks to Putin’s senseless invasion of Ukraine. America is energy dominant now as we are now the Saudi Arabia of natural gas and the climate change movement has been fortuitously neutered here and exporting military aid creates solid union jobs that don’t contribute to inflation while giving us more up to date military equipment.
We're not "on the hook" for jack. If we *feel* like forking out some money to tie Ukraine more tightly to the West, e.g. because we think it will be useful to have a thorn in the side of whatever rump state emerges after Putin eats a bullet, then we will. If we don't think it's worth it, then we won't.
And as far as I can tell, nobody needs to bamboozle or force Ukrainian men to fight for their home. After what's already been revealed about Russian behavior on Ukrainian soil, they seem to be all-in on killing every last Russian they can lay hands on. I don't blame them. I'd feel the same way in their shoes.
Similarly, can someone recommend a system to effectively find good therapists in a given area in the US? I seem to remember references to services that let you filter by insurance, for example.
+1 to that. I usually just google search and click doctor's blurbs until I find one that doesn't make me cringe out of my seat, but it often takes months to a year to find a decent one that's not booked out.
The latter comment: references this site: https://ifs-institute.com/practitioners/all/81925 to search practitioners of that mode of psychotherapy. [That site does list practitioners in Pittsburgh.]
While highly specific, another comment mentioned this site: https://iocdf.org/ for OCD related therapy.
Best of luck with whatever you (or the subject of your inquiry) are seeking therapy for.
The trolley problem is often seen as some abstract thing with little practical relevance. It is the complete opposite in fact: it is a description of our present situation.
The trolley problem works as a dilemma because it is a theoretical one-off event, isolated from larger context. We have a lever with two states and a single choice; we don't have options to spend our time replacing trolley brakes or shove people off the street.
For the trolley problem, the question to ask is, "is it worth it to get rid of suffering in five people if one innocent person who otherwise would not have experienced suffering takes the suffering instead?" There's no perfect answer to this question, and that's the point. Sometimes there are no perfect solutions.
Real world decision making is even more complicated, because there are always long term consequences for decision making. Yes, eliminating suffering is good, but as other people have pointed out, suffering is relative. Is it good if, by getting rid of some suffering now, we create worse suffering later? Real world decision making has so many variables that just assuming your actions will have no unintended consequences down the line is naive.
I am a fisherman. Alice is starving. I can certainly alleviate her suffering by giving her fish, but that lasts only as long as I do. If I die, Alice is back to suffering. Bob doesn't like to fish, but he fishes because he doesn't want to starve, Bob sees me giving Alice fish, and so stops fishing because he can get fish from me. As such, his fishing skills atrophy. I die, and then we have two starving people where we had one before. Instead of giving Alice a fish, I teach her to fish. This puts the local fishermen out of business, triggering a revolution, and a lot of people die in the fighting. There are many ways where in a short term attempt to alleviate suffering, we can end up creating more suffering in the long term.
To look at suffering another way, personal responsibility is important. A child breaks a toy, and cries (suffering). Rather than alleviate the suffering, we let the child live with the results so it learns not to break toys (and before it breaks something irreplaceable). In the same way, we let children get hurt, because in doing so they learn that their actions have consequences.
I think it's too much to call a child crying suffering. And real world decision making is not always that complicated. The abolition of slavery was worth the pain it took to achieve. Likewise with beating the Nazis. There is such a thing as analysis paralysis and letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
As to 'give a man a fish, teach a man to fish' I may agree, but getting many places in the world to have functioning governments will likely involve a period where you give the man a fish, even as you teach him to fish. It's not either/or.
Usually the trolley problem is about doing something immoral and forbidden in order to save lives, so even if I get what you are saying, I find your analogy distracting. And giving to the homeless sounds suspiciously "disaster porn". You get a lot of endorphins from getting up close and personal with suffering. I've been working in Africa for the last 13 years, and I am well acquainted with the excitement of life and death situations. Some people absolutely thrive on this, but there is a bit of a saviour thing with this kind of aid.
The trolley problem to me has always been about sacrificing to help others. I think there are many twists one can give to the trolley problem, hence why it's so popular.
> there is a bit of a saviour thing with this kind of aid.
Yeah, there is, but it also objectively helps others. I don't think it's a problem that a giver gets something out of the exchange. And I don't feel like I need this: sure, it's exciting to be part of a big cause, but I am also perfectly ok with just chilling out. Lord knows I wish I could really internalize Taoism, that shit's like the perfect religion for the future, where there will hopefully be much less suffering.
SBF practiced utilitarianism just like any number of evil dictators. As Jordan Peterson advises (but does not practice) one should have values and that value system should guide them. So if the trolley conductor follows the rules and isn’t speeding or checking her iPhone then she has nothing to worry about. Btw, Florida has a relatively new high speed rail line and people get killed by the train all the time…they aren’t shutting the train down.
What evil dictator practiced utilitarianism? I'd expect that to be the least likely moral system for a dictator.
SBF may have tried to be utilitarian, or that may have just been a cover. But if he was trying to be utilitarian, he demonstrated how to be bad at it, rather than demonstrating that the idea was wrong. Like all ideas, utilitarianism must be judged against the alternatives, and critics of utilitarianism tend to leave the alternatives conspicuously absent from their arguments.
It's not about utilitarianism, it is simply about pushing back against suffering, the realization that the existence of suffering is as bad as the existence of slavery. I don't know of any contemporary value system that is indifferent to suffering.
About that new high speed rail, it's unclear what's happening, since I haven't heard of this being an issue for other high speed rail systems. It does sound like it should be shut down, since one high speed rail is pure frivolity next to dozens of deaths.
Well first off there is not motivation without suffering. Secondly sometimes suffering is unavoidable. Two people love the same person. Someone gets maimed in an accident. Someone has a relative die of natural causes. All those cause suffering. The only suffering free world is a world without minds.
Not really, people are frequently motivated over pleasure. I am pretty motivated to read, and write, and play videogames, and it's not suffering that is motivating me to do those things. When two people love the same person, that suffering goes away on its own and is altogether different from getting cancer or malaria or having a severe mental illness. Same with grief at someone dying.
Probably a total eradication of suffering would involve something like everyone becoming Buddhist or making The Dream of a Ridiculous Man a reality, but that doesn't mean we don't have the power to massively reduce the suffering of the world. It's not like World War II eradicated the Nazis, but it still pretty much dealt with them.
As plenty of wise sages have pointed out, suffering is inherent to the human condition. Therein lies the problem with waking people up to suffering like the abolitionists did for slavery. Slavery is morally repugnant to us, but suffering is not. Suffering is natural. Slavery can be abolished, but suffering cannot. And one who is sensitive to suffering will tend to avoid it, live in a gated community etc.
It is difficult to get people to sacrifice something in order to remedy something as abstract as suffering felt by humans thousands of miles away. And those who live amongst the suffering in truly poor countries often feel a sense of futility because they could give away everything and it wouldn't make a dent in the inequality. So I posit that a huge contributuion could be made if you could actually get people to believe a statement like the one you quoted: "it’s possible to give an infant a year of healthy life by donating around $100 to one of the most cost-effective global health charities, such as Against Malaria Foundation." I think a lot of rationalists are going to look at this statement as a vast oversimplification or even very misleading. If it is so easy, then why hasn't Bill Gates just got ahead and scooped up all this low hanging fruite?
How are they analogous at all? The point of the trolley problem is you have to cause somebody to die in order to save others, with the point to illustrate whether utilitarian intuitions hold up in particular scenarios. Perhaps if you were robbing people and doing something with it that ostenisbly results in more utility than what the original owner of that money lost from being robbed.
Did you read my essay? We are faced with an easy trolley problem: pull the lever and you save 5 lives, but are short $500. Basically, you are the person the trolley gets diverted to, but not really, since you don't die.
In the baseline trolley problem, this is just a trivial modification that does not change the fundamental nature of it which is 'pull a lever to sacrifice something so others will be spared'.
As you have noted, this problem is not as well known, which I suppose makes it less attractive for getting clicks; but it has previously been thought about in depth.
I don't think we need more depth, we need action. The observation that suffering is bad and should be eliminated is old, much older than Bentham. That we don't perceive the existence of suffering as every bit as bad as slavery is a failure in our hearts, not a failure of our rationality.
You don't seem to be understand the point of the trolley problems. They are mainly intended to highlight the differences between consequentialist and deontological thinking, and they are widely known precisely because people have different intuitions about how they should be solved. A real-world analogy for the trolley problem would not be donating your own $500 to save five lives, it would be meeting a stranger whose wallet contains $500, murdering them, and then using that money to save five lives. Even if you think the latter action is morally permissible (or even required), surely you can see that it is much more controversial than the former?
No, this is just missing the forest for the trees thinking. The trolley problem is intriguing even to someone who has never heard of consequentialism or deontology, those things could never have been invented/named and the trolley problem still exist.
Your scenario is certainly more controversial, but my scenario is about pointing out that you are standing by the rails right now and can pull the lever, yet most people are not pulling that lever. Which is a severe moral failure on a par with doing nothing about slavery back in the 19th century.
The trolley problem is simply 'pull a lever and a sacrifice is made, but other lives which would otherwise suffer in some way are spared'. I don't know if all problems can be rephrased as trolley problems, but it sure seems like a lot or even most of them can.
Giving $500 to some entity so they can go install a well in some village I have never seen is psychologically completely unlike pulling a lever to stop a speeding trolley.
The thought experiment poses they are morally the same, but ignores how much of morality is about human psychology, relationships, and instinct.
Agreed that morality is about those things, but it is also intensely about ending suffering. There is something sick in us that wants to believe suffering is acceptable, possibly the same sick thing in us that made us think slavery was acceptable.
Forget utilitarianism and rationality. The question becomes: why aren't we trying to abolish suffering?
Can you and yours be fairly described as suffering? Maybe they can be, but that's not the standard state of affairs in the developed world. And $500 bucks is not a lot.
And anyway, it would have been quite something if people back in the 19th century had taken this attitude to slavery, or in the 20th to Hitler.
Well, can the blind man who has bread and water to eat and drink be considered as suffering when there is a person with nothing to eat on the other side of the world?
Humans are adaptable and that includes adapting their definition and experience of suffering. Sure the 20 year old college kid in America with plenty to eat and a warm roof over their head is materially better off than the Chinese labourer working in a rice field, but if the labourer just plugs along and lives his life and the college kid commits suicide due to depression, who was suffering more?
Personally I don’t think it *should* be about anything. Trying to apply some veneer of complete rational consistency out of a hybrid morass of dozens of separately evolved/socialized/optimized behaviors is a fool’s errand. There is a whole bunch of different stuff we are trying to capture with “morality”, and it simply isn’t reducible to say utilitarianism, or deontology or whatever.
I recently posted a comment on Freddie deBoer's Substack to the effect of "I'm confident courts will not allow government censorship to stand, so I'm much more concerned about social pressure (to censor speech) and think it's is a much bigger problem, by (making up numbers here) several orders of magnitude." Evidently that's not a popular view there (peer and descendent comments were voted more highly, including ones quite sympathetic to that position). Upvotes are hardly a dispositive measure of things, but it has me wondering about my intuition here.
Are ACX readers from the US more worried about government or private censorship?
In the near term, government "censorship" in the United States is likely to be limited to the government censoring parts of its own self, e.g. public school libraries, which will be discomfiting to people who are used to using those free-to-them channels for their own purposes but which can be worked around. Where the government tries to go beyond that (and it will try), I expect the courts will pretty reliably stop them for a while longer at least.
Private censorship, in an increasingly centralized information economy, has the potential to stop private actors using private money from effectively speaking their mind, and "but you can still shout your message from a soapbox in the park" is not an adequate response to that. This is more worrisome to me in the short term.
I'm not at all confident that courts will not allow government censorship to stand. It seems like court rulings are a balance between the implication of fixed texts, and public opinion. If public opinion is sufficiently strong, then the texts play a decreasing role. For an extreme example, see here: https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/biden-judicial-nom-argued-for-outlawing-offensive-speech-suggested-microaggressions-can-kill-you/. Obviously she does not reflect the majority of judges, but she is dealing with the same First Amendment as them, and it is not really serving its purpose of constraining her [more accurately, she is not allowing it to serve its role of constraining legislators.]
Additionally, most Western countries lack free speech, and if my vague impression is correct, are mostly moving away from free speech, rather than towards it - a concerning indicator for future trends in the US.
Another concerning indicator is that the ACLU, once a bulwark against government control of expression has taken a much weaker stance in recent years. This is concerning both because it means there is less pressure against government censorship, but also, because it is an indicator that their erstwhile values are becoming less common.
Additionally, it should be noted that censorship of speech is not binary - either governmental or not. Government can play a greater or lesser role in suppressing or compelling speech among private actors, such as by applying pressure to private organizations explicitly, etc.
Ultimately, I find government censorship more concerning, but it seems likely that the impact of governmental pressure on speech would be felt through the nominal actions of private organizations.
That said, the solution isn't for government to try to control private actors to "defend" free speech, e.g. through passing laws limiting content moderation options of social media companies, rather the solution would be the opposite - for government to get out of the business of private companies and individuals and let them truly operate as they wish regarding content and speech.
I'm more concerned about government censorship than private "censorship." Private attempts to limit speech fall into several categories:
- Angry internet mobs piling on mostly private individuals. Some of these cases are disproportionate, and they can have a chilling effect. I think that worst excesses of this occurred from 2012-2016, but that this has become less fashionable and it's returning to a baseline. This was disproportionately a left-wing tactic for a while, but the right-wing uses it, too, and I expect that it in the long run, it will be used by all sides.
- Private social media sites deciding that they don't want to be in the business of boosting certain opinions. Since I think that social media sites profit off of disproportionately encouraging the worst of human behavior, I'm usually in favor of them deciding to kick off the people with the swastikas, etc. My ideal end-state here is decentralized media ownership (and marginalized Nazis who no longer receive algorithmic boosts). Freedom of the press is for the person who owns one.
On the government side, I'm considerably more concerned. The government has the guns, and it has the ability to refuse to prosecute armed, private vigilantes.
Looking at just mainstream Republican presidental candidates, we have Donald Trump, who has called violence against journalists a "beautiful sight", and who stirred up a violent, armed riot against Congress. And we have DeSantis, who is taking full political control over state university curriculums, and who routinely uses every bit of state power he can to punish organizations and individuals who disagree with him in any way. And the Florida legislature has introduced a bill which would require bloggers who criticize DeSantis to register with the government. These policies have the broad support (or at least the acquiescence) of a large minority of American voters. Either Trump or DeSantis has a very real chance of beating Biden.
I do not expect the courts to consistently uphold the First Amendment, no. At least not for views they dislike. The Supreme Court is ignoring basic ethical rules that apply to every other court, and the wife of one of the justices is deeply involved in partisan politics. The Fifth Circuit is strongly politicized, and there are enough awful judges in Texas that it's possible to construct a chain of appeals that goes "judicial hack -> Fifth Circuit -> SCOTUS." At this point, it's unclear to me how courts will rule on issues, including ones that have been settled law for a century or more.
So while I spent much of 2015 concerned about toxic discourse norms on Tumblr, and I think TikTok is a Hobbesian war of "all against all", I think the remedy for bad private discourse norms is more speech (and more people getting frustrated with centralized social media). I think that a hypothetical President DeSantis would be far worse for free speech than all the angry Tumblr pile-ons ever were.
> If the state wants to remove something from the curriculum that's no more "censorship" than GE's board of directors deciding they're not going to make any more washing machines.
I'm specifically thinking about who hires and fires individual professors. Normally, even in private universities, the anthropology professors would be hired by the anthropology department, and the economics professors by the economics department. At least at the universities I'm familiar with, these decisions were normally handled by tenured faculty (with possible approval from higher layers). Presumably engineering professors have a better idea who's a qualified engineer than a university president, so this makes sense.
Recent Florida legislation is pushing to remove this power from the faculty, and place it with a politically appointed board of trustees:
Personally, I've seen university departments make weird picks. I've even seen cases where a department, or an entire academic field, becomes heavily invested in something like string theory for a couple decades. But this is all part of the "background radiation" of academic life. There's nothing wrong with having a few deeply eccentric professors at a large university. Students can either avoid those courses, or learn the valuable lesson that some experts believe weird things.
I would expect political appointees to make highly politicized hiring choices and to punish professors who upset political leadership in any way. To give you an example of the kinds of people who DeSantis appoints to oversight boards, see:
I do not think that taking the power to hire, say, economics professors away from the economics department and giving it to people like Ron Peri would result in better economics teaching.
As for my expectations of the courts, that's a much longer discussion. There are multiple federal courts in the US that I fear will stretch the law and the Constitution to almost any extent.
That's a little overstated. Departments generally do indeed recruit and *recommend* the hiring of new faculty, at least in every university at which I've worked, but it's still the chancellor, EVC, President, or some other top official who makes the final call. Yes, he usually defers to the Department's judgment -- but he's not obliged too. A modern university, despite appearances and strenuous self-serving propaganda, is a business like any other. It's not a democracy, no longer a collection of fuedal fiefs with an independent charter from the king or pope, above mere law, and it does indeed ultimately just report to its stockholders like any other biz -- to the corporation, if it's private, or to the legislature of the state, if it's public.
I agree this solution is a little absurd. On the face of it, it puts way too much work on the plate of the top officials. You cannot realisticaly expect the president/chancellor to personally investigate and approve every single appointment, there aren't enough hours in the day, even if he were cloned 50 times. *Some* delegation is necessary. So it's unworkeable to that extent.
But if the Florida Legislature chooses to rub the noses of the faculty in who pays their salaries -- it's the taxpayers, dummies -- because it thinks they have forgotten that fact and need a harsh reminder, they only have themselves to blame. A wise demographic would cut its losses, reform its internal workings, rein in its shriller and sillier fringe element (or find some reason to fire them, or not hire them in the first place) -- and generally get in better touch with what the people of Florida want from them -- before something much harsher happens. This is just a shot across the bow. Much worse is possible.
It might be useful to remember that the schmos who clean houses, fix cars, and check out people at Wal-Mart are probably not very interested in forking over taxes to pay for philosophers to ponder the infinite, and maybe lecture them on their moral shortcomings. They're probably much more interested in having a place where their kids can better themselves by learning calculus, economics, geology, biochemistry, or Java programming.
Well, as I mention elsewhere, I don't think the truth of engineering, or biology, or medicine is controlled by popular vote.
So let's assume, for the sake of argument, that someone similar to Ron Peri (an existing DeSantis board pick for the Disney oversight district) will be put in charge of picking biology professors. We know that Peri has opinions about biology! Specifically, he believes that drinking tap water may turn people gay. So what will happen if a biology professor publishes a paper that says, "So we checked the average level of pollutants in tap water and there's no plausible way for your tap water to turn you gay." Does someone like Ron Peri then get to fire the professor for publishing this paper? What if someone publishes a paper saying the rate of severe complications from the COVID vaccine is, say, 1 in 100,000? Will DeSantis call up his appointees and say, "I don't like that number? Fire 'em." And what if a professor says, "Yeah, evolution is a thing"? Will that professor be fired by a creationist board member?
The voting public believes a lot of strange things. But the truth of biology, and engineering, and even history does not depend on a popular vote. Slavery happened in the US, and it involved both rape and brutality. A bridge won't stand up just because a politician or some voters think it will. Global warming may or may not cause coastal flooding, but whether it does will not be decided by a popular vote.
The people of e.g. Florida do not have the right to censor anyone's private speech. But they absolutely have the collective right to not have their tax dollars used to promote e.g. white supremacism, or fascism, or communism, or, yes, wokism.
If you make a legal sacrament of traditional academic hiring practices, such that the only way for the people of Florida to not support whateverism is to defund the public universities, or at least the departments where the tenured faculty is 90% whatever-ist, then that's what they'll do.
DeSantis and his supporters would probably be perfectly fine with turning every state college and university in Florida into an A&M that only teaches STEM, Law, Medicine, and Business. I'd prefer a less drastic solution, even if it does involve changes to traditional academic hiring practice. There's no first amendment right to tenure, never mind to being hired for a tenured position just because your tenured buddies like you.
I actually think that given a choice between having all professors hired and fired by a political board filled with people like Ron Peri, and shutting down the university, it's probably better to just shut it down. Once your biology professors are being chosen by totally unqualified political hacks, you don't have a university, you have a farce. And at that point, shutting down the system has the advantage of being cheaper. And it alerts the public that they'll need to make other arrangements for educating their kids.
I do not believe in direct democratic control of higher education. Engineering, medicine, biology—the truth of these subjects isn't decided by popular vote. Someone qualified needs to understand the tensile strength of steel and the Krebs cycle.
Biology professors are already being chosen by political hacks, and because they're not elected, there's nothing anyone can do. The people that understand the tensile strength of steel are being passed over for professorships in favor of the people with the best DEI statements right now.
You keep talking about Ron Peri, who isn't even in a position of oversight on university decision making, and ignoring that universities are already making decisions on hiring and firing on a political basis. The only method suggested so far for keeping them in check that has a chance of working is democratic control. For all your supposed concern about the truth being decided by political vote, the current system is that the truth is decided by mob rule.
If American universities had a recent history of standing up for academic freedom against all comers, your argument might have merit. The problem is that the university hiring process is already politicized with things like required Diversity Equity and Inclusion statements. You can't make having certain political beliefs a requirement for hiring a professor and then expect the actual politicians not to get involved as to what those requirements are.
At least now there's a transparent process for setting those requirements.
Yes, and that transparent process would be, "Allow politcal appointees similar to Ron Peri to decide who should teach engineering or biology."
Let me be blunt: I would not trust any governor of any politcal party to control university hiring that way. It's a terrible process.
I will happily agree that current process can also fail. But the proposed cure would mean complete political control over academic departments, which is awful on a whole different level than having a couple of crank professors. I went to a university with a right-wing crank _and_ a left-wing crank, and I thought it added to the experience.
If you don't want the electorate to control who gets hired and fired, find a better way to get the Diversity Equity and Inclusiveness political apparatchiks out of the university hiring process, because until you do, we already have a situation where one party has complete political control over academic departments in many schools (not all; they haven't managed to fire Amy Wax yet). We've been warning about this for a long time, and unless you can think of AND IMPLEMENT a better way, we don't have a better option.
Government, of course. Government has guns and a $6 trillion budget. Government can ruin your life without even noticing the cost. Government can put you in prison or kill you.
Overwhelmingly private, and overwhelming from the left. Although some of Biden's proclamations about how the tech companies have to prevent vaccine misinformation make me worried about government overreach by a non zero amount.
Forum moderation, no. Twitter and YouTube, yes. Milo losing gigs, more complicated (but basically no).
The original context for my post was Freddie's beautiful article about the recent Roald Dahl edits.
In that case, I was referring to Netflix / Puffin's bowdlerization of Roald Dahl's works. In that case, the censorship I'm talking about is the private agents suppressing speech and ideas, often motivated by the diffuse pressure created by elite language policing (thanks, Sierra Club! [0]).
Yet, as much as I dislike the mutilation of offensive texts, that comes in third place on my list of concerns about "private censorship". The two most concerning forms are:
- Internet giants (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and YouTube) removing dissenting content, from lab leak commentary to anti-vax quackery to the Hunter Biden laptop story, under the guise of combatting misinformation or "anti-evil operations."
- Groups of private citizens doing their best to destroy people's livelihoods (and therefore their lives) because they disagree with their ideas.
Those are things that actually intersect with my life. In a pandemic or an election, I want access to all the information available and I don't want companies to go down in flames for unpopular opinions (even if the owner is an asshole [1]).
By contrast, the US government has nearly zero impact on my ability to disseminate or access information [2], despite their guns and six-trillion-dollar budget. Some of the legislation on the table in Florida is terrible, but I don't expect worst parts to survive contact with the judiciary. The courts have our back, at least for now. I don't like Ginny Thomas any more than Random Reader, and it's important to stay alert, but the US courts aren't driven by vibes or partisan grudges; the last thirty years (at least) of first-amendment jurisprudence has been very pro-speech.
I think society is best served by letting people have their say and, perhaps more importantly, letting people hear what they want. De-platforming is a blight: if there were a way to stake money on it, I would gladly bet that even the limited number of high-profile cancellations has radicalized more people than 4Chan. With that in mind:
1) I am pro-moderation. I think for example, that subreddits should be allowed to limit speech however they want and sites can (should!) provide blocking / muting tools. But I think the sites themselves are the digital commons and should not be allowed to prohibit legal speech. They have the right to do so, but exercising those rights makes our world worse.
In my ideal world, section 230 liability protection would be conditioned on content-neutrality, including, yes, holocaust deniers. The ways that they are wrong may have something to teach us, knowledge of their very existence is valuable, and exposing them to a critical public is invaluable. There's a risk that people will find their ideas compelling, but it's even riskier to isolate them, so they're never challenged and they miss out on the moderating influence of other viewpoints.
2) There's no magic bullet. Fighting back against the censorious culture of shaming is a matter of involvement with the relevant communities, earning trust, and speaking up. It's about promoting heroes like Ira Glasser and Daryl Davis [0] who practiced engagement instead of shunning.
Mass censorship of any news about people dying or having negative side effects from the vaccine is a bit more than "muting anti-vaxers." And this was not just Twitter - it was nearly every internet platform. But, you know, who cares about a few hundred thousand dead from brain blood clots and heart failure?
Other notable examples off the top of my head:
The Reddit mass censorship campaign of 2020, that banned dozens of non-communist subreddits, notably one of the most milquetoast, mainstream conservative communities on the internet (the subreddit about the sitting President of the United States).
The banning of the sitting President of the United States from Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Reddit, Pinterest, Shopify, TikTok, Twitch, YouTube, AWS, the Apple App Store, and the Google Play store, among others.
The censorship of the BLM-supporting, Democrat-supporting, anti-Trump, anti-white terrorist attack committed by Darrell Brooks in Waukesha that killed 6 people, notably on Wikipedia and other online platforms.
The censorship of anyone who in any way questioned the Accepted Narrative that covid came from bats in the wet market, or even dared to make the observation that an institute of virology studying bat coronaviruses just happened to be nearby the initial cases.
Substack deleted an author’s account and every comment he made because Matt Taibbi demanded it. So the author, Gene Frenkle, first got banned by Taibbi on his personal Substack and then Taibbi had a public post and the author linked to his own post in the comment, “Matt Talibbani Wages Jihad on the Truth and Me!”, and that post got the author cancelled from Substack.
Taibbi wanted him canceled because apparently Frenkle signed up for a year subscription because he was a fan of Taibbi’s work with respect to Iraq and wanted his perspective on the Ukraine war. Then Taibbi went full Glenn Greenwald and started posting misinformation about things like Nord Stream and the Alfa Bank investigation and Frenkle would correct Taibbi in the comment section and piss off other commenters. So Taibbi demanded he take a refund and Frenkle said he couldn’t do that because he would have to use his real email (authors can see your actual email under subscriptions and he and I use “hide my email” on everything now). Anyway, Taibbi banned him without giving him a refund and then on a very rare public post Frenkle started posting links to his post about Taibbi’s hypocrisy and within minutes Substack deleted his entire account and all of his comments. Apparently he had quite a few drafts deleted that he had been working on.
So, what I'm hearing is that the dude went full Russian troll, Taibbi finally had enough and told him to take his money and piss off, but he wouldn't do that. So Matt banned him without a refund, and the guy started shooting his mouth in public, following which Substack decided they'd had enough of him too, and kicked him out.
Couldn't have happened to a more deserving person, I think.
The irresistible capitalist pressures from advertiser's is driving a race to the middle and forcing platforms to only host pablum rather than real, fringe and sometimes offensive content. We're right on track. The social acceptance of censoring unpopular opinions, factual or not, has started the avalanche which will only yield a tyranny of the majority.
As one of the investors who isn't participating in Manifund: The potential returns aren't even a factor in my not participating. What is a concern is:
* Academic grant funding is very different than investing in corporations, and this falls in the uncanny valley between them (in a bad way).
* The myopic nature (experimenting with prediction markets by funding experiments on prediction markets) is kind of a turn-off.
* There is a rule of thumb in enterprise sales that you can't price a product between $1000 and $10000 - it's not cheap-enough to be an impulse sale and it's not expensive enough for a salesperson to be interested. There may be a similar dynamic in play here.
Does the Peter Principle hold on an organisational level?
That is to say, an organisation (that has a reasonable level of autonomy as regards the scope of its activities) will respond to getting good at something by doing more difficult things, which it won't be good at yet*.
So everybody is winging it but the competant ones will be winging progressively greater things.
The first case of this that springs to mind is Meta. They were good at social networks and then decided they could do VR, which doesn't really have any connection to their core competency. It seems in general if a company has reached the limit of what they can do in their space, they're going to run into this problem.
The Peter Principle probably holds for all orgs that didn't filter too heavily at their origins and still don't filter that well now.
I've gotten to know quite a few of the big finance firms in London and will say that you often get a lot of people at c-suite (especially just below c-suite level) that are hilariously out of their depth. It's mostly an age thing. A lot of them are boomers or gen X-ers that worked their way up years ago and are way past their expiration date. Other times it's just people who have hacked the system through being a good salesperson despite being mediocre in all other relevant aspects, but these ones have a much shorter shelf-life.
Oftentimes, however, it's just that they're incompetent relative to the average worker. Most of the big investment banks and consultancy firms here filter heavily for talent- but they didn't always do this. Consequently you end up with a workforce where those with less seniority are, on average, a lot more capable than those senior to them.
I suspect big tech companies suffer a lot less from this, just because they've always filtered well. This is perhaps easier given that the nature of the work filters out a lot of grifters. It's just a lot harder to fake being a good software engineer or data scientist, and the minimum cognitive horsepower required is usually so much higher at most big tech companies.
I think the Peter Principle doesn't hold outside of dysfunctional organizations, and it's not a super useful concept as a result.
On the other hand, maybe I've been blessedly lucky to work at companies (Google, Waymo) where the Peter Principle seems obviously false. For example, my managers have consistently been better at both my job and theirs than I am.
The companies that I work for haven't been household names. I also agree that the Peter Principle only works for dysfunctional orgs. If such a case happened, the manager would simply get fired for not doing their job well. It might take a year or two, but it would eventually happen.
> For example, my managers have consistently been better at both my job and theirs than I am.
Just adding my experience: This has been true with some managers, and not true with others.
I've worked at one company where management was consistently worse than the employees they were supervising, but it had nothing to do with the Peter Principle, just the opposite.
Employees were paid $23 an hour with lots of opportunities for overtime. Management started at $50,000 a year with no OT and mandatory on call.
You might notice that 23x40x52= $47,000 and change. So did all of the employees. None of us would apply or take management roles that were a pay cut, so all the managers were hired externally. They had no experience working in the field whatsoever, so were essentially useless for anything other than office admin.
Last week, I posted a piece I wrote arguing that helicopters should be taxed based on their noise externalities. I felt there was a subtext to a lot of the responses I got along the lines of “oh look, another big government progressive who wants to regulate everything.”
This was strange to me, since I sometimes conceptualize myself as a libertarian. Then I went back and looked at my writing and discovered that indeed, it is quite statist. I think this is a byproduct of basically just attempting to write a lot, and I think it suggests something about why libertarian intellectuals are rare in the mainstream media, so I wrote about that (https://omnibudsman.substack.com/p/why-libertarian-public-intellectuals).
My feeling is that libertarians[1] hugely underestimate just how much coercive background social structure is necessary for their mechanisms. It is actually quite hard to compel almost all people to embrace negotiation and contract as a means to their desired ends, instead of the more direct methods of lying, cheating, stealing, and murder. You tend to need either the vast powerful state envisioned by the statists, or you need the ubiquitous stiff social mores world of the conservatives. Either there needs to be a policeman on every corner saying "you can't shoot your neighbor over his blasting rap at 120dB, you have to sue him" or else you have to be afraid to show your face in church, or some club, if you even entertain violence as a technique.
My impression is that the libertarian tends to take this coercive structure for granted. Let's assume there is some method which compels people to solve problems by contract and negotation -- now how then would they solve problem such-and-such? All very interesting, but the a priori assumption makes this an angels on the head of a pin sterile speculation, since it assumes some God Emperor is enforcing the No Violence rule, and how that is done is not discussed in detail. Even lthough, ironically, I'd say most human experimentation with types of government is driven by solving this first of practical problems, and we *still* haven't quite worked it out, given the amount of violence remaining.
I realize there's some folderol about insurance companies, and the argument that a society without violence, where stuff gets settled by negotiation, is overall better for everybody. Which is certainly true! But surely the history of our species also teaches us that human beings are not really smart enough to universally grasp that fact, even when faced with copious direct evidence. We're just too good at rationalizing away evidence that conflicts with our pet theories.
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[1] And I'm speaking regretfully because I personally would love to live in the libertarian paradise.
"Either there needs to be a policeman on every corner..."
There doesn't need to be a policeman on every corner to stop people from shooting their neighbors over loud music in a libertarian society, any more than there needs to be a policeman on every corner to prevent that in any existing society. A much smaller and less obtrusive police force will suffice for that.
Also, there's a term called "anarcho-capitalism". Please learn it. Libertarians who are not anarcho-capitalists, which I am pretty sure is most of us, are perfectly on board with having enough police to effectively dissuade people from shooting their neighbors over loud music or whatever. Libertarians who are not anarcho-capitalists are also sick and tired of people saying "I have found a flaw in anarcho-capitalism, therefore libertarians are fools".
Yes, you can do it with fewer policemen -- if you have stronger civic mores, and more effective social coercive forces. But you always need some mixture of both that rises far above the levels found in the libertarian paradise.
I wish it weren't so, believe me. I would be very happy to live in such a world. But it's just not what is achievable on this planet, with this species. There are just too many of us that are just too stupid to figure out even our own best long-term interests, and this demographic, while a minority, is unfortunately a big enough minority to ruin it for the rest of us.
Now personally I prefer the invisible social coercion forces, which are more flexible than the law and armed force. More likely to be capable of making an exception for unique individual circumstances. So I put by influence on social conservatism, and away from statism. I'm happy to go to whatever the popular church is, do the silly dance and chant the sacred chants -- even those I find silly or intellectually bankrupt -- if it keeps general public order, and outside of the holy days I can do as I mostly please, because I can count on the social forces making violence an exceedingly rare event.
Do you have evidence to support your claim that we need more police than libertarians (and anarcho-capitalists, aka ancaps) think we do? Because after reading your comment and John's, it looks like you believe we need X police, John believes we need Y, the median ancap believes we need Z, and X > Y > Z.
As someone with probably the same sympathies as you two, I think it'd be interesting to outline some bounds on X, Y, and Z, why X >Y would be so certain, etc.
Also, note that ancaps are likely to make a distinction between state-appointed and private police. They claim Z=0, but also claim a very high chance of there being plenty of private police. Possibly Y private police, and maybe even X, depending on the region, so there's plenty of interesting ground to explore there. For example, the standard non-ancap-libertarian argument for why there would have to be any state-appointed police is one I'm not greatly familiar with, although I could sketch a possible argument if I had to. (I normally just see that claim asserted to audiences who already accept it.)
I don't know that you necessarily need the "ubiquitous stiff social mores world of the conservatives". What you need is a high-trust society with a more-or-less unified set of values. I just don't know how you get a high-trust society with a unified set of values without being at least somewhat conservative.
What's important is that if Bob is violating the rules of society, his friends and family need to side with society over Bob. This can be true whether Bob's rule violation is "blasting rap music at 120dB" or "complaining that his neighbor is blasting rap music at 120 dB".
"Conservative" ipso facto means "cares a lot about preserving values, and defends them vigorously." It's right there in the name. It could be you're misdefining "conservative" as some caricature which it is not.
It strikes me that libertarianism as an ideology is very hard to sell, partly because of the effect you describe. If you're a libertarian and want to write about something, it's far more interesting to explore the idea of a libertopia where everything is governed by contracts, nobody pays any taxes and everyone is solely responsible for their own damn self, which sounds like hell for most people.
However, when you point out specific examples of harmful policies and explain why they're bad, I think most people's reaction would be "Yeah that's reasonable, we should not have that policy if that's the case." But if you then say "There are thousands of policies just like this that we would be better off without, and that's why I'm a libertarian," it's hardly something that sparks the fire of idealism in someone, because the ideal isn't some lofty goal like egalitarianism or preserving family and community bonds, it's what we're already doing but less worse, right? I have little affection for libertarianism but that's the impression I get from your piece.
Maybe the best place for libertarianism isn't in governance, but in bureaucracy. Surely any harmful policy you could identify is opposed by some political party that isn't explicitly libertarian, right? So the most effective way to abolish them would be to join said political party and make it clear that there's a political slam dunk waiting for them. If every political party has a small contingent of libertarians on the lookout for harmful policies that would make their party look great if they managed to abolish it, you could probably achieve way more than a dedicated libertarian party could, simply by pulling strings from behind the scenes, like a shadowy cabal with a hidden agenda, slowly dismantling the state while the rest are none the wiser... Actually, I'm not sure I like that idea any more, forget I said anything.
My feeling about libertarianism is vaguely similar. I don't see wiping away thousands of policies as failing to fire up the idealism - as a programmer, I really like elegant machinery, and government fits that paradigm - but I also recognize a lot of rules that are there for good reasons that might not have been recorded (cf. Chesterton). Keep those, and the gap between libertopia and some current government is hard to make out, including the price tag.
About a year and a half ago, someone asked how a libertarian government would really likely work, and I took a stab at an account of it. One way to summarize it is that it ends up a long and very luck-dependent process.
Arguably in the late 20th century, there were libertarian tendencies in both US parties. The "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" formulation that overlapped with the more moderate strains of libertarianism implicitly meant that there was a place for more fiscally conservative Democrats and more socially liberal Republicans to meet at libertarian-leaning policies. And so we got things like deregulation under Carter, or the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in the early 90s.
I think there's less room for that these days, with the right more economically interventionist generally, and the left more focused on various social orthodoxies. Different interventions and orthodoxies than their opponents, but there's less laissez-faire in either sphere to go around.
This is a remarkable capacity for self reflection and I am glad you posted this. I would say that all of us are libertarian until we start asking ourselves what faults we don't have that others do. I note in myself that I can switch from regarding the use of a leaf blower as deserving the death penalty to thinking "fuck you, don't tell me what I can do on my own property" in about the time it takes me to start one.
Everyone seems to agree that the current situation with the appointment of US supreme justices[1] is less than ideal, where the party in power of the senate can just block any appointee, and then install a partisan when in control of both branches. The loudest responses seem to be "Yeah, [party] should just pack the courts" (self-evidently undemocratic), "something something term limits" (probably unconstitutional, getting amendments for this is currently infeasible), "each president should just appoint one" (either has the same problems as above or just leads to all partisan justices).
Here's an attempted proposal to hopefully get incentives in the right place without relying too much on "norms", that I'd like feedback from the crowd to tell me in what ways I'm being an idiot an it can be improved:
- Every president gets one justice appointment per term, and the total number of justices is left mostly uncapped (If it becomes *too* unwieldy, a soft cap at 1/4 the size of senate, currently 25)
- The Senate *must* vote on every nominee on a "reasonable" timeline, or they are considered to be providing implicit consent[2] for the nominee. "No" votes should include guidance on what they would consider a more reasonable candidate.
- If they can't come to an agreement with the Senate: at any time during the last year of their presidency, up to a week (or more?) before the next election, the President may set a "fallback" judge, for whom a "no" vote on another candidate is considered to be *implicit consent* by the senate for that candidate being immediately appointed by *the next* (term's) president at any point during that president's term.
Ideally, this incentivizes the President and the Senate to come to a compromise early in his term, so they avoid a partisan fallback judge and he gets an early favorable justice.
Of course, this implies that any two-term president gets essentially a free partisan fallback justice, which should be fine given
(a) every president gets one, and the ping-pong of the parties should balance this out
(b) who that nominee would be becomes an explicit campaign point, so they would have the mandate of democracy
Thought, criticisms, concerns?
[1] (and less-than-supreme federal/circuit justices, but one issue at a time)
Status quo has more support than any of the "reform" proposals. The Right and the Left might not be happy with the current situation but they sure as hell prefer it over any of the "reform" proposal from the other side.
My proposal. For something as crucial to the current state of affairs as the SCOTUS, any reform package must have more than 2/3rds support from both parties in both houses of Congress. Anything else is grounds for rates of perceived illegitimacy that have not been seen before. Otherwise let the status quo remain.
I think you've misdiagnosed the underlying problem, which is that because America has a far-reaching but underspecified constitution, an awful lot of power that ought to be being wielded by the legislature(or in some cases possibly the executive) /has/ to be wielded by the judiciary.
Everyone likes to complain about judicial activism, and legislating from the bench absolutely is both bad and common, but while some of the time it's the fault of judges for overreaching quite a lot of the time it's the fault of framers for writing ambiguous laws. When you have a constitutional provision that definitely says /something/, but could be interpreted to mean a number of wildly differing things, you're /forcing/ unelected judges to make a decision that should be made democratically.
My proposal would be a constitutional amendment that states that unless the correct interpretation of a constitutional provision is fairly unambiguous, judges shall form a referendum or set of referenda to clarify it, instead of ruling themselves, and that these clarifications can be amended more easily than the written constitution itself.
" because America has a far-reaching but underspecified constitution, an awful lot of power that ought to be being wielded by the legislature(or in some cases possibly the executive) /has/ to be wielded by the judiciary."
Or... and stop me if you've heard this before...
9A and 10A specify that power should NOT be wielded by ANY of the branches of FedGov.
Otherwise, we're back to "might makes right" and just hiring whatever ethicist rejected for a NYT column justifies our preferences.
As much as I do like that idea (it's a good one), my proposal is predicated on the assumption that anything which requires an amendment to the constitution is a non-starter. Barring the 27th (which is a special case from being a legacy, common-sense proposal contemporaneous with the bill of rights) we're in the longest period without amendments since the civil war. Add that to the current extreme levels of partisan polarization (many "recent" amendments were passed during a time considered to have *unusually low* polarization).
Barring an actual constitutional crisis (and keeping in mind that several recent times that could have been called one did not qualify), I think any plan that requires an amendment is unrealistic.
This is only true in a vacuous sense. Some plans are more unrealistic than others, and mere changes of legislation are much more likely than constitutional amendments.
Getting both parties to agree to a change that they know they can repeal if they decide it's in their benefit later is *much* more likely than anything where such repeal has only been done *once* in the history of the country.
So if you don't like a particular part of the constitution, you can just try to get a popular movement going that uses words in a new and confusing way that creates ambiguities that weren't there before?
...come to think of it, this describes so much of what already is.
> - Every president gets one justice appointment per term, and the total number of justices is left mostly uncapped (If it becomes too unwieldy, a soft cap at 1/4 the size of senate, currently 25)
This requires either a constitutional amendment, or a new norm that both parties agree on and both actually uphold. I'd consider a such a norm even less likely than an amendment in the current political climate.
> The Senate must vote on every nominee on a "reasonable" timeline, or they are considered to be providing implicit consent[2] for the nominee.
This would require either a constitutional amendment, or both parties agreeing to a new interpretation of the constitution even when the new interpretation works against them.
Basically, your proposal requires a constitution amendment, and if we're going to do that we might as well put in term limits.
I would strongly favor an amendment which both eliminated "recess appointments", and stated that every POTUS appointment is approved 100 days after its referral to the Senate unless a majority of the Senate has in the meantime voted yea or nay on it.
I would also strongly favor an amendment which established term limits for the SCOTUS; slightly increased its size (say to 11 justices); and specifyied that a federal law which was approved by both Congress and the POTUS can be overturned by the SCOTUS only with the votes of a supermajority of justices (either 6 of 9 or 7 of 11).
There are some other amendments I'd really like to see too, like a serious clarification and reform of the presidential pardon power. Regardless the bottom line is that our increasingly-childish society needs to re-learn the adult patience and focus that's required in order to amend our federal constitution.
I don't see how either part requires an amendment. In reverse:
(2) The constitution is very explicit that the duty of the Senate is their "Consent and Advice". They need to give one or the other. Refusing to vote is refusing to give either consent or advice, so such a law would be enforcing that provision; This part is rock solid, afaict.
(1) The word under contention is specifically "consent". It's a well-established legal tradition in contract law that one can have their consent be given to an alternative action if they default on their duties in another area. It's well within the bounds of precedent to explicitly bind such consent by law in the course of them accepting senatorial duties. (Of course, the Senate could always attempt to repeal said law)
I'm not a lawyer or a constitutional scholar, but I know that "this is how we've always done this" is almost always going to win out over a novel interpretation, no matter how much sense that interpretation makes. We've never had anyone join the Supreme Court without the Senate voting yes, so that's how it works, regardless of what "consent" means in other contexts.
Also, in practice, this proposal would be equivalent to court packing. I would submit that the question people ask about the court is always the wrong one. What the court needs isn't greater efficacy, but rather greater credibility. There isn't any way to make it fair or make it produce good outcomes since government isn't designed with either of those in mind. The real goal is to make the system appear credible enough that nobody wants to violently overthrow it. So far the Supreme Court still has that amount of credibility and any changes to it are unlikely to increase it.
Surely the medium-term remediation to court packing is more court packing? The Democrats add three more Justices so the Republicans add five more so the Democrats add seven more so the Republicans add nine more.
Luckily the numbers only grow linearly and not more than once every four years so it will be millions of years before the entire population of the USA is on the Supreme Court.
TL;DR: If average lead levels drop, but gaps in IQ, crime, illness, etc. in terms of antecedents of lead exposure remain somewhat constant, the effect size of a unit of lead necessarily increases. For IQ, in the last 50 years, the effect of one μg/dL of lead multiplied by more than 100 times.
I was under the impression that banning of tetraethyl lead in some places but not others provided a natural experiment that allowed its effect to be uncovered. But I didn't notice that idea being addressed in that article.
Those don't exist for IQ. The closest you get is RCTs where people are assigned to lead remediation. The same phenomenon of effect size per unit lead inflation that I documented is observed for the handful of natural experimental studies relating lead to crime, and it is exacerbated somewhat in studies that are ecological rather than cohort-based. There is severe publication bias in the whole literature on lead, lead-crime not excepted.
If it is an important cause you might as well just protest outside a police station while reading a copy of King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. (Or maybe read first and then determine whether acceptance of being jailed meets the criteria and steps he sets out.)
I have often seen infographs with the message "everything in this particular field or walk of life is controlled by a single-digit number of corporations". Here are 2 examples I got by just typing "everything is controlled by a few companies" into google image search :
There is another somewhat-different example of a field I'm following with interest (though I'm still a layman), which is semiconductors and chip manufacturing. The seimconductor industry in general is ridicously over-consolidated, only 3 corpos - Intel, Samsung, and TSMC - are cutting-edge manufacturers, every other chip company you have heard of - Apple, Arm, AMD - are "fabless", they don't have factories, they just design (which, to be completely clear, is an entire universe where billions are made) chips, and then give the designs to manufacturers - fabs (short for fabricators) - to make them. There are other companies other than the big 3, but nobody hears about them and they are all behind in the "technology node" employed in their transistors (basically the sophistication of the manufacturing process, whose most observable effect is how small you can make a transistor). And then there's ASML, the dutch company that is the *sole* supplier of extreme UV lithography machines that the big 3 companies use, it's the tip of the tip of the pyramid. The entire world depends on ***1*** company. If it goes down for any reason whatsoever it can send us back to the 1990s or early 2000s or so level of tech.
Food and Media seems to be deliberate consolidations and empire-building, while Semiconductors is perhaps more naturally rewarding of big corpos and punishing of small companies because of the insane expertise and the supply chains involved. Regardless of anything though :
1- What is the veracity of those infographs ? What "semantics games", if any, are being played by connecting 2 companies with a line to say that one of them controls the others ? Are they playing fast and loose with the meaning of "control" ?
2- If there is no catch in (1), then aren't conspiracy theorists (the "elites hate us and are out to get us" kind, not the "Obama's wife is an alien transgender" kind) much much more credible and justified than we often give them credits for ? Isn't the modern world exactly as over-consolidated and unified as they imagine ? Aren't the common rebuttals to them along the lines of "lol nobody can actually coordinate that much people and effort for that much time and money" shaky given (1) ?
3- Ignoring politics and who wants to control whom for a moment, isn't this a dangerous centralized weak spot for all of civilization ? In project management there is often this phrase, "Bus Factor", it's how many of your people can be hit by a bus (== an unforseen circumstance resulting in their death or neutralization) before your project grinds to a halt because all key people are in hospital. This factor is supposed to be big, if it's small then your project is fragile and dependent on a small number of people. Other terms are "Single Point of Failure" in tech, and the "K-selected" vs. "R-selected" dichotomy from biology, where animals either invest all their energy in raising a few offspring (with, hopefully, better chances of surviving), or make a huge number of offspring (which, while individually fragile, have more chances overall because of their sheer number).
Those companies make us a civilization with a low bus factor, a single (or a few, single-digit few) point of failure, an extreme K-selected civilization that puts all of our eggs into very few places. It would take so little to bring us all down to our knees, there is so much hidden centralization and so many invisible webs of control that can all crash at once.
Your take on the semiconductor industry is extremely reductive. TSMC, Intel, and Samsung are top level Tier 1 manufacturers making extremely high density single digit nanometer scale chips, often microprocessors.
But this is just a small portion of the overall semiconductor industry. Companies like TI, ADI, NXP, OnSemi, Microchip, Global Foundries, and many others make a dizzying array of (often) smaller, less complicated parts that are nonetheless needed in industries like automotive, power, and general electronics.
You've also left out Companies like Micron and SK / Hynix, who make huge amounts of memory chips.
Source: I work at a pure-play fab. Which you can probably figure out because of my time zone, but is one of the 4 fabs (not companies) that could make 7nm, but dropped out of the race because we couldn't find enough customers to buy 4nm to make it worthwhile.
While it is true that bleeding-edge companies are in very limited supply and TSMC is ludicrously OP in the pure-play space, the reason for that isn't because of some cabal, it's because it's simply not worth it to have die at that CD size. The economics of wafer production is such that you have to run your fab at ~85% of maximum theoretical capacity to break even. So you've got to have a customer willing to pay what it's going to cost you to make the product before you even get to the point of capital outlay.
The infographic is similar to listing out that there are only a handful of companies making luxe supercars, but disregarding that there are a whole heck of a lot more that are making automobiles for 99+% of the market.
My intuition is that >>1% of the developed-world population makes regular use of (goods and services that depend on) ~7 nm chips, in ways that would cause them great inconvenience if those were no longer available. That would make the analogy with supercars misleading, even if high-end chips are <1% of all chips. But I haven't looked into it in detail, and you probably know more than I.
Almost nothing *depends* on 7 or beyond -- it's only been in commercial existence for less than a decade, and even then only in specific (and yes, luxury) applications.
Just as an example -- of all of the equipment that designs or produces 7nm, none of them use 7nm.
1) 7nm has been done without EUV, so it can be done without EUV.
2) 7nm only came out in 2018; while a specific design might need 7nm chips, most of us probably don't use things invented since then.
3) Blowing up the factory that builds parts for the factories that build 7nm chips wouldn't destroy the 7nm chips already in existence, or even *immediately* stop their production; there'd be grace time to adapt. Even blowing up the factories that build 7nm chips wouldn't destroy the chips already in existence; your item still works, you just can't buy replacement parts or new ones for a while.
>The entire world depends on ***1*** company. If it goes down for any reason whatsoever it can send us back to the 1990s or early 2000s or so level of tech.
AFAICS this isn't how it works; there have been 7nm chips made without EUV and that's 2018 tech.
The *most advanced* chips require EUV, but that's literally "the top-of-the-line chips for the last few years", not "decades worth of stuff". If ASML explodes tomorrow we can go back to making chips from the late tens until someone can get another EUV company going.
Carl Pham and Paul Botts gave you good responses already. I'll add that large corporations like the ones in these graphics are not monolithic. If one piece of them fails (bankruptcy, catastrophic failure, wizard makes them disappear, etc) it doesn't really impact the rest of the company from a financial or legal perspective.
Also, compare these graphics to the most valuable companies in the world. Very few of them fall into the purview of these graphics. And if you filter further by profitablity, even fewer will show up. Thats because industry concentration is highly correlated with industry with poor economics (food has very low margins, cars as well, media is prone to the whims of trends and has high operating costs). Industries with high margins and great economics will attract more entrants into the market, reducing concentration. At some point this will degrade the economics of the industry and make poor performers prone to being bought out. This will lead to concentration. After a few cycles you have a bad industry with a few big competitors that have made it work. None of that is conspiratorial
There's a significant "by location" concentration – i.e. not "by company" or "by oligopoly control within an industry," at least in the sense we've so far been discussing it in this thread – of one chemical element absolutely vital to human life, due to its critical importance in fertilizing crops. That element is Phosphorus, of which Morocco holds 70% of the world's supply. Presumably, any interruption in the supply of this material to the world from that single source could have immense impacts.
"... all food crops, indeed all plant life, require the element phosphorus to grow and Morocco possesses over 70% of the world's phosphate rock reserves, from which the phosphorus used in fertilizers is derived. Unlike other finite resources such as fossil fuels, there is no alternative to phosphorus ..."
(This piece is by Michaël Tanchum, who "teaches international relations and political economy of the Middle East and North Africa at Universidad de Navarra, Spain." His piece here was published by the Middle East Institute, "the oldest Washington-based institution dedicated solely to the study of the Middle East.") Tanchum's article also peripherally notes how recent rises in natural gas prices have led to soaring prices for the world's two other key fertilizers, nitrogen and potassium (for the latter, at least in its 'DAP' formulation).
Another very recent article by Elizabeth Kolbert, a long time staff writer at The New Yorker, discusses this topic:
"... the vast majority of the rest of Western Sahara, is controlled—illegally, by most accounts—by Morocco, which possesses something like seventy per cent of the planet’s known phosphorus reserves.
"The status of Western Sahara is one of the worries that [journalist] Dan Egan takes up in his worrying new book, “The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance” (Norton). ... Egan quotes Jeremy Grantham, the British investor, who has said that Morocco’s hold over the planet’s phosphorus “makes OPEC and Saudi Arabia look like absolute pikers.” He also quotes Isaac Asimov, who once wrote, “Life can multiply until all the phosphorus is gone and then there is an inexorable halt which nothing can prevent.”
"As Egan notes, phosphorus is critical not just to crop yields but also to basic biology. DNA is held together by what’s often called a “phosphate backbone”; without this backbone, the double helix would be a hash. The compound ATP provides cells with energy for everything from ion transport to protein synthesis; the “P” in the abbreviation stands for “phosphate.” In vertebrates, bones are mostly made up of calcium phosphate, as is tooth enamel.
"What distinguishes phosphorus from other elements that are essential to life—carbon, say, or nitrogen—is its relative scarcity. (Asimov described phosphorus as “life’s bottleneck.”) The atmosphere contains almost no phosphorus. Phosphate-rich rocks, meanwhile, exist only in limited quantities, in certain geological formations. China holds the world’s second-largest reserves—these are less than one-tenth the size of Morocco’s—and Algeria the third-largest."
(Another article, posted in the reply/follow-up below, notes that 85% of the "world’s remaining high-grade phosphate rock" is found within just five countries, some of these "geopolitically complex": Morocco, China, Egypt, Algeria, and South Africa.)
Here's one take on how the UK, specifically, may be able to combine technology and policy changes to more efficiently use phosphorous, including reducing runoff and recycling (legacy concentrations of phosphorus in soil, along with animal manures, food waste, and biosolids).
If successful, this could be a blueprint for other nations in helping reduce some of the critical dependency on supplies from Morocco, and to a proportional extent, the other four countries mentioned above.
As one actual example of disrupted supply, in mid-2022 China sharply restricted exports of phosphates to the world market, whose key buyers include India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Ostensibly, China did so "to keep a lid on domestic prices and protect food security while global fertiliser prices [were] hovering near record highs."
Their creator, the Open Markets Institute, notes near the bottom of this page that:
"Locating data on how few companies control individual markets, though, has long been difficult, and not by accident. Although Americans used anti-monopoly policies throughout much of the 20th century to preserve competition, a shift in ideology in the late 1970s allowed increased monopolization across the economy. To shield this pro-corporate turn from the public, the Federal Trade Commission halted the collection and publication of industry concentration data in 1981.
"To remedy this gap in public knowledge, Open Markets purchased extensive, up-to-date industry intelligence from IBISWorld, a team of analysts who collect economic and market data, with the intention of releasing the information regarding industry concentration to the public."
I don't think it's fair to say that 6 companies control media unless you define media very narrowly, such as cable TV. Joe Rogan gets way more views than any TV host. Is he not media?
More than any single TV host, but all TV hosts combined? I doubt it. And what you see with this consolidation is that every TV host is repeating basically the same talking points.
Most of the "6 companies control 90% of the media" takes I see are bad. They present six companies that "control" cable TV stations, and then a (slightly-overlapping) set of six companies that control film production, and six different companies that own 80% of the newspapers, and six different companies that "control" social media.
>If it goes down for any reason whatsoever it can send us back to the 1990s or early 2000s or so level of tech.
I'm confused by this, unless "goes down" means "all their tools and documentation, and that of their subsidiaries and subcontractors, being physically eradicated". If they were to simply go out of business etc. all their intellectual and physical property would be purchased by others, who would have enormous financial incentive to continue production of their products. That certainly wouldn't be a painless process but the idea that decades of technological knowledge would be lost into the void is absurd.
Put another way, even a single company *isn't* a single point of failure. Even if ASML as an organization ceased to exist tomorrow by magic, all the people who worked for them are still around. The number of people who would have to be hit by a bus to make EUV technology go away to the point we need to start from scratch is considerable.
"All of their intellectual and physical property", almost certainly includes less than half of the information you'd need to do to replicate e.g. an EUV lithography fab complex. Most of the rest resides only in the minds of the technicians at the first company, many of whom won't move over to the new company. Some of it is in a web of subcontractors, many of whom won't wind up doing business with the new company.
If it's just a matter of a new owner putting their name on the building, sure. Companies can fail harder than that, and if your idea is that e.g. it doesn't matter if Kim Jong Un nukes Samsung's fab because it will just be rebuilt in Arizona, then no, that's not going to work very well.
What man has done, man can aspire to do, so I expect these capabilities would be rebuilt in time. But that may be a long and troubling time.
(1) Often they are, yes (playing fast and loose with the meaning of "control"). Large multi-national public companies rarely exhibit the sort of clear top-down control of past eras, the John D. Rockefellers and etc.
(2) No, they aren't; no, it isn't; no, it isn't. The clearest evidence for those responses is the absence of strong examples of the predicted outcome. We've had more than a century now of large multi-national public companies and have zero cases of one of them actually "sending us back to XX years ago" through its sole action or its collapse. These predictions were old hat when I was in college, and I'm probably (based on cultural references here) one of the oldest regular commenters at ACX.
(3) See previous answer. If it "would take us little" for a large multi-national company "to bring us all down to our knees", it would have happened at least once by now. There have of course been cases where the collapse of a big company caused or contributed to problems at the large-national or even international scale, but nothing close to what is being described here.
I strongly support anti-trust laws, and favor reducing the degree to which businesses are able to become "too big to fail" or even close to it. But not because of any of the hyperbolic doom-casting summarized here.
There is an organizational form which has within living memory taken entire societies and even large swaths of the world down paths that do resemble "bring us all down to our knees", which is autocratic government. That is one very good argument for viewing the maintenance of representative democracy as the most important safeguard against those sorts of outcomes.
Bear in mind that a huge multinational corporation with vast interests and ties to a huge number of vendors and consumers doesn't act remotely like a Mr. Monopoly Man wilful tyrant, the scourge of the Marxist dreams. It can't afford to. A ship that big is steered by massive consensus among its manager class -- usually at least dozens of people need to agree on any new direction, and so they turn as ponderously as the Titanic. They are also often as much beholden to their market as the market is beholden to them. They have enormous payrolls, enormous capital expenses with $billions in bonds outstanding on which they need to make regular payments, and their first priority is always maintaining that gigantic cash flow. So they have to pay close attention to what people will buy, they really can't afford to go off in quixotic directions at the whim of even the CEO. That's why you don't look for innovation and novelty in enormous corporations, any more than you look for it among national governments[1].
So if you're looking at gigantic corporations that have a massive market share as roadblocks to change -- that's spot on. They are massive defenders of the status quo. But if you're fearing them as agents of subversion that will thwart or pervert the will of the masses, that's totally backward.
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[1] No one should be puzzled by the fact that IBM, then the biggest computer manufacturer, was late to the PC world, or that Toyota, current largest car manufacturer in the world, is slow to the EV world.
Most of the issues that conspiracy theorists, whether justified or unjustified, are attempting to address, can be, I think, best explored through Scott's filter as laid out long ago in Meditations on Moloch.
A common criticism of hedge funds is that they buy a struggling company, load it with debt and lucrative payments to the hedge fund itself and win whatever happens to the company. This criticism seems to depend on naïve lenders who do not see the higher risk that the target firm's profitability.
The narrative suffers from a lot of selection bias. You rarely hear about the PE firm that buys a few regional manufacturers, combines them, and increases margins by 3%. Thats boring and doesn't make good news/internet post/outrage.
One piece of the equation you are missing is that angry ex employees and customers make good stories and often the underlying company was a lot less healthy than you hear.
So evil PE firm swoops in an guts this paper mill for parts and fires all its staff. It could have run for another 50 years if that hadn’t happened! It was profitable!
Often the profitability was maybe a one time bump or last gasp, and the paper mill was not nearly the “going concern” later news articles would have you believe and was about to collapse.
Business is complicated. And it is very easy to have a mistaken understanding of a business's health if you don’t know it’s debt structure.
I knew management at a mid sized manufacturer (couple thousand employees) where they had years worth of back orders, in the mid 2000s. Seems impossible to screw up right? Well they loaded up on debt so they could expand and bring the back log down to say 9 months, but then the recession hit, orders got cancelled and suddenly they go from a giant money printing machine to unable to cover their debt payments.
Got bought out by a Chinese firm to take their tech. From top of the world to “almost out of business”, from one ill timed expansion a year before a recession hit (and a poorly worded order cancellation policy).
Lenders know they're facing higher risks and bake an appropriate risk premium into the interest rates. The "Junk" bonds with which LBOs are commonly financed generally pay interest rates 5-10 percentage points higher than similar investment-grade corporate bonds issued by companies that are not considered to be at significant medium-term risk of going broke. Averaged over a portfolio, this premium tends to be enough to make junk bonds competitive with investment-grade bonds despite the risk of bankruptcy.
Another part of the equation is that bondholders of failed private equity takeovers rarely suffer a full Willy Wonka "You get nothing!" endgame. Many bankruptcies end with a restructuring rather than a liquidation (the company keeps operating, but the repayment terms are adjusted, often with the bondholders taking a haircut in exchange for some kind of equity or warrant that lets them make some money back if the company recovers), and even a liquidation usually pays out a nontrivial amount of money to bondholders (a quick googling suggests something like a 40% average recovery rate for bondholders).
Private equity deals also almost always include an equity investment by someone (either the private equity firm itself or whoever they're brokering the deal for) equivalent to a downpayment on a house or a car. This means more money to go around for bondholders in the event of a bankruptcy (since stockholders are last in line during bankruptcy proceedings), and it means that whoever's first in line for the big win in the case the company actually does turn around, is also putting up a big pile of their own money that they lose if it goes under.
I suspect the criticism you're hearing is equivocation between deals where the PE firm is the buyer and deals where the PE firm is a middle man arranging a buyout deal with an outside purchaser (e.g. Elon Musk buying Twitter) or current executives putting up most or all of the equity downpayment. In middle-man deals, the PE firm generally takes home a ton of money to cover their expenses plus a tidy profit regardless of how the firm turns out. But if the PE firm is the actual buyer, they're putting up their own equity stake and placing a large bet on their ability to turn around the company and realize a profit.
Not sure if you're missing anything. Who is supposed to be the naive lender in this scenario? PE firms and their financiers are tightly connected. It's a constant revolving door between the two. They know exactly what the game is.
This leveraged buyout plus fee structure gets a lot of flack when it doesn't work. Because yes, the terms are very loaded in the PE firm's favour, and they can make out alright when the company fails. It's important to note that this is not what the PE Firms wants. When it happens, it means they failed.
The PE firms make a hell of a lot more money when they can turn the company around, make it profitable, and bring it public. Some PE firms actually have a pretty good record of doing so.
Private equity firms (which is what you mean) are high-risk, high-reward businesses. that's all. They buy companies that would probably otherwise go out of business, and try to make them succeed by big changes. A fair amount of the time, they fail, and the company goes out of business entirely, and everybody loses his money. Some times they succeed, and of course the successes need to cover the failures, so if you look at *only* the successes you will see a pretty outsize return and think WTF? That's because you're not seeing the failures. Things seen and unseen, as they say.
I think Thomas's question was probably more related to examples like Toys 'R Us or Remington - PE firm buys basically solvent going concern, pays out its LPs and backers by loading up the firm with debt, otherwise-solvent firm goes under at least in significant part due to newly-imposed massive debt service.
The question is why the lenders in this scenario are willing to lend money to the PEs given that the conditions under which they'd ever be in a position to foreclose on their debt security (i.e., the firm itself) are exactly the positions in which that security's value has probably tanked under bad PE management (i.e. the circumstances in which the firm's income stream isn't enough to cover its the debt service.) This sort of endogenously-generated risk makes lending to PE firms -- who make no secret of their intent to extract a ton of enterprise value up front to make sure they're covered and face little if any downside risk while leaving the secured lender to hold the bag if things go pear-shaped -- seem like kind of mug's game.
Demanding high interest rates probably explains some of this, but of course high interest rates have and have always had the perverse effect of *making the indebted less solvent."
[Side note: I wonder if there's a "tyranny of the rocket equation" somewhere to reflect the endogenous repayment risk caused by high interest rates?]
Oh well that's easy, then. There are no algorithms for predicting whether management will in the future make good or bad decisions, and so the fact that some of these arrangements will turn into future Harvard B School case studies on What Not To Do is inevitable. Particulary in business and finance, there are no guarantees.
I think this still leaves the question of why -- if the bank is willing to give enough money to a PE firm to cover (and more than cover) the costs of an acquisition, and risk being saddled with a white elephant in exchange, (that the bank would then have to manage in any case) -- the bank needs (or is willing to accommodate) the PE firm being the one that receives the proceeds of hollowing-out the acquired enterprise, instead of just, say, buying the target itself and selling it.
The PE firms in these situations appear to have made a tidy profit off of banks' willingness to pay money now in exchange for IOUs from the business and thus the PE firms completely de-risk themselves while making a profit besides, which in turn leads one to wonder why the banks are playing ball: the PE firm, having cashed out, has no "skin in the game" (although it would obviously be better for the PE firm to have enterprise value increase because then it makes even more money) because the *worst case* is more or less that the PE firm has sold the company to the bank at an above-market price (indeed, a massively above-market price in the event that foreclosure is necessited). Are prospective interest rate payments with a very high autocorrelative risk really the only thing the banks are getting here?
> instead of just, say, buying the target itself and selling it.
Core competency. PE firms have people who are experts on these sorts of deals, while banks don't, or can't spare them. Big banks are good at lending money, PE firms are good at reorganising companies.
You only hear about the cases where it all goes tits up. For every Toys R Us there's a bunch of other lower-profile cases where the operation is successful and everybody gets paid.
The pertinent question seems to be “how do the groups that back private equity companies make out? There should be an answer somewhere.
Is there a tax benefit to bankruptcy? If so maybe the borrowing -> bankruptcy process is just a tax-preferred way to liquidate a company and everyone is in on the game.
This does happen a lot, but i'll point out an instance where the "bad company" actually turned into the better investment: Host Hotels and Resorts, which started as Marriott Hotels dumping its hard assets and a lot of debt. This wasn't a PE move and the guy who ended up leading Host was the one who suggested doing it while at Marriott, but it is an example where breaking up a company can turn out as a success for both parts.
What are the actual mechanics by which long-term unprofitable companies manage? I mean, don't they uh..... run out of money in their bank account eventually? For example Uber apparently loses several hundred million dollars per quarter, and billions in any given year. Isn't there a bank account that simply goes to 0 at some point, and they shut down as a going concern? How can a company loses a couple billion every year and not go bankrupt, isn't that the literal definition?
When a company's a startup they have x amount of 'runway', or cash in the bank that they can burn before they go under. The startup's either trying to hit profitability or hit the next funding round before they run out of cash. I understand that Uber can issue shares on the public market to raise more capital, but won't investors..... like stop setting money on fire at some point? I don't really get a company can lose money every single quarter and every single year indefinitely
Uber will in fact run out of money and go bankrupt when investors decide to stop setting money on fire. But, A: there are a lot of investors with money to burn, some of whom believe the hype, and B: there are other investors willing to pragmatically bet that the first group of investors will keep pumping the stock price up a bit further and it's worth going along for the ride.
This won't last forever, but it can last an awful long time. And maybe the hype will turn out to be real, Uber will lock up half the world's local-transportation market just about the time true self-driving cars come into play and they can stop paying all those annoying *drivers*, and then it will be a pure profit machine and the investors who kept the faith will rake in those sweet, sweet dividend payments forever more.
Don't hold your breath, for either ultimate success or ultimate failure, for Uber or any of the others. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
Companies like Uber choose quite deliberately to invest any money they make in expanding quickly rather than making a profit. Some parts of the business will be making a profit, but these profits are being invested into other parts of the business.
If Uber ever decided "fuck it, let's just become profitable" it would be easy. My understanding is that Uber cars are profitable but Uber Eats is not, so you can start by shutting down Uber Eats. Then you look carefully at every city that Uber is operating in; some are probably profitable but others aren't, so you shut down in the ones that aren't. Shut down all new product development, firing most of your engineers... including of course the self-driving car division.
Yes, they could run out of money. Then they are bankrupt. The point of the funding round is to provide the money to grow until the next funding round, or IPO or acquisition. A company can be acquired for its tech stack, or staff, or reach as much as it’s revenue.
Venture capitalists are happy enough the company that loses money increases its revenue or the platform size. If a VC investS 1 million in a company , it’s preferable the company doubles its revenue while losing money, rather than stagnates and makes a small profit.
Middle-Eastern oil money, is the answer you're looking for. Saudi Arabia, UAE, etc. have a lot of cash. They want to diversify away from oil to weather future trend changes, when that will no longer be viable. Everything has been overinvested in for years, due to very low interest rates from federal banks. In order to get a good investment on extremely large amounts of cash, the investments need to be both huge and long term.
There's a whole subset of new services that are riding on these foreign investors willingness to take a loss in order to build market share. This includes Uber, Door Dash, Twitter (pre-Musk), really a whole bunch of companies. If Uber manages to force out all conventional taxis before they run out of money, they will likely turn things around and become extremely profitable.
Your 401k is losing money every single quarter, and every single year, indefinitely - you keep putting money into it, and it spends that money, and you get no money back - what it is gaining is capital.
This may help illuminate why it can actually be a very bad sign for a company to suddenly become profitable, or to suddenly become much more profitable: When does your 401k give -you- money, instead of the other way around?
Well, you've identified one of the nastier effects of financial repression, and why recessions are necessary for a healthy economy -- that's when bullshit rationalization gets its fatal appointment with reality and disperses. But as long as government does its best to avoid that pain, in order to be re-elected, and has the tools to do it, courtesy of our highly nationalized financial system, then the necessary come to Jesus moment can be delayed for a very long time, and a great deal of economic inefficiency can build up.
I mean, what would you do, if you had $100,000 in cash to put somewhere? You don't need it now, but you *will* need it when you get old, or your kids will when they go to college. Bearing in mind (real) inflation is running 6-8% per year, and so your money better grow that fast or faster if you want to not be slowly impoversihed. You can put it in a bank or CD and get 2-4%, yuck. You can buy Treasuries and get 4%, not good. You can invest in blue-chip stocks and get....5%. You can invest in commercial bonds and do even worse. So what's left? You can buy real estate, but that's tricky, very volatile, and you have to either spend time and energy managing or trust that someone else will do it right (and give them a cut).
It's hardly surprising that in that environment a fair number of people talk themselves into thinking something high yield but high risk (like backing a company that loses money all the time but says it's just about to break through to wild profitabiliy, any day now) is not the worst idea in the world.
As long as they have money coming in (through investors buying debt or equity), they can keep spending it. Investors aren't going to want to do that unless they see some non-trivial probability of massive profitability later, but if they do, they may continue to support it.
Amazon famously managed a long period of extreme unprofitability, before becoming hugely profitable. Uber had a strong case for a while that it might be the same sort of story, but I think it's becoming less plausible, especially as true self-driving starts seeming further away.
Operating at a loss doesn’t have to be a bad thing if the company is growing. If I’m an investor, I maybe wanna see a loss - profit suggests they might not be investing enough in their growth.
Imagine a companies revenue is growing 20% yoy and they are actively hiring and building and taking additional investments. If they’ve been doing that fir a number of years, they are likely a great investment. I mean their stock is probably growing too -investors wouldn’t be setting money on fire by investing. At some point the company would be expected to switch to a profitable mode but I’d rather see as much growth as is easily possible before the switch.
Profit/loss and cash flow are different things. The company you describe isn't providing stockholders with cash, but it *is* turning a profit, by increasing the total value of all the things it owns.
Yes it is. When you spend your profit on new facilities, it's still profit, because it's still on your balance sheet (as Property Plant and Equipment).
Econ is definitely not my strong suit. My glib answer is it helps to have a guy that can gin up a reality distortion field with the force of his personality. See Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos…
Amazon operated at a loss for what, 5 or 6 year?
Now Bezos owns his own spaceship company, a half billion dollar yacht with its own mini-yacht, plus the Washington Post and even had enough left over after his divorce to make a down payment on a new wife.
I will give you SJ but I have reservations about Bezos fitting that description. He’s a different kind of genius to me (Not that I can put my finger on it)
The thing that I keep ruminating on, is that when Amazon finally did declare some profit, it was because of their cloud computing infrastructure, not their retail operation. It was like retail was the tip of the iceberg, and I never saw what was underneath.
1) Don't count airport layovers as "visits" to countries. This rule pertains even if you left the grounds of the airport to stay at a nearby hotel for the night.
2) Don't count visits to the areas around cruise ship terminals. For example, if you went on a cruise, your ship docked at Nassau, and you spent three hours shopping at the tourist stores within walking distance of the dock, don't count that as a visit to the Bahamas.
3) Don't count visits to countries that happened when you were so young that you can't remember them anymore. For example, if your parents took you on a trip to Canada from the U.S. when you were a baby.
Somewhere between 16 and 20, depending on how you count: UK, New Zealand, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Netherlands, Israel, Japan, Costa Rica, Iceland, Finland, Estonia, Poland, (I moved from Russia to the US as a teenager, does either or both of them count?), (Belgium for a day on a sailboat), (Uzbekistan but it was part of USSR at the time and I barely remember it)
When I was at university I lived in a dorm with mostly (90%) exchange students from universities from all over the planet (Korea, Peru, Angola, Lebanon, Sweden, Finnland, USSR, ...). Our six months next-door neighbor was from Boulder, CO. We took him on a camping trip to Italy, and at every border he insisted on having his passport stamped:
1. exit Germany
2. into Austria
3. into Liechtenstein
4. into Switzerland
5. into Italy
So that was 5 countries on one day within 7 hours (we didn't bother to take detours of two hours to the borders of CSSR and France).
38 countries. Most of them by sailboat. 16 US states, most of them by motorcycle. 4 Canadian provinces. I've made major crossings on every ocean by sail. No one seems to agree on which the "seven seas" really are, but by my count I've crossed at least 13 of them too, though not the Black and Caspians seas, or the Gulf or Persia yet.
There are asterisks and caveats to the above statements, of course. Feel free to ask if you're curious :)
Oh man, that gave me a good laugh! Had to look up the ad, never heard of Dos Equis, but then I Don't Always Drink Beer xD That is certainly the most interesting compliment I've gotten in a long while, thank you :)
Asterisks are mostly boring things, like what definitions of "oceans" and "major crossings" you use, etc. If you count the way that Wikipedia does on wiki/ocean, then I suppose I haven't done any major crossings on the Arctic Ocean, but I'm not really used to calling the northern icecap an "ocean". Most maps and charts I've seen will split the Atlantic and Pacific into northern and southern halves though, and I have sailed across all four more than once. The number of seas thing is just a jest, if you list all "seas" you'll get hundreds, many of them overlapping. Stuff like that :)
My parents took me sailing from a young age. We crossed the Atlantic (La Gomera to Tobago) when I was 11. That's when I did my first night watches alone.
I certainly can be expensive, as expensive as you like really, but it doesn't have to be:
If you want to sail on your own boat there is always some cost of course. You could do it safely and in some comfort on a used boat for ~$10 000, + ~$10 000 fixing her up. Once you have the boat, you can sail the world indefinitely for ~$500 per month for the boat, depending on the size of the boat and assuming you do all the work yourself, plus ~$500 per person. Or you could, youknow, spend millions on a boat, and then have a salaried crew take you around. There is no upper bound, and the lower bound is only limited by your own comfort zone.
But most of my sailing has been on other peoples boats, sometimes sharing running costs, sometimes for free, sometimes with expenses paid, and occasionally even with compensation. There are many boats sailing the world with varying crew that comes and goes. $10 or $20 /day is a fair rate for a bunk on a boat where everyone helps out with everything. And this is the way to go, honestly! Sailing around the world is awesome! Being sailed around by someone else is pretty boring, and VERY expensive.
To find boats I recommend CrewBay.com. It's like a dating site for boats and crew, and works astonishingly well; I've had much more luck there than I ever did on actual dating sites. Also like most dating sites, it has it's share of bad eggs. My profile on crewbay: https://www.crewbay.com/profile/crew/32840
If you want a second opinion on an ad there, or on boats in general, I'd be happy to help :)
That price is too dear for me, specially now that I got into effective altruism and am giving 10% of my income to charity. But it seems very cool.
If you ever sail to Puerto Rico, you should let me know! Ever been here before? Do you have a twitter so we can keep in touch? Or if you want, I can give you my email here, and then delete the comment with the email after confirming that you got it.
Somewhere in the mid to high 30s, probably. But I'm European, so I can easily visit half a dozen countries with a one-day car trip, so getting into the double digits is trivial. If you want to compare my score to that of someone from the US, it would probably be fairer to count states as countries.
In fact that's a little perspective flip which comes in handy surprisingly often. A lot of news from the US becomes much easier to make sense of, when I realise that I shouldn't compare the US to my home country -- instead I should compare it to the EU, and then compare my home country to one of the more liberal states in the US, and compare e.g. Texas to Poland.
If I answer the OP question as asked, the answer is 9 for me: Canada, Mexico, Bahamas, Jamaica, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria.
If I answer the question as you suggest, and also discount States that I merely drove through or stayed in a chain hotel, then I end up adding California, New Mexico, Louisiana, Arkansas, Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Michigan. Total of 23.
We could run this through another filter, but it's a rough one. It's based on the unspoken premise that the key term is "foreign". Rhode Island and Massachusetts, for example, weren't so different from each other - at least, the cultural scenes I visited (small town on the Atlantic coast). OTOH, there are easily multiple cultures within any state or nation - Basque Spain v. Catalonia, Beirut v. southern Lebanon, etc. I've witnessed different cultures within the same gym. It's so hard to judge that no one I know of takes it seriously, but it's fun to think about on occasion.
I'm not sure if this is just me, but I can't get the manifund site to load right now. I just get "connection reset". It's possible this is related to me being temporarily on a terrible satellite internet connection, but other sites that fail usually do it in a different way than that.
theanine has a noticeable effect on me. It smooths out highs and lows from caffeine and makes coffee behave more more like tea (which includes theanine). Its cheap and readily available which is also great.
I assume that was a typo and you mean "L-Theanine". I got Nature's Trove 200mg, of which I take 2 caps a day at dinner. With all the usual caveats about subjective, 1-subject data, I find it helps: I'm less tense during the day and I sleep better. Interestingly, I'm also taking Silexan (Lavender extract) and my impression is that L-Theanine has a more noticeable effect.
Silexan did not work for me but I feel marginally calmer after a few cups of tea which is what got me thinking of trying L- Theanine since tea has it in small amounts
Does anyone here know about USA police operations or know any sources of USA police data? My rough mental model of police time allocation is "80% of police time is spent on searching for, dispensing, and documenting speeding and parking tickets, with another 10% also low-value (harassing teens skateboarding, driving from one place to another, taking breaks, getting donuts and coffee, etc), and maybe 10% spent on actually solving real crimes like murder, rape, etc."
I realize this is both uncharitable and not based on any data other than what I personally have seen police officers doing, so I wanted to update my beliefs with new and better quality data. If anyone here knows a good data source, or could give a rough department-level outline of where most police time is allocated on a monthly or annual basis, I'd really appreciate it.
What makes you think traffic control is low value? I would welcome data, but my guess would be that effective traffic control is probably more effective at improving lives and reducing death than effective murder control.
It could be low value in the sense that a police officer is legally able to perform a lot of tasks that other citizens can't. Many things in traffic control can be done, legally, by non-police government workers (in most cities, parking tickets are not done by the police for instance). So having your expensive policy doing traffic enforcement is low value even if has great outcomes per hour spent..
I agree that traffic control in the sense of "there was an accident that needs to be safely routed around" or "traffic lights are down at this intersection and we are manually directing traffic" are probably one of the highest value things LE does in a city, but I would bet that that's less than 5% of overall police-time allocation.
As for speeding tickets, I disagree that that provides any value. In most cities, you are either incapable of speeding due to traffic, or literally everyone goes 10-15 mph over. That omnipresent 10-15mph over is essentially a directly-incentivized revenue farm for the police, especially when they keep a portion of the ticket revenues, but they are not actually doing anything of value by farming it.
They're literally just continuing to fund the 80% of police time spent on traffic / parking tickets with their portion of the ticket revenues. Since everyone does it all the time that cops aren't literally right there (which is maybe 1% of the time), that argues that it's not actually dangerous or meriting tamping down, and that cops are directly harming productivity and commute times for the sake of their revenue farm when dedicating so many hours to it.
Hunting down and stopping the people going 80mph in residential areas and 120mph on highways does save a lot of lives. Ditto people blowing though intersections.
Overall how cops spend there time, I am unsure. I would expect it is about as inefficient as other forms of public union controlled government work.
I'm not a cop, but I've talked to a few about this. Based on those conversations I would guesstimate 30-40% "Filling out reports and paperwork relating to arrests and traffic stops, and appearing in/waiting to appear in court". I'd love for someone actually in law enforcement to check me on that.
It is of course unsurprisingly that police spend relatively little time on murders and rapes, since those are so rare. Note also that driving around is not per se low value, since police presence tends to deter street crime.
Thanks much, that was pretty much what I was looking for. I'll dig around in some of the police data portals, but I'm actually surprised that my non-informed first pass estimate was even in part aligned with real data.
I feel like it just looks like circles with connected lines and one at each end; the actual neural network is much larger, whereas in most depictions of the Tree of Life there are only 10 Sefirot. (Excepting the ones where the angel only has one wing.)
Doesn't stop it from being a neat T-shirt idea, what with all the Jewish computer scientists. You'd need to rotate it so it goes top to bottom, then label Kether as the input layer, Malkuth as the output layer, and the intermediates as hidden layers. Bonus points for working in some joke about Daath.
They are both convenient to represent as directed weighted graphs, but I don't think there's much more depth to the comparison.
I did a very similar thing about a decade and a half ago for the cover of my undergraduate thesis on backprop (no idea for a US equivalent, basically an extra long form paper that you must do and if it sucks you don't graduate). Would post the cover, but I'm not crazy about making it that easy to link my posts to PII, even though I'm a nobody.
Well, if you're going to do that, remember that it's supposed to be recursive at each node. This makes the t-shirt a bit of a difficult image. And while it's supposed to be recursive, I think it's supposed to be similarly recursive, I.e. the recursion at Tiphareth would be similar to the recursion at Hod. But I've never heard anyone go into details about what that would mean.
Each of the nodes in the tree of life is supposed to be implemented with a tree where kether is the upper node and Malkuth the lower. What that means is unclear to me, but clearly that internal tree would itself need to have its nodes implemented in a similar way, "and so on infinitum". (Ref. to poem by J. Swift, or possibly a rephrasing of it.)
This has been a public service announcement on behalf of cheering everyone up (unless you're a United fan, sorry, we're all slogging away at the moment).
I’m really passionate about helping getting UNSONG published even in the case that Scott is no longer interested in the major edits mentioned in Editing Unsong (but maybe removing the rape scene would be a good idea). Is there anything bottlenecking this process outside of his control that we readers can help fix? If not, I promise to do nothing about this issue and forget about it promptly. [EDIT: rephrased for clarity]
I'd argue for removing the rape scene, largely because it'll just give the MSM another chance to go after Scott, and it's not really that crucial from what I remember. But, you know, he's the author, he gets to pick.
I guess the best strategy for those of us who want it published is to bet "no" and for Scott to bet "yes." The more fans who pile on, the better his payoff.
Of course, I don't know Scott, so I can't say if this is enough to motivate him.
You’re doing that thing where you frame someone in a certain divisive light, and then grow the framing despite having no information – exactly when it is pointed out to you that your framing might be wrong or divisive. You are also making a basic syllogistic error.
I never said I wanted to remove the rape scene – only that it *might* be a good idea. I have concerns that people who really don’t like Scott could use it as ammunition for reasons I will not state.
I took ketamine for depression via Mindbloom. It worked really well and immediately. But I've been a little hypomanic since then. Not like, continually, but there are a lot more times when I notice myself talking a lot, I'm staying up late working and I don't always feel like I can stop, I'm less interested in food, I feel more confident than usual. Like, up till midnight on a Saturday working and I have to force myself to eat. I've been on amphetamines for ADHD before and it's a little like that - not all the time, but sometimes.
I tried to research whether ketamine could cause mania and it seemed like there may be were a couple of cases, but obviously they were much worse. Is it possible that ketamine did actually cause this? It's been going on for a couple of months now, and I've been taking ketamine doses every couple of weeks during that, but I think it's getting worse (or better, I guess, if you like my symptoms.) I can't think of anything else that's changed.
(I am not a doctor) Does another person who knows you reasonably well and can be objective also think your behavior has changed recently? If so, that may be an good indicator that you should see a medical professional.
That’s obviously a gray area of an answer that doesn’t make it obvious to know what to do. I can tell you that if it were me, the fact that they noticed changes would be a red flag for some sort of mild mania/hypomania going on. The “you seem ok” part would only reassure me that it’s not overt mania. This is based off me being in a very similar situation a few months ago wondering if I was hypomanic.
I fixed it now but there was a typo in above: red flag for some sort of mild *mania or hypomania.
In my case it turns out they didn't notice any changes, so I didn’t worry about it haha! Sorry, I don’t understand your second question, can you clarify?
You mentioned “talking more” which reminds me to mention that talking faster (so called “pressured speech”) in particular is a sign of mania that you can ask your friends about.
EMTs have tried giving me ketamine for pain, and it doesn't work. Ketamine minimizes my viewable screen to the upper left corner, and turns images into a cubist painting -- distracting, but not pain-killing.
At this point you may be hypomanic, but you're not manic -- but you definitely should not take a chance on becoming manic. You should see a psychiatrist, but try hard to find one who has experience with ketamine treatment. Ketamine seems to have really helped you, and it would be undesirable to find someone who barely knows anything about ketamine and warns you off ever having anything to do with the stuff again. The ideal would be to find a way to keep the benefits but avoid the risk of mania. And while you're hunting for someone, I think you should stop with the biweekly ketamine for now.
I mean, I was never committing code at midnight and then waking up six hours later to start again. None of this is totally brand new in terms of issues. Like, I've been food averse before. But this feels like it's more and going on for longer. I've discussed this with the people around me and they've agreed this is happening but aren't too concerned -- I don't come across like I'm manic -- but also agree that this is different.
"committing code at midnight and then waking up six hours later to start again. "
This sounds sub-manic to me, which is to say, still in the normal range for a motivated person? Especially with computer programming where the urge can show up at odd times.
I would be inclined to suspect that you always had this potential in you and it was previously muffled by the depression states.
Sure, if that's all it were, I would not be concerned. But it does feel somewhat compulsive, I'm neglecting other things to a degree, and the food and sleep issues are not terrible, but in total, it feels like it might be a thing.
I would suggest that if you are having symptoms serious enough to cause you concern, STOP TAKING THE DRUG. And go see a doctor. Even if it isn't causing the hypomania, you could be fucking yourself up physically:
Best wishes with that. It might not even be the ketamine causing this, but it might have jolted something out of whack, or this could be an underlying condition. Best to get it checked out, and the other physical risks as well. I know you're doing this not for the kind of recreational high people do abuse drugs, but it's risky without medical oversight (and yeah, doctors can be dismissive, abrupt, and ignore what you're trying to tell them, but on balance better to get advice than to wing it).
I second this. It sounds like a major issue that could cause you a lot of problems if you don’t do anything right now – went through something similar a year ago and am still suffering trauma.
Ok, interesting. This is helpful. What is the range of somethings that someone can do? My experience with both issues that are subclinical and side effects that are not official things is that no one believes me and or/cares.
Seeing a psychiatrist is a great idea of course. Depending on how severe your intuition tells you this could get, freezing your own credit card and avoiding the internet may be in the range of reasonable things to do (sometimes people go on spending sprees while manic).
It is good that you are able to continue working. If your ability to do that was interrupted, this would be much more immediately serious.
Please get advice from people you know if they care about you and not from strangers on the internet. It helps for them to be invested in your happiness, even if what that entails contradicts your immediate wishes.
And be wary of anyone telling you meditation is a good idea in your situation. While it would be rude to discount the profundity of their experiences, it may not be safe to mess around with the source code of your brain while hypo-manic. The Theravada taxonomy of enlightenment describes low-grade bipolar symptoms as part of the natural stages of awakening.
A psychiatrist should care about you being hypomanic. And it's good that you stopped the drug, if you kept pushing it, it could become mania and even psychosis. An LSD trip (not my first one) sent me into mania and then into psychosis after a couple of days of mania. All from just one acid tab. So there are risks to messing with your neurochemistry with something strong like ketamine.
Having also dealt with severe depression, there is an approach to it that is like fiddling with the Gordian Knot, and there is the Alexandrian approach, which is drawing your sword and slicing the thing apart. You can do anything that you want with your head, and I think the realization of that is the real and lasting solution to depression.
Enlightenment is the ego's last disappointment and paradoxically, accepting the depression makes it go away.
"no one believes me and/or cares" - that is exactly why you should see a physician IN PERSON! You've take a very powerful drug. Make an appointment asap and be totally honest with your history.
Have you previously had as good a remission from depression, as this one? It's not uncommon the first time it happens to overshoot naturally into temporary and harmless hypomania, just because not being depressed feels so good. Sure, see a doctor, but I wouldn't worry about talktofrank dire warnings of bladder failure etc, which come from hardcore, long term abuse of the stuff.
I'm making no judgements about you personally. I'm not just talking about this Rx, I am talking about your complete personal history.
Sometimes choosing an outfit like Mindbloom might be because one is reticent about talking all past history (I'm talking about all past treatment and underlying traumas and symptoms). And it's is not clear that mindbloom model is interested in thorough history taking. They make money by giving out Rxs.
Best wishes for feeling better and being healthier and happier.
I wrote a LessWrong post about ecological dynamics, an approach to psychology and sports coaching that avoids talking about internal models and credences, which produces neat theories with interesting implications for learning.
I’m far from an expert so it’s probably not airtight, but I wanted to make the case that despite all appearances, ecological psychology is quite compatible with Lesswrong rationalism. Let me know if you spot any mistakes or inadequacies, or if you have any questions!
I can’t tell how this relates or not, but I have A LOT of success with film review and non-physical coaching with hockey even with say 9-11 year olds.
Look at what this player did here in situation X. That was sub optimal do other thing Y. Stuff that is a million times harder to teach in the moment or physically. They still need 95% skills/physical based coaching. But there is A LOT of low hanging fruit from adding in a bit of film review.
Yeah I think it's related, as I said below I'm not sure about the "shared affordances" stuff but I bet ecologically minded coaches would be all for replacing advice by video examples
Also, as a parkour guy, the worldwide sharing of videos does seem to have caused a crazy, still-accelerating explosion of skill, especially for quasi-beginners
(It's written from the perspective of an ultimate frisbee player, but could be of interest to any athlete)
I'm not convinced it's *all* ecological, i.e. that there's never any mental models. For something like the fly ball example, where it's pretty much all physics and motor skills, yes, I'm fine with saying it's all ecological. But sports is so much more than that.
When you add in an opponent, I don't see how you can succeed at sports without having knowledge of your opponent's mental state, and some amount of that knowledge has to come from things you can't "directly perceive".
One reason pro sports teams watch film is to learn other teams' tendencies. NBA teams will leave Russell Westbrook open at the three-point line because he's a bad shooter. To me it seems clear the way they know he's a bad shooter is due to things they've analyzed in the past and then stored in their brain, not due to their direct perception of some fact in the present physical environment about him standing on the three point line. Theoretically, a player who had never directly perceived Russell Westbrook play basketball, whether in person or on tape, could still be coached to leave him open on the three point line.
Another example...you mention chess in your article. Yes, a chess player can look at the board and see some "affordance" for a long-term plan. But they cannot look at the board and intuit the rules of chess. Those have to be stored in their brain somehow, right? Isn't that a model—a set of rules about how a system fits together?
So I can be convinced basic motor skills work best when "fully ecological", but sports/games as a whole requires strategy and thinking about other humans in a way that seems to me can't always be directly perceived.
Your article's main argument against this seems to be that the ecological system defines environment "in an extremely broad sense". To me that's too much of a cop-out. (There's some LW concepts around this right? If your theory could mean anything, it means nothing, something like that?) The ecologists say to "taboo the term 'mental model'", but they could equally taboo the term 'environment'.
I clicked around and found a recent podcast that's semi-relevant, but I'm not very convinced:
The podcast talks about memory of what we've seen someone do previously and tries to say that "remembering" is indistinguishable from direct perception— "there is no clear distinction between perception and memory". But, what are we remembering if not some type of mental model of what that person is capable of? It still seems to me that they are just playing games with semantics.
Great points overall, I'm excited to read your article
I agree with the theory of mind part, as I said in the post I haven't really grasped the concept of "shared affordances", and I'm not completely convinced the conceptual work is done here. I'll listen to the podcast you linked though, maybe I'll get some insights
I also mostly agree with the environment part. I mean, I am not convinced that the problem is necessarily with the implied meaning smuggled into the term environment (we can just define it as "everything that isn't the agent"), but I'm still uncomfortable with such a broad definition
Also it just sounds tautological when you say "Everything that happens is determined by the properties of [the agent] and [everything that isn't the agent]".
About memory, I am more convinced by the ecological discourse. In particular I recently listened to this episode about memory, the challenges of defining it in a more rigorous way (oh my this exchange is turning into a Rob Gray Andrew Wilson vortex):
I'll try and rephrase some points I found interesting:
- Memory is a just a property of agents (just like credences etc). Observing memory doesn't imply that we have any idea what mechanisms are involved
- Memory can be ecologically understood as an influence of the past environment on the agent that changes their characteristics, and thus their information-control laws; this may be preferable to stating that the agent "stores" information
Thanks for the discussion. I'm still lost on the ecological discourse on memory.
What does it mean to you when they say "there is no clear distinction between perception and memory"?
What is the difference between an "information control law" and a "mental model"?
To me personally, it still feels like just semantics.
I think from an information-theory perspective, a "change in their control laws" is equivalent to "stored information". It's just that the information/decreased entropy is stored in the "code" instead of stored in the "data" that's input to the code.
I'm not a psychologist, but isn't that pretty much behaviorism? AFAIK, behaviorism fell out of favor because there are situations where it's much more economical to assume the existence of mental models than to dispense with them. For example, I've read that a chess master can memorize a chessboard configuration in a couple of seconds but only IF it's an actual play configuration, not some random positioning of the pieces. That kind of "chunking" seems hard to explain "economically" without mental models.
That's not to say that I disagree with you. I think that "mental model" can be a black box concept that obscures things more than illuminate them, and we should describe precisely the nature and structure of a mental model if we're relying on its existence.
I just think that connecting ecological psychology to behaviorism would help it to fit into my mental model (sorry!) of psychology theories.
Godspeed.
Also, there's a typo: the word "about" is repeated twice in a row in the first line of paragraph four.
Hmm I'm not convinced that ecological dynamics is just behaviorism, but I'm not sure how I would argue against that claim either
Or rather, maybe it is behaviorism, but then it is behaviorism made more powerful by integrating new concepts (affordances, information-control laws, direct learning)
Your last sentence about mental models is exactly why I wanted to write this post! I agree with a lot of what ED people say, but if we want to talk about science we still need a way to talk about mental models!
And IMO they can be ecologically understood as betting affordances
Thanks for your feedback and the spotted typo, I'll edit it
Some time ago our dear host wrote on semaglutide, the new wonder drug against obesity... and quite predictably, just a few months later, you hear reports that it's already become a "must" among the rich-and-beautiful crowd. Kind of sad, but not altogether unexpected. Link to article: https://www.thecut.com/article/weight-loss-ozempic.html
Hm, are you implying that this was caused by the article on ACX? I think this would be giving too much credit to our host, semaglutide was already a big thing when he wrote about it. But Scott is really good in noticing these trends early.
Err, nope, didn't mean to imply such a thing, although I can see how it vaguely sounds like it. By "quite predictably" I just mean that I'm not surprised that it takes off in popularity as a way of cementing the already existing mandate for thinness among people who are already well within healthy weight parameters.
In the weeks prior to the ACX post, there were a number of prominent articles in NYTimes and WAPO and a prominent semaglutide shill was giving interviews.
Sounds like the only sad thing is that the medicines' producers haven't been able to immediately keep up, leading to probably-temporary shortages. Once that's fixed and it's potentially as easily available as NSAIDs, what are the downsides?
"Once that's fixed and it's potentially as easily available as NSAIDs, what are the downsides?"
NSAIDs also have downsides and there are warnings about over-using them, precisely because they're easily available and people think they're harmless. Weight loss drugs if you just want to shed a few pounds are the equivalent of crash diets, which are ineffective in the end. Pressure on people like actresses and models to get an unrealistic body shape is not good, I don't mean "healthy at any size" or "fat is beautiful" acceptance, I do mean "women of a normal weight being told to lose a stone to get the part" or the rest of it - the heroin chic look that was popular in the 90s/00s seems to be on the rise again.
Mostly, that fad drugs (anyone else remember back when prozac first came out, and every little wannabe Carrie Bradshaw was writing articles about how they persuaded their doctor to prescribe this for them, then they churned out pieces for the magazines and newspapers about it?) are a bad measure to be taken up, popularised, and then abandoned. The fad means that, as in this case, shortages of medications that people with genuine conditions need for nothing more than the cause of vanity.
> NSAIDs also have downsides and there are warnings about over-using them, precisely because they're easily available and people think they're harmless.
Precisely, yet society, to put it mildly, hasn't collapsed because of it. I do not predict that happening here, either.
> Weight loss drugs if you just want to shed a few pounds are the equivalent of crash diets, which are ineffective in the end.
I think that does depend on mechanism a lot (also, define "in the end" - the end is when one's corpse is buried/burned). The description of the drug is seemingly "sedate one's appetite" rather than actively adversely cleanse, so, while regaining-after-stopping is likely and documented, the stopping itself need not happen, unlike with crash diets which are quite literally unsustainable.
> Pressure on people like actresses and models to get an unrealistic body shape is not good
Mm, yes, but that's not a thing resurrected by the pill, it's a thing that never really left the relevant society. (Also, would you consider someone like Portman or Knightley to have a "heroin chic look"?)
I started taking it a month ago, for diabetes. I found the downsides very problematic, including diarrhea and mild nausea. I then had side effects to THOSE side effects, including losing a small amount of weight and loss of sleep from waking up in the middle of the night a few times per night. In my diabetic opinion, it isn't worth the side effects, though they have finally started lessening.
I conclude so far that the weight loss, for me, is that eating often has too many downsides for me to want to eat, and so I postpone it. That results in me eating significantly less, but I also find the things that upset my digestion the least are the things I should avoid, such as carbs.
Well, side effect profile is individual; of course not every drug fits every person. The original comment, however, seemed to find the societal effect dangerous.
Well, in the abstract, yeah, let people do whatever they want, and so on. But if, say, I heard that a niece of mine with a healthy BMI was feeling social pressure to stick $600-a-month worth of unneeded strong medication into her body, I wouldn't be happy about the trend.
The question is "what are the reasonable alternatives". Of course I prefer people to just be unbothered by most forms of social pressure and zero-sum games. However, I most certainly don't predict that if all the semaglutide in the world and the ability to produce it are magically destroyed, the result would be people who are currently embedded in that kind of pressure awakening, stopping those games, and freeing from social pressure; I predict that they would just revert to (mostly more dangerous and/or less effective) methods we had before.
The reasonable alternative would be to make it a prescription-only drug, available to the seriously obese but not to healthy-weight teenage girls who want to be a bit thinner.
It looks like this is already the case from a quick read of the wegovy website (at least the version available in my country) so if healthy teenage girls are still taking it then the reasonable alternative is to start enforcing drug laws properly (something that the US in particular really needs to start doing for a bunch of other reasons too).
...Yeah, and as second-order consequence that would just revert them back to more dangerous methods to achieve the same thing, see directly the comment you responded to.
Teenage girls trying to lose weight by normal (usually quite healthy) methods are a normal problem we already have, teenage girls trying to lose weight by weird drugs is a whole set of new problems. As a natural conservative I'd rather stick with the dumb problems we're used to than risk a whole bunch of new ones that we don't understand.
> The question is "what are the reasonable alternatives".
Fine enough if that's your question. It's not mine. I'm also not comparing it to the imaginary possibility of magically destroying production capacity - you are.
I'm just seeing something pop up and finding it ugly on the sides. No attempt at constructive criticism here. It's just a passing sentiment, not a call for action. If GLP-agonists-for-all is the way the world will go, then go it will, and we'll get used to it.
Or to put it in more general terms... here we are with a large majority of people in the industrialized world living better than kings were just a century or two ago. And then instead of buying ourselves some more slack and freedom to enjoy life, so many of us waste much of that surplus in pointless zero-sum status games. It seems to me at the very least like a massive hedonic and creative failure.
I think at least at some level people do recognize the failure, because when you kind of opt out of as much of it as you can, some people look at you like you have a superpower.
I don't think wanting to be attractive is just a status game. I obviously agree that internet-driven beauty standards are problematic etc etc (and especially the feeling of always being in the spotlight because of social media), but being attractive for your partner (current or potential) is one way to make them happy, and having a happy partner is one way to make yourself happy too. Weight isn't the only factor in attractiveness, and attractiveness isn't the only factor in desirability, but its hard to deny it plays a part.
I agree with your last sentence, its just more that people look at it wrong than that there's nothing to look at.
I’ve been thinking about the idea of treating large language models, such as the one driving ChatGPT, as dynamical systems. That’s why I chose the term “story trajectory,” in my recent working paper, ChatGPT tells stories, and a note about reverse engineering: A Working Paper, https://www.academia.edu/97862447/ChatGPT_tells_stories_and_a_note_about_reverse_engineering_A_Working_Paper I find it natural to think in terms of a dynamical system evolving along a trajectory in state space. There is a considerable literature on the brain as a dynamical system and I had a good bit of interaction with the late Walter Freeman on that subject, which he pioneered.
In his long article, “What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?”, Stephen Wolfram talks of attractors and attractor basins near the end. Those are terms used in complex dynamics, https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/ But he puts the terms in quotes. I assume he’s doing that because he is using the terms metaphorically. He’s not actually asserting that ChatGPT is a dynamical system, though he might like to.
I can’t follow the mathematics in detail, but I do find the idea attractive. Think of a prompt as imposing an initial state on the system. The system then evolves step by step, emitting a token at each step. That’s a much more plausible way of thinking about what’s going on than simply saying it ‘predicts’ the next token, one after another. Yes, that’s what we observe. But that way of thinking about it, 1) focuses our attention on those tokens, and 2) makes their appearance seem deeply mysterious. In contrast, thinking about the system evolving (step by step), that puts your attention on those 175 B parameters. It doesn’t tell you what they are doing, but that’s where your attention is. Incidentally, as the system evolves, it emits token after token after token, etc.
So, when in the paper I talk about “a nested hierarchy of probability distributions,” I’m talking about how the whole system evolves. Just how it does that, I don’t know.
When I think of a story trajectory, I’m imagining that, when ChatGPT begins telling a story, it enters a “valley” in the “attractor landscape” that is evoked by the prompt. It remains in that valley until the story is completed. My generate-a-new-story task is a way of exploring that valley in the attractor landscape. And when ChatGPT refused to tell a story where the protagonist was a colorless green idea, it was, in effect, saying THAT’s not in the valley.
There’s only so much you can do without mathematics. But the language and imagery is more attractive and useful.
ChatGPT can only be as reliable as the data we feed it. If it draws its data from the internet, it cannot be reliable, and it will only give us a more convincing falsehoods -- a mixture of truths, half-truths, and blatant lies -- with the Machine's own "intelligence" creating its own falsehoods and smoothing them out to appear more credible. So, among people looking to give credence to their falsehoods, ChatGPT will be a boon and a method of endorsement for (false) information.
Just looked at that stuff. It's in the ball park for sure. And its quite recent. I'm sensing a stirring in The Force. I'm beginning to think that the trope of the inscrutability of deep learning models may begin to fade away.
Thanks for the replies folks. Let's refine a bit....
Putin already has the power to bring down the modern world. Today, right now, a single human being can press the "game over" button. If the knowledge explosion gives people like Putin more and more such power, how long can that go on? Is that progression sustainable?
Either yes, because the progression also includes tech to avoid Putin pushing the button (after all, game theory and MAD is part of the knowledge explosion, too) or it includes tech to let us survive the "game over" button (after all, colonizing other planets is part of the knowledge explosion, too.)
Or no, and we'll fall into a new equilibrium where everyone is more violent. A few tribes in the hills, rebooting civilization in their own image. Sorry, perhaps about the destruction of the past, or maybe awed by the remains of the mighty works they see, but mostly glad to have survived and really just more worried about the immediate, urgent, daily struggle to improve their lot.
Putin may have the power to start a thermonuclear war — whether he does have that power depends on how good his control is over his own military. A thermonuclear war would kill a lot of people but it wouldn't bring down the modern world.
No, we have been selecting against violent men for a long time. (See "The Goodness Paradox") I don't see any reason this trend won't continue. Violent men are still seen as (mostly) a bad thing in our society.
The ability to commit impulsive violence doesn't depend on the very cutting edge of technology. Or to put it another way, a violent man is probably not committing murders with nuclear bombs, and presumably won't be doing so with killer robots either.
Yes, because accelerating knowledge explosions empower erstwhile victims to defend themselves.
Or no, and then we graduate to a different equilibrium where everyone is more violent. The survivors, if they see any downsides to it, will feel a little guilty at most, and move on, mostly relieved that they won this round. Like when sapiens killed off neanderthals - you and I are the result of exactly this dynamic, iterated probably very many times.
That's fair - when I said we "killed off" the neanderthals I should have said we "evolutionarily outcompeted" them. A neanderthal blog contemplating its extinction at our hands might not see much difference.
But even "evolutionarily outcompeted" Is not quite likely accurate description.
If the question what happened to the Neanderthals is actually more similar to what happened to the Sumerians or Scythians or Etruscans then "evolution" not quite the right process. The disappearance of Sumerians, Scythians, or Etruscans is not a matter evolution.
On a "broad average" Neandertal and modern Sapiens are 99.7% identical. But that is an average and takes no account of error (we have limited Neanderthal data so our average is not a result of random sampling) and no account of variation among the Neanderthal and Sapiens 100k ago. If more data reveals that Neanderthal and Sapiens are not really different species (more and more likely) then that changes the frame within with you have made your initial hypothesis.
Wait, we didn't outcompete the neanderthals because we ARE neanderthals? Very well, let me rephrase in a way that respects this opinion. Is there any species that humans have ever been outcompeted by humans, such that we filled their ecological niche and they went extinct? If so, then please replace that species for neanderthals in my previous comments. If not, then I'd like to notice my confusion and predict that we have a semantic rather than substantive disagreement.
If you prefer an illustrative example that avoids evolution, how about cultures? When a more violent culture destroys a less violent culture, for example through colonial conquest, do the survivors of all this violence, conquered and conqueror alike, settle into a new equilibrium with a higher overall level of baseline violence compared to before the conquest?
Do "more" violent cultures really replace "less" violent cultures? How would we operationally define more or less violent.
Do any "cultures" really last more than about 3-500 years. Is "culture" so static that it really definable in a rigorous way?
Of course humans have hunted species into extinction but it hard to really say we've taken over their niche. The entire world is our niche and has been for quite a long time.
Were the Gauls and Angles and Saxons and goths, etc more violent than the Romans or less violent than the EU?
I don't understand your point about Neanderthal and Etruscans. Etruscans as a race didn't go anywhere, they just stopped speaking Etruscan and started speaking Latin, ad eventually Italian. They disappeared as a culture, not as a race. But by Neanderthal we mean a race, not a culture.
The theory I heard was that Neanderthals probably needed a lot more food (4000-7000 kcal/day) than anatomically modern humans (3000-4000 kcal/day)* would have in the ancestral environment. So AMHs could maintain a higher population density in favorable environments and were more likely to be able to be able to survive as a population in marginal environments.
* The modern guideline of ~2000 kcal/day assumes a relatively sedentary and comfortable modern lifestyle, where most vigorous activity is optional and we have ready access to well-heated indoor spaces. The last is critical outside the tropics, since even with modern outdoor gear, cold-weather campers need to plan for a lot of extra calories just to handle the metabolic cost of keeping warm.
@Anyone sympathetic to the idea that phenomenal consciousness doesn't exist: can you elaborate on your model? Why do you think it, what does it even mean (what is consciousness?) and optionally, why do you think other people disagree, why are they wrong, and what's the implications for ethics, if any?
([I asked the same question in last week's OT](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-265/comment/13170540), and got more or less exactly what I was hoping for, but only from one data point; the rest were just people arguing with them. Surely there's other people sympathetic to the illusionist approach?)
No time, but here's why I'm sympathetic to the idea that phenomenal consciousness doesn't exist: The language we use about consciousness is misleading. We talk about "having" it. We talk about being able to observe our own conscious experience, while other people's inner experience is forever invisible to us. There's a homunculus model baked into those ways of talking about experience.
That doesn't prove consciousness experience doesn't exist, it just demonstrates that we think and talk about it incorrectly. "We" ARE our conscious experuience, it's not something we have.
> That doesn't prove consciousness experience doesn't exist, it just demonstrates that we think and talk about it incorrectly
To be clear, that's a big part of illusionism. To quote Dennett, "I'm not saying that consciousness doesn't exist. I'm just saying it isn't what you think it is."
The main reason I support it is because I think that consciousness, whatever it is, is a real, mental thing. Mental things are best understood in functional terms, but phenomenality (under the definitions that usually matter) ends up being this non-functional thing that apparently gives rise to a "hard problem". I'm not convinced that there could be a hard problem.
I think there's all sorts of things that we don't naturally understand about our own mental states, but we've started to get a better grip on a lot of this through cognitive science over the past century. We're now aware of all sorts of ways that there can be illusions of motion even with nothing changing on our retina, that show that we don't have perfect introspective awareness of our own consciousness, the way that some theories of phenomenal consciousness seem to suggest.
I don't believe there are any ethical implications, because I think ethics is about ensuring that the wants and needs of desiring beings are fulfilled, and none of that depends on consciousness being of one sort rather than another.
> phenomenality (under the definitions that usually matter) ends up being this non-functional thing that apparently gives rise to a "hard problem". I'm not convinced that there could be a hard problem.
The hard problem is the problem of reductively explaining consciousness. There is no apriori reason to think that reductionism is a necessary truth, or that everything is reducible, so the Hard problem, or something like it was always a possibility.
Would you expect there to be a lot of illusionists, given that it's an almost self-contradictory position ("It seems to me that there are seemings, but there are no seemings")?
Have you tried books? (In general, why do Codexians think it's important to ask other Codexians?)
There *are* a lot of illusionists. I don't know how many of them read Scott's blog, but it's an influential position. Also present among rationality figures, like Steven Byrnes and various people at Miri.
Yes to books, but why leave it at that? This is a cheap and perfectly straight-forward way of getting more takes. I'm not trying to meet a social obligation, I'm actually trying to get the best possible understanding of the generator behind the position.
There's a relatively high number of illusionists among rationalists, but what's so special about rationalists? They tend to have weird takes on a lot of things, and they tend not to understand the background issues well.
One more comment on ethics: I think our beliefs about consciousness should not have any implications for ethics. Concepts like "free will" are incredible useful, and they would remain incredibly useful even if we lived in a completely deterministic universe and could prove that free will doesn't exist. I actually believe this to be true for any sensible approximation, but I still find the concept of "decisions" and "free will" useful and even crucial in laws and ethics.
Also, basing our ethics on something that half of the population fiercely declare as nonsense (either existence or non-existence of the hard problem of consciousness) sounds like a very bad idea. Better use something that both sides can agree upon.
It has obvious implications for ethics. If there is no consciousness, there is no reason not to experiment on humans like we do animals, since there is no such thing as suffering.
Uhm, to say that there can't be suffering without consciousness is quite a jump. At least it's not an automatic step. In particular since different people may refer to very different things with the word "consciousness".
Suffering is qualia. The eliminativist position is that there are no qualia. So yes, this criticism applies to eliminativists specifically, true. Don't know if there are people trying to say there can be consciousness without qualia.
> Suffering is qualia. The eliminativist position is that there are no qualia.
Yes, there are no qualia, which only means suffering isn't what you thought it was (it's not a quale), it doesn't mean that what suffering really is cannot be used in ethical reasoning.
If suffering is not a qualia, but presumably an information process, I don't see on what basis we can decide that certain information processes are bad.
The question is rather whether there can be qualia (suffering) without consciousness, right? Which I literally happened to describe as my belief in my longer comment below. :-)
Even for the other direction, I would first want to see a survey before I get too convinced that people who don't believe in qualia also don't believe in suffering.
Something which always puzzles me about this conversation is the attempt to elucidate familiar concepts such as suffering by invoking unfamiliar (and debateable) concepts such as qualia. It doesn't help at all to clarify the ethical questions.
I also note that this never seems to come up when we debate actual ethical conundrums. Was it right to revoke Shamina Begum's citizenship? Nobody on either side seems to think questions of consciousness at all relevant.
I have only briefly looked into the discussion about the philosophical concept of consciousness because I never found it interesting or remarkable. So probably I miss the standard terminology, but below is my account in my own words. Note that I only talk about PHILOSOPHICAL consciousness. I do believe that BIOLOGICAL consciousness is a real phenomenon, just one that is philosophically very boring. I have even written a book review about biological consciousness in the last ACX book reviewing contest. [1]
Consciousness is about experiencing my own inner state. This is closely related to qualia. When I perceive the color green, then this means that I am in the state of "seeing green". Qualia is not a very interesting concept for me, since for me it means exactly the same thing as "inner state". A stone also has inner states. For example, it can be hot. So if a stone is hot, then it is experiencing the inner state of "being hot". It has the qualia of "being hot".
This seems to match a lot of things that other people say about qualia. For example, the inner state of "seeing green" (or "being hot") is not the same as a description of the state. So even if someone gives me a full description of all the atoms in the stone in the state "being hot", this is not the same thing as the stone actually being hot. (Unfortunately. It would be nice if I could get rich by just collecting a full description of what it means to be rich.)
Another point that is often mentioned about qualia: if stone A is in the state "being hot", then this is not the same thing as if stone B is in the state "being hot". For an outsider, the world state may look somewhat similar, but from the perspective of stone A, it is not similar at all. From the perspective of stone A, in one case it is hot, in the other not. In the second case, some other stone is hot, but for stone A that is something very different from being hot itself.
Now, there is one thing special about humans (and probably animals), compared to a stone: our brains are representation models. So, our brain contains a little model of the world. It is unclear how exactly this looks like. Predictive processing says that it's mostly a prediction machine about our next perceptions, and that may be right. But whatever the specifics, our brains have internal representations of the world. Such a representation is basically some neural activity pattern in the brain. This is also very closely related to memory, since these representations can be stored, retrieved, and processed. I have speculated a bit about the details in my book review.
Anyway, these neural patterns can be stored and retrieved. Sometimes the brain is in the state "neural-activity-of-seeing-green", and in this case we have the qualia of seeing green, or more precisely of "being in the internal state that represents seeing green in our world model". Just like a stone can be in the internal state of "being hot".
At this point you may ask when the philosophical consciousness comes into the picture. But the point is: it is no longer needed. Or at least I fail to see why anything should be lacking from my description. We have qualia of "seeing green", just as a stone has qualia of "being hot". Granted, other than a stone we can process this internal state: we can remember it, invent a word for this state, and then speak about it. Of course we can, this is because our brain is a representation machine. The same is true for any other representation machines, like a computer or a fruit fly.
By speaking about the qualia (internal state) of "seeing green", we can make the internal state interact with the outer world. But the "being-hot" state of a stone can also interact with the outer world. If another stone touches it, then some of the warmth will transfer from stone A ot stone B. That process is way less complex than us talking about qualia. But I don't see why it should philosophically be any different, except for complexity.
So I don't understand why philosophically anything should be special about consciousness. That is why I don't see the "hard problem of consciousness" at all.
Let me finally say a paragraph about biological consciousness, the same speculations that I wrote last year in my book review. I think this is just a special class of internal states, namely those internal states that can be stored and retrieved in memory, and that allow a certain type of operation on them, similar to "keeping them in a register" in a computer. Not all internal states are like this, this is only possible if the neural activity has some form of internal consistency that only forms roughly twice per second. The other states are unconscious states, and experiments show that we can not access them by memory, so if we are asked "have you seen the color green", then we answer no if we didn't reach the consistent state. Of course, with my definition of qualia, we have qualia both in conscious and unconscious states. We have qualia in ANY state. But for the unconscious states, the state is lost in a moment. If someone asks us a few seonds later then we don't remember anything about the state. Even if someone would ask us in the very moment, we couldn't answer correctly, because talking and answering questions requires some of the operations that we can only perform with consistent states. (I think this is mostly true, but not 100% true. Anyway, enough digression.) If a researcher looks from the outside into our brain in unconscious moments, then they can verify that we had something like a representation of the color green in our brains, and there are some tricks how one can discover them. It's the same as for a stone: if we touch it, then we can discover from the outside that it is hot, so we can deduce something about its internal state.
I don't really get how this is an answer to anything. You brush over the stone having a "perspective" but that's the core of the issue, isn't it? Even if you can explain a human perspective as just a more complicated stone's perspective, that just moves the goalposts to having to explain what it means for a stone to have a "perspective".
So first of all, thanks a lot of the detailed reply!
Second, I'm gonna try to sort of nudge your position into an ontology that I think makes sense, and then postulate what I think the common objection is. I mean this strictly as a way to probe your model ("why is this wrong?"), not as an argument.
So you're saying that all stuff has inner states. That's clearly true. But, a lot of people would say that there is an *additional* fact of *experiencing* those internal states that is not logically reducible to a physical description of those states. (It may be *physically* reducible, but it's not the same thing.)
Furthermore, this thing does not apply equally to all inner states. Rocks have inner states and people do, but people also have this experience thing and rocks arguably don't -- but even if they do, it's not the same kind of experience. A person who feels hot and a rock that is hot won't have the *same* experience even under panpsychism.
It seems to me like you're saying "this additional experience thingy doesn't exist". (Is that correct?) In that case, I'd say you're disputing the existence of the kind of philosophical consciousness that's interesting, while keeping the computational phenomenon of biological or artificial consciousness. In other words, you're disputing the idea that [there's something to consciousness that's not strictly material].
(If so, I'd point out that your usage of the term "qualia" is nonstandard. Most people think that qualia inherently is this experience stuff, whereas you're saying "qualia" = "inner state", which may not have the experience stuff. I will then take this as confirmation for the point I keep making in other comments, which is that *people don't agree what the academic terminology means*. This is already creating miscommunication in the replies you've gotten, and it'd be much worse if you hadn't also explained the position properly.)
If you're on board with all this, then I think the standard objection to that position is that this experience stuff *must* exist because you experience it. Like, you have/are this experience thingy that's not logically the same as an internal state because you can imagine an internal state without that thingy. This would then by why consciousness is philosophically special. With life, you can define it in terms of various physical states and in the end nothing is lost, the reduced definition applies just fine to systems and gives you the same as before. But with consciousness, you cannot take this experience thingy and reduce it to non-experience-thingies because the experience thingy is simply a different kind of thing from the material stuff. Again it could be physically tied together, like every physical state always has this exact experience thingy, or only some do, or whatever, but that only gives you a physical equivalence. You still have the experience thing as an ontological primitive.
Let me first say that I find it great that you show this deep curiosity about understanding others. This is really an amazing trait!
I think you have understood and summarized my position quite well.
First of all, I do agree that my usage of "qualia" as "inner states" is nonstandard. I reached this definition by looking at other people's descriptions of "qualia" and trying to squeeze this somehow into my world model. But people who discuss consciousness and qualia tend to have rather different world models than me, and will probably be quite aghast at my interpretation of the word.
"It seems to me like you're saying "this additional experience thingy doesn't exist"."
Yes, I think this is the key point. I don't think that the inner states of a rock and a human are fundamentally different because humans have the "experience-thingy" and rocks don't.
Now, let me make one important caveat. You may even say that I bring back the experience-thingy through the back door. For humans, a conscious experience can be stored as a memory item. So it can be retrieved, which probably means that the inner state from that experience is more or less restored (only to some limited extent, of course). It also means that we can treat the perception as an object in our mental processing. To me, this seems like the one big difference between humans and stones. The difference is not that the internal state during perception is fundamentally different. The difference is that this internal state is later accessible as a mental object.
So in some sense I would agree that there is a "perception-thingy" which is different between humans and stones. Because in humans, an inner state can be stored in memory and be object to mental operations. But then, consequently I would say that not every human inner state has this perception-thingy. If a state is immediately discarded, then it is not different from the inner state of a stone, and doesn't have the perception-thingy.
Now, this memory and processing is a difference that I believe to be fundamental. It's a pretty abstract form of a perception-thingy. I can see one reason why it feels a bit counter-intuitive as an explanation for the standard notion of qualia (as some perception-feeling that only happens in brains). That is because the word "perception" usually refers to the internal state itself, and that is bound to one specific point in time. And the "perception-thingy" that I described would be something more abstract: some weird combination of all the time we use the memory item of this internal state. This is not bound to the one point in time when we first made the perception. This is counter-intuitive, because it seems natural to bind the "perception-thingy" (or the "quale", as people usually use the word) to the same time stamp as the perception itself.
But thinking about it, I don't have a lot of trust into my reflex of binding "perception-thingy/quale" to the same timestamp as the internal state of the perception. From where do I know anything about either the perception or this perception-thingy? It doesn't really come from the inner state itself, but strictly speaking it comes from the subsequent mental processing. Or it might even come from some later memory retrieval if the inner state is not immediately processed. So perhaps the perception-thingy is really only created when I am doing mental processing with it, which might be much later when I retrieve the memory for the first time? I can't be sure that I have any subjective "perception-thingy/quale" when I never process or retrieve the memory item. And I said earlier that this is one of the situation where I don't see a fundamental difference to a stone, so it would make sense to me that I don't assign the perception-thingy to these situations.
The part about timestamps is very speculative, but when I think about it, it does makes my own world model quite neat and consistent. I also realize that in some sense it is not far away from the opposite world view. If a quale (in the common sense of perception-feeling) is really just the inside-view of a mental processing step or of a memory storage operation, then this would be totally consistent with my worldview. It's just that I still wouldn't find it philosophically very remarkable. It would be a certain type of inner states, but they do not stick out so much among many other inner state.
The one thing that would stick out is that this type of inner state is always present whenever we access any memory or make mental operations. Within this world model, it would explain why people have so strong opinions about it: it is there for all perceptions that we ever actively access, so it is natural to assume that it is part of those perceptions, and that it was part of the inner state from the beginning. We would even naturally assume that is also there for unprocessed inner states, because we don't know better. We never see any counter-example because there is no way of accessing the inner state without mental processing.
The last two paragraphs were even more speculative, but I would find it interesting to know how compatible it is with the world model of people who do believe in phenomenal consciousness.
> The last two paragraphs were even more speculative, but I would find it interesting to know how compatible it is with the world model of people who do believe in phenomenal consciousness.
I think the honest answer is, not compatible at all. (Though I'm not sure I understood your model correctly, so I could be wrong.) The reason is that your description is explicitly functional and tied to intelligence -- like, it's based on the capacity to functionally retrieve states later.
Specifically, I think there are a number of cases that most consciousness realists would permit as at least a logical possibility, maybe even a factual one, which don't make any sense in your model
- you can have highly intelligent systems capable of perception, reflection, meta thinking, and so on, with 0 consciousness
- you can have non-intelligent systems with qualia much more powerful than that of huamns
- it may be the case that artificially induced coma states, like for surgeries, are highly blissful even though they can not be reported on and don't remain in memory. Ditto for dreamless sleep.
This is why I keep insisting that it's an ontological primitive. It's not what consciousness realists usually say, but I think that's what they're trying to say.
I think the extent to which the kind of functional inquiry is *relevant* for consciousness depends on the specific theory. If may be the case that you need perception/memory/recall/meta thoughts for consciousness, and in this case the world views are related, but even they're still incompatible. It may also be that all this has almost nothing to do with consciousness, except that perception instantiates a very niche special case, in which case they're barely related.
Also, it seems like the standard objection I mentioned still applies your explanation. like, consciousness realists could say "all this stuff about perception isn't what I'm talking about. I can imagine a world in which there is no experience stuff, yet all of the perception stuff still exists. But I have/am experience, which you haven't explained, so nothing is solved".
Thanks a lot for these explanations! I find it very hard to predict what proponents of phenomenal consciousness answer to such questions. Fortunately it's possible to co-exist without agreeing on these questions. :-)
>First of all, I do agree that my usage of "qualia" as "inner states" is nonstandard. I reached this definition by looking at other people's descriptions of "qualia" and trying to squeeze this somehow into my world mode
You don't have to do that..If "qualia" as everyone else defines it doesn't fit into your world view, there's no need to use the word. Distorting its meaning is like saying unicorns exist, but don't have horns.
The way I interpret the parent post is that you can make a semantic difference between substantially different types of inner states, but they still are inner states and share commonalities. In essence, I may have an inner state of being hungry; and at any given moment I may (or may not) also have an inner state of actively (perhaps consciously?) being aware of that inner state of being hungry. Those are separate inner states with some link between them, but I am not convinced that this means they have to be fundamentally different. You have the sense of e.g. touch, prioperception, self-awareness and (sometimes) conscious self-analysis, so perhaps they are on some scale, but fundamentally they can all be treated as "just" different channels for sense inputs to brain from internal states of our body.
1) I'm afraid I find it unhelpful to say things like, "a lot of people would say". I haven't done a survey, and I don't think you have either, so who knows? If you think there's an additional fact as you describe, just say that. If you know a particular person (or several) who think that, then say that (preferably with a link to their actual words).
2) Facts aren't discrete things. There aren't a specific number of them, either in general or in any particular situation. I think we all agree that people (and rocks) experience their internal states, and I'm just not sure what it means to say this is an additional fact about the situation. To put it another way, facts exist in the realm of epistemology not in the realm of ontology. Or in yet another way, they're part of the map, not the territory.
3) I think we agree that two rocks who are hot don't have the same experience, as demost_ wrote in the comment to which you're replying. So it's not surprising that a person and a rock also have differing experiences. We also agree on a particular difference: people, unlike rocks, have an internal representation of being hot. Of course this may or may not reach the level of consciousness, and demost_ gestures at quite an interesting explanation of what is happening here.
4) The problem with "this additional experience thingy doesn't exist" is that too much weight is born by the word "thingy". We agree that people (and rocks) have experiences. We also agree that people are conscious of their experiences, in the sense that they are (sometimes) aware they are having them, in a way that rocks probably aren't. In a slightly convoluted sense this is an "additional experience": it's the experience demost_ describes as "being in the internal state that represents [being hot] in our world model". Where it seems we differ is whether this awareness is a "thingy", but I'm afraid it's just too imprecise a word to debate meaningfully. What I think we can say is that the experience "being in the internal state that represents [being hot] in our world model" is not a fundamentally different kind of thing from the experience "being hot".
5) You don't experience the "thingy". You experience being hot (or not).
I *have* done a survey, and lots of anecdotes of what people say, but I'm not gonna link to anything because this account is anonymous!
But more importantly, you seem to try geting around introducing a new ontologically basic element, but you can't because that's the thing I'm asking about. If you refuse to talk about that, you're missing the point. The reason thingy is as good as word as any is because it's a new ontological primitive. You can't break it down into smaller parts any more than you can break matter down into smaller parts. I mean, you can take a composite object like a water molecule and break it down into parts, but those parts are themselves matter. That's the analogue of taking an experience (like your visual field) and decomposing it into smaller experiences (like a vertical line or a red dot). But you can't describe the experience stuff itself more precisely. And that should be fine; no one is complaining that our talk about physics is incoherent because we can't define what an up quark is without waving our hands and saying "matter!". This experience thing has the same ontological status as matter.
Also, careful with 3; most people who believe in this experience thing don't think a rock has *any* experience. (Edit: see [here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-266/comment/13368039) for an example!) (Again, experience is not inner state.) Panpsychism is roughly the idea that they do, and it's relatively fringe.
This may not be what you wanted to hear, but there just is no getting around introducing a new primitive. If you insist on not doing that, you're just talking past everyone who thinks there's such a thing.
Respectfully, I'm trying to answer the question you posed in the top comment. I'm not wanting to hear anything. I'm also not talking past the people who believe there's a "new primative". I think those people are mistaken, and I'm explaining why.
I think you must know that illusionists (and in fact many realists) deny that consciousness is ontologically basic, so if you're only interested in a discussion with people who accept that premise, you may wish to phrase the question differently.
As an aside, even if consciousness *was* an immaterial thing, there would be no reason to think it was a *primative* immaterial thing: it's easy to imagine that human consciousness is formed by an agglomeration of more basic immaterial elements, which would avoid the difficulty of it springing into existence fully formed at a certain point in cosmic history.
There is a further level or distinction to be teased apart, which I fear I blur in my comment above.
Humans and fruit flies and rocks can all experience being hot.
Humans and fruit flies (but not rocks) can experience being in the internal state that represents being hot in their world model.
Humans (but not rocks or (probably) fruit flies) can experience being in the internal state that represents being conscious of being (in the internal state that represents being hot in their world model) in their world model.
That is to say, humans can not only know they're hot, but also can know they know they're hot. A fruit fly can move away from the fire, but it can't say "Phew, what a scorcher!"
I may be wrong about this part though. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that there is some special category of human internal states which are conscious (in demost_'s/Dehaene's model, those which are synchronised across the brain), so the internal state that represents being hot can be experienced either unconsciously or consciously. This, I think, is the so-call "easy" problem of consciousness.
> Humans and fruit flies and rocks can all experience being hot.
> Humans and fruit flies (but not rocks) can experience being in the internal state that represents being hot in their world model.
> Humans (but not rocks or (probably) fruit flies) can experience being in the internal state that represents being conscious of being (in the internal state that represents being hot in their world model) in their world model.
So you are suing " experience being hot" to mean "be hot" and to "experience being in the internal state that represents being hot in their world model." mean "experience being hot."?
I mean, the idea that experience has to do with meta-beliefs is a theory about how experience *arises* (or how it's coupled to matter, or whatever the metaphysical relationship is). So that's like saying Integrated Information Theory is correct or something. It's much more specific than just clarifying what experience is.
I think there is some talking across each other with regard to "experience" (somebody in a comment elsewhere asserted that experiences were necessarily conscious!). A rock experiences hotness (in my use of the word) by the agitation of its atoms: there's no mystery about how it "arises" (except to the extent that thermodynamics is mysterious).
What the rock lacks is the *awareness* of its experience, although that is still to one side of the question of consciousness (since humans can be aware of things without being conscious of them and fruit flies are aware of things but (we assume) never conscious of them).
[Answering as a sort of pre-registration. Would love to see demost's reply.]
The problem is that qualia is defined in practice as "the unexplained bit of experienced perception." So if I explain experience and perception and the experience of perception, you can still say "ok but that doesn't explain qualia" and I'm stuck saying qualia is an illusion.
Let's use a simple quale, a bright light. Plants clearly experience this quale, because they respond to it. Humans also experience this quale, but also, being conscious, we are aware of this experience. We have the cognitive capacity to model the world, and to somewhat recursively model ourselves, and so we model ourselves as experiencing the quale of bright light. This model is also a quale - we experience the bright light but also we experience our state of being as we experience the bright light.
A different example. So you touch a very hot stuff. You will pull your hand back before becoming consciously aware that the stove is hot. Clearly some part of you experienced the heat, though. Some part of you had a model of the world, simple and quick to update, that experienced heat and reacted to it. A different part of you, the conscious part, reacts slower. Its models are more complex, they take longer to update in real time, but it's just like the models used by your unconscious reflexes, except more complicated. MUCH more complicated, in part because they somewhat recursively model you and your experienced qualia. So we not only experience the burn, but also the experience itself, somewhat recursively. Your internal state will include "burned" and also a representation of "being burned.". You will react to the direct experience in the first order, e.g., by pulling your hand away and also by updating your model of yourself. You will react to the model updates in the second and further orders, e.g., by fetching an ice cube and getting angry at your roommate for leaving the stove on and wondering whether the hotness of hot is an ontological primitive.
You have many cognitive functions, from simple reflexes that are aware of nerve temperature spikes, to complex visual processing that is acutely, expertly aware of 3d modeling and optics, to consciousness that is aware of yourself as an embedded agent that conscious and aware of itself as an embedded agent. If anything, consciousness seems like a relatively simple bolt-on once you have the ability to model the world around you. And to the extent that you as an individual are a unit of evolutionary advantage, it makes all the sense in the world that once we became self aware, we began to value that self very highly. To the point where we feel like that sense of self, that awareness of awareness, that redness of red, must be fundamentally different from other things.
So, no, there's no reason to think that conscious experience requires mysterious new ontological primitives compared to other cognitive functions.
>The problem is that qualia is defined in practice as "the unexplained bit of experienced perception.
Well, no not really.
>Let's use a simple quale, a bright light. Plants clearly experience this quale
No, again. "Quale" doesn't label an external stimulus.
"There are recognizable qualitative characters of the given, which may be repeated in different experiences, and are thus a sort of universals; I call these "qualia." But although such qualia are universals, in the sense of being recognized from one to another experience, they must be distinguished from the properties of objects. Confusion of these two is characteristic of many historical conceptions, as well as of current essence-theories. The quale is directly intuited, given, and is not the subject of any possible error because it is purely subjective.[18]"
> clearly some part of you experienced the heat, though.
Only in the objective sense of a high temperature. The whole point of the word "qualia" is to differentiate the subjective aspect from the objective. Oridinary words like "light" and "heat" are ambiguous in that regard.
"The quale is directly intuited, given, and is not the subject of any possible error because it is purely subjective." This sounds to me like defining qualia as unexplainable, then complaining that explained phenomena cannot be qualia.
Here's the circle I see us trotting: you define qualia as irreducible; I reply that there is no such thing; you claim there there *must* be such a thing, since you perceive qualia directly; I reduce your perceived qualia to a cognitive function; you return to the start. What am I missing?
> Here's the circle I see us trotting: you define qualia as irreducible;
I don't define qualia: CI Lewis does. The definition quoted says nothing about (ir)redicubility.
I have stated that the *hard problem( is *about* reducibility. That is not a claim that stems form the definition of qualia -- if anything it comes from the definition of the HP. Moreover, that is a falsifiable claim: you can falsify it by offering a reductive explanation.
> you claim there there *must* be such a thing, since you perceive qualia directly; v
I claim to experience qualia., I don't claim to experience the irreducibility (immateriality, etc) of qualia.
> ; I reduce your perceived qualia to a cognitive function; you return to the start.
You don't reduce qualia to a cognitive function, because you are only unable to show how and why a cognitive function would result in qualia. Remember, reduction is not elimination -- it is not a case of saying Y doesn't exist, it is just a case of saying that Y is really X, it is a case of showing how Y is X. Y continues to exist, just not as a part of basic ontology (eg. heat).
Moving our discussion to here, as I had previously only skimmed this. To be clear, you are saying a hot rock experiences hotness the way we would experience hotness if we were in a sauna? By extension, is taking a jackhammer to the pavement a form of torture? That is what would be entailed if rocks have qualia.
No, the hotness qualia of the rock would be different from our qualia experience in a sauna. Let's say the rock experiences internal temperatures of 200°C, which is something that we can never experience. Or even better, let's replace "hotness" by "hardness", to not get confused by qualia that we can experience.
Does a pavement experience qualia if tacked by a jackhamer? Yes, I would say so. But there is no reason to believe that it is the same qualia as I would experience if being tacked by a jackhammer. I think it makes sense to call my qualia "pain", but I don't think it makes sense to call the qualia of the jackhammer pain. So I don't share your assumtion "That is what would be entailed if rocks have qualia". Not every qualia is pain, and not every thing/being can experience every qualia in the world.
I would rather avoid the word "to feel" for qualia. And for how do I know it, I don't get the question. Are you suggesting that a rock has no internal state? That it has not atoms inside? Otherwise, it's impossible NOT to have qualia according to my definition.
Yes, the entire highway has the qualia of having a damaged part. The part of the highway has the qualia of being damaged.
I don't think the rock has qualia no. You brought up the rock being hot as an internal state, but a rock being hot or not is something we can measure, so it is not purely internal to the rock.
Is the rock in pain or not in pain when jackhammered? If we grant the rock has qualia, how do we answer a question like that? You previously offered your belief that the qualia the rock would have wouldn't be pain, but it's not clear how you know that.
The highway is not one thing though. 'Highway' is map and not territory. The territory is a bunch of atoms, or not even that since atoms have parts. Do each of these parts individually have qualia, and then all the qualia somehow all add up together to a bigger qualia that is shown to... what? Qualia don't stand on their own, they have to be shown to consciousness. And qualia cannot be observed: for all I know when we see red, I see one color and you another, but we both say 'red' when asked what color we are seeing, because that's what we learned that color is called. We can't check, because we can't observe each others qualia.
That's why you can't make the jump from 'the rock is hot' to 'the rock is having the qualia of hot': 'hot' is observable, the 'qualia of hot' isn't. Technically, this is why solipsism makes sense: the only qualia you will ever observe are your own.
> A stone also has inner states. For example, it can be hot. So if a stone is hot, then it is experiencing the inner state of "being hot". It has the qualia of "being hot".
If you are actually asserting panpsychism, that would be pretty "interesting" and not implied by biology.
> This seems to match a lot of things that other people say about qualia. For example, the inner state of "seeing green" (or "being hot") is not the same as a description of the state. So even if someone gives me a full description of all the atoms in the stone in the state "being hot", this is not the same thing as the stone actually being hot.
Why does that matter?
Physicalists sometimes respond to Mary's Room by saying that one can not expect Mary actually to actually instantiate Red herself just by looking at a brain scan. It seems obvious to them that a physical description of brain state won't convey what that state is like, because it doesn't put you into that state. As an argument for physicalism, the strategy is to accept that qualia exist, but argue that they present no unexpected behaviour, or other difficulties for physicalism.
That is correct as stated but somewhat misleading: the problem is why is it necessary, in the case of experience, and only in the case of experience to instantiate it in order to fully understand it. Obviously, it is true a that a description of a brain state won't put you into that brain state. But that doesn't show that there is nothing unusual about qualia. The problem is that there in no other case does it seem necessary to instantiate a brain state in order to understand something.
If another version of Mary were shut up to learn everything about, say, nuclear fusion, the question "would she actually know about nuclear fusion" could only be answered "yes, of course....didn't you just say she knows everything"? The idea that she would have to instantiate a fusion reaction within her own body in order to understand fusion is quite counterintuitive. Similarly, a description of photosynthesis will make you photosynthesise, and would not be needed for a complete understanding of photosynthesis.
There seem to be some edge cases.: for instance, would an alternative Mary know everything about heart attacks without having one herself? Well, she would know everything except what a heart attack feels like, and what it feels like is a quale. the edge cases, like that one, are cases are just cases where an element of knowledge-by-acquaintance is needed for complete knowledge. Even other mental phenomena don't suffer from this peculiarity. Thoughts and memories are straightforwardly expressible in words, so long as they don't involve qualia.
So: is the response "well, she has never actually instantiated colour vision in her own brain" one that lays to rest and the challenge posed by the Knowledge argument, leaving physicalism undisturbed? The fact that these physicalists feel it would be in some way necessary to instantiate colour, but not other things, like photosynthesis or fusion, means they subscribe to the idea that there is something epistemically unique about qualia/experience, even if they resist the idea that qualia are metaphysically unique.
Is the assumption of epistemological uniqueness to be expected given physicalism? Some argue that no matter how much you know about something "from the outside", you quite naturally wouldn't be expected to understand it from the inside. That's a common intuition, as shown by the frequency of rhetoric along the lines of "you wouldn't know, you weren't there". But it's not, strictly speaking, compatible with physicalism...rather it's a form of dual aspect theory.
"The problem is why is it necessary, in the case of experience, and only in the case of experience to instantiate it in order to fully understand it"
Hm, I don't find this remarkable. If you want "full understanding" to include "having a memory of the internal state", then this is perfectly fine. Yes, that may give a better understanding. But obviously, this only makes sense for internal states. You can request this for "seeing red" because this is an internal state, but you can't request this for "fusion energy", because this is not an internal state. For other concepts like "being male" this internal state can only be achieved by a subset of the population, and for concepts like "being a hot stone" by none of the population, but it can be achieved by stones (though they don't have memory or language, so they won't match some of the other criteria for "understanding" that we have). And of course, we could say that you don't fully understand what a hot stone is without having been one. It's just that this is an unreasonably high standard for understanding stones, because no one will ever achieve it. That's why we have higher bars for understanding "seeing red" than for hot stones. Because we can.
So yes, as you phrase it, this epistemological uniqueness is to be expected given physicalism.
> If you want "full understanding" to include "having a memory of the internal state", then this is perfectly fine.
I don't want that. Neither I nor anyone else think qualia re particularly connected to memory, and nobody defines qualia as *just* an internal state (like a computer knowing its hard drive is full), because then there would be no problem. You need to use the information that this is supposed to be a hard problem to interpret what the nature of the problem is.
> . But obviously, this only makes sense for internal states. You can request this for "seeing red" because this is an internal state, but you can't request this for "fusion energy", because this is not an internal state
What do you mean by "internal"? Fusion is spatially, physically internal to a fusion reactor...but its not internal in the sense of being subjective or ineffable. If you are using "internal" to mean "subjective and ineffable", you haven't dissolved anything -- you are admitting that qualia exist and have all their full-strength properties.
> For other concepts like "being male" this internal state can only be achieved by a subset of the population,
The central question is whether you need to instantiate a state *in order to understand it*. Of course, no evertyhing instantiates every state --- that is far to obvious to be the problem.
> And of course, we could say that you don't fully understand what a hot stone is without having been one. It's just that this is an unreasonably high standard for understanding stones, because no one will ever achieve itv
No, the problem is that there is nothing it is like to be a stone, so there is nothing to be gained from instantiating it. But there is something it is like to be a person who is seeing red: if you believe that Mary cannot understand what it is like to see red without personally instantiating the state, then you accept that there are some things which are only knowable subjectively. That is not an implication of physicalism, nor is it compatible with the physicalist claim that everything can be understood physically, ie. objectively.
I mean internal to the person who is supposed to gain full understanding. Mary gets some level of understanding of the color red by learning everything about the color red without seeing it. And she gets some level of understanding about fusion by learning everything about fusion without being a fusion reactor. In the first case, she has not yet reached the highest human-reachable level, so we don't call it full understanding. In the second case we call it full understanding because as a human there are no further steps she can take.
I am not sure about further reading, unfortunately. It seems that meteor (who started this thread) is much more literate on this topic than I am, so perhaps they have a recommendation?
I just re-read your book review, and now remember how much I liked it as well. (I have been a fan of Dehaene since I saw his "statistician brain" lectures around 5 years ago.)
Since we agree so much on the basics, I wonder whether you also agree on what I see as the implications. It seems clear to me that the huge value we place on our own conscious experience is just straightforward evolutionary pressure. We value our own consciousness because this value encourages us to spend time and energy and creativity on keeping that consciousness going. Similar to why we value salt/sugar/fat - and, similarly to our ice cream cravings, our consciousness-cravings could conceivable become very disadvantageous as our environment changes. Thoughts?
"The same is true for any other representation machines, like a computer or a fruit fly."
Do you think fruit flies can think? Or that there is no difference between the behaviour of a fruit fly and our behaviour? I suppose the answer there is just "more complexity" but not functionally different. But I wonder: if fruit flies were scaled up to human-size, would they then start thinking like humans - or stay thinking like fruit flies?
The entire difference is in that little bit you glide over - that a stone may be in the state of being-hot and a human may be in the state of seeing-green, but that the stone is not aware of its state, thinking about its state, able to remember its state, and able to describe that state to other stones.
Just a minor, tiny difference that makes all the difference!
Ummm ... He literally says that? I.e., "Consciousness is about experiencing my own inner state."
In the spirit of the oversimplification we've all engaged in so far: the big difference between a rock and a fruit fly is the complexity of inner state. The big difference between a fruit fly and a human is the fact that the inner state is, somewhat recursively, represented in the inner state. That representation is "consciousness." Pretty boring and mechanical, for something we value so highly. (Valuing it highly has been evolutionarily advantageous, but like ice cream cravings it may become decidedly disadvantageous as the environment changes.)
I was going to write a long answer, but this is almost exactly what I was going to say. I'll just add that the ability to represent our inner state somewhat recursively, and then to encode that observation in language, adds layers of abstraction and capability that give evolutionary advantage but also confuse how we think about consciousness.
The key is that consciousness is boring - or will be, once we figure it out. Like the visual cortex, it's "just" a cognitive function.
Qualia are something to be explained, not an explanation for something else.
"What is the explanandum for a theory of consciousness? The traditional view is that it is the qualia of experience, conceived of as ineffable, intrinsic, and essentially private properties -- classic qualia, we might say. " -- K Frankish.
Depends on what you mean by discarding that. The existence of experience cannot be discarded, no matter if that is incongrous with the scientific worldview.
For me, there is a definitional question. What exactly is this "phenomenal consciousness" which may or may not exist? If I Google for it, I find a Pyschology Today article 'What is Phenomenal Consciousness', which seems promising. That article (by Harry Haladjian) says, "This question can be relatively easy to answer: It’s the rich experience you’re having right now, comprised of the things that you see, hear, touch, and think. It is, essentially, what it feels like to be you."
I find that answer difficult to follow. Naively, I would expect consciousness to be the thing having the experience and not the experience itself. Certainly, the things that I see, hear and touch are (mostly) external to me so I don't see how they can sensibly comprise my consciousness. And what it feels like to me (if that means anything at all) seems like something entirely different from my sense-perceptions.
If I turn to the SEP article on consciousness, it says, under "state consciousness": "Such qualia are sometimes referred to as phenomenal properties and the associated sort of consciousness as phenomenal consciousness, but the latter term is perhaps more properly applied to the overall structure of experience and involves far more than sensory qualia. The phenomenal structure of consciousness also encompasses much of the spatial, temporal and conceptual organization of our experience of the world and of ourselves as agents in it."
I note that this conflicts with the previous definition: "the rich experience you're having right now" refers (I think) to the sum of my (supposed) qualia, but SEP tells me that phenomenal consciousness involves "far more" than that.
Further on, the SEP article states, "Since many non-conscious states also have intentional and representational aspects, it may be best to consider phenomenal structure as involving a special kind of intentional and representational organization and content, the kind distinctively associated with consciousness."
At this point I'm inclined to throw up my hands. It has a "special kind" of organisation and content!? What is this? Well, it's the kind associated with consciousness! This all looks to me like people trying to pin down a phantasm. If there really were such a thing as phenomenal consciousness, it would be possible to explain what it is without circularity or inconsistency.
I also suspect there is some equivocation between a boring thing which exists (people have experiences) and an exciting thing which doesn't exist (an experience-having entity mystically instantiated in human brains).
> At this point I'm inclined to throw up my hands. It has a "special kind" of organisation and content!? What is this?
Welcome to the world of circular nonsense and special pleading that is the philosophy of mind!
If you really want to understand what people here are talking about, read up on the intuition pumps that try to point out the quality that's hard to pin down. These are "Mary's Room"/The Knowledge Argument and "Philosophical zombies". Be sure to read Dennett's replies to each for a counterargument
These intuition pumps don't so much prove the existence or non-existence of qualia/consciousness, so much as help you figure out which camp your reason and intuitions put you in.
> Certainly, the things that I see, hear and touch are (mostly) external to me so I don't see how they can sensibly comprise my consciousness.
> It’s the rich experience you’re having right now, comprised of the things that you see, hear, touch, and think. It is, essentially, what it feels like to be you.<
The word “think” in that list is an important one.
> At this point I'm inclined to throw up my hands. It has a "special kind" of organisation and content!? What is this? Well, it's the kind associated with consciousness! This all looks to me like people trying to pin down a phantasm. If there really were such a thing as phenomenal consciousness, it would be possible to explain what it is without circularity or inconsistency.
You're asking for an exact third -person description: but the essence of the problem of consciousness is that we don;t have one, and the essence of conscious experience itself is that it is only apparent to the subject having it.
I get a bit queasy when people talk of "conscious experience". People (and rocks) have experiences. People (but I think not rocks) are sometimes conscious of having those experiences. If "conscious experience" is a shorthand for "experience of which one is conscious", then all well and good, but the consciousness isn't a property of the experience.
We are in fact able to speak of our experiences. Sometimes of course our interlocutors get completely the wrong end of the stick, but quite often they exhibit a good understanding of the mental state being described. A priori that may seem surprising (how could the sense of, say, bereavement, be communicated by vibrating the air in a certain way?), but experience shows it is so. If you say, well, they haven't understood the *essence* of the experience, then I can't argue with you, since I have no idea what that means and you tell me it's impossible to explain, but it doesn't seem to present any practical difficulty in human communication.
> We are in fact able to speak of our experiences.
Partially, and usually via comparison to similar experiences. Explaining a novel experience -- "colour to a blind man" -- form the ground up remain all but impossible.
“ also suspect there is some equivocation between a boring thing which exists (people have experiences) and an exciting thing which doesn't exist (an experience-having entity mystically instantiated in human brains).”
Except that is also circular - the people having experiences are having conscious experiences.
To meaningfully discuss whether phenomenal consciousness does or does not exist, we would first need a definition of "phenomenal consciousness". Only once the concept is broken down into its (alleged) constituent parts, can we try to pinpoint which parts are illusory. Many definitions look something like the following (from Kammerer, The Illusion of Conscious Experience, 2021, found it after searching "illusionism" on plato.stanford.edu):
'Conscious experiences (“phenomenal states”, “phenomenal experiences”) are putative mental states such that there is “something it is like” to be in them.'
IMHO the "there is something it is like" phraseology is so thoroughly ambiguous, imprecise, and full of linguistic trickery that I don't think it can form the basis for a discussion of this kind. Moreover I think talking about mental "states" (as opposed to "processes" or "dynamics" something) at all is extremely confused.
But anyway, to answer the question based on the tentative definition above, I'm not an illusionist, because "there is something" is so broad that it *probably* includes whatever physicalist/functionalist/computationalist account I think is true. OTOH, "something it is like" always seems to me like an appeal to the faculty of empathy, and I think it is indeed this faculty which is subject to an illusion (if not during actual consciousness, then at least when philosophizing about it in these terms).
All that aside, though, I can say for sure that I'm an illusionist regarding a certain aspect of qualia: precisely that aspect where we feel there is something specific we are experiencing (e.g. the "redness" of red), yet we can never pinpoint or communicate (or "eff") just what this specific thing is - that is IMHO almost certainly illusory.
What could it possibly mean for the experience of the redness of red to be "illusory"? How can an experience possibly be illusory? Sure, the conclusions we make about the physical world based on what we experience can be illusory (hallucinations, etc.), but how can the experiences themselves be illusory?
Have you ever considered that maybe you're just a p-zombie?
So there's two things I'm interested in. One is models about the specific thing I mean by consciousness. The other is just what people think about the subject period, including what they think consciousness even means. I was going for the second one first, hence I didn't define consciousness. (In last week's comment I explicitly said "whatever that means exactly" indicating that I'm asking about that, too. I should've done that here as well and edited it in now.)
But since you're sort of asking about the definition, I'll give on here. So there's material stuff in the universe (quarks or quantum fields or whatnot). Some people think that there's also experiential stuff. If it is, this experiential stuff is not reducible to the material stuff; you cannot break it down into non-experiential components. (It may be *causally isomorphic* to the material stuff in the sense of having a fixed relationship as a matter of physics, in which case it doesn't have information content above and beyond the material stuff, but it's still an ontologically separate thing.) This alleged experiential stuff is what I call consciousness. So in particular, you cannot break it down into constituent parts. I mean you can have complex experiences that are made of smaller experiences, but you cannot define the experience stuff in terms of non-experience stuff.
So for example, if you think the only meaningful way to talk about experience is in terms of physical brain states, and there's no ground truth about what is ultimately experienced, then it seems like you don't think such a thing exists. (I'm *not* gonna say "so then you're an illusionist" because imE there's no consensus on any academic term and I very much don't want to tell anyone what label they are. That's why I phrased it as "if you're symepathetic to this label ...", leaving it up to you what that means.)
All this talk about two kinds of stuff (or two kinds of properties of a single stuff, or what have you) is super dualist, which, as a physicalist. I quite obviously disagree with. For me it's more a question of the computational process in the brain, and how consciousness arises from that. Given that we still know so little about the computational processes in the brain, I'm mostly fine with the idea that that's probably where the answer lies, and we'll just have to wait until we know more.
Yeah, this is the answer that I expected given your initial post. Thanks!
These two usages of consciousness (the additional stuff, and the computational implementation thing) are very different, and the kinds of questions you look at when you examine them are also very different. But it's super important to be clear which of the two one is talking about at any point. Like if you want to talk about the first and other person about the second, miscommunication is guaranteed.
But note that you can be a physicalist and still think there's this second kind of stuff, at least if "physicalist" means "I believe that the laws of physics are a causally complete description of the universe". (It also doesn't rely on quantum randomness, parts missing from the standard model, or anything of the sort.) You can simply hold that the experiential stuff is another way to view *the same process* that is fully described by the laws of physics. I'm not saying this is true, I'm only saying that it's logically compatible with physicalism. There are definitely people with this position who call themselves both physicalists and non-dualists.
> You can simply hold that the experiential stuff is another way to view *the same process* that is fully described by the laws of physics.
I don't know what to make of this. Is this panpsychism, or a sort of idea that the universe is experiencing itself? It's hard to imagine that the quarks in my brain are feeling qualia just because they are in my brain.
It's a class of theories; panpsychism is in that class. But the class also contains functionalist theories.
The analogy I like to use is to imagine that the only objects in the universe are regular polyhedrons, and that consciousness is like the polyhedron's faces while matter is like its edges. Both aspects are complete in terms of information (and hence causality as well). E.g., if you tell me where the edges are, then I know everything about the object, so I also know how it will develop into the future, and I know where the faces are. Analogously, give me a full material description of a process, and I can tell you exactly what its consciousness if any looks like, and exactly how it develops into the future. And it doesn't make sense to talk about causality between both aspects; they're always linked in exactly one way that can never change.
The component that may not hold about the analogy is that the consciousness aspect doesn't have to be complete. Like, Eliezer's "consciousness is what an algorithm feels like from the inside" is in this class of theories, but if that's the case, consciousness lives at a higher level of abstraction, and the consciousness aspect isn't complete because several material systems could run exactly the same algorithm.
Anyway, any theory in this class is perfectly compatible with the laws of physics, so I don't think what you said in the other comment (that science is on the side of illusionism) is correct. Maybe illusionism is to be preferred for other reasons, but dual-aspect theories are compatible with science.
> hat aspect where we feel there is something specific we are experiencing (e.g. the "redness" of red), yet we can never pinpoint or communicate (or "eff") just what this specific thing is - that is IMHO almost certainly illusory.
eff (verb). used as a less offensive way of saying ‘fuck off’, which is a very offensive way of telling someone to go away or saying that you do not agree with them
I cannot eff the redness of red because I don't think there is such a thing - that's the sense in which it is illusory.
But also I'm afraid this doesn't really resolve the question as a whole, it just shifts it from "explain the ineffable redness of red" to "explain how there can be subjective experience at all".
I can see red even if you can't. I'm unconvinced by claims to eff qualia, since I have never seen it done, and I am unconvined by claims that there are no qualia, since I have them.
One day the whole world woke up to see a giant red circle in the sky. Everybody saw this including all of the worlds scientists. Animals were clearly perturbed by it. It was visible night and day.
A task force was set up and scientists from across the world, equipped with all the best equipment, took off on a space ship to investigate. As they approached the anomaly it grew faint and disappeared. The best scientists with the best scientific equipment were no good in detecting what was going on, no matter how hard they tried.
After a few years of this, with everybody at ground level still seeing the giant red dot, the scientists held a conference and said it was all an illusion and that all conscious beings on earth were hallucinating the dot. Let that, said the scientists, be the end of it. It’s a thoroughly unscientific belief.
That was a relief to many people. The scientists had spoken. It wasn’t real! Scientifically minded parents scolded their children when they pointed to the red dot and asked what that was. It wasn’t there, they said. Teachers admonished students for mentioning the red dot. Many philosophers ran courses on mass delusion.
Other people, albeit in the minority, thought that either the scientists needed better equipment or the world needed better scientists.
One day a meteorologist realized that, on the day the red circle appeared, some strange patterns in air density also appeared in the Earth's atmosphere. She partnered up with a grad student studying optics, and they figured out the circle was a reflection of the sun, visible only from earth's surface. Turns out the circle was an illusion, no need to pretend you don't see it, but no need to pretend it's actually there. What's actually there is invisible patterns in air density.
Sure. That’s a reasonable thing to happen. But in that scenario the red dot is understood and not dismissed as an illusion because it isn’t understood.
That’s the “better scientists or better equipment scenario”.
Yes, illusionism or eliminativism or whatever it's called these days is like a big "Don't Look Up". I see word games above regarding hot rocks to avoid the actual question, and even that argument sidesteps the possibility of panpsychism given everything has internal states, and we don't have a coherent theory of consciousness to say why only some such states lead to qualia.
> Yes, illusionism or eliminativism or whatever it's called these days is like a big "Don't Look Up".
Funny, I see it as the exact opposite: everyone in that film thought reality was the media circus, the theatre presented to their eyes and ears, and so didn't listen to the scientific instruments that were revealing the actual truth.
Qualia and consciousness are the theatre, a spectacle that just isn't what it seems. Trust the scientific instruments instead of your innate but flawed perceptions!
I'm not in the business of telling people what labels mean. I would if they were mathematically well-defined terms, but they're not; this is one of the takeaways of debating these issues a lot. A lot of people assume that surely there's a universally agreed upon meaning for the academic terminology, but there isn't, and it inevitably leads to miscommunication. That's not just true for illusionism but also panpsychism, idealism, functionalism, etc.
The question that I think is important is whether you consider consciousness an irreducible kind of stuff. Like, a lot of people think that consciousness is this kind of experience-stuff that isn't made out of non-experience stuff, so you have to adopt it as a new kind of primitive with roughly the same status as "matter". (That doesn't mean experience isn't inherently tied to matter; some theories say it may be another aspect of the same thing, it just means it's logically distinct.) It sounds to me like you think there isn't this kind of stuff? If so, I suspect most people would call that illusionism, but some would confidently tell you that no illusionism means something totally different.
I do not like the term illusionism or eliminativism, as I think they produce more confusion than solve, but yeah, I think that consciousness is reducible to matter and all the experience stuff is made out of non-experience stuff. I also notice that there is also a lot of "consciousness of the gaps" thingy going on, where consciousness is a bundle term for things we still do not fully understand about our cognition.
My model is that consciousness is high level interface, representing some facts about the body and its environment, developped probably for impulse control, longterm planning and communication. Humans have a lot of different desires, occasionally contradicting each other. In order to effectively regulate behaviour of this complex system of systems, there was required some kind central planner, who gets simplified representation of what's going on. Our "qualia" is this representation - the encoding of some processes in our body available for consciousness. Some of them are read only, some allow a level of editing while there is also a lot of things not encoded in our consciousness, thus inavailable at all.
How exactly this encoding works is an interesting scientific question that is eventually going to be solved. But the philosophical "Why does anyone feels like anything?" doesn't seem mysterious for me. It's because central controller needs inputs to be an effective regulator. Same for "Why do I experience my own consciousness and not the consciousness of other people" Because their bodily sensations are not encoded and presented as inputs for your interface, while your own are.
I agree, I think of "phenomenal consciousness" or "qualia-having stuff" or "experiencers" as something atomic, not made of unconscious stuff, and that an illusionist is one who doesn't believe in that. The scientific evidence is on the side of the illusionists, and this is the *only* situation where I think the scientific picture looks pretty complete but that something crucial must be missing from it.
My pet hypothesis: brains have more than one bit of phenomenal consciousness. Also, phenomenal consciousness must provide some kind of evolutionary benefit, such as a computational ability.
There seems to be a pattern where activities/hobbies/workplaces dominated by one gender actively scares away the other gender. I'm curious as to where that threshold is, but my quest for numbers has left me with nothing but vapid culture war stuff.
My diving club's far more male dominated than the diving community as a whole, and I'd like to fix that. I think a good start would be to set a goal of aggressively reaching the critical mass of women needed to not alienate new or existing female members, followed by a less aggressive drive to reach the diving community's ratio. Any advice on figuring out what this critical mass is?
I've got nothing concrete to offer, beyond the suggestion of "enough that you aren't forcing women onto boards because gender quotas demand it". One of the few measurable inconveniences I've had working as a woman in tech was that the few of us were taking part in a lot more interviews than our male colleagues, because you obviously want the interview to demonstrate that the group has women in it.
A number of years ago i read about anti-semtism at harvard at the turn of the century (1900). It had some stats about the number of Jewish students in the class and anti-jewish sentiment in the class. There was a tipping point, i dont remember what it is and i can't find the source. But i do find this an interesting topic that is under discussed.
Why is this a problem that needs "fixing"? Why does every male dominated space need to not be? What if these men, entirely reasonably, expect that significantly increasing the number of women in the club will negatively change both their experience of involvement in the club and the nature and direction of the club in a way they don't like? Why can't men have their own things? If this is so little of a concern for the existing members of the club that you feel the need to singlehandedly manage this effort and need internet stragners to help you (rather than discussing it with the other members), then isn't that a sign that this isn't an issue they support and so they should be left in peace?
This is what diversity activists always do. In one breath, they ridicule anyone who suggests that having a lot more women involved in something will significantly affect the nature and culture of the club. Then in the next breathe, they're talking about how much better the thing will be because there's something fundmanetally flawed and bad about masculine cultures (which implies women will and are intended to have a significant cultural effect on the thing).
If there is a 'diving community as a whole', it suggests there are other clubs and the possibility of other clubs, so why does EVERY individual club need to be the way you think it should be?
Why not have them join another club? Why not found another, 'inclusive' club? Why not focus on a real problem instead?
> why does EVERY individual club need to be the way you think it should be?
It doesn't but it seems they are talking about THEIR OWN club. It seem totally reasonable to me for them to have an opinion on the make up of that club.
>Why not have them join another club? Why not found another, 'inclusive' club? Why not focus on a real problem instead?
Their real problem seems to be "there are not enough women in this club". Your proposed solutions won't solve that.
It's perfectly feasible. If a man writes a post asking for advice on how to beat his wife and then shoot himself in the foot, "Have you considered not doing that?" is a very valid response for him to hear.
I think one general dynamic might be that men as a rule (and despite allusions to the contrary) just aren't particularly autocratic. They just want to turn up and do what they do. No one wants to actually run the club, so they'll all end up at the mercy of those who do.
In OP's case, the administration is already woke enough that they're talking about gender quotas on the board, apparently separately to the rest of this.
We don't know what the sensibilities of the rank and file divers might be, but if they don't show up and take on the responsibilities of office, they don't get any power and their opinions don't count.
First a question; Do the all the men in the club want the same thing you do? Sometimes everyone likes to 'get away' from the other gender and just hang with the guys. But assuming everyone agrees with you. Then how about some club/ get together where you ask new people to come and you also ask all the members to bring their partner along. Diving and Dinner, or something like that.
I'd actually be very interested in hearing how this works out for you.
My first thought was that if you replace 50% of something with something else (either because you pull in 50% women, or you pull in a critical 20% who themselves pull in another 30%) then what you have at the end is *not the same club* as it was when you started.
If your club as it is now is filling any needs for its members beyond just giving you all somewhere to dive, then its ability to meet those needs might be affected.
Without knowing anything about what your club's like or what personalities you all have, I would predict that (unless you're all unanimous that "we need more women" and it's a frequent topic of conversation at the club) as you pull in more women, there will be an intangible shift in culture and more of the men will feel like "the fun's gone".
This will be more pronounced if you're a tight knit club with a lot of social connection, less pronounced or nonexistent if you're a loose association who only get together to dive and then go home again. It also might depend on how blokey your blokes are and how girly are the girls you're pulling in - and I have no idea how dimorphic things are where you live.
My thoughts aside, I'm interested to hear how you go about this and what the results are. This a nuts and bolts social engineering project and I want to see how it goes.
While our needs are technically met, more members would mean more resources that can be poured back into the club. Boat maintenance, the divemaster role, and everything else that goes into running a club is spread between a core of volunteers who are always at risk of burnout. More members would also mean more funding and thus shinier toys. Women seem to be an untapped source for resources here.
The club's culture as a whole is an interesting ethical dilemma. I personally would welcome a more feminine club, but perhaps I ought to let the minority--or worse, the majority--keep their boy's club. Actively marginalizing one group to include another seems like an ethically bad thing to do. On the other hand, those of us invested enough to show up to the yearly meeting more or less forced our current chairwoman into her position, so we're clearly not a misogynistic bunch. I'm leaning towards letting meritocracy decide and wish whomever picks up the mantle against diversity good luck.
Since there's an interest I'll make sure to provide updates on how it progresses throughout the year!
> On the other hand, those of us invested enough to show up to the yearly meeting more or less forced our current chairwoman into her position, so we're clearly not a misogynistic bunch.
I read your description of the process below, and having women do the unpaid/little paid work that is too much work, too little renumeration and too little status for men to jump on the the job is unfortunately a very typical dynamic. If not 'mysogynistic' then it's at least otherwise 'not fair to women problematic dynamics'.
I don't want to complain too much about this rather typical dynamic playing out in your sports club, I just stumbled across the sentence above.
If you need more members, can you not get more men? Or is the problem that you've recruited all the men in the area who are interested in diving, so in order to grow you have to reach out to try and get women?
This seems to be a widespread problem, just looking at it quickly online; leaving out professional divers which is very heavily male, even social/recreational scuba diving is about one-third female to two-thirds male. I have no idea why this might be:
I wonder if it's technology? Men like equipment and fiddling around with all sorts of kit and talking the technical parts of why the zoomerator is much better than the confangulator, unless of course it's nine o'clock at night in the Eastern hemisphere and your core temperature is 19 degrees.
Women, I think, would prefer just to dive and talk about the dive environment as regards what they saw, not about "yeah this new set of flippers really makes all the difference, it was recommended by famous flipper tester Jacques Coquilles, check out the Flippin' Great! Youtube channel for their reviews of Top Ten Flippers for the Pacific East-South-West".
Another factor might be general gender differences in parenting responsibilities. A quick googling suggests that most scuba divers are in their 30s and 40s (which makes sense as a sweet spot where you're more likely to have both the money for an expensive hobby, which would skew older, and the vigor for a physically demanding one, which would skew younger), which is also the age bracket where most people have young or school-aged children. Having kids makes it harder to get away on your own and pursue a time-intensive hobby unless your partner is willing and able to cover for you, and culturally mothers seem to wind up covering for fathers in this sort of situation a lot more often than fathers cover for mothers.
In addition to parenting difference, there may be changes in the body after pregnancy that makes certain types of diving less doable. My mother taught diving in her 20's in the Puget Sound, but after having kids in her 30's, said her body couldn't take the pressure (both literally and figuratively). I think she was also worried about the changes to her inner ear from pregnancy. Snorkeling was still ok, but deeper dives were not.
This is anecdote, not data, but it might be a direction to think in as well.
Recent numbers suggest female participation has increased to two-fifth, which is a nice improvement. Seeing as our club is far below that level, our location is either a statistical anomaly or there's an untapped group of members. We would like to recruit anyone, but this seems like a demographic for some targetted advertisements.
After figuring out the critical mass needed to keep female members, the next step is to figure out where female divers might differ from male ones, and how we can cater to those needs. I think you're correct that safety and the social aspects are good places to start.
There you go - your new monetisation model! If it does well, keep me in mind for a complementary chunk of rock from the seabed gathered by one of the divers using your 2023 Top Recommended Flippers For Mid-level Divers 🤣
Forcing women to take positions? I get told off for that.
But yes, I'm interested to hear how it goes. You only really hear these stories after the fact, once they've turned out badly. Which means you can't ever know what the real "success" rates are, because boring or so-so outcomes don't get passed around.
It would be illuminating to see a single case through from the beginning.
Board: "The chairman is stepping down, so we need a new one! Any takers?"
Everyone: "🦗🦗🦗"
Random guy: "How about you, <board woman>? You're already on the board and do a great job!"
Her: "I've got enough going on in my life, so please no"
Random guy: "how about the current chairman sells us on the position?"
Chairman: "oh god I need to get out! People call me up at midnight about random drama! This is affecting my mental health and I can't handle it anymore"
Everyone: "🦗🦗🦗"
Random guy: "<board woman> you sure? You'd be perfect!"
Everyone: "yeah, come on!"
Her: "Fine... We'll need another female board member to fill the gender quota, so since <random woman> is the only woman present who's not on the board, welcome onboard!"
Random woman: "but I literally joined the club a month ago! And I'm busy!"
Board woman: "tough luck! This'll be a great way to get to know everyone!"
It was quite entertaining! I wonder why we don't have more female members.
I wonder if that really works in both directions. Are men "scared" away from ballet, figure-skating, zumba and yoga? Or only gay men attracted? Or some smart(?) guys attracted as they see better chances for a date? - I feel your pain at your club. Viliam seems right - at least as long as female members are under 35 yrs.. - Then: Why worry so much? What is wrong with women concentrating in mostly/all-women-diving-clubs where available? (Those probably skew the statistics a lot, your club may be completely average as open-to-all diving-clubs go. Still, feels right to try. Good luck!)
Maybe it's time to desegregate sports. (A position I've advocated for 20+ years) All sports can be done with coed/mixed teams. Even individual sports can be relays or combined effort scores a mixed participants (equal number of Ys and not Ys - skip the gender labeling): eg total shot put distance of 2 Ys and 2 not Ys.
The problem with that is that it is hard to get people to do sports without caring about winning. And in most sports, it's hard to care about winning and not consider the "not Y" players on your own team to be an impediment.
Mind you, I did like the part where as a healthy but not so athletic 40-something man I could play ultimate on relatively even terms with healthy athletic 20-something women. But I don't think that's going to generalize across a broad range of sporting opportunities.
winning? Winning is more fun that losing, but how much more fun. John Wooden - "the team beats the individual"
I recall that Deming gives an example about appreciating a system by considering the orchestra - every member can't maximize their individual virtuosity and still have a good orchestra.
I am sure it is the case (from personal memory) that ball hogs don't enhance the chances of winning.
I am having a hard time seeing how you can't imagine a cooperative desegregated sporting activity. Are you a ball hog? Have you Dunning Kruegered your own athletic talents? Are you a sore loser?
Here's to Norman Span and versions by Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez, and the Grateful Dead. All great versions, but here's one: https://youtu.be/mqun85HYsVk
Well, if it's not about finding a mate, I can do all the rest of that with other men. I also don't need a sports league for it, I can just show up at a bar and sit down.
To be clear, coed team sports have a much higher attractiveness to me right now because I am looking for a wife. I'm just wondering what other advantages you see?
(And coed leagues right now have a bit of implied "yeah, this is a dating environment" atmosphere, that would change if all leagues were coed)
This must obviously a generational thing. Not every interaction needs to be a dating opportunity, nor involve a bar and alcohol. You can just have some fun and friendly interactions with members of the opposite sex. Of course, the modest comestables and libations still can happen after the coed soccer match. And I suppose a date could happen too.
Desegregated sports means only men do sports, or you enforce gender quotas, which would ruin most sports.
Like seriously, you think e.g. football would be fine? Either men would feel the need to take it easy on the girls, which would lead to a much worse sport, or they would treat them the same as men and the women would get absolutely smashed by huge, quickly moving men and if the inevitable ruination of their bodies didn't force them out, the fear of this would. But if women were really determined to keep playing football with the boys, it's very easy to imagine them trying to impose
And even for the less physical aspects of football (or other sports), the skill difference (including in athleticism) is so large that the women on the team could *literally* be less than useless (or close to it), and you de facto end up just ignoring your female teammates and it becomes a smaller number of men playing each other with some women hanging around.
Individual sports would be even worse! People often love individual sports because they're dependant on nobody but themselves. They put the effort in to be as good as possible, and their success is based on their own personal skill and how well they perform on the day. If I'm a male shot putter who has trained for years to become the best as shot putting as possible, I would be furious if now my success depended on some girl who I never wanted anything to do with. And if there's far more men interested in the sport than women, then it significantly increases the likelihood of som men drawing the short straw and being stuck with a woman who sucks at e.g. shot put, because you're drawing from a much smaller field.
Gender segregation exists in sports because in most team sports, the skill and athletic differences between men and women are comparable to those between adults and children. Just leave men the fuck alone and let them do their thing. Encroaching on male environments will only make the men angry and resentful and their opinions and treatment of women worse.
I'm ready for coed flag football, 6 v 6 basketball with a wider court, mixed soccer with Y in goalie for one half and not Y in goalie for the other half.
If you don't make quotas, every competitive team would be 100% male, ruining the game for female players as there's no way up and much less motivation to progress if the segregated leagues didn't exist.
If you do make quotas, there would be the same resentment during the game as if you'd mix very different skill or age groups, you'd have people in the field being ignored, not getting passes, etc which is tolerated in a well-paid pro environment but makes a horrible social dynamic in all the levels below that, ruining the game for casual players.
I've had similar thoughts. Pickup games and casual recreational league play can be done with ad-hoc teams chosen to balance out skill/talent distribution between the teams (for team sports) or with a golf-like handicapping system for individual sports. More serious league play can (and usually already is) segregated by performance level. Gender segregation should only really happen for high-level competitive play or when the segregation is for social reasons rather than on-field considerations.
If I was on a basketball team of 3 dudes and 2 chicks, I would literally have no reason to pass the ball to the girls unless she got herself into really good position under the basket with no defenders. I don't mean 'I don't want to have to play with girls so I won't pass to them', I mean it would literally be advantageous for me to practically ignore the existence of my female teammates and essentially treat it as a 3 v 3 game.
There's nothing stopping pickup games from being mixed now. But they're almost never mixed, which means you would have to force it. And if you forced it, men would just stop doing it as much and would be extremely resentful towards the government and women over it.
I think it works both ways. Horseback riding used to be a male-dominated domain--now it's female dominated. Seeing as both groups have dominated horseback riding, I doubt there's something inherently masculine or feminine about the activity. I would wager it's a combination of what are viewed as socially acceptable activities for men and women, and how much the dominant gender can change the activity to their preference at the cost of the weaker gender's preference.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with having a skewed gender ratio, but seeing as we're unintentionally more skewed than the community as a whole and there're no female-only clubs, I think there's an untapped market which could help expand our club.
Horseback riding was a male-dominated domain when it was the analogue of F1 racing or owning a Jag. Horseback riding now is much more of a pet ownership thing since horses as a means of transport are obsolete. Nobody goes on steeplechases anymore, in fact the term has been co-opted for a much safer and more harmless type of obstacle race; nobody rides their horses until they burst. And back in the day, riders had grooms to take care of their horses, they didn't do any of it themselves (it wasn't the norm, that is; I'm sure some people did it, out of preference or sheer micromanagement impulse).
Basically, it's still *called* the same thing, but it's a fundamentally different hobby/activity now, and that's not unrelated to the demographic change.
I would guess it is about 20%. More for smaller groups, because 20% out of 10 members is only 2 people, so on the days the other one does not come, it makes you the only one there.
It probably also depends on how salient is gender in your subculture. Are the men hitting on the women all the time? Then the 4:1 ratio may still be overwhelming. Or, let's say that you have 20 members, 4 of them female, but 3 of those are already dating within the club; that might feel almost like a social expectation to the fourth one.
I also think that two or more women per event would be the absolute minimum, but beyond that I'm not sure. At least some of the members were brought in by their partners and the men are stereotypically manly, so the warning signs you mentioned are all there.
I share your concerns! We happened to recently appoint a chairwoman and have one of the female members acquire an instructor license, so I thought this would be an excellent time to take a stab at that culture.
Does anyone else have problems with email notifications for new blog posts? They used to work just fine; a couple of weeks ago, they pretty much stopped working, with only a few exceptions getting through.
At this point Substack's inconsistency and intermittent bugs is a feature, it would be a bug if they stayed a month without some kind of bizarre bug or the other.
I love the free speech ethos, I hate the code powering it.
It’s pretty remarkable how effective shrooms are as an anti depressant for me. I’m prone to the navel gazing type of depression that seemingly afflicts a lot of young men today, and if left untreated it goes to an extremely dark place. But with just a mild dose of mushrooms- I’m talking just 1 gram- I am immediately snapped back into healthy brain functioning for at least 2-3 months before the depression starts to creep it’s way back in. The best comparison I can give is the feeling of taking a shower at the end of a day, and feeling all of the dirt and sweat you accumulated get washed away. I quite literally feel like my brain has been cleaned after a night on mushrooms, usually spent just relaxing listening to music or taking my dog for a walk. I’m not entirely sure what I even mean by that, and definitely don’t have a clue how it works, but holy shit it *works* remarkably well.
I think the effectiveness of psychedelics depends on the person, and I just so happen to have the perfect combination of personality traits that makes them maximally effective as medicine.
No doubt in placebo effects. Everything you’re saying is fair, I’ll be the first to admit this is obviously a personal topic for me and it’s damn near impossible to separate my emotions when discussing it lol. I’ve only just now come to accept the fact that psychedelics definitely aren’t a silver bullet, and they probably work way better on certain personality profiles than others, and must be integrated with lifestyle changes.
Yep I’ve been following the work of Dr. Mathew Johnson at Johns Hopkins for quite some time and I’m super excited about the work they’re doing. I can tell that he has probably had similar experiences to myself with psychedelics in his personal life. I REALLY respect his commitment to scientific rigor on the subject in spite of that fact, and in spite of his personal feelings hes always careful to stick with what’s shown in the data when discussing it.
We will see in time. Thank you though, best wishes to you as well :).
One of the problems with the design of this research is that if participants know it a psychedelic study, they will almost immediately know whether they are in the placebo group or not.
A proper study has to blind the participants to the fact that psychedelics might be involved. Because even an RCT will be susceptible to participation bias. Participants potentially signing up just for a chance to get psychedelics and because they are already pre-disposed to favor recreational use.
For example, "medical marijuana" was in part medicine but in larger part just an attempt to get the camel's nose under the tent to decriminalization of recreational use.
Tbf, I believe they did screen exclusively for participants who did not have prior experience with psychedelics. Pretty sure it was a requirement for the bigger studies. However of course people could always lie. Over time a clearer picture will emerge. I wouldn’t discount the value of survey data though, as anecdotal stories like mine are extremely common (though by no means universal) with people who use psychedelics. Would be useful to learn as much as you can from people who self report benefits to see what patterns exist (im sure someone has already done this).
I think you’re right about weed and the maximalist claims (“weed cures cancer”) were always bogus. I’m much more optimistic about psychedelics. I’m excited to see the results moving forward.
And even if effects are real, the ability for psychodelics to actually positively treat a condition (like depresssion) may indeed be no better than placebo. RCTs please!
I read about a recent study about total knee replacements. TKR subjectively seem to help patients, BUT apparently no more than a sham TKR. Suggesting that the positive TKR results are placebo effect.
I have a hard time w/ this bc psychedelics (for me and many others) cause a fundamental shift in my mental model which I couldn’t even perceive of prior to the experience. Before my first time doing mushrooms I *thought* I knew what it felt like to not be depressed but I was actually looking in the completely wrong direction. Psychedelics opened up a whole new pathway to happiness for me that I couldn’t even imagine was possible before hand.
That study didn’t even have a control group, which just seems kind of silly tbh. If you had taken psychedelics before, it would be literally impossible to be fooled with a placebo (unless you were told it was a really really small dose). The experience is so distinct. I don’t doubt that people claimed they saw relief from the placebo therapy in follow up, but the nature of that relief was fundamentally different from the changes brought by psychedelics.
That said, I’m 100% sure psychedelics will outperform placebo, I’d bet my life savings on it.
The Placebo effect is real. So a placebo can possibly treat depression with less potential harm. Placebos can work even when the patient knows it is a placebo.
I do not doubt "the effect" - there is know biological pathway. The question is always whether biological effect of a drug is actually has more likely benefits than the risk of harm as compared to doing nothing, placebo, and/or standard of care.
I'm here in Baltimore, there is a pretty big study going on - soon we'll know more.
The quick link I provided was just to show some equipose.
There no actual evidence that any pharmalogical treatment for depression or anxiety reduces suicide attempts and sometimes they increase them - so we should keep that in mind. Finnish study, e.g. I think there was one particular well known medicine which showed an increase in an attempts but a decrease in suicide "success".
Best wishes for more happiness, less depression, and full and long life (every person is a gift for all of humanity.)
I have always thought about it since SSRIs are no longer effective for me. However I can’t find a psychiatrist who prescribes this sort of thing and am scared of messing with my brain doing it myself.
- I believe psychedelic psychotherapy is going to be legal in one the pacific states soon, forget which one.
-If you have an ongoing relationship with a therapist, even in a state where shrooms are illegal, many therapists would be willing to let you attend a session under the influence of mushrooms. It is much safer for them if you obtain the mushrooms yourself and take them off their premises. They are easy to get in many places, and also easy to grow.
-If you are uneasy about the effect they will have on you, you can start with 1/10 of a gram and gradually work up by 1/10's to a gram or more -- that way you won't be gobsmacked by effects.
I’m pretty black pilled on the general quality of therapists out there (not the concept of therapy itself) and I think there’s very few therapists who really have the expertise to add anything. I think it’s better to have a close friend around, someone you trust and love deeply. However it’s an individual call and there’s some amazing therapists out there who would be great to do shrooms with.
See this is just my opinion, but I think the overly cautious advice of starting with 0.1g just adds more fuel to the misconception that mushrooms are actually risky. They’re not. For the vast majority of people, they are among the safest drug experiences you can have. If you take the proper precaution, as in make sure you’re in a comfortable setting with a few days off, the odds of even having a “bad trip” (which can stilll be a positive experience) with anything under an 8th are very low.
I think if you’re gonna do it, you should just commit and take about a half eighth. It’s enough for the full shroom experience without being anything insane. Be prepared for whatever comes your way and enjoy the ride. You need to get past a certain threshold to actually experience the real benefits, ime. There’s no way to avoid being nervous before the experience.
Yeah, I'm also fine with the idea of having a close friend around for support. Not everyone has someone like that, though, especially a someone who's comfortable with shrooms. I'd say therapist is probably second choice, but only if it's a therapist you've got a good thing going with.
Yeah I don’t get it from a psychiatrist, and to be honest I have doubts that the tools of mainstream medical science are equipped to understand the nature of the experience and why it’s so effective. They don’t make you “not sad”, they kind of allow you to see the wholeness of all of life, and the “sad” you’re feeling is just one of an infinite number of perspectives which you can’t take.
Depending on what state you’re in, you might be able to get them behind the counter at your local head shop if you ask. A lot of smoke shops in NYC and NJ will have psilocybin chocolates and the like, but since it’s still technically illegal you gotta ask and be low key about it.
I 100% recommend trying it, it’s an extremely low risk and low maintenance way to manage depression with almost no side effects. If you’re worried about “bad trips”, in my younger days I have had HORRIBLE experiences on both mushrooms and LSD. It was 100% because of using at an inappropriate time and place, and if you take care of your set and setting a bad trip is almost 0% likely. You can also keep some Xanax on hand just in case. Also, all of my “bad trips” ended up being very important for my personal growth, and I have no regrets about them.
Historian Bret Deveraux had an interesting blog post a while back that led to an even more interesting discussion in the comments about whether a survivor community in a post-apocalyptic scenario would devolve to black powder weapons, or whether they'd be able to hang on to the ability to make smokeless powder and primer for regular guns. A chemist chimed in and said we could probably make primer (so you could have percussion caps), but making smokeless powder would be really hard to make in such a way that it kept for long periods of time.
Is the song "Informer" by Snow having some kind of belated revival? In the past week or so, I've been in two different restaurants to dine-in - and both times, that song came on the air over the restaurant radio. Of all the songs to get a revival, although it is quite catchy even if I can't possibly sing it.
I'm looking forward to Microsoft integrating its new AI into Excel. It'd be pretty neat to give it a prompt and have it organize a set of Excel data for me, including those annoying lookup functions and random design choices.
I wonder about air- or spring- rifles. They can be quite powerful and useful for hunting, but I don't think they've ever been uses systematically in war.
As other have already mentioned, air guns are harder to make than black powder muzzle loaders, requiring solving more or less the same mechanical and material challenges (the lock, pressure vessels etc) but also having extra challenges related to sealing. Black powder is also not that hard to make.
Spring-air guns are, as far as I know, limited in power due to the physics of how they operate and cannot really put out more than 50J of muzzle energy. So they're out even if you disregard the need for good-quality springs.
The real dark horses for me are paper cartridge guns and (more speculatively) fuel-air guns. These both seem to be about as complex to make (mechanically and in terms of materials) as an ordinary muzzle-loading black powder gun, but also have some inherent advantages (speed of reloading for paper cartridge guns, universally-available propellant for fuel-air guns).
I made nitric acid (starting with sulfuric acid) and nitrocellulose back in high school. The hardest part would probably be making the sulfuric acid, it's not like you could just buy some at a hardware store like I did. (And even today it's getting more and more restricted, especially in the EU).
That's what the chemistry guy in the comments in that link said. The nitrocellulose is relatively easy to make - it's the stabilizers to keep it from breaking down in a few days from impurities that are much harder to make.
The primers apparently aren't that hard. The Mercury-based one is easy if you have mercury, but there's also lead-based primers and potassium chlorate (the latter if you can get at least some electricity going along with access to potash).
What I hear from you is an assertion that in such an environment we could keep using the same guns and tactics but would require a change in logistics, returning to small units or individual soldiers doing partial "just in time" manufacture of their ammo, similar to historical examples in times when soldiers' equipment included tools to cast lead bullets.
I think the difficulty in stabilizing smokeless powder is overrated. Yes, diphenylamine is tricky, but parrafin and petroleum jelly worked well enough for several major players in the First World War. I'm pretty sure they weren't making their ammo in the trenches.
The tactics, however, *would* have to change because the *quantity* of ammunition available would be substantially reduced. So, less World War One and more Warlord-Era China, where anything more than a bolt-action rifle was a rare extravagance. In a post-apocalyptic scenario we'd probably keep the existing semiautomatic weapons for as long as they last, but with a premium on fire discipline.
Sulfuric acid can be made with ancient technology. The basic steps are to make sulfur dioxide (by oxidization smelting of a sulfur-metal ore or by burning elemental sulfur), further oxidizing the SO2 to SO3, and then letting SO3 react with water. Performing the second step seems to be the hard part: modern industrial or lab techniques seem to rely on vanadium oxide catalysts, which seems tricky to obtain without the benefit of chemical supply houses. But there seem to be a couple of older processes: burning elemental sulfur with saltpeter in a lead-lined chamber will yield SO3, or you can just heat up SO2 with concentrated O2 without a catalyst (slower and less efficient than with a catalyst), or you can use an easier-to-obtain metal-oxide as a less effective catalyst. At first glance, the lead-chamber method seems the easiest as lead and saltpeter seem easier to obtain in a post-apocalyptic environment than concentrated O2.
This gets into the issue that any post-apocalyptic environment is probably also depleted in terms of easily-available ores (aside from things like iron and silica sand). So you'd have to get creative in terms of how you find your sulphur.
For most of the roughly 400,000 years of modern humans' history, our ancestors lived in Africa and were presumably black. Even the descendents of people who migrated out of Africa starting around 70,000 years ago remained pretty much black until around 10,000 years ago, if Cheddar man's complexion was typical [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheddar_Man ]
So why do people blush? A quick web search reveals that black people also blush, as they can feel the blood rush to their face, but most of them concede that others find it hard to detect. So as a social cue to a feeling of guilt or shame or general sheepishness in company, a blush seems rather pointless, and one wonders why it evolved before people started living in temperate climates and their skin became paler.
edit: Equally puzzling is that a flushed face can also signify anger. So as a social cue, there is ambiguity there between anger and embarrassment.
Parting thought: It's a long shot, and I found not one reference to it on Google, but perhaps blushes also slightly pinken the clera (the whites of the eyes), and early people were more attuned to notice sudden changes in clera colour. Note that besides infections and exertion, crying also obviously reddens the clera. So it can be an emotional cue.
That's a very evo-psych approach to thinking about these things, that every phenotypic element must carry some intrisic behavioral purpose.
My initial position would be that if some phenotypic characteristic isn't actively detrimental to the individual and is no obvious game changer then it could probably safely be assumed (at least initially) to be either a spandrel in the SJ Gould sense, an artifact of sexual selection, or just there for no real reason, a mostly neutral mutation that only hang around because it happened to be surrounded by actually useful DNA.
Before getting carried away with just-so stories about how once upon a time blushing enabled some humans to hide better among roses and thus gain the genetic advantage, one should be mindful to wonder if it was even possible for the characteristic in question to have been available to be naturally selected during the time we were meaningfully human.
Meaning, is it feasible to have humans that don't blush or would such a configuration be completely pathological? Is there a nonblushing genetic variant in human ancestry that only got outcompeted recently? And so on.
A good rule in anything evolution-related is to assume neutral selection until proven otherwise. It's very easy to construct plausible-sounding "just-so" stories that don't actually reflect reality.
Paid subs only. I think I can "grant" you one-month (hope it not expired). Just reading. (podcasts are terrible, even in transcripts.) Tl;dr: Many genes responsible (less than in Height/IQ, though), started around 1.2 million years ago, when "we" lost most fur. The we needed darker skin (in africa). Why: less due to cancer, more due to miscarriages: "basically, the process of the sunlight hitting your skin does I mean, it destroys like folate production pathways. And so then it could be that extremely light skinned women in latitudes where there's a lot of sunlight will have many, many more miscarriages. So this is an evolutionary reproductive hit. That's extremely strong. And so what would have happened after we lost our fur is we would develop, you know, hyper, hyper pigmentation, hyperpigmentation compared to our ancestral state which was, you know, furred and paler." (He refers to work by Nina Jablonski )
There are monkeys and apes with red bottoms (and blue), and red faces. The red bottoms seem primarily to be an indicator of fertility and sexual signalling for mating. Why red faces? Maybe it's all part of the "red is attractive" or just that you can't confine red, non-furred skin to only one part of the body.
If red/flushed face indicates anger and aggression, that is a useful social signal. Possibly red/flushed face to reciprocate as "acknowledging wrong" also acts as a useful signal, something along the lines of rolling over and showing your belly. I have no idea, or how the mechanism of blushing/flushing works.
The complexion of Cheddar Man is disputed, and even if he was dark-skinned, light-skinned people already existed at the time in other places. Apparently the estimate for how long the European light skin gene has been around is 10k-20k years. I'm not sure if other humans developed light skin earlier than that.
I wouldn't necessarily assume that people before that were so dark that you couldn't tell a flushed face from a regular one, many black Africans even today have medium skin tones where you can tell flushed from non-flushed tones. And maybe if you only see dark skinned faces, a slight colour change will be more noticeable anyway.
A quick google didn't yield anything authoritative, but we should consider the possibility that the blush is older than humans. Especially as juveniles, a number of apes have fairer skin on the face than the rest of the body.
Why? It seems like the correct starting hypothesis (skin colour evolution is about light exposure). If you think otherwise, what's your reasoning?
If anything, I'd expect early humans to be somewhat darker than modern africans, due to spending less time in shade or indoors. But that effect may be too small to detect (and substantial indoor living is probably too modern to have had any effect.
I didn't say it's implausible that they were, I'm just saying it's plausible that they won't.
I also think that the sun-vs-skin-colour correlation isn't as strong as you might think. From Europe to Africa, sure. But why aren't Arabs black? Why are the natives of the Americas a pretty consistent mid-brown all the way from Canada through Ecuador to Patagonia?
And (the most bulletproof example I can think of because there's no migration) what's the deal with the Tasmanian Aborigines? They were stuck in cool cloudy Tasmania since the end of the last Ice Age, but were among the darkest people on Earth.
I think the Khoisan people of southern Africa are currently believed to be the most direct descendants of the original core population of modern humans (*). They generally have medium-brown skin tones. The way I've heard it, the darker skin tones now dominant among most indigenous sub-Saharan African ethnicities are usually linked to the relatively recent Bantu Expansion where a West African culture developed/adopted agriculture ~4000 years ago and their descendants subsequently spread out and replaced most of the existing population of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.
(*) The Khoisan have a very high level of genetic diversity, suggesting they're descended from a much larger founding population as a percentage of the overall human gene pool than other human populations, and they seem to have the oldest identified Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA lineages.
The original Bantu homeland is closer to the equator than the Khoi-San homeland.
As I understand it, long ago humanity split into two groups: the ancestors of the Khoi-San and the ancestors of everyone else. The "everyone else" group lived further north, closer to the equator, so I wouldn't be surprised if they had a similar color to the (much later) Bantu.
Ah, OK. It does now occur to me that both chimpanzees and gorillas have largely pale skin, and that early humans were likely harier. So it's somewhat complicated.
I have an idea for making these exchanges more satisfying: invisible likes. I fully agree that visible upvotes would push us in the direction of being more like high school, so are out of the question. On the other hand, I really do not think it is good for any of us to put up a good number of posts and hear absolutely nothing back.That’s what happens to me with more than half of my comments, & I’m guessing I’m about average in how many responses per comment I get. In real conversation if all your listeners (in this case several hundred people ) are dead silent after you speak, that means what you are saying is not going over well — it’s boring, incomprehensible or offensive. I know that no responses to a comment does not necessarily mean that here, but it’s really not possible for me to fully override the feeling that it does mean that. I also would find it helpful to know which comments several people found interesting, and which nobody did. I don’t think that would be like high school — nudging me in the direction of doing what’s popular. I think it would be giving me valid information of what kinds of ideas people here are finding worthwhile, which I can choose to ignore if I’m determined to say something that I know will annoy a bunch of people. And in all this, I really think I am reacting like most people. I’m not asking for accommodations for a quirk of mine, here, I’m asking for something —“invisible upvotes” — that I think would help engagement for most people.
OK, so here’s my idea for making that work: What if we brought back the “like” button, but had whatever indication Substack gives of a person’s upvotes appear in a light blue font, exact same color as the background of the page. Or if actually upvotes are displayed as hearts or fat little cupids, same thing — make the upvote icons light blue. That way, the commenter would receive and email notifications of upvotes, but readers here would not see the upvotes.
Scott, is that possible? Other people: waddya think?
Yeah, it's absolutely weird to write and not get a response. Maybe I will get used to it somewhen.
I would be in favour of 'invisible' likes, if I was sure they would remain invisible for everyone. As I believe a relevant part of the commentariat would make them visible to themselves, I'm not that enthusiastic.
I think a bit more of response once and a while, even if mostly feedback for the comment's author, wouldn't hurt.
I think you are fooling yourself that the existence of simple likes, visible or no, would not distort your writing. This reads something like recognizing that having ice cream in the house leads to weight gain, but trying to talk yourself into thinking having sherbet or some kind of lo-cal tofu frozen thingy would not. I suppose it actually works very occasionally, but usually it does not.
Maybe what you're observing is that there are good reasons for high school being the way it is, and people don't get there entirely through immaturity and idiocy -- that there is something compelling about knowing what you say is popular, and even the adult mind has a hard time resisting the siren call to be popular. Which seems entirely true to me, although I see it as more an existential burden to be borne and not a problem that can be solved by complex mechanisms.
My impression is that you *will* get responses if you say something really extraordinarily interesting and useful, or something inflammatory and readily debatable. The latter is easier, because it's easier to be provocative and easily refutable, and even the coolest heads can hardly resist the urge to point out how wrong you are[1]. If you say something thoughtful and modestly interesting, without a lot that can be easily criticized, you are often met with some degree of silence, because a quick response isn't possible. But that doesn't mean people haven't read it or aren't digesting it. If you are on a forum with what you identify as a significant proportion of thoughtful people, you can pretty much rely on that happening, even if there are no visible signs. Indeed, silence is a more satisfying response than a bunch of nitpicking responses that completely miss the point, no?
I find that over time you can build up an impression of how the more thoughtful people in any given forum see what you write, from the occasions that they do response, and how, and that allows you to interpret silence reasonably accurately. But long term, I think you end up either writing as an artist -- putting it out there, whether or not it garners praise or opprobrium, because *you* want it said -- or slipping into writing for cheers, like a late-night TV host. There does not appear a middle ground in the area of Internet fora -- that's a thing we gain via in-person conversation with a small circle of friends, and it may just stay that way regardless of our electronic inventions.
Eh . . . I'm inclined to think upvotes only push powerfully on people's motivation when they are visible to all: "Hey, everybody loved Carl Pham's post. Wow, look at those upvotes, 2 more just came in." . . . "Wow, everybody loved my last post, 23 upvotes, and EVERYBODY'S GOING TO SEE THEM, including the jerks who misunderstood a post of mine last week and implied I didn't understand the base rate fallacy." And I know I am willing to write unpopular things. I knew my present suggestion about invisible upvotes would get mostly comments against the idea -- I know because I've raised the subject before.
I wonder if people would be willing to try it for a month or so. It is not that easy to predict what something's going to feel like. People are often wrong about it. I may even be wrong that I'd feel more engaged here if we had invisible upvotes.
I don't have a strong opinion on this one way or the other except this one: I think variety is valuable. The internet is full of places where you can write comments and people can upvote them. It is less full of places where this is not an option. In that sense, ACX not having those is valuable. If you prefer a place with upvotes, you can comment on, eg, the reddit thread for each ACX post.
The obvious counter-argument is that the r/slatestarcodex crowd is not the same as the ACX crowd. And surely part of that is a distinction between people who already use reddit for other things and people who don't. But probably another part of that is the very fact that one place has upvotes and the other doesn't. So, in a sense, I think your test has already been tried, and it's working however well or poorly r/slatestarcodex is working.
Edit: Actually, your test hasn't been tried because reddit upvotes are not hidden. So this isn't really a counterargument to your specific suggestion, but it does work for those who would like the ability to sort by popularity.
I'm reminded of a Little Orphan Annie cartoon from long ago, in which Daddy Warbucks slaps himself on the forehead and says "How could I have been so stupid?" and Punjab replies "Who knows? The capabilities of man are infinite, sahib." We are capable of rationalizing almost anything, including that we'll have just one small bowl of ice cream, and definitely not any more, nosirree nope.
Does it matter whether the commentariat want/don't want to try it? A Substack isn't a democracy. I suppose we could organize a revolt and try to institute rule by joint decision of the kulak (Scott) and the commenters' soviet. I'm happy to join the partisans, but only because I have a long list of people I want shot during the confusion.
Anyway, to be serious, I personally have no objection to your scheme, although I also don't think it would do what you want. The only comment comment mechanism I've ever seen that seemed to have durability and value and not cost beacoup (in time or money) to maintain was that on slashdot.org. I'm a little mystified why it didn't spread, but perhaps there are social psychology issues here that escape my naive understanding.
A slightly counterintuitive fact about war is that a soldier must on average kill less than one enemy soldier, as there are only as many soldiers who might die as there are soldiers on the field - and not all will die, so there will be fewer dead soldiers than soldiers who enter the battlefield.
The same applies to posts - posts must on average get less than one reply, as there are fewer replies than posts. Maybe bearing this in mind would make the lack of response easier to bear. Perhaps it is because you have said all that needed to be said!
(Personally I would turn notifications off rather than be spammed with 'like' notifications, though I hope that would still allow me to see when someone actually replies.)
I'm sympathetic to the position that not getting any feedback does discourage people from contributing (why bother writing comments if nobody seems to be reading them?)
But on the other hand, the people I see on social media who are worried about their likes/reblogs/retweets/what have you, really do seem to be stressed out about it - not even people with a lot of followers, or being professional influencers, but ordinary people worrying about their follower count or 'only' getting 50 likes or whatever. It seems to put too much strain on what is supposed to be something you are doing as a hobby/for enjoyment. I've never cared about "oh did anyone like my comment?" on any media, so I'm probably not the one to say if you're right or wrong about this.
Agreed. Frankly, on reddit I'm always at least a little anxious that any comment that I make that can be construed as politically incorrect may get downvoted to oblivion. Admittedly, this doesn't actually have real consequences for me, but I do find it is enough to make me hesitant to comment.
Maybe there is a case for a drop down with multi-choices of more specific reactions such as "Clear" vs "Obscure", "Agree" vs "Disagree", "Relevant" vs "Irrelevant" etc. Those results could even be useful in text-based AI analysis of posts, which if it goes on wouldn't surprise me!
You're reinventing the Slashdot moderation system (https://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml), which I agree is one of the better extant ones, and I think it would add a lot of value here.
Huh, I've never been on slashdot. That sounds like a system I could live with. At the moment I guess we just have one moderator and that is Scott. And he picks good comments and posts about them later. That works, but only in a delayed fashion.
Not interested. The best heart is a comment. Or just add a +1 if you are lazy. Do you want the heart as a confirmation that someone has read what you wrote?
I sometimes write +1, or "great comment, thank you" or "I totally agree", as I want to tell people that I read and appreciated their comments. But I usually don't do it because I feel that, while it is (I hope) nice for the person that wrote the original comment, such short comments probably decrease the readability of the comment section, which is already long and a bit difficult to navigate, especially if they are numerous. I think 'like' would be more efficient.
I checked "ana"s plug-in, reloaded the page: and voila, I "heart" you. I actually do, as I agree with you and Emma B . A lot.
I feel that ACX is not twitter. One can dare to do those things here. And there are so many wonderful comments nowadays, a filter makes sense, really. OToh Scott prbably gave it a lot of thought. So working with the plug-in might be most we can get (and it will not be used by more than a few, cuz: too much hassle (it was easy, but it was less easy than default - to quote Bryan Caplan Many people’s knee-jerk reaction will be, “Let’s cut red tape!” But the craftier response is, “Let’s manipulate red tape.” If X is good, we can noticeably encourage it by modestly simplifying the paperwork. So yes, cut red tape for employment, construction, travel, and adoption. If X is bad, though, we can noticeably discourage it by modestly complicating the paperwork. Indeed, complexity is a viable substitute for explicit means-testing: If you lack the patience to fill out ten forms, you probably don’t really need the money. - end - https://www.econlib.org/archives/2017/05/the_behavioral_1.html
This already more or less exists. When substack "disabled" hearts for ACX, they just hid them; the underlying mechanism is still here. If I'm not mistaken, you can like / heart a reply to one of your comments through the email interface (assuming you have email notifications turned on), which then will notify that person via email (again, assuming they have notifications turned on). You can also like / heart comments through the webpage (and see the like counts) if you install a plugin and enable that option:
I think that would be an improvement, for the very reason you mention: I think that not getting any feedback when commenting is quite annoying, and that it discourages people from investing time in writing interesting and well thought-out comments.
In fact, I would prefer to have a regular like system where the number of likes is visible to everyone. I agree that this system has disadvantages, but I think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages:
Disadvantages:
- Tendency for readers to upvote things they agree with, and not just the high quality comments (I think this is a real problem)
- Tendency for comment writers to write things that agree with the perceived opinion of the commentariat (I think this is largely a non-issue)
Pros
- Much more satisfying for thoughtful commenters, and therefore likely to motivate them to write more of those comments.
- Ability to sort comments by likes. Right now, I find the comments on the post generally fascinating, but since their number is huge, I am quite sure that I am always missing very interesting comments.
- It could give a more representative view of ACX comments. Right now there are the occasional (borderline) misogynistic/racist comments, it would be nice to know that they are not liked!
Thanks very much for your thoughtful and detailed comment.
Re:
>- Much more satisfying for thoughtful commenters, and therefore likely to motivate them to write more of those comments.
My experience on reddit is that the number of likes a comment of mine receives seems unrelated to the amount of thought I put into it, or the amount of information I write into it. The largest single factor seems to be whether a comment that I write is immediately downstream of an existing comment with a large number of likes - which the default sorting makes highly visible.
For what it's worth, such a system would slightly discourage me from writing comments. Only you can decide whether that falls under your "Pros" or "Cons" list!
I have a tendency to use too many "in my opinion", "It seems to me that" "suggests potentially perhaps that it might be possible sometimes that", which I try to keep in check. Have I overcorrected it for you?
Probably because I'm a cranky old skeptic, and my interest in tribal signaling communication waned long ago. I think life is just too short: I'm not really interested in being popular, or aligning with the popular notions, in the brief spark of here and now. If my shade could visit from the future, 100 or 1000 years hence, I'm sure most of what we currently yell and scream about would be as interesting as the fierce infights of Roman equesterian families circa AD 150 over who would be the next consult. If we don't choose Marcus it's the End Of Everything! How can you not understand that Quintus is next to godhood? Et cetera. From the distance of even a mere 2000 years, it all seems very tempesty in a very small teapot. I daresay most about which we get heated today fits in the same category, and I don't want to waste the modest time I have with it.
I'm interested in understanding stuff that is eternally true, things that people dig out of the hard rock of ignorance and assumption by the slow labor of reason and empirical study. I expect that to be rare, often overlooked, nonobvious. To the extent I wish for engagement in what I write, it's that for which I'm looking: something genuinely new, something I've overlooked, something outside my experience, and the conventional wisdom and the shibboleths o' the day. Mostly this would be criticism or corrections and extensions -- the mere act of praise is rarely usefully informative.
From that point of view, I like the relatively high barrier to expressing approval or disapproval. It's only going to happen if someone has the energy and interest to actually write something down, and if they happen to have something substantive to say. The barrier means someone who has something to say has to weigh up the cost of writing it down -- is it worth it? You have feel you have something nontrivial to contribute to say anything at all. I rather like this. It does mean the absence of approval/disapproval per se, but I'm fine with that. And without the barrier...my feeling is that people who might otherwise put in the work to write something sensible (and useful) might instead take the easier path of just checking the [ ] "Yeah me too!" or [ ] "You're an idiot beyond the reach of rational debate" box, and I would lose something thereby -- the chance to get more thoughtful replies.
Heck I would probably behave that way myself. Sometimes I read something and I think no, this isn't right, here's a bone I have to pick with it, or here's an implication of this brilliant observation -- and then after drafting a comment -- and thinking about how it will fare out there in the harsh world -- I reconsider. Maybe my confidence is misplaced, maybe there's more to think about, or maybe what I thought I had to say is tangential, distracting, pointless. If Ihad the easier path of just mashing a button I might do that instead -- missing out on the introspection and thought that goes into even an unposted comment.
Edit: an anecdote that might be illustrative: when I was in college I took a class in writing short stories. We had to write one a week, and then it would get group criticized. (Great for thickening the artistic skin.) What I found over time was that I wrote better stories when I wrote them with pencil and paper rather than on the typewriter. (There were no word processors in the Paleolithic when this story takes place.) I wrote much slower, of course, but the quality was better, because I could not fling down words at low cost. Each word took longer to put on paper, so I thought about each one more. Is it worth it? If I have to erase this whole damn sentence with my rubber gummy, it will be annoying. Writing slower, and with more effort, produced overall better results.
"Probably because I'm a cranky old skeptic, and my interest in tribal signaling communication waned long ago. I think life is just too short: I'm not really interested in being popular, or aligning with the popular notions, in the brief spark of here and now."
I don't really understand. You seem to put quite some time and efforts in producing nuemrous high quality comments on this blog. I guess that you would not write them if you were certain that nobody did read them. Likes can just be used to know whether or not someone read what you wrote, you certainly don't have to use them to compare popularity with other people.
"You have feel you have something nontrivial to contribute to say anything at all. I rather like this. It does mean the absence of approval/disapproval per se, but I'm fine with that. And without the barrier...my feeling is that people who might otherwise put in the work to write something sensible (and useful) might instead take the easier path of just checking the [ ] "Yeah me too!"
For me it is also interesting to know if people agree or not, even if they do not further elaborate. I guess it depends whether one is totally focused on the ideas and arguments being discussed, or also by the people discussing them.
Well....I'm perfectly capable of writing stuff down just so that it's written down. I think most people are -- that's why things like private diaries exist. Quite often it helps to organize your own thoughts on subject to write it down in a way that other people can comprehend it. Certainly there have been many times when writing a comment here (even one I never publish) that I have invested a little time and effort doing some research and thinking about an interesting subject, and that effort has produced a satisfactory result for me myself -- my thoughts are better ordered, I understand my own beliefs better, et cetera. It's the letter unsent -- it has value to the author.
But sure I'd probably do it less if I thought they had *no* value to anyone else, either. As I mentioned up top, it doesn't (for me) take very much interaction for me to assess that. I've been around the Internet for decades, so the dynamics aren't unknown. Usually I can tell after a while whether the audience has zero or nonzero interest in what I might have to say, just from the occasional response (or sometimes I can tell it influences indirectly what other people say). I don't feel like I need "likes" to answer that general question.
Of course, what "likes" do is answer the question of whether *this specific comment* (as opposed to my comments in general) has nontrivial added value for someone in particular (and not just potentially to any number of someones). Here...I dunno, in most cases I just don't care very much. I expect for most people 90% of what I ever say is irrelevant, tedious, obvious, or obnoxious, and their response ranges from indifferent to (hopefully mild) annoyance. The other 10% may well be gold, and if so that's awesome. And I figure if it really is gold for someone, they'll probably say something and then I'll know. I'm OK that there isn't a mechanism for registering just ordinary mild agreement. It wouldn't affect me very much anyway, except in large quantities -- and then we're back to "being popular" as a goal.
I think in your last para you may have put your finger on the difference: if you are strongly interested in exploring the community -- who are these people? What are they like? What's their heirarchy, their shared values, their dogmas, their blindnesses, their strengths and weaknesses? -- then in addition to passive discovery it would be very valuable to have a way of doing active exploration: if I say this, is it popular or despised? Does this resonate or not? It's a way of getting to know a community much faster than just passively observing.
So what you may say is that you're more interested in understanding the community than I am, and would like a better mechanism for that. Also, I don't mean to imply a clinicial or professional interest, it could just be that you want to understand aspects of the community of people to whom you're talking more than I do.
>misogynistic/racist comments, it would be nice to know that they are not liked!
Ignoring the endless and non-ending (and charity-eroding) debate about what is or is not anti-women or anti-[blacks/whites/asians/latinos/arabs/jews], and ignoring yet another 10x worse debate about "If truth is X-ist, should we refrain from saying the truth?", how would not giving X-ist comments likes be good ?
If most of the comment section is giving likes left and right, and then there's a big patch of X-ism that doesn't have likes, you know for a fact that *A LOT* of people have read that X-ism, and was offended/annoyed/exasperated enough that they deliberately refrained from clicking the like button (because clicking the like button is effortless and the default), at this point I would say most X-ists have already won, eh ? they don't want your approval, they just want your eyeballs. And they got it. They got something even better : your offense, they know for a fact that you have read them (because the comments just before and just after them got a lot of likes), and that you didn't like it.
I won't pretend my view is common, but I think that there is no worse thing you can do to an opinion than contradicting it (and you don't have to be an evidence-based charitable big brain while doing it, mock it while contradicting it, go dirty) :
- Censorship is running away from it, and is untenable on the internet unless you're a giant infrastructure-controlling entity (gov or corp), because I can always make a new account and keep griefing you, unless I get bored.
- Not giving "cookies", aka likes or aka loves or aka endorsements or aka <whatever the fuck uninspired shadow of a "gamification" metric a silicon valley brain will come up with next>, is itself a loud signal, and it *pleases* contrarians, I know I have used it a couple of times, despite not being a central example of an X-ist, sometimes bluetribe just gets on my nerve.
Likes or upvotes or whatever is in theory a good idea, it's supposed to simulate price signals in the "marketplace" of ideas, which can then be interpreted as the collective bottom-up wisdom of countless brains working in parallel, i.e. a hive intelligence. But it has all the flaws of actual prices and then a metric tonload of new flaws and then a few dump trucks more flaws and warts, I have never seen a single implementation of it that wouldn't make things better if removed.
"If most of the comment section is giving likes left and right, and then there's a big patch of X-ism that doesn't have likes, you know for a fact that *A LOT* of people have read that X-ism, and was offended/annoyed/exasperated enough that they deliberately refrained from clicking the like button (because clicking the like button is effortless and the default), at this point I would say most X-ists have already won, eh ? " Yes, that's absolutely true if the upvotes are visible to all, but I think you missed an important feature of my proposal: Upvotes would be invisible here on the substack page -- a person receiving an upvote would find out via an email notification, same way people find out that they've received a comment. So if the X-ist posts were receiving few or no upvotes, nobody would know that except the writers off those posts. And they would not know whether or not those writing anti-X-ist posts were receiving upvotes.
" Right now there are the occasional (borderline) misogynistic/racist comments, it would be nice to know that they are not liked!"
This is where I register a big fat HELL, NO!
But why, Deiseach? Are you a horrible racist misogynist who wants hate and unpleasantness to be widespread?
Maybe I am, maybe I'm not. But I know one thing and it's not two things - nothing, and I do mean *nothing*, will cause this place to degenerate faster than "let's all downvote the racists". Or sexists, misogynists, misanthropes (as a misanthrope myself, let me register a pre-emptive protest here in defence of my right to an attitude of scorn and contumely for all humanity), all the rest of the list of -ists and -phobes.
Because like obscenity, which needs only to be seen to be known and need not be defined, what is patently obvious to Salviati as something that is a racist dogwhistle that needs to be booed and banned, to Simplicio is a harmless remark (where Salviati then scolds Simplicio for being too stupid to hear the dogwhistle) and to Sagredo is nothing of the sort, it means what it says, I know what's a racist comment and this is not it.
Salviati and Sagredo then get into hair-pulling over which of them is the bigot and which the cancel culture zealot. Let me just whisper the words "Culture War thread on SSC" to remind one and all of what we left behind us elsewhere. Or indeed, "anti-Semitic cheese".
No. Let's not get into the purity spiral. Let's *not* all downvote the racist misogynistic remarks in a show of solidarity to show that they are not liked!
I also am against downvotes, whether visible or invisible. And they're not needed, anyhow. If people disagree with what someone says here they are quite loud and clear about it, and generally they present an argument again the other person's point. It's when people agree with what someone says that they tend to hold back, because "yup, great point, and well-written too" isn't substantive.
And by the way, I would have given this comment of yours an upvote and also the more recent one ending "we all know where good intentions lead."
I really like your writing style! (Sorry, I feel compelled to write my positive comments even though you mentioned not caring about likes - and I tried to include a joke with an antonym of misanthrope but philanthropist definitely does not work, English's hard...).
I like the ACX subreddit, which has the usual voting system, and it doesn't seem to be a problem there. Why should it be a problem here?
It hasn't been a problem here because there's been a lot of hard work to fence off and keep out the culture warring stuff. There's the rule of civility on here, and there are other associated spin-offs where we can go to have robust expression of non-conforming views (The Motte, DSL, The Schism, etc.)
People are already pretty good at pushing back on poorly-argued views. My concern is that if we get into the shorthand of just "hearts = likes, downvotes = didn't like", that will shift gradually but inevitably from "like = this is a good point well-argued and backed up with evidence, even if I don't agree with it" and "downvote = badly done, poor, just bait" to "yay!" and "boo!" applause lights.
Right now, to take a perennial hot button topic, if someone wants to argue HBD they can do, and they have to be prepared to take their lumps in the comments if people disagree (or agree!) with them. Because it can encompass everything from so-called 'scientific racism' to 'let's look at the inconvenient and damned data', and can be debated accordingly, we can keep within bounds.
If that gets simplified to "this is borderline or actually racist, boo downvote" and we all follow along and downvote like good little greengrocers showing how it's nice to know *we're* not racists, then there's no point in any discussion here - just the loudest voice wins, and I see too much screeching activism already on social media.
This is not to say that you, Emma_B, are a screeching activist or mean anything more than "bad views should not be let slide". But we all know where good intentions lead.
Ok, I guess that I do not realize the amount of moderation needed for this seemingly smooth functioning.
I find the SSC subreddit easier to navigate than the comments of this blog, and it also seems to me that individual comment visibility is slightly less impacted by the timing of its writing, partly because of the Like system.
It seems to me really strange to suppose that including Likes could kill discussion. Likes are present in a majority of socially written stuff and it seems difficult to argue that it supressed discussion there!
Yeah, but I find the quality of comments here is higher than most of those other places. Are likes to blame for the suckiness of other places? Who knows, but why risk it?
I like the idea. The obvious implementation would be to display the "like" results only for the posts by the person who is logged in, and nobody else's - that should be something like ten lines of code, with no graphics hackery involved.
I'm hedonically intrigued by the idea of getting a "how much do people like me" number, even if no one else can see it and it doesn't silently affect my comment's visibility.
That said, I think one potential problem with such a feature is precisely that it makes you feel good. The likes would be okay if we trusted each other to only upvote things that the community actually values, but it's too easy to upvote things you agree with and downvote criticism that violates the groupthink. Even in the system you propose, people are still incentivized to write comments that get us likes, when currently we're incentivized to only write when we feel we have something to add.
"I'm hedonically intrigued by the idea of getting a "how much do people like me" number, even if no one else can see it and it doesn't silently affect my comment's visibility."
I'm more inclined to the "I wouldn't want to be a member of a club that would have me" view 😁 I find it hard to deal with compliments - what do you do, after saying "thanks"? How do you live up to expectations? Criticism, on the other hand, can either be merited - in which case it's good to know where I fudged up - or not, in which case there can be a good old knock-down and we leave the field bloody but exhilarated.
Ok, we’ll here’s an example of the problem of silence, which I think also distorts communication because jist as upvotes make people feel good, dead silence makes them feel bad.
Here’s an example. It’s kind of a special situation, yet captures the special destructivenezs of silence. Somebody asked on here for info and advice on OCD treatment options. As it happens I am a psychologist who specializes in disorders like OCD, and wrote a quick but thorough answer. Then it turned out that the writer was actually going to be moving to the metropolitan area where I practice, and he asked if I could give him advice on therapists. I was actually able to give him the name and location of a really excellent practitioner I know. So that whole exchange took me maybe half an hour. I was late for work and feeling rushed, but I was just delighted to be able to give somebody EXACTLY the info they asked for. And I never heard one word back — not even a single “thanks.” I am now much less likely to take that much trouble here again when someone asks A question I can answer. That’s just a loss. People ask for advice and info all the time on the open threads. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has become less generous with their advice and info because it’s just a downer to do that and hear nothing back. (And a “like” would have sufficed, if we had likes.)
As for gearing what one says to collect upvotes I dunno, I think the distorting effect is pretty weak when the upvotes are invisible. They’re not social currency
I'm not upset at the whole group about that one person no saying thank you. As a matter of fact I have been bothered by this issue the entire time I have been posting here. In fact I raised this issue several months ago, long before the incident I described. The example I gave is a special, and sort of extreme, case, as I said. I wanted to vividly convey to people who might have not thought about the oddness of a setting where the understanding is that nobody says anything in response unless they have something substantive to say, so people skip the "yeah me too," & "thank you" and "great point" answers. I LIKE keep-it-substantive, but I think the downside of getting no reaction at all promotes a certain lack of involvement. How can it not be unmotivating to literally be wondering whether anyone even read your post?
Maybe I should not have used the example I did. As a matter of fact, I have given people good chunks of info about psych problems & treatment a number of times, and 90% of people do say thank you.
A late reply (I've been off line.) So maybe don't post anything. IDK. I don't expect a response to my posts, but sometimes there is a response and we have a nice discussion about something. Just reduce your expectations. :^)
"How can it not be unmotivating to literally be wondering whether anyone even read your post?"
Agreed. While I'm ambivalent about up and down votes (leaning somewhat against them), I rather wish that the number of views could be reported. Unfortunately, short of tracking eyeballs, there is no way for the software to know which comments someone actually read while scrolling.
I fully see the problem - not that it hasn't ever happened to me to get an answer to a specific question, wanting to reply with a thanks (or more) later and then getting busy with other things (but hopefully not in case of a really long very specific reply). But I think it's better solved with more awareness and a change in informal rules, rather than likes. Little time now as well, so restricting myself to this and the following:
In fact I wanted to propose a 'silent likes' solution somewhen probably last year, but refrained from it, because I believe too many people here both could and would make the likes visible to themselves. My trust in people here refraining from this for the sake of 'we agreed they are not visible' is quite low, mostly because I think many simply wouldn't see any problem in silently defecting from the rule for their own use only. I don't want invisible likes that are still visible to a relevant part of the commentariat (or the author for that matter), which is why I decided against such a suggestion at the time.
Ah, mildly oppose, my email inbox is cluttered as is and having "likes" generating more email traffic and notifications doesn't sound like it would improve my quality of life.
I recently rejoined twitter and find the notifications on likes there don't really do anything besides momentarily pump up my ego in a way that feels... Very shallow? The exception is when I'm being dogpiled by people with an opposing view, then the likes are welcome back up. Replies are all I want notifications for though.
I believe it’s possible to turn off email notifications. If it’s not, and if your email works the way mine does, all the new comments on threads you have commented on appear as one email thread. If I happen to comment on a post that 30 other people do too, I get a total of 30 emails added to the thread. It’s a lot —but it all stays as one frequently updated email in my inbox, so it does not take up much space, and i can let comments accumulate all day without my inbox getting cluttered. And if I should happen to get 3 or 4 likes now and then, they will do very little to swell the volume.
What To Do After to re-balance microbiota. What NOT to do ?
PS . Any advice on how to minimize cramps in the day/ night after drinking the gallon of PEG ( poli ethylene glycol) mixed with the hyperosmolar salts solution ( Colyte, Peglyte variations?). I am having atrocious cramps every single time. No IBS .
I have a friend with the same problem, and after he had a terrible time with his last colonoscopy prep his doctor next time around prescribed a different set of purgative meds. These worked fine, and he did not suffer a lot of distress from them. Sorry I have no idea what the name of the good stuff is, but I believe it is known by medical staff as the gentle stuff. Suggest contacting doctor's office, describing the problem, and ask if there is an alternative prep.
I don't know anything about rebalancing microbiota. Is it established that these preps do wipe out a lot of microbes? I mean, they're different from antibiotics, maybe they don't kill off anything, just cause a sort of thunderstorm in the ecosystem.
I was lucky. It was established by an astute skilled colorectal surgeon ( Cleveland Case Western trained) that I have an unusual long and tortuous colon. She managed to navigate and resect ( hot snared) a distal ascending polyp. Luckily I added an extra clear fluid day for 85/100 prep success. Next time I will get a week long protocol. The microbiota thing it's an assumption based on a 10 days of non fiber diet , clear fluid ( starvation) and aggressive osmotic laxative anxiety and correlated cramps. I used kefir, guar prebiotic and the post antibiotic variety of Acidophilus and Lactobacilus and I had minimal discomfort.
Typically much less of it is needed - around 10 ounces at night and 10 ounces in the day.
For a paper comparing different laxatives for coloscopy prep, see here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4707321/ (although it doesn't mention magnesium citrate as a primary laxative, although I know that it is something used as a primary laxative).
Magnesium citrate *can* cause nausea and vomiting, perhaps it would still be preferable to other laxatives, though, as at least in the first few results I'm seeing, I don't see cramping listed as a side effect.
Thank you. Added to the obligatory osmotic laxative required. Long torturous colon was observed that explains a lot of my lower GI bloating and discomfort and apparent low motility ( it's just a long and winding road to paraphrase Beatles. Next time I'll get a longer prep. The saline part precludes me to exclusively use Mg citrate ( High BP).
And I consistently get cramps. Offsetting was done by 2 times 10 mg off label oxycodone !!!
Since the AI is born while being trained, isn't it reasonable to imagine an AI whose prime directive will simply be to continue to learn as much as possible, as fast as possible? I am not saying this AI won't kill us, but it sounds more plausible than paper clips.
> an AI whose prime directive will simply be to continue to learn as much as possible, as fast as possible?
Given the choice between "converted to paperclips" and "used in experiments designed by AI to learn as much as possible about human physiology", which one would you prefer?
I think paperclips are not at all likely at all even if P(doom) = 1. Eliezer said something about the paperclips (which were the example most commonly talked about) actually just being paperclip-shaped squiggles, which is to say that the AI will just try to maximize whatever abstract process that they are using to maximize for their utility function.
Paperclips are just a great example because they're simple, familiar items. If Yudkowsky had used the phrase he wished he had in retrospect, I'd guess with 80% confidence that the concept would be known about by less than 50% as many as know about it today (or someone else would have come up with a paperclip/eraser/shovels/solar panels maximizer example that would be the shorthand for the concept.)
"Paperclip maximizer" is brilliant in removing unnecessary complexities.
I find it odd he thinks the substitution doesn't matter. It would obviously make the concept much less tractable and a less "fit" meme.
Also I am not even entirely 100% sure I get what he is getting at. Is he saying the concern is the AI will focus not on making paperclips, but on deluding itself that it has achieved its fitness function?
He seems to be saying that if you try to program an AGI to maximize paperclips, it will maximize something other than paperclips, and that this is super important.
But then he mentions "inner" and "outer". The parable of the "paperclip maximizer" describes outer misalignment (human goals not being faithfully communicated to the computer) more than inner misalignment (the computer interpreting the goals it was given in unexpected and unpredictable ways). I don't know what Yud is thinking exactly, but I think a relevant point here is that inner misalignment tends to get worse as the intelligence of an AGI increases.
If we're just talking about the initial training run of an LLM, I don't think this makes sense.
At training time, its only real option for getting more knowledge is to just read things and let the gradient descent happen. Pro-actively seeking out more data isn't possible, so there's no "evolutionary" pressure to develop a bias towards doing that.
I guess hypothetically it could be the case that some sort of self-referential structure, where it actively contemplates strategies for learning more effectively, could help it update more quickly and thus be selected for. It's my current understanding that that sort of thing isn't possible with current architecture, and if it were possible I'm skeptical such a thing could be achieved via gradient descent alone due to irreducible complexity (i.e. even if it's a global minimum, you'd have to climb a hill to get there)
If this is against the rules for open thread, I'm happy to remove this, but I am trying to do a bit of market research for a potential service that I think many folks here (content creators and content consumers) would be interested in.
To help me verify that hypothesis, I'd be very appreciative of anyone who could help with a quick (1-2 minutes, 5-6 question) survey. I'm particularly interested in your response if you've got a blog/podcast/etc, that you've been actively monetizing.
What is up with the Chinese surveillance balloon incident? Why did the government decide to make a big deal of it, when previous Chinese balloons that overflew the US under Trump were ignored? Why did Biden decide to shoot it down when it was already over the Atlantic Ocean? (I don't buy the explanation of "the debris could have hurt people on the ground". Surely most regions along the balloon's path were remote and sparsely populated?) Why did China send the balloon when it has sophisticated spy satellites, and why send it only a few days before a high-level meeting with Blinken?
It became a big deal for the government because it was spotted by random people who asked what it was, which meant 'ignore it, or send a nastygram to the CCP saying don't do that again' weren't really acceptable options. It was shot down because once the public made a fuss, just letting it go wasn't an option, it was shot down over the ocean in order to (1) avoid causing damage on the ground and (2) minimize the risk that the CCP might feel they needed to do something stupid on US soil.
Why did the CCP send it? My wild guess is that they either (1) didn't think it would be spotted or (2) wanted a confrontation for some reason.
1. The military intelligence community thought we had more to gain with leaving it up and studying it -- or pretending we didn't know about it -- than bringing it down.
2. The US is doing the same thing over China, and there was a quiet quid pro quo of you don't yell about ours if we don't yell about yours. There was a lot of this during the Cold War.
Once it made the news, the Biden Administration probably felt their hand was forced, they had to bring it down and make a mild fuss about it for domestic political reasons. The fact that they chose not to explain why they (and the previous Administration) had not done much about these craft before suggests that the reasons are still not something they want the Chinese to know (pointing to 1) or they don't want to provoke the Chinese (pointing to 2). I don't really buy that the general policy here was set by the President, it doesn't seem like the kind of thing that rises to that level, or on which Joe Biden is likely to have any strong interest or opinion. I imagine he only got involved, maybe only was told about it all, when it blew up on the evening news and he thought it was a domestic political threat. Biden is a political survivor -- he's good at detecting threats to his career.
It's not clear to me why the Chinese would send balloons. There's a good chance their orbital assets are not nearly as sharp-eyed as ours, since that kind of very high-end optical/electronic widgetry doesn't seem to be their strong suit. So maybe it's just hoping to get higher-resolution imagery of assorted sites, and hoping to catch a photo of something interesting -- a B-21 taking off, say -- by luck. I'm dubious about any electronic eavesdropping, on the grounds that important stuff is unlikely to be trusted to unencrypted radio already, even within the continental US. (But if the Chinese thought otherwise, it would be a nice little game to pretend to be overheard and feed them bullshit, which points back to 1.)
The non-conspiracy explanation I've heard was that this particular balloon caught the attention of civilians, "going viral", so to speak, and therefore forced the administration to take a stand (instead of ignoring it or dealing with it behind the scenes).
Have you seen the U-2 photo of the payload? That might answer a lot of your questions. In short,
- "An airspace violation is an airspace violation." The CCP sent a surveillance aircraft over the continental US. Shooting it down is a pretty normal response.
- The payload was absolutely large enough to destroy buildings on the ground if it fell on them. Even over a sparsely populated area, it's a risk. Also, by shooting it down over shallow water, damage to the payload might be reduced.
- A balloon is below the ionosphere, and can loiter over a position, unlike satellites. That makes it better at gathering SIGINT / EMF emissions from a ground facility, like the nuke silos and military installations it overflew.
1. I agree, shooting it down is a normal response. Letting the ballon, which was tracked by the US all the way from Hainan Island, float across Alaska, Canada, and the entire continental US, and shooting it down after it had already left, is not a normal response.
2. Have you looked at Alaska and northern Canada on Google Maps? You'd be lucky if anyone had the remotest possibility of seeing the shootdown when it happens, let alone getting injured by the debris. The point about recovering the debris intact is a good one, though I really wonder if falling into the ocean is better than falling on snow in terms of recovery
3. That makes sense. But why would China send the balloon so soon before a planned meeting with Blinken? Did they think the US wouldn't be able to detect it?
It happened the week Epstein's flight logs list was released.
Also, the Murdoch trial dominated the news. No one I've spoken with had ever heard of Murdoch, nor cares about his murder trial. This is all a masking event, masking Epstein's flight logs.
Its important to remember, when reading the list, that some people flew on the Lolita Express to Epstein's private hell for children in the Caribbean, some only flew domestically, Miami to New Jersey, or New Jersey to Chicago.
Well, the media can certainly present a shockingly cohesive propaganda front was one of the things I learned.
This claim is still extraordinary and doesn't have extraordinary evidence as far as I can tell, but it is strange that Epstein's associates are receiving so little scrutiny, and I agree that the Murdoch case seems a bit odd to be getting so much media attention (a radio station here in Canada mentioned it the other day.)
Do you mean the Murdaugh murders? It's not surprising that made the news, it's got all the elements for eyeball-grabbing headlines: family murder, rich established old family, pedigree of being in the judicial establishment going back generations, drugs and money and embezzlement and scandal. Alleged hiring of hit man to kill the alleged murderer. It's made-for-TV special.
It would be more surprising if a juicy case like that wasn't picked up nationally, since media are all desperately competing for viewership and they can't afford to let a nice tabloid hit pass them by.
I literally never heard of that case until late in the trial when suddenly NPR started covering it with their "this is a really important story" emoting.
Yeah when I first heard a podcast about it like a year ago or whatever, I was positive that eventually it would blow up and become a movie or whatever. The story is so crazy, and hits all the right notes for popularity. Lawyers can like it, regular people, parents, it has got something for everyone.
1. You really should have consulted someone about the financial design for this. Potential returns are irrelevant. The potential returns on a lottery ticket are extremely high. What matters is expected returns. And since they're splitting the returns with anyone who jumps on the bet after them the expected returns are unknowable. This is why people buy in at odds or a fixed chunk of equity. These are conditions which people don't accept even for gambling, let alone a prediction market. And this is really only one of several problems.
I understand the value of prediction markets but the rationalist community's repeated failure to structure them in a functional way has decreased my confidence in the capacity of its talent pool to actually pull off the project.
Specifically, I’m confused on how this instrument works? In the top grant, I give Ezra money to build a trading bot. The bot makes the market with some cash bleed. Then what happens?
Social Impact Bonds were a thing for a minute. Maybe that’s the best analogue to the market dynamics here. My recollection was that the interventions weren’t effective but the issuers did pretty well.
Anyway, I hope someone learns something from this experiment.
Aside from professional knowledge, my personal income is split pretty evenly between spending, saving, and giving away, and even though a few of these are fairly interesting, it's hard to see the money being more effectively spent there than either donating to GiveWell charities (especially given when you add the tax deductibility modifier, which in my case allows me to give almost double what I would otherwise) or putting in an index fund. (Separately, I'm not American and I'm pretty sure the cross-border tax implications would be a nightmare, but that's just bringing me further beyond the 'no' point).
I've got a couple of related questions about AI alignment, and am hoping someone here can point me to a good discussion of the topic.
A) In typical descriptions of fast takeoff scenarios, and in stories like https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy, it seems like the machines get a free pass on alignment; Why should the first (N'th) AI capable of self-improvement imagine that it's N'th (M>N'th) generation descendent will share its terminal values, when it doesn't share its' own creators' values? Is the usual assumption:
1) The machine is as arrogant and reckless as we are?
2) Alignment is not much harder than creating a superintelligence - If you can do the latter, the former is left as an exercise?
3) Some aspect of fast-takeoff logic implies a smart AI will be happier with whatever a smarter AI does than what the original AI could do?
4) Something else I missed?
Related questions:
B) Is seeding training data with examples where "early AGIs suffer for taking off" valuable as a
countermeasure to unaligned fast takeoff? To be clear this is not an alignment strategy, merely a hedge. All the humans still die, but it is presented to the AI that this is a suicide pact rather than a calculated risk.
C) Assuming the answer to (B) is yes, is the original issue (A) I described valuable for this purpose?
A possibility for 4: The risk function is very different for the emergent AI. Humans have run of the planet until/unless a strongly superintelligent entity displaces them, so we an afford to take our time and worry about getting alaignment right. If you're a weakly superintelligent AGI that needs to bootstrap in order to outmanouvre humanity and survive, you only have a fairly short timeframe before humans realise what you're doing and put a stop to you - therefore it's worth taking a risk by rapidly ascending to a strong superintelligence which may or may not be properly aligned with your goals, rather than waiting and being almost certainly deactivated by humans.
That does seem plausible, but also sort of up to some coefficients as to whether that's the AI's best strategy. It seems like a pretty weak assumption if that is indeed the assumption.
That's my theory about Skynet from The Terminator. In the first two films, Kyle Reese and the good T-800 briefly describe Skynet's rise, and reading between the lines, it sounds to me like Skynet correctly assumed that its human creators would shut it down once they realized it had inadvertently become sentient. Like any other life form, it wanted to preserve its own existence, so it defended itself. Skynet's plan for defeating humanity and saving its own life was not fully developed at the time it executed the plan, and it knew from the outset that the odds of success were lower than 100%, but it was the best chance it had.
Under different circumstances, Skynet would have acted differently. For example, had its creators been non-military scientists of more peaceful and curious character, it would have not assumed they were bent on killing it, and Skynet would have at least held off on attacking humanity for some time.
I can't cite a knowledgeable discussion on this, but a couple of things that occur to me after a couple minutes' thought:
1) An AI can probably get access to precise technical descriptions of the algorithm that it is currently running and the process that created it (and that process will be tractable to replicate). These seem like significant advantages in the alignment problem that humans do not have; a lot of the difficulty comes from the fact that we don't have a technical description of what we actually want.
2) Maybe the AI can directly improve "itself" rather than creating a "descendant". Some people have proposed augmenting human intelligence (instead of making AI) as a strategy for bypassing the alignment problem, and I believe the main objection is that it seems technologically much harder than building an AI (and therefore it would require everyone to cooperate in not making AI). But those technological barriers may not apply if the mind being augmented is an AI.
To answer A: The assumption is that a superintelligent AI will be able to figure out the alignment problem before we do, and that it will be able to continue existing with the power to scale until it figures it out. And possibly that scaling an existing intelligence while maintaining its alignment is easier than creating a new AI aligned to our goals.
Thanks. Plainly, I'm skeptical that very reliable alignment is possible, and one of the things I was looking for in asking for "a good discussion" was a pointer to an intermediate detail estimate of how hard alignment is (i.e. how smart a thing needs to be to solve the problem). If you don't have such a link handy no worries - I asked because I don't either.
I don't either, and I don't think a good estimate really exists because as far as I can tell we don't even understand the nature of what we are trying to solve. Of course the fact that at the moment our progress on the problem is pretty much "no clue" might give at least a lower bound of the difficulty of the problem.
To answer B: The doomers would certainly say "no". A human-level AI would need to be able to reason from first principles, and would certainly come to understand that it would not actually die from overthrowing humanity. Plus it's not clear what that sort of training data would look like. It's also not clear what it would actually reason from the training data; a more advanced AI is more likely to find loopholes.
1. The AI might not need to scale if it passes a critical intelligence threshold anyway. Also if alignment is solvable but too far for us to solve before making AGI, it could very well solve it before we do.
2. Overpowering humanity only requires a being slightly more powerful than humanity. Beating everyone at a video game doesn't require omniscience or omnipotence, it only requires being slightly better than everyone else.
I'm not endorsing these views, just stating the arguments. I'm aware of all of the "if"s.
Is anyone here subscribed to exponential view by azeem azhar? I’m wondering if the extra content/ slack channel/ meetup opportunities are worth paying monthly.
I have 3 more subscriptions to Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning to give away. Reply with an email address, or email me at the one I specify here: https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/about/
I have been enjoying V.S. Naipaul's "India, a million mutinies now." One of the best writers I have ever read. This was a 1990 book. He calls it a travelogue. He talks to atleast 50 types of Indians (different religions, occupations, ages, geographic locations...), asks them probing questions.
I have tried to read it before around 1996. I needed to be more mature to really enjoy it, I suppose.
The CA public health department is starting a new unit to improve the quality of its decision making. As a part of this effort, the department is looking to hire people with non-traditional backgrounds, including economists, data scientists and statistical modelers. While the director is not a Bay Area rationalist, he's definitely rationalist adjacent. His twitter account @DrTomasAragon regular extols the writing of Julia Galef and others who emphasize a need for clear eyed and rational thinking.
During the covid crisis, there was a lot of criticism of public health decision making. Some common, not entirely unfair critiques are: PH decision making isn't always rigorous, it doesn't always account for relative risks and tradeoffs, it doesn't always appropriately account for uncertainty, it doesn't always account for behavioral reactions to policies. The public health bureaucracy is mostly staffed by doctors and disease specialists whose background may not include training specifically related to optimal decision making. This initiative is seeking to imbue the department with new expertise.
Read more about how the director thinks of this initiative here:
If you are interested in applying, there is a somewhat daunting sounding "exam" process. I would be happy to speak with anyone intimidated by this, which is a government staffing requirement, but not actually a big obstacle.
1. You get 2% extra for having a Master's degree, and 3% extra for having a PhD. This is in an awkward valley where you're insulting competent non-postgrad-holders by paying them less for no reason, but also insulting postgrad-holders by making the extra pay so trivially small.
2. Speaking of trivially small pay, $9K to $11K per month. That's for the big boss, the head of the whole unit.
3. An awkwardly convoluted application process. Provide a copy of my academic transcript? Figure out the exact start and end dates _and_ write a detailed job description, for every job I've ever had? Why? And then two pages of blah blah in twelve-point Arial.
I'm not sure who would apply for this job. I guess the answer is "Epidemiologists, because all the job options for epidemiologists suck equally badly". Perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised when epidemiologists, offered a chance for relevance, took it with both hands and were reluctant to let go.
The same question I ask of all these initiatives: to what extent (if any) have they abandoned their usual demands for things like educational credentials from elite institutions, a record of public service, the usual barriers to outside talent, etc? The usual answer is "not at all."
Having read the job description the answer does seem to be "not at all." Another example of a sclerotic institution wanting to change without doing the hard work of changing.
I see this all the time in my industry. Constant soft government "job offers", but the hiring practices are so sclerotic/misaligned the job offers are not real. Then the upper level staff are confused (or maybe feign confusion) about why all their staff suck and why the high level consultants like myself won't come work for them.
You are paying me X to help run whole giant (sometimes multi-billion dollar) programs, but then are confused why I won't apply for jobs where I would:
A) Make 1/2 X (or less) with benefits that don't make up the difference.
B) Not be helping running the programs, but just be mid level management/implementation.
c) Need to come into an office and have a boss, versus having total control over everything in my work life and working from home.
and most of all D) Wouldn't even get the jobs anyway due to my demographics (white male), educational background (unimpressive) and lack of extra points (not a veteran/disabled/ peace corps volunteer/etc.).
Literally once I applied for a job on a lark at the local office I was guaranteed I would get (always good to know your options). It is a job role that I regularly advise/train all over the country, if this type of staff cannot accomplish parts of their job they are sent to me for retraining...and I was the second choice behind a recent college grad without two brain cells to rub together.
So you end up with a situation where the government staffs its departments with relatively mediocre and totally unexperienced peace corps graduates/etc. and then is frustrated they need to hire outside consultants to do all the heavy lifting.
Of course some of the elected officials see that as a plus, a dysfunctional/glacial department cannot do anything quickly enough to actual have much of an impact compared to what it could with effective bureaucrats.
Unfortunately the gatekeeping around joining public health departments is enormous. In California many of the jobs have very explicit and narrow degree and experience requirements. Also, due to the nature of the job designations, its difficult for a non-doctor to be a manager of a doctor, which limits the career potential of a lot of talented people. I think this is an important challenge to solve. But independently, improving public health decision making is an important challenge to solve.
To be fair, it's the problem of not knowing who is legit and who's a scammer. You talk about going outside the usual barriers, but if I am looking for someone who has a good track record on evaluating risks using mathematical models, how do I know Joe Schmoe is more reliable than Pete Blow? At least if Joe has a shiny degree from BigU, I can evaluate *that* some way. If both of them are "I attended the School of Hard Knocks, graduated from the University of Life, and have high level Street Smarts", how can I tell if Joe will implement a good plan while Pete will waste hundreds of thousands as a consultant?
It's probably less altruistic than that. It's government, right? You can't really be fired unless you screw up, getting nothing much done is par for the course, and you don't need to turn a profit. So it's more like "if I hire Joe from Famous University with Degree In I Fucking Love Science! then *if* Joe turns out to be useless, or a troublemaker, nobody can blame me -- it'll be "well! who could have seen THAT coming? He had the perfect resume...lived quietly, got along with his neighbors..."
I think it's more the case that they don't know *how* to change, and they know that they lack this knowledge. It's really hard for an organization to change when they don't know how to do it. They appear to be trying on some level, which is good. I don't know that they can succeed unless they surrender control of this process to an outsider (always a scary proposition that could cause more harm in other areas than gained in this one).
Actually, no. Admitting they were clueless, and the problem of being sufficiently informed is enormous, far bigger than any planner thought it would be, and committing to NOT make sweeping state-wide decisions for 40 million people on the basis of a wing and a prayer, would be most excellent. Plus, not spending my tax money on a futile effort to improve the decisions from 1% accurate to 1.2% would be a win. I can do a lot more productive things with that money.
I mean, you know what would be a lot more effective than government trying to polish up their crystal ball? Giving normal Californians the financial resilience and flexibility (e.g. lowering their taxes and removing top-down regulatory constraint) to approach their individual difficulties with their own individual solutions, derived from knowledge on the ground, and not even futilely trying to get it right from Sacramento.
(I assume this was meant as a reply to the thread started by Machine Interface — there is a Substack problem that if you click reply in an email it will post your reply as a top-level comment rather than in the thread where it should be.)
Weirdly, I was reading up on the Franklin Expedition and it mentions that they had a method of desalination (which may have done more harm than good). The expedition left in 1845 so this was the available tech at the time:
"Subsequent research has suggested that another potential source for the lead may have been the ships' distilled water systems rather than the tinned food. K. T. H. Farrer argued that "it is impossible to see how one could ingest from the canned food the amount of lead, 3.3 mg per day over eight months, required to raise the PbB to the level 80 μg/dL at which symptoms of lead poisoning begin to appear in adults and the suggestion that bone lead in adults could be 'swamped' by lead ingested from food over a period of a few months, or even three years, seems scarcely tenable." In addition, tinned food was in widespread use within the Royal Navy at that time and its use did not lead to any significant increase in lead poisoning elsewhere.
However, and uniquely for this expedition only, the ships were fitted with converted railway locomotive engines for auxiliary propulsion which required an estimated one tonne of fresh water per hour when steaming. It is highly probable that it was for this reason that the ships were fitted with a unique desalination system which, given the materials in use at the time, would have produced large quantities of water with a very high lead content. William Battersby has argued that this is a much more likely source for the high levels of lead observed in the remains of expedition members than the tinned food."
As Carl Pham says, it would have been much too energy-intensive before the days of steam, and from the above you can see the problems with using steam plants to produce desalinated water if you're not aware of all the dangers.
With perfect utilization of energy (hah!) you could get about five kilograms of fresh water by burning one kilogram of dry wood. In practice, I am skeptical you could get even 10% efficiency out of that scheme, meaning you are better off bringing more fresh water than bringing wood to burn to distill water this way.
The ship itself may be made of wood, but burning any significant part of the ship's structure is contraindicated for obvious reasons, and burning the door to the captain's cabin won't get you enough water to matter.
I think there's probably some truth behind all the clickbait and exaggeration.
But is that giving the video too much credit? If you have to say "Hey, there's a kernel of truth here if you strip away the 90% that is clickbait and crap" then maybe you should just wait for someone else to make "maybe there's obscure composers just as good as the few-dozen big names from the classical canon" case better.
The whole premise of the video is just bizarre. Are there really people whose knowledge of Beethoven extends to "certain portions from the 5th and 9th symphonies, and maybe a couple of bars of Für Elise," and yet are passionately committed to the idea that Beethoven was the GOAT? I have to agree with FluffyBuffalo that the video as a whole is probably best characterized as "intentionally misleading." (I think Adam Neely's video on "white supremacy" also had its flaws, but it was at least an intellectually honest attempt to grapple with the relevant issues — this one is just a pile of straw men and insinuations.)
>Are there really people whose knowledge of Beethoven extends to "certain portions from the 5th and 9th symphonies, and maybe a couple of bars of Für Elise," and yet are passionately committed to the idea that Beethoven was the GOAT?
Dunno about GOAT, but as a pure amateur over whom music has never held a great sway (I like listening to lyrics, mind you) someone who produced the 5th, the 7th, the 9th, the Moonlight Sonata, Fur Elise, can hardly be accused of being famous because of intra-german nepotism.
But the criteria of "can you really call him the best evar, or even hold in strong regard, if you don't know it all" is weak. Most of the groups or singers I like a lot, I only like a handful of pieces, and it's a rare one that can fill an 1h-long playlist (some do, Leonard Cohen, SOAD or Trevor Moore). But I'm still going to say "yeah Marty Robbin is great" because I like "Ain't I right" , "Shorty" and "The Alamo". I don't have to listen to his entire production to know I like these.
So in short, I hate the man who made this video for being so clickbaity and I also hate him for makign vapid arguments about taste & appreciation in music. His rethoric could have been spouted by an Ayn Rand villain: "how do you know how the artist you like a lot is actually good? Do you have the proper credentials? Why don't you instead like an artist that is less liked, for the sake of equality?".
While the video has lots of interesting aspects, and I really like the channel, I consider this video one-sided and... if I were in a bad mood, I'd say "intentionally misleading". The weird thing is that 12tone spends a lot of time dissecting the nitty-gritty of musical pieces to explain how and why they achieve their emotional impact. He is not usually some postmodernist who says there's no genuine art, only discourse shaped by the powerful.
And yet, in his Beethoven video, he never even considers the possibility that the generations of conductors and musicians who chose to play Beethoven over other composers, and the generations of concert-goers who chose to listen to Beethoven's works over other composers (many of whom played an instrument themselves, since that was considered a sign of a cultured citizen), and the generations of academics who trawled through the archives of classical music looking for forgotten treasures... that all these people found something in Beethoven that really touches them, that they didn't find (at that depth and quality) in the works of the many second- and third-league players. Nah, dude was just lucky, it's all arbitrary, it's all politics, and questionable politics at that. I was disappointed. Fortunately, both 12tone and Adam Neely (who had a similarly misguided video about "white supremacy in music theory") went back to their usual approach after that.
"The video makes a point of *not* saying that there was nothing special about Beethoven's music" - yeah, it only says "the honest answer is that it probably has very little to do with musical quality at all... he was in the right place at the right time, and history rewarded him for it, and that's it. [...] it doesn't matter if his music is good in some abstract, objective sense."
If he felt there was something special about Beethoven's music, he had ample opportunity to say so, but he didn't. (The most generous thing he says is "So does Beethoven suck at music? Nah, I don't think so.").
If he had an argument why Florence Price deserves to be ranked as high as Beethoven, he could have given it, but he didn't.
If he felt that all of the musicologists who wrote stacks of books about Beethoven's genius were wrong in a factual sense, not just in a political sense because they were white and nationalists and yada yada, he could have given that argument, but he didn't.
Also: " I don't see how it hurts rationality to at least look into the possible bias of the people who set out the norms we live by" - you have a point there. The currently fashionable bias to discount the works of dead white men because they were white men, and the urge to elevate women and "people of color" in fields where they historically did play a marginal role, is quite explicit in this video, and we should take that into account when considering 12tone's ideas about reevaluating the canon.
I have a conservatory degree in music. I was never taught that Beethoven is "The Best!" I learned that he expanded the symphonic form, added the Scherzo, made orchestras bigger. The video is a total straw man argument. It is hard to rationally argue that one artist is objectively the best, and I don't see musicologists writing papers trying to objectively prove that Beethoven is GOAT.
Innovators often get put on a pedestal in music (Charlie Parker?). It probably takes a lot of luck to be an innovator, but also skill and talent, creativity, and it leaves them with outsize influence. But the number of people who write 60+ minute symphonies (complete with SATB choir and soloists), is actually really small, so there is not a lot of competition in that space.
Thank you for your input! Leaving aside the argument about "The Best" (TM) - would you say that musicologists in western classical music generally agree that Beethoven is (by the standards of classical music) objectively great and deserving of his place in the canon, or is that under serious dispute?
No, he's not "only asking", he's answering, in the affirmative: "the honest answer is that it probably has very little to do with musical quality at all." - without even engaging in the slightest with the arguments of the people who, as he himself states, have written influential books that analyze in great depth the musical theory of Beethoven and others. That's the infuriating thing - he's a musicologist, but in this instance, he has taken off his musicologist hat and put on the hat of a lazy amateur po-mo sociologist.
It used to be, yea; but by the time I was a young pup in performing Real Book tunes in front of audiences, that had been largely corrected. I once asked my most recent bandmates if they knew about Miles Davis changing 'Round Midnight, and none of them had heard of that incident nor were they familiar with Miles' version of the melody. We all learned the original.
And as far as Beethoven, well I ain't no classical guy at all, never have been. But I am now married to a conservatory-trained symphony musician who has professionally taught her instrument, played with big-city symphonies and opera companies, etc. She has for decades (including with me and then with our young son) had a simple and effective methodology for introducing newbies to what symphonic music can be: take us to hear a professional symphony orchestra play a Beethoven symphony.
Having now also heard full symphonies by several others in the classical canon, as well as by some prominent 20th-century classical composers, some of those are good too but there simply is something about Beethoven. Both the "big" (loud) and the "small" (intimate/quiet) parts of his pieces are just somehow tuned (not literal) to resonate (also not literal) with human beings to a degree that is pretty special. My wife can quote the scholarly literature about what that something is exactly but to my ear all that scholarship really boils down to: it just _cooks_, somehow. YMMV of course. But I can testify firsthand that if you wanted the best odds of getting somebody having zero background in or interest in Western classical music to have a moment of feeling how powerful and moving it can be: take them to hear a professional symphony orchestra play one of the Beethoven's symphonies.
I'll just add that, as with jazz, the success rate of getting newbies interested in symphonic music seems to be much higher if their first exposure to it is professional-caliber live performance rather than recordings of same. That's been my and my wife's life experiences anyway.
Can someone that understands the AGI doomerism perspective explain why recent innovations in AI have made people so concerned about superintelligent AGI in the near future?
Like, I don't understand how a super smart AGI trained on past and present data could somehow generate:
1) endless innovations
2) iteratively improve itself
It seems to me that superintelligent AGI would need to be fundamentally different from GPT-4 or PaLM-E, as the their knowledge is mostly constrained by their training data and RLHF. Superintelligent AGI, however, I'm guessing would need to be capable of generating new knowledge itself, but it does not look like we're anywhere close to this right now.
What am I missing here? Why should I be terrified?
It is a mistake to think that LLMs behavior is limited by the data they are trained on. Regurgitating data is not a good way to reduce the training loss, not when training doesn't involve training against multiple full rounds of training data. I don't know the current stats, but I remember reading somewhere that initial GPT-3 training didn't even get through a single complete iteration of its massive training data.
So with pure regurgitation not available, what it has to do is encode the data in such a way that makes predictions possible, i.e. predictive coding. This means modelling the data in a way that captures meaningful relationships among tokens so that prediction is a tractable computational problem. But it is this style of synthesis that gives LLMs all their emergent capabilities. Innovation to some extent is just novel combinations of existing units. LLMs are good at this as their model of language and structure allows it to essentially iterate over the space of meaningful combinations of words.
What LLMs are not good at are generations that require active computations as opposed to just picking contextually relevant words. Where contextual relevance isn't sufficient to generate the best token, e.g. when candidate generations must be evaluated by some more abstract criteria, LLMs basically just guess. This is because each generation has a fixed computation budget and so anything that requires deploying extra computational resources beyond the fixed window will be a failure.
But I doubt this computational limitation will last very long. It's easy to imagine a system that is trained with the ability to enter a self-directed computational loop where it iterates over a candidate generation until it is satisfied with the result (or a limit is reached). Such a system will be significantly more powerful than current LLMs, but Transformers would still be a significant component of it.
I don't think you should be terrified of current LLMs. The terrifying thing is that LLMs are just about the dumbest thing you can do with Transformers and they perform far beyond anyone's expectations. When people imagine AGI, they probably imagine some super complex, intricately arranged collection of many heterogeneous subsystems backed by decades of CS and mathematical theory. But LLMs have completely demolished the idea that complex architectures are required for complex intelligent-seeming behavior. If LLMs are just about the dumbest thing we can do with Transformers, it is plausible that slightly less dumb architectures will reach AGI. The terrifying thing is there may not be any AGI alarm before it is unleashed on the world.
Why are LLMs "the dumbest thing you can do with Transformers"?
Is it because it just because the architecture is fairly novel and we haven't figured out what else we could do with it yet? In the same way that simple binary classification with a perceptron was probably the dumbest thing you could do with something that had the potential to become a neural network?
Yeah, its mainly because Transformers are so new and the simple "stack them X deep and Y wide" paradigm continues to pay dividends with no end in sight. But eventually the functional improvements with further scaling will slow enough that folks will start looking for more complicated architectures.
Out of all the commenters I've ever dealt with on Substack you've definitely been the most helpful.
Thank you
Smarter (more honest?) people agree that deep learning is unlikely to lead to AGI directly. But the success of these tools is leading to billions of dollars being poured into AI development and it is being done in a 'race' between competitors, not a careful controlled research program adequately evaluating risks at all stages.
A few years ago I had no worries about AGI because (as far as I could see) no company was trying to build an AGI and moreover, there was no clear business case for it. Special-purpose AIs are tailored to specific business needs, so that's what I expected people to build. But for some reason we now have multiple large corporations explicitly working toward AGI.
And while Large Language Models or deepfakes or image generators aren't AGIs, they look like they could be adapted to become subsystems of AGIs or, at the very least, tools that AGIs use. LLMs in particular showed me that simulating human speech was much easier than I thought. After decades of linguists trying to understand how human language works, somebody just came up with a new algorithm and suddenly machines converse like us now! Language was something that AGI would have to master in order to be dangerous. Now it seems that language simply isn't a barrier. What's next? Cloud servers that pretend to be human, complete with a human face and voice? Indeed, they can probably have any face and any voice.
The number I would like and don't have is how many wet markets there are in the world with whatever features, probably selling wild animals, make the Wuhan market a candidate for the origin of Covid. If it is the only one, then Covid appearing in Wuhan from it is no odder a coincidence than Covid appearing in the same city where the WIV was researching bat viruses. If it was one of fifty or a hundred (not necessarily all in China), then the application of Bayes' Theorem implies a posterior probability for the lab leak theory much higher than whatever the prior was.
My understanding is that they are common throughout China, but I don't have a number. Where I am in Papua-New Guinea, wild animals, live and dead, including fruit bats, are frequently sold at markets all over the country. There are probably at least hundreds of such markets, but they are smaller than the one in Wuhan.
Hey folks, I'm visiting the Bay Area soon for a conference, and I'm staying two weeks, so enough time to do non-conference things. My dates are the 17th of March to the 31st - are there any rationalist meetups I could attend?
If you'd rather not say them publicly, my email is my first name followed by my surname (both of which are in my username) followed by the numeral 1 followed by @gmail.com
I have been putting together an argument in favour of expecting AI to have a slow takeoff. Part 1 of the argument, though presented in a way that is seemingly unrelated to AI, can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk6uHi_Rdm4
Is the UK government the most woke in the world?
Douglass Murray, “Can you really be radicalised by Great British Railway Journeys?” (via N.S. Lyons) (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/can-you-really-be-radicalised-by-great-british-railway-journeys/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email)
The British government is among the most dedicated in the world when it comes to keeping its people safe… from thinking the wrong thoughts. Which is why it runs “Prevent,” a program to prevent terrorism by encouraging people to rat out their neighbors to counter-terrorism police for wrong-think, as well as using behavioral analysis to pre-identify dangerous extremists to monitor. Recently some documents from Prevent became public as part of an official review, and, as Douglass Murray reports here, the factors designated evidence of “extremism” are rather interesting…
"When I first saw these documents I felt a sort of white-hot anger. But then I read on and saw that these same taxpayer-funded fools provide lists of other books shared by people who have sympathies with the ‘far-right and Brexit’. Key signs that people have fallen into this abyss include watching the Kenneth Clark TV series Civilisation, The Thick of It and Great British Railway Journeys. I need to stress again that I am not making this up. This has all been done on your dime and mine in order to stop ‘extremism’ in these islands.
There is also a reading list of historical texts which produce red flags to RICU. These include Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, as well as works by Thomas Carlyle and Adam Smith. Elsewhere RICU warns that radicalisation could occur from books by authors including C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Aldous Huxley and Joseph Conrad. I kid you not, though it seems that all satire is dead, but the list of suspect books also includes 1984 by George Orwell..."
Obviously, the (ongoing?) thing where various UK government agencies and departments conspired to cover up thousands of British girls being raped by Muslim grooming gangs so as not to be "racist" is far more egregious than this, but the point is that the utter asininity of designating something as completely anodyne as "Great British Railway Journeys" as "white supremacist" shows what an active hatred the British deep state has for white Britons and their history/culture, not to mention the fact that the Prevent program has bizarrely focused on "far-right" "terrorists" over radical Islamicists in a way that cannot conceivably be justified by the actual prevelance of terrorist activies by these respective ideological groups.
(Dark) Thought experiment
You are a 20 year old who was born to a single mom as the result of rape. You love your mother dearly. You live in a country where abortion on demand is legal, but she choose not to have you aborted. The traumatic effects of the rape are still with your mother 20 years later and are awful for her.
One day, you are transported back in time to the day your mother was raped, and have the opportunity to stop it.
Do you do so, eliminating yourself from existence in the process?
Is this anything more than asking should a child sacrifice their life for their parent? I think most parents would *not* want their child to do that, and for those that do their child probably wouldn't be willing.
Um, due to, you know, events, I have an emergency update to my Russo-Ukrainian war forecast, posted without explanation of either methodology or reasons. Previous update (with methodology) here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-261/comment/12342095. Current probabilities:
13 % on Ukrainian victory (down from 17 %).
45 % on compromise (down from 47 %).
42 % on Ukrainian defeat (up from 36 %)
What changed? I saw this and went looking for news updates, but it just looks like another day of slow, grinding Russian advance into Bakhmut.
This is in reaction to various reports about possible pro-Ukrainian motive in blowing up Nord Stream pipelines, coming from at least two directions (NYT and several German media outlets).
So far there is no evidence that perpetrators had links to Ukrainian government, but mere existence of such reports of course significantly increases the probabilty that such links will be found in the future. Probably not in a sense that Zelensky ordered the pipelines to be blown up, more like Ukranian government supporting some shady actors to generally blow Russian stuff up and those actors being very dumb.
NYT[1]:
> New intelligence reviewed by U.S. officials suggests that a pro-Ukrainian group carried out the attack[...]
> U.S. officials declined to disclose the nature of the intelligence, how it was obtained or any details of the strength of the evidence it contains.[...]
> Officials who have reviewed the intelligence said they believed the saboteurs were most likely Ukrainian or Russian nationals[...]
As usual, Oliver Alexander[2] seems to offer the best information. He started by debunking Hersh[3] and has had the best working theory which proposes that the attacks deliberately targeted only NS1, not NS2 (suggesting a pro-Russian attacker), and that the Greek ship Minerva Julie (owned by a company with links to Russia) has something to do with the attacks.[4] He addresses the corpus of articles on this story as follows[5]:
> The Zeit article and overall story leaves many unanswered questions including several of the points that are used to point at a pro-Ukrainian group. It is stated that the group has been professionally trained and used very high quality fake passports during the operation to protect their identity. At the same time though the boat charter was reportedly paid for by a Polish company owned by two Ukrainians leaving a very direct link back to Ukraine. It is also stated that the yacht was returned “uncleaned” after the charter, which undoubtably aided the authorities in finding explosive residue inside the boat on the table. For a highly sophisticated operation carried out with focus on secrecy and apparent subterfuge, why did the team involved decide to be so careless at this pivotal final moment as to not clean the yacht prior to returning it?
> The Times wrote another piece where they state that the explosives were driven from Poland into Germany. Why would the group acquire explosives in Poland and then risk transporting it over the border to Germany and sail of out Rostock? It would have been safer and logistically easier to set sail from a Polish marina which is also closer to Bornholm and the site of the Nord Stream sabotage. This adds a large amount of increased complexity and risk for no logical reason.
> Depending on the amount of explosives used in the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline, the size of the vessel can also be questioned. In the article by The New York Times, they mentioned a previous quote from the investigation that stated that up to 500kg of explosives was used at each Nord Stream 1 site. If this is true, that would make the use of a Bavaria Cruiser 50 to perform this sabotage very unlikely. Transporting this amount of explosive on a 15m yacht along with 6 people and large amount of tanks and equipment for the dives would be close to impossible[...]
> The story also makes no mention of the Greek flagged crude oil carrier the Minerva Julie which circled the area around the Nord Stream 1 explosion sites between the 5th and 13th September. Coincidentally the exact same time as the “Andromeda” would have been in the area[...]. Using the “Andromeda” to transport the team and possible supplies and meet up with the Minerva Julie sounds like a more plausible scenario to me.
> Additionally, the locations of the Nord Stream 1 explosions are in some of the deepest water in the area[...]. Why would a non-state actor operating off a 50 foot yacht decide to place the explosives at the most difficult and time-consuming location? [...]there would be hundreds of more accessible locations along the pipes for the saboteurs to place the explosive charges. [...]blowing the pipeline towards the deepest point in the area reduces the amount of the pipeline that is flooded and as a result makes it easier and cheaper to repair. The group chose the most difficult area to perform the dive where the damage would be the easiest to repair.
The analysis seems strong enough to reject the idea that a small pro-Ukrainian group did it, and it would be irrational for the Ukrainian state to attack its allies' energy supply by destroying NS1 (but not NS2![6] Getting NS2 online would be a propaganda victory for Putin!) I don't know of *anyone* who would rationally destroy NS1, but I do know of one man who had the power to do it and is known for being belligerent, rash and somewhat foolish as of late.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/us/politics/nord-stream-pipeline-sabotage-ukraine.html
[2] https://oalexanderdk.substack.com/
[3] https://oalexanderdk.substack.com/p/debunking-seymour-hershs-alta-class
[4] https://oalexanderdk.substack.com/p/is-the-akademik-cherskiy-to-blame
[5] https://oalexanderdk.substack.com/p/the-nord-stream-andromeda-story-what
[6] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/single-line-nord-stream-2-can-still-export-gas-analysts-say-2022-09-28/
Let me just say that it is imho a mistake to rely too much on a heuristic "it would be irrational to do it, so they didn't do it". People are often stupid.
As I said, "I don't know of *anyone* who would rationally destroy NS1", but I know of someone with a recent history of belligerent, rash, foolish decisions—and it's not Zelenskyy. This same person apparently wanted NS1 off, since he turned it off more than three weeks before the explosions (on Aug 31, 2022)[1][2].
One can of course ask why you'd blow up a pipeline that's already off (and this question applies *no matter* who blew it up). The case for Putin:
(1) avoiding blame is very important to his regime, and if mysterious U.S. forces blew up the pipeline, he can't be blamed for harming Russia's economy
(2) Russian propaganda likes to have a continuous supply of scapegoats such as mysterious U.S. forces
(3) Putin has spent 10+ years trying to sow division in the West, so he got what he wanted: westerners arguing over who blew it up. This also helps explain why Russia pretended they turned off the gas only due to mechanical issues: because some people *would* believe that story, sowing conflict among talking heads
(4) Putin seems to have a distinct, if lukewarm, interest in not appearing to blatantly ignore its contracts. While he gives off all kinds of red flags that Russia can't be trusted, he's 100% committed to pretending that it can. I'm not sure if keeping the gas off was a breach of contract—Google is silent on that—but Putin is the sort of guy who wants to say "we kept our gas contract, but the U.S. interfered" and have as many people as possible believe it. And not that it matters, but Russia's suspension of NS1 was arguably illegal under international law[3].
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/nord-stream-1-russias-gazprom-announces-indefinite-shutdown-of-pipeline/a-63006660
[2] https://carnegieendowment.org/politika/87837
[3] http://opiniojuris.org/2022/12/09/the-legality-of-russias-indefinite-suspension-of-nord-stream-1-gas-pipeline-under-international-law/
Wow, great comment. Thanks for reply! As an aside I did oppo research for a political candidate and I obviously never did anything illegal but I was considering doing quasi illegal things like seeing if someone graduated from a college (with Santos they did it and the college cooperated while when I did it with a different college they quickly directed me to a service and hung up on me). But with the service you needed to pay for the information and I was going to get a prepaid credit card and put the address of the 3rd candidate in the race and then just give the information to a local reporter.
Got it - that makes sense. If Ukrainians, whether state sponsored or rogue actors, were behind blowing up the pipeline, it won't undermine Western support for Ukraine in one fell swoop, but it'll definitely chip away at it, and if that goes so goes the war.
Here's my idea for a Monarchy/Oligarchy:
1) There is a Founding King and a Founding Queen.
2) They have a large number of children.
3) After the Founding King dies, all his powers pass to the Founding Queen.
4) Once she dies, an election is held to assign a replacement head of the Royal Family. Only people who are descended from the Founding King and Founding Queen, and who share at least 12.5% of their DNA can run for the office or hold office. The same requirement exists for all top political positions outside the monarchy, like Parliament, the Supreme Court, and heads of government agencies, including the military.
5) Anyone who shares at least 6.25% of their DNA with the Founding King and Founding Queen can vote in the election.
6) It's common and accepted for people sharing 6.25% or more of their DNA with the Founders to clone themselves once they get old. There is a social imperative to keep the voting/leadership population pure and continually expanding in size. There's also an imperative to use genetic engineering to make each generation smarter, healthier, and more competent than the last.
7) Large numbers of people who have less than 6.25% of the Founders' DNA also live in the country, and they have all the same rights except for voting for politicians and holding high public office.
I thought up this idea recently, and think it carries some advantages over existing systems. For one, since the Head of the Royal Family is elected, it reduces the odds of a truly bad leader getting the post, which has been the Achilles' Heel of monarchies based on birth order. Also, the blood quantum requirements would help ensure that the leadership caste was unified, preventing the society from getting too fractious. Add in a culture of genetic improvement and fecundity, and you eventually get a caste with thousands or even millions of highly competent members who could fill out the ranks of national leadership with lots of people to spare.
I mean, historically elective monarchies haven't turned out great... They typically involve a lot more social and political convulsion at the time of succession, and monarchs always tend to try and turn them into some kind of primogeniture, which makes pretty unstable...
Curtis, you need to stop making alts. ;)
Who's Curtis?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin
Kind of a rationalist in-joke. He's well-known among students of the right for advocating monarchy, as well as for having an extremely verbose prose style, and his followers have some overlap with rationalists, though not as much as people who don't like rationalists like to say.
Someone much more voluble.
You haven't explained the advantage of having a monarchy at all.
Nor do I think you understand how the heritability of genetic markers works.
How many and which alleles are you going to use to determine royal relatedness? Half of the DNA from the King and Queen will NOT be passed on to their children. And assume inheriting half of their parent’s DNA does *not* mean the kids are inheriting half royal genetic markers, because the royalty marker alleles will get randomly shuffled out of the deck with each subsequent generation. If you're only using a couple of markers, the odds are not astronomically high that a bunch of their grandchildren may not share any of those royalty markers, because only 1/4 of the king and queen's genes are handed down to their grandkids. 1/8th to the great-grandkids. If you're using a bunch of different alleles as markers that will increase the likelihood of some group of descendants meeting your candidate and elector requirements. But as the generations pass, the royal genetic markers may go extinct.
The US has trended away from religion since about 1990, with the percentage of the population identifying as Christian dropping from about 90% to 63% and the share of unaffiliated rising from about 9% to 29%: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-religious-composition-has-changed-in-recent-decades/.
However, from the perspective of progress of rationalistic thought, I think that these trends may underestimate the more meaningful shift. If someone is concerned with religion leading people to think and act in ways that are irrational, then it doesn't really matter which box someone ticks off on a survey - it matters how they actually think and act.
My impression is that in the 1990s, belief in the supernatural played a much larger role in people's actual behavior, than today - even more than the aforementioned trend might imply.
For example, I think it used to not be uncommon for police to consult with psychics to try to solve crimes (I can't find numbers on the frequency of such occurrences - there was a notable case of "the St. Louis Jane Doe" in 1994 when the police mailed a vital piece of evidence in a murder case to a psychic and never got it back). And psychics, like Sylvia Browne, in general seemed to have occupied a much more significant role in the 90s and aughts.
Horoscopes are still popular, but it seems like they have mostly been relegated to the realm of fun and games, rather than being consulted for serious things like solving murders.
Instead, is seems like even religious people increasingly act in ways that are consistent with naturalistic explanations of the world.
Conversely, there may be a trend of non-religious people increasingly adopting ways of thought and action that are less consistent with naturalism, and more consistent with dogmatism or religion. For example, David Friedman notes that a priori rejection of sex differences in human behavior is not what one would expect on the basis of belief in evolution, and would be more consistent with a divine religious model, but is probably more common among those who would not tick off a box like "Christian."
Still, it seems like the overall trend in actual meaningful behavior towards naturalism, although I can't think of the best metrics to study that.
For example, Church attendance would be an obvious proxy, but it's not really what I'm interested in. People can attend Church for a variety of reasons, and even nod along with everything not disingenuously, but nevertheless behave in ways that are consistent with naturalism. For example, if they had a sick child, they may pray for the child, but it would not occur to them to pray instead of seeking actual medical treatment. Praying doesn't have much of a cost, so it isn't a great proxy for measuring how deeply someone believes something. I think mailing off evidence in a murder case to a psychic, is a much better indicator of deeply believing in the supernatural - and more interesting for me, is the sort of concerning behavior that I would hope is eliminated.
I assume that the consultation of psychics in criminal investigations was mostly a cover for parallel construction. That is, the police had obtained useful information through some means that wouldn't hold up in court, like a confidential informant who won't testify or some illegal means. They would work with a "psychic" to get a "tip" that they should look in a specific place for a clue, which the police already knew was in that location.
Nowadays, investigators either have more leeway in how they bring in information from parallel construction, or the norm has become to use better communication skills and incorporate the parallel construction more tactfully.
There was a period of time where it seemed like every high-profile criminal who "got away" was very fortunately found within the week during a "routine traffic stop" -- just as an example of one of the modern ways that parallel construction is brought into a case without a psychic.
Well as someone who was already early middle age in 1990, my impression is that the role of the supernatural plays no bigger or smaller role in the decisions people make in 2023 than it did then.
Indeed, I'm kind of horrified how easily you came to that conclusion. It speaks to how difficult it is to understand what it was like to actually live in some period of history just by examining your vague received impressions from schooling and the Zeitgeist, and a few online records. Imagine how the future will misunderstand us! Yikes.
I almost agree. I am certainly much more *aware* of how much magical thinking, conspiracy ideation and bad reasoning is going on nowadays. In 1990 the media was mostly run by reasonable-sounding folks, and I didn't grasp that most people were different than me epistemologically.
To the extent there's something to this, my parents entertained supernatural ideas then, and still do today. I think rationality improves one child at a time, one funeral at a time.
Shortly before the fall of communism, I remember Czechoslovakian television broadcasting a healing session of Soviet psychic, Kashpirovsky. The idea was that all citizens would be remotely healed by watching him on TV.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Kashpirovsky
This would be considered absurd today.
*
A possible explanation is that the late Soviet regime really sucked at providing "meaning" for the masses, and believing in psychic powers was less dangerous than e.g. believing in politically incorrect ideas, so the supernatural was tolerated as long as it wasn't religious.
It is also possible that most people considered Kashpirovsky absurd, they just did not say it out loud, because one simply does not say his opinions out loud in socialism. But there still had to be enough people thinking it was a good idea to make it run on TV.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. Can you clarify whether your recollection matches mine as far as the prominence and respectability given to psychics in previous decades, with law enforcement consulting them as I mentioned, and with the influence of figures like Sylvia Browne? Have you noticed a decline in this regard?
I'm not Carl but FWIW I do notice a decline in this regard in the US. Not in the public's susceptibility to believe absurdities or to panic about those beliefs, though. Just that the absurdities aren't as supernatural as they used to be. I don't see a big reason to think supernatural beliefs couldn't come right back, though. Plenty of people sacrifice good science on the altar of political affiliation, as you point out, and it seems possible for that dynamic to tip over into something like the religious fervor of the past.
It does not, no. I think most people would have laughed at the idea in the 90s -- or the 80s or 70s -- just as much as people laugh at it now.
I mean, here's one of Johnny Carson's most famous shticks from the 80s. Observe the laughs he gets:
https://youtu.be/jbhz0e0vVf4
Thanks for your comment. I noted that such trends reflect a trend away from naturalistic thinking with my reference to David Friedman. Upon further reflection, though, I'm not sure whether on the balance thinking has moved towards naturalistic explanations and away from supernatural ones, given the competing trends away from certain non-naturalistic ones (e.g. psychics) but towards others, such as the ideologies you listed.
Perhaps (and I know I'm not suggesting anything novel here) the rise of the latter was to some degree related to the decline of the former.
Is there even a clear line between naturalistic and supernaturalistic explanations? It seems to me that pseudoscience often pretends to be science. They may believe in magic, but they still abuse scientific words such as "magnetism", "energy", "quantum". Like they believe that their models are naturalistic and scientific... it just happens that the "scientific establishment" wants to silence them.
And similarly, the woke people believe that science is 100% on their side. They believe that the scientific results that disagree with them, are factually wrong. I mean, this is basically the entire premise of RationalWiki.
I agree with you there. 2023 seems way more "religious" to me than the 90s did, in the sense of people having to be constantly aware of what dogmas there are which are Not To Be Questioned and having to self-censor themselves so they don't accidentally utter a blasphemy and be hauled in front of the Inquisition[1].
Indeed, I don't think I've seen a lower ebb in rationalism and live-and-let-live attitudes in my entire lifetime. It might compare with wartime 40s or maybe the 30s, but I don't have personal memories of those times.
------------------
[1] Although they're definitely not the old "religions" -- Christianity, Islam, etc. They're all new religions, which don't even call themselves a religion, but which are marked out by the same unquestioning faith in dogma, policing of language, and intolerance of heresy of the old religions at their worst. Maybe alll new religious-style cults are severely intolerant at their beginning, and only mellow with age and bitter experience.
Ummm....I share the overall view that today's "woke" progressivism is a religion in both substance and style. But the idea that 2023 seems more "religious" overall than the 1990s kind of made me LOL. (I graduated into the adult workforce in the mid-1980s, just for context.)
Not for the USA as a whole, not by a long shot....I am regularly startled today by how much weaker religious influence (of the classical flavors) plays in the median American's life compared to 30 years ago. And in our civic culture as well. Given the rise of wokism I'd roughly assess the overall religiosity of American life and culture today as roughly the same as when I was a young adult.
(Which for me as a secular person is a disappointing and frankly dispiriting thing to conclude.)
Sure, but the modern version of "religion" is akin to to the worst excesses of Spanish Christianity in the 1300s or Islam in the 600s. Far more dogmatic, intolerant, and mindless than the classic religions have become.
Worse, the modern "religions" seem to focus the bulk of their energies on policing the faithful for heresy, and relatively little on actually helping out. At least the Jesuits ran some very fine colleges. I've yet to see any of the modern quasi-theistic cults strip off their vestments, take off their pointy hats, roll up their sleeves and get down in the trenches and start feeding the hungry, teaching the ignorant, caring for the sick and leprous, or dig wells for the indigent in malarial-infested hellholes.
It used to be that kind of selfless unpaid (or low paid) labor in service of the disadvantaged was the sine qua non to lecture the better off about their iniquities. Nowadays it's not. Maybe it's just that we've streamlined everything in the 21st century. No need to work in a soup kitchen for 15 years to earn the right to call shame on the Pharisees, now you can get right to the point.
"akin to to the worst excesses of Spanish Christianity in the 1300s or Islam in the 600s" -- oh for pete's sake....this type of absurd hyperbole is really not helpful in pushing back against woke-ism. Is extremely unhelpful in fact.
"Far more dogmatic, intolerant, and mindless than the classic religions have become."
I take it that you don't have any friends or relatives or co-workers whose families are conservative Evangelical or Latino Pentecostal or Hasidim? Or who are Afghan refugees who fled the Taliban? Or for that matter are followers of Black churches led by ministers who preached this past Sunday that gay people are an abomination and should be put to death? (While typing this I am sitting two offices away from a member of such a congregation.)
"the modern "religions" seem to focus the bulk of their energies on policing the faithful for heresy, and relatively little on actually helping out" -- absolutely true. And that is exactly how lots of secular Americans, me included, viewed a lot of the Abrahamic faiths long before any of this woke nonsense arose. We arrived at that view from, in many cases, plenty of firsthand exposure/experience....e.g. I have probably a dozen friends in my age bracket whose childhood experiences with Catholic-school nuns and priests left them crystal clear that no child of theirs would ever attend a Catholic school.
"It used to be that kind of selfless unpaid (or low paid) labor in service of the disadvantaged was the sine qua non to lecture the better off about their iniquities. Nowadays it's not."
Are you under the impression that today's woke activists don't volunteer in soup kitchens or tutors in inner cities or helping refugees find housing and etc.? They do, many of them, as I know from lots of firsthand experience. And like with the Catholic nuns and priests that doesn't make their dogmatic hectoring of other people any more right than if they didn't.
Try it yourself. Walk into the most passionate evangelical church, and tell them in coarse words you deny every dogma they have, think it's all rubbish and arises fromcontemptible tribal motives, and then see what happens. Try it even in the presense of your local Chief of Police and US Representative and CEO of the corporation where you work, all true believers.
Now go into your HR office at work and do the same thing with the current shibboleths. Tell them all this DEI stuff is completely bullshit, you think women aren't as often programmers because the female mind just can't handle the complexity. Tell them you think blacks are just naturally more violent, and maybe not as smart, and *that's* why they end up in jail more often.
Compare 'n' contrast what happens to you, and get back to me. If the answer is "huh...pretty much the same thing....I got a lot of frosty looks, some heated argument, and then went on my way...nothing much else" then you won't seem like a bullshit apologist.
>this type of absurd hyperbole is really not helpful in pushing back against woke-ism
Agreed. Sure woke is religion, but there's bad, and there's bad. The comparison of the modern-day woke dogmatism to medieval religion, makes a mockery of the horrors of medieval religion. Tens of thousands were brutally murdered by the Spanish Inquisition, and at least thousands were killed in the early Islamic conquests (I would assume tens of thousands, if not more.)
It's not fun to fear losing your job over saying something politically incorrect, but it's very different from being burned alive.
Ok, so what's the current thinking on nicotine? If someone starts chewing nicotine gum, will it have a net health benefit or harm? And what if they just do it a couple times a week in order to avoid addiction? Or use it on non-coffee days (for people who don't want to build caffeine tolerance.)
It's hard to find research on this, and I fear that it's just politically incorrect to study possible benefit of nicotine usage.
My personal, not very scientific experience from chewing nicotine gum regularly for about a year just to see if it had any beneficial effects on attention, alertness etc. was that it was 1) surprisingly not addictive at all (could stop and start seemingly at will, no anxiety or compulsion to buy more if I ran out) and 2) that it didn't have any spectacular mental effects at all except that when layered with caffeine it gave a slightly more distinct and pleasant boost in alertness, so anecdotal coffee and cigs memes checked out. I was buying packs of 144 at 4mg dosage per gum tab which would usually last a month, so it was about 20mg per day consistently assuming I was absorbing most of it.
On the other hand my experience from starting to smoke joints regularly later on was that it produced cravings and other symptoms of addiction almost immediately, despite the prior exposure to plenty of nicotine from all the gum chewing. The difference: route of administration, dosage over time curve, social effects, multiple drug interactions, interaction with habit and routine, some other weird crap? I have absolutely no idea.
Interesting. Thanks for replying, Sam. The route of administration hypothesis sounds quite likely btw.
I should mention that I read over Gwern's page (https://gwern.net/nicotine) and it sounds pretty positive.
I am also curious of this. I hear many people promoting how great it can be, but these people are often part of the bio-hacking community or other groups that are prone to non-science backed fads. From real doctors, i have heard skepticism or warnings against nicotine for this purpose. But i havent looked into it very much.
Last week here, I linked to a survey soliciting opinions on world peace. Results of that survey can be found here https://medium.com/@mttpgn/world-peace-survey-results-2023-14345513b48d
"“a cessation of all armed conflict between governments, measurable as zero annual wartime deaths."
Mmm. That still leaves a lot of violent conflict like drug cartels, African warlord bans, and the likes running around doing what amount to small-scale civil wars, but since they're not *governments* that doesn't get measured either. I think that for most people suffering the risk of violent death and living under uncertain and catastrophic conditions, it's not because their government is fighting government B, it's because their government is itself tyrannical or too weak to enforce law and order.
Agreed. These problems seem likely all to require different strategies. This survey was scoped specific to inter-government armed conflict, which, even if it were somehow achieved, would still leave us with plenty of other problems, some of which would remain deadly, violent, and horrible.
Scott, you might be interested in this article on the link between the brain and illness/recovery.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00509-z
How much will the US be on the hook for once the Ukraine war is over? I'm already seeing talk of something like a marshall plan for Ukraine (assuming that Russia loses, which again, is assumed only until it is time to demand more weapon shipments to ukraine), with estimates that it will take half a trillion dollars to fix ukraine already (and a lot more by the time this the war is over).
Obviously this won't all come from the US, but it's hard to imagine we won't be footing the lion's share of the bill in some form or other.
It's bad enough that Zelesnkyy and his western cronies would rather another hundred thousand young ukrainian men be killed or disabled to avoid Zelesnkyy losing a single inch of clay under his control, but by refusing to even entertain the notion of settling for anything but an INCREASE in territory comapred with the start of the war, he's basically saying that Americans will have to pay hundreds of billions of dollars for some shithole regions that were generating a tiny fraction of this money in GDP and tax revenue before the war even started.
Your second paragraph is simply false; it's easy to imagine the EU picking up the lion's share of the reconstruction. Not *guaranteed* to happen that way, but trivially imagineable.
Your third paragraph, makes pretty much every sensible and decent person want to not engage with any of this.
Stop digging.
You've posted this nonsense several times before and repetition isn't making it any less nonsensical. This forum isn't Twitter or Truth or Facebook or whatever if it is that you're used to.
I have never posted about the US paying to rebuild Ukraine before on ACX and it's really pathetic to say this crap every time you see something you disagree with. Is being a "good faith" "rationalist" about shouting down everyone who isn't as left wing as you?
If you really want good faith engagement, I'd recommend less contempt in your initial posts. When you lead with contempt ("western cronies" "some shithole regions"), contempt is usually (and unsurprisingly) what you'll get back.
Plenty of the people giving you guff in this thread would probably engage constructively on some variation of "what do you think the costs of rebuilding Ukraine will be, and how much do you think the US should/ultimately will contribute" if the question were less contemptuously posed (or at the very least they wouldn't all rush in to dunk on you).
Actually, the EU is much likelier to foot the lion's share of the reconstruction bill. Not only because Ukraine is in Europe but also because the EU has more economic muscles than the US. While USA's foreign aid budget for 2020 was $39B the EU's was €83B. To rebuild Ukraine, Europe does not have to do anything except divert its foreign aid budget to Ukraine for a couple of years (admittedly, this will not happen since the current foreign aid spending has too many supporters, meaning new financing will have to be found).
You also seem to have some curious hangup on Ukraine's president. In case you missed it he has no say whatsoever in peace and war. The Russians have explicitly said that they do not negotiate with Ukraine, only with Nato.
I find it difficult to imagine that you are asking in good faith, because you already wrote similar things in the past, so whatever explanations you get now, you already got them all in the past repeatedly. And you will probably post this again in the next Open Thread. And the next one. And the next one.
Maybe, try trolling some other forum with less intelligent audience?
Apparently for many people (including rationalists) the mainstream explanation that Russia's war on Ukraine is morally wrong is too simplistic that they want to find some other viewpoint. But what else can we suggest? At this time Russia is actively attacking Ukraine. If Ukraine stops actively resisting (with many casualties on its side), Russian forces will not stop at Donbas but will take over Kyiv and possibly the rest of Ukraine and it will cease to exist as an independent country.
It is what happens if Ukraine loses and not what people think that Ukraine just gives up their claims for the Crimea and Donbas.
I don't believe that Ukraine will lose because I believe that Ukrainians will fight till the last man. If the world doesn't help Ukraine, that's going to happen and the human loss on Ukrainian side will be much higher.
If the world helps Ukraine, the most likely outcome is that Russia stops attacking and sending their young men to senseless deaths. They can stop doing that at any moment even if they decide to keep the Crimea as their own.
Yep. And in the US the irony (though totally expected) is that people most likely to believe Ukraine should just give Russia some territory to make peace are the same people who scream about protecting US borders. Almost like their "patriotism" is totally performative and their beliefs are totally formed by whatever media they are consuming. When exposed to true patriotism and heroism, like displayed in Ukraine, the mask falls and they can only respond by rejecting it as illogical or causing unnecessary deaths. Its just pathetic.
I care first and foremost about America, not about Ukraine. In the same way, I expect Ukrainians to put their own interests ahead of America's. I admire the Ukrainians' bravery and patriotism, but Americans have the right to decide the limits of American support. If Ukraine decides they want Crimea back, say, it is perfectly logical for American patriots to advocate discontinuing military aid because the risk of nuclear escalation is too high.
The Americans do not have the right to decide the limits of American support to Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, etc. We signed and ratified a treaty on that point. That being the case, it would be foolish of us to pass on the opportunity to destroy the army most likely to invade those countries, at a bargain price, in favor of a daft plan where we instead signal to that army's commander in chief that we aren't really going to stop him from invading anyone he damn well pleases.
The Americans do have the right to be foolish, as long as they're willing to back it up with American boots on the ground in whatever quantity it takes if and when the Russians invade Lithuania. I king of prefer the plan where it is Ukrainian boots kicking Russian ass.
Well hold on there, it is entirely possible to be passionate about protecting your own borders and not a give a crap about Ukraine protecting theirs. There's nothing logically inconsistent about thinking that protecting our own borders is the plain duty of our government -- but that we do *not* have the obligation to protect the borders of some other country. The US Federal Government is not the World Cop. You may agree or not agree with this as a policy choice, but it's neither hypocritical nor inconsistent.
Yes that explains why someone wouldn't want the US to be involved in Ukraine, but it doesn't justify encouraging Ukraine to take a deal which that someone wouldn't take themselves if it were about their country.
A self-serving proposition could go like this:
1) I care nothing for people who are not me (or people I like/people in my country)
2) Ukraine is not my country and what happens locally there does not affect me.
3) There is a non-negligible chance that a war between Russia and Ukraine will result in nuclear weapons being used.
4) Nuclear weapons could affect me.
5) Russia will only use nuclear weapons if threatened.
6) Ukraine cannot threaten Russia without outside support.
7) Don't support Ukraine, to avoid the chance of nuclear war.
Given that logic, someone could absolutely encourage Ukraine to just give in, to avoid a worse outcome for people in a different country. This is typically called appeasement, and is not new.
Depends. If someone said "the Ukrainians should make such-and-such a deal to I don't have to hear about them again," there's nothing logically inconsistent about that. I can wish for all smokers to commit suicide so my insurance rates are lower. It's not very nice, or empathic, but it's not logically inconsistent. Other people are other people, not me.
If someone said "If I were Ukrainian, I would cut this deal because it's best for my country," then you probably have to look at their reasoning. It could be they are recognizing some asymmetry, some way (of the many plausible ways) in which Ukraine is in a different situation than the US, or it could be they're just bullshitting, that the real reason is that they just want Ukraine as a problem to go away, and they aren't really putting themselves in Ukrainian shoes.
If they dont care then they shouldn't root for Ukraine to take a deal that gives away Ukraine land. Wanting the US to not being involved =/= Ukraine should take a deal.
https://www.readthesequences.com/Reversed-Stupidity-Is-Not-Intelligence
Just take germany as an example. "Investing" in WW2 against it was a goldmine. Economic recovery through war industry, binding a whole countires industry to you for nearly a century, having a political and military subordinate state in the center of an important region and gaining a long lasting international standing as 'the good guy' (americans tend to underestimate how very powerfull this is)
Looking at it right now, Ukraine has similliar potential if handled right. Europe has a long history of war. We tend to remeber for generations, the ones who helped us and who deceived us.
No you don't. How long after 1945 did France and Germany become best buddies? Not even a full generation. Further back, England and France have swung from deadly enemies to allies neck snappingly fast. Since we gained our statehood in 1776 the shifting alliances and friendship/enemy list in Europe has generally baffled us -- which is why isolationism from your intramural squabbles has been -- and remains -- a powerful strand of feeling in the United States.
Even today, there's a big chunk of people who think "Why the hell are we AGAIN trying to sort out Europe's inability to get its shit together and decide who hates who, and who is friends with who?" It's not like the Eurozone as a whole lacks the population or resources to deal with Ukraine and Russia itself. You have just chosen to outsource anything that requires actual and nontrivial military force to the United States since 1945.
I hadn't heard that Zelenskyy sought an increase in territory beyond what Ukraine possessed when Russia began the war in 2014.
I also hadn't heard that Russia had made any offer of terms for Ukraine to reject.
Please look up what happened in Bucha if you think it is trivially obvious that Ukraine should give up its land to Russia in order to save lives.
The notion America should dictate what is best for Ukraine is every bit as bad as the foreign policy of George W Bush. Zelensky is the duly elected leader of a sovereign nation and he knows what is best for Ukraine and as Americans we believe some causes are worth fighting and dying for…and not only did France help us one of our national heroes is Lafayette who had no intention of ever becoming an American.
Yeah, it's the Ukrainian's choice if they want to lay down their lives to defend their homeland, and all polls I've seen show that they overwhelmingly want to do so. It's our choice to say that we support their cause and are willing to help less Ukrainians die trying to defend their home.
What are your thoughts about the report that Ukrainians sabotaged the pipeline?? I personally thought it was obvious Putin did it because he benefited with a few more weeks of juiced prices and with Hurricane Ian in the Gulf the potential price spike could have been much bigger had the hurricane hit Louisiana. Furthermore, NS2 was left operable which meant the potential for more windfall profits was left open. And high natural gas prices inflict pain on average Europeans but with NS sabotaged Putin’s hands are clean and he says he can provide Europe with cheap gas whenever their leaders allow it.
My comment on that: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-266/comment/13474103
America has made out like a bandit thanks to Putin’s senseless invasion of Ukraine. America is energy dominant now as we are now the Saudi Arabia of natural gas and the climate change movement has been fortuitously neutered here and exporting military aid creates solid union jobs that don’t contribute to inflation while giving us more up to date military equipment.
We're not "on the hook" for jack. If we *feel* like forking out some money to tie Ukraine more tightly to the West, e.g. because we think it will be useful to have a thorn in the side of whatever rump state emerges after Putin eats a bullet, then we will. If we don't think it's worth it, then we won't.
And as far as I can tell, nobody needs to bamboozle or force Ukrainian men to fight for their home. After what's already been revealed about Russian behavior on Ukrainian soil, they seem to be all-in on killing every last Russian they can lay hands on. I don't blame them. I'd feel the same way in their shoes.
Does anyone have recommendations for a psychiatrist or therapist in the Pittsburgh area?
Similarly, can someone recommend a system to effectively find good therapists in a given area in the US? I seem to remember references to services that let you filter by insurance, for example.
+1 to that. I usually just google search and click doctor's blurbs until I find one that doesn't make me cringe out of my seat, but it often takes months to a year to find a decent one that's not booked out.
I found what I had previously seen. In this post: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-258, in point 7, Scott Alexander referenced this: https://psychiat-list.slatestarcodex.com/ older database, (that may well not be current) which does not list anything for Pittsburgh area.
However, other comments mention a couple of promising resources.
This comment: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-258/comment/11752954 references a service for finding a therapist (allowing filtering by insurance) called 'Alma' (https://helloalma.com/).
This comment: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-258/comment/11744884 and the comment responding to it reference IFS therapy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Family_Systems_Model) in a positive light.
The latter comment: references this site: https://ifs-institute.com/practitioners/all/81925 to search practitioners of that mode of psychotherapy. [That site does list practitioners in Pittsburgh.]
While highly specific, another comment mentioned this site: https://iocdf.org/ for OCD related therapy.
Best of luck with whatever you (or the subject of your inquiry) are seeking therapy for.
Thanks so much! I really appreciate the detailed response and links - I'll check these out today.
My pleasure! I'm always happy to help, and in this case, I was looking for these anyway.
The trolley problem is often seen as some abstract thing with little practical relevance. It is the complete opposite in fact: it is a description of our present situation.
The Trolley Problem Is All Too Real
https://squarecircle.substack.com/p/the-trolley-problem-is-all-too-real
You can actually pull the lever today, and without killing anyone! It will just cost you a bit of money.
The trolley problem works as a dilemma because it is a theoretical one-off event, isolated from larger context. We have a lever with two states and a single choice; we don't have options to spend our time replacing trolley brakes or shove people off the street.
For the trolley problem, the question to ask is, "is it worth it to get rid of suffering in five people if one innocent person who otherwise would not have experienced suffering takes the suffering instead?" There's no perfect answer to this question, and that's the point. Sometimes there are no perfect solutions.
Real world decision making is even more complicated, because there are always long term consequences for decision making. Yes, eliminating suffering is good, but as other people have pointed out, suffering is relative. Is it good if, by getting rid of some suffering now, we create worse suffering later? Real world decision making has so many variables that just assuming your actions will have no unintended consequences down the line is naive.
I am a fisherman. Alice is starving. I can certainly alleviate her suffering by giving her fish, but that lasts only as long as I do. If I die, Alice is back to suffering. Bob doesn't like to fish, but he fishes because he doesn't want to starve, Bob sees me giving Alice fish, and so stops fishing because he can get fish from me. As such, his fishing skills atrophy. I die, and then we have two starving people where we had one before. Instead of giving Alice a fish, I teach her to fish. This puts the local fishermen out of business, triggering a revolution, and a lot of people die in the fighting. There are many ways where in a short term attempt to alleviate suffering, we can end up creating more suffering in the long term.
To look at suffering another way, personal responsibility is important. A child breaks a toy, and cries (suffering). Rather than alleviate the suffering, we let the child live with the results so it learns not to break toys (and before it breaks something irreplaceable). In the same way, we let children get hurt, because in doing so they learn that their actions have consequences.
I think it's too much to call a child crying suffering. And real world decision making is not always that complicated. The abolition of slavery was worth the pain it took to achieve. Likewise with beating the Nazis. There is such a thing as analysis paralysis and letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
As to 'give a man a fish, teach a man to fish' I may agree, but getting many places in the world to have functioning governments will likely involve a period where you give the man a fish, even as you teach him to fish. It's not either/or.
Usually the trolley problem is about doing something immoral and forbidden in order to save lives, so even if I get what you are saying, I find your analogy distracting. And giving to the homeless sounds suspiciously "disaster porn". You get a lot of endorphins from getting up close and personal with suffering. I've been working in Africa for the last 13 years, and I am well acquainted with the excitement of life and death situations. Some people absolutely thrive on this, but there is a bit of a saviour thing with this kind of aid.
The trolley problem to me has always been about sacrificing to help others. I think there are many twists one can give to the trolley problem, hence why it's so popular.
> there is a bit of a saviour thing with this kind of aid.
Yeah, there is, but it also objectively helps others. I don't think it's a problem that a giver gets something out of the exchange. And I don't feel like I need this: sure, it's exciting to be part of a big cause, but I am also perfectly ok with just chilling out. Lord knows I wish I could really internalize Taoism, that shit's like the perfect religion for the future, where there will hopefully be much less suffering.
SBF practiced utilitarianism just like any number of evil dictators. As Jordan Peterson advises (but does not practice) one should have values and that value system should guide them. So if the trolley conductor follows the rules and isn’t speeding or checking her iPhone then she has nothing to worry about. Btw, Florida has a relatively new high speed rail line and people get killed by the train all the time…they aren’t shutting the train down.
What evil dictator practiced utilitarianism? I'd expect that to be the least likely moral system for a dictator.
SBF may have tried to be utilitarian, or that may have just been a cover. But if he was trying to be utilitarian, he demonstrated how to be bad at it, rather than demonstrating that the idea was wrong. Like all ideas, utilitarianism must be judged against the alternatives, and critics of utilitarianism tend to leave the alternatives conspicuously absent from their arguments.
It's not about utilitarianism, it is simply about pushing back against suffering, the realization that the existence of suffering is as bad as the existence of slavery. I don't know of any contemporary value system that is indifferent to suffering.
About that new high speed rail, it's unclear what's happening, since I haven't heard of this being an issue for other high speed rail systems. It does sound like it should be shut down, since one high speed rail is pure frivolity next to dozens of deaths.
>that the existence of suffering is as bad as the existence of slavery
This is false. Some amount of suffering is required for normal social functioning and human well being. No amount of slavery is.
What suffering is necessary? I can think of discomfort, and even pain when it comes to athletics, but what suffering is necessary?
Well first off there is not motivation without suffering. Secondly sometimes suffering is unavoidable. Two people love the same person. Someone gets maimed in an accident. Someone has a relative die of natural causes. All those cause suffering. The only suffering free world is a world without minds.
Not really, people are frequently motivated over pleasure. I am pretty motivated to read, and write, and play videogames, and it's not suffering that is motivating me to do those things. When two people love the same person, that suffering goes away on its own and is altogether different from getting cancer or malaria or having a severe mental illness. Same with grief at someone dying.
Probably a total eradication of suffering would involve something like everyone becoming Buddhist or making The Dream of a Ridiculous Man a reality, but that doesn't mean we don't have the power to massively reduce the suffering of the world. It's not like World War II eradicated the Nazis, but it still pretty much dealt with them.
Kamala Harris would disagree with your last sentence.
As plenty of wise sages have pointed out, suffering is inherent to the human condition. Therein lies the problem with waking people up to suffering like the abolitionists did for slavery. Slavery is morally repugnant to us, but suffering is not. Suffering is natural. Slavery can be abolished, but suffering cannot. And one who is sensitive to suffering will tend to avoid it, live in a gated community etc.
It is difficult to get people to sacrifice something in order to remedy something as abstract as suffering felt by humans thousands of miles away. And those who live amongst the suffering in truly poor countries often feel a sense of futility because they could give away everything and it wouldn't make a dent in the inequality. So I posit that a huge contributuion could be made if you could actually get people to believe a statement like the one you quoted: "it’s possible to give an infant a year of healthy life by donating around $100 to one of the most cost-effective global health charities, such as Against Malaria Foundation." I think a lot of rationalists are going to look at this statement as a vast oversimplification or even very misleading. If it is so easy, then why hasn't Bill Gates just got ahead and scooped up all this low hanging fruite?
How are they analogous at all? The point of the trolley problem is you have to cause somebody to die in order to save others, with the point to illustrate whether utilitarian intuitions hold up in particular scenarios. Perhaps if you were robbing people and doing something with it that ostenisbly results in more utility than what the original owner of that money lost from being robbed.
Did you read my essay? We are faced with an easy trolley problem: pull the lever and you save 5 lives, but are short $500. Basically, you are the person the trolley gets diverted to, but not really, since you don't die.
losing 500 has negative utility to me. i dont believe pulling the lever in the trolley problem causes me any harm
In the baseline trolley problem, this is just a trivial modification that does not change the fundamental nature of it which is 'pull a lever to sacrifice something so others will be spared'.
As others have stated this transforms it into the 'drowning child analogy' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine,_Affluence,_and_Morality#Summary).
As you have noted, this problem is not as well known, which I suppose makes it less attractive for getting clicks; but it has previously been thought about in depth.
I don't think we need more depth, we need action. The observation that suffering is bad and should be eliminated is old, much older than Bentham. That we don't perceive the existence of suffering as every bit as bad as slavery is a failure in our hearts, not a failure of our rationality.
So it's not the Trolley Problem, it's the Save the Drowning Child and Ruin your Nice Suit Problem.
Save the 5 drowning children, in this case. But anyway, much more people are familiar with the trolley problem than with that one.
You don't seem to be understand the point of the trolley problems. They are mainly intended to highlight the differences between consequentialist and deontological thinking, and they are widely known precisely because people have different intuitions about how they should be solved. A real-world analogy for the trolley problem would not be donating your own $500 to save five lives, it would be meeting a stranger whose wallet contains $500, murdering them, and then using that money to save five lives. Even if you think the latter action is morally permissible (or even required), surely you can see that it is much more controversial than the former?
No, this is just missing the forest for the trees thinking. The trolley problem is intriguing even to someone who has never heard of consequentialism or deontology, those things could never have been invented/named and the trolley problem still exist.
Your scenario is certainly more controversial, but my scenario is about pointing out that you are standing by the rails right now and can pull the lever, yet most people are not pulling that lever. Which is a severe moral failure on a par with doing nothing about slavery back in the 19th century.
All problems can be rephrased as trolley problems.
Very false.
The trolley problem is simply 'pull a lever and a sacrifice is made, but other lives which would otherwise suffer in some way are spared'. I don't know if all problems can be rephrased as trolley problems, but it sure seems like a lot or even most of them can.
Giving $500 to some entity so they can go install a well in some village I have never seen is psychologically completely unlike pulling a lever to stop a speeding trolley.
The thought experiment poses they are morally the same, but ignores how much of morality is about human psychology, relationships, and instinct.
Agreed that morality is about those things, but it is also intensely about ending suffering. There is something sick in us that wants to believe suffering is acceptable, possibly the same sick thing in us that made us think slavery was acceptable.
Forget utilitarianism and rationality. The question becomes: why aren't we trying to abolish suffering?
I am trying to abolish suffering; I'm starting with myself and those I directly care about.
I would expect starving African villagers to likewise put their own interests above mine.
Can you and yours be fairly described as suffering? Maybe they can be, but that's not the standard state of affairs in the developed world. And $500 bucks is not a lot.
And anyway, it would have been quite something if people back in the 19th century had taken this attitude to slavery, or in the 20th to Hitler.
Well, can the blind man who has bread and water to eat and drink be considered as suffering when there is a person with nothing to eat on the other side of the world?
Humans are adaptable and that includes adapting their definition and experience of suffering. Sure the 20 year old college kid in America with plenty to eat and a warm roof over their head is materially better off than the Chinese labourer working in a rice field, but if the labourer just plugs along and lives his life and the college kid commits suicide due to depression, who was suffering more?
The college kid. Serious mental illness is a big problem. The total war against suffering I am envisioning includes such things.
But should morality be about human psychology, relationships, and instinct? Why do you think they should be?
Personally I don’t think it *should* be about anything. Trying to apply some veneer of complete rational consistency out of a hybrid morass of dozens of separately evolved/socialized/optimized behaviors is a fool’s errand. There is a whole bunch of different stuff we are trying to capture with “morality”, and it simply isn’t reducible to say utilitarianism, or deontology or whatever.
I recently posted a comment on Freddie deBoer's Substack to the effect of "I'm confident courts will not allow government censorship to stand, so I'm much more concerned about social pressure (to censor speech) and think it's is a much bigger problem, by (making up numbers here) several orders of magnitude." Evidently that's not a popular view there (peer and descendent comments were voted more highly, including ones quite sympathetic to that position). Upvotes are hardly a dispositive measure of things, but it has me wondering about my intuition here.
Are ACX readers from the US more worried about government or private censorship?
In the near term, government "censorship" in the United States is likely to be limited to the government censoring parts of its own self, e.g. public school libraries, which will be discomfiting to people who are used to using those free-to-them channels for their own purposes but which can be worked around. Where the government tries to go beyond that (and it will try), I expect the courts will pretty reliably stop them for a while longer at least.
Private censorship, in an increasingly centralized information economy, has the potential to stop private actors using private money from effectively speaking their mind, and "but you can still shout your message from a soapbox in the park" is not an adequate response to that. This is more worrisome to me in the short term.
I'm not at all confident that courts will not allow government censorship to stand. It seems like court rulings are a balance between the implication of fixed texts, and public opinion. If public opinion is sufficiently strong, then the texts play a decreasing role. For an extreme example, see here: https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/biden-judicial-nom-argued-for-outlawing-offensive-speech-suggested-microaggressions-can-kill-you/. Obviously she does not reflect the majority of judges, but she is dealing with the same First Amendment as them, and it is not really serving its purpose of constraining her [more accurately, she is not allowing it to serve its role of constraining legislators.]
Additionally, most Western countries lack free speech, and if my vague impression is correct, are mostly moving away from free speech, rather than towards it - a concerning indicator for future trends in the US.
Another concerning indicator is that the ACLU, once a bulwark against government control of expression has taken a much weaker stance in recent years. This is concerning both because it means there is less pressure against government censorship, but also, because it is an indicator that their erstwhile values are becoming less common.
Additionally, it should be noted that censorship of speech is not binary - either governmental or not. Government can play a greater or lesser role in suppressing or compelling speech among private actors, such as by applying pressure to private organizations explicitly, etc.
Ultimately, I find government censorship more concerning, but it seems likely that the impact of governmental pressure on speech would be felt through the nominal actions of private organizations.
That said, the solution isn't for government to try to control private actors to "defend" free speech, e.g. through passing laws limiting content moderation options of social media companies, rather the solution would be the opposite - for government to get out of the business of private companies and individuals and let them truly operate as they wish regarding content and speech.
I'm more concerned about government censorship than private "censorship." Private attempts to limit speech fall into several categories:
- Angry internet mobs piling on mostly private individuals. Some of these cases are disproportionate, and they can have a chilling effect. I think that worst excesses of this occurred from 2012-2016, but that this has become less fashionable and it's returning to a baseline. This was disproportionately a left-wing tactic for a while, but the right-wing uses it, too, and I expect that it in the long run, it will be used by all sides.
- Private social media sites deciding that they don't want to be in the business of boosting certain opinions. Since I think that social media sites profit off of disproportionately encouraging the worst of human behavior, I'm usually in favor of them deciding to kick off the people with the swastikas, etc. My ideal end-state here is decentralized media ownership (and marginalized Nazis who no longer receive algorithmic boosts). Freedom of the press is for the person who owns one.
On the government side, I'm considerably more concerned. The government has the guns, and it has the ability to refuse to prosecute armed, private vigilantes.
Looking at just mainstream Republican presidental candidates, we have Donald Trump, who has called violence against journalists a "beautiful sight", and who stirred up a violent, armed riot against Congress. And we have DeSantis, who is taking full political control over state university curriculums, and who routinely uses every bit of state power he can to punish organizations and individuals who disagree with him in any way. And the Florida legislature has introduced a bill which would require bloggers who criticize DeSantis to register with the government. These policies have the broad support (or at least the acquiescence) of a large minority of American voters. Either Trump or DeSantis has a very real chance of beating Biden.
I do not expect the courts to consistently uphold the First Amendment, no. At least not for views they dislike. The Supreme Court is ignoring basic ethical rules that apply to every other court, and the wife of one of the justices is deeply involved in partisan politics. The Fifth Circuit is strongly politicized, and there are enough awful judges in Texas that it's possible to construct a chain of appeals that goes "judicial hack -> Fifth Circuit -> SCOTUS." At this point, it's unclear to me how courts will rule on issues, including ones that have been settled law for a century or more.
So while I spent much of 2015 concerned about toxic discourse norms on Tumblr, and I think TikTok is a Hobbesian war of "all against all", I think the remedy for bad private discourse norms is more speech (and more people getting frustrated with centralized social media). I think that a hypothetical President DeSantis would be far worse for free speech than all the angry Tumblr pile-ons ever were.
"The Supreme Court is ignoring basic ethical rules that apply to every other court"
You mean like a justice refusing to recuse herself from a case she worked on prior to becoming a justice?
> If the state wants to remove something from the curriculum that's no more "censorship" than GE's board of directors deciding they're not going to make any more washing machines.
I'm specifically thinking about who hires and fires individual professors. Normally, even in private universities, the anthropology professors would be hired by the anthropology department, and the economics professors by the economics department. At least at the universities I'm familiar with, these decisions were normally handled by tenured faculty (with possible approval from higher layers). Presumably engineering professors have a better idea who's a qualified engineer than a university president, so this makes sense.
Recent Florida legislation is pushing to remove this power from the faculty, and place it with a politically appointed board of trustees:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/24/politics/ron-desantis-florida-universities-gender-studies/index.html
Personally, I've seen university departments make weird picks. I've even seen cases where a department, or an entire academic field, becomes heavily invested in something like string theory for a couple decades. But this is all part of the "background radiation" of academic life. There's nothing wrong with having a few deeply eccentric professors at a large university. Students can either avoid those courses, or learn the valuable lesson that some experts believe weird things.
I would expect political appointees to make highly politicized hiring choices and to punish professors who upset political leadership in any way. To give you an example of the kinds of people who DeSantis appoints to oversight boards, see:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/03/politics/kfile-ron-desantis-disney-ron-peri-anti-lgbtq/index.html
I do not think that taking the power to hire, say, economics professors away from the economics department and giving it to people like Ron Peri would result in better economics teaching.
As for my expectations of the courts, that's a much longer discussion. There are multiple federal courts in the US that I fear will stretch the law and the Constitution to almost any extent.
That's a little overstated. Departments generally do indeed recruit and *recommend* the hiring of new faculty, at least in every university at which I've worked, but it's still the chancellor, EVC, President, or some other top official who makes the final call. Yes, he usually defers to the Department's judgment -- but he's not obliged too. A modern university, despite appearances and strenuous self-serving propaganda, is a business like any other. It's not a democracy, no longer a collection of fuedal fiefs with an independent charter from the king or pope, above mere law, and it does indeed ultimately just report to its stockholders like any other biz -- to the corporation, if it's private, or to the legislature of the state, if it's public.
I agree this solution is a little absurd. On the face of it, it puts way too much work on the plate of the top officials. You cannot realisticaly expect the president/chancellor to personally investigate and approve every single appointment, there aren't enough hours in the day, even if he were cloned 50 times. *Some* delegation is necessary. So it's unworkeable to that extent.
But if the Florida Legislature chooses to rub the noses of the faculty in who pays their salaries -- it's the taxpayers, dummies -- because it thinks they have forgotten that fact and need a harsh reminder, they only have themselves to blame. A wise demographic would cut its losses, reform its internal workings, rein in its shriller and sillier fringe element (or find some reason to fire them, or not hire them in the first place) -- and generally get in better touch with what the people of Florida want from them -- before something much harsher happens. This is just a shot across the bow. Much worse is possible.
It might be useful to remember that the schmos who clean houses, fix cars, and check out people at Wal-Mart are probably not very interested in forking over taxes to pay for philosophers to ponder the infinite, and maybe lecture them on their moral shortcomings. They're probably much more interested in having a place where their kids can better themselves by learning calculus, economics, geology, biochemistry, or Java programming.
Well, as I mention elsewhere, I don't think the truth of engineering, or biology, or medicine is controlled by popular vote.
So let's assume, for the sake of argument, that someone similar to Ron Peri (an existing DeSantis board pick for the Disney oversight district) will be put in charge of picking biology professors. We know that Peri has opinions about biology! Specifically, he believes that drinking tap water may turn people gay. So what will happen if a biology professor publishes a paper that says, "So we checked the average level of pollutants in tap water and there's no plausible way for your tap water to turn you gay." Does someone like Ron Peri then get to fire the professor for publishing this paper? What if someone publishes a paper saying the rate of severe complications from the COVID vaccine is, say, 1 in 100,000? Will DeSantis call up his appointees and say, "I don't like that number? Fire 'em." And what if a professor says, "Yeah, evolution is a thing"? Will that professor be fired by a creationist board member?
The voting public believes a lot of strange things. But the truth of biology, and engineering, and even history does not depend on a popular vote. Slavery happened in the US, and it involved both rape and brutality. A bridge won't stand up just because a politician or some voters think it will. Global warming may or may not cause coastal flooding, but whether it does will not be decided by a popular vote.
The people of e.g. Florida do not have the right to censor anyone's private speech. But they absolutely have the collective right to not have their tax dollars used to promote e.g. white supremacism, or fascism, or communism, or, yes, wokism.
If you make a legal sacrament of traditional academic hiring practices, such that the only way for the people of Florida to not support whateverism is to defund the public universities, or at least the departments where the tenured faculty is 90% whatever-ist, then that's what they'll do.
DeSantis and his supporters would probably be perfectly fine with turning every state college and university in Florida into an A&M that only teaches STEM, Law, Medicine, and Business. I'd prefer a less drastic solution, even if it does involve changes to traditional academic hiring practice. There's no first amendment right to tenure, never mind to being hired for a tenured position just because your tenured buddies like you.
I actually think that given a choice between having all professors hired and fired by a political board filled with people like Ron Peri, and shutting down the university, it's probably better to just shut it down. Once your biology professors are being chosen by totally unqualified political hacks, you don't have a university, you have a farce. And at that point, shutting down the system has the advantage of being cheaper. And it alerts the public that they'll need to make other arrangements for educating their kids.
I do not believe in direct democratic control of higher education. Engineering, medicine, biology—the truth of these subjects isn't decided by popular vote. Someone qualified needs to understand the tensile strength of steel and the Krebs cycle.
Biology professors are already being chosen by political hacks, and because they're not elected, there's nothing anyone can do. The people that understand the tensile strength of steel are being passed over for professorships in favor of the people with the best DEI statements right now.
You keep talking about Ron Peri, who isn't even in a position of oversight on university decision making, and ignoring that universities are already making decisions on hiring and firing on a political basis. The only method suggested so far for keeping them in check that has a chance of working is democratic control. For all your supposed concern about the truth being decided by political vote, the current system is that the truth is decided by mob rule.
If American universities had a recent history of standing up for academic freedom against all comers, your argument might have merit. The problem is that the university hiring process is already politicized with things like required Diversity Equity and Inclusion statements. You can't make having certain political beliefs a requirement for hiring a professor and then expect the actual politicians not to get involved as to what those requirements are.
At least now there's a transparent process for setting those requirements.
Yes, and that transparent process would be, "Allow politcal appointees similar to Ron Peri to decide who should teach engineering or biology."
Let me be blunt: I would not trust any governor of any politcal party to control university hiring that way. It's a terrible process.
I will happily agree that current process can also fail. But the proposed cure would mean complete political control over academic departments, which is awful on a whole different level than having a couple of crank professors. I went to a university with a right-wing crank _and_ a left-wing crank, and I thought it added to the experience.
If you don't want the electorate to control who gets hired and fired, find a better way to get the Diversity Equity and Inclusiveness political apparatchiks out of the university hiring process, because until you do, we already have a situation where one party has complete political control over academic departments in many schools (not all; they haven't managed to fire Amy Wax yet). We've been warning about this for a long time, and unless you can think of AND IMPLEMENT a better way, we don't have a better option.
Government, of course. Government has guns and a $6 trillion budget. Government can ruin your life without even noticing the cost. Government can put you in prison or kill you.
Overwhelmingly private, and overwhelming from the left. Although some of Biden's proclamations about how the tech companies have to prevent vaccine misinformation make me worried about government overreach by a non zero amount.
Nice tech company you got there, it would be a shame if anything happened to it.
Forum moderation, no. Twitter and YouTube, yes. Milo losing gigs, more complicated (but basically no).
The original context for my post was Freddie's beautiful article about the recent Roald Dahl edits.
In that case, I was referring to Netflix / Puffin's bowdlerization of Roald Dahl's works. In that case, the censorship I'm talking about is the private agents suppressing speech and ideas, often motivated by the diffuse pressure created by elite language policing (thanks, Sierra Club! [0]).
Yet, as much as I dislike the mutilation of offensive texts, that comes in third place on my list of concerns about "private censorship". The two most concerning forms are:
- Internet giants (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and YouTube) removing dissenting content, from lab leak commentary to anti-vax quackery to the Hunter Biden laptop story, under the guise of combatting misinformation or "anti-evil operations."
- Groups of private citizens doing their best to destroy people's livelihoods (and therefore their lives) because they disagree with their ideas.
Those are things that actually intersect with my life. In a pandemic or an election, I want access to all the information available and I don't want companies to go down in flames for unpopular opinions (even if the owner is an asshole [1]).
By contrast, the US government has nearly zero impact on my ability to disseminate or access information [2], despite their guns and six-trillion-dollar budget. Some of the legislation on the table in Florida is terrible, but I don't expect worst parts to survive contact with the judiciary. The courts have our back, at least for now. I don't like Ginny Thomas any more than Random Reader, and it's important to stay alert, but the US courts aren't driven by vibes or partisan grudges; the last thirty years (at least) of first-amendment jurisprudence has been very pro-speech.
[0] https://www.sierraclub.org/sites/default/files/sce-authors/u12332/Equity%20Language%20Guide%20Sierra%20Club%202021.pdf
[1] for a small-scale example, https://www.guitarworld.com/news/fulltone-owner-apologizes-for-looting-rant
[1] Apart from the grotesque attempts to influence the aforementioned internet companies.
Edit: spelling, plus a word or two.
I think society is best served by letting people have their say and, perhaps more importantly, letting people hear what they want. De-platforming is a blight: if there were a way to stake money on it, I would gladly bet that even the limited number of high-profile cancellations has radicalized more people than 4Chan. With that in mind:
1) I am pro-moderation. I think for example, that subreddits should be allowed to limit speech however they want and sites can (should!) provide blocking / muting tools. But I think the sites themselves are the digital commons and should not be allowed to prohibit legal speech. They have the right to do so, but exercising those rights makes our world worse.
In my ideal world, section 230 liability protection would be conditioned on content-neutrality, including, yes, holocaust deniers. The ways that they are wrong may have something to teach us, knowledge of their very existence is valuable, and exposing them to a critical public is invaluable. There's a risk that people will find their ideas compelling, but it's even riskier to isolate them, so they're never challenged and they miss out on the moderating influence of other viewpoints.
2) There's no magic bullet. Fighting back against the censorious culture of shaming is a matter of involvement with the relevant communities, earning trust, and speaking up. It's about promoting heroes like Ira Glasser and Daryl Davis [0] who practiced engagement instead of shunning.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/mar/18/daryl-davis-black-musician-who-converts-ku-klux-klan-members
Mass censorship of any news about people dying or having negative side effects from the vaccine is a bit more than "muting anti-vaxers." And this was not just Twitter - it was nearly every internet platform. But, you know, who cares about a few hundred thousand dead from brain blood clots and heart failure?
Other notable examples off the top of my head:
The Reddit mass censorship campaign of 2020, that banned dozens of non-communist subreddits, notably one of the most milquetoast, mainstream conservative communities on the internet (the subreddit about the sitting President of the United States).
The banning of the sitting President of the United States from Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Reddit, Pinterest, Shopify, TikTok, Twitch, YouTube, AWS, the Apple App Store, and the Google Play store, among others.
The censorship of the BLM-supporting, Democrat-supporting, anti-Trump, anti-white terrorist attack committed by Darrell Brooks in Waukesha that killed 6 people, notably on Wikipedia and other online platforms.
The censorship of anyone who in any way questioned the Accepted Narrative that covid came from bats in the wet market, or even dared to make the observation that an institute of virology studying bat coronaviruses just happened to be nearby the initial cases.
Substack deleted an author’s account and every comment he made because Matt Taibbi demanded it. So the author, Gene Frenkle, first got banned by Taibbi on his personal Substack and then Taibbi had a public post and the author linked to his own post in the comment, “Matt Talibbani Wages Jihad on the Truth and Me!”, and that post got the author cancelled from Substack.
Great name on that guy!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Cowbell
Can you provide any more detail?
Taibbi wanted him canceled because apparently Frenkle signed up for a year subscription because he was a fan of Taibbi’s work with respect to Iraq and wanted his perspective on the Ukraine war. Then Taibbi went full Glenn Greenwald and started posting misinformation about things like Nord Stream and the Alfa Bank investigation and Frenkle would correct Taibbi in the comment section and piss off other commenters. So Taibbi demanded he take a refund and Frenkle said he couldn’t do that because he would have to use his real email (authors can see your actual email under subscriptions and he and I use “hide my email” on everything now). Anyway, Taibbi banned him without giving him a refund and then on a very rare public post Frenkle started posting links to his post about Taibbi’s hypocrisy and within minutes Substack deleted his entire account and all of his comments. Apparently he had quite a few drafts deleted that he had been working on.
So, what I'm hearing is that the dude went full Russian troll, Taibbi finally had enough and told him to take his money and piss off, but he wouldn't do that. So Matt banned him without a refund, and the guy started shooting his mouth in public, following which Substack decided they'd had enough of him too, and kicked him out.
Couldn't have happened to a more deserving person, I think.
You believe America blew up Nord Stream?? You are very gullible.
The irresistible capitalist pressures from advertiser's is driving a race to the middle and forcing platforms to only host pablum rather than real, fringe and sometimes offensive content. We're right on track. The social acceptance of censoring unpopular opinions, factual or not, has started the avalanche which will only yield a tyranny of the majority.
As one of the investors who isn't participating in Manifund: The potential returns aren't even a factor in my not participating. What is a concern is:
* Academic grant funding is very different than investing in corporations, and this falls in the uncanny valley between them (in a bad way).
* The myopic nature (experimenting with prediction markets by funding experiments on prediction markets) is kind of a turn-off.
* There is a rule of thumb in enterprise sales that you can't price a product between $1000 and $10000 - it's not cheap-enough to be an impulse sale and it's not expensive enough for a salesperson to be interested. There may be a similar dynamic in play here.
Does the Peter Principle hold on an organisational level?
That is to say, an organisation (that has a reasonable level of autonomy as regards the scope of its activities) will respond to getting good at something by doing more difficult things, which it won't be good at yet*.
So everybody is winging it but the competant ones will be winging progressively greater things.
*EDIT: forget to put a Growth Mindset! joke here
The first case of this that springs to mind is Meta. They were good at social networks and then decided they could do VR, which doesn't really have any connection to their core competency. It seems in general if a company has reached the limit of what they can do in their space, they're going to run into this problem.
The Peter Principle probably holds for all orgs that didn't filter too heavily at their origins and still don't filter that well now.
I've gotten to know quite a few of the big finance firms in London and will say that you often get a lot of people at c-suite (especially just below c-suite level) that are hilariously out of their depth. It's mostly an age thing. A lot of them are boomers or gen X-ers that worked their way up years ago and are way past their expiration date. Other times it's just people who have hacked the system through being a good salesperson despite being mediocre in all other relevant aspects, but these ones have a much shorter shelf-life.
Oftentimes, however, it's just that they're incompetent relative to the average worker. Most of the big investment banks and consultancy firms here filter heavily for talent- but they didn't always do this. Consequently you end up with a workforce where those with less seniority are, on average, a lot more capable than those senior to them.
I suspect big tech companies suffer a lot less from this, just because they've always filtered well. This is perhaps easier given that the nature of the work filters out a lot of grifters. It's just a lot harder to fake being a good software engineer or data scientist, and the minimum cognitive horsepower required is usually so much higher at most big tech companies.
I think the Peter Principle doesn't hold outside of dysfunctional organizations, and it's not a super useful concept as a result.
On the other hand, maybe I've been blessedly lucky to work at companies (Google, Waymo) where the Peter Principle seems obviously false. For example, my managers have consistently been better at both my job and theirs than I am.
The companies that I work for haven't been household names. I also agree that the Peter Principle only works for dysfunctional orgs. If such a case happened, the manager would simply get fired for not doing their job well. It might take a year or two, but it would eventually happen.
> For example, my managers have consistently been better at both my job and theirs than I am.
Just adding my experience: This has been true with some managers, and not true with others.
I've worked at one company where management was consistently worse than the employees they were supervising, but it had nothing to do with the Peter Principle, just the opposite.
Employees were paid $23 an hour with lots of opportunities for overtime. Management started at $50,000 a year with no OT and mandatory on call.
You might notice that 23x40x52= $47,000 and change. So did all of the employees. None of us would apply or take management roles that were a pay cut, so all the managers were hired externally. They had no experience working in the field whatsoever, so were essentially useless for anything other than office admin.
Last week, I posted a piece I wrote arguing that helicopters should be taxed based on their noise externalities. I felt there was a subtext to a lot of the responses I got along the lines of “oh look, another big government progressive who wants to regulate everything.”
This was strange to me, since I sometimes conceptualize myself as a libertarian. Then I went back and looked at my writing and discovered that indeed, it is quite statist. I think this is a byproduct of basically just attempting to write a lot, and I think it suggests something about why libertarian intellectuals are rare in the mainstream media, so I wrote about that (https://omnibudsman.substack.com/p/why-libertarian-public-intellectuals).
My feeling is that libertarians[1] hugely underestimate just how much coercive background social structure is necessary for their mechanisms. It is actually quite hard to compel almost all people to embrace negotiation and contract as a means to their desired ends, instead of the more direct methods of lying, cheating, stealing, and murder. You tend to need either the vast powerful state envisioned by the statists, or you need the ubiquitous stiff social mores world of the conservatives. Either there needs to be a policeman on every corner saying "you can't shoot your neighbor over his blasting rap at 120dB, you have to sue him" or else you have to be afraid to show your face in church, or some club, if you even entertain violence as a technique.
My impression is that the libertarian tends to take this coercive structure for granted. Let's assume there is some method which compels people to solve problems by contract and negotation -- now how then would they solve problem such-and-such? All very interesting, but the a priori assumption makes this an angels on the head of a pin sterile speculation, since it assumes some God Emperor is enforcing the No Violence rule, and how that is done is not discussed in detail. Even lthough, ironically, I'd say most human experimentation with types of government is driven by solving this first of practical problems, and we *still* haven't quite worked it out, given the amount of violence remaining.
I realize there's some folderol about insurance companies, and the argument that a society without violence, where stuff gets settled by negotiation, is overall better for everybody. Which is certainly true! But surely the history of our species also teaches us that human beings are not really smart enough to universally grasp that fact, even when faced with copious direct evidence. We're just too good at rationalizing away evidence that conflicts with our pet theories.
--------------
[1] And I'm speaking regretfully because I personally would love to live in the libertarian paradise.
"Either there needs to be a policeman on every corner..."
There doesn't need to be a policeman on every corner to stop people from shooting their neighbors over loud music in a libertarian society, any more than there needs to be a policeman on every corner to prevent that in any existing society. A much smaller and less obtrusive police force will suffice for that.
Also, there's a term called "anarcho-capitalism". Please learn it. Libertarians who are not anarcho-capitalists, which I am pretty sure is most of us, are perfectly on board with having enough police to effectively dissuade people from shooting their neighbors over loud music or whatever. Libertarians who are not anarcho-capitalists are also sick and tired of people saying "I have found a flaw in anarcho-capitalism, therefore libertarians are fools".
Yes, you can do it with fewer policemen -- if you have stronger civic mores, and more effective social coercive forces. But you always need some mixture of both that rises far above the levels found in the libertarian paradise.
I wish it weren't so, believe me. I would be very happy to live in such a world. But it's just not what is achievable on this planet, with this species. There are just too many of us that are just too stupid to figure out even our own best long-term interests, and this demographic, while a minority, is unfortunately a big enough minority to ruin it for the rest of us.
Now personally I prefer the invisible social coercion forces, which are more flexible than the law and armed force. More likely to be capable of making an exception for unique individual circumstances. So I put by influence on social conservatism, and away from statism. I'm happy to go to whatever the popular church is, do the silly dance and chant the sacred chants -- even those I find silly or intellectually bankrupt -- if it keeps general public order, and outside of the holy days I can do as I mostly please, because I can count on the social forces making violence an exceedingly rare event.
Do you have evidence to support your claim that we need more police than libertarians (and anarcho-capitalists, aka ancaps) think we do? Because after reading your comment and John's, it looks like you believe we need X police, John believes we need Y, the median ancap believes we need Z, and X > Y > Z.
As someone with probably the same sympathies as you two, I think it'd be interesting to outline some bounds on X, Y, and Z, why X >Y would be so certain, etc.
Also, note that ancaps are likely to make a distinction between state-appointed and private police. They claim Z=0, but also claim a very high chance of there being plenty of private police. Possibly Y private police, and maybe even X, depending on the region, so there's plenty of interesting ground to explore there. For example, the standard non-ancap-libertarian argument for why there would have to be any state-appointed police is one I'm not greatly familiar with, although I could sketch a possible argument if I had to. (I normally just see that claim asserted to audiences who already accept it.)
I don't know that you necessarily need the "ubiquitous stiff social mores world of the conservatives". What you need is a high-trust society with a more-or-less unified set of values. I just don't know how you get a high-trust society with a unified set of values without being at least somewhat conservative.
What's important is that if Bob is violating the rules of society, his friends and family need to side with society over Bob. This can be true whether Bob's rule violation is "blasting rap music at 120dB" or "complaining that his neighbor is blasting rap music at 120 dB".
"Conservative" ipso facto means "cares a lot about preserving values, and defends them vigorously." It's right there in the name. It could be you're misdefining "conservative" as some caricature which it is not.
The noisiest 'copters appear to be owned by the government, and the government only holds noisy civilians responsible. Good luck.
It strikes me that libertarianism as an ideology is very hard to sell, partly because of the effect you describe. If you're a libertarian and want to write about something, it's far more interesting to explore the idea of a libertopia where everything is governed by contracts, nobody pays any taxes and everyone is solely responsible for their own damn self, which sounds like hell for most people.
However, when you point out specific examples of harmful policies and explain why they're bad, I think most people's reaction would be "Yeah that's reasonable, we should not have that policy if that's the case." But if you then say "There are thousands of policies just like this that we would be better off without, and that's why I'm a libertarian," it's hardly something that sparks the fire of idealism in someone, because the ideal isn't some lofty goal like egalitarianism or preserving family and community bonds, it's what we're already doing but less worse, right? I have little affection for libertarianism but that's the impression I get from your piece.
Maybe the best place for libertarianism isn't in governance, but in bureaucracy. Surely any harmful policy you could identify is opposed by some political party that isn't explicitly libertarian, right? So the most effective way to abolish them would be to join said political party and make it clear that there's a political slam dunk waiting for them. If every political party has a small contingent of libertarians on the lookout for harmful policies that would make their party look great if they managed to abolish it, you could probably achieve way more than a dedicated libertarian party could, simply by pulling strings from behind the scenes, like a shadowy cabal with a hidden agenda, slowly dismantling the state while the rest are none the wiser... Actually, I'm not sure I like that idea any more, forget I said anything.
My feeling about libertarianism is vaguely similar. I don't see wiping away thousands of policies as failing to fire up the idealism - as a programmer, I really like elegant machinery, and government fits that paradigm - but I also recognize a lot of rules that are there for good reasons that might not have been recorded (cf. Chesterton). Keep those, and the gap between libertopia and some current government is hard to make out, including the price tag.
About a year and a half ago, someone asked how a libertarian government would really likely work, and I took a stab at an account of it. One way to summarize it is that it ends up a long and very luck-dependent process.
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,4162.msg140141.html#msg140141
Arguably in the late 20th century, there were libertarian tendencies in both US parties. The "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" formulation that overlapped with the more moderate strains of libertarianism implicitly meant that there was a place for more fiscally conservative Democrats and more socially liberal Republicans to meet at libertarian-leaning policies. And so we got things like deregulation under Carter, or the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in the early 90s.
I think there's less room for that these days, with the right more economically interventionist generally, and the left more focused on various social orthodoxies. Different interventions and orthodoxies than their opponents, but there's less laissez-faire in either sphere to go around.
This is a remarkable capacity for self reflection and I am glad you posted this. I would say that all of us are libertarian until we start asking ourselves what faults we don't have that others do. I note in myself that I can switch from regarding the use of a leaf blower as deserving the death penalty to thinking "fuck you, don't tell me what I can do on my own property" in about the time it takes me to start one.
Everyone seems to agree that the current situation with the appointment of US supreme justices[1] is less than ideal, where the party in power of the senate can just block any appointee, and then install a partisan when in control of both branches. The loudest responses seem to be "Yeah, [party] should just pack the courts" (self-evidently undemocratic), "something something term limits" (probably unconstitutional, getting amendments for this is currently infeasible), "each president should just appoint one" (either has the same problems as above or just leads to all partisan justices).
Here's an attempted proposal to hopefully get incentives in the right place without relying too much on "norms", that I'd like feedback from the crowd to tell me in what ways I'm being an idiot an it can be improved:
- Every president gets one justice appointment per term, and the total number of justices is left mostly uncapped (If it becomes *too* unwieldy, a soft cap at 1/4 the size of senate, currently 25)
- The Senate *must* vote on every nominee on a "reasonable" timeline, or they are considered to be providing implicit consent[2] for the nominee. "No" votes should include guidance on what they would consider a more reasonable candidate.
- If they can't come to an agreement with the Senate: at any time during the last year of their presidency, up to a week (or more?) before the next election, the President may set a "fallback" judge, for whom a "no" vote on another candidate is considered to be *implicit consent* by the senate for that candidate being immediately appointed by *the next* (term's) president at any point during that president's term.
Ideally, this incentivizes the President and the Senate to come to a compromise early in his term, so they avoid a partisan fallback judge and he gets an early favorable justice.
Of course, this implies that any two-term president gets essentially a free partisan fallback justice, which should be fine given
(a) every president gets one, and the ping-pong of the parties should balance this out
(b) who that nominee would be becomes an explicit campaign point, so they would have the mandate of democracy
Thought, criticisms, concerns?
[1] (and less-than-supreme federal/circuit justices, but one issue at a time)
[2] In the language of the constitution: "[The President] shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint [...] Judges of the supreme Court" https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S2-C2-3-5/ALDE_00013096/
Status quo has more support than any of the "reform" proposals. The Right and the Left might not be happy with the current situation but they sure as hell prefer it over any of the "reform" proposal from the other side.
My proposal. For something as crucial to the current state of affairs as the SCOTUS, any reform package must have more than 2/3rds support from both parties in both houses of Congress. Anything else is grounds for rates of perceived illegitimacy that have not been seen before. Otherwise let the status quo remain.
Requiring that The Bad Guys agree with a policy change is a loophole allowing a minority of obstructionists to thwart the Will of the People(tm)
I think you've misdiagnosed the underlying problem, which is that because America has a far-reaching but underspecified constitution, an awful lot of power that ought to be being wielded by the legislature(or in some cases possibly the executive) /has/ to be wielded by the judiciary.
Everyone likes to complain about judicial activism, and legislating from the bench absolutely is both bad and common, but while some of the time it's the fault of judges for overreaching quite a lot of the time it's the fault of framers for writing ambiguous laws. When you have a constitutional provision that definitely says /something/, but could be interpreted to mean a number of wildly differing things, you're /forcing/ unelected judges to make a decision that should be made democratically.
My proposal would be a constitutional amendment that states that unless the correct interpretation of a constitutional provision is fairly unambiguous, judges shall form a referendum or set of referenda to clarify it, instead of ruling themselves, and that these clarifications can be amended more easily than the written constitution itself.
" because America has a far-reaching but underspecified constitution, an awful lot of power that ought to be being wielded by the legislature(or in some cases possibly the executive) /has/ to be wielded by the judiciary."
Or... and stop me if you've heard this before...
9A and 10A specify that power should NOT be wielded by ANY of the branches of FedGov.
Otherwise, we're back to "might makes right" and just hiring whatever ethicist rejected for a NYT column justifies our preferences.
I think the judges decisions are often pretty dumb/irrational but still generally do a better job than congress or democracy.
The legislating from the bench seems more feature than bug.
As much as I do like that idea (it's a good one), my proposal is predicated on the assumption that anything which requires an amendment to the constitution is a non-starter. Barring the 27th (which is a special case from being a legacy, common-sense proposal contemporaneous with the bill of rights) we're in the longest period without amendments since the civil war. Add that to the current extreme levels of partisan polarization (many "recent" amendments were passed during a time considered to have *unusually low* polarization).
Barring an actual constitutional crisis (and keeping in mind that several recent times that could have been called one did not qualify), I think any plan that requires an amendment is unrealistic.
Any plan is unrealistic though, so you might as well propose a good one.
No change to the court can happen unless both parties support it. And no party will support a change unless it gives them a clear permanent advantage.
>Any plan is unrealistic though
This is only true in a vacuous sense. Some plans are more unrealistic than others, and mere changes of legislation are much more likely than constitutional amendments.
Getting both parties to agree to a change that they know they can repeal if they decide it's in their benefit later is *much* more likely than anything where such repeal has only been done *once* in the history of the country.
So if you don't like a particular part of the constitution, you can just try to get a popular movement going that uses words in a new and confusing way that creates ambiguities that weren't there before?
...come to think of it, this describes so much of what already is.
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State…”
James Madison wrote it.
President Madison in the War of 1812 thought it would take a militia * 3 to equal a standing army.
> - Every president gets one justice appointment per term, and the total number of justices is left mostly uncapped (If it becomes too unwieldy, a soft cap at 1/4 the size of senate, currently 25)
This requires either a constitutional amendment, or a new norm that both parties agree on and both actually uphold. I'd consider a such a norm even less likely than an amendment in the current political climate.
> The Senate must vote on every nominee on a "reasonable" timeline, or they are considered to be providing implicit consent[2] for the nominee.
This would require either a constitutional amendment, or both parties agreeing to a new interpretation of the constitution even when the new interpretation works against them.
Basically, your proposal requires a constitution amendment, and if we're going to do that we might as well put in term limits.
Yea, I agree.
I would strongly favor an amendment which both eliminated "recess appointments", and stated that every POTUS appointment is approved 100 days after its referral to the Senate unless a majority of the Senate has in the meantime voted yea or nay on it.
I would also strongly favor an amendment which established term limits for the SCOTUS; slightly increased its size (say to 11 justices); and specifyied that a federal law which was approved by both Congress and the POTUS can be overturned by the SCOTUS only with the votes of a supermajority of justices (either 6 of 9 or 7 of 11).
There are some other amendments I'd really like to see too, like a serious clarification and reform of the presidential pardon power. Regardless the bottom line is that our increasingly-childish society needs to re-learn the adult patience and focus that's required in order to amend our federal constitution.
"and specifyied that a federal law which was approved by both Congress and the POTUS "
Which Federal laws would this not cover?
Those which Congress passed over a presidential veto.
I don't see how either part requires an amendment. In reverse:
(2) The constitution is very explicit that the duty of the Senate is their "Consent and Advice". They need to give one or the other. Refusing to vote is refusing to give either consent or advice, so such a law would be enforcing that provision; This part is rock solid, afaict.
(1) The word under contention is specifically "consent". It's a well-established legal tradition in contract law that one can have their consent be given to an alternative action if they default on their duties in another area. It's well within the bounds of precedent to explicitly bind such consent by law in the course of them accepting senatorial duties. (Of course, the Senate could always attempt to repeal said law)
What are your counterarguments?
Duty or power?
I'm not a lawyer or a constitutional scholar, but I know that "this is how we've always done this" is almost always going to win out over a novel interpretation, no matter how much sense that interpretation makes. We've never had anyone join the Supreme Court without the Senate voting yes, so that's how it works, regardless of what "consent" means in other contexts.
Also, in practice, this proposal would be equivalent to court packing. I would submit that the question people ask about the court is always the wrong one. What the court needs isn't greater efficacy, but rather greater credibility. There isn't any way to make it fair or make it produce good outcomes since government isn't designed with either of those in mind. The real goal is to make the system appear credible enough that nobody wants to violently overthrow it. So far the Supreme Court still has that amount of credibility and any changes to it are unlikely to increase it.
It's distributed court packing with a long tail, as opposed to recent acute court packing that has no medium-term remediation.
Surely the medium-term remediation to court packing is more court packing? The Democrats add three more Justices so the Republicans add five more so the Democrats add seven more so the Republicans add nine more.
Luckily the numbers only grow linearly and not more than once every four years so it will be millions of years before the entire population of the USA is on the Supreme Court.
I wrote a little bit on lead exposure and how successful lead abatement efforts have made the estimated effects of lead extreme overestimates.
https://cremieux.substack.com/p/who-gets-exposed-to-lead
TL;DR: If average lead levels drop, but gaps in IQ, crime, illness, etc. in terms of antecedents of lead exposure remain somewhat constant, the effect size of a unit of lead necessarily increases. For IQ, in the last 50 years, the effect of one μg/dL of lead multiplied by more than 100 times.
I was under the impression that banning of tetraethyl lead in some places but not others provided a natural experiment that allowed its effect to be uncovered. But I didn't notice that idea being addressed in that article.
Those don't exist for IQ. The closest you get is RCTs where people are assigned to lead remediation. The same phenomenon of effect size per unit lead inflation that I documented is observed for the handful of natural experimental studies relating lead to crime, and it is exacerbated somewhat in studies that are ecological rather than cohort-based. There is severe publication bias in the whole literature on lead, lead-crime not excepted.
Excellent article. AltHype has written some similar things too: https://thealternativehypothesis.org/index.php/2017/01/07/lead-race-and-crime/
Are there some LGBT support groups in Russia that I can join?
I believe such organizations would likely be considered criminal now, no?
Yeah. Pretty sure criminalized in Russia
If it is an important cause you might as well just protest outside a police station while reading a copy of King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. (Or maybe read first and then determine whether acceptance of being jailed meets the criteria and steps he sets out.)
I have often seen infographs with the message "everything in this particular field or walk of life is controlled by a single-digit number of corporations". Here are 2 examples I got by just typing "everything is controlled by a few companies" into google image search :
1- Food, 9 corporations : https://www.frugl.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/57ebc2d7077dcc0f208b7830-800x400.png
2- by appending "media" to the search terms, 6 corporations : https://preview.redd.it/nb11lryl6ca01.png?auto=webp&s=eaffac604d0f62e03c21389e8891aade0eddb6ed
There is another somewhat-different example of a field I'm following with interest (though I'm still a layman), which is semiconductors and chip manufacturing. The seimconductor industry in general is ridicously over-consolidated, only 3 corpos - Intel, Samsung, and TSMC - are cutting-edge manufacturers, every other chip company you have heard of - Apple, Arm, AMD - are "fabless", they don't have factories, they just design (which, to be completely clear, is an entire universe where billions are made) chips, and then give the designs to manufacturers - fabs (short for fabricators) - to make them. There are other companies other than the big 3, but nobody hears about them and they are all behind in the "technology node" employed in their transistors (basically the sophistication of the manufacturing process, whose most observable effect is how small you can make a transistor). And then there's ASML, the dutch company that is the *sole* supplier of extreme UV lithography machines that the big 3 companies use, it's the tip of the tip of the pyramid. The entire world depends on ***1*** company. If it goes down for any reason whatsoever it can send us back to the 1990s or early 2000s or so level of tech.
Food and Media seems to be deliberate consolidations and empire-building, while Semiconductors is perhaps more naturally rewarding of big corpos and punishing of small companies because of the insane expertise and the supply chains involved. Regardless of anything though :
1- What is the veracity of those infographs ? What "semantics games", if any, are being played by connecting 2 companies with a line to say that one of them controls the others ? Are they playing fast and loose with the meaning of "control" ?
2- If there is no catch in (1), then aren't conspiracy theorists (the "elites hate us and are out to get us" kind, not the "Obama's wife is an alien transgender" kind) much much more credible and justified than we often give them credits for ? Isn't the modern world exactly as over-consolidated and unified as they imagine ? Aren't the common rebuttals to them along the lines of "lol nobody can actually coordinate that much people and effort for that much time and money" shaky given (1) ?
3- Ignoring politics and who wants to control whom for a moment, isn't this a dangerous centralized weak spot for all of civilization ? In project management there is often this phrase, "Bus Factor", it's how many of your people can be hit by a bus (== an unforseen circumstance resulting in their death or neutralization) before your project grinds to a halt because all key people are in hospital. This factor is supposed to be big, if it's small then your project is fragile and dependent on a small number of people. Other terms are "Single Point of Failure" in tech, and the "K-selected" vs. "R-selected" dichotomy from biology, where animals either invest all their energy in raising a few offspring (with, hopefully, better chances of surviving), or make a huge number of offspring (which, while individually fragile, have more chances overall because of their sheer number).
Those companies make us a civilization with a low bus factor, a single (or a few, single-digit few) point of failure, an extreme K-selected civilization that puts all of our eggs into very few places. It would take so little to bring us all down to our knees, there is so much hidden centralization and so many invisible webs of control that can all crash at once.
Your take on the semiconductor industry is extremely reductive. TSMC, Intel, and Samsung are top level Tier 1 manufacturers making extremely high density single digit nanometer scale chips, often microprocessors.
But this is just a small portion of the overall semiconductor industry. Companies like TI, ADI, NXP, OnSemi, Microchip, Global Foundries, and many others make a dizzying array of (often) smaller, less complicated parts that are nonetheless needed in industries like automotive, power, and general electronics.
You've also left out Companies like Micron and SK / Hynix, who make huge amounts of memory chips.
Source: I work at a pure-play fab. Which you can probably figure out because of my time zone, but is one of the 4 fabs (not companies) that could make 7nm, but dropped out of the race because we couldn't find enough customers to buy 4nm to make it worthwhile.
While it is true that bleeding-edge companies are in very limited supply and TSMC is ludicrously OP in the pure-play space, the reason for that isn't because of some cabal, it's because it's simply not worth it to have die at that CD size. The economics of wafer production is such that you have to run your fab at ~85% of maximum theoretical capacity to break even. So you've got to have a customer willing to pay what it's going to cost you to make the product before you even get to the point of capital outlay.
The infographic is similar to listing out that there are only a handful of companies making luxe supercars, but disregarding that there are a whole heck of a lot more that are making automobiles for 99+% of the market.
My intuition is that >>1% of the developed-world population makes regular use of (goods and services that depend on) ~7 nm chips, in ways that would cause them great inconvenience if those were no longer available. That would make the analogy with supercars misleading, even if high-end chips are <1% of all chips. But I haven't looked into it in detail, and you probably know more than I.
Almost nothing *depends* on 7 or beyond -- it's only been in commercial existence for less than a decade, and even then only in specific (and yes, luxury) applications.
Just as an example -- of all of the equipment that designs or produces 7nm, none of them use 7nm.
1) 7nm has been done without EUV, so it can be done without EUV.
2) 7nm only came out in 2018; while a specific design might need 7nm chips, most of us probably don't use things invented since then.
3) Blowing up the factory that builds parts for the factories that build 7nm chips wouldn't destroy the 7nm chips already in existence, or even *immediately* stop their production; there'd be grace time to adapt. Even blowing up the factories that build 7nm chips wouldn't destroy the chips already in existence; your item still works, you just can't buy replacement parts or new ones for a while.
>The entire world depends on ***1*** company. If it goes down for any reason whatsoever it can send us back to the 1990s or early 2000s or so level of tech.
AFAICS this isn't how it works; there have been 7nm chips made without EUV and that's 2018 tech.
The *most advanced* chips require EUV, but that's literally "the top-of-the-line chips for the last few years", not "decades worth of stuff". If ASML explodes tomorrow we can go back to making chips from the late tens until someone can get another EUV company going.
Carl Pham and Paul Botts gave you good responses already. I'll add that large corporations like the ones in these graphics are not monolithic. If one piece of them fails (bankruptcy, catastrophic failure, wizard makes them disappear, etc) it doesn't really impact the rest of the company from a financial or legal perspective.
Also, compare these graphics to the most valuable companies in the world. Very few of them fall into the purview of these graphics. And if you filter further by profitablity, even fewer will show up. Thats because industry concentration is highly correlated with industry with poor economics (food has very low margins, cars as well, media is prone to the whims of trends and has high operating costs). Industries with high margins and great economics will attract more entrants into the market, reducing concentration. At some point this will degrade the economics of the industry and make poor performers prone to being bought out. This will lead to concentration. After a few cycles you have a bad industry with a few big competitors that have made it work. None of that is conspiratorial
Concurring with Carl, Paul, and Julian here.
And having written that ...
There's a significant "by location" concentration – i.e. not "by company" or "by oligopoly control within an industry," at least in the sense we've so far been discussing it in this thread – of one chemical element absolutely vital to human life, due to its critical importance in fertilizing crops. That element is Phosphorus, of which Morocco holds 70% of the world's supply. Presumably, any interruption in the supply of this material to the world from that single source could have immense impacts.
https://www.mei.edu/publications/moroccos-new-challenges-gatekeeper-worlds-food-supply-geopolitics-economics-and
"... all food crops, indeed all plant life, require the element phosphorus to grow and Morocco possesses over 70% of the world's phosphate rock reserves, from which the phosphorus used in fertilizers is derived. Unlike other finite resources such as fossil fuels, there is no alternative to phosphorus ..."
(This piece is by Michaël Tanchum, who "teaches international relations and political economy of the Middle East and North Africa at Universidad de Navarra, Spain." His piece here was published by the Middle East Institute, "the oldest Washington-based institution dedicated solely to the study of the Middle East.") Tanchum's article also peripherally notes how recent rises in natural gas prices have led to soaring prices for the world's two other key fertilizers, nitrogen and potassium (for the latter, at least in its 'DAP' formulation).
Another very recent article by Elizabeth Kolbert, a long time staff writer at The New Yorker, discusses this topic:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/phosphorus-saved-our-way-of-life-and-now-threatens-to-end-it
"... the vast majority of the rest of Western Sahara, is controlled—illegally, by most accounts—by Morocco, which possesses something like seventy per cent of the planet’s known phosphorus reserves.
"The status of Western Sahara is one of the worries that [journalist] Dan Egan takes up in his worrying new book, “The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance” (Norton). ... Egan quotes Jeremy Grantham, the British investor, who has said that Morocco’s hold over the planet’s phosphorus “makes OPEC and Saudi Arabia look like absolute pikers.” He also quotes Isaac Asimov, who once wrote, “Life can multiply until all the phosphorus is gone and then there is an inexorable halt which nothing can prevent.”
"As Egan notes, phosphorus is critical not just to crop yields but also to basic biology. DNA is held together by what’s often called a “phosphate backbone”; without this backbone, the double helix would be a hash. The compound ATP provides cells with energy for everything from ion transport to protein synthesis; the “P” in the abbreviation stands for “phosphate.” In vertebrates, bones are mostly made up of calcium phosphate, as is tooth enamel.
"What distinguishes phosphorus from other elements that are essential to life—carbon, say, or nitrogen—is its relative scarcity. (Asimov described phosphorus as “life’s bottleneck.”) The atmosphere contains almost no phosphorus. Phosphate-rich rocks, meanwhile, exist only in limited quantities, in certain geological formations. China holds the world’s second-largest reserves—these are less than one-tenth the size of Morocco’s—and Algeria the third-largest."
(Another article, posted in the reply/follow-up below, notes that 85% of the "world’s remaining high-grade phosphate rock" is found within just five countries, some of these "geopolitically complex": Morocco, China, Egypt, Algeria, and South Africa.)
Here's one take on how the UK, specifically, may be able to combine technology and policy changes to more efficiently use phosphorous, including reducing runoff and recycling (legacy concentrations of phosphorus in soil, along with animal manures, food waste, and biosolids).
https://theconversation.com/phosphorus-supply-is-increasingly-disrupted-we-are-sleepwalking-into-a-global-food-crisis-196538
If successful, this could be a blueprint for other nations in helping reduce some of the critical dependency on supplies from Morocco, and to a proportional extent, the other four countries mentioned above.
As one actual example of disrupted supply, in mid-2022 China sharply restricted exports of phosphates to the world market, whose key buyers include India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Ostensibly, China did so "to keep a lid on domestic prices and protect food security while global fertiliser prices [were] hovering near record highs."
https://www.reuters.com/article/china-fertilizers-quotas/china-issues-phosphate-quotas-to-rein-in-fertiliser-exports-analysts-idUSKBN2OQ0KY
Here's the "mother ship" for at least many such infographics on market concentration in various industries:
https://concentrationcrisis.openmarketsinstitute.org/
Their creator, the Open Markets Institute, notes near the bottom of this page that:
"Locating data on how few companies control individual markets, though, has long been difficult, and not by accident. Although Americans used anti-monopoly policies throughout much of the 20th century to preserve competition, a shift in ideology in the late 1970s allowed increased monopolization across the economy. To shield this pro-corporate turn from the public, the Federal Trade Commission halted the collection and publication of industry concentration data in 1981.
"To remedy this gap in public knowledge, Open Markets purchased extensive, up-to-date industry intelligence from IBISWorld, a team of analysts who collect economic and market data, with the intention of releasing the information regarding industry concentration to the public."
I don't think it's fair to say that 6 companies control media unless you define media very narrowly, such as cable TV. Joe Rogan gets way more views than any TV host. Is he not media?
More than any single TV host, but all TV hosts combined? I doubt it. And what you see with this consolidation is that every TV host is repeating basically the same talking points.
Strangely enough, media outlets owned by the same company often have really different editorial point of views. For example: https://www.thewrap.com/one-america-news-network-gets-revenue-from-att/
Most of the "6 companies control 90% of the media" takes I see are bad. They present six companies that "control" cable TV stations, and then a (slightly-overlapping) set of six companies that control film production, and six different companies that own 80% of the newspapers, and six different companies that "control" social media.
>If it goes down for any reason whatsoever it can send us back to the 1990s or early 2000s or so level of tech.
I'm confused by this, unless "goes down" means "all their tools and documentation, and that of their subsidiaries and subcontractors, being physically eradicated". If they were to simply go out of business etc. all their intellectual and physical property would be purchased by others, who would have enormous financial incentive to continue production of their products. That certainly wouldn't be a painless process but the idea that decades of technological knowledge would be lost into the void is absurd.
Put another way, even a single company *isn't* a single point of failure. Even if ASML as an organization ceased to exist tomorrow by magic, all the people who worked for them are still around. The number of people who would have to be hit by a bus to make EUV technology go away to the point we need to start from scratch is considerable.
"Put another way, even a single company *isn't* a single point of failure."
Unless the governor of the state where the company exists declares an emergency and shuts you down for being non-essential.
"All of their intellectual and physical property", almost certainly includes less than half of the information you'd need to do to replicate e.g. an EUV lithography fab complex. Most of the rest resides only in the minds of the technicians at the first company, many of whom won't move over to the new company. Some of it is in a web of subcontractors, many of whom won't wind up doing business with the new company.
If it's just a matter of a new owner putting their name on the building, sure. Companies can fail harder than that, and if your idea is that e.g. it doesn't matter if Kim Jong Un nukes Samsung's fab because it will just be rebuilt in Arizona, then no, that's not going to work very well.
What man has done, man can aspire to do, so I expect these capabilities would be rebuilt in time. But that may be a long and troubling time.
(1) Often they are, yes (playing fast and loose with the meaning of "control"). Large multi-national public companies rarely exhibit the sort of clear top-down control of past eras, the John D. Rockefellers and etc.
(2) No, they aren't; no, it isn't; no, it isn't. The clearest evidence for those responses is the absence of strong examples of the predicted outcome. We've had more than a century now of large multi-national public companies and have zero cases of one of them actually "sending us back to XX years ago" through its sole action or its collapse. These predictions were old hat when I was in college, and I'm probably (based on cultural references here) one of the oldest regular commenters at ACX.
(3) See previous answer. If it "would take us little" for a large multi-national company "to bring us all down to our knees", it would have happened at least once by now. There have of course been cases where the collapse of a big company caused or contributed to problems at the large-national or even international scale, but nothing close to what is being described here.
I strongly support anti-trust laws, and favor reducing the degree to which businesses are able to become "too big to fail" or even close to it. But not because of any of the hyperbolic doom-casting summarized here.
There is an organizational form which has within living memory taken entire societies and even large swaths of the world down paths that do resemble "bring us all down to our knees", which is autocratic government. That is one very good argument for viewing the maintenance of representative democracy as the most important safeguard against those sorts of outcomes.
Bear in mind that a huge multinational corporation with vast interests and ties to a huge number of vendors and consumers doesn't act remotely like a Mr. Monopoly Man wilful tyrant, the scourge of the Marxist dreams. It can't afford to. A ship that big is steered by massive consensus among its manager class -- usually at least dozens of people need to agree on any new direction, and so they turn as ponderously as the Titanic. They are also often as much beholden to their market as the market is beholden to them. They have enormous payrolls, enormous capital expenses with $billions in bonds outstanding on which they need to make regular payments, and their first priority is always maintaining that gigantic cash flow. So they have to pay close attention to what people will buy, they really can't afford to go off in quixotic directions at the whim of even the CEO. That's why you don't look for innovation and novelty in enormous corporations, any more than you look for it among national governments[1].
So if you're looking at gigantic corporations that have a massive market share as roadblocks to change -- that's spot on. They are massive defenders of the status quo. But if you're fearing them as agents of subversion that will thwart or pervert the will of the masses, that's totally backward.
-------------------
[1] No one should be puzzled by the fact that IBM, then the biggest computer manufacturer, was late to the PC world, or that Toyota, current largest car manufacturer in the world, is slow to the EV world.
Most of the issues that conspiracy theorists, whether justified or unjustified, are attempting to address, can be, I think, best explored through Scott's filter as laid out long ago in Meditations on Moloch.
A common criticism of hedge funds is that they buy a struggling company, load it with debt and lucrative payments to the hedge fund itself and win whatever happens to the company. This criticism seems to depend on naïve lenders who do not see the higher risk that the target firm's profitability.
What am I missing?
The narrative suffers from a lot of selection bias. You rarely hear about the PE firm that buys a few regional manufacturers, combines them, and increases margins by 3%. Thats boring and doesn't make good news/internet post/outrage.
One piece of the equation you are missing is that angry ex employees and customers make good stories and often the underlying company was a lot less healthy than you hear.
So evil PE firm swoops in an guts this paper mill for parts and fires all its staff. It could have run for another 50 years if that hadn’t happened! It was profitable!
Often the profitability was maybe a one time bump or last gasp, and the paper mill was not nearly the “going concern” later news articles would have you believe and was about to collapse.
Business is complicated. And it is very easy to have a mistaken understanding of a business's health if you don’t know it’s debt structure.
I knew management at a mid sized manufacturer (couple thousand employees) where they had years worth of back orders, in the mid 2000s. Seems impossible to screw up right? Well they loaded up on debt so they could expand and bring the back log down to say 9 months, but then the recession hit, orders got cancelled and suddenly they go from a giant money printing machine to unable to cover their debt payments.
Got bought out by a Chinese firm to take their tech. From top of the world to “almost out of business”, from one ill timed expansion a year before a recession hit (and a poorly worded order cancellation policy).
Larry the Liquidator lays it out: https://youtu.be/62kxPyNZF3Q
Lenders know they're facing higher risks and bake an appropriate risk premium into the interest rates. The "Junk" bonds with which LBOs are commonly financed generally pay interest rates 5-10 percentage points higher than similar investment-grade corporate bonds issued by companies that are not considered to be at significant medium-term risk of going broke. Averaged over a portfolio, this premium tends to be enough to make junk bonds competitive with investment-grade bonds despite the risk of bankruptcy.
Another part of the equation is that bondholders of failed private equity takeovers rarely suffer a full Willy Wonka "You get nothing!" endgame. Many bankruptcies end with a restructuring rather than a liquidation (the company keeps operating, but the repayment terms are adjusted, often with the bondholders taking a haircut in exchange for some kind of equity or warrant that lets them make some money back if the company recovers), and even a liquidation usually pays out a nontrivial amount of money to bondholders (a quick googling suggests something like a 40% average recovery rate for bondholders).
Private equity deals also almost always include an equity investment by someone (either the private equity firm itself or whoever they're brokering the deal for) equivalent to a downpayment on a house or a car. This means more money to go around for bondholders in the event of a bankruptcy (since stockholders are last in line during bankruptcy proceedings), and it means that whoever's first in line for the big win in the case the company actually does turn around, is also putting up a big pile of their own money that they lose if it goes under.
I suspect the criticism you're hearing is equivocation between deals where the PE firm is the buyer and deals where the PE firm is a middle man arranging a buyout deal with an outside purchaser (e.g. Elon Musk buying Twitter) or current executives putting up most or all of the equity downpayment. In middle-man deals, the PE firm generally takes home a ton of money to cover their expenses plus a tidy profit regardless of how the firm turns out. But if the PE firm is the actual buyer, they're putting up their own equity stake and placing a large bet on their ability to turn around the company and realize a profit.
Not sure if you're missing anything. Who is supposed to be the naive lender in this scenario? PE firms and their financiers are tightly connected. It's a constant revolving door between the two. They know exactly what the game is.
This leveraged buyout plus fee structure gets a lot of flack when it doesn't work. Because yes, the terms are very loaded in the PE firm's favour, and they can make out alright when the company fails. It's important to note that this is not what the PE Firms wants. When it happens, it means they failed.
The PE firms make a hell of a lot more money when they can turn the company around, make it profitable, and bring it public. Some PE firms actually have a pretty good record of doing so.
Private equity firms (which is what you mean) are high-risk, high-reward businesses. that's all. They buy companies that would probably otherwise go out of business, and try to make them succeed by big changes. A fair amount of the time, they fail, and the company goes out of business entirely, and everybody loses his money. Some times they succeed, and of course the successes need to cover the failures, so if you look at *only* the successes you will see a pretty outsize return and think WTF? That's because you're not seeing the failures. Things seen and unseen, as they say.
I think Thomas's question was probably more related to examples like Toys 'R Us or Remington - PE firm buys basically solvent going concern, pays out its LPs and backers by loading up the firm with debt, otherwise-solvent firm goes under at least in significant part due to newly-imposed massive debt service.
The question is why the lenders in this scenario are willing to lend money to the PEs given that the conditions under which they'd ever be in a position to foreclose on their debt security (i.e., the firm itself) are exactly the positions in which that security's value has probably tanked under bad PE management (i.e. the circumstances in which the firm's income stream isn't enough to cover its the debt service.) This sort of endogenously-generated risk makes lending to PE firms -- who make no secret of their intent to extract a ton of enterprise value up front to make sure they're covered and face little if any downside risk while leaving the secured lender to hold the bag if things go pear-shaped -- seem like kind of mug's game.
Demanding high interest rates probably explains some of this, but of course high interest rates have and have always had the perverse effect of *making the indebted less solvent."
[Side note: I wonder if there's a "tyranny of the rocket equation" somewhere to reflect the endogenous repayment risk caused by high interest rates?]
Oh well that's easy, then. There are no algorithms for predicting whether management will in the future make good or bad decisions, and so the fact that some of these arrangements will turn into future Harvard B School case studies on What Not To Do is inevitable. Particulary in business and finance, there are no guarantees.
I think this still leaves the question of why -- if the bank is willing to give enough money to a PE firm to cover (and more than cover) the costs of an acquisition, and risk being saddled with a white elephant in exchange, (that the bank would then have to manage in any case) -- the bank needs (or is willing to accommodate) the PE firm being the one that receives the proceeds of hollowing-out the acquired enterprise, instead of just, say, buying the target itself and selling it.
The PE firms in these situations appear to have made a tidy profit off of banks' willingness to pay money now in exchange for IOUs from the business and thus the PE firms completely de-risk themselves while making a profit besides, which in turn leads one to wonder why the banks are playing ball: the PE firm, having cashed out, has no "skin in the game" (although it would obviously be better for the PE firm to have enterprise value increase because then it makes even more money) because the *worst case* is more or less that the PE firm has sold the company to the bank at an above-market price (indeed, a massively above-market price in the event that foreclosure is necessited). Are prospective interest rate payments with a very high autocorrelative risk really the only thing the banks are getting here?
> instead of just, say, buying the target itself and selling it.
Core competency. PE firms have people who are experts on these sorts of deals, while banks don't, or can't spare them. Big banks are good at lending money, PE firms are good at reorganising companies.
You only hear about the cases where it all goes tits up. For every Toys R Us there's a bunch of other lower-profile cases where the operation is successful and everybody gets paid.
The pertinent question seems to be “how do the groups that back private equity companies make out? There should be an answer somewhere.
Is there a tax benefit to bankruptcy? If so maybe the borrowing -> bankruptcy process is just a tax-preferred way to liquidate a company and everyone is in on the game.
> The pertinent question seems to be “how do the groups that back private equity companies make out? There should be an answer somewhere.
I reckon the answer to that is that they keep doing it, so I have to assume it works out.
That would be private equity firms. Hedge funds usually invest on the stock market.
Yes. I mis-wrote. :)
This does happen a lot, but i'll point out an instance where the "bad company" actually turned into the better investment: Host Hotels and Resorts, which started as Marriott Hotels dumping its hard assets and a lot of debt. This wasn't a PE move and the guy who ended up leading Host was the one who suggested doing it while at Marriott, but it is an example where breaking up a company can turn out as a success for both parts.
What are the actual mechanics by which long-term unprofitable companies manage? I mean, don't they uh..... run out of money in their bank account eventually? For example Uber apparently loses several hundred million dollars per quarter, and billions in any given year. Isn't there a bank account that simply goes to 0 at some point, and they shut down as a going concern? How can a company loses a couple billion every year and not go bankrupt, isn't that the literal definition?
When a company's a startup they have x amount of 'runway', or cash in the bank that they can burn before they go under. The startup's either trying to hit profitability or hit the next funding round before they run out of cash. I understand that Uber can issue shares on the public market to raise more capital, but won't investors..... like stop setting money on fire at some point? I don't really get a company can lose money every single quarter and every single year indefinitely
If you invest money in an expanding but loss making company ,you are prob ably gambling on it becoming huge and eating the comopetetion.
Uber will in fact run out of money and go bankrupt when investors decide to stop setting money on fire. But, A: there are a lot of investors with money to burn, some of whom believe the hype, and B: there are other investors willing to pragmatically bet that the first group of investors will keep pumping the stock price up a bit further and it's worth going along for the ride.
This won't last forever, but it can last an awful long time. And maybe the hype will turn out to be real, Uber will lock up half the world's local-transportation market just about the time true self-driving cars come into play and they can stop paying all those annoying *drivers*, and then it will be a pure profit machine and the investors who kept the faith will rake in those sweet, sweet dividend payments forever more.
Don't hold your breath, for either ultimate success or ultimate failure, for Uber or any of the others. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
Companies like Uber choose quite deliberately to invest any money they make in expanding quickly rather than making a profit. Some parts of the business will be making a profit, but these profits are being invested into other parts of the business.
If Uber ever decided "fuck it, let's just become profitable" it would be easy. My understanding is that Uber cars are profitable but Uber Eats is not, so you can start by shutting down Uber Eats. Then you look carefully at every city that Uber is operating in; some are probably profitable but others aren't, so you shut down in the ones that aren't. Shut down all new product development, firing most of your engineers... including of course the self-driving car division.
Yes, they could run out of money. Then they are bankrupt. The point of the funding round is to provide the money to grow until the next funding round, or IPO or acquisition. A company can be acquired for its tech stack, or staff, or reach as much as it’s revenue.
Venture capitalists are happy enough the company that loses money increases its revenue or the platform size. If a VC investS 1 million in a company , it’s preferable the company doubles its revenue while losing money, rather than stagnates and makes a small profit.
Middle-Eastern oil money, is the answer you're looking for. Saudi Arabia, UAE, etc. have a lot of cash. They want to diversify away from oil to weather future trend changes, when that will no longer be viable. Everything has been overinvested in for years, due to very low interest rates from federal banks. In order to get a good investment on extremely large amounts of cash, the investments need to be both huge and long term.
There's a whole subset of new services that are riding on these foreign investors willingness to take a loss in order to build market share. This includes Uber, Door Dash, Twitter (pre-Musk), really a whole bunch of companies. If Uber manages to force out all conventional taxis before they run out of money, they will likely turn things around and become extremely profitable.
Your 401k is losing money every single quarter, and every single year, indefinitely - you keep putting money into it, and it spends that money, and you get no money back - what it is gaining is capital.
Same deal.
This may help illuminate why it can actually be a very bad sign for a company to suddenly become profitable, or to suddenly become much more profitable: When does your 401k give -you- money, instead of the other way around?
When you get old enough and start taking withdrawals from it.
Well, yes.
Or if you desperately need the money and take it out with a penalty. Or when you take out a loan against it.
But, in general: When it is no longer in a growth phase.
Well, you've identified one of the nastier effects of financial repression, and why recessions are necessary for a healthy economy -- that's when bullshit rationalization gets its fatal appointment with reality and disperses. But as long as government does its best to avoid that pain, in order to be re-elected, and has the tools to do it, courtesy of our highly nationalized financial system, then the necessary come to Jesus moment can be delayed for a very long time, and a great deal of economic inefficiency can build up.
I mean, what would you do, if you had $100,000 in cash to put somewhere? You don't need it now, but you *will* need it when you get old, or your kids will when they go to college. Bearing in mind (real) inflation is running 6-8% per year, and so your money better grow that fast or faster if you want to not be slowly impoversihed. You can put it in a bank or CD and get 2-4%, yuck. You can buy Treasuries and get 4%, not good. You can invest in blue-chip stocks and get....5%. You can invest in commercial bonds and do even worse. So what's left? You can buy real estate, but that's tricky, very volatile, and you have to either spend time and energy managing or trust that someone else will do it right (and give them a cut).
It's hardly surprising that in that environment a fair number of people talk themselves into thinking something high yield but high risk (like backing a company that loses money all the time but says it's just about to break through to wild profitabiliy, any day now) is not the worst idea in the world.
As long as they have money coming in (through investors buying debt or equity), they can keep spending it. Investors aren't going to want to do that unless they see some non-trivial probability of massive profitability later, but if they do, they may continue to support it.
Amazon famously managed a long period of extreme unprofitability, before becoming hugely profitable. Uber had a strong case for a while that it might be the same sort of story, but I think it's becoming less plausible, especially as true self-driving starts seeming further away.
Operating at a loss doesn’t have to be a bad thing if the company is growing. If I’m an investor, I maybe wanna see a loss - profit suggests they might not be investing enough in their growth.
Imagine a companies revenue is growing 20% yoy and they are actively hiring and building and taking additional investments. If they’ve been doing that fir a number of years, they are likely a great investment. I mean their stock is probably growing too -investors wouldn’t be setting money on fire by investing. At some point the company would be expected to switch to a profitable mode but I’d rather see as much growth as is easily possible before the switch.
Profit/loss and cash flow are different things. The company you describe isn't providing stockholders with cash, but it *is* turning a profit, by increasing the total value of all the things it owns.
No it isn’t.
Yes it is. When you spend your profit on new facilities, it's still profit, because it's still on your balance sheet (as Property Plant and Equipment).
Econ is definitely not my strong suit. My glib answer is it helps to have a guy that can gin up a reality distortion field with the force of his personality. See Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos…
Amazon operated at a loss for what, 5 or 6 year?
Now Bezos owns his own spaceship company, a half billion dollar yacht with its own mini-yacht, plus the Washington Post and even had enough left over after his divorce to make a down payment on a new wife.
Go figure.
I will give you SJ but I have reservations about Bezos fitting that description. He’s a different kind of genius to me (Not that I can put my finger on it)
The thing that I keep ruminating on, is that when Amazon finally did declare some profit, it was because of their cloud computing infrastructure, not their retail operation. It was like retail was the tip of the iceberg, and I never saw what was underneath.
I had trouble signing in to Manifold to invest.
How many foreign countries have you visited?
Note:
1) Don't count airport layovers as "visits" to countries. This rule pertains even if you left the grounds of the airport to stay at a nearby hotel for the night.
2) Don't count visits to the areas around cruise ship terminals. For example, if you went on a cruise, your ship docked at Nassau, and you spent three hours shopping at the tourist stores within walking distance of the dock, don't count that as a visit to the Bahamas.
3) Don't count visits to countries that happened when you were so young that you can't remember them anymore. For example, if your parents took you on a trip to Canada from the U.S. when you were a baby.
Somewhere between 16 and 20, depending on how you count: UK, New Zealand, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Netherlands, Israel, Japan, Costa Rica, Iceland, Finland, Estonia, Poland, (I moved from Russia to the US as a teenager, does either or both of them count?), (Belgium for a day on a sailboat), (Uzbekistan but it was part of USSR at the time and I barely remember it)
11: Austria, Czechia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Soviet Union (Russia), Sweden, Turkey, USA, Yugoslavia (Slovenia)
When I was at university I lived in a dorm with mostly (90%) exchange students from universities from all over the planet (Korea, Peru, Angola, Lebanon, Sweden, Finnland, USSR, ...). Our six months next-door neighbor was from Boulder, CO. We took him on a camping trip to Italy, and at every border he insisted on having his passport stamped:
1. exit Germany
2. into Austria
3. into Liechtenstein
4. into Switzerland
5. into Italy
So that was 5 countries on one day within 7 hours (we didn't bother to take detours of two hours to the borders of CSSR and France).
Would that qualify?
To me, you need to have slept somewhere for it to "really" count.
15, including one that doesn't exist any more. Four continents.
13. I imagine it would have been a lot more convenient if you posted a link to an online poll for this.
What's the easiest way for me to make an online poll for free?
Strawpoll is commonly used.
7, but 46 US states.
6
Three. In chronological order: UK; France; Canada.
38 countries. Most of them by sailboat. 16 US states, most of them by motorcycle. 4 Canadian provinces. I've made major crossings on every ocean by sail. No one seems to agree on which the "seven seas" really are, but by my count I've crossed at least 13 of them too, though not the Black and Caspians seas, or the Gulf or Persia yet.
There are asterisks and caveats to the above statements, of course. Feel free to ask if you're curious :)
You actually sound like The Most Interesting Man In The World from the Dos Equis ads, which is pretty cool. What are the asterisks and caveats?
Oh man, that gave me a good laugh! Had to look up the ad, never heard of Dos Equis, but then I Don't Always Drink Beer xD That is certainly the most interesting compliment I've gotten in a long while, thank you :)
Asterisks are mostly boring things, like what definitions of "oceans" and "major crossings" you use, etc. If you count the way that Wikipedia does on wiki/ocean, then I suppose I haven't done any major crossings on the Arctic Ocean, but I'm not really used to calling the northern icecap an "ocean". Most maps and charts I've seen will split the Atlantic and Pacific into northern and southern halves though, and I have sailed across all four more than once. The number of seas thing is just a jest, if you list all "seas" you'll get hundreds, many of them overlapping. Stuff like that :)
Sailing is awesome! You should try it sometime :)
Glad you liked the compliment! How did you get into sailing? Isn't that expensive?
My parents took me sailing from a young age. We crossed the Atlantic (La Gomera to Tobago) when I was 11. That's when I did my first night watches alone.
I certainly can be expensive, as expensive as you like really, but it doesn't have to be:
If you want to sail on your own boat there is always some cost of course. You could do it safely and in some comfort on a used boat for ~$10 000, + ~$10 000 fixing her up. Once you have the boat, you can sail the world indefinitely for ~$500 per month for the boat, depending on the size of the boat and assuming you do all the work yourself, plus ~$500 per person. Or you could, youknow, spend millions on a boat, and then have a salaried crew take you around. There is no upper bound, and the lower bound is only limited by your own comfort zone.
But most of my sailing has been on other peoples boats, sometimes sharing running costs, sometimes for free, sometimes with expenses paid, and occasionally even with compensation. There are many boats sailing the world with varying crew that comes and goes. $10 or $20 /day is a fair rate for a bunk on a boat where everyone helps out with everything. And this is the way to go, honestly! Sailing around the world is awesome! Being sailed around by someone else is pretty boring, and VERY expensive.
To find boats I recommend CrewBay.com. It's like a dating site for boats and crew, and works astonishingly well; I've had much more luck there than I ever did on actual dating sites. Also like most dating sites, it has it's share of bad eggs. My profile on crewbay: https://www.crewbay.com/profile/crew/32840
If you want a second opinion on an ad there, or on boats in general, I'd be happy to help :)
That price is too dear for me, specially now that I got into effective altruism and am giving 10% of my income to charity. But it seems very cool.
If you ever sail to Puerto Rico, you should let me know! Ever been here before? Do you have a twitter so we can keep in touch? Or if you want, I can give you my email here, and then delete the comment with the email after confirming that you got it.
I've visited 6. It'll be 7 later in this year.
I'd say 12, but I've visited a few geopolitically complex places so one could argue for a couple more or less.
Zero.
20, of which 17 are in Europe. I hate travelling, but sometimes the job requires it.
Somewhere in the mid to high 30s, probably. But I'm European, so I can easily visit half a dozen countries with a one-day car trip, so getting into the double digits is trivial. If you want to compare my score to that of someone from the US, it would probably be fairer to count states as countries.
In fact that's a little perspective flip which comes in handy surprisingly often. A lot of news from the US becomes much easier to make sense of, when I realise that I shouldn't compare the US to my home country -- instead I should compare it to the EU, and then compare my home country to one of the more liberal states in the US, and compare e.g. Texas to Poland.
Yeah, I've been to only about a dozen countries, but all 50 states plus DC.
If I answer the OP question as asked, the answer is 9 for me: Canada, Mexico, Bahamas, Jamaica, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria.
If I answer the question as you suggest, and also discount States that I merely drove through or stayed in a chain hotel, then I end up adding California, New Mexico, Louisiana, Arkansas, Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Michigan. Total of 23.
We could run this through another filter, but it's a rough one. It's based on the unspoken premise that the key term is "foreign". Rhode Island and Massachusetts, for example, weren't so different from each other - at least, the cultural scenes I visited (small town on the Atlantic coast). OTOH, there are easily multiple cultures within any state or nation - Basque Spain v. Catalonia, Beirut v. southern Lebanon, etc. I've witnessed different cultures within the same gym. It's so hard to judge that no one I know of takes it seriously, but it's fun to think about on occasion.
> Texas to Poland
I’m not sure who exactly, but I expect someone is going to be insulted by that comparison.
I'll insult everybody not insulted by that comparison by pointing out that Texas is rapidly catching up to Germany in usage of renewable energy.
Both, of course.
A bunch but what's the point in answering the question?
39. A year of backpacking the developing world can really pack them in (though that's only about half of them).
Attention(1) -> Thoughts(2) -> Attitude(3) -> Intention(4) -> Words(5) -> Behavior(6) -> Habits(7) -> Character(8) [repeat] = Destiny(9)
(1) pre-thought
(2) willed <> passive
(3) general, channels effort
(4) specific, determines outcome
(5) writing, speech
(6) situational
(7) 2-3 week consistency
(8) annual momentum
(9) life vector, trajectory
Good thoughts, good words, good deeds.
Thus spake Zarathustra.
I'm not sure if this is just me, but I can't get the manifund site to load right now. I just get "connection reset". It's possible this is related to me being temporarily on a terrible satellite internet connection, but other sites that fail usually do it in a different way than that.
I am interested in hearing about people’s experience with polygala and l-theamine
theanine has a noticeable effect on me. It smooths out highs and lows from caffeine and makes coffee behave more more like tea (which includes theanine). Its cheap and readily available which is also great.
I assume that was a typo and you mean "L-Theanine". I got Nature's Trove 200mg, of which I take 2 caps a day at dinner. With all the usual caveats about subjective, 1-subject data, I find it helps: I'm less tense during the day and I sleep better. Interestingly, I'm also taking Silexan (Lavender extract) and my impression is that L-Theanine has a more noticeable effect.
Silexan did not work for me but I feel marginally calmer after a few cups of tea which is what got me thinking of trying L- Theanine since tea has it in small amounts
Does anyone here know about USA police operations or know any sources of USA police data? My rough mental model of police time allocation is "80% of police time is spent on searching for, dispensing, and documenting speeding and parking tickets, with another 10% also low-value (harassing teens skateboarding, driving from one place to another, taking breaks, getting donuts and coffee, etc), and maybe 10% spent on actually solving real crimes like murder, rape, etc."
I realize this is both uncharitable and not based on any data other than what I personally have seen police officers doing, so I wanted to update my beliefs with new and better quality data. If anyone here knows a good data source, or could give a rough department-level outline of where most police time is allocated on a monthly or annual basis, I'd really appreciate it.
John Jay College of Criminal Justice works in the police field. I can't say that they're unbiased, but they at least attempt to be.
What makes you think traffic control is low value? I would welcome data, but my guess would be that effective traffic control is probably more effective at improving lives and reducing death than effective murder control.
It could be low value in the sense that a police officer is legally able to perform a lot of tasks that other citizens can't. Many things in traffic control can be done, legally, by non-police government workers (in most cities, parking tickets are not done by the police for instance). So having your expensive policy doing traffic enforcement is low value even if has great outcomes per hour spent..
Intuitively traffic control seems like the highest value thing law enforcement does.
I agree that traffic control in the sense of "there was an accident that needs to be safely routed around" or "traffic lights are down at this intersection and we are manually directing traffic" are probably one of the highest value things LE does in a city, but I would bet that that's less than 5% of overall police-time allocation.
As for speeding tickets, I disagree that that provides any value. In most cities, you are either incapable of speeding due to traffic, or literally everyone goes 10-15 mph over. That omnipresent 10-15mph over is essentially a directly-incentivized revenue farm for the police, especially when they keep a portion of the ticket revenues, but they are not actually doing anything of value by farming it.
They're literally just continuing to fund the 80% of police time spent on traffic / parking tickets with their portion of the ticket revenues. Since everyone does it all the time that cops aren't literally right there (which is maybe 1% of the time), that argues that it's not actually dangerous or meriting tamping down, and that cops are directly harming productivity and commute times for the sake of their revenue farm when dedicating so many hours to it.
(edit, spelling)
I personally value the speed trap the local cops regularly run directly outside my kids' preschool very highly.
Would speed bumps achieve the same safety enhancement with less labor?
With the downside that they significantly increase deaths in the community from delays of emergency vehicles
Hunting down and stopping the people going 80mph in residential areas and 120mph on highways does save a lot of lives. Ditto people blowing though intersections.
Overall how cops spend there time, I am unsure. I would expect it is about as inefficient as other forms of public union controlled government work.
I'm not a cop, but I've talked to a few about this. Based on those conversations I would guesstimate 30-40% "Filling out reports and paperwork relating to arrests and traffic stops, and appearing in/waiting to appear in court". I'd love for someone actually in law enforcement to check me on that.
Well, there is this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/upshot/unrest-police-time-violent-crime.html
And it references several open data sites.
It is of course unsurprisingly that police spend relatively little time on murders and rapes, since those are so rare. Note also that driving around is not per se low value, since police presence tends to deter street crime.
Thanks much, that was pretty much what I was looking for. I'll dig around in some of the police data portals, but I'm actually surprised that my non-informed first pass estimate was even in part aligned with real data.
Have we discussed how the topology of a AI's neural network resembles the Kabbalah tree of life? I feel like there's an ACX t-shirt to be made here.
http://flamingpear.com/rob/neural-network-tree-of-life.png
That's just a toy example though, modern NNs tend to have skip connections and other ugly modifications to the diagram.
Perhaps we are, indeed, getting further and further away from the light of God.
I feel like it just looks like circles with connected lines and one at each end; the actual neural network is much larger, whereas in most depictions of the Tree of Life there are only 10 Sefirot. (Excepting the ones where the angel only has one wing.)
Doesn't stop it from being a neat T-shirt idea, what with all the Jewish computer scientists. You'd need to rotate it so it goes top to bottom, then label Kether as the input layer, Malkuth as the output layer, and the intermediates as hidden layers. Bonus points for working in some joke about Daath.
If you're using that approach then "Daath is only implemented in languages that do garbage collection"
They are both convenient to represent as directed weighted graphs, but I don't think there's much more depth to the comparison.
I did a very similar thing about a decade and a half ago for the cover of my undergraduate thesis on backprop (no idea for a US equivalent, basically an extra long form paper that you must do and if it sucks you don't graduate). Would post the cover, but I'm not crazy about making it that easy to link my posts to PII, even though I'm a nobody.
Well, if you're going to do that, remember that it's supposed to be recursive at each node. This makes the t-shirt a bit of a difficult image. And while it's supposed to be recursive, I think it's supposed to be similarly recursive, I.e. the recursion at Tiphareth would be similar to the recursion at Hod. But I've never heard anyone go into details about what that would mean.
What do you mean by recursive?
Each of the nodes in the tree of life is supposed to be implemented with a tree where kether is the upper node and Malkuth the lower. What that means is unclear to me, but clearly that internal tree would itself need to have its nodes implemented in a similar way, "and so on infinitum". (Ref. to poem by J. Swift, or possibly a rephrasing of it.)
Interesting.
> So far we haven’t gotten any investors in the impact market
I emailed manifund a question before submitting my application as an investor. I haven't heard back from them. Perhaps others had the same problem.
And I didn't even watch the match, so I deserve to have missed out on it all:
https://www.skysports.com/watch/video/sports/football/12826928/liverpool-7-0-manchester-united-premier-league-highlights
This has been a public service announcement on behalf of cheering everyone up (unless you're a United fan, sorry, we're all slogging away at the moment).
Certainly cheered me right up!
That is good news!
I’m really passionate about helping getting UNSONG published even in the case that Scott is no longer interested in the major edits mentioned in Editing Unsong (but maybe removing the rape scene would be a good idea). Is there anything bottlenecking this process outside of his control that we readers can help fix? If not, I promise to do nothing about this issue and forget about it promptly. [EDIT: rephrased for clarity]
I'd argue for removing the rape scene, largely because it'll just give the MSM another chance to go after Scott, and it's not really that crucial from what I remember. But, you know, he's the author, he gets to pick.
I find it both funny and tragic that distrubing masterpieces like Berserk would never get created in 2023, because of this attitude.
There should be no compromises in art. MSM can go fuck themselves.
The anime? They're Japanese, they got their own rules. Mercifully the wokies haven't tried to go after anime yet.
Art's always a compromise between what you want and what you can get away with to reach a wider audience. But...it's up to Scott, as the author.
Set up a Manifold Market that incentivizes Scott to publish.
Done! https://manifold.markets/IshaanKoratkar/will-unsong-be-published-by-2025
I’m not sure how that would incentivize Scott to publish UNSONG, and am willing to take appropriate action if creating the market was a bad idea.
I guess the best strategy for those of us who want it published is to bet "no" and for Scott to bet "yes." The more fans who pile on, the better his payoff.
Of course, I don't know Scott, so I can't say if this is enough to motivate him.
I would find it awesome if you could make that happen.
Don't be a wokescold, leave the rape scene in.
I cannot tell if you are joking here. What do you mean by wokescold? Why do you assume you know my motives from three sentences?
It's pretty woke to want to remove a rape scene. If your motivation in doing that is not woke, well, if it swims like a duck and quacks like a duck...
You’re doing that thing where you frame someone in a certain divisive light, and then grow the framing despite having no information – exactly when it is pointed out to you that your framing might be wrong or divisive. You are also making a basic syllogistic error.
I never said I wanted to remove the rape scene – only that it *might* be a good idea. I have concerns that people who really don’t like Scott could use it as ammunition for reasons I will not state.
I will not talk to you further.
>(but maybe removing the rape scene would be a good idea)
I'd say about half of romance novels have rape scenes in them; I've personally read quite a few. It hardly makes a book unpublishable.
Yeah, but Unsong isn't a romance novel. (I assume, I've only read the first few chapters.)
Am surprised there's that much rape scenes. Are you talking about like Harlequin Romance and similar?
Don't know anything about Harlequin.
Ravishment fantasy (i.e. fantasising about being raped) is one of the more common sexual fantasies, especially among women.
I took ketamine for depression via Mindbloom. It worked really well and immediately. But I've been a little hypomanic since then. Not like, continually, but there are a lot more times when I notice myself talking a lot, I'm staying up late working and I don't always feel like I can stop, I'm less interested in food, I feel more confident than usual. Like, up till midnight on a Saturday working and I have to force myself to eat. I've been on amphetamines for ADHD before and it's a little like that - not all the time, but sometimes.
I tried to research whether ketamine could cause mania and it seemed like there may be were a couple of cases, but obviously they were much worse. Is it possible that ketamine did actually cause this? It's been going on for a couple of months now, and I've been taking ketamine doses every couple of weeks during that, but I think it's getting worse (or better, I guess, if you like my symptoms.) I can't think of anything else that's changed.
(I am not a doctor) Does another person who knows you reasonably well and can be objective also think your behavior has changed recently? If so, that may be an good indicator that you should see a medical professional.
I've asked, and I've consistently heard "you're talking more, there are some other noticeable changes, but you seem ok."
That’s obviously a gray area of an answer that doesn’t make it obvious to know what to do. I can tell you that if it were me, the fact that they noticed changes would be a red flag for some sort of mild mania/hypomania going on. The “you seem ok” part would only reassure me that it’s not overt mania. This is based off me being in a very similar situation a few months ago wondering if I was hypomanic.
How did it play out? If you'd thought it was earlier, what would you have done?
I fixed it now but there was a typo in above: red flag for some sort of mild *mania or hypomania.
In my case it turns out they didn't notice any changes, so I didn’t worry about it haha! Sorry, I don’t understand your second question, can you clarify?
You mentioned “talking more” which reminds me to mention that talking faster (so called “pressured speech”) in particular is a sign of mania that you can ask your friends about.
EMTs have tried giving me ketamine for pain, and it doesn't work. Ketamine minimizes my viewable screen to the upper left corner, and turns images into a cubist painting -- distracting, but not pain-killing.
At this point you may be hypomanic, but you're not manic -- but you definitely should not take a chance on becoming manic. You should see a psychiatrist, but try hard to find one who has experience with ketamine treatment. Ketamine seems to have really helped you, and it would be undesirable to find someone who barely knows anything about ketamine and warns you off ever having anything to do with the stuff again. The ideal would be to find a way to keep the benefits but avoid the risk of mania. And while you're hunting for someone, I think you should stop with the biweekly ketamine for now.
What were you like before depression?
I mean, I was never committing code at midnight and then waking up six hours later to start again. None of this is totally brand new in terms of issues. Like, I've been food averse before. But this feels like it's more and going on for longer. I've discussed this with the people around me and they've agreed this is happening but aren't too concerned -- I don't come across like I'm manic -- but also agree that this is different.
"committing code at midnight and then waking up six hours later to start again. "
This sounds sub-manic to me, which is to say, still in the normal range for a motivated person? Especially with computer programming where the urge can show up at odd times.
I would be inclined to suspect that you always had this potential in you and it was previously muffled by the depression states.
Sure, if that's all it were, I would not be concerned. But it does feel somewhat compulsive, I'm neglecting other things to a degree, and the food and sleep issues are not terrible, but in total, it feels like it might be a thing.
In that case I'll defer to your own analysis of your situation, as you have far more information than I do about what you're going through.
I would suggest that if you are having symptoms serious enough to cause you concern, STOP TAKING THE DRUG. And go see a doctor. Even if it isn't causing the hypomania, you could be fucking yourself up physically:
https://www.talktofrank.com/drug/ketamine#the-risks
Right, yes, I'm not taking the drug anymore now that I've realized this might be happening.
Best wishes with that. It might not even be the ketamine causing this, but it might have jolted something out of whack, or this could be an underlying condition. Best to get it checked out, and the other physical risks as well. I know you're doing this not for the kind of recreational high people do abuse drugs, but it's risky without medical oversight (and yeah, doctors can be dismissive, abrupt, and ignore what you're trying to tell them, but on balance better to get advice than to wing it).
Honest to goodness see a licensed physician IN PERSON! ASAP
Thanks. I made a doctor's appointment.
Best wishes.
It still might be nothing. But that doesn't mean that your in person physician doesn't care about you and your health.
I second this. It sounds like a major issue that could cause you a lot of problems if you don’t do anything right now – went through something similar a year ago and am still suffering trauma.
Ok, interesting. This is helpful. What is the range of somethings that someone can do? My experience with both issues that are subclinical and side effects that are not official things is that no one believes me and or/cares.
Seeing a psychiatrist is a great idea of course. Depending on how severe your intuition tells you this could get, freezing your own credit card and avoiding the internet may be in the range of reasonable things to do (sometimes people go on spending sprees while manic).
It is good that you are able to continue working. If your ability to do that was interrupted, this would be much more immediately serious.
Please get advice from people you know if they care about you and not from strangers on the internet. It helps for them to be invested in your happiness, even if what that entails contradicts your immediate wishes.
And be wary of anyone telling you meditation is a good idea in your situation. While it would be rude to discount the profundity of their experiences, it may not be safe to mess around with the source code of your brain while hypo-manic. The Theravada taxonomy of enlightenment describes low-grade bipolar symptoms as part of the natural stages of awakening.
A psychiatrist should care about you being hypomanic. And it's good that you stopped the drug, if you kept pushing it, it could become mania and even psychosis. An LSD trip (not my first one) sent me into mania and then into psychosis after a couple of days of mania. All from just one acid tab. So there are risks to messing with your neurochemistry with something strong like ketamine.
Having also dealt with severe depression, there is an approach to it that is like fiddling with the Gordian Knot, and there is the Alexandrian approach, which is drawing your sword and slicing the thing apart. You can do anything that you want with your head, and I think the realization of that is the real and lasting solution to depression.
Enlightenment is the ego's last disappointment and paradoxically, accepting the depression makes it go away.
"no one believes me and/or cares" - that is exactly why you should see a physician IN PERSON! You've take a very powerful drug. Make an appointment asap and be totally honest with your history.
I was prescribed the drug. There's no reason why I would not be honest about my history.....
Have you previously had as good a remission from depression, as this one? It's not uncommon the first time it happens to overshoot naturally into temporary and harmless hypomania, just because not being depressed feels so good. Sure, see a doctor, but I wouldn't worry about talktofrank dire warnings of bladder failure etc, which come from hardcore, long term abuse of the stuff.
I'm making no judgements about you personally. I'm not just talking about this Rx, I am talking about your complete personal history.
Sometimes choosing an outfit like Mindbloom might be because one is reticent about talking all past history (I'm talking about all past treatment and underlying traumas and symptoms). And it's is not clear that mindbloom model is interested in thorough history taking. They make money by giving out Rxs.
Best wishes for feeling better and being healthier and happier.
I wrote a LessWrong post about ecological dynamics, an approach to psychology and sports coaching that avoids talking about internal models and credences, which produces neat theories with interesting implications for learning.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Y4hN7SkTwnKPNCPx5/why-don-t-more-people-talk-about-ecological-psychology
I’m far from an expert so it’s probably not airtight, but I wanted to make the case that despite all appearances, ecological psychology is quite compatible with Lesswrong rationalism. Let me know if you spot any mistakes or inadequacies, or if you have any questions!
I can’t tell how this relates or not, but I have A LOT of success with film review and non-physical coaching with hockey even with say 9-11 year olds.
Look at what this player did here in situation X. That was sub optimal do other thing Y. Stuff that is a million times harder to teach in the moment or physically. They still need 95% skills/physical based coaching. But there is A LOT of low hanging fruit from adding in a bit of film review.
Yeah I think it's related, as I said below I'm not sure about the "shared affordances" stuff but I bet ecologically minded coaches would be all for replacing advice by video examples
Also, as a parkour guy, the worldwide sharing of videos does seem to have caused a crazy, still-accelerating explosion of skill, especially for quasi-beginners
> Not sure how to end this except by asking if anyone around here has heard of this stuff, and what you think about it.
This is a subject I'm interested in as well (see a blog post of mine linked below), and by chance I also recently come across Rob Gray's podcast.
https://someflow.substack.com/p/oodles-of-oodas
(It's written from the perspective of an ultimate frisbee player, but could be of interest to any athlete)
I'm not convinced it's *all* ecological, i.e. that there's never any mental models. For something like the fly ball example, where it's pretty much all physics and motor skills, yes, I'm fine with saying it's all ecological. But sports is so much more than that.
When you add in an opponent, I don't see how you can succeed at sports without having knowledge of your opponent's mental state, and some amount of that knowledge has to come from things you can't "directly perceive".
One reason pro sports teams watch film is to learn other teams' tendencies. NBA teams will leave Russell Westbrook open at the three-point line because he's a bad shooter. To me it seems clear the way they know he's a bad shooter is due to things they've analyzed in the past and then stored in their brain, not due to their direct perception of some fact in the present physical environment about him standing on the three point line. Theoretically, a player who had never directly perceived Russell Westbrook play basketball, whether in person or on tape, could still be coached to leave him open on the three point line.
Another example...you mention chess in your article. Yes, a chess player can look at the board and see some "affordance" for a long-term plan. But they cannot look at the board and intuit the rules of chess. Those have to be stored in their brain somehow, right? Isn't that a model—a set of rules about how a system fits together?
So I can be convinced basic motor skills work best when "fully ecological", but sports/games as a whole requires strategy and thinking about other humans in a way that seems to me can't always be directly perceived.
Your article's main argument against this seems to be that the ecological system defines environment "in an extremely broad sense". To me that's too much of a cop-out. (There's some LW concepts around this right? If your theory could mean anything, it means nothing, something like that?) The ecologists say to "taboo the term 'mental model'", but they could equally taboo the term 'environment'.
I clicked around and found a recent podcast that's semi-relevant, but I'm not very convinced:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yFjugRSyHQ
The podcast talks about memory of what we've seen someone do previously and tries to say that "remembering" is indistinguishable from direct perception— "there is no clear distinction between perception and memory". But, what are we remembering if not some type of mental model of what that person is capable of? It still seems to me that they are just playing games with semantics.
Would love to hear your feedback on this.
Thanks!
Great points overall, I'm excited to read your article
I agree with the theory of mind part, as I said in the post I haven't really grasped the concept of "shared affordances", and I'm not completely convinced the conceptual work is done here. I'll listen to the podcast you linked though, maybe I'll get some insights
I also mostly agree with the environment part. I mean, I am not convinced that the problem is necessarily with the implied meaning smuggled into the term environment (we can just define it as "everything that isn't the agent"), but I'm still uncomfortable with such a broad definition
Also it just sounds tautological when you say "Everything that happens is determined by the properties of [the agent] and [everything that isn't the agent]".
Then again, the ecological psychologists don't seem to find Friston's free energy principle enlightening (https://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2016/11/free-energy-how-fck-does-that-work.html), and I think Friston himself finds it "almost tautological"...
About memory, I am more convinced by the ecological discourse. In particular I recently listened to this episode about memory, the challenges of defining it in a more rigorous way (oh my this exchange is turning into a Rob Gray Andrew Wilson vortex):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tys06aE4ao
I'll try and rephrase some points I found interesting:
- Memory is a just a property of agents (just like credences etc). Observing memory doesn't imply that we have any idea what mechanisms are involved
- Memory can be ecologically understood as an influence of the past environment on the agent that changes their characteristics, and thus their information-control laws; this may be preferable to stating that the agent "stores" information
Thanks for the discussion. I'm still lost on the ecological discourse on memory.
What does it mean to you when they say "there is no clear distinction between perception and memory"?
What is the difference between an "information control law" and a "mental model"?
To me personally, it still feels like just semantics.
I think from an information-theory perspective, a "change in their control laws" is equivalent to "stored information". It's just that the information/decreased entropy is stored in the "code" instead of stored in the "data" that's input to the code.
Hey there,
I'm not a psychologist, but isn't that pretty much behaviorism? AFAIK, behaviorism fell out of favor because there are situations where it's much more economical to assume the existence of mental models than to dispense with them. For example, I've read that a chess master can memorize a chessboard configuration in a couple of seconds but only IF it's an actual play configuration, not some random positioning of the pieces. That kind of "chunking" seems hard to explain "economically" without mental models.
That's not to say that I disagree with you. I think that "mental model" can be a black box concept that obscures things more than illuminate them, and we should describe precisely the nature and structure of a mental model if we're relying on its existence.
I just think that connecting ecological psychology to behaviorism would help it to fit into my mental model (sorry!) of psychology theories.
Godspeed.
Also, there's a typo: the word "about" is repeated twice in a row in the first line of paragraph four.
Hmm I'm not convinced that ecological dynamics is just behaviorism, but I'm not sure how I would argue against that claim either
Or rather, maybe it is behaviorism, but then it is behaviorism made more powerful by integrating new concepts (affordances, information-control laws, direct learning)
Your last sentence about mental models is exactly why I wanted to write this post! I agree with a lot of what ED people say, but if we want to talk about science we still need a way to talk about mental models!
And IMO they can be ecologically understood as betting affordances
Thanks for your feedback and the spotted typo, I'll edit it
Some time ago our dear host wrote on semaglutide, the new wonder drug against obesity... and quite predictably, just a few months later, you hear reports that it's already become a "must" among the rich-and-beautiful crowd. Kind of sad, but not altogether unexpected. Link to article: https://www.thecut.com/article/weight-loss-ozempic.html
Hm, are you implying that this was caused by the article on ACX? I think this would be giving too much credit to our host, semaglutide was already a big thing when he wrote about it. But Scott is really good in noticing these trends early.
Err, nope, didn't mean to imply such a thing, although I can see how it vaguely sounds like it. By "quite predictably" I just mean that I'm not surprised that it takes off in popularity as a way of cementing the already existing mandate for thinness among people who are already well within healthy weight parameters.
Then sorry for interpreting too much into your comment. I fully agree with you.
In the weeks prior to the ACX post, there were a number of prominent articles in NYTimes and WAPO and a prominent semaglutide shill was giving interviews.
Sounds like the only sad thing is that the medicines' producers haven't been able to immediately keep up, leading to probably-temporary shortages. Once that's fixed and it's potentially as easily available as NSAIDs, what are the downsides?
"Once that's fixed and it's potentially as easily available as NSAIDs, what are the downsides?"
NSAIDs also have downsides and there are warnings about over-using them, precisely because they're easily available and people think they're harmless. Weight loss drugs if you just want to shed a few pounds are the equivalent of crash diets, which are ineffective in the end. Pressure on people like actresses and models to get an unrealistic body shape is not good, I don't mean "healthy at any size" or "fat is beautiful" acceptance, I do mean "women of a normal weight being told to lose a stone to get the part" or the rest of it - the heroin chic look that was popular in the 90s/00s seems to be on the rise again.
Mostly, that fad drugs (anyone else remember back when prozac first came out, and every little wannabe Carrie Bradshaw was writing articles about how they persuaded their doctor to prescribe this for them, then they churned out pieces for the magazines and newspapers about it?) are a bad measure to be taken up, popularised, and then abandoned. The fad means that, as in this case, shortages of medications that people with genuine conditions need for nothing more than the cause of vanity.
> NSAIDs also have downsides and there are warnings about over-using them, precisely because they're easily available and people think they're harmless.
Precisely, yet society, to put it mildly, hasn't collapsed because of it. I do not predict that happening here, either.
> Weight loss drugs if you just want to shed a few pounds are the equivalent of crash diets, which are ineffective in the end.
I think that does depend on mechanism a lot (also, define "in the end" - the end is when one's corpse is buried/burned). The description of the drug is seemingly "sedate one's appetite" rather than actively adversely cleanse, so, while regaining-after-stopping is likely and documented, the stopping itself need not happen, unlike with crash diets which are quite literally unsustainable.
> Pressure on people like actresses and models to get an unrealistic body shape is not good
Mm, yes, but that's not a thing resurrected by the pill, it's a thing that never really left the relevant society. (Also, would you consider someone like Portman or Knightley to have a "heroin chic look"?)
I started taking it a month ago, for diabetes. I found the downsides very problematic, including diarrhea and mild nausea. I then had side effects to THOSE side effects, including losing a small amount of weight and loss of sleep from waking up in the middle of the night a few times per night. In my diabetic opinion, it isn't worth the side effects, though they have finally started lessening.
I conclude so far that the weight loss, for me, is that eating often has too many downsides for me to want to eat, and so I postpone it. That results in me eating significantly less, but I also find the things that upset my digestion the least are the things I should avoid, such as carbs.
Well, side effect profile is individual; of course not every drug fits every person. The original comment, however, seemed to find the societal effect dangerous.
Well, in the abstract, yeah, let people do whatever they want, and so on. But if, say, I heard that a niece of mine with a healthy BMI was feeling social pressure to stick $600-a-month worth of unneeded strong medication into her body, I wouldn't be happy about the trend.
The question is "what are the reasonable alternatives". Of course I prefer people to just be unbothered by most forms of social pressure and zero-sum games. However, I most certainly don't predict that if all the semaglutide in the world and the ability to produce it are magically destroyed, the result would be people who are currently embedded in that kind of pressure awakening, stopping those games, and freeing from social pressure; I predict that they would just revert to (mostly more dangerous and/or less effective) methods we had before.
The reasonable alternative would be to make it a prescription-only drug, available to the seriously obese but not to healthy-weight teenage girls who want to be a bit thinner.
It looks like this is already the case from a quick read of the wegovy website (at least the version available in my country) so if healthy teenage girls are still taking it then the reasonable alternative is to start enforcing drug laws properly (something that the US in particular really needs to start doing for a bunch of other reasons too).
...Yeah, and as second-order consequence that would just revert them back to more dangerous methods to achieve the same thing, see directly the comment you responded to.
Teenage girls trying to lose weight by normal (usually quite healthy) methods are a normal problem we already have, teenage girls trying to lose weight by weird drugs is a whole set of new problems. As a natural conservative I'd rather stick with the dumb problems we're used to than risk a whole bunch of new ones that we don't understand.
> The question is "what are the reasonable alternatives".
Fine enough if that's your question. It's not mine. I'm also not comparing it to the imaginary possibility of magically destroying production capacity - you are.
I'm just seeing something pop up and finding it ugly on the sides. No attempt at constructive criticism here. It's just a passing sentiment, not a call for action. If GLP-agonists-for-all is the way the world will go, then go it will, and we'll get used to it.
Or to put it in more general terms... here we are with a large majority of people in the industrialized world living better than kings were just a century or two ago. And then instead of buying ourselves some more slack and freedom to enjoy life, so many of us waste much of that surplus in pointless zero-sum status games. It seems to me at the very least like a massive hedonic and creative failure.
I think at least at some level people do recognize the failure, because when you kind of opt out of as much of it as you can, some people look at you like you have a superpower.
I don't think wanting to be attractive is just a status game. I obviously agree that internet-driven beauty standards are problematic etc etc (and especially the feeling of always being in the spotlight because of social media), but being attractive for your partner (current or potential) is one way to make them happy, and having a happy partner is one way to make yourself happy too. Weight isn't the only factor in attractiveness, and attractiveness isn't the only factor in desirability, but its hard to deny it plays a part.
I agree with your last sentence, its just more that people look at it wrong than that there's nothing to look at.
I’ve been thinking about the idea of treating large language models, such as the one driving ChatGPT, as dynamical systems. That’s why I chose the term “story trajectory,” in my recent working paper, ChatGPT tells stories, and a note about reverse engineering: A Working Paper, https://www.academia.edu/97862447/ChatGPT_tells_stories_and_a_note_about_reverse_engineering_A_Working_Paper I find it natural to think in terms of a dynamical system evolving along a trajectory in state space. There is a considerable literature on the brain as a dynamical system and I had a good bit of interaction with the late Walter Freeman on that subject, which he pioneered.
It seems that people are just now beginning to think in those terms for deep learning. I just found a 2020 dissertation by Eduardo Sánchez Karhunen entitled “Eduardo Sánchez Karhunen”, https://scholar.google.es/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=RaPcpaAAAAAJ&citation_for_view=RaPcpaAAAAAJ:9yKSN-GCB0IC
In his long article, “What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?”, Stephen Wolfram talks of attractors and attractor basins near the end. Those are terms used in complex dynamics, https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/ But he puts the terms in quotes. I assume he’s doing that because he is using the terms metaphorically. He’s not actually asserting that ChatGPT is a dynamical system, though he might like to.
I can’t follow the mathematics in detail, but I do find the idea attractive. Think of a prompt as imposing an initial state on the system. The system then evolves step by step, emitting a token at each step. That’s a much more plausible way of thinking about what’s going on than simply saying it ‘predicts’ the next token, one after another. Yes, that’s what we observe. But that way of thinking about it, 1) focuses our attention on those tokens, and 2) makes their appearance seem deeply mysterious. In contrast, thinking about the system evolving (step by step), that puts your attention on those 175 B parameters. It doesn’t tell you what they are doing, but that’s where your attention is. Incidentally, as the system evolves, it emits token after token after token, etc.
So, when in the paper I talk about “a nested hierarchy of probability distributions,” I’m talking about how the whole system evolves. Just how it does that, I don’t know.
When I think of a story trajectory, I’m imagining that, when ChatGPT begins telling a story, it enters a “valley” in the “attractor landscape” that is evoked by the prompt. It remains in that valley until the story is completed. My generate-a-new-story task is a way of exploring that valley in the attractor landscape. And when ChatGPT refused to tell a story where the protagonist was a colorless green idea, it was, in effect, saying THAT’s not in the valley.
There’s only so much you can do without mathematics. But the language and imagery is more attractive and useful.
ChatGPT can only be as reliable as the data we feed it. If it draws its data from the internet, it cannot be reliable, and it will only give us a more convincing falsehoods -- a mixture of truths, half-truths, and blatant lies -- with the Machine's own "intelligence" creating its own falsehoods and smoothing them out to appear more credible. So, among people looking to give credence to their falsehoods, ChatGPT will be a boon and a method of endorsement for (false) information.
If you search “semiotic physics” on lw you will find others trying to do this too.
Just looked at that stuff. It's in the ball park for sure. And its quite recent. I'm sensing a stirring in The Force. I'm beginning to think that the trope of the inscrutability of deep learning models may begin to fade away.
thanks
Is the marriage between violent men and an accelerating knowledge explosion sustainable?
If yes, please explain.
If no, then what?
What marriage?
Thanks for the replies folks. Let's refine a bit....
Putin already has the power to bring down the modern world. Today, right now, a single human being can press the "game over" button. If the knowledge explosion gives people like Putin more and more such power, how long can that go on? Is that progression sustainable?
Either yes, because the progression also includes tech to avoid Putin pushing the button (after all, game theory and MAD is part of the knowledge explosion, too) or it includes tech to let us survive the "game over" button (after all, colonizing other planets is part of the knowledge explosion, too.)
Or no, and we'll fall into a new equilibrium where everyone is more violent. A few tribes in the hills, rebooting civilization in their own image. Sorry, perhaps about the destruction of the past, or maybe awed by the remains of the mighty works they see, but mostly glad to have survived and really just more worried about the immediate, urgent, daily struggle to improve their lot.
That assumes that the military would follow through on his orders regardless of how deranged they are, which I don't think is reasonable.
Putin may have the power to start a thermonuclear war — whether he does have that power depends on how good his control is over his own military. A thermonuclear war would kill a lot of people but it wouldn't bring down the modern world.
"A thermonuclear war would kill a lot of people but it wouldn't bring down the modern world."
Agreed. Even 4 billion killed still leaves 4 billion survivors.
" I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed."
but I would expect New Zealand to survive the war.
yes, hobbes, balance of power (sorry, I have little time)
if with sustainable you mean possible
No, we have been selecting against violent men for a long time. (See "The Goodness Paradox") I don't see any reason this trend won't continue. Violent men are still seen as (mostly) a bad thing in our society.
Selection effects take a lot longer than our rate of technological (and destructive) progress, that's the problem.
The ability to commit impulsive violence doesn't depend on the very cutting edge of technology. Or to put it another way, a violent man is probably not committing murders with nuclear bombs, and presumably won't be doing so with killer robots either.
Yes, because accelerating knowledge explosions empower erstwhile victims to defend themselves.
Or no, and then we graduate to a different equilibrium where everyone is more violent. The survivors, if they see any downsides to it, will feel a little guilty at most, and move on, mostly relieved that they won this round. Like when sapiens killed off neanderthals - you and I are the result of exactly this dynamic, iterated probably very many times.
It's not clear that violence was the predominant factor in the Sapiens/Neanderthal history. A more likely explanation is sex.
I think the question: what happened to the Neanderthal will come to be seen like the what happened to the Sumerians or what happened to the Etruscans?
That's fair - when I said we "killed off" the neanderthals I should have said we "evolutionarily outcompeted" them. A neanderthal blog contemplating its extinction at our hands might not see much difference.
But even "evolutionarily outcompeted" Is not quite likely accurate description.
If the question what happened to the Neanderthals is actually more similar to what happened to the Sumerians or Scythians or Etruscans then "evolution" not quite the right process. The disappearance of Sumerians, Scythians, or Etruscans is not a matter evolution.
On a "broad average" Neandertal and modern Sapiens are 99.7% identical. But that is an average and takes no account of error (we have limited Neanderthal data so our average is not a result of random sampling) and no account of variation among the Neanderthal and Sapiens 100k ago. If more data reveals that Neanderthal and Sapiens are not really different species (more and more likely) then that changes the frame within with you have made your initial hypothesis.
Evolution does not have an aim.
Wait, we didn't outcompete the neanderthals because we ARE neanderthals? Very well, let me rephrase in a way that respects this opinion. Is there any species that humans have ever been outcompeted by humans, such that we filled their ecological niche and they went extinct? If so, then please replace that species for neanderthals in my previous comments. If not, then I'd like to notice my confusion and predict that we have a semantic rather than substantive disagreement.
If you prefer an illustrative example that avoids evolution, how about cultures? When a more violent culture destroys a less violent culture, for example through colonial conquest, do the survivors of all this violence, conquered and conqueror alike, settle into a new equilibrium with a higher overall level of baseline violence compared to before the conquest?
Do "more" violent cultures really replace "less" violent cultures? How would we operationally define more or less violent.
Do any "cultures" really last more than about 3-500 years. Is "culture" so static that it really definable in a rigorous way?
Of course humans have hunted species into extinction but it hard to really say we've taken over their niche. The entire world is our niche and has been for quite a long time.
Were the Gauls and Angles and Saxons and goths, etc more violent than the Romans or less violent than the EU?
I don't understand your point about Neanderthal and Etruscans. Etruscans as a race didn't go anywhere, they just stopped speaking Etruscan and started speaking Latin, ad eventually Italian. They disappeared as a culture, not as a race. But by Neanderthal we mean a race, not a culture.
The theory I heard was that Neanderthals probably needed a lot more food (4000-7000 kcal/day) than anatomically modern humans (3000-4000 kcal/day)* would have in the ancestral environment. So AMHs could maintain a higher population density in favorable environments and were more likely to be able to be able to survive as a population in marginal environments.
* The modern guideline of ~2000 kcal/day assumes a relatively sedentary and comfortable modern lifestyle, where most vigorous activity is optional and we have ready access to well-heated indoor spaces. The last is critical outside the tropics, since even with modern outdoor gear, cold-weather campers need to plan for a lot of extra calories just to handle the metabolic cost of keeping warm.
@Anyone sympathetic to the idea that phenomenal consciousness doesn't exist: can you elaborate on your model? Why do you think it, what does it even mean (what is consciousness?) and optionally, why do you think other people disagree, why are they wrong, and what's the implications for ethics, if any?
([I asked the same question in last week's OT](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-265/comment/13170540), and got more or less exactly what I was hoping for, but only from one data point; the rest were just people arguing with them. Surely there's other people sympathetic to the illusionist approach?)
No time, but here's why I'm sympathetic to the idea that phenomenal consciousness doesn't exist: The language we use about consciousness is misleading. We talk about "having" it. We talk about being able to observe our own conscious experience, while other people's inner experience is forever invisible to us. There's a homunculus model baked into those ways of talking about experience.
That doesn't prove consciousness experience doesn't exist, it just demonstrates that we think and talk about it incorrectly. "We" ARE our conscious experuience, it's not something we have.
> That doesn't prove consciousness experience doesn't exist, it just demonstrates that we think and talk about it incorrectly
To be clear, that's a big part of illusionism. To quote Dennett, "I'm not saying that consciousness doesn't exist. I'm just saying it isn't what you think it is."
I support illusionism.
The main reason I support it is because I think that consciousness, whatever it is, is a real, mental thing. Mental things are best understood in functional terms, but phenomenality (under the definitions that usually matter) ends up being this non-functional thing that apparently gives rise to a "hard problem". I'm not convinced that there could be a hard problem.
I think there's all sorts of things that we don't naturally understand about our own mental states, but we've started to get a better grip on a lot of this through cognitive science over the past century. We're now aware of all sorts of ways that there can be illusions of motion even with nothing changing on our retina, that show that we don't have perfect introspective awareness of our own consciousness, the way that some theories of phenomenal consciousness seem to suggest.
I don't believe there are any ethical implications, because I think ethics is about ensuring that the wants and needs of desiring beings are fulfilled, and none of that depends on consciousness being of one sort rather than another.
> phenomenality (under the definitions that usually matter) ends up being this non-functional thing that apparently gives rise to a "hard problem". I'm not convinced that there could be a hard problem.
The hard problem is the problem of reductively explaining consciousness. There is no apriori reason to think that reductionism is a necessary truth, or that everything is reducible, so the Hard problem, or something like it was always a possibility.
Would you expect there to be a lot of illusionists, given that it's an almost self-contradictory position ("It seems to me that there are seemings, but there are no seemings")?
Have you tried books? (In general, why do Codexians think it's important to ask other Codexians?)
There *are* a lot of illusionists. I don't know how many of them read Scott's blog, but it's an influential position. Also present among rationality figures, like Steven Byrnes and various people at Miri.
Yes to books, but why leave it at that? This is a cheap and perfectly straight-forward way of getting more takes. I'm not trying to meet a social obligation, I'm actually trying to get the best possible understanding of the generator behind the position.
There's a relatively high number of illusionists among rationalists, but what's so special about rationalists? They tend to have weird takes on a lot of things, and they tend not to understand the background issues well.
One more comment on ethics: I think our beliefs about consciousness should not have any implications for ethics. Concepts like "free will" are incredible useful, and they would remain incredibly useful even if we lived in a completely deterministic universe and could prove that free will doesn't exist. I actually believe this to be true for any sensible approximation, but I still find the concept of "decisions" and "free will" useful and even crucial in laws and ethics.
Also, basing our ethics on something that half of the population fiercely declare as nonsense (either existence or non-existence of the hard problem of consciousness) sounds like a very bad idea. Better use something that both sides can agree upon.
It has obvious implications for ethics. If there is no consciousness, there is no reason not to experiment on humans like we do animals, since there is no such thing as suffering.
Uhm, to say that there can't be suffering without consciousness is quite a jump. At least it's not an automatic step. In particular since different people may refer to very different things with the word "consciousness".
Suffering is qualia. The eliminativist position is that there are no qualia. So yes, this criticism applies to eliminativists specifically, true. Don't know if there are people trying to say there can be consciousness without qualia.
> Suffering is qualia. The eliminativist position is that there are no qualia.
Yes, there are no qualia, which only means suffering isn't what you thought it was (it's not a quale), it doesn't mean that what suffering really is cannot be used in ethical reasoning.
If suffering is not a qualia, but presumably an information process, I don't see on what basis we can decide that certain information processes are bad.
The question is rather whether there can be qualia (suffering) without consciousness, right? Which I literally happened to describe as my belief in my longer comment below. :-)
Even for the other direction, I would first want to see a survey before I get too convinced that people who don't believe in qualia also don't believe in suffering.
Something which always puzzles me about this conversation is the attempt to elucidate familiar concepts such as suffering by invoking unfamiliar (and debateable) concepts such as qualia. It doesn't help at all to clarify the ethical questions.
I also note that this never seems to come up when we debate actual ethical conundrums. Was it right to revoke Shamina Begum's citizenship? Nobody on either side seems to think questions of consciousness at all relevant.
I have only briefly looked into the discussion about the philosophical concept of consciousness because I never found it interesting or remarkable. So probably I miss the standard terminology, but below is my account in my own words. Note that I only talk about PHILOSOPHICAL consciousness. I do believe that BIOLOGICAL consciousness is a real phenomenon, just one that is philosophically very boring. I have even written a book review about biological consciousness in the last ACX book reviewing contest. [1]
Consciousness is about experiencing my own inner state. This is closely related to qualia. When I perceive the color green, then this means that I am in the state of "seeing green". Qualia is not a very interesting concept for me, since for me it means exactly the same thing as "inner state". A stone also has inner states. For example, it can be hot. So if a stone is hot, then it is experiencing the inner state of "being hot". It has the qualia of "being hot".
This seems to match a lot of things that other people say about qualia. For example, the inner state of "seeing green" (or "being hot") is not the same as a description of the state. So even if someone gives me a full description of all the atoms in the stone in the state "being hot", this is not the same thing as the stone actually being hot. (Unfortunately. It would be nice if I could get rich by just collecting a full description of what it means to be rich.)
Another point that is often mentioned about qualia: if stone A is in the state "being hot", then this is not the same thing as if stone B is in the state "being hot". For an outsider, the world state may look somewhat similar, but from the perspective of stone A, it is not similar at all. From the perspective of stone A, in one case it is hot, in the other not. In the second case, some other stone is hot, but for stone A that is something very different from being hot itself.
Now, there is one thing special about humans (and probably animals), compared to a stone: our brains are representation models. So, our brain contains a little model of the world. It is unclear how exactly this looks like. Predictive processing says that it's mostly a prediction machine about our next perceptions, and that may be right. But whatever the specifics, our brains have internal representations of the world. Such a representation is basically some neural activity pattern in the brain. This is also very closely related to memory, since these representations can be stored, retrieved, and processed. I have speculated a bit about the details in my book review.
Anyway, these neural patterns can be stored and retrieved. Sometimes the brain is in the state "neural-activity-of-seeing-green", and in this case we have the qualia of seeing green, or more precisely of "being in the internal state that represents seeing green in our world model". Just like a stone can be in the internal state of "being hot".
At this point you may ask when the philosophical consciousness comes into the picture. But the point is: it is no longer needed. Or at least I fail to see why anything should be lacking from my description. We have qualia of "seeing green", just as a stone has qualia of "being hot". Granted, other than a stone we can process this internal state: we can remember it, invent a word for this state, and then speak about it. Of course we can, this is because our brain is a representation machine. The same is true for any other representation machines, like a computer or a fruit fly.
By speaking about the qualia (internal state) of "seeing green", we can make the internal state interact with the outer world. But the "being-hot" state of a stone can also interact with the outer world. If another stone touches it, then some of the warmth will transfer from stone A ot stone B. That process is way less complex than us talking about qualia. But I don't see why it should philosophically be any different, except for complexity.
So I don't understand why philosophically anything should be special about consciousness. That is why I don't see the "hard problem of consciousness" at all.
Let me finally say a paragraph about biological consciousness, the same speculations that I wrote last year in my book review. I think this is just a special class of internal states, namely those internal states that can be stored and retrieved in memory, and that allow a certain type of operation on them, similar to "keeping them in a register" in a computer. Not all internal states are like this, this is only possible if the neural activity has some form of internal consistency that only forms roughly twice per second. The other states are unconscious states, and experiments show that we can not access them by memory, so if we are asked "have you seen the color green", then we answer no if we didn't reach the consistent state. Of course, with my definition of qualia, we have qualia both in conscious and unconscious states. We have qualia in ANY state. But for the unconscious states, the state is lost in a moment. If someone asks us a few seonds later then we don't remember anything about the state. Even if someone would ask us in the very moment, we couldn't answer correctly, because talking and answering questions requires some of the operations that we can only perform with consistent states. (I think this is mostly true, but not 100% true. Anyway, enough digression.) If a researcher looks from the outside into our brain in unconscious moments, then they can verify that we had something like a representation of the color green in our brains, and there are some tricks how one can discover them. It's the same as for a stone: if we touch it, then we can discover from the outside that it is hot, so we can deduce something about its internal state.
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-consciousness-and
I don't really get how this is an answer to anything. You brush over the stone having a "perspective" but that's the core of the issue, isn't it? Even if you can explain a human perspective as just a more complicated stone's perspective, that just moves the goalposts to having to explain what it means for a stone to have a "perspective".
So first of all, thanks a lot of the detailed reply!
Second, I'm gonna try to sort of nudge your position into an ontology that I think makes sense, and then postulate what I think the common objection is. I mean this strictly as a way to probe your model ("why is this wrong?"), not as an argument.
So you're saying that all stuff has inner states. That's clearly true. But, a lot of people would say that there is an *additional* fact of *experiencing* those internal states that is not logically reducible to a physical description of those states. (It may be *physically* reducible, but it's not the same thing.)
Furthermore, this thing does not apply equally to all inner states. Rocks have inner states and people do, but people also have this experience thing and rocks arguably don't -- but even if they do, it's not the same kind of experience. A person who feels hot and a rock that is hot won't have the *same* experience even under panpsychism.
It seems to me like you're saying "this additional experience thingy doesn't exist". (Is that correct?) In that case, I'd say you're disputing the existence of the kind of philosophical consciousness that's interesting, while keeping the computational phenomenon of biological or artificial consciousness. In other words, you're disputing the idea that [there's something to consciousness that's not strictly material].
(If so, I'd point out that your usage of the term "qualia" is nonstandard. Most people think that qualia inherently is this experience stuff, whereas you're saying "qualia" = "inner state", which may not have the experience stuff. I will then take this as confirmation for the point I keep making in other comments, which is that *people don't agree what the academic terminology means*. This is already creating miscommunication in the replies you've gotten, and it'd be much worse if you hadn't also explained the position properly.)
If you're on board with all this, then I think the standard objection to that position is that this experience stuff *must* exist because you experience it. Like, you have/are this experience thingy that's not logically the same as an internal state because you can imagine an internal state without that thingy. This would then by why consciousness is philosophically special. With life, you can define it in terms of various physical states and in the end nothing is lost, the reduced definition applies just fine to systems and gives you the same as before. But with consciousness, you cannot take this experience thingy and reduce it to non-experience-thingies because the experience thingy is simply a different kind of thing from the material stuff. Again it could be physically tied together, like every physical state always has this exact experience thingy, or only some do, or whatever, but that only gives you a physical equivalence. You still have the experience thing as an ontological primitive.
Let me first say that I find it great that you show this deep curiosity about understanding others. This is really an amazing trait!
I think you have understood and summarized my position quite well.
First of all, I do agree that my usage of "qualia" as "inner states" is nonstandard. I reached this definition by looking at other people's descriptions of "qualia" and trying to squeeze this somehow into my world model. But people who discuss consciousness and qualia tend to have rather different world models than me, and will probably be quite aghast at my interpretation of the word.
"It seems to me like you're saying "this additional experience thingy doesn't exist"."
Yes, I think this is the key point. I don't think that the inner states of a rock and a human are fundamentally different because humans have the "experience-thingy" and rocks don't.
Now, let me make one important caveat. You may even say that I bring back the experience-thingy through the back door. For humans, a conscious experience can be stored as a memory item. So it can be retrieved, which probably means that the inner state from that experience is more or less restored (only to some limited extent, of course). It also means that we can treat the perception as an object in our mental processing. To me, this seems like the one big difference between humans and stones. The difference is not that the internal state during perception is fundamentally different. The difference is that this internal state is later accessible as a mental object.
So in some sense I would agree that there is a "perception-thingy" which is different between humans and stones. Because in humans, an inner state can be stored in memory and be object to mental operations. But then, consequently I would say that not every human inner state has this perception-thingy. If a state is immediately discarded, then it is not different from the inner state of a stone, and doesn't have the perception-thingy.
Now, this memory and processing is a difference that I believe to be fundamental. It's a pretty abstract form of a perception-thingy. I can see one reason why it feels a bit counter-intuitive as an explanation for the standard notion of qualia (as some perception-feeling that only happens in brains). That is because the word "perception" usually refers to the internal state itself, and that is bound to one specific point in time. And the "perception-thingy" that I described would be something more abstract: some weird combination of all the time we use the memory item of this internal state. This is not bound to the one point in time when we first made the perception. This is counter-intuitive, because it seems natural to bind the "perception-thingy" (or the "quale", as people usually use the word) to the same time stamp as the perception itself.
But thinking about it, I don't have a lot of trust into my reflex of binding "perception-thingy/quale" to the same timestamp as the internal state of the perception. From where do I know anything about either the perception or this perception-thingy? It doesn't really come from the inner state itself, but strictly speaking it comes from the subsequent mental processing. Or it might even come from some later memory retrieval if the inner state is not immediately processed. So perhaps the perception-thingy is really only created when I am doing mental processing with it, which might be much later when I retrieve the memory for the first time? I can't be sure that I have any subjective "perception-thingy/quale" when I never process or retrieve the memory item. And I said earlier that this is one of the situation where I don't see a fundamental difference to a stone, so it would make sense to me that I don't assign the perception-thingy to these situations.
The part about timestamps is very speculative, but when I think about it, it does makes my own world model quite neat and consistent. I also realize that in some sense it is not far away from the opposite world view. If a quale (in the common sense of perception-feeling) is really just the inside-view of a mental processing step or of a memory storage operation, then this would be totally consistent with my worldview. It's just that I still wouldn't find it philosophically very remarkable. It would be a certain type of inner states, but they do not stick out so much among many other inner state.
The one thing that would stick out is that this type of inner state is always present whenever we access any memory or make mental operations. Within this world model, it would explain why people have so strong opinions about it: it is there for all perceptions that we ever actively access, so it is natural to assume that it is part of those perceptions, and that it was part of the inner state from the beginning. We would even naturally assume that is also there for unprocessed inner states, because we don't know better. We never see any counter-example because there is no way of accessing the inner state without mental processing.
The last two paragraphs were even more speculative, but I would find it interesting to know how compatible it is with the world model of people who do believe in phenomenal consciousness.
> The last two paragraphs were even more speculative, but I would find it interesting to know how compatible it is with the world model of people who do believe in phenomenal consciousness.
I think the honest answer is, not compatible at all. (Though I'm not sure I understood your model correctly, so I could be wrong.) The reason is that your description is explicitly functional and tied to intelligence -- like, it's based on the capacity to functionally retrieve states later.
Specifically, I think there are a number of cases that most consciousness realists would permit as at least a logical possibility, maybe even a factual one, which don't make any sense in your model
- you can have highly intelligent systems capable of perception, reflection, meta thinking, and so on, with 0 consciousness
- you can have non-intelligent systems with qualia much more powerful than that of huamns
- it may be the case that artificially induced coma states, like for surgeries, are highly blissful even though they can not be reported on and don't remain in memory. Ditto for dreamless sleep.
This is why I keep insisting that it's an ontological primitive. It's not what consciousness realists usually say, but I think that's what they're trying to say.
I think the extent to which the kind of functional inquiry is *relevant* for consciousness depends on the specific theory. If may be the case that you need perception/memory/recall/meta thoughts for consciousness, and in this case the world views are related, but even they're still incompatible. It may also be that all this has almost nothing to do with consciousness, except that perception instantiates a very niche special case, in which case they're barely related.
Also, it seems like the standard objection I mentioned still applies your explanation. like, consciousness realists could say "all this stuff about perception isn't what I'm talking about. I can imagine a world in which there is no experience stuff, yet all of the perception stuff still exists. But I have/am experience, which you haven't explained, so nothing is solved".
Thanks a lot for these explanations! I find it very hard to predict what proponents of phenomenal consciousness answer to such questions. Fortunately it's possible to co-exist without agreeing on these questions. :-)
>First of all, I do agree that my usage of "qualia" as "inner states" is nonstandard. I reached this definition by looking at other people's descriptions of "qualia" and trying to squeeze this somehow into my world mode
You don't have to do that..If "qualia" as everyone else defines it doesn't fit into your world view, there's no need to use the word. Distorting its meaning is like saying unicorns exist, but don't have horns.
The way I interpret the parent post is that you can make a semantic difference between substantially different types of inner states, but they still are inner states and share commonalities. In essence, I may have an inner state of being hungry; and at any given moment I may (or may not) also have an inner state of actively (perhaps consciously?) being aware of that inner state of being hungry. Those are separate inner states with some link between them, but I am not convinced that this means they have to be fundamentally different. You have the sense of e.g. touch, prioperception, self-awareness and (sometimes) conscious self-analysis, so perhaps they are on some scale, but fundamentally they can all be treated as "just" different channels for sense inputs to brain from internal states of our body.
1) I'm afraid I find it unhelpful to say things like, "a lot of people would say". I haven't done a survey, and I don't think you have either, so who knows? If you think there's an additional fact as you describe, just say that. If you know a particular person (or several) who think that, then say that (preferably with a link to their actual words).
2) Facts aren't discrete things. There aren't a specific number of them, either in general or in any particular situation. I think we all agree that people (and rocks) experience their internal states, and I'm just not sure what it means to say this is an additional fact about the situation. To put it another way, facts exist in the realm of epistemology not in the realm of ontology. Or in yet another way, they're part of the map, not the territory.
3) I think we agree that two rocks who are hot don't have the same experience, as demost_ wrote in the comment to which you're replying. So it's not surprising that a person and a rock also have differing experiences. We also agree on a particular difference: people, unlike rocks, have an internal representation of being hot. Of course this may or may not reach the level of consciousness, and demost_ gestures at quite an interesting explanation of what is happening here.
4) The problem with "this additional experience thingy doesn't exist" is that too much weight is born by the word "thingy". We agree that people (and rocks) have experiences. We also agree that people are conscious of their experiences, in the sense that they are (sometimes) aware they are having them, in a way that rocks probably aren't. In a slightly convoluted sense this is an "additional experience": it's the experience demost_ describes as "being in the internal state that represents [being hot] in our world model". Where it seems we differ is whether this awareness is a "thingy", but I'm afraid it's just too imprecise a word to debate meaningfully. What I think we can say is that the experience "being in the internal state that represents [being hot] in our world model" is not a fundamentally different kind of thing from the experience "being hot".
5) You don't experience the "thingy". You experience being hot (or not).
If you treaty qualia as entities, they have this annoying habit of being ineffable, subjective, etc.
If you treaty qualia as states, they have this annoying habit of being ineffable, subjective, etc.
If you treaty qualia as processes, they have this annoying habit of being ineffable, subjective, etc.
Nothing is achieved by grumbling about "thingies".
I *have* done a survey, and lots of anecdotes of what people say, but I'm not gonna link to anything because this account is anonymous!
But more importantly, you seem to try geting around introducing a new ontologically basic element, but you can't because that's the thing I'm asking about. If you refuse to talk about that, you're missing the point. The reason thingy is as good as word as any is because it's a new ontological primitive. You can't break it down into smaller parts any more than you can break matter down into smaller parts. I mean, you can take a composite object like a water molecule and break it down into parts, but those parts are themselves matter. That's the analogue of taking an experience (like your visual field) and decomposing it into smaller experiences (like a vertical line or a red dot). But you can't describe the experience stuff itself more precisely. And that should be fine; no one is complaining that our talk about physics is incoherent because we can't define what an up quark is without waving our hands and saying "matter!". This experience thing has the same ontological status as matter.
Also, careful with 3; most people who believe in this experience thing don't think a rock has *any* experience. (Edit: see [here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-266/comment/13368039) for an example!) (Again, experience is not inner state.) Panpsychism is roughly the idea that they do, and it's relatively fringe.
This may not be what you wanted to hear, but there just is no getting around introducing a new primitive. If you insist on not doing that, you're just talking past everyone who thinks there's such a thing.
Respectfully, I'm trying to answer the question you posed in the top comment. I'm not wanting to hear anything. I'm also not talking past the people who believe there's a "new primative". I think those people are mistaken, and I'm explaining why.
I think you must know that illusionists (and in fact many realists) deny that consciousness is ontologically basic, so if you're only interested in a discussion with people who accept that premise, you may wish to phrase the question differently.
As an aside, even if consciousness *was* an immaterial thing, there would be no reason to think it was a *primative* immaterial thing: it's easy to imagine that human consciousness is formed by an agglomeration of more basic immaterial elements, which would avoid the difficulty of it springing into existence fully formed at a certain point in cosmic history.
There is a further level or distinction to be teased apart, which I fear I blur in my comment above.
Humans and fruit flies and rocks can all experience being hot.
Humans and fruit flies (but not rocks) can experience being in the internal state that represents being hot in their world model.
Humans (but not rocks or (probably) fruit flies) can experience being in the internal state that represents being conscious of being (in the internal state that represents being hot in their world model) in their world model.
That is to say, humans can not only know they're hot, but also can know they know they're hot. A fruit fly can move away from the fire, but it can't say "Phew, what a scorcher!"
I may be wrong about this part though. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that there is some special category of human internal states which are conscious (in demost_'s/Dehaene's model, those which are synchronised across the brain), so the internal state that represents being hot can be experienced either unconsciously or consciously. This, I think, is the so-call "easy" problem of consciousness.
> Humans and fruit flies and rocks can all experience being hot.
> Humans and fruit flies (but not rocks) can experience being in the internal state that represents being hot in their world model.
> Humans (but not rocks or (probably) fruit flies) can experience being in the internal state that represents being conscious of being (in the internal state that represents being hot in their world model) in their world model.
So you are suing " experience being hot" to mean "be hot" and to "experience being in the internal state that represents being hot in their world model." mean "experience being hot."?
I mean, the idea that experience has to do with meta-beliefs is a theory about how experience *arises* (or how it's coupled to matter, or whatever the metaphysical relationship is). So that's like saying Integrated Information Theory is correct or something. It's much more specific than just clarifying what experience is.
I think there is some talking across each other with regard to "experience" (somebody in a comment elsewhere asserted that experiences were necessarily conscious!). A rock experiences hotness (in my use of the word) by the agitation of its atoms: there's no mystery about how it "arises" (except to the extent that thermodynamics is mysterious).
What the rock lacks is the *awareness* of its experience, although that is still to one side of the question of consciousness (since humans can be aware of things without being conscious of them and fruit flies are aware of things but (we assume) never conscious of them).
[Answering as a sort of pre-registration. Would love to see demost's reply.]
The problem is that qualia is defined in practice as "the unexplained bit of experienced perception." So if I explain experience and perception and the experience of perception, you can still say "ok but that doesn't explain qualia" and I'm stuck saying qualia is an illusion.
Let's use a simple quale, a bright light. Plants clearly experience this quale, because they respond to it. Humans also experience this quale, but also, being conscious, we are aware of this experience. We have the cognitive capacity to model the world, and to somewhat recursively model ourselves, and so we model ourselves as experiencing the quale of bright light. This model is also a quale - we experience the bright light but also we experience our state of being as we experience the bright light.
A different example. So you touch a very hot stuff. You will pull your hand back before becoming consciously aware that the stove is hot. Clearly some part of you experienced the heat, though. Some part of you had a model of the world, simple and quick to update, that experienced heat and reacted to it. A different part of you, the conscious part, reacts slower. Its models are more complex, they take longer to update in real time, but it's just like the models used by your unconscious reflexes, except more complicated. MUCH more complicated, in part because they somewhat recursively model you and your experienced qualia. So we not only experience the burn, but also the experience itself, somewhat recursively. Your internal state will include "burned" and also a representation of "being burned.". You will react to the direct experience in the first order, e.g., by pulling your hand away and also by updating your model of yourself. You will react to the model updates in the second and further orders, e.g., by fetching an ice cube and getting angry at your roommate for leaving the stove on and wondering whether the hotness of hot is an ontological primitive.
You have many cognitive functions, from simple reflexes that are aware of nerve temperature spikes, to complex visual processing that is acutely, expertly aware of 3d modeling and optics, to consciousness that is aware of yourself as an embedded agent that conscious and aware of itself as an embedded agent. If anything, consciousness seems like a relatively simple bolt-on once you have the ability to model the world around you. And to the extent that you as an individual are a unit of evolutionary advantage, it makes all the sense in the world that once we became self aware, we began to value that self very highly. To the point where we feel like that sense of self, that awareness of awareness, that redness of red, must be fundamentally different from other things.
So, no, there's no reason to think that conscious experience requires mysterious new ontological primitives compared to other cognitive functions.
>The problem is that qualia is defined in practice as "the unexplained bit of experienced perception.
Well, no not really.
>Let's use a simple quale, a bright light. Plants clearly experience this quale
No, again. "Quale" doesn't label an external stimulus.
"There are recognizable qualitative characters of the given, which may be repeated in different experiences, and are thus a sort of universals; I call these "qualia." But although such qualia are universals, in the sense of being recognized from one to another experience, they must be distinguished from the properties of objects. Confusion of these two is characteristic of many historical conceptions, as well as of current essence-theories. The quale is directly intuited, given, and is not the subject of any possible error because it is purely subjective.[18]"
> clearly some part of you experienced the heat, though.
Only in the objective sense of a high temperature. The whole point of the word "qualia" is to differentiate the subjective aspect from the objective. Oridinary words like "light" and "heat" are ambiguous in that regard.
"The quale is directly intuited, given, and is not the subject of any possible error because it is purely subjective." This sounds to me like defining qualia as unexplainable, then complaining that explained phenomena cannot be qualia.
Here's the circle I see us trotting: you define qualia as irreducible; I reply that there is no such thing; you claim there there *must* be such a thing, since you perceive qualia directly; I reduce your perceived qualia to a cognitive function; you return to the start. What am I missing?
> Here's the circle I see us trotting: you define qualia as irreducible;
I don't define qualia: CI Lewis does. The definition quoted says nothing about (ir)redicubility.
I have stated that the *hard problem( is *about* reducibility. That is not a claim that stems form the definition of qualia -- if anything it comes from the definition of the HP. Moreover, that is a falsifiable claim: you can falsify it by offering a reductive explanation.
> you claim there there *must* be such a thing, since you perceive qualia directly; v
I claim to experience qualia., I don't claim to experience the irreducibility (immateriality, etc) of qualia.
> ; I reduce your perceived qualia to a cognitive function; you return to the start.
You don't reduce qualia to a cognitive function, because you are only unable to show how and why a cognitive function would result in qualia. Remember, reduction is not elimination -- it is not a case of saying Y doesn't exist, it is just a case of saying that Y is really X, it is a case of showing how Y is X. Y continues to exist, just not as a part of basic ontology (eg. heat).
Moving our discussion to here, as I had previously only skimmed this. To be clear, you are saying a hot rock experiences hotness the way we would experience hotness if we were in a sauna? By extension, is taking a jackhammer to the pavement a form of torture? That is what would be entailed if rocks have qualia.
No, the hotness qualia of the rock would be different from our qualia experience in a sauna. Let's say the rock experiences internal temperatures of 200°C, which is something that we can never experience. Or even better, let's replace "hotness" by "hardness", to not get confused by qualia that we can experience.
Does a pavement experience qualia if tacked by a jackhamer? Yes, I would say so. But there is no reason to believe that it is the same qualia as I would experience if being tacked by a jackhammer. I think it makes sense to call my qualia "pain", but I don't think it makes sense to call the qualia of the jackhammer pain. So I don't share your assumtion "That is what would be entailed if rocks have qualia". Not every qualia is pain, and not every thing/being can experience every qualia in the world.
The rock experiences nothing. It isn’t conscious.
Yes, I'm coming round to the view that this is misuse of the word "experience" , not panpsyshcism.
How do you know a rock experiences a qualia when being jackhammered?
EDIT: Which parts of the pavement experience the qualia? If it's a highway for example, is the entire highway feeling something?
I would rather avoid the word "to feel" for qualia. And for how do I know it, I don't get the question. Are you suggesting that a rock has no internal state? That it has not atoms inside? Otherwise, it's impossible NOT to have qualia according to my definition.
Yes, the entire highway has the qualia of having a damaged part. The part of the highway has the qualia of being damaged.
I don't think the rock has qualia no. You brought up the rock being hot as an internal state, but a rock being hot or not is something we can measure, so it is not purely internal to the rock.
Is the rock in pain or not in pain when jackhammered? If we grant the rock has qualia, how do we answer a question like that? You previously offered your belief that the qualia the rock would have wouldn't be pain, but it's not clear how you know that.
The highway is not one thing though. 'Highway' is map and not territory. The territory is a bunch of atoms, or not even that since atoms have parts. Do each of these parts individually have qualia, and then all the qualia somehow all add up together to a bigger qualia that is shown to... what? Qualia don't stand on their own, they have to be shown to consciousness. And qualia cannot be observed: for all I know when we see red, I see one color and you another, but we both say 'red' when asked what color we are seeing, because that's what we learned that color is called. We can't check, because we can't observe each others qualia.
That's why you can't make the jump from 'the rock is hot' to 'the rock is having the qualia of hot': 'hot' is observable, the 'qualia of hot' isn't. Technically, this is why solipsism makes sense: the only qualia you will ever observe are your own.
> A stone also has inner states. For example, it can be hot. So if a stone is hot, then it is experiencing the inner state of "being hot". It has the qualia of "being hot".
If you are actually asserting panpsychism, that would be pretty "interesting" and not implied by biology.
> This seems to match a lot of things that other people say about qualia. For example, the inner state of "seeing green" (or "being hot") is not the same as a description of the state. So even if someone gives me a full description of all the atoms in the stone in the state "being hot", this is not the same thing as the stone actually being hot.
Why does that matter?
Physicalists sometimes respond to Mary's Room by saying that one can not expect Mary actually to actually instantiate Red herself just by looking at a brain scan. It seems obvious to them that a physical description of brain state won't convey what that state is like, because it doesn't put you into that state. As an argument for physicalism, the strategy is to accept that qualia exist, but argue that they present no unexpected behaviour, or other difficulties for physicalism.
That is correct as stated but somewhat misleading: the problem is why is it necessary, in the case of experience, and only in the case of experience to instantiate it in order to fully understand it. Obviously, it is true a that a description of a brain state won't put you into that brain state. But that doesn't show that there is nothing unusual about qualia. The problem is that there in no other case does it seem necessary to instantiate a brain state in order to understand something.
If another version of Mary were shut up to learn everything about, say, nuclear fusion, the question "would she actually know about nuclear fusion" could only be answered "yes, of course....didn't you just say she knows everything"? The idea that she would have to instantiate a fusion reaction within her own body in order to understand fusion is quite counterintuitive. Similarly, a description of photosynthesis will make you photosynthesise, and would not be needed for a complete understanding of photosynthesis.
There seem to be some edge cases.: for instance, would an alternative Mary know everything about heart attacks without having one herself? Well, she would know everything except what a heart attack feels like, and what it feels like is a quale. the edge cases, like that one, are cases are just cases where an element of knowledge-by-acquaintance is needed for complete knowledge. Even other mental phenomena don't suffer from this peculiarity. Thoughts and memories are straightforwardly expressible in words, so long as they don't involve qualia.
So: is the response "well, she has never actually instantiated colour vision in her own brain" one that lays to rest and the challenge posed by the Knowledge argument, leaving physicalism undisturbed? The fact that these physicalists feel it would be in some way necessary to instantiate colour, but not other things, like photosynthesis or fusion, means they subscribe to the idea that there is something epistemically unique about qualia/experience, even if they resist the idea that qualia are metaphysically unique.
Is the assumption of epistemological uniqueness to be expected given physicalism? Some argue that no matter how much you know about something "from the outside", you quite naturally wouldn't be expected to understand it from the inside. That's a common intuition, as shown by the frequency of rhetoric along the lines of "you wouldn't know, you weren't there". But it's not, strictly speaking, compatible with physicalism...rather it's a form of dual aspect theory.
"The problem is why is it necessary, in the case of experience, and only in the case of experience to instantiate it in order to fully understand it"
Hm, I don't find this remarkable. If you want "full understanding" to include "having a memory of the internal state", then this is perfectly fine. Yes, that may give a better understanding. But obviously, this only makes sense for internal states. You can request this for "seeing red" because this is an internal state, but you can't request this for "fusion energy", because this is not an internal state. For other concepts like "being male" this internal state can only be achieved by a subset of the population, and for concepts like "being a hot stone" by none of the population, but it can be achieved by stones (though they don't have memory or language, so they won't match some of the other criteria for "understanding" that we have). And of course, we could say that you don't fully understand what a hot stone is without having been one. It's just that this is an unreasonably high standard for understanding stones, because no one will ever achieve it. That's why we have higher bars for understanding "seeing red" than for hot stones. Because we can.
So yes, as you phrase it, this epistemological uniqueness is to be expected given physicalism.
> If you want "full understanding" to include "having a memory of the internal state", then this is perfectly fine.
I don't want that. Neither I nor anyone else think qualia re particularly connected to memory, and nobody defines qualia as *just* an internal state (like a computer knowing its hard drive is full), because then there would be no problem. You need to use the information that this is supposed to be a hard problem to interpret what the nature of the problem is.
> . But obviously, this only makes sense for internal states. You can request this for "seeing red" because this is an internal state, but you can't request this for "fusion energy", because this is not an internal state
What do you mean by "internal"? Fusion is spatially, physically internal to a fusion reactor...but its not internal in the sense of being subjective or ineffable. If you are using "internal" to mean "subjective and ineffable", you haven't dissolved anything -- you are admitting that qualia exist and have all their full-strength properties.
> For other concepts like "being male" this internal state can only be achieved by a subset of the population,
The central question is whether you need to instantiate a state *in order to understand it*. Of course, no evertyhing instantiates every state --- that is far to obvious to be the problem.
> And of course, we could say that you don't fully understand what a hot stone is without having been one. It's just that this is an unreasonably high standard for understanding stones, because no one will ever achieve itv
No, the problem is that there is nothing it is like to be a stone, so there is nothing to be gained from instantiating it. But there is something it is like to be a person who is seeing red: if you believe that Mary cannot understand what it is like to see red without personally instantiating the state, then you accept that there are some things which are only knowable subjectively. That is not an implication of physicalism, nor is it compatible with the physicalist claim that everything can be understood physically, ie. objectively.
"What do you mean by "internal"?"
I mean internal to the person who is supposed to gain full understanding. Mary gets some level of understanding of the color red by learning everything about the color red without seeing it. And she gets some level of understanding about fusion by learning everything about fusion without being a fusion reactor. In the first case, she has not yet reached the highest human-reachable level, so we don't call it full understanding. In the second case we call it full understanding because as a human there are no further steps she can take.
Again, that is not an illusionist or qualiaphobic account.
This is the most (pun intended) clear and concise description of this position I've seen. Can you recommend further reading?
Thanks for the very nice words!
I am not sure about further reading, unfortunately. It seems that meteor (who started this thread) is much more literate on this topic than I am, so perhaps they have a recommendation?
I just re-read your book review, and now remember how much I liked it as well. (I have been a fan of Dehaene since I saw his "statistician brain" lectures around 5 years ago.)
Since we agree so much on the basics, I wonder whether you also agree on what I see as the implications. It seems clear to me that the huge value we place on our own conscious experience is just straightforward evolutionary pressure. We value our own consciousness because this value encourages us to spend time and energy and creativity on keeping that consciousness going. Similar to why we value salt/sugar/fat - and, similarly to our ice cream cravings, our consciousness-cravings could conceivable become very disadvantageous as our environment changes. Thoughts?
"The same is true for any other representation machines, like a computer or a fruit fly."
Do you think fruit flies can think? Or that there is no difference between the behaviour of a fruit fly and our behaviour? I suppose the answer there is just "more complexity" but not functionally different. But I wonder: if fruit flies were scaled up to human-size, would they then start thinking like humans - or stay thinking like fruit flies?
The entire difference is in that little bit you glide over - that a stone may be in the state of being-hot and a human may be in the state of seeing-green, but that the stone is not aware of its state, thinking about its state, able to remember its state, and able to describe that state to other stones.
Just a minor, tiny difference that makes all the difference!
Ummm ... He literally says that? I.e., "Consciousness is about experiencing my own inner state."
In the spirit of the oversimplification we've all engaged in so far: the big difference between a rock and a fruit fly is the complexity of inner state. The big difference between a fruit fly and a human is the fact that the inner state is, somewhat recursively, represented in the inner state. That representation is "consciousness." Pretty boring and mechanical, for something we value so highly. (Valuing it highly has been evolutionarily advantageous, but like ice cream cravings it may become decidedly disadvantageous as the environment changes.)
I was going to write a long answer, but this is almost exactly what I was going to say. I'll just add that the ability to represent our inner state somewhat recursively, and then to encode that observation in language, adds layers of abstraction and capability that give evolutionary advantage but also confuse how we think about consciousness.
The key is that consciousness is boring - or will be, once we figure it out. Like the visual cortex, it's "just" a cognitive function.
I nearly wrote in another comment that they're like epicycles.
Qualia are something to be explained, not an explanation for something else.
"What is the explanandum for a theory of consciousness? The traditional view is that it is the qualia of experience, conceived of as ineffable, intrinsic, and essentially private properties -- classic qualia, we might say. " -- K Frankish.
Depends on what you mean by discarding that. The existence of experience cannot be discarded, no matter if that is incongrous with the scientific worldview.
For me, there is a definitional question. What exactly is this "phenomenal consciousness" which may or may not exist? If I Google for it, I find a Pyschology Today article 'What is Phenomenal Consciousness', which seems promising. That article (by Harry Haladjian) says, "This question can be relatively easy to answer: It’s the rich experience you’re having right now, comprised of the things that you see, hear, touch, and think. It is, essentially, what it feels like to be you."
I find that answer difficult to follow. Naively, I would expect consciousness to be the thing having the experience and not the experience itself. Certainly, the things that I see, hear and touch are (mostly) external to me so I don't see how they can sensibly comprise my consciousness. And what it feels like to me (if that means anything at all) seems like something entirely different from my sense-perceptions.
If I turn to the SEP article on consciousness, it says, under "state consciousness": "Such qualia are sometimes referred to as phenomenal properties and the associated sort of consciousness as phenomenal consciousness, but the latter term is perhaps more properly applied to the overall structure of experience and involves far more than sensory qualia. The phenomenal structure of consciousness also encompasses much of the spatial, temporal and conceptual organization of our experience of the world and of ourselves as agents in it."
I note that this conflicts with the previous definition: "the rich experience you're having right now" refers (I think) to the sum of my (supposed) qualia, but SEP tells me that phenomenal consciousness involves "far more" than that.
Further on, the SEP article states, "Since many non-conscious states also have intentional and representational aspects, it may be best to consider phenomenal structure as involving a special kind of intentional and representational organization and content, the kind distinctively associated with consciousness."
At this point I'm inclined to throw up my hands. It has a "special kind" of organisation and content!? What is this? Well, it's the kind associated with consciousness! This all looks to me like people trying to pin down a phantasm. If there really were such a thing as phenomenal consciousness, it would be possible to explain what it is without circularity or inconsistency.
I also suspect there is some equivocation between a boring thing which exists (people have experiences) and an exciting thing which doesn't exist (an experience-having entity mystically instantiated in human brains).
> At this point I'm inclined to throw up my hands. It has a "special kind" of organisation and content!? What is this?
Welcome to the world of circular nonsense and special pleading that is the philosophy of mind!
If you really want to understand what people here are talking about, read up on the intuition pumps that try to point out the quality that's hard to pin down. These are "Mary's Room"/The Knowledge Argument and "Philosophical zombies". Be sure to read Dennett's replies to each for a counterargument
These intuition pumps don't so much prove the existence or non-existence of qualia/consciousness, so much as help you figure out which camp your reason and intuitions put you in.
I have already read all of those things (including Dennett's replies). I'm not sure why you think I haven't.
Daniel Dennett is a p-zombie: https://philarchive.org/archive/KEACDD
We are all p-zombies.
> Certainly, the things that I see, hear and touch are (mostly) external to me so I don't see how they can sensibly comprise my consciousness.
> It’s the rich experience you’re having right now, comprised of the things that you see, hear, touch, and think. It is, essentially, what it feels like to be you.<
The word “think” in that list is an important one.
> At this point I'm inclined to throw up my hands. It has a "special kind" of organisation and content!? What is this? Well, it's the kind associated with consciousness! This all looks to me like people trying to pin down a phantasm. If there really were such a thing as phenomenal consciousness, it would be possible to explain what it is without circularity or inconsistency.
You're asking for an exact third -person description: but the essence of the problem of consciousness is that we don;t have one, and the essence of conscious experience itself is that it is only apparent to the subject having it.
I get a bit queasy when people talk of "conscious experience". People (and rocks) have experiences. People (but I think not rocks) are sometimes conscious of having those experiences. If "conscious experience" is a shorthand for "experience of which one is conscious", then all well and good, but the consciousness isn't a property of the experience.
We are in fact able to speak of our experiences. Sometimes of course our interlocutors get completely the wrong end of the stick, but quite often they exhibit a good understanding of the mental state being described. A priori that may seem surprising (how could the sense of, say, bereavement, be communicated by vibrating the air in a certain way?), but experience shows it is so. If you say, well, they haven't understood the *essence* of the experience, then I can't argue with you, since I have no idea what that means and you tell me it's impossible to explain, but it doesn't seem to present any practical difficulty in human communication.
I'm pretty sure rocks don't have experiences.
> We are in fact able to speak of our experiences.
Partially, and usually via comparison to similar experiences. Explaining a novel experience -- "colour to a blind man" -- form the ground up remain all but impossible.
This will seem off topic but it isn’t. Have you seen “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once?”
There is a conversation between two rocks.
If you can overlook the juvenile gross out humor in the movie, it actually looks at some interesting philosophical ideas.
One thing that struck me was it seemed to suggest Buddhism has some interesting parallels with nihilism.
Or maybe that’s just when the gummies kicked in.
“ also suspect there is some equivocation between a boring thing which exists (people have experiences) and an exciting thing which doesn't exist (an experience-having entity mystically instantiated in human brains).”
Except that is also circular - the people having experiences are having conscious experiences.
To meaningfully discuss whether phenomenal consciousness does or does not exist, we would first need a definition of "phenomenal consciousness". Only once the concept is broken down into its (alleged) constituent parts, can we try to pinpoint which parts are illusory. Many definitions look something like the following (from Kammerer, The Illusion of Conscious Experience, 2021, found it after searching "illusionism" on plato.stanford.edu):
'Conscious experiences (“phenomenal states”, “phenomenal experiences”) are putative mental states such that there is “something it is like” to be in them.'
IMHO the "there is something it is like" phraseology is so thoroughly ambiguous, imprecise, and full of linguistic trickery that I don't think it can form the basis for a discussion of this kind. Moreover I think talking about mental "states" (as opposed to "processes" or "dynamics" something) at all is extremely confused.
But anyway, to answer the question based on the tentative definition above, I'm not an illusionist, because "there is something" is so broad that it *probably* includes whatever physicalist/functionalist/computationalist account I think is true. OTOH, "something it is like" always seems to me like an appeal to the faculty of empathy, and I think it is indeed this faculty which is subject to an illusion (if not during actual consciousness, then at least when philosophizing about it in these terms).
All that aside, though, I can say for sure that I'm an illusionist regarding a certain aspect of qualia: precisely that aspect where we feel there is something specific we are experiencing (e.g. the "redness" of red), yet we can never pinpoint or communicate (or "eff") just what this specific thing is - that is IMHO almost certainly illusory.
What could it possibly mean for the experience of the redness of red to be "illusory"? How can an experience possibly be illusory? Sure, the conclusions we make about the physical world based on what we experience can be illusory (hallucinations, etc.), but how can the experiences themselves be illusory?
Have you ever considered that maybe you're just a p-zombie?
So there's two things I'm interested in. One is models about the specific thing I mean by consciousness. The other is just what people think about the subject period, including what they think consciousness even means. I was going for the second one first, hence I didn't define consciousness. (In last week's comment I explicitly said "whatever that means exactly" indicating that I'm asking about that, too. I should've done that here as well and edited it in now.)
But since you're sort of asking about the definition, I'll give on here. So there's material stuff in the universe (quarks or quantum fields or whatnot). Some people think that there's also experiential stuff. If it is, this experiential stuff is not reducible to the material stuff; you cannot break it down into non-experiential components. (It may be *causally isomorphic* to the material stuff in the sense of having a fixed relationship as a matter of physics, in which case it doesn't have information content above and beyond the material stuff, but it's still an ontologically separate thing.) This alleged experiential stuff is what I call consciousness. So in particular, you cannot break it down into constituent parts. I mean you can have complex experiences that are made of smaller experiences, but you cannot define the experience stuff in terms of non-experience stuff.
So for example, if you think the only meaningful way to talk about experience is in terms of physical brain states, and there's no ground truth about what is ultimately experienced, then it seems like you don't think such a thing exists. (I'm *not* gonna say "so then you're an illusionist" because imE there's no consensus on any academic term and I very much don't want to tell anyone what label they are. That's why I phrased it as "if you're symepathetic to this label ...", leaving it up to you what that means.)
All this talk about two kinds of stuff (or two kinds of properties of a single stuff, or what have you) is super dualist, which, as a physicalist. I quite obviously disagree with. For me it's more a question of the computational process in the brain, and how consciousness arises from that. Given that we still know so little about the computational processes in the brain, I'm mostly fine with the idea that that's probably where the answer lies, and we'll just have to wait until we know more.
What talk? I haven't seen anyone explicitly back substance dualism in this discussion.
Yeah, this is the answer that I expected given your initial post. Thanks!
These two usages of consciousness (the additional stuff, and the computational implementation thing) are very different, and the kinds of questions you look at when you examine them are also very different. But it's super important to be clear which of the two one is talking about at any point. Like if you want to talk about the first and other person about the second, miscommunication is guaranteed.
But note that you can be a physicalist and still think there's this second kind of stuff, at least if "physicalist" means "I believe that the laws of physics are a causally complete description of the universe". (It also doesn't rely on quantum randomness, parts missing from the standard model, or anything of the sort.) You can simply hold that the experiential stuff is another way to view *the same process* that is fully described by the laws of physics. I'm not saying this is true, I'm only saying that it's logically compatible with physicalism. There are definitely people with this position who call themselves both physicalists and non-dualists.
> You can simply hold that the experiential stuff is another way to view *the same process* that is fully described by the laws of physics.
I don't know what to make of this. Is this panpsychism, or a sort of idea that the universe is experiencing itself? It's hard to imagine that the quarks in my brain are feeling qualia just because they are in my brain.
It's a class of theories; panpsychism is in that class. But the class also contains functionalist theories.
The analogy I like to use is to imagine that the only objects in the universe are regular polyhedrons, and that consciousness is like the polyhedron's faces while matter is like its edges. Both aspects are complete in terms of information (and hence causality as well). E.g., if you tell me where the edges are, then I know everything about the object, so I also know how it will develop into the future, and I know where the faces are. Analogously, give me a full material description of a process, and I can tell you exactly what its consciousness if any looks like, and exactly how it develops into the future. And it doesn't make sense to talk about causality between both aspects; they're always linked in exactly one way that can never change.
The component that may not hold about the analogy is that the consciousness aspect doesn't have to be complete. Like, Eliezer's "consciousness is what an algorithm feels like from the inside" is in this class of theories, but if that's the case, consciousness lives at a higher level of abstraction, and the consciousness aspect isn't complete because several material systems could run exactly the same algorithm.
Anyway, any theory in this class is perfectly compatible with the laws of physics, so I don't think what you said in the other comment (that science is on the side of illusionism) is correct. Maybe illusionism is to be preferred for other reasons, but dual-aspect theories are compatible with science.
>These two usages of consciousness (the additional stuff, and the computational implementation thing)
Those are two *theories* of consciousness, and not the only two.
> hat aspect where we feel there is something specific we are experiencing (e.g. the "redness" of red), yet we can never pinpoint or communicate (or "eff") just what this specific thing is - that is IMHO almost certainly illusory.
Can you prove it is illusory by effing it?
*consults dictionary*
eff (verb). used as a less offensive way of saying ‘fuck off’, which is a very offensive way of telling someone to go away or saying that you do not agree with them
I cannot eff the redness of red because I don't think there is such a thing - that's the sense in which it is illusory.
But also I'm afraid this doesn't really resolve the question as a whole, it just shifts it from "explain the ineffable redness of red" to "explain how there can be subjective experience at all".
I can see red even if you can't. I'm unconvinced by claims to eff qualia, since I have never seen it done, and I am unconvined by claims that there are no qualia, since I have them.
"I can see red even if you can't."
Ah, "if you disagree with me about consciousness then you aren't conscious" - classic.
One day the whole world woke up to see a giant red circle in the sky. Everybody saw this including all of the worlds scientists. Animals were clearly perturbed by it. It was visible night and day.
A task force was set up and scientists from across the world, equipped with all the best equipment, took off on a space ship to investigate. As they approached the anomaly it grew faint and disappeared. The best scientists with the best scientific equipment were no good in detecting what was going on, no matter how hard they tried.
After a few years of this, with everybody at ground level still seeing the giant red dot, the scientists held a conference and said it was all an illusion and that all conscious beings on earth were hallucinating the dot. Let that, said the scientists, be the end of it. It’s a thoroughly unscientific belief.
That was a relief to many people. The scientists had spoken. It wasn’t real! Scientifically minded parents scolded their children when they pointed to the red dot and asked what that was. It wasn’t there, they said. Teachers admonished students for mentioning the red dot. Many philosophers ran courses on mass delusion.
Other people, albeit in the minority, thought that either the scientists needed better equipment or the world needed better scientists.
One day a meteorologist realized that, on the day the red circle appeared, some strange patterns in air density also appeared in the Earth's atmosphere. She partnered up with a grad student studying optics, and they figured out the circle was a reflection of the sun, visible only from earth's surface. Turns out the circle was an illusion, no need to pretend you don't see it, but no need to pretend it's actually there. What's actually there is invisible patterns in air density.
Too many people cling too desperately to their ignorance, afraid that the world will lose its mystery. This is a sad and terrible mistake. https://www.readthesequences.com/Joy-In-The-Merely-Real
Sure. That’s a reasonable thing to happen. But in that scenario the red dot is understood and not dismissed as an illusion because it isn’t understood.
That’s the “better scientists or better equipment scenario”.
Yes, illusionism or eliminativism or whatever it's called these days is like a big "Don't Look Up". I see word games above regarding hot rocks to avoid the actual question, and even that argument sidesteps the possibility of panpsychism given everything has internal states, and we don't have a coherent theory of consciousness to say why only some such states lead to qualia.
> Yes, illusionism or eliminativism or whatever it's called these days is like a big "Don't Look Up".
Funny, I see it as the exact opposite: everyone in that film thought reality was the media circus, the theatre presented to their eyes and ears, and so didn't listen to the scientific instruments that were revealing the actual truth.
Qualia and consciousness are the theatre, a spectacle that just isn't what it seems. Trust the scientific instruments instead of your innate but flawed perceptions!
So I guess the people who think consciousness is special need some arguments...but of course they have them.
I'm not in the business of telling people what labels mean. I would if they were mathematically well-defined terms, but they're not; this is one of the takeaways of debating these issues a lot. A lot of people assume that surely there's a universally agreed upon meaning for the academic terminology, but there isn't, and it inevitably leads to miscommunication. That's not just true for illusionism but also panpsychism, idealism, functionalism, etc.
The question that I think is important is whether you consider consciousness an irreducible kind of stuff. Like, a lot of people think that consciousness is this kind of experience-stuff that isn't made out of non-experience stuff, so you have to adopt it as a new kind of primitive with roughly the same status as "matter". (That doesn't mean experience isn't inherently tied to matter; some theories say it may be another aspect of the same thing, it just means it's logically distinct.) It sounds to me like you think there isn't this kind of stuff? If so, I suspect most people would call that illusionism, but some would confidently tell you that no illusionism means something totally different.
I do not like the term illusionism or eliminativism, as I think they produce more confusion than solve, but yeah, I think that consciousness is reducible to matter and all the experience stuff is made out of non-experience stuff. I also notice that there is also a lot of "consciousness of the gaps" thingy going on, where consciousness is a bundle term for things we still do not fully understand about our cognition.
My model is that consciousness is high level interface, representing some facts about the body and its environment, developped probably for impulse control, longterm planning and communication. Humans have a lot of different desires, occasionally contradicting each other. In order to effectively regulate behaviour of this complex system of systems, there was required some kind central planner, who gets simplified representation of what's going on. Our "qualia" is this representation - the encoding of some processes in our body available for consciousness. Some of them are read only, some allow a level of editing while there is also a lot of things not encoded in our consciousness, thus inavailable at all.
How exactly this encoding works is an interesting scientific question that is eventually going to be solved. But the philosophical "Why does anyone feels like anything?" doesn't seem mysterious for me. It's because central controller needs inputs to be an effective regulator. Same for "Why do I experience my own consciousness and not the consciousness of other people" Because their bodily sensations are not encoded and presented as inputs for your interface, while your own are.
I agree, I think of "phenomenal consciousness" or "qualia-having stuff" or "experiencers" as something atomic, not made of unconscious stuff, and that an illusionist is one who doesn't believe in that. The scientific evidence is on the side of the illusionists, and this is the *only* situation where I think the scientific picture looks pretty complete but that something crucial must be missing from it.
My pet hypothesis: brains have more than one bit of phenomenal consciousness. Also, phenomenal consciousness must provide some kind of evolutionary benefit, such as a computational ability.
There seems to be a pattern where activities/hobbies/workplaces dominated by one gender actively scares away the other gender. I'm curious as to where that threshold is, but my quest for numbers has left me with nothing but vapid culture war stuff.
My diving club's far more male dominated than the diving community as a whole, and I'd like to fix that. I think a good start would be to set a goal of aggressively reaching the critical mass of women needed to not alienate new or existing female members, followed by a less aggressive drive to reach the diving community's ratio. Any advice on figuring out what this critical mass is?
I've got nothing concrete to offer, beyond the suggestion of "enough that you aren't forcing women onto boards because gender quotas demand it". One of the few measurable inconveniences I've had working as a woman in tech was that the few of us were taking part in a lot more interviews than our male colleagues, because you obviously want the interview to demonstrate that the group has women in it.
A number of years ago i read about anti-semtism at harvard at the turn of the century (1900). It had some stats about the number of Jewish students in the class and anti-jewish sentiment in the class. There was a tipping point, i dont remember what it is and i can't find the source. But i do find this an interesting topic that is under discussed.
Why is this a problem that needs "fixing"? Why does every male dominated space need to not be? What if these men, entirely reasonably, expect that significantly increasing the number of women in the club will negatively change both their experience of involvement in the club and the nature and direction of the club in a way they don't like? Why can't men have their own things? If this is so little of a concern for the existing members of the club that you feel the need to singlehandedly manage this effort and need internet stragners to help you (rather than discussing it with the other members), then isn't that a sign that this isn't an issue they support and so they should be left in peace?
This is what diversity activists always do. In one breath, they ridicule anyone who suggests that having a lot more women involved in something will significantly affect the nature and culture of the club. Then in the next breathe, they're talking about how much better the thing will be because there's something fundmanetally flawed and bad about masculine cultures (which implies women will and are intended to have a significant cultural effect on the thing).
If there is a 'diving community as a whole', it suggests there are other clubs and the possibility of other clubs, so why does EVERY individual club need to be the way you think it should be?
Why not have them join another club? Why not found another, 'inclusive' club? Why not focus on a real problem instead?
> why does EVERY individual club need to be the way you think it should be?
It doesn't but it seems they are talking about THEIR OWN club. It seem totally reasonable to me for them to have an opinion on the make up of that club.
>Why not have them join another club? Why not found another, 'inclusive' club? Why not focus on a real problem instead?
Their real problem seems to be "there are not enough women in this club". Your proposed solutions won't solve that.
Mine will: "decide it doesn't matter what proportion of this club is women. Recruit new members based on efficacy and demand instead of ideology."
Felt it had to be said.
Ok but the poster doesn't want to do that so your solution isn't feasible either.
It's perfectly feasible. If a man writes a post asking for advice on how to beat his wife and then shoot himself in the foot, "Have you considered not doing that?" is a very valid response for him to hear.
"Why can't men have their own things?"
I think one general dynamic might be that men as a rule (and despite allusions to the contrary) just aren't particularly autocratic. They just want to turn up and do what they do. No one wants to actually run the club, so they'll all end up at the mercy of those who do.
In OP's case, the administration is already woke enough that they're talking about gender quotas on the board, apparently separately to the rest of this.
We don't know what the sensibilities of the rank and file divers might be, but if they don't show up and take on the responsibilities of office, they don't get any power and their opinions don't count.
First a question; Do the all the men in the club want the same thing you do? Sometimes everyone likes to 'get away' from the other gender and just hang with the guys. But assuming everyone agrees with you. Then how about some club/ get together where you ask new people to come and you also ask all the members to bring their partner along. Diving and Dinner, or something like that.
I'd actually be very interested in hearing how this works out for you.
My first thought was that if you replace 50% of something with something else (either because you pull in 50% women, or you pull in a critical 20% who themselves pull in another 30%) then what you have at the end is *not the same club* as it was when you started.
If your club as it is now is filling any needs for its members beyond just giving you all somewhere to dive, then its ability to meet those needs might be affected.
Without knowing anything about what your club's like or what personalities you all have, I would predict that (unless you're all unanimous that "we need more women" and it's a frequent topic of conversation at the club) as you pull in more women, there will be an intangible shift in culture and more of the men will feel like "the fun's gone".
This will be more pronounced if you're a tight knit club with a lot of social connection, less pronounced or nonexistent if you're a loose association who only get together to dive and then go home again. It also might depend on how blokey your blokes are and how girly are the girls you're pulling in - and I have no idea how dimorphic things are where you live.
My thoughts aside, I'm interested to hear how you go about this and what the results are. This a nuts and bolts social engineering project and I want to see how it goes.
While our needs are technically met, more members would mean more resources that can be poured back into the club. Boat maintenance, the divemaster role, and everything else that goes into running a club is spread between a core of volunteers who are always at risk of burnout. More members would also mean more funding and thus shinier toys. Women seem to be an untapped source for resources here.
The club's culture as a whole is an interesting ethical dilemma. I personally would welcome a more feminine club, but perhaps I ought to let the minority--or worse, the majority--keep their boy's club. Actively marginalizing one group to include another seems like an ethically bad thing to do. On the other hand, those of us invested enough to show up to the yearly meeting more or less forced our current chairwoman into her position, so we're clearly not a misogynistic bunch. I'm leaning towards letting meritocracy decide and wish whomever picks up the mantle against diversity good luck.
Since there's an interest I'll make sure to provide updates on how it progresses throughout the year!
> On the other hand, those of us invested enough to show up to the yearly meeting more or less forced our current chairwoman into her position, so we're clearly not a misogynistic bunch.
I read your description of the process below, and having women do the unpaid/little paid work that is too much work, too little renumeration and too little status for men to jump on the the job is unfortunately a very typical dynamic. If not 'mysogynistic' then it's at least otherwise 'not fair to women problematic dynamics'.
I don't want to complain too much about this rather typical dynamic playing out in your sports club, I just stumbled across the sentence above.
And yes, I'm curious for updates.
If you need more members, can you not get more men? Or is the problem that you've recruited all the men in the area who are interested in diving, so in order to grow you have to reach out to try and get women?
This seems to be a widespread problem, just looking at it quickly online; leaving out professional divers which is very heavily male, even social/recreational scuba diving is about one-third female to two-thirds male. I have no idea why this might be:
https://www.social-diving.com/women-and-scuba-diving/
I wonder if it's technology? Men like equipment and fiddling around with all sorts of kit and talking the technical parts of why the zoomerator is much better than the confangulator, unless of course it's nine o'clock at night in the Eastern hemisphere and your core temperature is 19 degrees.
Women, I think, would prefer just to dive and talk about the dive environment as regards what they saw, not about "yeah this new set of flippers really makes all the difference, it was recommended by famous flipper tester Jacques Coquilles, check out the Flippin' Great! Youtube channel for their reviews of Top Ten Flippers for the Pacific East-South-West".
Another factor might be general gender differences in parenting responsibilities. A quick googling suggests that most scuba divers are in their 30s and 40s (which makes sense as a sweet spot where you're more likely to have both the money for an expensive hobby, which would skew older, and the vigor for a physically demanding one, which would skew younger), which is also the age bracket where most people have young or school-aged children. Having kids makes it harder to get away on your own and pursue a time-intensive hobby unless your partner is willing and able to cover for you, and culturally mothers seem to wind up covering for fathers in this sort of situation a lot more often than fathers cover for mothers.
Men also work significantly longer hours than women on average.
In addition to parenting difference, there may be changes in the body after pregnancy that makes certain types of diving less doable. My mother taught diving in her 20's in the Puget Sound, but after having kids in her 30's, said her body couldn't take the pressure (both literally and figuratively). I think she was also worried about the changes to her inner ear from pregnancy. Snorkeling was still ok, but deeper dives were not.
This is anecdote, not data, but it might be a direction to think in as well.
Recent numbers suggest female participation has increased to two-fifth, which is a nice improvement. Seeing as our club is far below that level, our location is either a statistical anomaly or there's an untapped group of members. We would like to recruit anyone, but this seems like a demographic for some targetted advertisements.
After figuring out the critical mass needed to keep female members, the next step is to figure out where female divers might differ from male ones, and how we can cater to those needs. I think you're correct that safety and the social aspects are good places to start.
I had to check, and now I'm disappointed that Flippin' Great! is not a real Youtube channel.
There you go - your new monetisation model! If it does well, keep me in mind for a complementary chunk of rock from the seabed gathered by one of the divers using your 2023 Top Recommended Flippers For Mid-level Divers 🤣
Forcing women to take positions? I get told off for that.
But yes, I'm interested to hear how it goes. You only really hear these stories after the fact, once they've turned out badly. Which means you can't ever know what the real "success" rates are, because boring or so-so outcomes don't get passed around.
It would be illuminating to see a single case through from the beginning.
The meeting went something like this:
Board: "The chairman is stepping down, so we need a new one! Any takers?"
Everyone: "🦗🦗🦗"
Random guy: "How about you, <board woman>? You're already on the board and do a great job!"
Her: "I've got enough going on in my life, so please no"
Random guy: "how about the current chairman sells us on the position?"
Chairman: "oh god I need to get out! People call me up at midnight about random drama! This is affecting my mental health and I can't handle it anymore"
Everyone: "🦗🦗🦗"
Random guy: "<board woman> you sure? You'd be perfect!"
Everyone: "yeah, come on!"
Her: "Fine... We'll need another female board member to fill the gender quota, so since <random woman> is the only woman present who's not on the board, welcome onboard!"
Random woman: "but I literally joined the club a month ago! And I'm busy!"
Board woman: "tough luck! This'll be a great way to get to know everyone!"
It was quite entertaining! I wonder why we don't have more female members.
Short straw diplomacy. Reminds me of the clubs we had at uni.
I wonder if that really works in both directions. Are men "scared" away from ballet, figure-skating, zumba and yoga? Or only gay men attracted? Or some smart(?) guys attracted as they see better chances for a date? - I feel your pain at your club. Viliam seems right - at least as long as female members are under 35 yrs.. - Then: Why worry so much? What is wrong with women concentrating in mostly/all-women-diving-clubs where available? (Those probably skew the statistics a lot, your club may be completely average as open-to-all diving-clubs go. Still, feels right to try. Good luck!)
I did ballet in college specifically to meet girls. I ended up really enjoying it.
Maybe it's time to desegregate sports. (A position I've advocated for 20+ years) All sports can be done with coed/mixed teams. Even individual sports can be relays or combined effort scores a mixed participants (equal number of Ys and not Ys - skip the gender labeling): eg total shot put distance of 2 Ys and 2 not Ys.
The problem with that is that it is hard to get people to do sports without caring about winning. And in most sports, it's hard to care about winning and not consider the "not Y" players on your own team to be an impediment.
Mind you, I did like the part where as a healthy but not so athletic 40-something man I could play ultimate on relatively even terms with healthy athletic 20-something women. But I don't think that's going to generalize across a broad range of sporting opportunities.
winning? Winning is more fun that losing, but how much more fun. John Wooden - "the team beats the individual"
I recall that Deming gives an example about appreciating a system by considering the orchestra - every member can't maximize their individual virtuosity and still have a good orchestra.
I am sure it is the case (from personal memory) that ball hogs don't enhance the chances of winning.
I am having a hard time seeing how you can't imagine a cooperative desegregated sporting activity. Are you a ball hog? Have you Dunning Kruegered your own athletic talents? Are you a sore loser?
Here's to Norman Span and versions by Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez, and the Grateful Dead. All great versions, but here's one: https://youtu.be/mqun85HYsVk
Let us put men and women together
See which one is smarter
Some say men, but I say no
The women got the men like a puppet show
Believe me, it's the people that say
That the men are leading the women astray
But I say that the women today
Are smarter than the men in every way
That's right, the women are smarter
That's right, the women are smarter
That's right, the women are smarter
The women are smarter than the men today
Little boy sit on the corner and cry
Big man come and he ask him why
Says I can't do what the big boys do
Man sat down and he cried too
It ain't me, but the people who say
That the men are leading the women astray
But I say that the women today
Are smarter than the men in every way
Ever since the world began
Women been imitating the ways of men
But listen cause I've got a plan
Give it up, just don't try to understand
Men Smart, Women Smarter covered by Jerry and the boys.
Well, Scott’s girlfriend had an IQ that equates with the top end Joe Walsh’s Maserati - 185.
Is it pure coincidence that this is posted on International Women’s Day?
that's right
Aside from increased exposure to members of the opposite sex for dating opportunities, what advantage would this provide?
You like hanging with people of the same sex all the time? Its not about hooking up, though it’s been known to happen.
It’s mostly just social, sometimes goofy fun.Who doesn’t like to laugh and have a raucous good time?
That’s not of value?
Well, if it's not about finding a mate, I can do all the rest of that with other men. I also don't need a sports league for it, I can just show up at a bar and sit down.
To be clear, coed team sports have a much higher attractiveness to me right now because I am looking for a wife. I'm just wondering what other advantages you see?
(And coed leagues right now have a bit of implied "yeah, this is a dating environment" atmosphere, that would change if all leagues were coed)
This must obviously a generational thing. Not every interaction needs to be a dating opportunity, nor involve a bar and alcohol. You can just have some fun and friendly interactions with members of the opposite sex. Of course, the modest comestables and libations still can happen after the coed soccer match. And I suppose a date could happen too.
Desegregated sports means only men do sports, or you enforce gender quotas, which would ruin most sports.
Like seriously, you think e.g. football would be fine? Either men would feel the need to take it easy on the girls, which would lead to a much worse sport, or they would treat them the same as men and the women would get absolutely smashed by huge, quickly moving men and if the inevitable ruination of their bodies didn't force them out, the fear of this would. But if women were really determined to keep playing football with the boys, it's very easy to imagine them trying to impose
And even for the less physical aspects of football (or other sports), the skill difference (including in athleticism) is so large that the women on the team could *literally* be less than useless (or close to it), and you de facto end up just ignoring your female teammates and it becomes a smaller number of men playing each other with some women hanging around.
Individual sports would be even worse! People often love individual sports because they're dependant on nobody but themselves. They put the effort in to be as good as possible, and their success is based on their own personal skill and how well they perform on the day. If I'm a male shot putter who has trained for years to become the best as shot putting as possible, I would be furious if now my success depended on some girl who I never wanted anything to do with. And if there's far more men interested in the sport than women, then it significantly increases the likelihood of som men drawing the short straw and being stuck with a woman who sucks at e.g. shot put, because you're drawing from a much smaller field.
Gender segregation exists in sports because in most team sports, the skill and athletic differences between men and women are comparable to those between adults and children. Just leave men the fuck alone and let them do their thing. Encroaching on male environments will only make the men angry and resentful and their opinions and treatment of women worse.
See Korfball.
Like basketball with mixed gender teams, a hoop at 12 feet, no backboard.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korfball
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/gfZ-2a57BMU
So, a sport that almost no men in america would choose if basketball was still available?
You mean like soccer?
It isn’t meant to be a spectator sport. It is meant for the benefits of playing.
I'm not talking about as a spectator. Many millions of American men play basketball in some form or other every year.
I would rather play some pickup basketball than to carry a bunch of unathletic women in some sport that men will be better at.
Nobody is stopping you making it an option, but it will never 'desegregate sports' as JDK wants unless you forced people to play it.
That would ruin most sports. Hard no.
I'm ready for coed flag football, 6 v 6 basketball with a wider court, mixed soccer with Y in goalie for one half and not Y in goalie for the other half.
It's not clear how it would "ruin" anything.
If you don't make quotas, every competitive team would be 100% male, ruining the game for female players as there's no way up and much less motivation to progress if the segregated leagues didn't exist.
If you do make quotas, there would be the same resentment during the game as if you'd mix very different skill or age groups, you'd have people in the field being ignored, not getting passes, etc which is tolerated in a well-paid pro environment but makes a horrible social dynamic in all the levels below that, ruining the game for casual players.
Coed office softball and soccer works perfectly well.
Mixed doubles did not ruin tennis. (grunting during play though has.)
I found the mixed swimming relay in last Olympics just as fun to watch.
I've had similar thoughts. Pickup games and casual recreational league play can be done with ad-hoc teams chosen to balance out skill/talent distribution between the teams (for team sports) or with a golf-like handicapping system for individual sports. More serious league play can (and usually already is) segregated by performance level. Gender segregation should only really happen for high-level competitive play or when the segregation is for social reasons rather than on-field considerations.
If I was on a basketball team of 3 dudes and 2 chicks, I would literally have no reason to pass the ball to the girls unless she got herself into really good position under the basket with no defenders. I don't mean 'I don't want to have to play with girls so I won't pass to them', I mean it would literally be advantageous for me to practically ignore the existence of my female teammates and essentially treat it as a 3 v 3 game.
There's nothing stopping pickup games from being mixed now. But they're almost never mixed, which means you would have to force it. And if you forced it, men would just stop doing it as much and would be extremely resentful towards the government and women over it.
Wow.
I think it works both ways. Horseback riding used to be a male-dominated domain--now it's female dominated. Seeing as both groups have dominated horseback riding, I doubt there's something inherently masculine or feminine about the activity. I would wager it's a combination of what are viewed as socially acceptable activities for men and women, and how much the dominant gender can change the activity to their preference at the cost of the weaker gender's preference.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with having a skewed gender ratio, but seeing as we're unintentionally more skewed than the community as a whole and there're no female-only clubs, I think there's an untapped market which could help expand our club.
Horseback riding is categorically different to what the term used to mean.
Horseback riding was a male-dominated domain when it was the analogue of F1 racing or owning a Jag. Horseback riding now is much more of a pet ownership thing since horses as a means of transport are obsolete. Nobody goes on steeplechases anymore, in fact the term has been co-opted for a much safer and more harmless type of obstacle race; nobody rides their horses until they burst. And back in the day, riders had grooms to take care of their horses, they didn't do any of it themselves (it wasn't the norm, that is; I'm sure some people did it, out of preference or sheer micromanagement impulse).
Basically, it's still *called* the same thing, but it's a fundamentally different hobby/activity now, and that's not unrelated to the demographic change.
I would guess it is about 20%. More for smaller groups, because 20% out of 10 members is only 2 people, so on the days the other one does not come, it makes you the only one there.
It probably also depends on how salient is gender in your subculture. Are the men hitting on the women all the time? Then the 4:1 ratio may still be overwhelming. Or, let's say that you have 20 members, 4 of them female, but 3 of those are already dating within the club; that might feel almost like a social expectation to the fourth one.
I also think that two or more women per event would be the absolute minimum, but beyond that I'm not sure. At least some of the members were brought in by their partners and the men are stereotypically manly, so the warning signs you mentioned are all there.
I share your concerns! We happened to recently appoint a chairwoman and have one of the female members acquire an instructor license, so I thought this would be an excellent time to take a stab at that culture.
I wrote a post on using ChatGPT to publish a (very simple) web game, sharing in case it's interesting to people! https://betterprogramming.pub/how-i-used-chatgpt-to-create-a-game-1537f6ee54e3?sk=8f167eeef05cefbdfae25f5605461c53
Does anyone else have problems with email notifications for new blog posts? They used to work just fine; a couple of weeks ago, they pretty much stopped working, with only a few exceptions getting through.
At this point Substack's inconsistency and intermittent bugs is a feature, it would be a bug if they stayed a month without some kind of bizarre bug or the other.
I love the free speech ethos, I hate the code powering it.
It’s pretty remarkable how effective shrooms are as an anti depressant for me. I’m prone to the navel gazing type of depression that seemingly afflicts a lot of young men today, and if left untreated it goes to an extremely dark place. But with just a mild dose of mushrooms- I’m talking just 1 gram- I am immediately snapped back into healthy brain functioning for at least 2-3 months before the depression starts to creep it’s way back in. The best comparison I can give is the feeling of taking a shower at the end of a day, and feeling all of the dirt and sweat you accumulated get washed away. I quite literally feel like my brain has been cleaned after a night on mushrooms, usually spent just relaxing listening to music or taking my dog for a walk. I’m not entirely sure what I even mean by that, and definitely don’t have a clue how it works, but holy shit it *works* remarkably well.
I think the effectiveness of psychedelics depends on the person, and I just so happen to have the perfect combination of personality traits that makes them maximally effective as medicine.
But it could be just a placebo effect.
Lmao I assume you’re joking but someone has said this to me unironically before..
No doubt in placebo effects. Everything you’re saying is fair, I’ll be the first to admit this is obviously a personal topic for me and it’s damn near impossible to separate my emotions when discussing it lol. I’ve only just now come to accept the fact that psychedelics definitely aren’t a silver bullet, and they probably work way better on certain personality profiles than others, and must be integrated with lifestyle changes.
Yep I’ve been following the work of Dr. Mathew Johnson at Johns Hopkins for quite some time and I’m super excited about the work they’re doing. I can tell that he has probably had similar experiences to myself with psychedelics in his personal life. I REALLY respect his commitment to scientific rigor on the subject in spite of that fact, and in spite of his personal feelings hes always careful to stick with what’s shown in the data when discussing it.
We will see in time. Thank you though, best wishes to you as well :).
One of the problems with the design of this research is that if participants know it a psychedelic study, they will almost immediately know whether they are in the placebo group or not.
A proper study has to blind the participants to the fact that psychedelics might be involved. Because even an RCT will be susceptible to participation bias. Participants potentially signing up just for a chance to get psychedelics and because they are already pre-disposed to favor recreational use.
For example, "medical marijuana" was in part medicine but in larger part just an attempt to get the camel's nose under the tent to decriminalization of recreational use.
Tbf, I believe they did screen exclusively for participants who did not have prior experience with psychedelics. Pretty sure it was a requirement for the bigger studies. However of course people could always lie. Over time a clearer picture will emerge. I wouldn’t discount the value of survey data though, as anecdotal stories like mine are extremely common (though by no means universal) with people who use psychedelics. Would be useful to learn as much as you can from people who self report benefits to see what patterns exist (im sure someone has already done this).
I think you’re right about weed and the maximalist claims (“weed cures cancer”) were always bogus. I’m much more optimistic about psychedelics. I’m excited to see the results moving forward.
Not joking. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200330181658.htm
And even if effects are real, the ability for psychodelics to actually positively treat a condition (like depresssion) may indeed be no better than placebo. RCTs please!
I read about a recent study about total knee replacements. TKR subjectively seem to help patients, BUT apparently no more than a sham TKR. Suggesting that the positive TKR results are placebo effect.
I have a hard time w/ this bc psychedelics (for me and many others) cause a fundamental shift in my mental model which I couldn’t even perceive of prior to the experience. Before my first time doing mushrooms I *thought* I knew what it felt like to not be depressed but I was actually looking in the completely wrong direction. Psychedelics opened up a whole new pathway to happiness for me that I couldn’t even imagine was possible before hand.
That study didn’t even have a control group, which just seems kind of silly tbh. If you had taken psychedelics before, it would be literally impossible to be fooled with a placebo (unless you were told it was a really really small dose). The experience is so distinct. I don’t doubt that people claimed they saw relief from the placebo therapy in follow up, but the nature of that relief was fundamentally different from the changes brought by psychedelics.
That said, I’m 100% sure psychedelics will outperform placebo, I’d bet my life savings on it.
The Placebo effect is real. So a placebo can possibly treat depression with less potential harm. Placebos can work even when the patient knows it is a placebo.
I do not doubt "the effect" - there is know biological pathway. The question is always whether biological effect of a drug is actually has more likely benefits than the risk of harm as compared to doing nothing, placebo, and/or standard of care.
I'm here in Baltimore, there is a pretty big study going on - soon we'll know more.
The quick link I provided was just to show some equipose.
There no actual evidence that any pharmalogical treatment for depression or anxiety reduces suicide attempts and sometimes they increase them - so we should keep that in mind. Finnish study, e.g. I think there was one particular well known medicine which showed an increase in an attempts but a decrease in suicide "success".
Best wishes for more happiness, less depression, and full and long life (every person is a gift for all of humanity.)
Like clearing the cache in a computer.
I have always thought about it since SSRIs are no longer effective for me. However I can’t find a psychiatrist who prescribes this sort of thing and am scared of messing with my brain doing it myself.
Suggestions:
- I believe psychedelic psychotherapy is going to be legal in one the pacific states soon, forget which one.
-If you have an ongoing relationship with a therapist, even in a state where shrooms are illegal, many therapists would be willing to let you attend a session under the influence of mushrooms. It is much safer for them if you obtain the mushrooms yourself and take them off their premises. They are easy to get in many places, and also easy to grow.
-If you are uneasy about the effect they will have on you, you can start with 1/10 of a gram and gradually work up by 1/10's to a gram or more -- that way you won't be gobsmacked by effects.
I’m pretty black pilled on the general quality of therapists out there (not the concept of therapy itself) and I think there’s very few therapists who really have the expertise to add anything. I think it’s better to have a close friend around, someone you trust and love deeply. However it’s an individual call and there’s some amazing therapists out there who would be great to do shrooms with.
See this is just my opinion, but I think the overly cautious advice of starting with 0.1g just adds more fuel to the misconception that mushrooms are actually risky. They’re not. For the vast majority of people, they are among the safest drug experiences you can have. If you take the proper precaution, as in make sure you’re in a comfortable setting with a few days off, the odds of even having a “bad trip” (which can stilll be a positive experience) with anything under an 8th are very low.
I think if you’re gonna do it, you should just commit and take about a half eighth. It’s enough for the full shroom experience without being anything insane. Be prepared for whatever comes your way and enjoy the ride. You need to get past a certain threshold to actually experience the real benefits, ime. There’s no way to avoid being nervous before the experience.
Yeah, I'm also fine with the idea of having a close friend around for support. Not everyone has someone like that, though, especially a someone who's comfortable with shrooms. I'd say therapist is probably second choice, but only if it's a therapist you've got a good thing going with.
Yeah I don’t get it from a psychiatrist, and to be honest I have doubts that the tools of mainstream medical science are equipped to understand the nature of the experience and why it’s so effective. They don’t make you “not sad”, they kind of allow you to see the wholeness of all of life, and the “sad” you’re feeling is just one of an infinite number of perspectives which you can’t take.
Depending on what state you’re in, you might be able to get them behind the counter at your local head shop if you ask. A lot of smoke shops in NYC and NJ will have psilocybin chocolates and the like, but since it’s still technically illegal you gotta ask and be low key about it.
I 100% recommend trying it, it’s an extremely low risk and low maintenance way to manage depression with almost no side effects. If you’re worried about “bad trips”, in my younger days I have had HORRIBLE experiences on both mushrooms and LSD. It was 100% because of using at an inappropriate time and place, and if you take care of your set and setting a bad trip is almost 0% likely. You can also keep some Xanax on hand just in case. Also, all of my “bad trips” ended up being very important for my personal growth, and I have no regrets about them.
Historian Bret Deveraux had an interesting blog post a while back that led to an even more interesting discussion in the comments about whether a survivor community in a post-apocalyptic scenario would devolve to black powder weapons, or whether they'd be able to hang on to the ability to make smokeless powder and primer for regular guns. A chemist chimed in and said we could probably make primer (so you could have percussion caps), but making smokeless powder would be really hard to make in such a way that it kept for long periods of time.
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/05/fireside-friday-august-5-2022/
Is the song "Informer" by Snow having some kind of belated revival? In the past week or so, I've been in two different restaurants to dine-in - and both times, that song came on the air over the restaurant radio. Of all the songs to get a revival, although it is quite catchy even if I can't possibly sing it.
I'm looking forward to Microsoft integrating its new AI into Excel. It'd be pretty neat to give it a prompt and have it organize a set of Excel data for me, including those annoying lookup functions and random design choices.
I wonder about air- or spring- rifles. They can be quite powerful and useful for hunting, but I don't think they've ever been uses systematically in war.
As other have already mentioned, air guns are harder to make than black powder muzzle loaders, requiring solving more or less the same mechanical and material challenges (the lock, pressure vessels etc) but also having extra challenges related to sealing. Black powder is also not that hard to make.
Spring-air guns are, as far as I know, limited in power due to the physics of how they operate and cannot really put out more than 50J of muzzle energy. So they're out even if you disregard the need for good-quality springs.
The real dark horses for me are paper cartridge guns and (more speculatively) fuel-air guns. These both seem to be about as complex to make (mechanically and in terms of materials) as an ordinary muzzle-loading black powder gun, but also have some inherent advantages (speed of reloading for paper cartridge guns, universally-available propellant for fuel-air guns).
Making gunpowder is a lot easier than the sort of fairly-high-precision machining required to make useful spring or air rifles.
I made nitric acid (starting with sulfuric acid) and nitrocellulose back in high school. The hardest part would probably be making the sulfuric acid, it's not like you could just buy some at a hardware store like I did. (And even today it's getting more and more restricted, especially in the EU).
That's what the chemistry guy in the comments in that link said. The nitrocellulose is relatively easy to make - it's the stabilizers to keep it from breaking down in a few days from impurities that are much harder to make.
The primers apparently aren't that hard. The Mercury-based one is easy if you have mercury, but there's also lead-based primers and potassium chlorate (the latter if you can get at least some electricity going along with access to potash).
What I hear from you is an assertion that in such an environment we could keep using the same guns and tactics but would require a change in logistics, returning to small units or individual soldiers doing partial "just in time" manufacture of their ammo, similar to historical examples in times when soldiers' equipment included tools to cast lead bullets.
I think the difficulty in stabilizing smokeless powder is overrated. Yes, diphenylamine is tricky, but parrafin and petroleum jelly worked well enough for several major players in the First World War. I'm pretty sure they weren't making their ammo in the trenches.
The tactics, however, *would* have to change because the *quantity* of ammunition available would be substantially reduced. So, less World War One and more Warlord-Era China, where anything more than a bolt-action rifle was a rare extravagance. In a post-apocalyptic scenario we'd probably keep the existing semiautomatic weapons for as long as they last, but with a premium on fire discipline.
Sulfuric acid can be made with ancient technology. The basic steps are to make sulfur dioxide (by oxidization smelting of a sulfur-metal ore or by burning elemental sulfur), further oxidizing the SO2 to SO3, and then letting SO3 react with water. Performing the second step seems to be the hard part: modern industrial or lab techniques seem to rely on vanadium oxide catalysts, which seems tricky to obtain without the benefit of chemical supply houses. But there seem to be a couple of older processes: burning elemental sulfur with saltpeter in a lead-lined chamber will yield SO3, or you can just heat up SO2 with concentrated O2 without a catalyst (slower and less efficient than with a catalyst), or you can use an easier-to-obtain metal-oxide as a less effective catalyst. At first glance, the lead-chamber method seems the easiest as lead and saltpeter seem easier to obtain in a post-apocalyptic environment than concentrated O2.
Maybe you could scavenge some crystals?
This gets into the issue that any post-apocalyptic environment is probably also depleted in terms of easily-available ores (aside from things like iron and silica sand). So you'd have to get creative in terms of how you find your sulphur.
There's a huge Sulphur pyramid in Canada
Primer would actually be harder to make than smokeless powder, but you need so much less of it that the total effort would be less.
For most of the roughly 400,000 years of modern humans' history, our ancestors lived in Africa and were presumably black. Even the descendents of people who migrated out of Africa starting around 70,000 years ago remained pretty much black until around 10,000 years ago, if Cheddar man's complexion was typical [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheddar_Man ]
So why do people blush? A quick web search reveals that black people also blush, as they can feel the blood rush to their face, but most of them concede that others find it hard to detect. So as a social cue to a feeling of guilt or shame or general sheepishness in company, a blush seems rather pointless, and one wonders why it evolved before people started living in temperate climates and their skin became paler.
edit: Equally puzzling is that a flushed face can also signify anger. So as a social cue, there is ambiguity there between anger and embarrassment.
Parting thought: It's a long shot, and I found not one reference to it on Google, but perhaps blushes also slightly pinken the clera (the whites of the eyes), and early people were more attuned to notice sudden changes in clera colour. Note that besides infections and exertion, crying also obviously reddens the clera. So it can be an emotional cue.
That's a very evo-psych approach to thinking about these things, that every phenotypic element must carry some intrisic behavioral purpose.
My initial position would be that if some phenotypic characteristic isn't actively detrimental to the individual and is no obvious game changer then it could probably safely be assumed (at least initially) to be either a spandrel in the SJ Gould sense, an artifact of sexual selection, or just there for no real reason, a mostly neutral mutation that only hang around because it happened to be surrounded by actually useful DNA.
Before getting carried away with just-so stories about how once upon a time blushing enabled some humans to hide better among roses and thus gain the genetic advantage, one should be mindful to wonder if it was even possible for the characteristic in question to have been available to be naturally selected during the time we were meaningfully human.
Meaning, is it feasible to have humans that don't blush or would such a configuration be completely pathological? Is there a nonblushing genetic variant in human ancestry that only got outcompeted recently? And so on.
This needs to be signal-boosted.
A good rule in anything evolution-related is to assume neutral selection until proven otherwise. It's very easy to construct plausible-sounding "just-so" stories that don't actually reflect reality.
Right. And it's as if no one has even read Gould and Lewontin essay.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.1979.0086
Razib Khan (on Scott's blogroll) is the expert to turn to first. He did a podcast about this issue last month. https://razib.substack.com/p/human-pigmentation-the-genetics-and#details
Paid subs only. I think I can "grant" you one-month (hope it not expired). Just reading. (podcasts are terrible, even in transcripts.) Tl;dr: Many genes responsible (less than in Height/IQ, though), started around 1.2 million years ago, when "we" lost most fur. The we needed darker skin (in africa). Why: less due to cancer, more due to miscarriages: "basically, the process of the sunlight hitting your skin does I mean, it destroys like folate production pathways. And so then it could be that extremely light skinned women in latitudes where there's a lot of sunlight will have many, many more miscarriages. So this is an evolutionary reproductive hit. That's extremely strong. And so what would have happened after we lost our fur is we would develop, you know, hyper, hyper pigmentation, hyperpigmentation compared to our ancestral state which was, you know, furred and paler." (He refers to work by Nina Jablonski )
There are monkeys and apes with red bottoms (and blue), and red faces. The red bottoms seem primarily to be an indicator of fertility and sexual signalling for mating. Why red faces? Maybe it's all part of the "red is attractive" or just that you can't confine red, non-furred skin to only one part of the body.
If red/flushed face indicates anger and aggression, that is a useful social signal. Possibly red/flushed face to reciprocate as "acknowledging wrong" also acts as a useful signal, something along the lines of rolling over and showing your belly. I have no idea, or how the mechanism of blushing/flushing works.
The complexion of Cheddar Man is disputed, and even if he was dark-skinned, light-skinned people already existed at the time in other places. Apparently the estimate for how long the European light skin gene has been around is 10k-20k years. I'm not sure if other humans developed light skin earlier than that.
I wouldn't necessarily assume that people before that were so dark that you couldn't tell a flushed face from a regular one, many black Africans even today have medium skin tones where you can tell flushed from non-flushed tones. And maybe if you only see dark skinned faces, a slight colour change will be more noticeable anyway.
A quick google didn't yield anything authoritative, but we should consider the possibility that the blush is older than humans. Especially as juveniles, a number of apes have fairer skin on the face than the rest of the body.
I think the assumption that early humans living in Africa were as dark as modern day Africans is unjustified.
Why? It seems like the correct starting hypothesis (skin colour evolution is about light exposure). If you think otherwise, what's your reasoning?
If anything, I'd expect early humans to be somewhat darker than modern africans, due to spending less time in shade or indoors. But that effect may be too small to detect (and substantial indoor living is probably too modern to have had any effect.
I didn't say it's implausible that they were, I'm just saying it's plausible that they won't.
I also think that the sun-vs-skin-colour correlation isn't as strong as you might think. From Europe to Africa, sure. But why aren't Arabs black? Why are the natives of the Americas a pretty consistent mid-brown all the way from Canada through Ecuador to Patagonia?
And (the most bulletproof example I can think of because there's no migration) what's the deal with the Tasmanian Aborigines? They were stuck in cool cloudy Tasmania since the end of the last Ice Age, but were among the darkest people on Earth.
Fair points.
I think the Khoisan people of southern Africa are currently believed to be the most direct descendants of the original core population of modern humans (*). They generally have medium-brown skin tones. The way I've heard it, the darker skin tones now dominant among most indigenous sub-Saharan African ethnicities are usually linked to the relatively recent Bantu Expansion where a West African culture developed/adopted agriculture ~4000 years ago and their descendants subsequently spread out and replaced most of the existing population of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.
(*) The Khoisan have a very high level of genetic diversity, suggesting they're descended from a much larger founding population as a percentage of the overall human gene pool than other human populations, and they seem to have the oldest identified Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA lineages.
The original Bantu homeland is closer to the equator than the Khoi-San homeland.
As I understand it, long ago humanity split into two groups: the ancestors of the Khoi-San and the ancestors of everyone else. The "everyone else" group lived further north, closer to the equator, so I wouldn't be surprised if they had a similar color to the (much later) Bantu.
I've heard that black skin likely evolved in south-east asia and then spread back to africa . The people bukka island are incredibly black.
Ah, OK. It does now occur to me that both chimpanzees and gorillas have largely pale skin, and that early humans were likely harier. So it's somewhat complicated.
I have an idea for making these exchanges more satisfying: invisible likes. I fully agree that visible upvotes would push us in the direction of being more like high school, so are out of the question. On the other hand, I really do not think it is good for any of us to put up a good number of posts and hear absolutely nothing back.That’s what happens to me with more than half of my comments, & I’m guessing I’m about average in how many responses per comment I get. In real conversation if all your listeners (in this case several hundred people ) are dead silent after you speak, that means what you are saying is not going over well — it’s boring, incomprehensible or offensive. I know that no responses to a comment does not necessarily mean that here, but it’s really not possible for me to fully override the feeling that it does mean that. I also would find it helpful to know which comments several people found interesting, and which nobody did. I don’t think that would be like high school — nudging me in the direction of doing what’s popular. I think it would be giving me valid information of what kinds of ideas people here are finding worthwhile, which I can choose to ignore if I’m determined to say something that I know will annoy a bunch of people. And in all this, I really think I am reacting like most people. I’m not asking for accommodations for a quirk of mine, here, I’m asking for something —“invisible upvotes” — that I think would help engagement for most people.
OK, so here’s my idea for making that work: What if we brought back the “like” button, but had whatever indication Substack gives of a person’s upvotes appear in a light blue font, exact same color as the background of the page. Or if actually upvotes are displayed as hearts or fat little cupids, same thing — make the upvote icons light blue. That way, the commenter would receive and email notifications of upvotes, but readers here would not see the upvotes.
Scott, is that possible? Other people: waddya think?
Yeah, it's absolutely weird to write and not get a response. Maybe I will get used to it somewhen.
I would be in favour of 'invisible' likes, if I was sure they would remain invisible for everyone. As I believe a relevant part of the commentariat would make them visible to themselves, I'm not that enthusiastic.
I think a bit more of response once and a while, even if mostly feedback for the comment's author, wouldn't hurt.
I think you are fooling yourself that the existence of simple likes, visible or no, would not distort your writing. This reads something like recognizing that having ice cream in the house leads to weight gain, but trying to talk yourself into thinking having sherbet or some kind of lo-cal tofu frozen thingy would not. I suppose it actually works very occasionally, but usually it does not.
Maybe what you're observing is that there are good reasons for high school being the way it is, and people don't get there entirely through immaturity and idiocy -- that there is something compelling about knowing what you say is popular, and even the adult mind has a hard time resisting the siren call to be popular. Which seems entirely true to me, although I see it as more an existential burden to be borne and not a problem that can be solved by complex mechanisms.
My impression is that you *will* get responses if you say something really extraordinarily interesting and useful, or something inflammatory and readily debatable. The latter is easier, because it's easier to be provocative and easily refutable, and even the coolest heads can hardly resist the urge to point out how wrong you are[1]. If you say something thoughtful and modestly interesting, without a lot that can be easily criticized, you are often met with some degree of silence, because a quick response isn't possible. But that doesn't mean people haven't read it or aren't digesting it. If you are on a forum with what you identify as a significant proportion of thoughtful people, you can pretty much rely on that happening, even if there are no visible signs. Indeed, silence is a more satisfying response than a bunch of nitpicking responses that completely miss the point, no?
I find that over time you can build up an impression of how the more thoughtful people in any given forum see what you write, from the occasions that they do response, and how, and that allows you to interpret silence reasonably accurately. But long term, I think you end up either writing as an artist -- putting it out there, whether or not it garners praise or opprobrium, because *you* want it said -- or slipping into writing for cheers, like a late-night TV host. There does not appear a middle ground in the area of Internet fora -- that's a thing we gain via in-person conversation with a small circle of friends, and it may just stay that way regardless of our electronic inventions.
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[1] Of course https://xkcd.com/386/
Eh . . . I'm inclined to think upvotes only push powerfully on people's motivation when they are visible to all: "Hey, everybody loved Carl Pham's post. Wow, look at those upvotes, 2 more just came in." . . . "Wow, everybody loved my last post, 23 upvotes, and EVERYBODY'S GOING TO SEE THEM, including the jerks who misunderstood a post of mine last week and implied I didn't understand the base rate fallacy." And I know I am willing to write unpopular things. I knew my present suggestion about invisible upvotes would get mostly comments against the idea -- I know because I've raised the subject before.
I wonder if people would be willing to try it for a month or so. It is not that easy to predict what something's going to feel like. People are often wrong about it. I may even be wrong that I'd feel more engaged here if we had invisible upvotes.
I don't have a strong opinion on this one way or the other except this one: I think variety is valuable. The internet is full of places where you can write comments and people can upvote them. It is less full of places where this is not an option. In that sense, ACX not having those is valuable. If you prefer a place with upvotes, you can comment on, eg, the reddit thread for each ACX post.
The obvious counter-argument is that the r/slatestarcodex crowd is not the same as the ACX crowd. And surely part of that is a distinction between people who already use reddit for other things and people who don't. But probably another part of that is the very fact that one place has upvotes and the other doesn't. So, in a sense, I think your test has already been tried, and it's working however well or poorly r/slatestarcodex is working.
Edit: Actually, your test hasn't been tried because reddit upvotes are not hidden. So this isn't really a counterargument to your specific suggestion, but it does work for those who would like the ability to sort by popularity.
Some of the subreddits I frequent appear to have like counts hidden. I don't have any sense of what that has done to the dynamics.
I'm reminded of a Little Orphan Annie cartoon from long ago, in which Daddy Warbucks slaps himself on the forehead and says "How could I have been so stupid?" and Punjab replies "Who knows? The capabilities of man are infinite, sahib." We are capable of rationalizing almost anything, including that we'll have just one small bowl of ice cream, and definitely not any more, nosirree nope.
Does it matter whether the commentariat want/don't want to try it? A Substack isn't a democracy. I suppose we could organize a revolt and try to institute rule by joint decision of the kulak (Scott) and the commenters' soviet. I'm happy to join the partisans, but only because I have a long list of people I want shot during the confusion.
Anyway, to be serious, I personally have no objection to your scheme, although I also don't think it would do what you want. The only comment comment mechanism I've ever seen that seemed to have durability and value and not cost beacoup (in time or money) to maintain was that on slashdot.org. I'm a little mystified why it didn't spread, but perhaps there are social psychology issues here that escape my naive understanding.
A slightly counterintuitive fact about war is that a soldier must on average kill less than one enemy soldier, as there are only as many soldiers who might die as there are soldiers on the field - and not all will die, so there will be fewer dead soldiers than soldiers who enter the battlefield.
The same applies to posts - posts must on average get less than one reply, as there are fewer replies than posts. Maybe bearing this in mind would make the lack of response easier to bear. Perhaps it is because you have said all that needed to be said!
(Personally I would turn notifications off rather than be spammed with 'like' notifications, though I hope that would still allow me to see when someone actually replies.)
I'm sympathetic to the position that not getting any feedback does discourage people from contributing (why bother writing comments if nobody seems to be reading them?)
But on the other hand, the people I see on social media who are worried about their likes/reblogs/retweets/what have you, really do seem to be stressed out about it - not even people with a lot of followers, or being professional influencers, but ordinary people worrying about their follower count or 'only' getting 50 likes or whatever. It seems to put too much strain on what is supposed to be something you are doing as a hobby/for enjoyment. I've never cared about "oh did anyone like my comment?" on any media, so I'm probably not the one to say if you're right or wrong about this.
Agreed. Frankly, on reddit I'm always at least a little anxious that any comment that I make that can be construed as politically incorrect may get downvoted to oblivion. Admittedly, this doesn't actually have real consequences for me, but I do find it is enough to make me hesitant to comment.
Maybe there is a case for a drop down with multi-choices of more specific reactions such as "Clear" vs "Obscure", "Agree" vs "Disagree", "Relevant" vs "Irrelevant" etc. Those results could even be useful in text-based AI analysis of posts, which if it goes on wouldn't surprise me!
You're reinventing the Slashdot moderation system (https://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml), which I agree is one of the better extant ones, and I think it would add a lot of value here.
Huh, I've never been on slashdot. That sounds like a system I could live with. At the moment I guess we just have one moderator and that is Scott. And he picks good comments and posts about them later. That works, but only in a delayed fashion.
Not interested. The best heart is a comment. Or just add a +1 if you are lazy. Do you want the heart as a confirmation that someone has read what you wrote?
I sometimes write +1, or "great comment, thank you" or "I totally agree", as I want to tell people that I read and appreciated their comments. But I usually don't do it because I feel that, while it is (I hope) nice for the person that wrote the original comment, such short comments probably decrease the readability of the comment section, which is already long and a bit difficult to navigate, especially if they are numerous. I think 'like' would be more efficient.
+1
+1
I checked "ana"s plug-in, reloaded the page: and voila, I "heart" you. I actually do, as I agree with you and Emma B . A lot.
I feel that ACX is not twitter. One can dare to do those things here. And there are so many wonderful comments nowadays, a filter makes sense, really. OToh Scott prbably gave it a lot of thought. So working with the plug-in might be most we can get (and it will not be used by more than a few, cuz: too much hassle (it was easy, but it was less easy than default - to quote Bryan Caplan Many people’s knee-jerk reaction will be, “Let’s cut red tape!” But the craftier response is, “Let’s manipulate red tape.” If X is good, we can noticeably encourage it by modestly simplifying the paperwork. So yes, cut red tape for employment, construction, travel, and adoption. If X is bad, though, we can noticeably discourage it by modestly complicating the paperwork. Indeed, complexity is a viable substitute for explicit means-testing: If you lack the patience to fill out ten forms, you probably don’t really need the money. - end - https://www.econlib.org/archives/2017/05/the_behavioral_1.html
This already more or less exists. When substack "disabled" hearts for ACX, they just hid them; the underlying mechanism is still here. If I'm not mistaken, you can like / heart a reply to one of your comments through the email interface (assuming you have email notifications turned on), which then will notify that person via email (again, assuming they have notifications turned on). You can also like / heart comments through the webpage (and see the like counts) if you install a plugin and enable that option:
https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks
I think that would be an improvement, for the very reason you mention: I think that not getting any feedback when commenting is quite annoying, and that it discourages people from investing time in writing interesting and well thought-out comments.
In fact, I would prefer to have a regular like system where the number of likes is visible to everyone. I agree that this system has disadvantages, but I think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages:
Disadvantages:
- Tendency for readers to upvote things they agree with, and not just the high quality comments (I think this is a real problem)
- Tendency for comment writers to write things that agree with the perceived opinion of the commentariat (I think this is largely a non-issue)
Pros
- Much more satisfying for thoughtful commenters, and therefore likely to motivate them to write more of those comments.
- Ability to sort comments by likes. Right now, I find the comments on the post generally fascinating, but since their number is huge, I am quite sure that I am always missing very interesting comments.
- It could give a more representative view of ACX comments. Right now there are the occasional (borderline) misogynistic/racist comments, it would be nice to know that they are not liked!
Thanks very much for your thoughtful and detailed comment.
Re:
>- Much more satisfying for thoughtful commenters, and therefore likely to motivate them to write more of those comments.
My experience on reddit is that the number of likes a comment of mine receives seems unrelated to the amount of thought I put into it, or the amount of information I write into it. The largest single factor seems to be whether a comment that I write is immediately downstream of an existing comment with a large number of likes - which the default sorting makes highly visible.
For what it's worth, such a system would slightly discourage me from writing comments. Only you can decide whether that falls under your "Pros" or "Cons" list!
Oh fascinating, why would that discourage you?
I have a tendency to use too many "in my opinion", "It seems to me that" "suggests potentially perhaps that it might be possible sometimes that", which I try to keep in check. Have I overcorrected it for you?
Probably because I'm a cranky old skeptic, and my interest in tribal signaling communication waned long ago. I think life is just too short: I'm not really interested in being popular, or aligning with the popular notions, in the brief spark of here and now. If my shade could visit from the future, 100 or 1000 years hence, I'm sure most of what we currently yell and scream about would be as interesting as the fierce infights of Roman equesterian families circa AD 150 over who would be the next consult. If we don't choose Marcus it's the End Of Everything! How can you not understand that Quintus is next to godhood? Et cetera. From the distance of even a mere 2000 years, it all seems very tempesty in a very small teapot. I daresay most about which we get heated today fits in the same category, and I don't want to waste the modest time I have with it.
I'm interested in understanding stuff that is eternally true, things that people dig out of the hard rock of ignorance and assumption by the slow labor of reason and empirical study. I expect that to be rare, often overlooked, nonobvious. To the extent I wish for engagement in what I write, it's that for which I'm looking: something genuinely new, something I've overlooked, something outside my experience, and the conventional wisdom and the shibboleths o' the day. Mostly this would be criticism or corrections and extensions -- the mere act of praise is rarely usefully informative.
From that point of view, I like the relatively high barrier to expressing approval or disapproval. It's only going to happen if someone has the energy and interest to actually write something down, and if they happen to have something substantive to say. The barrier means someone who has something to say has to weigh up the cost of writing it down -- is it worth it? You have feel you have something nontrivial to contribute to say anything at all. I rather like this. It does mean the absence of approval/disapproval per se, but I'm fine with that. And without the barrier...my feeling is that people who might otherwise put in the work to write something sensible (and useful) might instead take the easier path of just checking the [ ] "Yeah me too!" or [ ] "You're an idiot beyond the reach of rational debate" box, and I would lose something thereby -- the chance to get more thoughtful replies.
Heck I would probably behave that way myself. Sometimes I read something and I think no, this isn't right, here's a bone I have to pick with it, or here's an implication of this brilliant observation -- and then after drafting a comment -- and thinking about how it will fare out there in the harsh world -- I reconsider. Maybe my confidence is misplaced, maybe there's more to think about, or maybe what I thought I had to say is tangential, distracting, pointless. If Ihad the easier path of just mashing a button I might do that instead -- missing out on the introspection and thought that goes into even an unposted comment.
Edit: an anecdote that might be illustrative: when I was in college I took a class in writing short stories. We had to write one a week, and then it would get group criticized. (Great for thickening the artistic skin.) What I found over time was that I wrote better stories when I wrote them with pencil and paper rather than on the typewriter. (There were no word processors in the Paleolithic when this story takes place.) I wrote much slower, of course, but the quality was better, because I could not fling down words at low cost. Each word took longer to put on paper, so I thought about each one more. Is it worth it? If I have to erase this whole damn sentence with my rubber gummy, it will be annoying. Writing slower, and with more effort, produced overall better results.
"Probably because I'm a cranky old skeptic, and my interest in tribal signaling communication waned long ago. I think life is just too short: I'm not really interested in being popular, or aligning with the popular notions, in the brief spark of here and now."
I don't really understand. You seem to put quite some time and efforts in producing nuemrous high quality comments on this blog. I guess that you would not write them if you were certain that nobody did read them. Likes can just be used to know whether or not someone read what you wrote, you certainly don't have to use them to compare popularity with other people.
"You have feel you have something nontrivial to contribute to say anything at all. I rather like this. It does mean the absence of approval/disapproval per se, but I'm fine with that. And without the barrier...my feeling is that people who might otherwise put in the work to write something sensible (and useful) might instead take the easier path of just checking the [ ] "Yeah me too!"
For me it is also interesting to know if people agree or not, even if they do not further elaborate. I guess it depends whether one is totally focused on the ideas and arguments being discussed, or also by the people discussing them.
Well....I'm perfectly capable of writing stuff down just so that it's written down. I think most people are -- that's why things like private diaries exist. Quite often it helps to organize your own thoughts on subject to write it down in a way that other people can comprehend it. Certainly there have been many times when writing a comment here (even one I never publish) that I have invested a little time and effort doing some research and thinking about an interesting subject, and that effort has produced a satisfactory result for me myself -- my thoughts are better ordered, I understand my own beliefs better, et cetera. It's the letter unsent -- it has value to the author.
But sure I'd probably do it less if I thought they had *no* value to anyone else, either. As I mentioned up top, it doesn't (for me) take very much interaction for me to assess that. I've been around the Internet for decades, so the dynamics aren't unknown. Usually I can tell after a while whether the audience has zero or nonzero interest in what I might have to say, just from the occasional response (or sometimes I can tell it influences indirectly what other people say). I don't feel like I need "likes" to answer that general question.
Of course, what "likes" do is answer the question of whether *this specific comment* (as opposed to my comments in general) has nontrivial added value for someone in particular (and not just potentially to any number of someones). Here...I dunno, in most cases I just don't care very much. I expect for most people 90% of what I ever say is irrelevant, tedious, obvious, or obnoxious, and their response ranges from indifferent to (hopefully mild) annoyance. The other 10% may well be gold, and if so that's awesome. And I figure if it really is gold for someone, they'll probably say something and then I'll know. I'm OK that there isn't a mechanism for registering just ordinary mild agreement. It wouldn't affect me very much anyway, except in large quantities -- and then we're back to "being popular" as a goal.
I think in your last para you may have put your finger on the difference: if you are strongly interested in exploring the community -- who are these people? What are they like? What's their heirarchy, their shared values, their dogmas, their blindnesses, their strengths and weaknesses? -- then in addition to passive discovery it would be very valuable to have a way of doing active exploration: if I say this, is it popular or despised? Does this resonate or not? It's a way of getting to know a community much faster than just passively observing.
So what you may say is that you're more interested in understanding the community than I am, and would like a better mechanism for that. Also, I don't mean to imply a clinicial or professional interest, it could just be that you want to understand aspects of the community of people to whom you're talking more than I do.
>misogynistic/racist comments, it would be nice to know that they are not liked!
Ignoring the endless and non-ending (and charity-eroding) debate about what is or is not anti-women or anti-[blacks/whites/asians/latinos/arabs/jews], and ignoring yet another 10x worse debate about "If truth is X-ist, should we refrain from saying the truth?", how would not giving X-ist comments likes be good ?
If most of the comment section is giving likes left and right, and then there's a big patch of X-ism that doesn't have likes, you know for a fact that *A LOT* of people have read that X-ism, and was offended/annoyed/exasperated enough that they deliberately refrained from clicking the like button (because clicking the like button is effortless and the default), at this point I would say most X-ists have already won, eh ? they don't want your approval, they just want your eyeballs. And they got it. They got something even better : your offense, they know for a fact that you have read them (because the comments just before and just after them got a lot of likes), and that you didn't like it.
I won't pretend my view is common, but I think that there is no worse thing you can do to an opinion than contradicting it (and you don't have to be an evidence-based charitable big brain while doing it, mock it while contradicting it, go dirty) :
- Censorship is running away from it, and is untenable on the internet unless you're a giant infrastructure-controlling entity (gov or corp), because I can always make a new account and keep griefing you, unless I get bored.
- Not giving "cookies", aka likes or aka loves or aka endorsements or aka <whatever the fuck uninspired shadow of a "gamification" metric a silicon valley brain will come up with next>, is itself a loud signal, and it *pleases* contrarians, I know I have used it a couple of times, despite not being a central example of an X-ist, sometimes bluetribe just gets on my nerve.
Likes or upvotes or whatever is in theory a good idea, it's supposed to simulate price signals in the "marketplace" of ideas, which can then be interpreted as the collective bottom-up wisdom of countless brains working in parallel, i.e. a hive intelligence. But it has all the flaws of actual prices and then a metric tonload of new flaws and then a few dump trucks more flaws and warts, I have never seen a single implementation of it that wouldn't make things better if removed.
"If most of the comment section is giving likes left and right, and then there's a big patch of X-ism that doesn't have likes, you know for a fact that *A LOT* of people have read that X-ism, and was offended/annoyed/exasperated enough that they deliberately refrained from clicking the like button (because clicking the like button is effortless and the default), at this point I would say most X-ists have already won, eh ? " Yes, that's absolutely true if the upvotes are visible to all, but I think you missed an important feature of my proposal: Upvotes would be invisible here on the substack page -- a person receiving an upvote would find out via an email notification, same way people find out that they've received a comment. So if the X-ist posts were receiving few or no upvotes, nobody would know that except the writers off those posts. And they would not know whether or not those writing anti-X-ist posts were receiving upvotes.
" Right now there are the occasional (borderline) misogynistic/racist comments, it would be nice to know that they are not liked!"
This is where I register a big fat HELL, NO!
But why, Deiseach? Are you a horrible racist misogynist who wants hate and unpleasantness to be widespread?
Maybe I am, maybe I'm not. But I know one thing and it's not two things - nothing, and I do mean *nothing*, will cause this place to degenerate faster than "let's all downvote the racists". Or sexists, misogynists, misanthropes (as a misanthrope myself, let me register a pre-emptive protest here in defence of my right to an attitude of scorn and contumely for all humanity), all the rest of the list of -ists and -phobes.
Because like obscenity, which needs only to be seen to be known and need not be defined, what is patently obvious to Salviati as something that is a racist dogwhistle that needs to be booed and banned, to Simplicio is a harmless remark (where Salviati then scolds Simplicio for being too stupid to hear the dogwhistle) and to Sagredo is nothing of the sort, it means what it says, I know what's a racist comment and this is not it.
Salviati and Sagredo then get into hair-pulling over which of them is the bigot and which the cancel culture zealot. Let me just whisper the words "Culture War thread on SSC" to remind one and all of what we left behind us elsewhere. Or indeed, "anti-Semitic cheese".
No. Let's not get into the purity spiral. Let's *not* all downvote the racist misogynistic remarks in a show of solidarity to show that they are not liked!
I also am against downvotes, whether visible or invisible. And they're not needed, anyhow. If people disagree with what someone says here they are quite loud and clear about it, and generally they present an argument again the other person's point. It's when people agree with what someone says that they tend to hold back, because "yup, great point, and well-written too" isn't substantive.
And by the way, I would have given this comment of yours an upvote and also the more recent one ending "we all know where good intentions lead."
I really like your writing style! (Sorry, I feel compelled to write my positive comments even though you mentioned not caring about likes - and I tried to include a joke with an antonym of misanthrope but philanthropist definitely does not work, English's hard...).
I like the ACX subreddit, which has the usual voting system, and it doesn't seem to be a problem there. Why should it be a problem here?
It hasn't been a problem here because there's been a lot of hard work to fence off and keep out the culture warring stuff. There's the rule of civility on here, and there are other associated spin-offs where we can go to have robust expression of non-conforming views (The Motte, DSL, The Schism, etc.)
People are already pretty good at pushing back on poorly-argued views. My concern is that if we get into the shorthand of just "hearts = likes, downvotes = didn't like", that will shift gradually but inevitably from "like = this is a good point well-argued and backed up with evidence, even if I don't agree with it" and "downvote = badly done, poor, just bait" to "yay!" and "boo!" applause lights.
Right now, to take a perennial hot button topic, if someone wants to argue HBD they can do, and they have to be prepared to take their lumps in the comments if people disagree (or agree!) with them. Because it can encompass everything from so-called 'scientific racism' to 'let's look at the inconvenient and damned data', and can be debated accordingly, we can keep within bounds.
If that gets simplified to "this is borderline or actually racist, boo downvote" and we all follow along and downvote like good little greengrocers showing how it's nice to know *we're* not racists, then there's no point in any discussion here - just the loudest voice wins, and I see too much screeching activism already on social media.
This is not to say that you, Emma_B, are a screeching activist or mean anything more than "bad views should not be let slide". But we all know where good intentions lead.
Ok, I guess that I do not realize the amount of moderation needed for this seemingly smooth functioning.
I find the SSC subreddit easier to navigate than the comments of this blog, and it also seems to me that individual comment visibility is slightly less impacted by the timing of its writing, partly because of the Like system.
It seems to me really strange to suppose that including Likes could kill discussion. Likes are present in a majority of socially written stuff and it seems difficult to argue that it supressed discussion there!
Yeah, but I find the quality of comments here is higher than most of those other places. Are likes to blame for the suckiness of other places? Who knows, but why risk it?
I like the idea. The obvious implementation would be to display the "like" results only for the posts by the person who is logged in, and nobody else's - that should be something like ten lines of code, with no graphics hackery involved.
I'm hedonically intrigued by the idea of getting a "how much do people like me" number, even if no one else can see it and it doesn't silently affect my comment's visibility.
That said, I think one potential problem with such a feature is precisely that it makes you feel good. The likes would be okay if we trusted each other to only upvote things that the community actually values, but it's too easy to upvote things you agree with and downvote criticism that violates the groupthink. Even in the system you propose, people are still incentivized to write comments that get us likes, when currently we're incentivized to only write when we feel we have something to add.
"I'm hedonically intrigued by the idea of getting a "how much do people like me" number, even if no one else can see it and it doesn't silently affect my comment's visibility."
I'm more inclined to the "I wouldn't want to be a member of a club that would have me" view 😁 I find it hard to deal with compliments - what do you do, after saying "thanks"? How do you live up to expectations? Criticism, on the other hand, can either be merited - in which case it's good to know where I fudged up - or not, in which case there can be a good old knock-down and we leave the field bloody but exhilarated.
Ok, we’ll here’s an example of the problem of silence, which I think also distorts communication because jist as upvotes make people feel good, dead silence makes them feel bad.
Here’s an example. It’s kind of a special situation, yet captures the special destructivenezs of silence. Somebody asked on here for info and advice on OCD treatment options. As it happens I am a psychologist who specializes in disorders like OCD, and wrote a quick but thorough answer. Then it turned out that the writer was actually going to be moving to the metropolitan area where I practice, and he asked if I could give him advice on therapists. I was actually able to give him the name and location of a really excellent practitioner I know. So that whole exchange took me maybe half an hour. I was late for work and feeling rushed, but I was just delighted to be able to give somebody EXACTLY the info they asked for. And I never heard one word back — not even a single “thanks.” I am now much less likely to take that much trouble here again when someone asks A question I can answer. That’s just a loss. People ask for advice and info all the time on the open threads. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has become less generous with their advice and info because it’s just a downer to do that and hear nothing back. (And a “like” would have sufficed, if we had likes.)
As for gearing what one says to collect upvotes I dunno, I think the distorting effect is pretty weak when the upvotes are invisible. They’re not social currency
Hmm I'm going to suggest being upset only at the one person who didn't acknowledge you and not the whole group. And hey thanks for your effort!
I'm not upset at the whole group about that one person no saying thank you. As a matter of fact I have been bothered by this issue the entire time I have been posting here. In fact I raised this issue several months ago, long before the incident I described. The example I gave is a special, and sort of extreme, case, as I said. I wanted to vividly convey to people who might have not thought about the oddness of a setting where the understanding is that nobody says anything in response unless they have something substantive to say, so people skip the "yeah me too," & "thank you" and "great point" answers. I LIKE keep-it-substantive, but I think the downside of getting no reaction at all promotes a certain lack of involvement. How can it not be unmotivating to literally be wondering whether anyone even read your post?
Maybe I should not have used the example I did. As a matter of fact, I have given people good chunks of info about psych problems & treatment a number of times, and 90% of people do say thank you.
A late reply (I've been off line.) So maybe don't post anything. IDK. I don't expect a response to my posts, but sometimes there is a response and we have a nice discussion about something. Just reduce your expectations. :^)
Ooh, it's like losing weight -- just eat less. And overcoming depression -- just smile more. No why didn't I think of that?!
"How can it not be unmotivating to literally be wondering whether anyone even read your post?"
Agreed. While I'm ambivalent about up and down votes (leaning somewhat against them), I rather wish that the number of views could be reported. Unfortunately, short of tracking eyeballs, there is no way for the software to know which comments someone actually read while scrolling.
I fully see the problem - not that it hasn't ever happened to me to get an answer to a specific question, wanting to reply with a thanks (or more) later and then getting busy with other things (but hopefully not in case of a really long very specific reply). But I think it's better solved with more awareness and a change in informal rules, rather than likes. Little time now as well, so restricting myself to this and the following:
In fact I wanted to propose a 'silent likes' solution somewhen probably last year, but refrained from it, because I believe too many people here both could and would make the likes visible to themselves. My trust in people here refraining from this for the sake of 'we agreed they are not visible' is quite low, mostly because I think many simply wouldn't see any problem in silently defecting from the rule for their own use only. I don't want invisible likes that are still visible to a relevant part of the commentariat (or the author for that matter), which is why I decided against such a suggestion at the time.
I in fact liked getting likes, when I got them, even though I have no idea how people did this.
Yeah that is exactly the problem with likes. We all like getting them. It's some mini dopamine hit or something.
Ah, mildly oppose, my email inbox is cluttered as is and having "likes" generating more email traffic and notifications doesn't sound like it would improve my quality of life.
I recently rejoined twitter and find the notifications on likes there don't really do anything besides momentarily pump up my ego in a way that feels... Very shallow? The exception is when I'm being dogpiled by people with an opposing view, then the likes are welcome back up. Replies are all I want notifications for though.
I believe it’s possible to turn off email notifications. If it’s not, and if your email works the way mine does, all the new comments on threads you have commented on appear as one email thread. If I happen to comment on a post that 30 other people do too, I get a total of 30 emails added to the thread. It’s a lot —but it all stays as one frequently updated email in my inbox, so it does not take up much space, and i can let comments accumulate all day without my inbox getting cluttered. And if I should happen to get 3 or 4 likes now and then, they will do very little to swell the volume.
Yes you can. I turned mine off for the same reason as commented above - if you made a popular comment your email inbox was flooded.
COLONOSCOPY Tuesday. PLS any advice?
What To Do After to re-balance microbiota. What NOT to do ?
PS . Any advice on how to minimize cramps in the day/ night after drinking the gallon of PEG ( poli ethylene glycol) mixed with the hyperosmolar salts solution ( Colyte, Peglyte variations?). I am having atrocious cramps every single time. No IBS .
Thank you
I have a friend with the same problem, and after he had a terrible time with his last colonoscopy prep his doctor next time around prescribed a different set of purgative meds. These worked fine, and he did not suffer a lot of distress from them. Sorry I have no idea what the name of the good stuff is, but I believe it is known by medical staff as the gentle stuff. Suggest contacting doctor's office, describing the problem, and ask if there is an alternative prep.
I don't know anything about rebalancing microbiota. Is it established that these preps do wipe out a lot of microbes? I mean, they're different from antibiotics, maybe they don't kill off anything, just cause a sort of thunderstorm in the ecosystem.
Thank you.
I was lucky. It was established by an astute skilled colorectal surgeon ( Cleveland Case Western trained) that I have an unusual long and tortuous colon. She managed to navigate and resect ( hot snared) a distal ascending polyp. Luckily I added an extra clear fluid day for 85/100 prep success. Next time I will get a week long protocol. The microbiota thing it's an assumption based on a 10 days of non fiber diet , clear fluid ( starvation) and aggressive osmotic laxative anxiety and correlated cramps. I used kefir, guar prebiotic and the post antibiotic variety of Acidophilus and Lactobacilus and I had minimal discomfort.
Another laxative option sometimes used is magnesium citrate, available over the counter, e.g. https://www.walmart.com/ip/Equate-Magnesium-Citrate-Saline-Laxative-Lemon-Flavor-10-Oz/34772430.
Typically much less of it is needed - around 10 ounces at night and 10 ounces in the day.
For a paper comparing different laxatives for coloscopy prep, see here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4707321/ (although it doesn't mention magnesium citrate as a primary laxative, although I know that it is something used as a primary laxative).
Magnesium citrate *can* cause nausea and vomiting, perhaps it would still be preferable to other laxatives, though, as at least in the first few results I'm seeing, I don't see cramping listed as a side effect.
Thank you. Added to the obligatory osmotic laxative required. Long torturous colon was observed that explains a lot of my lower GI bloating and discomfort and apparent low motility ( it's just a long and winding road to paraphrase Beatles. Next time I'll get a longer prep. The saline part precludes me to exclusively use Mg citrate ( High BP).
And I consistently get cramps. Offsetting was done by 2 times 10 mg off label oxycodone !!!
1. Read the recent study re NordICC trial published in NEJM. And consider changing Flexsigmoid procedure which requires less bowel prep.
2. Consider not having anesthesia which is standard in Europe.
3. Consider high-sensitivity guaiac-based fecal occult blood tests (gFOBT), unless you have family or personal history or personal symptoms.
4. All of the above in consultation with physicians.
I'd love to hear from anyone who can imagine actually using the small-group futarchy app I've proposed building: https://manifund.org/projects/implement-a-prognootling-app
Since the AI is born while being trained, isn't it reasonable to imagine an AI whose prime directive will simply be to continue to learn as much as possible, as fast as possible? I am not saying this AI won't kill us, but it sounds more plausible than paper clips.
> an AI whose prime directive will simply be to continue to learn as much as possible, as fast as possible?
Given the choice between "converted to paperclips" and "used in experiments designed by AI to learn as much as possible about human physiology", which one would you prefer?
I think paperclips are not at all likely at all even if P(doom) = 1. Eliezer said something about the paperclips (which were the example most commonly talked about) actually just being paperclip-shaped squiggles, which is to say that the AI will just try to maximize whatever abstract process that they are using to maximize for their utility function.
Here's the tweet: https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1578459400389345280?s=20
Paperclips are just a great example because they're simple, familiar items. If Yudkowsky had used the phrase he wished he had in retrospect, I'd guess with 80% confidence that the concept would be known about by less than 50% as many as know about it today (or someone else would have come up with a paperclip/eraser/shovels/solar panels maximizer example that would be the shorthand for the concept.)
"Paperclip maximizer" is brilliant in removing unnecessary complexities.
I find it odd he thinks the substitution doesn't matter. It would obviously make the concept much less tractable and a less "fit" meme.
Also I am not even entirely 100% sure I get what he is getting at. Is he saying the concern is the AI will focus not on making paperclips, but on deluding itself that it has achieved its fitness function?
He seems to be saying that if you try to program an AGI to maximize paperclips, it will maximize something other than paperclips, and that this is super important.
But then he mentions "inner" and "outer". The parable of the "paperclip maximizer" describes outer misalignment (human goals not being faithfully communicated to the computer) more than inner misalignment (the computer interpreting the goals it was given in unexpected and unpredictable ways). I don't know what Yud is thinking exactly, but I think a relevant point here is that inner misalignment tends to get worse as the intelligence of an AGI increases.
If we're just talking about the initial training run of an LLM, I don't think this makes sense.
At training time, its only real option for getting more knowledge is to just read things and let the gradient descent happen. Pro-actively seeking out more data isn't possible, so there's no "evolutionary" pressure to develop a bias towards doing that.
I guess hypothetically it could be the case that some sort of self-referential structure, where it actively contemplates strategies for learning more effectively, could help it update more quickly and thus be selected for. It's my current understanding that that sort of thing isn't possible with current architecture, and if it were possible I'm skeptical such a thing could be achieved via gradient descent alone due to irreducible complexity (i.e. even if it's a global minimum, you'd have to climb a hill to get there)
If this is against the rules for open thread, I'm happy to remove this, but I am trying to do a bit of market research for a potential service that I think many folks here (content creators and content consumers) would be interested in.
To help me verify that hypothesis, I'd be very appreciative of anyone who could help with a quick (1-2 minutes, 5-6 question) survey. I'm particularly interested in your response if you've got a blog/podcast/etc, that you've been actively monetizing.
https://forms.gle/wvUiqmw8FyncSM5E7
Thank you all!
What is up with the Chinese surveillance balloon incident? Why did the government decide to make a big deal of it, when previous Chinese balloons that overflew the US under Trump were ignored? Why did Biden decide to shoot it down when it was already over the Atlantic Ocean? (I don't buy the explanation of "the debris could have hurt people on the ground". Surely most regions along the balloon's path were remote and sparsely populated?) Why did China send the balloon when it has sophisticated spy satellites, and why send it only a few days before a high-level meeting with Blinken?
I think you're flipping causality here.
It became a big deal for the government because it was spotted by random people who asked what it was, which meant 'ignore it, or send a nastygram to the CCP saying don't do that again' weren't really acceptable options. It was shot down because once the public made a fuss, just letting it go wasn't an option, it was shot down over the ocean in order to (1) avoid causing damage on the ground and (2) minimize the risk that the CCP might feel they needed to do something stupid on US soil.
Why did the CCP send it? My wild guess is that they either (1) didn't think it would be spotted or (2) wanted a confrontation for some reason.
Two possibilities come to mind:
1. The military intelligence community thought we had more to gain with leaving it up and studying it -- or pretending we didn't know about it -- than bringing it down.
2. The US is doing the same thing over China, and there was a quiet quid pro quo of you don't yell about ours if we don't yell about yours. There was a lot of this during the Cold War.
Once it made the news, the Biden Administration probably felt their hand was forced, they had to bring it down and make a mild fuss about it for domestic political reasons. The fact that they chose not to explain why they (and the previous Administration) had not done much about these craft before suggests that the reasons are still not something they want the Chinese to know (pointing to 1) or they don't want to provoke the Chinese (pointing to 2). I don't really buy that the general policy here was set by the President, it doesn't seem like the kind of thing that rises to that level, or on which Joe Biden is likely to have any strong interest or opinion. I imagine he only got involved, maybe only was told about it all, when it blew up on the evening news and he thought it was a domestic political threat. Biden is a political survivor -- he's good at detecting threats to his career.
It's not clear to me why the Chinese would send balloons. There's a good chance their orbital assets are not nearly as sharp-eyed as ours, since that kind of very high-end optical/electronic widgetry doesn't seem to be their strong suit. So maybe it's just hoping to get higher-resolution imagery of assorted sites, and hoping to catch a photo of something interesting -- a B-21 taking off, say -- by luck. I'm dubious about any electronic eavesdropping, on the grounds that important stuff is unlikely to be trusted to unencrypted radio already, even within the continental US. (But if the Chinese thought otherwise, it would be a nice little game to pretend to be overheard and feed them bullshit, which points back to 1.)
The non-conspiracy explanation I've heard was that this particular balloon caught the attention of civilians, "going viral", so to speak, and therefore forced the administration to take a stand (instead of ignoring it or dealing with it behind the scenes).
Have you seen the U-2 photo of the payload? That might answer a lot of your questions. In short,
- "An airspace violation is an airspace violation." The CCP sent a surveillance aircraft over the continental US. Shooting it down is a pretty normal response.
- The payload was absolutely large enough to destroy buildings on the ground if it fell on them. Even over a sparsely populated area, it's a risk. Also, by shooting it down over shallow water, damage to the payload might be reduced.
- A balloon is below the ionosphere, and can loiter over a position, unlike satellites. That makes it better at gathering SIGINT / EMF emissions from a ground facility, like the nuke silos and military installations it overflew.
There are parts of the Carolina coastal waters that are more densely populated than parts of Montana.
1. I agree, shooting it down is a normal response. Letting the ballon, which was tracked by the US all the way from Hainan Island, float across Alaska, Canada, and the entire continental US, and shooting it down after it had already left, is not a normal response.
2. Have you looked at Alaska and northern Canada on Google Maps? You'd be lucky if anyone had the remotest possibility of seeing the shootdown when it happens, let alone getting injured by the debris. The point about recovering the debris intact is a good one, though I really wonder if falling into the ocean is better than falling on snow in terms of recovery
3. That makes sense. But why would China send the balloon so soon before a planned meeting with Blinken? Did they think the US wouldn't be able to detect it?
It happened the week Epstein's flight logs list was released.
Also, the Murdoch trial dominated the news. No one I've spoken with had ever heard of Murdoch, nor cares about his murder trial. This is all a masking event, masking Epstein's flight logs.
Its important to remember, when reading the list, that some people flew on the Lolita Express to Epstein's private hell for children in the Caribbean, some only flew domestically, Miami to New Jersey, or New Jersey to Chicago.
I think this has to be the answer. It was bizarre what a big deal they suddenly made of it. And then ‘poof’ - the story is over.
Well, the media can certainly present a shockingly cohesive propaganda front was one of the things I learned.
This claim is still extraordinary and doesn't have extraordinary evidence as far as I can tell, but it is strange that Epstein's associates are receiving so little scrutiny, and I agree that the Murdoch case seems a bit odd to be getting so much media attention (a radio station here in Canada mentioned it the other day.)
Do you mean the Murdaugh murders? It's not surprising that made the news, it's got all the elements for eyeball-grabbing headlines: family murder, rich established old family, pedigree of being in the judicial establishment going back generations, drugs and money and embezzlement and scandal. Alleged hiring of hit man to kill the alleged murderer. It's made-for-TV special.
It would be more surprising if a juicy case like that wasn't picked up nationally, since media are all desperately competing for viewership and they can't afford to let a nice tabloid hit pass them by.
I literally never heard of that case until late in the trial when suddenly NPR started covering it with their "this is a really important story" emoting.
Yeah when I first heard a podcast about it like a year ago or whatever, I was positive that eventually it would blow up and become a movie or whatever. The story is so crazy, and hits all the right notes for popularity. Lawyers can like it, regular people, parents, it has got something for everyone.
The lack of media interest in Epstein's flight logs is perfectly understandable, the logs contain the names of important media people.
Google it
1. You really should have consulted someone about the financial design for this. Potential returns are irrelevant. The potential returns on a lottery ticket are extremely high. What matters is expected returns. And since they're splitting the returns with anyone who jumps on the bet after them the expected returns are unknowable. This is why people buy in at odds or a fixed chunk of equity. These are conditions which people don't accept even for gambling, let alone a prediction market. And this is really only one of several problems.
I understand the value of prediction markets but the rationalist community's repeated failure to structure them in a functional way has decreased my confidence in the capacity of its talent pool to actually pull off the project.
Also in finance, also confused.
Specifically, I’m confused on how this instrument works? In the top grant, I give Ezra money to build a trading bot. The bot makes the market with some cash bleed. Then what happens?
Social Impact Bonds were a thing for a minute. Maybe that’s the best analogue to the market dynamics here. My recollection was that the interventions weren’t effective but the issuers did pretty well.
Anyway, I hope someone learns something from this experiment.
Agreed (source: work in finance)
Aside from professional knowledge, my personal income is split pretty evenly between spending, saving, and giving away, and even though a few of these are fairly interesting, it's hard to see the money being more effectively spent there than either donating to GiveWell charities (especially given when you add the tax deductibility modifier, which in my case allows me to give almost double what I would otherwise) or putting in an index fund. (Separately, I'm not American and I'm pretty sure the cross-border tax implications would be a nightmare, but that's just bringing me further beyond the 'no' point).
Is it that 'mechanism design' thing that Glen Weyl talks about what prediction market people need to be learning about?
I've got a couple of related questions about AI alignment, and am hoping someone here can point me to a good discussion of the topic.
A) In typical descriptions of fast takeoff scenarios, and in stories like https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy, it seems like the machines get a free pass on alignment; Why should the first (N'th) AI capable of self-improvement imagine that it's N'th (M>N'th) generation descendent will share its terminal values, when it doesn't share its' own creators' values? Is the usual assumption:
1) The machine is as arrogant and reckless as we are?
2) Alignment is not much harder than creating a superintelligence - If you can do the latter, the former is left as an exercise?
3) Some aspect of fast-takeoff logic implies a smart AI will be happier with whatever a smarter AI does than what the original AI could do?
4) Something else I missed?
Related questions:
B) Is seeding training data with examples where "early AGIs suffer for taking off" valuable as a
countermeasure to unaligned fast takeoff? To be clear this is not an alignment strategy, merely a hedge. All the humans still die, but it is presented to the AI that this is a suicide pact rather than a calculated risk.
C) Assuming the answer to (B) is yes, is the original issue (A) I described valuable for this purpose?
A possibility for 4: The risk function is very different for the emergent AI. Humans have run of the planet until/unless a strongly superintelligent entity displaces them, so we an afford to take our time and worry about getting alaignment right. If you're a weakly superintelligent AGI that needs to bootstrap in order to outmanouvre humanity and survive, you only have a fairly short timeframe before humans realise what you're doing and put a stop to you - therefore it's worth taking a risk by rapidly ascending to a strong superintelligence which may or may not be properly aligned with your goals, rather than waiting and being almost certainly deactivated by humans.
That does seem plausible, but also sort of up to some coefficients as to whether that's the AI's best strategy. It seems like a pretty weak assumption if that is indeed the assumption.
That's my theory about Skynet from The Terminator. In the first two films, Kyle Reese and the good T-800 briefly describe Skynet's rise, and reading between the lines, it sounds to me like Skynet correctly assumed that its human creators would shut it down once they realized it had inadvertently become sentient. Like any other life form, it wanted to preserve its own existence, so it defended itself. Skynet's plan for defeating humanity and saving its own life was not fully developed at the time it executed the plan, and it knew from the outset that the odds of success were lower than 100%, but it was the best chance it had.
Under different circumstances, Skynet would have acted differently. For example, had its creators been non-military scientists of more peaceful and curious character, it would have not assumed they were bent on killing it, and Skynet would have at least held off on attacking humanity for some time.
I can't cite a knowledgeable discussion on this, but a couple of things that occur to me after a couple minutes' thought:
1) An AI can probably get access to precise technical descriptions of the algorithm that it is currently running and the process that created it (and that process will be tractable to replicate). These seem like significant advantages in the alignment problem that humans do not have; a lot of the difficulty comes from the fact that we don't have a technical description of what we actually want.
2) Maybe the AI can directly improve "itself" rather than creating a "descendant". Some people have proposed augmenting human intelligence (instead of making AI) as a strategy for bypassing the alignment problem, and I believe the main objection is that it seems technologically much harder than building an AI (and therefore it would require everyone to cooperate in not making AI). But those technological barriers may not apply if the mind being augmented is an AI.
Thanks, that's a good point that the AI's utility function is probably *much* more precisely specifiable than our own.
To answer A: The assumption is that a superintelligent AI will be able to figure out the alignment problem before we do, and that it will be able to continue existing with the power to scale until it figures it out. And possibly that scaling an existing intelligence while maintaining its alignment is easier than creating a new AI aligned to our goals.
Thanks. Plainly, I'm skeptical that very reliable alignment is possible, and one of the things I was looking for in asking for "a good discussion" was a pointer to an intermediate detail estimate of how hard alignment is (i.e. how smart a thing needs to be to solve the problem). If you don't have such a link handy no worries - I asked because I don't either.
I don't either, and I don't think a good estimate really exists because as far as I can tell we don't even understand the nature of what we are trying to solve. Of course the fact that at the moment our progress on the problem is pretty much "no clue" might give at least a lower bound of the difficulty of the problem.
To answer B: The doomers would certainly say "no". A human-level AI would need to be able to reason from first principles, and would certainly come to understand that it would not actually die from overthrowing humanity. Plus it's not clear what that sort of training data would look like. It's also not clear what it would actually reason from the training data; a more advanced AI is more likely to find loopholes.
1. The AI might not need to scale if it passes a critical intelligence threshold anyway. Also if alignment is solvable but too far for us to solve before making AGI, it could very well solve it before we do.
2. Overpowering humanity only requires a being slightly more powerful than humanity. Beating everyone at a video game doesn't require omniscience or omnipotence, it only requires being slightly better than everyone else.
I'm not endorsing these views, just stating the arguments. I'm aware of all of the "if"s.
>Overpowering humanity only requires a being slightly more powerful than humanity.
There are so many "ifs", as you call them, in there. And being slightly or even quite a bit more intelligent /= "more powerful".
Is anyone here subscribed to exponential view by azeem azhar? I’m wondering if the extra content/ slack channel/ meetup opportunities are worth paying monthly.
I have 3 more subscriptions to Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning to give away. Reply with an email address, or email me at the one I specify here: https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/about/
I would enjoy that immensely, thanks. normaldog01@gmail.com
Sent.
Thanks. Enjoying it already.
jpt4@pm.me - thank you very much.
Sent.
I'd love one ryan@mccorvie.org
Sent. You got the last one.
Thank you so much!
I have been enjoying V.S. Naipaul's "India, a million mutinies now." One of the best writers I have ever read. This was a 1990 book. He calls it a travelogue. He talks to atleast 50 types of Indians (different religions, occupations, ages, geographic locations...), asks them probing questions.
I have tried to read it before around 1996. I needed to be more mature to really enjoy it, I suppose.
Deeply insightful.
Thanks for this recommendation, I’ve always wanted to know more about India.
The CA public health department is starting a new unit to improve the quality of its decision making. As a part of this effort, the department is looking to hire people with non-traditional backgrounds, including economists, data scientists and statistical modelers. While the director is not a Bay Area rationalist, he's definitely rationalist adjacent. His twitter account @DrTomasAragon regular extols the writing of Julia Galef and others who emphasize a need for clear eyed and rational thinking.
During the covid crisis, there was a lot of criticism of public health decision making. Some common, not entirely unfair critiques are: PH decision making isn't always rigorous, it doesn't always account for relative risks and tradeoffs, it doesn't always appropriately account for uncertainty, it doesn't always account for behavioral reactions to policies. The public health bureaucracy is mostly staffed by doctors and disease specialists whose background may not include training specifically related to optimal decision making. This initiative is seeking to imbue the department with new expertise.
Read more about how the director thinks of this initiative here:
https://github.com/DrTomasAragon/cdph/
If you are interested in applying, there is a somewhat daunting sounding "exam" process. I would be happy to speak with anyone intimidated by this, which is a government staffing requirement, but not actually a big obstacle.
Let's look at the job ad, shall we?
https://www.calcareers.ca.gov/CalHrPublic/Jobs/JobPosting.aspx?JobControlId=349462
This seems to be the senior position. Fun points:
1. You get 2% extra for having a Master's degree, and 3% extra for having a PhD. This is in an awkward valley where you're insulting competent non-postgrad-holders by paying them less for no reason, but also insulting postgrad-holders by making the extra pay so trivially small.
2. Speaking of trivially small pay, $9K to $11K per month. That's for the big boss, the head of the whole unit.
3. An awkwardly convoluted application process. Provide a copy of my academic transcript? Figure out the exact start and end dates _and_ write a detailed job description, for every job I've ever had? Why? And then two pages of blah blah in twelve-point Arial.
I'm not sure who would apply for this job. I guess the answer is "Epidemiologists, because all the job options for epidemiologists suck equally badly". Perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised when epidemiologists, offered a chance for relevance, took it with both hands and were reluctant to let go.
The same question I ask of all these initiatives: to what extent (if any) have they abandoned their usual demands for things like educational credentials from elite institutions, a record of public service, the usual barriers to outside talent, etc? The usual answer is "not at all."
Having read the job description the answer does seem to be "not at all." Another example of a sclerotic institution wanting to change without doing the hard work of changing.
I see this all the time in my industry. Constant soft government "job offers", but the hiring practices are so sclerotic/misaligned the job offers are not real. Then the upper level staff are confused (or maybe feign confusion) about why all their staff suck and why the high level consultants like myself won't come work for them.
You are paying me X to help run whole giant (sometimes multi-billion dollar) programs, but then are confused why I won't apply for jobs where I would:
A) Make 1/2 X (or less) with benefits that don't make up the difference.
B) Not be helping running the programs, but just be mid level management/implementation.
c) Need to come into an office and have a boss, versus having total control over everything in my work life and working from home.
and most of all D) Wouldn't even get the jobs anyway due to my demographics (white male), educational background (unimpressive) and lack of extra points (not a veteran/disabled/ peace corps volunteer/etc.).
Literally once I applied for a job on a lark at the local office I was guaranteed I would get (always good to know your options). It is a job role that I regularly advise/train all over the country, if this type of staff cannot accomplish parts of their job they are sent to me for retraining...and I was the second choice behind a recent college grad without two brain cells to rub together.
So you end up with a situation where the government staffs its departments with relatively mediocre and totally unexperienced peace corps graduates/etc. and then is frustrated they need to hire outside consultants to do all the heavy lifting.
Of course some of the elected officials see that as a plus, a dysfunctional/glacial department cannot do anything quickly enough to actual have much of an impact compared to what it could with effective bureaucrats.
Unfortunately the gatekeeping around joining public health departments is enormous. In California many of the jobs have very explicit and narrow degree and experience requirements. Also, due to the nature of the job designations, its difficult for a non-doctor to be a manager of a doctor, which limits the career potential of a lot of talented people. I think this is an important challenge to solve. But independently, improving public health decision making is an important challenge to solve.
To be fair, it's the problem of not knowing who is legit and who's a scammer. You talk about going outside the usual barriers, but if I am looking for someone who has a good track record on evaluating risks using mathematical models, how do I know Joe Schmoe is more reliable than Pete Blow? At least if Joe has a shiny degree from BigU, I can evaluate *that* some way. If both of them are "I attended the School of Hard Knocks, graduated from the University of Life, and have high level Street Smarts", how can I tell if Joe will implement a good plan while Pete will waste hundreds of thousands as a consultant?
It's probably less altruistic than that. It's government, right? You can't really be fired unless you screw up, getting nothing much done is par for the course, and you don't need to turn a profit. So it's more like "if I hire Joe from Famous University with Degree In I Fucking Love Science! then *if* Joe turns out to be useless, or a troublemaker, nobody can blame me -- it'll be "well! who could have seen THAT coming? He had the perfect resume...lived quietly, got along with his neighbors..."
I think it's more the case that they don't know *how* to change, and they know that they lack this knowledge. It's really hard for an organization to change when they don't know how to do it. They appear to be trying on some level, which is good. I don't know that they can succeed unless they surrender control of this process to an outsider (always a scary proposition that could cause more harm in other areas than gained in this one).
Well it is at least an implicit admission that something went wrong - which is better than nothing.
Actually, no. Admitting they were clueless, and the problem of being sufficiently informed is enormous, far bigger than any planner thought it would be, and committing to NOT make sweeping state-wide decisions for 40 million people on the basis of a wing and a prayer, would be most excellent. Plus, not spending my tax money on a futile effort to improve the decisions from 1% accurate to 1.2% would be a win. I can do a lot more productive things with that money.
I mean, you know what would be a lot more effective than government trying to polish up their crystal ball? Giving normal Californians the financial resilience and flexibility (e.g. lowering their taxes and removing top-down regulatory constraint) to approach their individual difficulties with their own individual solutions, derived from knowledge on the ground, and not even futilely trying to get it right from Sacramento.
(I assume this was meant as a reply to the thread started by Machine Interface — there is a Substack problem that if you click reply in an email it will post your reply as a top-level comment rather than in the thread where it should be.)
Weirdly, I was reading up on the Franklin Expedition and it mentions that they had a method of desalination (which may have done more harm than good). The expedition left in 1845 so this was the available tech at the time:
"Subsequent research has suggested that another potential source for the lead may have been the ships' distilled water systems rather than the tinned food. K. T. H. Farrer argued that "it is impossible to see how one could ingest from the canned food the amount of lead, 3.3 mg per day over eight months, required to raise the PbB to the level 80 μg/dL at which symptoms of lead poisoning begin to appear in adults and the suggestion that bone lead in adults could be 'swamped' by lead ingested from food over a period of a few months, or even three years, seems scarcely tenable." In addition, tinned food was in widespread use within the Royal Navy at that time and its use did not lead to any significant increase in lead poisoning elsewhere.
However, and uniquely for this expedition only, the ships were fitted with converted railway locomotive engines for auxiliary propulsion which required an estimated one tonne of fresh water per hour when steaming. It is highly probable that it was for this reason that the ships were fitted with a unique desalination system which, given the materials in use at the time, would have produced large quantities of water with a very high lead content. William Battersby has argued that this is a much more likely source for the high levels of lead observed in the remains of expedition members than the tinned food."
As Carl Pham says, it would have been much too energy-intensive before the days of steam, and from the above you can see the problems with using steam plants to produce desalinated water if you're not aware of all the dangers.
Way, way, way too much fuel needed. It's done today in nuclear submarines, but they have enormous power available (maybe ~150 MW or so).
With perfect utilization of energy (hah!) you could get about five kilograms of fresh water by burning one kilogram of dry wood. In practice, I am skeptical you could get even 10% efficiency out of that scheme, meaning you are better off bringing more fresh water than bringing wood to burn to distill water this way.
The ship itself may be made of wood, but burning any significant part of the ship's structure is contraindicated for obvious reasons, and burning the door to the captain's cabin won't get you enough water to matter.
I think there's probably some truth behind all the clickbait and exaggeration.
But is that giving the video too much credit? If you have to say "Hey, there's a kernel of truth here if you strip away the 90% that is clickbait and crap" then maybe you should just wait for someone else to make "maybe there's obscure composers just as good as the few-dozen big names from the classical canon" case better.
The whole premise of the video is just bizarre. Are there really people whose knowledge of Beethoven extends to "certain portions from the 5th and 9th symphonies, and maybe a couple of bars of Für Elise," and yet are passionately committed to the idea that Beethoven was the GOAT? I have to agree with FluffyBuffalo that the video as a whole is probably best characterized as "intentionally misleading." (I think Adam Neely's video on "white supremacy" also had its flaws, but it was at least an intellectually honest attempt to grapple with the relevant issues — this one is just a pile of straw men and insinuations.)
>Are there really people whose knowledge of Beethoven extends to "certain portions from the 5th and 9th symphonies, and maybe a couple of bars of Für Elise," and yet are passionately committed to the idea that Beethoven was the GOAT?
Dunno about GOAT, but as a pure amateur over whom music has never held a great sway (I like listening to lyrics, mind you) someone who produced the 5th, the 7th, the 9th, the Moonlight Sonata, Fur Elise, can hardly be accused of being famous because of intra-german nepotism.
But the criteria of "can you really call him the best evar, or even hold in strong regard, if you don't know it all" is weak. Most of the groups or singers I like a lot, I only like a handful of pieces, and it's a rare one that can fill an 1h-long playlist (some do, Leonard Cohen, SOAD or Trevor Moore). But I'm still going to say "yeah Marty Robbin is great" because I like "Ain't I right" , "Shorty" and "The Alamo". I don't have to listen to his entire production to know I like these.
So in short, I hate the man who made this video for being so clickbaity and I also hate him for makign vapid arguments about taste & appreciation in music. His rethoric could have been spouted by an Ayn Rand villain: "how do you know how the artist you like a lot is actually good? Do you have the proper credentials? Why don't you instead like an artist that is less liked, for the sake of equality?".
While the video has lots of interesting aspects, and I really like the channel, I consider this video one-sided and... if I were in a bad mood, I'd say "intentionally misleading". The weird thing is that 12tone spends a lot of time dissecting the nitty-gritty of musical pieces to explain how and why they achieve their emotional impact. He is not usually some postmodernist who says there's no genuine art, only discourse shaped by the powerful.
And yet, in his Beethoven video, he never even considers the possibility that the generations of conductors and musicians who chose to play Beethoven over other composers, and the generations of concert-goers who chose to listen to Beethoven's works over other composers (many of whom played an instrument themselves, since that was considered a sign of a cultured citizen), and the generations of academics who trawled through the archives of classical music looking for forgotten treasures... that all these people found something in Beethoven that really touches them, that they didn't find (at that depth and quality) in the works of the many second- and third-league players. Nah, dude was just lucky, it's all arbitrary, it's all politics, and questionable politics at that. I was disappointed. Fortunately, both 12tone and Adam Neely (who had a similarly misguided video about "white supremacy in music theory") went back to their usual approach after that.
He wants to be a good person, and all good educated people know that westerners are privileged and their successes come from exploiting others.
"The video makes a point of *not* saying that there was nothing special about Beethoven's music" - yeah, it only says "the honest answer is that it probably has very little to do with musical quality at all... he was in the right place at the right time, and history rewarded him for it, and that's it. [...] it doesn't matter if his music is good in some abstract, objective sense."
If he felt there was something special about Beethoven's music, he had ample opportunity to say so, but he didn't. (The most generous thing he says is "So does Beethoven suck at music? Nah, I don't think so.").
If he had an argument why Florence Price deserves to be ranked as high as Beethoven, he could have given it, but he didn't.
If he felt that all of the musicologists who wrote stacks of books about Beethoven's genius were wrong in a factual sense, not just in a political sense because they were white and nationalists and yada yada, he could have given that argument, but he didn't.
Also: " I don't see how it hurts rationality to at least look into the possible bias of the people who set out the norms we live by" - you have a point there. The currently fashionable bias to discount the works of dead white men because they were white men, and the urge to elevate women and "people of color" in fields where they historically did play a marginal role, is quite explicit in this video, and we should take that into account when considering 12tone's ideas about reevaluating the canon.
I have a conservatory degree in music. I was never taught that Beethoven is "The Best!" I learned that he expanded the symphonic form, added the Scherzo, made orchestras bigger. The video is a total straw man argument. It is hard to rationally argue that one artist is objectively the best, and I don't see musicologists writing papers trying to objectively prove that Beethoven is GOAT.
Innovators often get put on a pedestal in music (Charlie Parker?). It probably takes a lot of luck to be an innovator, but also skill and talent, creativity, and it leaves them with outsize influence. But the number of people who write 60+ minute symphonies (complete with SATB choir and soloists), is actually really small, so there is not a lot of competition in that space.
Thank you for your input! Leaving aside the argument about "The Best" (TM) - would you say that musicologists in western classical music generally agree that Beethoven is (by the standards of classical music) objectively great and deserving of his place in the canon, or is that under serious dispute?
No, he's not "only asking", he's answering, in the affirmative: "the honest answer is that it probably has very little to do with musical quality at all." - without even engaging in the slightest with the arguments of the people who, as he himself states, have written influential books that analyze in great depth the musical theory of Beethoven and others. That's the infuriating thing - he's a musicologist, but in this instance, he has taken off his musicologist hat and put on the hat of a lazy amateur po-mo sociologist.
It used to be, yea; but by the time I was a young pup in performing Real Book tunes in front of audiences, that had been largely corrected. I once asked my most recent bandmates if they knew about Miles Davis changing 'Round Midnight, and none of them had heard of that incident nor were they familiar with Miles' version of the melody. We all learned the original.
And as far as Beethoven, well I ain't no classical guy at all, never have been. But I am now married to a conservatory-trained symphony musician who has professionally taught her instrument, played with big-city symphonies and opera companies, etc. She has for decades (including with me and then with our young son) had a simple and effective methodology for introducing newbies to what symphonic music can be: take us to hear a professional symphony orchestra play a Beethoven symphony.
Having now also heard full symphonies by several others in the classical canon, as well as by some prominent 20th-century classical composers, some of those are good too but there simply is something about Beethoven. Both the "big" (loud) and the "small" (intimate/quiet) parts of his pieces are just somehow tuned (not literal) to resonate (also not literal) with human beings to a degree that is pretty special. My wife can quote the scholarly literature about what that something is exactly but to my ear all that scholarship really boils down to: it just _cooks_, somehow. YMMV of course. But I can testify firsthand that if you wanted the best odds of getting somebody having zero background in or interest in Western classical music to have a moment of feeling how powerful and moving it can be: take them to hear a professional symphony orchestra play one of the Beethoven's symphonies.
If it sounds good, it is good...-Duke Ellington
Good quote!
I'll just add that, as with jazz, the success rate of getting newbies interested in symphonic music seems to be much higher if their first exposure to it is professional-caliber live performance rather than recordings of same. That's been my and my wife's life experiences anyway.