Would you consider covering the fact that girls have been getting their periods younger and younger? It seems like a topic for a “more than you ever wanted to know about” deep dive. The question is from my wife but I happen to be interested also. To pick a a random one of many relevant links: https://epibiostat.ucsf.edu/news/what-drives-earlier-menstruation-girls
I worked for several months writing a nerdcore rap song about cognitive biases (it's a lot of lyrics and I have a day job and a weekend gig too). Anyway the song is about how the bees have bounced back from Colony Collapse Disorder, but Negativity Bias prevented people from caring about this good news. The funny thing is by the time I released the song it became apparent that bees were now facing new problems like the Varroa destructor mite, so many of the commenters self-righteously denounced me for downplaying the problem. Still, it kind of proved my point. Anyway here's the song, let's cheer for the bees! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs8_cQpI_IM
But seriously - you're right about how rarely we follow up here. And it has consequences - every so often someone tries to downplay global warming by saying "Remember acid rain? Or the ozone layer? Those problems went away!" But those problems went away because people took action. The absence of follow-up leads people to incorrectly conclude that those problems went away on their own.
I would love see some in-depth reporting on the bee thing. Did they truly just recover on their own? Did we Fix the Bees? Was there ever a problem in the first place, or was it a Shark Attack fear cycle?
I hear that one of the big problems is that other drugs are laced with fentanyl to cut costs while giving them a kick. And so the standard administration measures and doses no longer apply for these other drugs, and result in deaths.
The current fentanyl epidemic seems to be far more deadly than the crack epidemic. Two sources of drug overdose deaths show that the 1980s were lower than any year since for overdose deaths, and the Wikipedia list says that they were lower than any year before 1979. (They also show a weird discontinuity at 1979 - I'm not sure if that's a real one-year drop, or some data issue.)
The Wikipedia page also shows cocaine deaths broken out since 2000 - there was apparently a peak around 2005-2007, and a second higher spike now involving cocaine and opiates together.
Does anyone else not understand why people take so many holidays? Yes, I know I sound like one of those overbearing and demanding managers, but hear me out.
I frequently hear people say that they "need" a holiday as if:
a) the excessive demands of their current work are such that they will not be able to continue without a complete break for some duration, usually in a different country
b) After this complete break, the previously excessive work will no longer be a problem due to the magical rejuvenating powers of the holiday
Is this actually what happens most of the time? Or is the real reason just that people want time off work to do something else?
* People need a break to dissolve the stress from work. Yes, having a break makes it easier also for the few days after vacation until the stress accumulates again.
* If you want to visit a different country, a weekend is not enough; the ratio between "time and money spent traveling" and "actually being there" is dramatically different when you take a vacation.
* Yes, sometimes people want or need to do something in the private lives, too. For some of those things, an evening or a weekend is not enough.
>Is this actually what happens most of the time? Or is the real reason just that people want time off work to do something else?
It kinda works. Time solves everything, and a surprising number of problems go away if you ignore them long enough. So taking a vacation means that of everything that's a problem at work at a time T, a part will have become irrelevant at T+2 weeks, another part will have been solved by someone else, and yet another part you'll have worked out unconsciously. And one can assume you come back better rested than before, and better able to solve the problems that remains.
As for the leading question of "not understand why people take so many holidays", I used to not understand when i started working, but that's because I had just graduated from College, so of course, after a 5-years vacation I didn't need much for the first 2 or 3 years.
I don't think anyone actually believes (b). The value of a vacation is that you don't have to work for that period of time, not that it's any better once you come back.
Most people build up stress such that their work performance slowly declines. Taking a break can be a corrective. Not taking a break makes it worse. Evenings and weekends can be enough of a break, and usually at least help, but most people need more than that. Real breaks, where they don't monitor email or do anything else related to work for a period of time.
For me, the break needs to be longer than four days. About 3-4 days into a vacation I start feeling better and my stress drops off.
I've never had a break help with work stress, but I can imagine a situation where someone's stress is coming from a growing backlog of home tasks, which holidays allow time to address.
Otherwise, taking a trip can provide motivation for continuing a harrowing job; sure the work sucks, but it also means I get to see Hawaii, and if I stick with it I'll get to see Europe soon.
Time away from work induced stress is immensely valuable. it usually doesn't need to be an overseas trip to be valuable, but for many people home and/or family can be a stressor or a reminder or stressors so getting out of town commonly helps relaxation.
The homepage for this blog has started showing subscriber-only posts in the main list of recent posts to me, a non-subscriber. Given he specifically said he'd avoid this and there hasn't been any announcement from him about the change as far as I've seen, I assume this is due to a change from Substack not Scott. I just wanted to point this out in case he hadn't noticed given it presumably doesn't affect his view of his own blog.
Thanks for the heads up. This is not a deliberate change on my part, but my subscriber count keeps going down and I'm looking for ways to change that, so I'm going to experiment with keeping it for now.
Scott, I can't afford (or at least justify) the US$100 paid-subscription rate, particularly given that I'm paid in C$, but also feel bad about not contributing.
I know you have a student rate, but that was a long time ago for me. I'm not willing to rationalize that "I'm a student of life" or somesuch rot.
I wonder if you'd consider a retiree rate of US$50/year.
This could be a voluntary thing attracting people like me who want to contribute financially. I'd be fine with paying a reduced rate and not having access to the subscriber-only posts.
Or is there some other way people can contribute financially?
Could be partially inflation, though I wasn't a subscriber to the blog, I'm letting even my newspaper subscription lapse, gas is 50% more than a few years ago, groceries are up 20% or more on many items; and my pay is not keeping pace; entertainment is definitely one of the areas I am cutting to be able to keep affording car repairs while I wait for my new one to get built and delivered. :(
Almost all my scores for book reviews are in the 5-8 range and rather a lot of them are 6 or 7. (Because they're almost all at least _quite good_ and most aren't _astonishing_.) I suspect that my book reviewing may affect the final outcome more by rewarding/penalizing the reviews I've happened to choose (depending on whether I'm more or less generous than the average) than by rewarding the ones I like over the ones I don't.
(Perhaps the scoring process should normalize each rater's scores, or use them only to adjust _relative_ merits for pairs of reviews, or something, but that's not so easy to do for people who don't rate as many reviews as I do.)
Yeah, the problem with normalization is whether the *unrated* reviews should be treated as the *worst* or as *average*. If there are 3 reviews A, B, C, and I rate A as good and B as bad and don't say anything about C, is that "A, B, C" or "A, C, B"? Obviously A is my favorite, but is explicitly disliking something worse than not even bothering to rate it?
If we answer this, the rest is relatively simple. If there are e.g. 10 reviews, then everyone's best rated review gets 10 points, the second one 9 points, etc.; if there are reviews rated the same, they get the average number of the points for their places.
The book review review submission form doesn't seem to check the email-address field. I have definitely submitted at least one review-review with an "email address" lacking the @-sign and everything that should follow it, and I think probably at least one with nothing at all in that field. But I have no idea whether those submissions will be ignored, or treated on an equal footing with all the rest, or what. (I have not attempted to resubmit them. I have already forgotten which ones they were.)
Reading book review contest entries, I frequently find myself thinking "this is a pretty good review of a book that doesn't deserve the attention, and its actual value to me is therefore pretty small". (One _can_ in principle write a review of a bad book that's so good on its own merits as to deserve reading, but that's difficult and most reviewers in the contest have not done it.) I've tended to give these good-ish but not great scores, because to me the value of a really good book review is typically _both_ that it's interesting or enjoyable in its own right _and_ that it directs me to a book that's worth reading. I wonder whether I'm typical in this.
Yeah I also tend to rate highly books I want to read. If I order the book while reading the review then it's at least an 8. I see this as self interest, as I'm mostly here to find other good books to read.
IMO the point of you fine folk taking the time to do this is to curate what the time poor among us read in a few months time. Thus, if the subject matter is tripe it probably isn't worthy, even with a good review.
Does the book review contest really have to be about book reviews? As I’m reading I definitely feel like most reviewers have done their own thinking, and are stretching the definition of a review to talk about what they’re interested in. Which honestly I’m on board with, I just wonder if this really has to be a book review contest every year. Why not- book inspired blog post contest or something?
I've heard that MMA helped to sort out which of the martial arts were the best since, in the beginning, anyone of any fighting style could enter tournaments. There were weird matchups like sumo wrestlers fighting kung-fu guys. Through a process of natural selection, the winners converged on the best set of fighting styles.
Has this same thing been done with sword fighting? Are there tournaments where guys with medieval broadswords fight guys with katanas or Roman gladii?
>Has this same thing been done with sword fighting? Are there tournaments where guys with medieval broadswords fight guys with katanas or Roman gladii?
Actual swords where people can literally die, no. But an open ruleset including sticks/clubs as well as full MMA rules? (I.e. you can choose to tackle the guy hitting you with a stick, hit them on the ground, etc.) Yes, it's obscure but has actually been around since a little before the first UFC- it's called Dog Brothers. It's not a competition (there's no winners or losers), but just guys or gals getting together in a park or gym and fighting with sticks. Here's a good sample https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvmLQ_Jjqmk&pp=ygUWZG9nIGJyb3RoZXJzIGdhdGhlcmluZw%3D%3D
Part of the trouble is that every weapon and martial art is designed for a particular context, and sometimes these are incompatible. Is it for battlefield, or self-defense, or formal duels? Do they wear armor, and if so what sort? Do people carry around shields, daggers, or other off-hand implements? Are there assumptions about the sort of thing a gentleman simply Would Not Do?
Also, being able to practice at full force without injuring your partner(s) is very important, and different schools come up with different compromises. Which inevitably leaks back into the style itself, sometimes creating weak points. So to some extent, the dominant style of this free-form competition would be determined by the rules being set.
The fight choreography at the end of "Rob Roy" (1995) isn't a horrible depiction of different styles in conflict:
My understanding though is that all top-level MMA competitors deploy elements of more than one martial art -- it isn't the case that a pure judo expert is fighting a pure jiu-jitsu expert or whatever. That seems to muddy the sorting part quite a bit.
And would that translate to sword fighting or fighting with other types of weapons? As a practical matter could a broadsword guy and a katana guy each be benefitting from techniques from swords having different lengths/weights than the one they're each holding?
There were; but the gladiatorial games fell out of favour a few centuries ago due to the deaths, and there have been quite a few new swords developed since then.
You could use fencing-style rules, I suppose. Like, most blades don't need a tremendous amount of force behind them to inflict a fatal wound - if you can hit their chest with even moderate force you're going to ruin their day, and that's well within the ability of a judge or even an electronic circuit.
The trouble is, swordfighting under those rules would likely converge on, well, fencing swords - very long and very thin, maximizing your ability to stab your opponent without getting stabbed in return, in an environment where you don't need to worry about armor. Actual fencing foils have a maximum length, but if you went UFC-style anything goes, you'd probably see some stupidly long swords that blur the line between "sword" and "polearm."
Yea, ultimately the problem is that human anatomy is really complicated, and what, in practice, is a "disabling cut" is basically impossible to ascertain. Increasingly HEMA tournaments are trying to incentivize a greater variety of tactics though, for example "doubles", where the person who scores the initial hit gets hit within 2 seconds of that hit give both people a point, as well as getting extra hits for deep cuts, torso, head or thigh, etc.
Even within this ruleset rapiers tend to win out, although this is mitigated by the fact that slicing cuts with a rapier aren't always counted. I will note that in my personal experience doing HEMA longsword vs katana is a pretty even matchup, the katana has less inertia and can be viably used one handed, but longswords have greater reach and the increased inertia means that they can collapse an opponents block while its unlikely a katana can do the same.
The stupidly long and thin "sword" has been used in a real war before, and the people who used it conquered the entire known world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarissa
Interestingly, the recent upsurge in HEMA has made a lot of people aware of why spears were always the traditional kings of the battlefield. A spear is very hard to deal with for a person using a sword due to its reach and speed.
I have an old Samsung Galaxy Tab 4, running the Android 5 operating system. I want to upgrade it to Android 11 or higher. Here's an instructional video on how to do that, but I can't understand what the guy is saying, or his written instructions in the video "caption." [Skip to the 4:00 mark]
Having watched the video, even though I am not technical myself, I would *not* recommend you follow this guy as he has a lot of weird files and dodges and honestly I think you're as likely to wreck your system as update it.
But if you really want to chance it, here's a transcript of most of the video:
And it’s called Linux OS. We will as well install gaps okay so you’re gonna have Google Play Store as well. This tablet can handle it, but how to get started?
Well, just turn off the tablet, power off, okay and then it’s a matter of pressing the Home button, pressing volume down and press power. I keep these three together, we will get into a download mode you see?
(Get to Warning screen about “if you want to download a custom OS, press the volume up key”)
And now you hit “volume up” to continue. Now we are in actual download mode now (get to screen saying “Downloading – do not turn off target!)
Are we gonna connect the cable to the computer and you’re gonna start up your ODIN, okay, and in ODIN when ODIN is started up you’re gonna as well see that the com port is litten up (lighting up, I think he means). Com 4 or whatever it’s gonna be called will be turned on.
As well, if I want to show you that, in options, in ODIN, if you select “options” you’re gonna see “turn off auto restart”. You can deselect it because sometimes it’s a little bit difficult, after the flash is done it’s going really fast and then you must grab the tablet and then hit “volume up”, “power” and “home” together and keep them pressed until you see the Samsung logo.
So you only have a couple of seconds to do that and release the buttons when you see the Samsung logo and then you’re gonna get into the TWRP. But you must do it the first time right - well at least you must do it right after the flashing of the TWRP, because if the tablet is gonna boot up then you already missed it and then the original recovery will be restored.
So then you’re not gonna have TWRP so then you’re gonna have to do this again. Okay? All right, so connect the cable to the computer, in ODIN we select PDA and we browse for the 3.5 star file that we downloaded from the Android file host and we’re gonna go ahead and flash it to the device.
Remember what I said about “options” in ODIN, that you can turn off auto reboot. If you’re gonna turn off auto reboot and the progress will be done, then you’re gonna go ahead with “volume down” and “power”, yeah?, you’re gonna keep them pressed until the tablet so let’s go ahead and exercise that.
Okay, so the tablet is now done with flashing TWRP now, okay, so we’re gonna hit “volume down” first, so we can feel the “volume down”, play with it a bit that you feel it good and then the “power” you press it, press it and feel that you’re feeling it good and then you keep them together until the tablet goes off.
And now we’re gonna switch with “volume up”, “power” and “home” and now we’re gonna see recovery and then we’re gonna go into recovery. I already installed TWRP okay but I’m showing you the procedure. Alrighty? That’s how to go into TWRP. And then when you’re in TWRP you can do several things, you can go ahead and wipe, you must wipe first, you can as well do a “format data”, you’re gonna lose everything on the tablet, you hit “select”, “yes” and “okay” and then you must reboot, you hit the home back and then reboot back into recovery, and when you’re back into recovery, you’re ready to flash the ROM.
We’re gonna do all that in the video but I need you to understand this procedure. It’s not so easy but you can do it, okay, just put the tablet to stand in a thing like this (a stand) and just try it, or let somebody help you.
So make sure that ODIN is seeing the tablet, connect the cable to the computer, make sure the device is in the download mode, this is a download mode, and the yellow com port is lit up.
Select AP, select the TWRP file, the TAR file, hit “start”, and be quick, okay. It’s flash(ed) now and now “home”, “volume up” and “power”, let go when you see the logo, and there we go into a recovery mode.
So now we are in recovery so let’s go ahead and flash Android 11. When you see the blue light turning on, you did it right. So now it’s gonna go into recovery mode and TWRP. You see that? So now we flashed TWRP to the device. It can be a bit of a hassle but just try to keep it right. (Skipped a bit of comment).
So what happens if we do an advanced wipe? Dalvik, System, Data, Cache (select these on screen). Is this thing encrypted? No it’s not. So that means we can boot up the system, we can leave it Samsung firmware if we want, but that’s not what we want, what we now want is, of course, connect to the device, you can close “other” now, and I just downloaded a file.
We’re just going to copy the files to the computer and here you can see that I already copied some files to the computer so let’s go ahead and flash. As you can see we’re getting a red line there, that’s because I’m using old TWRP, so we need to update the TWRP. The TWRP 3.5 you can download from Mateo.
(Skipped advertising for this Mateo guy).
So then we’re gonna go ahead and put the phone (sic) into a recovery mode, we’re gonna copy Android 11 to it, but as well we’re gonna update the TWRP.
The tablet is now off and we’re gonna go into a recovery mode, we’re gonna press “home”, this is “volume up” and “power” and when we see the logo we release these three buttons.
You see we get a little red sign there saying (ignore all the rest of this bit, it’s just blathering)
In the recovery mode – so first of all we’re gonna update the recovery, because this recovery is not proper. It’s image 3.5 and we flash it as a recovery and then we’re first gonna reboot back into recovery.
So now we’re gonna do a wipe (same procedure as for advanced wipe above)
So now we’re gonna go ahead and install Lineage OS 18. The code name for this device is mattisa wi-fi. So we’re gonna go ahead and select 18 and we’re flashing Lineage OS 18 Android 11.
Thanks for your help, but it's still too confusing for me to follow. The fact that he says making a mistake will "brick" the tablet puts me off even more.
(1) Who is Noah Berlatsky, and why is he an idiot?
I've read his review of the new Disney live-action remake of "Peter Pan", now renamed "Peter Pan and Wendy", and while I don't care too much about the entire thing because I was never into the original cartoon version, this is just ridiculous. They've race-swapped, gender-swapped, and been as inclusive as they could possibly be (Wendy and her brothers are still white, or I should say White given Noah's reviews, unfortunately) and it's still not enough.
It's the colonialism, you see. Neverland is a cypher for - well, the USA? The British West Indies? The exact location isn't important, it's the idea of the British colonial possessions. Go out West and it's filled with childish natives and thus a natural place for literal (White) British children to have fun adventures.
Going by the trailers, I think the movie is not that great. But honestly, this kind of reviewing is just making me tired. "Okay, so they fixed Tiger Lily, they race-swapped Tinkerbell, and the Lost Boys are also including girls, but I have to find *something* to complain about, else how will I live up to my trendy bohemian coffee-house Beatnik headshot?"
Yeah, they're giving the female lead agency, but she's still White! Problematic!
"The intention in both is to elevate Wendy as the hero, giving her more agency and adventuresomeness than the sexist prototype in Barrie’s writing. But in centering (White) Wendy, the Peters of color are pushed toward stereotype."
Yeah, the 1924 version was full of tropes we find totally unacceptable today. But today is 2023 not 1924, and the new movie is bending over backwards to be as DEI as it can be. And honestly? I find a white guy from Chicago complaining about the treatment of Native Americans in the source material to be a bit, how shall I say, precious? Somewhat like land acknowledgements, which boil down to "yeah we took this land, and we're not giving it back, so whatever".
(2) Anyway, on a cheerier note: an American Youtube cook/chef plumbs the mysteries of the Spice Bag!
I don't know who this guy is, so I have no idea if he's Youtube famous or just another cookery channel. Ignore the Irish accents, they're terrible, but he does keep the paddywhackery to a minimum and he suffers for his art - he nearly kills himself making the dish 😀
I've never heard of parboiling the chips (fries) before, and I remain dubious, but if it works? Great!
Also the curry sauce is (traditionally) Chinese chipper curry sauce and it's an optional dip rather than an integral part of the dish, but every place has its own version of a spice bag, you can buy commercial spice bag mixes (ranging from the decent to the terrible) and in the end, whatever way you make it, it's going to be great.
The only problem is that now I'm craving a spice bag!
Why would you assume that a writer for NBC Think, Independent, Public Notice, Atlantic, and WaPo, and a member of the CIC, was an idiot? He's such an idiot that he stumbled, Mr. Bean style, into having millions of people absorb his pontifications on a regular basis? Meanwhile, people like me and you are simply too intelligent to be listened to? What is the mental block with concluding that it is entirely intentional?
He's an idiot because he wrote a stupid review of a bland, inoffensive, carefully ticking all the diversity boxes movie (black Tinkerbell! Mixed-race Peter! Girls in the Lost Boys! Non-stereotypical Native Americans!) to find some scrap of racism he could bloviate about.
I don't care if he's written for Big Name Publications. As we've seen with the NYT, being a Big Name Publication is no guarantee of quality content.
I never heard of him before, and after reading this, I wish I had remained in happy ignorance. Next week: Noah tells us "Did you know Washington owned slaves and Jefferson was a rapist? This country was built on slaves (slaves!)".
But none of this speaks to his being an idiot! It reads to me like he (any by extension this blob of mainstream western media, of which he is an apparatchik) is just straight up oppressing you! He's on your telescreen (which doesn't turn off, remember, if you'll permit me to abruptly change the metaphor) smugly telling you yet more lies and nonsense, as your anxiety increases because you don't know which bits you are permitted to dispute, which bits you are chancing your arm if you even so much as fail to publicly reaffirm -- "the film was PC, why is he still mad about it, oh god what will it take!" -- and he's doing it apace, he's competently and intelligently destroying your probity. And yeah I agree, the founding fathers might well be next, if that hasn't already begun.
(1) simpliciter, because of all the valid things to criticise this movie for, "too white" ain't one of them.
(2) because he's a white guy himself, and all the simping in the world isn't going to save his backside should the Revolution come (it never will, but suppose).
I don't know anything about Noah Berlatsky, but I'd guess his job is to serve up PC nonsense to generate clicks for the crowd that loves such stuff, and also for the crowd that hates it and would enjoy complaining about it. Hard to fault a dude for just doing his (ridiculous) job.
A white guy complaining "too much whiteness!" in a movie that is based on an Edwardian story-turned play-turned novel set in Britain is a bit rich, especially when Disney was as DEI as they dared. "No, you left Wendy white, that is wrong!"
I mean, by the same logic, I could complain that Noah's review is Too White and by centering a White writer it pushes the Reviewers of colour to stereotypes (to quote his own lines). Step back, step down, and relinquish your privileged position to a Person (preferably female) of Colour, Noah!
Anyway, your complaint is like: "Who is the Coca Cola company, and why are they idiots? Don't they realize that drinking too much water with sugar (or artificial sweeteners) ruins your health?"
The answer is, yes they know it, no they don't care, and they are laughing all the way from the bank. The don't drink the sugar-water; they *sell* it.
Similarly, the ultrawoke guy is not reading this stuff, he is *writing* it, and he is getting paid for writing it, and who knows he might be getting paid better than most of us. We might prefer keeping our dignity to getting generously paid for writing nonsense, but that's a matter of different preferences, not stupidity.
I've heard of Coke, I've never heard of Berlatsky. Hence the questions, because I could not understand how he could look at the trailers and (presumably) the movie, and come away with "Wendy is White, Problematic!"
I hadn't until now thought about the fact that 20th century Peter Pan productions casting an adult woman to play a boy is the mirror-reverse of how the Elizabethans cast female roles.
(Apparently Barrie wanted a boy in the role, but was overruled by the first producer of the stage play.)
I genuinely don't know the guy, his opinions, or his politics, and I genuinely wanted to know how he could produce a review of a movie. that made nearly all the Good Guys non-white while keeping the Bad Guys all white, which complained about "too much whiteness, the racism is showing through".
The movie looks like a safe, family-friendly, forgettable piece of work. Take the kids to it over the bank holiday without needing to worry they'll see blood or nudity.
But the reviews are still banging on about racism. Barrie's work too White! Yes, Tinkerbell is now black, but the actress gets no lines, so this is Bad even if it's the way the original character was written. Wendy and her brothers are White, this is Bad.
Yeah, they can make a version where everyone is a mixed-race trans pansexual nonbinary they/them, but at that point it's not Peter Pan anymore, it's a whole new thing, and if you want that, then why not write a whole new thing? Complaining about oh my gosh, a Scottish writer in 1911 wrote his main characters as white English children is a bit like complaining that oh my gosh, imagine that Gilgamesh is Middle-Eastern and not Latinx!
Oh, the Epic is just *riddled* with Problematic content. While it gains credit for its sex-positivity, sex-worker support, and valorisation of same-sex relationships, on the other hand it has cruelty to animals (killing the Bull of Heaven), racist and colonialist attitudes (Enkidu the 'wild man' has to be 'civilised'), class struggle issues, environmental exploitation and destruction (cutting down the Cedar forest) and of course the privilege of the rich, powerful, male king.
I submitted a book review before April 5th. I then went away on holiday for two weeks. I came back and opened my laptop and pressed one key on the google doc and deleted it straight away (the letter 'k'). This was saved on the google doc as a change/edit. I tried to 'undo the edit' that further saved that as a change too. I am unsure if you can see edits or if you have only the version I submitted on the day.
Will it show that I edited it and will I get automatically dismissed? I posted this anonymously and left no clue as to my submission date. I hope it is okay to be asking.
How controversial would the notion of "1-10 rating scales are fake, no one actually can consistently & reliably distinguish buckets beyond 4-5" be?
I'll personally be rating reviews on a scale of 1-5, then doubling the score for submittal (except particularly egregious 1s which will stay 1s I suppose)
You don't need to consistently and reliably distinguish them. You just need your error-prone and inaccurate rating mechanism to have some sort of reliable correlation with how good you actually find the thing, and as long as enough people with similar feelings are averaged together, the noise should wash you, and you get just signal+bias. (And the fineness of the scale doesn't eliminate or magnify bias in any obvious way.)
You absolutely can distinguish all ten places, though studies of people reading analog instruments (where you visually estimate the last decimal place) show that not everyone is good at it.
You really don't see a difference between "this is a 5" and "this is a 10"? If I'm confined to 1-5 scale, I might score some things 3 which would be a little higher than I want to score it, but 2 is too low.
For my purposes, 5-6 is not the same as 7-8 is not the same as 9-10. Something to score 9-10 would really have to knock my socks off. A 1 on 1-10 scale is worse than a 1 on a 1-5 scale, because the smaller scale doesn't allow me the same level of discrimination. A 2 on 1-5 scale is better than a 2 on 1-10 scale because of the shortened range, but simply doubling that 2 to make it 4 for 1-10 may not fit with how I score it: it might only be 3 on 1-10 in my judgement.
1-10 is too finegrained if you're only rating a few items, but once you have rated, e.g., twenty of them, then you can make a large enough number of comparisons for 1-10 to make sense.
But 1-5 doesn't give you a lot of room. For me, on 1-5, that ranks as "1 - bad, 2 - poor to mediocre, 3 - good, 4 - very good, 5 - excellent".
But with the book reviews, if I have six of them (say), I may well feel that A is better than B, even if both of them are not the best. So I would give A a 6 and B a 5 on 1-10 scale, where I might be forced to give them both 3 on 1-5 scale.
Depends on the number and how much you care. I have graded essays on 0-4 and 0-5 scales, and even with that I would sometimes give out a 3+ or a 5-. If you have a lot of items there really can be a need to get pretty fine grained.
I usually max out at 1 through 4 if I'm trying to grade in a vacuum. 10 is largely useful if you're trying to score things against each other and make a hierarchy; these two are both good but I like this one slightly more than that one, so this one gets an 8 and that one gets a 7.9.
Seems like a bit of a pity not to have an optional comments field for the book review contest. I think a lot of authors would appreciate the ability to see feedback for their essay.
Substack's UI (or servers) has apparently lost its mind, they show the "(banned)" flair next to Carl Pham and Freddie DeBoer. Their names in other threads show just fine.
Freddie also got a one-week ban, for a comment in which he called YIMBYs a "little cult" who will "kill you" for questioning their ideas.
Harsh? Maybe, but I appreciate the demonstration of the principle that even respected long-term commenters need to keep their comments civil and sensible.
Especially since I generally consider myself a YIMBY, but find some of his more thoughtful criticisms of the movement quite persausive.
If I were going to kill him for anything, it would not be that. (I do not intend to kill him or any other commenters on this board. Unless there are Wood Ducks posting on here in which case... I'm sorry, but it's your own fault for being delicious.)
Yes, and I prioritized backyard size over house size or location to the point of moving 3000km to buy a house with a decent sized backyard instead of an apartment condo.
I don't want anyone else telling me what I can do with my land, so, per the Golden Rule, I don't want to tell anyone else what to do with theirs.
I can not find the SSC post talking about how scarcity leads to politics and scott makes up a fictional example of if there was 10% of the available water all the interest groups would fight for it but with enough water it is a nonissue. It could be a ACT post but I think its older.
Thank you so much. I paraphrased this idea to a friend of mine to understand why making things cheaper is so good in the context of politics. Weinstein talked about how the enemy of systemic violence in the modern age is not peace but growth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L39Xr6bU9Mg
It is a sort of commentary of the stagnation and perceived increase in 'political violence'. Fundamentally, political ambitions are elevated to a higher level where simple things like plumbing and feeding a nation are seen as a given. This world could be called post-scarcity and it future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.
"Imagine if tomorrow, the price of water dectupled. Suddenly people have to choose between drinking and washing dishes. Activists argue that taking a shower is a basic human right, and grumpy talk show hosts point out that in their day, parents taught their children not to waste water. A coalition promotes laws ensuring government-subsidized free water for poor families; a Fox News investigative report shows that some people receiving water on the government dime are taking long luxurious showers. Everyone gets really angry and there’s lots of talk about basic compassion and personal responsibility and whatever but all of this is secondary to why does water costs ten times what it used to?"
It would be interesting to see someone come up with a diagram showing what various intellectuals and AI big wigs think about AI risk, displaying the relationships among them and who seems to be influenced by whom. Perhaps that would be very hard to do. But, for instance, I imagine Tyler Cowen isn't going to change his position as long as Robin Hanson doesn't. If Hanson did change his position, then TC + hundreds of thousands of his readers also might, some of whom are also public intellectuals with huge readerships.
For some use cases it will be possible to have hardware (cameras, microphones) that cryptographically sign their output to indicate 'yes this is in fact the digital artifact produced by a particular device at some particular time'.
Of course this might make ordinary postprocessing impossible, but in time even that could be solved in a similar manner by having a chain of signatures associated with certain 'acceptable' modification technologies, so that a picture could be cropped while retaining the verification that it was taken by some particular physical camera.
It's a cool idea, but I can see a lot of ways to cheat it:
1. Buy a crypto-signed camera, crack it open, and find a way to read its encryption key. Or if the chip itself is beyond your tools, find a way to feed it faked data. Physical access is nearly impossible to secure against, especially if you're worried about government action.
2. Actually, if you're a government propaganda agency, there's an even simpler option: Just go straight to the manufacturer and order them to secretly create some encryption keys for you to use.
3. The analog hole: Generate a fake image, print it out, and take a picture with your cryptographically verified camera. Add a bit of blur or JPEG compression to hide any rough spots, if necessary.
4. Just make up a reason why your data couldn't be signed. "This image comes from a confidential source and if they sign it you could track them down" is a good one - it might even be true for a lot of sources.
That being said, news reporters already have some defenses against people lying to them, such as by asking questions of actual human sources. After all, it's been possible to generate large quantities of realistic fake text ever since the invention of the typewriter.
I'm not sure what level of depth is right for someone like you, with lots of tech knowledge. I thought this youtube vid of a talk was good, regarding immediate dangers of AI:
Hinton's response to that article, from his Twitter: "In the NYT today, Cade Metz implies that I left Google so that I could criticize Google. Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly."
Cade Metz strikes again, huh? I've hit my limit of free NYT articles and I'll be damned and roasting on the hobs of Hell before I subscribe to them so I can't read it, but given that recently (apparently) on their recipe pages they described scrambled eggs and cheese on toast as "toad in the hole", they do seem to be living in their own little reality.
I'd just add the caveat that while this could be an expression of genuine feelings about google, it could also be the case that Hinton's NDA with google contains a non-disparage clause and he wants to make sure nobody at google thinks he's triggering it.
A lot of what humans "feel" corresponds to the presence of chemicals such as neurotransmitters and hormones. Are there analogs to these chemicals in how AIs work? I would think we would want there to be if we want AIs to feel things.
Maybe batch normalization is an analog. Rescales the inputs of a whole layer together so it’s something like a hormone having a global effect on all neurons rather than one by one. In general, global parameters (learning rate, regularization strength, others) can also be considered analogs, maybe.
Our microwave oven died, and I went to a couple of local appliance-parts stores to buy the defective part (a thermistor, a.k.a. thermal cutout). Neither store was able to help me, so I bought the part online.
The part was $13.88, shipping was $20.00, and tax was $4.07 for a total of $37.95*.
A comparable replacement would be $249.99 + 12% sales taxes, so if the oven goes another couple of years it will have been well-worthwhile.
But here's the thing - I'm irked over the shipping cost. (And that is irrational in itself; I spent close to two hours driving around looking for the part, and however much in gasoline and wear and tear on the van, before looking online.)
But in any case, had the part been $33.88 + tax, with free shipping, I would have been quite happy.
So is this sort of reaction normal or explainable? Would I have felt better ordering a bunch of other small widgets to amortize the shipping cost over a more expensive purchase?
As Carl alluded to, the cost is for shipping *and handling*. Handling is going to cover wages for, say, time spent driving the package to the post office.
...I'm looking at the tax and trying to figure out what it's based on. That's like 30% of $13.88, so I'd assume they're including the shipping cost, which... I don't know about that, that seems iffy.
We have two sales taxes - Federal (GST) @ 5%, and Provincial (PST) @ 7%. The taxes are independent (i.e. one is not calculated on the total after the first tax is added), so it's a straight 12%.
I think it depends. A seller who sells nominally below cost and makes their profit on shipping fees is clearly missleading, and one would not want that. You can mostly tell these sellers because the shipping cost will be per item, while the actual costs would be a fixed base and then scale slowly with mass and volume.
On the other hand, if the part was shipped by air mail from China, perhaps it just costs that much. Did they have a slower option which would take a month?
Contrary to Carl Pham, I don't think using ones personal inconvenience for sending a package should be used as an intuition pump. I guess the costs to getting the item out of the door of the shop/warehouse are lower for online retail than for walk-in shops, additional packaging non-withstanding. The shipping costs should be dominated by what it costs to pay a parcel service to transport that thing.
I don’t think it would bother me unless I was short on sleep or had a sinus headache or something making a bit of irritation into something bigger. But go ahead and feel annoyed.
Did you check Jameco dot com for the part? They are pretty good. I’ve used them a lot.
I have bought from Repair Clinic in the past, and they're good, but the first place I could find that stocked the part, after many misses, was Parts Town LLC. They were really good.
The thing that frustrated me with my first local supplier was that they refused to look for a very generic part because they didn't deal with my specific brand (Panasonic).
It appears they (the local supplier) have to find a specific number for the part, after drilling down from the manufacturer and model number. I would have thought they could have looked up "thermistor" or "thermal cutout", and then find applications from there.
I feel better about shipping costs when I think of the times I've sent a package. Find a box that fits, no not that one it's got weird stains on it, OK this one will do but a bit big, have to pack a lot of cuhsion in around it....find some newspaper, some bubble wrap, wrap it all up, now tape WHO THE FUCK forgot to tack down the end of the tape onto the little dispenser lip made for that purpose? Grumble, go find the glasses and strong light, finally tape the box up, trundle on down to the post office, wait in line, wait some more after this union drone decides it's lunch break or smoke break or sanity break time, whatever, weight, yes sir/ma'am first class today, I don't even want to think what you apes would do to it if I sent it 4th class, or whether it would get there before the Sun burned out, buy all these stamps, yes, lick them all, why the hell don't they sell $5 and $10 stamps anyway? drop the damn lump off -- finally! done!
Obviously it's way, way more efficient when you do it all day, but you'd have to pay *me* a lot more than $20 to go fetch the part from the warehouse, pack it up, tape it up, address it and send it on its merry way, leave alone the part about people humping the package around through warehouses and in and out of airplanes and trucks.
This is unrelated to your comment, but I wanted to tell you that I miss seeing what you have to say. You're thoughtful, insightful, intelligent, and knowledgeable, and regardless of whether you ever post here again, I thought I should tell you that. Too many people have fallen in and out of my life without knowing how much I value them, and even though this is just a couple of random people on the Internet passing in the night, I figured it'd be better to tell you than not. :-)
Well said! I have shipped service manuals and parts for cars I no longer own to people who can use them. What a hassle! I would feel weasely charging more than postage, so I eat the time and cost of repurposing old packaging, tape, and my time. It is a huge pain.
Although I feel good about the stuff going to a good home, I would be better off throwing it out.
I don't think it would be weasely at all to sell the item itself, even if your reason for charging is mainly the inconvenience of shipping it. I'd happily pay 20-50% of the original price plus shipping for such an item.
Why is this type of lawsuit permitted? I would understand if they were suing the CEO, etc. But all this lawsuit can do is waste a lot of time and money on legal expenses. The shareholders are effectively suing themselves.
It's only been filed, whether it's actually permitted is yet to be seen. Looks like those guys are Googling whatever phrases they can get into court with as an attempt to grub money, and once they're in court they're going to be demolished.
The claim is that they only lost money because the CEO lied to them about... whatever they're claiming he lied about. I guess they're arguing businesses have a contractual obligation to pre-emptively air all their sponsors' dirty laundry and deliberately tank their own value. They're going to be demolished in court.
As is the case with many class action suits the lawsuits could be funded by a law firm. They find clients to represent, in this case they'd probably look for shareholders with a very small stake in Adidas, and then talk them into suing. Since the clients have a small stake they might be close enough to indifferent or mad enough an Kanye to go along with it. The clients might get a small payout but the lawyers can capture a significant portion of a settlement or judgement which can make it very profitable for the law firm.
À-propos of the comments in the fantasy thread about the recondite vocabulary of Stephen Donaldson in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, I have to share these star examples from Chesterton's treatment of the English novelists Thomas Hardy and George Meredith:
"For it is the remarkable fact that it was the man who had the healthy and manly outlook who had the crabbed and perverse style; it was the man who had the crabbed and perverse outlook who had the healthy and manly style. The reader may well have complained of paradox when I observed above that Meredith, unlike most neo-Pagans, did in his way take Nature naturally. It may be suggested, in tones of some remonstrance, that things like "though pierced by the cruel acerb," or "thy fleetingness is bigger in the ghost," or "her gabbling grey she eyes askant," or "sheer film of the surface awag" are not taking Nature naturally. And this is true of Meredith's style, but it is not true of his spirit; nor even, apparently, of his serious opinions. In one of the poems I have quoted he actually says of those who live nearest to that Nature he was always praising —
"Have they but held her laws and nature dear,
They mouth no sentence of inverted wit";
which certainly was what Meredith himself was doing most of the time. But a similar paradox of the combination of plain tastes with twisted phrases can also be seen in Browning. Something of the same can be seen in many of the cavalier poets. I do not understand it: it may be that the fertility of a cheerful mind crowds everything, so that the tree is entangled in its own branches; or it may be that the cheerful mind cares less whether it is understood or not; as a man is less articulate when he is humming than when he is calling for help."
And from the Wikipedia article on Meredith's succès de scandale novel "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel":
"Sir Austin Feverel's wife deserts him to run away with a poet, leaving her husband to bring up their boy Richard. Believing schools to be corrupt, Sir Austin, a scientific humanist, educates the boy at home with a plan of his own devising known as "the System". This involves strict authoritarian supervision of every aspect of the boy's life, and in particular the prevention of any meeting between Richard and girls of his own age. Richard nevertheless meets and falls in love with Lucy Desborough, the niece of a neighboring farmer. Sir Austin finds out and, disapproving of her humble birth, forbids them to meet again, but they secretly marry. Sir Austin now tries to retrieve the situation by sending Richard to London. Here, however, Sir Austin's friend Lord Mountfalcon successfully sets a courtesan to seduce Richard, hoping that this will leave Lucy open to seduction by himself. Ashamed of his own conduct, Richard flees abroad where he at length hears that Lucy has given birth to a baby and has been reconciled to Sir Austin. He returns to England and, hearing about Lord Mountfalcon's villainy, challenges him to a duel. But this goes badly: Richard is seriously wounded. Lucy is so overcome by this turn of events that she loses her mind and dies."
From which the moral is, I guess, don't homeschool your kids! 😁 Also, based on a true story, apparently:
"In 1856 George Meredith's wife Mary began an affair with the artist Henry Wallis. In the following year, pregnant by Wallis, she ran away to join him, leaving her son Arthur behind. Meredith undertook to bring the child up. The parallels with the opening chapters of the novel are obvious, though Sir Austin is certainly not intended as a self-portrait. Meredith was equivocal in his attitude to Sir Austin's favourite educational theories, which, it has been shown, derived largely from the medical writer William Acton's Prostitution, Considered in Its Moral, Social & Sanitary Aspects (1857) and The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1857), from Herbert Spencer's essay "Moral Education" (Quarterly Review, April 1858), and from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's novel Émile."
A king had a son, and a fortune-teller said that the son would grow up to be either a great king or a great philosopher. The king decided to raise the boy to have no knowledge of illness, old age, or death, because that knowledge could lead to an interest in philosophy. But one day the guards accidently let an old man into the palace. The boy asked why the old man looked like that, so the old man explained what old age is, and the boy immediately became a philosopher.
Thanks for reviving this forgotten name. George Meredith was considered the leading "literary" novelist of his day and was praised by Virginia Woolf. His reputation absolutely crashed after his death, and now even I, who have a high tolerance for high-toned 19th Century writing, had to struggle through "Richard Feverel". The story of his errant wife and the raising of his child is memorably treated by Vivian Gornick in her non-fiction "The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith" -- published in the 1970s and considered a kind of feminist classic.
I think AI maximalists, which appears to be almost everyone, are making a bet on bad odds while under the influence of our natural cognitive inclination to believe that we're special https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-bet-youre-making
Alright, I think the article itself is open to a charitable interpretation.
The charitable interpretation is: don't hate the player, hate the game.
Look, the internet blows everything out of proportion, even the apocalypse. I'm sure there's lots of AI doomer "content" out there from people just trying to make a buck 'cuz it's the hot thing right now and I'm sure it's super inaccurate and annoying. And it's fair to be annoyed by that.
But, yo, that's just the way publicity works these days. You gotta draw hype, you gotta draw attention, and every "content creator" is gonna come and provide a cheap knockoff and, ya know, if that gets the message out, that's how the game is played. I don't like, from the article you don't like it, but ya gotta get your message out into the media ecosystem we have, not the one we wish we had. And to be fair to the "content creators", ya know, they have to make what sells, not what they wish they could make.
The media criticism angle? Yeah, totally on board, I'm sure lot's of irresponsible stuff has been published.
But why share that article here? This is, like, the second worst place you could post this behind LW because you know, and I've seen you commenting here and SSC for years, you know we didn't just jump on the hype train and we're not exaggerating. Right or wrong, people here have been worried and discussing AI "doomerism" since...what, like 2010? 2008? Well over a decade of it, ya know, being a weird niche interest. You know we're not just worried about ChatGPT, we're looking at how AI and ML systems have advanced over the last fifteen years and projecting that forward.
If you think the media is overhyping AI doomerism, I'm very sympathetic, if you think Yudkowsky and Altman and others are making headlines irresponsibly, hey, they're playing the media game we have, don't hate the player, hate the game. And I'm sure for 95%+ of the AI content out there, this is a valid criticism. But not here, why here, I remember hearing variations of this argument like 7 years ago, we've heard this and there's a half dozen arguments against it. This is, literally, like the second or third worst forum you could possibly post this argument in.
Please, someone, anyone, try reasoning about the object-level question instead of doing bias-hunting along the lines of "well, sea level rise is a lot like Noah's flood, so believing in climate change is just a secular apocalypse".
In terms of your actual argument: 7% of people throughout history are alive today. So if the world ends tomorrow, 7% of people throughout history will have been alive when the world ended. I agree it's mildly implausible that I'm in the 7% of closest-to-the-end people, but I'm much higher than the 7%th percent of richest people, or most educated people, so apparently mild 1/13 coincidences happen pretty often. I don't think this is a strong update. If I said we weren't going to have giant changes, you could fairly accuse me of status quo bias, which is also a real bias we are frequently told to avoid. This is why at some point you need to stop lobbing bias arguments and reason about the actual question.
There's a much stronger argument against either of us being real Substackers. We're probably in the top 0.001% of people in terms of media influence, so we should be pretty strongly worrying that we're in a simulation or something, where they only simulate the people with important effects on history. I do worry about this pretty often, and the Substacker thing seems like much stronger evidence than the "alive during big AI transition" thing.
Was it unreasonable for the people at the time of invention of nuclear weapons, or when the US and USSR were amassing giant stock piles of nuclear weapons, to worry about the possibility of a war driving the human race into extinction? It seems to me that Freddys argument would work equally well for telling those people they were being unreasonable, and yet I don't think that's obviously right.
What if the US and USSR had developed intentional doomsday weapons, for example, nuclear weapons designed to put massive amounts of fall out into the atmosphere and poison life on earth, as a deterrent to any possible aggression from the other side? Would people living in that timeline be less subject to Freddys argument than us living in the current timeline?
I think your primary argument is that Homosapiens have existed ~300,000 years, and humans live only ~75 years. Therefore, it is unlikely (75/300,000 = only 0.025%!) that you live during the end of human kind, and the only reason anyone thinks there is a significant chance is because of humans' innate desire to feel special.
This is an argument is a survival analysis model that only uses information about how long humans have existed and how long we live on average. It assumes constant rate of extinction for all time. The model doesn't use any additional information, and so can be applied to almost anything. We can use it to estimate how long a country will exist, how long a star will last, or how long human kind will survive. These aren't especially useful models since they don't account for any details like political unrest in the country, astronomical models of star lifetimes, or all the arguments used about AGI that are based on some evidence. Somewhat ironically, we can even use this same model to suggest there is a 50% chance humanity will end in 300,000 years, though again, that's not really a meaningful number.
Also, might as well note that your argument overlooks that more people are alive in modern times than 300,000 years ago. I found estimates that ~120 billion humans have ever lived and ~8 billion are alive today. As in ~7% of humans who have ever been alive are alive now; if now were the end of humanity we would be part of the "special" 7% that get to see the end of the world, which is much more probably than your 0.025% estimate. I still don't think this is a good model from what I wrote earlier, but 7% would still be alarming!
I personally don't really know where I fall in the AGI doomerism spectrum, but I just don't think this is a good approach for dismissing people's concerns. If there is a flaw in doomer arguments we should find it explicitly.
I'm not a maximalist, but do think a really terrible outcome isn't unlikely, and I feel like I'm constantly pushing *against* my natural cognitive inclination to believe tomorrow is going to be like today, and 5 years from now is going to substantially the same, with a just few tweaks. In fact, I go through whole afternoons without thinking once about AI dangers, and feeling as thought everything's the same as ever. Then something brings AI to mind, and I feel disoriented and creeped out, and I think, "but come on, everything feels normal, can that possibly be true?" And I think through the whole thing again, and reach the same conclusion: a really terrible outcome isn't unlikely. I do very occasionally have the thought that if our species is going to be annihilated, I'm sort of glad I'm one of the ones here to see it. But the occasional thrill of that is WAY more than balanced off by my distress about my daughter meeting some terrible end.
I think my modeling goes something like; end of human race 5%, major progress towards utopia 20%, major progress towards a dystopia, 20%, general acceleration on current trajectory 35%, unknown unknowns 20%.
The industrial revolution changed the world. The atom bomb changed the world. The internet changed the world. I don't think believing that AI will change the world is the result of a "the most special time in world history is when I'm alive" prejudice. To be sure, there are some extreme views about exactly how much AI will change things, but I don't know that those views should be off the table a priori.
"The industrial revolution changed the world. The atom bomb changed the world. The internet changed the world."
Thank you! That was _exactly_ what I thought when I saw "...that the world is going to mostly go on the way that it has, always the best bet you can make..." in Freddie deBoer's essay.
He does have a point that AI has a history of hype, and it is reasonable to do some discounting of the predictions of major effects based on specifically that history, but that still isn't a strong object level argument.
There have been a lot of conversations lately on ACX about what "change the world" means. Lots of things can and do change how we live our lives, and that's not new for humanity. A previous discussion thread looked at specific 40-year timespans where the original poster thought life didn't change that much, but several of us disagreed and pointed out how much changed within that time period even though it seemed intentionally selected to not involve a lot of change.
Anyway, those of us who are saying AI isn't special are not implying a lack of change, even world-changing levels of change. We're saying that major change is actually the norm, and that even if AI represents major change this is within normal bounds. Killing all of humanity would obviously not be normal, and transhumanist immortality would also not be normal. So arguing for transformative but not by as much as the maximalist positions seems to be Freddie's argument. If so, I agree.
I take your point, but over the sweep of human history, I don't think major change is the norm, certainly not major technological change. Until the industrial revolution most people lived agrarian lives, and technological advance was slow and gradual. We're so used to our historically anomalous fast pace that now people only count armageddon or transhumanist immortality as abnormal.
I'm wondering. Could we develop a metric for what would count as "major change" in terms of the difference between how life is like at a particular place and time, and what it was like X years later, where X is intended to encompass a person's lifetime or similar. Specifically, they are old enough to remember the first date, and can examine the level of change by the second date. I'm thinking 40-60 year gap.
Then, could we examine how much actually changed during that time period, and determine if a random sampling of periods did or did not have "major change" as we define it?
My gut tells me that we would count most or all post-Industrial-Revolution dates as constituting "major" and a large number but far less common before that. Before the Industrial Revolution I would expect location to matter much more, such that some places might be having "major" change while others are quiet, and vice-versa.
I can't rule out that if we really knew history (even as much as modern scholars, let alone people living at that time), we would consider almost all eras to show "major" levels of change, even compared to modern definitions.
Do you feel up to defining "major"? Technological would be a part of it, but can't be all of it. The fall of the Roman Empire, in part and then in whole, would certainly be "major" even without any new technology. I don't think I would count the founding of Rome as "major" because at first it affected so few people.
Well, there are changes that people will feel to be personally major ones in their lives (476 in Rome, 1453 in Constantinople, the Black Death, Columbus). But there's a real sense in which those event don't fundamentally affect the way human beings live together, or the kinds of lives they have. You could take a Roman engineer and put him in 17th century Britain and I don't think he would have a hard time picking up work. Technological unemployment might be a useful measure. When Gutenberg came along, that was world-changing--when the expensive scribes got put out of business and books were mass-produced and disseminated, that led directly to the Reformation and arguably to democratic revolutions.
Well, betting on bad odds is sort of our species' signature move. It's how the future learns wisdom, looking back at our follies and saying "Welp, not doing THAT again. Onward! To new and different mistakes!"
We *are* in (or rather, at the end of) a "special" period in development. Most of it happened in the 20th century, and while AI will be associated with the 21st century, it is the last gasp of that trend. There is a credible potential for it to be transformational (to the degree of "the concept of money becomes obsolete") that you simply want to *guess* will not happen.
Mmmm, I think the evidence is strong that the period of greatest human development was around 1860 to 1960 and that the returns from scientific and technological development of the past 60 years have been wildly disappointing relative to that baseline. In that sense we missed the special period.
Either way, there is very little sense in using statistics to try to guess *when* that period would happen, if we can consult a history book and see that it has already happened.
Also, there is no point in using statistics to try to guess if various adolescent fantasies about Dyson-sphere powered galactic colonialism (or nightmares about AI manifesting grey-goo) will come true. One can just point to the insurmountable engineering obstacles. Or one can acknowledge that they are merely "adolescent fantasies", and not consider them a serious idea worthy of debate.
Nice essay! I think that the 19th century rise of the chemical industry and discovery of 42 of the natural chemical elements ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_chemical_element_discoveries ) and Darwin's and Maxwell's work are at least within a factor of 2 or 3 of 20th century advances.
( am I misreading, or is the space race omitted from your essay? Arguably the lunar landings themselves didn't change peoples' lives, but weather satellites and GPS did. )
Probably true, but I was commenting about an essay on the 20th century (albeit a "long" 20th) and contrasting it with the 19th. While AI started in the 20th, it looks more like a technology of the 21st (particularly LLMs, other big neural nets, and systems containing them - presumably leading to AGI).
I think we've actually lived through fairly uninteresting times for the past twenty-ish years. I suspect when the history books are written the 1940s and 1990s will get most of the focus out of the past century. And the present will be seen as an interlude between the 1990s and the next world historical period. Like the 1880-1910 or 1820-1850 period in the US.
I think every time period is important and critical. But we certainly don't treat them that way. A lot of history mentions the start of things (often a somewhat artificially invented start) and when they become big enough to make "sudden" changes.
I think you're right about technology. The technological change I saw in my childhood, and even more so what my parents lived through, seems to me much bigger than anything that's happened in the last 25 years.
But sociologically...? Contrariwise, it feels to me like there is greater upheaval, division, and discontent around social shibboleths and norms than at any time since maybe the first decades of the 20th century -- which arguably led to the unspeakable horrors of the mid 20th century.
I think most of those trends really came out of the '90s. Like politically polarized parties, party line votes, political correctness/wokeness, impeachment hearings as political tactics, etc. Though of course they've grown and somewhat changed over time.
Strong agree, and I've made similar points before. I don't think the current generations have any idea what real change even looks like, so we think what we are seeing now is big. It's been unusually quiet in real terms since probably the early 90s at least.
If you were living a fairly cosmopolitan existence then the technology wasn't such a big deal. Big changes have been in the developing world, where you went from living in your little village, to living in your little village with a cell phone and internet. These mass migrations from Africa to Europe have been made possible with information technology.
Relatively mild mass migrations, compared to much of history. Between 1820 and 1850 the population of the US *tripled*, mostly from immigration. The US also expanded from the Mississippi river all the way to the west coast, taking half a million square miles of land from Mexico. It's hard to comprehend that kind of massive change in 30 years. Then, the number of immigrants skyrocketed after 1880, and the US built a colonial empire in that 40 year period, conquering Cuba, the Philippines, Hawaii, and various islands around the world.
No modern country is seeing anywhere near the frequency and magnitude of the changes the US saw then. And we consider those quiet years! WWI and WWII were far more massive in scale and scope, and set off very significant changes in the post war years.
If you say we are living in uninteresting times, are they uninteresting for the individual alive today, or for future historians? I am talking about changes on the lives of individuals. You could live on your farm in the US in the 1800s and milk a cow every day of your whole life, even if US population tripled over 30 years. Population % change was faster back in the old days, but with a much smaller population to start with. And migration within borders, and within EU for example is quite a lot if you consider numbers of people rather than % of population.
I guess I see technology as the probable driver of the sociological change that has been happening worldwide. People spend a lot of their time on screens in third world countries, and previously they didn;t even have TV or phones.
They're uninteresting for both the individual and for historians. For historians, we're in a period of extremely low military and political change - few wars, few boundary changes, few changes in government (not elections, but entirely new governments). Cultural historians will find interest, but that's literally true of every period of time ever, at least for periods when we have enough records to do anything about it. In terms of individuals, as a percent of the population, it's much more likely that an 1850 person lived in multiple countries and undertook extraordinarily difficult tasks to get to where they wanted to go. Someone born in Ireland who moved to England, then the US east coast, then US midwest, then US west coast (each of which had vastly different standards of living, from urban to pioneer) is not an uncommon story. That would be like a significant number of people leaving central Africa to move to Brazil and then go live in the Amazon. I don't think that's a very common type of story today. Even the immigration we do have affects far fewer percent of people than it used to. The percent is important, rather than raw numbers, because if you're moving 20% of your population that affects everybody and everything in your country. If you're moving 1%, it's really not. More than half the population of Ireland moved to the US over a 50 year period (8.2 million total population in 1841, and 4.5 million moved to the US by 1920). Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Asians also came in similarly large numbers in that same time period.
The decades where everyone thought global realignment was going to happen because of China, 9-11/Iraq, and the financial crisis, and then it just didn't happen.
I half-agree with you, Freddie: "it's not going to be very different for the majority of us whatever way AI turns out" is the most likely outcome. I don't believe in either the dystopia or the utopia, there is never going to be post-scarcity anything because what business on earth runs on "our productivity is so high and it is so cheap to make that we are giving this away for free"? Oh, this time it's gonna be different because Fairy Godmother AI is so productive and so smart? Then a totally new economic system is going to have to be implemented, I hope you enjoy the fall of capitalism because while it may be a bad system, it's the one we're currently running on, and history tells you what happens when you suddenly pull the rug from under it.
On the other hand, I disagree with you because we *are* special. There aren't any real dogs, dolphins, whales or elephants engaging in discussion on the Internet. Koko was not able to speak sign language. Our sister and cousin hominid species are gone, either absorbed by us or defeated in the battle of natural selection. We're so damn *lonely* for an equal intelligence that we believe in aliens and AI. No matter how much people go on about how we're only animals and use terms like "non-human animals" and how much they wuv their fur-babies and are their Mommy/Daddy, your dog or cat or rat or snake is not a human child, is not a human in any way, and is not your equal.
So we want AI to be our brain child (literally), a consciousness and/or intellect equal to or even greater than ours, but different, so we're not alone in the house anymore. I don't think we're going to get there, but we've managed at this moment - which *does*, unfortunately, make it special - to entangle ourselves in a net where computers (whether you want to talk about coding or AI or the Internet or whatever damn thing) are vastly important to the way we live now. Where the answer to "how do I get a good job that pays well?" is "learn to code" (or it was, up to recently).
People living at the time of the Industrial Revolution *were* living in a special time that changed the world (see climate change activism, if nothing else, about how that worked). Depending on how AI goes, we may be living in a similar time. ChatGPT and the rest of it is something genuinely new.
I think the problem will continue to be humans, not the AI; greed, fear, avarice, misplaced idealism and the rest of it making us pin our hopes on getting the Fairy Godmother AI. That's why I think the appeals for a moratorium will go nowhere; everyone is afraid of missing out, of not being the first with a product to market - whether that be "We can't let China beat us!" or "We can't let Microsoft beat us!"
The end result will be "them that has, will get and them that hasn't, will be left without" and, if we're particularly stupid, putting all our eggs into the one basket of "the AI is so smart, let it run our economy/our political system" and then Humpty Dumpty has a great fall.
>what business on earth runs on "our productivity is so high and it is so cheap to make that we are giving this away for free"?
You're describing like the ideal business model for the modern tech industry, and several products have pulled it off (Google search, Facebook, YouTube, etc). This is like the main advantage to turning business logic into software and then running it on machines, you can drive the marginal cost of serving another customer to near zero.
I'll concede that this only has been achieved so far in information products. I think you need more advanced robotics to pull it off for physical goods.
Except all the companies that used to do "buy our package one time for good" have now switched to "software as a service" which is hugely annoying to me. We're paying €X per month for a software package of email etc, that we will be paying forever and a day as long as we use this, which before we could have bought for a one-off price. It's not like we're doing anything with the fancy bells and whistles add-ins.
Youtube has gone to monetisation and ads, Facebook is using ads and trying to flog services, Google - if you had not noticed - has the "sponsored" search results (and ads too, if you permit 'em).
Uh, well sure, someone is paying for it, but users receive the services of YT, FB, and Google for free. They literally "get it for free" because it's so cheap to serve them that you can make money off the side effects of them existing as users on your platform. This is a business model innovation as much as it is a technological innovation.
Sure, business is never going to do something for totally free, without the expectation of making money off it somehow, but for opportunity cost reasons alone. I don't really think anyone is arguing this, I suspect you're engaging with a strawman.
Radio and TV were free for decades based on ads, and definitely not because it was "so cheap to serve them." It was because that's how people could monetize the product. Notably, to get a physical product (buying seasons of a TV show, for instance), you still had to pay money for it. Information services that are cheap to replicate can work with a subscription model or an ad model. This isn't new with Google, in the 1930s we were already there. Then Google didn't innovate the business model, whoever mass marketed the radio did.
You're missing the word "marginal." Setting up broadcast towers is a high upfront fixed cost, but then there is zero marginal cost to serving an additional customer. This drives you to "post scarcity" business models. Historically we have seen this in nonrival services like radio/tv broadcasts. But if you drive the marginal costs of anything to near zero, business models of this type become attractive.
Building Facebook, YouTube, and Google search also have high upfront costs, engineers and data centers are expensive. Once you have those, though, serving additional customers is nearly free.
Training models: very expensive. Running inference: dramatically cheaper than training but not quite "round to zero" yet.
Have any of you ever come upon a model that describes population density as a fractal pattern, where the highest density is in the very center and the lowest density in the very edges (or maybe a model with many clusters of population that are separated by areas with population density=0)?
I'm somewhat fed up with the "missing middle" rhetoric and I'd love to be able to refer to a model that shows that ideally, any density is surrounded by areas of both lower and higher density. Related material is also welcome.
I am not a city planner/engineer/architect, but these subjects are one of my hobbies. I advent seen anything like what you are describing, but have thought about it myself. You could probably use census data to do this to a certain degree.
Can you elaborate on your issues with "missing middle" debate and also how data of this type would play into that?
The "missing middle" proponents point out that there's a niche for 2-4 story buildings in between highrises and the suburbs, but I feel like it's often stated like this 2-3 story density could and should swallow up everything else, especially the suburbs. I miss a mention of how at the periphery of the 2-4 story "middle", before you reach area suited and/or designated for agriculture/industry/nature, there exists a niche for suburbs. And outside the suburbs there exists a niche for the population occupied with the primary industries.
I've seen a pattern approximated by regulation within cities - regulations like "no place should be more than x time or distance from a park/a school/a fire department". But I've never heard of "no one density should be x time or distance from another density" . I guess it's redundant, because these things figure themselves out (I guess Alain Bertauds "Order Without Design" says something about this). But I'd love a predictive model anyway, for geek reasons.
The "Missing middle" is named as such not because it doesnt exist - it exists very much in Europe, and is found somewhat more rarely in the US, just like you pointed out - but for many years now it's been under-represented in new construction in the US.
"Imagine that in the year 2025, a new virus occurs somewhere on Earth. This virus has a mortality estimated in the range of 0.1–1.0%. Not much later, scientists discover two things. One discovery is encouraging: there is a small number of people who are naturally immune, and who can transmit their immunity to others. The more disturbing discovery is that their immunity is transmitted only sexually. If one has intercourse with an immune person, one can acquire a partial, but not complete, degree of sexually transmitted immunity.
The medical authorities proceed to advise everyone to seek intercourse with one or multiple immune persons. Some consent, others do not. The former generally become immune, but only partially; the latter are usually not immune.
Because the partly immunized are still susceptible to infection, some of them are pressuring the medical community to find a way to immunize the nonconsenting. A brilliant doctor invents a procedure that can immunize people without fullblown sexual intercourse: required is only penetration, by an immune person, with a penis-like object—a medical dildo. . . . Alas, only a small number of additional persons agree to receive immunization by dildo. The rest object that penetration by dildo is too similar to intercourse for them to consent to: after all, receiving dildo penetration would ordinarily count as cheating on their partners.
Alternate response: One potential course for society in this scenario is as follows.
(1) Dildoings are not made mandatory. Everyone looks askance at the brilliant doctor, wondering why *this* was his chosen path for his research, but he did have IRB oversight, and someone points out that Barry’s always been weird. He is generally avoided at conferences.
(2) Research into a normal vaccine continues. In the meantime, voluntary medical dildoing is available at government expense. Conservative news networks make much of *your* government dollars paying for other people's dildoing, but the nation’s leaders hold their course in the name of public health.
(3) A less weird doctor develops a less weird vaccine.
(4) Since vaccines and dildoing are not equally invasive, a vaccine mandate is now more seriously considered. During debate, one legislator rises to offer the position that, if you think about it, being vaccinated isn't all that different from being dildoed. There is a long silence, and everyone in the chamber gives him a strange look, after which debate continues without further comment on this line of reasoning.
(5) In a normal country, a mandate might not pass, or one might pass with reasonable exceptions or limitations. For the sake of argument, though, let's assume that this is the nation of Humorstan, and the mandate passed there goes further than any policy seen in the US during the COVID pandemic. Vaccination is required. Full stop, no exceptions, no ‘you don’t have to get it but it’s a condition of going to school/work/etc,’ for whatever reason, Humorstan's leadership is drunk at the wheel and instead of trying to balance bodily autonomy interests with public health interests, it just slams the gas and careens into the autocratic abyss. Government is literally tracking everyone down and making sure they get vaccines and boosters, on penalty of fines and arrests. This assumption is silly, but hey, we started our journey at medical dildos.
(6) Most people get vaccinated.
(7) Some people object to the vaccination, on the grounds that being vaccinated and being dildoed are, to them, not all that different, and thus the mandate is like rape.
(8) Only the government of Humorstan foresaw this, and there is a special provision in the law. It states that anyone objecting to vaccination on the grounds that “being vaccinated is like being dildoed, so this is like rape” is offered a choice. They can (a) receive a vaccine, or (b) push a button which will determine, at random, whether they receive a vaccine by force or a dildoing by force.
(9) Strangely, vanishingly few people in the “being vaccinated and being dildoed are analogous” crowd choose option b. It’s almost as though it’s a bad analogy and being vaccinated is in fact very different from being dildoed, but the elders of Humorstan choose to keep their peace rather than make a big fuss of it.
(10) Eventually, the pandemic subsides and life moves on. Barry's medical dildo research continues. Everyone wonders where the heck he keeps getting funding.
The button-pushing argument is an interesting one. But it misrepresents my argument as presupposing that vaccination and dildoing are equivalent. The argument makes no such presupposition. Notice the paragraph on page 5:
> Sentence 10 is not the conclusion that nonconsensual vaccination is exactly as wrong as sexual assault. The conclusion is simply that nonconsensual vaccination is impermissible: it may perhaps be less wrong, to be sure, but it is wrong. Likewise, sentence 18 is not the conclusion that medical harassment is exactly as bad as sexual harassment. It is simply the conclusion that medical harassment is not to be permitted.
Also notice the footnote:
> I have also encountered the opposite opinion. An anonymous referee points out that nonconsensual vaccination sometimes yields lifelong adverse effects, whereas sexual assault sometimes does not. Hence, depending on further details, nonconsensual vaccination may in certain cases be worse than sexual assault.
(1) Is this hypothetical 2025 near-Earth one in which the concept of ‘dildoculation’ has existed for centuries, is widespread and commonplace, and has eliminated a variety of diseases that were previously large causes of mortality? To the point that people generally now think nothing of requirements that they or their families be barred from accessing certain schools, professions, or international travel unless they are pre-emptively dildoculated for disease, and people who "fear the poke" are a small minority generally thought of as kooks and conspiracy theorists but mostly left to their own devices unless some kind of pandemic raises the specter that their unpoked-ness could cost the lives of their fellows? If so, this society’s sexual mores and attitudes are probably so wildly different from our own that trying to map “what they’d do” to “what we’d do” would be pointless.
(2) If, on the other hand, your answer to #1 is “no,” then you haven’t really made an effective analogy to vaccines. It's just a weird dildo hypothetical, and one can't practically map "how society should engage with hypothetical dildo medicine that isn't comparable to vaccines" over to "how society should engage with vaccines."
> has eliminated a variety of diseases that were previously large causes of mortality
Smallpox to my knowledge is the only highly lethal disease that was eliminated through vaccination. Do you have other examples in mind?
Notice in any case that in my thought experiment we are talking about vaccines that confer only partial immunity, which makes them unlikely to eradicate anything.
> people generally now think nothing of requirements that they or their families be barred from accessing certain schools, professions, or international travel
You must be living in a fairly small bubble if you think people 'generally' think nothing about those things.
You make an interesting point that people would probably think differently from us under your highly counterfactual circumstances. But I doubt that it matters in practice. Those people would have to be very different from us, from a moral standpoint, if they practiced non-consensual sexual immunization for centuries. It is more important in practice to think about what real people think. If medical dildos had eradicated smallpox, then I doubt we would find them much more justified or permissible than we do as it is. The end does not always justify the means. After all, the Nazi doctors tried at Nuremberg had made useful medical discoveries, but they were still hanged. Would it make a difference to you if the Nazis had been doing it for hundreds of years?
"If medical dildos had eradicated smallpox, then I doubt we would find them much more justified or permissible than we do as it is."
Original efforts at inoculation/vaccination of, yes, small pox were met with the same kind of horror, mockery, and rejection as your medical dildos hypothetical. But then people noticed "not dying of a fatal illness" or "surviving but being deeply facially scarred", and they dropped the objections.
“Public Nudity Laws are just like RAPE! Most people can’t see it because the clothes just touch the outside of our skin, but what if the only way to hold up our pants was with BUTT PLUGS? What say you now, liberal? For you, maybe there's no difference between pants with a belt and pants with a butt plug, but some people hate pants so much that those two things are THE SAME to them, so you're a RAPIST if you think I should have to wear pants to go to Quiznos.”
“And Seat Belt Laws! Some think nothing of them because the seatbelt just rests gently over their clothing, but what if the only way to attach them was with NIPPLE CLAMPS? Communist and fascist totalitarians might not see any difference between a regular seatbelt and a nipple-clamp safety device, but some people hate seat belts so much that those two things are THE SAME to them, so you're a RAPIST if you think I should have to wear wear a seatbelt while I drive, pantless, to Quiznos.”
Only pants don't need butt plugs, seatbelts don't require nipple-clamp attachments, and vaccines don't need dildos. So trying to make those analogies (amusing though they may be to write) just fails to yield any useful inferences, due to the many *many* significant differences being papered over.
Your analogies seem facetious. Pants and seat belts don't penetrate your body and inject fluids that make lifelong changes to the functioning of your immune system in particular, and of your organism in general. If they did, then similar objections would presumably apply to them.
Friend, I'd accept your pooh-poohing of Freudian implications in your hypothesis much more easily if you didn't use terms like "penetrate your body and inject fluids".
If you'd been in Vienna, by now we'd be reading the Case Study of M.C.
Why does it matter what the consequences are? As long as the victim feels that, for example, wearing clothes is a violation of their bodily integrity, aren't laws that "all persons must be clothed" equivalent to sexual harrassment?
Remember that the definition of sexual harrassment (any form of unwanted verbal, non-verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature with the purpose or effect of violating the dignity of a person) does not distinguish between penetrative and non-penetrative, the presence or absence of long-term effects, or the magnitude of the act.
Now, imagine a group of clothes-rejectors, who view being forced to wear clothing as a violation of their bodily integrity, and I will quote directly from your journal:
"Some people will be given money, or other benefits, in return for consent. The rest will be banned from restaurants; they will be banned from shopping centers; they will banned from trains, airplanes, and buses; and they will be fired from their jobs, and banned from reemployment. Some of these bans will be implemented by the government itself, and others by privately owned corporations. Those who refuse to ban will be banned themselves..."
Could you make the argument "anyone who views clothes as a violation of their bodily integrity is not of sound mind"? If so, how is that different from "anyone who views vaccines as a violation of their bodily integrity is not of sound mind"?
If we assume that both clothes-rejectors and vaccine-rejectors are of sound mind, then the question is: should anyone be allowed to go nude in any public space? Why/why not?
The difference is that vaccines affect one's bodily integrity, whereas ordinary clothes do not. If somebody 'feels' that clothes do that, they should first explain how. For vaccines that explanation is easy: they penetrate your body and introduce foreign substances with lifelong effects. (Normal) clothes don't do that, so the one who 'feels' otherwise must explain what the problem is.
My point is you can put any policy you don’t like into a Rube Goldberg machine and try to turn it into a sex thing, but if you do your output is pretty invariably going to (a) look histrionic and silly, and (b) be so bent out of shape by RG machine processing that by the time its hammered into its new sex thing shape it no longer shares enough in common with the original policy you didn’t like for it to be relevant in a discussion thereof.
“Sure you say you’re okay with kids saying the pledge of allegiance in schools, but what if they pledged allegiance by FELLATING a George Washington statuette? Well for some people those two things are just the same!”
“People say there’s nothing wrong with requiring pasteurization of milk, but what if there were a NEW milk disease that could only be removed from dairy with HUMAN SEMEN? Well for some people…”
“Some believe that the right to own guns should be uninfringed, but what if there were a new hormone gun that could SPONTANEOUSLY TRANSITION YOUR CHILD if they found it unsecured in the closet while playing at a friend’s house? Well...”
"You might be fine with with forcing doctors to wash their hands before a procedure, but what if the best way to disinfect was to give another doctor a HANDJOB?"
So goes the dildo vaccine. I'm even against a good chunk of the policy positions I've critiqued here with this method, but while the results are varying degrees of funny, they’re still not relevant to any real-world policy conversation.
I understand what your point is, but I don't think it is a cogent one. I already explained above why the vaccine-intercourse analogy is grounded in biological reality, whereas your seat-belt and God-knows-what analogies are not.
This is an interesting article! It brought up some questions:
If medical care is held to the same moral and ethical standard as sexual acts, what about individuals below the age of consent? Would immunizing them be permissible in any case? Would the permissibility of immunizing a minor change if the virus had a 100% mortality rate instead of a 1% mortality rate?
A follow-up question:
Is a woman introducing a foreign substance into her baby's mouth (via a bottle, or some other device, or a part of her body) without its consent (as it is impossible for any individual below the age of consent to give consent) permissible?
My take is that it depends. The two extremes: if the foreign substance is milk and the baby is guaranteed to starve without it, I would say yes, because letting babies starve is bad. If the foreign substance is poison, I would say no, because poisoning babies is bad.
So (at least from my point of view) there has to be some amount of wiggle room for the permissibility of something that's intended to have a health benefit, even if the recipient does not (or cannot) consent. The question then becomes: who gets to decide the threshold of "this procedure's health benefit is large enough that it is worth overriding consent"? In most cases, this would probably be whoever enforces the law.
Another follow-up question:
By your reasoning: restraining someone against their will (an extension of a bondage kink, the same way vaccination could be seen as an extension of a dildo), and/or introducing a foreign substance (i.e. lead) into their body via the rapid expansion of gas is sexual assault, no? And yet most police forces do one or the other, ostensibly for the safety and security of the general population. Perhaps it's the case that the concept of a police force is inherently morally impermissible? But if the police weren't around, is there a morally permissible way of preventing someone from doing something morally impermissible to another person?
In most of the cases you describe, people usually think that it is parents who have a moral right to consent (or not) on behalf of their children. Perhaps you disagree with that, but in any case we shouldn't be quick to draw conclusions about adults from premises about children.
I think you are implying in the last paragraph that it is morally impermissible to be unvaccinated, or to communicate (not-on-purpose) a disease, but the first claim seems baseless, and the second depends a whole lot on the details of the case.
Whether the police has a permission to shoot someone depends, once again, on the details. Is it someone who is merely exercising their basic human rights? Then the police may not shoot them, even if it happens to prevent some undesired outcome.
Ok! Let's focus on children for now because it's the murkiest area, and one in which we may be able to test the strength of the argument.
If we accept that parents have a moral right to provide or withhold consent on behalf of their children, the next question would be: why is it that parents are able to consent on behalf of their children for some activities, like breastfeeding, but not other activities, like fellatio?
In both cases, an adult's genitals are entering a child's mouth without their consent (as a child cannot consent) and bodily fluids are discharged. By the same logic you used in your article, both of them are equally impermissible, are they not? I will use the same induction as you:
1) It is impermissible to feed a child semen through nonconsensual
sexual intercourse.
2) It is impermissible to feed a child bodily fluids through nonconsensual sexual intercourse.
3) It is impermissible to feed a child through nonconsensual sexual intercourse.
3) It is impermissible to feed a child through nonconsensual sexual penetration.
4) It is impermissible to feed a child through nonconsensual penetration.
5) As children cannot consent, it is impermissible to breastfeed a child.
How can we resolve this? I hope you'll agree with me when I say that mothers should be able to breastfeed their children, but should not be allowed to provide consent for fellatio on behalf of their children.
What is the difference between the two acts? Breastfeeding is much less sexual than fellatio, and provides more health benefits. As such, although the impermissibility of fellatio can be extended to breastfeeding based on certain similarities in terms of how the actions are carried out (a genital is inserted into the mouth, and after some amount of suction is applied, bodily fluids are discharged), it is their intent and predicted health benefit that sets them apart and makes one permissible while the other is not.
I think the major weakness of your argument is this: with your chained conditionals, it is extremely easy to link any activity that physically affects a child (some of which are permissible) to non-consensual sexual intercourse (which is not permissible).
First, it's not a good idea to focus precisely on what you think is the murkiest area. The murkiest area will likely give you the murkiest conclusions.
Second, you seem to be changing the subject. The article is about (non-)consenting adults. Child vaccination introduces additional puzzles of its own. (This brings us back to the previous paragraph: don't combine multiple distinct problems into one. That will only lead to murkiness.)
Third, there are obviously many areas in which _not_even_ parents are allowed to consent. In fact, there are areas in which even adults are not allowed to consent _for_themselves_. For instance, people cannot sell themselves into slavery.
This leaves open the question: may parents consent to have their children vaccinated? I suspect that the answer is yes, but within limits. Experimental injections should presumably be out of question. Vaccines against diseases to which children are practically invulnerable (e.g. covid) should also be off the table.
Ok! Now that we've established your argument doesn't hold for children, let's move on to adults.
What if we replaced "child" with "coma victim"? It is trivially easy to use chained conditionals to link "a dildo with food in it" to "a spoon with food on it", no?
Or how about this: someone arrested by the police, who no longer wishes to commit crime, is restrained (against his consent). He now only desires to exercise his basic human right to life and liberty, but will continue to be restrained in prison (without his consent) for some time. How is this any more permissible than an individual kidnapped and tied up in bondage gear, then kept in their kidnapper's basement to satisfy some sexual thrill? I could type out the chained conditionals again, if you'd like.
Another example: extortion (harrassing an individual to give up their money) is impermissible. Do you feel the same way about taxation, even if it were used 100% for the benefit of the people?
A third thought: you mentioned in your post above that "In fact, there are areas in which even adults are not allowed to consent _for_themselves_. For instance, people cannot sell themselves into slavery..." I'm assuming that it's the government, or whichever entity that has the capability to enforce the law, that prevents people from selling themselves into slavery, even if the individual does not consent to living a life outside slavery.
Is this not an example of the government overruling an individual's non-consent for "their own good"? Is this acceptable to you, or do you believe that people should be able to sell themselves into slavery?
Alternatively, let's say you're waiting next to train tracks. As a train approaches at high speed, an adult attempts to push past you and leap onto the tracks. As you grab them by instinct, you hear them shout "Let me go!" Is it permissible to restrain them without their consent (an act which, by your logic, is as impermissible as subjecting a nonconsenting adult to sexual bondage) to prevent harm to them and potential life-long trauma to any train operators and bystanders who might witness the scene, or should you let them commit suicide by train?
EDIT: You seem to have ninja-edited this line right at the top of your comment:
> Ok! Now that we've established your argument doesn't hold for children, let's move on to adults.
We have not established any such thing. Children's vaccination still requires informed consent, just like anything else. The only difference is that the right to consent (or not) is exercised by their parents. This isn't specific to vaccination, and it works the same for everything else.
In the rest of your comment you are jumping from one subject to another. There are answers to all of these different issues, but you shouldn't expect it to be the same answer. Coma victims are in someone's charge, just like children. Criminals under arrest are not held under arrest merely 'for the greater good,' but because they have (presumably) committed crimes that warrant their arrest. (Punishment also has a retributive aspect, not only a deterrent one.) My views on taxation are complicated, but the important point for us is that taxation is not a violation of bodily integrity.
> Is this not an example of the government overruling an individual's non-consent for "their own good"?
No, it is an example of the government safeguarding basic and inalienable human rights. Suppose that someone offered to buy you as a slave in return for five trillion dollars, which you could give to anyone you wanted. Then perhaps it would be for your own good if the government allowed you to sell yourself. But it is still impermissible to do so. It's about rights, not goods.
With or without the obvious COVID allegory, what we do now is *obviously* to make the mechanical dildo or whatever available to anyone who wants to use it, and we *don't* force it on anyone who doesn't. What we do to people who try to force other people to submit to mechanical dildoing for the greater good, is left as an exercise for the poetically inclined student.
" A Dutch court on Friday ordered a man who judges said had fathered between 500 and 600 children around the world to stop donating sperm.
The 41-year-old Dutchman, identified by de Telegraaf newspaper as Jonathan Meijer, was forbidden to donate more semen to clinics, the court ruling said. He could be fined 100,000 euros ($110,000) per infraction.
The court also ordered Meijer to write to clinics abroad asking them to destroy any of his semen they have in stock, except doses reserved for parents who already had children by him."
I am only willing to imagine this if you are willing to first imagine that immunity is achieved by kissing Trump's bare butt. A brief kiss gives some immunity -- for full immunity, deep and prolonged smooching is required. And let's not forget about kids' immunity, which your post made me think about thinking about, as not doubt it's intended to.. In the story I'm proposing, a footstool is provided for kids who are too short to reach the cure without aid. Go ahead, think it through, starting with your family. Write out an account and post it. If you are willing to do that, I am willing to think through your fucking cure.
Dildos are not needlessly grotesque? Come on, you're trying to push buttons. How about eating faeces provides full immunity, is that sufficiently disgusting for you?
Oops, but now we're into the territory of faecal transplants which are *already* a thing:
You don't seem to understand the argument, and that's because you don't seem to have read the article... Non-consensual vaccination is regarded by vaccine refusers as disgusting. You seem to be suggesting a similar argument using a non-consensual fecal transplant thought experiment. That, indeed, would also be seen as disgusting by vaccine refusers. If anything, you are proving my point.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'trying to push buttons.' Countless buttons have been pushed these years. I am sure whatever buttons I am dealing with have been pressed into action long ago. What I aim for is to explain to the compulsory vaccinators what they are doing.
"Dildos are not needlessly grotesque?", you ask. No, they are necessarily grotesque. They clarify exactly the point that vaccine refusers have been trying to get across to you for so many years.
But don't you think kissing Trump's butt better captures your objection to what compulsory vaccinators are doing? I mean, it includes the element of being humiliated by an authority one does not respect. Well, maybe it doesn't for some, who might view that task as more like a trip to Friendly's for hot fudge sundaes. I also think Deiseach's example has a lot going for it, because the task necessary for cure is very objectionable to most, but not to all, so then you have coprophiliacs as a stand-in for those happy to get vaxed. I also think your fuck cure analogy loses some of its strength because most of us in the US vaccination virginity ended a long time ago. We have all fucked chickenpox, diphtheria, measles, hepatitis, rubella, mumps, polio, tetanus and whooping cough, and many of us have also slutted around with influenza, shingles, papilloma virus and covid. Consequently, I think to come up with a more pungent and convincing analogy to forced covid vaccination you would do well to make out a spreadsheet with columns representing modes of intake (absorption through skin, anal penetration, cunnilingus, drinking, eating, fellatio, urethral penetration, and vaginal penetration -- plus, of course, just fuckin piercing the subject with a spear). Rows would represent different repellant substances (blood, buggers, ear wax, feces, mucus, pus, saliva, semen, smegma, toe jam, urine, and vomit). Consider each cell carefully, picturing the experience, and choose the one that best captures the deeply objectionable nature of forced covid vaccination. [PS to Carl: example of maleness]
The kink here is common in politics. It's the idea that coercion is the best solution to most problems, and it's a natural belief for people who are used to using the tools of government, which mostly amount to either coercion or handing out cash.
Sure it is. Your analogy is inapt, because vaccination isn't rape, and because you were never required to actually get a vaccination, the requirements were always "you can't participate in such-and-such an activity in the public square unless you're vaccinated." You're certainly free to decline to participate, and prevent any sapping or impurification of your precious bodily fluids.
And the majority is also certainly entitled to put conditions on your participation in public events, when that participation endangers others, or even seems like it might. Few cases are more straightforward than those of communicable disease. That's why you can still be locked up indefinitely if you refuse to take your TB meds, which is a whole lot more intrusive than requiring a vaccination to board a plane or enter a public schoolhouse.
If you reflect on the concept of analogy, you will realize that you can't argue that vaccination is not analogous to rape because it is not identical to rape. For A to be analogous to B, A does not need to be identical to B. (That would be a silly analogy indeed.)
As for your mistaken claim that people were not required to get the vaccine, you ought to read the article, especially the parts regarding consent. Otherwise your argument is no better than that of the sexual harasser who claims that the victim was 'free' to quit her job...
Perhaps, but an analogy should somehow help us reason about the original situation, adding clarity or perhaps a new perspective.
All this analogy does is to take the real-world situation and then swap out "a vaccination" for "a medical dildo". The analogy doesn't clarify the original situation, it presents a strictly worse situation, and then asks us to think about how bad it sounds now. No clarity has been added to the original question.
It's not a Freudian theory. It's an analogy between a) non-consensual intercourse, and b) non-consensual vaccination. The argument establishes that if you don't approve of sexual assault (as I'm sure you don't), then for the same reasons you must also disapprove of non-consensual vaccination. Furthermore, if you don't approve of sexual harassment, as I'm sure you don't, then you also must reject medical harassment, such as in particular vaccine mandates.
Until someone is holding me down and shoving a needle in my arm over my screams of "no, no!", this is not at all analogous to rape.
You don't want to be vaccinated. Cool, you do you. You think mandatory vaccination is a violation of bodily autonomy. Great, you are entitled to hold that opinion. But snappy little "it's just like being made to take a dildo up your ass, heterosexual cis gentlemen, doesn't that make you shiver in fear of sodomy?" analogies are veering into the "my secret kink" and/or "batshit insane" territory, as others are pointing out.
You are replying to a strawman, because you have not read the article. There are multiple degrees of constraint and of sexual assault, not all of which amount to rape. (In fact, the article never uses the term 'rape'.) There is also sexual harassment, which is the sexual analogue to mandatory vaccination.
Because consent is very important. I like both sexual intercourse and vaccines; I do not like being pressured, coerced, or forced into either.
Before the pressure tactics came out, I was trying to volunteer for COVID-19 vaccine trials, once pressure tactics came out (concurrently with general rollout of vaccines.) I was vehemently opposed and resisted until literally threatened with jail time. (I was serving in the Canadian army at the time and was not allowed to even resign as an alternative; while no one was jailed for refusing, that option was on the table, and my chain of command refused to say it would not be used.)
Sure, why don't we dispense with logic and argumentation altogether, and just say what we like and what we don't, right? Answer: because it's not about personal taste, but about basic human rights.
There are some foods whose taste I don't like, but I'd never bother to write long arguments against them. That's where your comment would apply.
> "Coupling the thing you don’t like to something nobody likes"
If my argument is right, then nobody should like either of them.
I feel like it is difficult to communicate to a layperson how AI could have divergent goals. So, I wrote this short story to try and fill the gap. I had intended to publish it on LessWrong, but it got rejected due to a recent uptick in activity. :( Thus, I figured I would post it here. Any feedback is welcome.
I'm hearing a lot about the Supreme Court needing ethics standards because of some stuff some (apparently only republican?) justices received. I don't understand the issue for two reasons:
1. The Supreme Court, by definition, decides what is right and wrong in all situations. All of the justices know that bribery is bad. If any "gifts" attempt to influence their decisions they ought to decline the gifts, using their own judgement.
2. The check on the Supreme Court for this kind of thing is impeachment. If Congress determines a Justice has been improperly influenced then the Justice should be removed.
Is this simply another case of trying to change the political composition of the Supreme Court, like having 15 Justices instead of 9?
Oh you know, when the Supreme Court rules the way the media likes, whether it correspond to the will of the majority or not, they are the last bastions of sober good sense. When they rule the way the media doesn't like, whether it correspond to the will of the majority or not, they are petty sadistic tyrants who probably molest dogs. The majority of pundits and the press stopped their emotional growth in 10th grade, so you have to expect a certain amount of routine hysteria.
That said, it would surprise me greatly if the Supreme Court *didn't* have a code of ethics already, in the sense that there is some set of long-standing traditions, communicated to newcomers, that outline what the Court as a collective expects of its members. It doesn't seem likely they have published it, or talked about it, in part because good judgment suggests that a code about which you have to make a big public fuss is one the letter of which, and not the spirit, is what people are following and want to follow. Drawing careful lines is what you do when you want to be able to color right up to the edges of the lines with impunity.
So like most of the ideas one finds bruited in the popular press, this one would achieve close to the opposite of its stated intentions. It would encourage cynicism and Pharisaic behavior, but -- and here perhaps is the point -- it would provide endless new opportunities for pundits and lawyers (the crew always in favor of new rules) to debate whether the actions of this or that justice had or had not transgressed Article 3, Subparagraph B, Section 99. That's a lot more perenially entertaining (for the class with season tickets to the Colosseum) than just a bunch of Senators each deciding within his own conscience "Does this guy belong on the Court or not?" and if he feels strongly enough in the negative, introducing articles of impeachment.
> 1. The Supreme Court, by definition, decides what is right and wrong in all situations. All of the justices know that bribery is bad. If any "gifts" attempt to influence their decisions they ought to decline the gifts, using their own judgement.
So supreme court justices can murder people if they decide its okay? You seem to be conflating moral legitimacy with legal supremacy. Supreme Court's authority isn't some absolute moral licence but applies in narrowly defined cases
Not at all. They get to decide any and all issues that come before them, and can overturn any lesser rulings. If any justice were to murder someone then I would expect them to be arrested, as usual. Eventually, as with all capital crimes, the crime would be appealed to the Supreme Court, which would then decide whether to hear the case.
Note also that it is the COLLECTIVE opinion of the Court as to whether an action was appropriate or not, given the circumstances. I suppose it is possible that the Court could rule a justice immune to any penalties in solidarity with each other. It is, however, unlikely in the extreme, and if this were possible then we don't actually have a justice system, but a political one.
The Supreme Court doesn't get to decide murder is OK, not even for specific individuals, since that is a decision of the legislature. The Constitution doesn't even say that murder is frowned upon, so they can't say murder for specific individuals is allowed. It would have to be some other constitutionally-guaranteed right they would assert, like "he was trying to quarter himself in my house".
The Supreme Court is known for making things up. They could (without a lot of difficulty) come up with a doctrine which immunizes them from prosecution for all criminal activity. Or read that into the Constitution somehow.
They could, at which point the other two branches of government would decide to come up with some sort of doctrine by which the Supreme Court's "we can murder with impunity" ruling doesn't count, and it would turn out that the other two branches of government control more men with guns than the Supreme Court does.
Rule of Law is a game that everybody agrees to play; if you manage to lawyer your way into a position of absolute power then the other players will decide they don't want to play any more and flip the table, at which point we're back to playing humanity's usual game of "who has the most armed men"
"The Supreme Court is known for making things up."
Yes, like "emanations of penumbras" to legalise abortion, or "it's a god-given natural human right for two - but only two! let's not go crazy here! - members of the same sex to marry".
We weren't hearing any qualms about ethics in those days.
The Supreme Court's willingness to stretch the letter of the law like silly putty is, in some sense, a reflection of the conviction of our elites that democracy doesn't really work. Many of their rulings resulted in changes that should (under the structure originally envisioned) have been carried out by Congress, or by constitutional amendment. But as the people were too uncooperative and backward to actually vote for the needful, it became necessary to implement various things by judicial fiat.
Actually, it seems to me that the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in a nod to social pressure, without any legal basis at all, and without examining any of the ramifications. How are they allowed to rule on it, based on the 10th amendment (any rights not given to the federal government are state or people's rights)? Can a father and son, or mother and daughter, marry, to dodge inheritance taxes? Why, as you intimate, is marriage restricted to two people? Why is it restricted to only humans?
Democrats don't have enough political power right now to carry out an impeachment of a sitting justice. Using the media/public to put pressure on the SC to take matters into their own hands is a lot easier than carrying out an impeachment attempt. This is especially true if the campaign fails to change anything.
I don't think this is ONLY a case of trying to change the political make up of the SC. There are legitimate reasons for the outrage. Regardless of why he received the gifts or who gave them, he didn't report them correctly and is only now amending his reports because of the outrage. Even if the gifts are innocent, this should be enough "bad behavior" for a SC Justice to step down - you lied on an official document! (But I think we should hold our government officials to extremely high standards, much higher than most people probably).
>Is this simply another case of trying to change the political composition of the Supreme Court
Yes for sure, the lefts hysteria about Thomas is.
It is a bad look by Thomas, but I am sure if you dug into the exact arrangements of a good half of high level politicians they would have impeachable enrichment of them and their associates. Look at Hunter Biden, or most of the leadership in congress. There is plenty enough smoke there for Joe Biden to be impeached, probably several times over. But that isn't how the game is played.
At the local level you will have lots of people who keep their hands clean, but the higher up the chain you go, the more compromised and power obsessed the people are generally. The process doesn't select for the righteous or the effective, it selects for other things.
Fair enough, just frustrated with a friend who is very very bright, but very ideological.
90 other scandals involving political favors come and go, he sleeps. Suddenly (because he is fired up about the conservative supreme court), Clearance Thomas is the epitome of corruption and the main thing he wants to talk about.
I am no friend of Thomas, I find his arguments frequently horrid. But the abrupt temperature change from my lefty friends about his misdeeds reminds me of everything I like least about politics.
As someone who read a bunch of Supreme Court cases to kill time, Justice Thomas is by far the most out-there justice. He doesn't believe in settled law, he's stated he doesn't think children have a constitutional right to free speech, he's generally way, way off in his own world.
How young when we're talking about children? Because I think a six year old does not indeed have a constitutional right to demand ice cream instead of broccoli for dinner, sympathetic as I may be to the position.
If he means "minors as the law defines them, that is, under 18" - damn it, stop making me agree with the man. The amount of bratty 17 year olds I'd love to tell "sit down and shut up, you do not have the right to screech in public before you're old enough to shave"... oh, well.
I don't remember which case it was so can't look it up easily. Pretty sure it was about a high school suspending a student for a statement they'd made outside of school grounds. Five judges ruled it violated Free Speech, two said instead the standard was too vague to enforce, one said it was fine because the school had sufficient reason, and Thomas said it was fine because the Founders probably didn't mean the First Amendment to apply to children.
I think I agree on that one; it's very likely the Founders considered only adults, not anyone under the age of 21, to be fully in possession of, and able to use, rights.
It can be argued, for example, whether or not there is such a thing as a right to vote, but nobody is (yet) giving the vote to 12 year olds, even if they in theory possess the right. So maybe it's more correct to say children possess *potential* rights (apart from basic ones like the right to life, the right not to be abused, etc.) that they will come into full possession of upon majority.
The child does not have a constitutional right to ice cream. Nor does the constitution prevent his parents from punishing him for his demand. But if the U.S. government punishes him up for stating his dinner preference, they have indeed violated one of his constitutional rights.
The right one has under the Constitution is to freely express one's opinion without fear of persecution or reprisal for having that opinion. If he is punished for preferring ice cream over broccoli that is a violation, regardless of his age. If he is punished for disrupting a venue, disturbing the peace, if you will, his rights are not violated.
Is a child having a temper tantrum in the aisle of a supermarket over "I want icecream!" expressing his free speech rights, or a kid having a tantrum who can legitimately be scooped up by his mom and brought out to sit in the car until he calms down?
Is she violating his constitutional right by not letting him freely express himself in public? Are the other shoppers going "Look missus, tell your kid to shut up and stop screaming" violating his constitutional right of free speech?
It could also be battlespace prep. It wouldn't surprise me if the majority chose Thomas to write the opinion in SFFA v. UNC and Harvard (the pending major case that could rule race-based affirmative action policies in university admissions[1] are unconstitutional). He's black, which makes it a smidge harder to cry white privilege racism, and he has a very long history of textualism that lends solid depth to Roberts's famous acerbic observation that "the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race, is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
So if the aristocrats want to tarnish that upcoming decision, and justify vigorous opposition to it, what better way to assist than to pre-emptively smear the integrity of the author of the decision?
I always look for the personal and financial interests before I credit pure ideology for the motives of actions like this. And there are plenty of personal and financial interests in that particular case that might line up with painting Thomas as corrupt.
-------------
[1] And elsewhere! It's entirely possible that a sweeping ruling could endanger a wide swathe of DEI policies.
"I am sure if you dug into the exact arrangements of a good half of high level politicians they would have impeachable enrichment of them and their associates"
Then they should be impeached or investigated depending on the accused act. "They all do it" is not an argument against punishment, it's an argument for MORE punishment. I wish more presidents (of any party) were impeached and thrown out, maybe they would start behaving better!
you need to be careful, implementing this idea, less you end up, putting the prosecutors/bureaucracy in a position to control or remove any judge/president/whatever crosses them.
I agree, but I think the popcorn throwing has to be equal opportunity. Not "it's okay for *our* justices to hang out with *our* guys with big yachts, because we are all so Virtuous And Incorruptible And Right Side Of History but the other lot are all Corrupt And Unethical And Bought".
Conservative, liberal, mushy middle - doesn't matter. One rule for all. Otherwise, this is just more "we don't like that the other side are actually doing stuff, even though legislating from the bench was fine and cool when it was our lot doing it".
Sorry, where are the liberal justices accepting huge gifts from their wealthy friends? Did I miss a news article? Or are you trying to argue that not following the originalist doctrine is morally the same thing as taking bribes?
"Ruth Bader Ginsburg boasts the highest potential net worth at $18.1 million with Stephen Breyer a close second at $17.1 million. Both were appointed by former President Bill Clinton.
However, Ginsburg’s actual net worth may be as low as $4.4 million and Breyer’s as low as $5 million. Federal officials are also exempt from disclosing the value of their homes, making an accurate calculation even more difficult."
That actually seem like the number one *wants* to hear - high enough no-one is taking bribes to fund their medical treatment, low enough to be totally plausibly the result of a long and successful legal career - most commercial partners will have more at their age, I'd bet.
So when one becomes a Supreme Court Justice one gives up the right to chill out on big yachts with rich folks? Note: I assume ALL rich folks, even perhaps all folks, have business before the courts.
Would it be OK for Clarence Thomas to hang out on big yachts with, perhaps, George Soros because they are diametrically opposed politically?
Doesn't seem reasonable to make a rule against hanging out with the super-rich. Still, doing it does interfere with an important secondary function of the court, which is to give the public the sense that ultimate arbiters are fair-minded and above being influenced by favors or purely personal preferences.
Good question, but that is not a fair approximation of what has been documented regarding Thomas. What he didn't disclose wasn't just 20 consecutive years of very-expensive travel being paid for by someone else, but also various expensive gifts to him and his wife, and also that same individual buying Thomas's mother's home and then allowing her to continue living in it rent-free.
Thomas and the active political donor involved say that the house purchase was intended for setting up a future Clarence Thomas historical site. Which okay, maybe -- but it is not hard to understand some serious eye-rolling at that belated explanation.
The eye-rolling seems rather justified, as it would be if it was for the benefit of Sotomayor's elderly father or whoever. Moreover it turns out that the Judicial Conference -- the nonpartisan internal body which sets disclosure guidelines for the federal judiciary -- has concluded that Thomas' transactions should have been disclosed and has amended its rules to close that particular "loophole".
So all in all, I agree with the GOP U.S. Senator whose comment on the above was simply, "It stinks."
That's irrelevant to the disclosure requirement that I commented on.
I'm not aware of any failure-to-recuse arguments being advanced regarding this Thomas benefactor. There was apparently one case in which this benefactor was the owner of a company which owned a company that had business before the Court, but it seems to be pretty indirect and nobody has yet argued that Thomas should have recused.
(There have been arguments that Thomas should recuse himself from cases related to Jan 6th, because his spouse was actively involved behind the scenes applauding and encouraging the efforts to overturn the November 2020 election. In theory I agree with that idea but it's an irrelevant argument: recusal is a strictly judicial decision that can be enforced only via appeal to a higher court, and there is no higher court than the Supreme Court.)
Why have all of the sub parts of review as links? The words that comes to mind is "ridiculously confusing". The set-up makes me uninclined to read any complete review.
I had someone else collate the reviews. My guess is they used section headings and Google automatically included them in a ToC. I'll ask them not to next year.
It'd honestly be sorta great to have one year where every single book review was secretly ghostwritten by Scott. A true test of writerly aptitude: can he successfully artistically-ITT dozens of different commenters?
Also precommitting myself to not leaving novella-length book review comments, nor savaging ones I dislike. If you're reading it, it's for you, and all that...
I believe the idea is is "do as many as you feel like". Ideally, those should be selected at random so that most reviews get read and scored by at least a few people, but if you just want to do the ones you are interested in, no on will stop you.
There are climate related concerns / fearmongering about the "La Niña" phase ending and "El Niño" starting. It looks like a topic very hard to research, does anyone here have insight to that or can point me in a promising direction?
So I'm not an expert, but I have taken graduate level courses in physical oceanography and currently work in marine/estuarine ecology (on the west coast even where the ENSO cycle is particularly relevant!), so I'm perhaps slightly better than google and/or your average well-read layperson. Do you have any specific questions?
- Will the increase in average temperature in 2023 and 2024 be significantly higher (because of the phenomenon)?
- When will we hit 2016 levels again.
- Will there be an increase in weather events because of that (and how to even measure that)?
The bigger question for me is how much I should concentrate on climate change compared to the other pressing issues. Nearly all news about climate change is bad, which makes me think the reporting is heavily biased. It's not what I'd expect for a topic where we roughly know what's going on since the 1970s.
I believe that we are officially out of the La Nino, and in a neutral phase, with a somewhat greater than 50% chance to transition into El Nino by mid-to-late summer, 80% chance by the fall. Transitioning from La Nina to neutral or El Nino does mean that temperatures will rise, especially on the west coast.
For the second:
2016 was ~+2.0 on NOAAs MEI ENSO index (see here: https://psl.noaa.gov/enso/mei/ for more), and had a Sea Surface Temperature (SST) anomaly of ~2.5. We aren't very good at predicting exact index values in advance, but values that high are relatively infrequent in the past 50ish years, and the model averages currently predicts a SST anomaly over between 1.5 and 2 degrees (with none of the models predicting values as high as 2016). See page 24 of this NOAA presentation for the model predictions: https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf
For the third question:
I'm the shakiest on this one, but my understanding is that El Nino generally has slightly _fewer_ storms than La NIna (thus the immense amount of rain that the west coast got during this past La Nina cycle)
As for how much you should concentrate on climate change: in my opinion: almost none. Beyond supporting common sense climate policies like a carbon tax, nuclear energy, and research into battery technology, there isn't much you can do on a personal level, and it's not very helpful to follow the nitty gritty. And yes, almost all of the media reporting is pretty bad and not worth the paper it's (digitally) printed on, in my opinion.
Now, the second half of that "relative to other pressing issues" complicates things. I personally think that we pay too much attention to too many issues, but that's starting to get pretty far afield from the original topic.
I hope these were helpful, and I'd be happy to respond more, although we are starting to reach the edge of what I'd feel comfortable/confident talking about with regards to ENSO
I had always heard there were the same number of storms, but El Nino shifted them south and La Nina shifted them north, is that wrong? When I lived in Southern California we would get soaked during El Nino years. Now I'm in the Bay and it seems about the midpoint where there's the same number of storms during both.
Since I was learning about ENSO stuff from a marine ecology perspective, storms and atmospheric effects were much less of a focus than the currents and ocean temperatures so my confidence level in saying anything about it is much lower. I think that, broadly speaking, it's generally correct that what the ENSO cycle is doing is just shifting things back and forth across the Pacific (with some knock-on affects that happen elsewhere), so It's likely that the total number of storms globally is the same.
"During El Nino...rainfall is below average over Indonesia and above average over the central or eastern Pacific."
But I note that I am confused, because we are just on our way out of a decently strong La Nina, and California had near record rainfall, plus I found the following sentence on a USGS page:
"There is a great contrast of the storm characteristics during the El Nino phase vs. the La Nina phase, with the largest scale, southerly extensive winter storms generated during El Nino."
I've also come across other sites suggesting that there are more tornado and hail storms during La Nina in the US, but that might have been in reference to the south east. I think that storm affects are much noisier, and also vary a lot more buy sub region (like you mentioned Northern to Southern California), and I feel very much unqualified to say too much about it.
I'm starting to feel sorry for California - they don't have rain, it's a problem. They do have rain, it's a problem. Is there any Goldilocks 'just right' amount and time?
It's not a very well-understood phenomenon. Government weather agencies might have some info about it, they are usually the ones predicting when they will form.
Anyone know if night owls were a thing before the light bulb? Hard to envisage candlelight being enough for someone to maintain that they perform better in the later hours / early hours. Seems much more plausible that people are overstimulated these days and thats the dominant factor. I know nada tho.
I note that if you picture a band of hunter gatherers on the savannah or wherever, you might want to have someone on watch during the night - night owls have a role even in very primitive conditions
It was pretty common across settled per-modern cultures to have hearth fires burning more or less continuously, or at the very least on cold nights and around the clock in winter. And in pastoralist/nomadic cultures, campfires were ubiquitous.
Fires were kept going primarily for the obvious purposes of warmth and cooking, but they also would provide a decent amount of light, usually enough to read by if you're sitting close to the fire at a good angle, your eyes are adjusted to the light level, and you have decent vision. And they provide plenty of light for less demanding visual tasks like cleaning, sewing, cooking, etc.
It seems like if there were not people who performed better at night pre-lightbulb, you gave the exact reason why we can't conclude anything from it! I tend to be a morning person, so on days when I sleep in I'm just kinda fucked. If people with a predisposition to be better functioning at night existed before adequate artificial light, they would presumably be similarly screwed.
There is both the impact of artificial light / stimulus, *and* there are genes to a more limited extent. Total sleep time for populations in developed nations has reduced over the last century owing to the former.
A self-styled night-owl could adjust to an early schedule, and vice versa. People misunderstand what a chronotype is. Our circadian rhythm is impacted by sunlight exposure (or bright light), social cues, and eating schedule. If you traveled to the other side of the world, you'd shift your circadian rhythm; there is nothing special about a particular hour of the day in itself qua sleep. What matters is our routine, and light. The rest is arbitrary preference. Modern living has allowed people to completely fuck up their circadian rhythms at home. Ultimately, humans are diurnal - that means everyone. A night-owl just means having a propensity for staying up late, it does not mean "creature of the night" - your hormones function basically the same way. Staying up all night is made possible and popularized owing to bright artificial light (notwithstanding the need for night-shift workers).
Another understated factor is that younger people on average will have a preference, mostly social, to stay up late. As we join the workforce, our schedules shift back again. It's not impossible for you to have a conventional sleep schedule just because you regularly stayed up all night in your early 20s.
Years ago I read about a study where they put people in a basement with no indication of what time it was. People's daily cycles ended up being anywhere from 20 to 30 hours. People with shorter cycles tended to be morning people in their normal lives, and people with longer cycles tended to be evening people.
Apparently R L Stevenson's late night "waking hour", as described in that article, was fairly routine in the Middle Ages. People would go to bed not long after dusk, sleep for three or four hours, and rise around midnight. They would then potter about for an hour or two, maybe have a snack and a drink, before toddling back to bed for another sleep until around dawn or before (depending on the season).
Also in those days, in the UK at least, night-time activities in towns were hampered by curfew and travel restrictions. Towns such as London were surrounded by huge 30 feet walls, studded with gates which were closed at dusk and not reopened until dawn.
Shortly after the gates had been closed, curfew bells would sound, and after that anyone the night patrols caught outdoors within the walls without a pass would be thrown in jail until the next morning. Also, all fires had to be extinguished (hence the name "curfew" meaning cover fire"). So there wasn't much to do besides sleep!
Well, yes and no, that "waking hour" in the middle of the night is preserved at least in Orthodox Christian Monastaries where there is typically a Matins church service held around that time.
I also frequently wake for it even though I rarely pray during it. (Shameful sinner that I am, I'm more frequently reading your comments here during that time.)
Huh, sorry. That's odd, I just tried it and it seemed to be fine for me. It's an article that describes one researcher's investigation into "biphasic sleep," a medieval to early modern age habit of going to sleep at dusk, sleeping several hours, then arising around midnight for an hour or two of wakefulness, during which people might walk around, visit, talk, screw, eat, et cetera, followed by another period of sleep until dawn. This resolving the conundrum of "what did people do before artificial light when e.g. in winter the hours of darkness significantly exceeded the hours of sleep required?" How extensive the habit was is I think a matter of academic debate.
I am guessing that historically (probably especially in the winter side of high latitude places), people have a historically attested habit of getting up in the middle of the night. For prayers, or to do a bit of this or that. probably because they went to bed after dark, but in the winter it can be dark for 13-14 hours in a lot of places. So you aren't going to sleep the whole time.
Considering that there appears to be good evidence of a "night owl" gene mutation which prompts some people to happily stay up late and sleep late, I'd say night owls have probably been part of civilization for a very long time!
And the existence and persistence of the gene makes sense, because in a preindustrial society, *someone* has to be awake and alert through the night to protect herds/flocks/settlements/etc.
Who knows, that need could explain why even non-night owl people tend to want to stay up late and sleep late during their teens/young adulthood (and why high schools should have later start times).
I was a night owl long before I had a smartphone or late-night internet access, so I don't buy that it's overstimulation. And the term "night owl" comes from Shakespeare.
I keep coming up against situations where my instinct is that I need to code a tool to help make the coding easier during a project.
To give concrete examples:
- I made a quick-n-dirty system of batch scripts that did primitive dependency management because using official repos in established package managers looked like a sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut solution.
- I have a thing and I want to give it wrappings for several popular languages (C, C#, Python, Javascript, etc). I'm thinking of writing something that autogenerates the wrappings every time I change the api.
- I'm working with a fairly complicated data structure (nothing insane, but it's not intuitive to reconstruct the "real shape" of the data from the JSON in debug print statements.) I'm considering building a graphical tool to visually display the data so I can see it better during debugging.
The downsides of creating these tools are obviously time lost, plus you've littered your project with lots of little project-specific helper tools you now need to document, and that anyone who comes in has to learn how to use.
I'm never sure whether I'm going about things in the smartest way. I've realised that I have *no idea* how often other people run into this kind of situation, or what they do about it when they get there.
In most cases I either don't find a generic tool online (in many cases because I don't know what to search for); or the generic tool is heavyweight and would require me to alter my project's layout in a way that I don't want to do; or the generic tool is too complicated to understand and I don't want to spend the time getting to grips with it, just to have it turn out that it doesn't actually do what I want; or, sometimes, the generic tool has an introverted and byzantine UX and I don't want to have to deal with remembering it all if I come back to the project after a long time.
What's the real prevalence in projects of little project-specific helper tools? How reasonable is it to come in to work on an existing project and find that it uses a bunch of custom and unfamiliar systems? What do the rest of you do?
I work in an org with thousands of developers. Our solution is to have dedicated teams for each of the main tools that everyone uses.
A successful tool needs to have:
1. Clear ownership. Without an owner, tools rot over time.
2. Defined scope. A tool that solves one problem cleanly is much better than one that partially solves lots of different problems but is unreliable.
3. Simple instructions for usage. This is the most important, so it deserves some elaboration.
Notes on simplicity:
- The best interface for your tool is no interface. For example, test infrastructure should run automatically whenever a change is checked in, without any explicit action from the developer.
- You can't depend on the user to follow a process with more than one step. A task that's a single step in the mind of the user (e.g., "build", "deploy") needs to be achievable with a single command.
- No matter how good your documentation is, no one will read it until they've started getting value from your tool first. That means the tool itself needs to show how it's meant to be used, perhaps with a single example.
- Visualizing data is extremely powerful. I've sometimes figured out complex bugs just by examining the right chart. But what makes a visualization successful depends heavily on context, so I don't know of any general guidelines.
- The best examples of visualizing information are in video games. My current favorites are Democracy 3 and Victoria 3. They both require managing complex political and economic simulations, but they succeed at making it actually fun.
>The downsides of creating these tools are obviously time lost
SWE's aren't assembly line workers; trying to measure output with "time" is almost always going to lead to faulty accounting.
IME, unless you're one of the very atypical devs that's able to work continuously on the same project for long hours with no loss in efficiency, the primary currency in software dev is not "time", but "motivation and ability to focus on a problem". If you are *motivated* to create a tool that removes barriers to actually focusing on the problem, you're spending time to create dividends in the resource that your customer actually cares about you spending.
(To be taken with a grain of salt, as this is somewhat coupled with the experience of ADHD/executive dysfunction management, which may or may not apply to you)
As you add programmers to a project, the cost of any customization rises, because the time it takes your coworkers to learn & maintain the custom thing, and the workarounds-upon-workarounds you end up having to pile on to address cases that weren't relevant when the thing was first built, quickly overwhelm the time the thing initially saved you.
The company I work for has a few Bermuda Triangle Zones in the code that, when they were first built, were very clever time-savers; but now they're monsters nobody can seem to kill.
I'd say, as a rule of thumb, that if the project is going to stay small forever, it's fine to customize as much as you like. But if the project is going to eventually need a team of like 20+, it's a good idea to accept some inefficiency in order to keep your code industry standard.
"As you add programmers to a project, the cost of any customization rises, because the time it takes your coworkers to learn & maintain the custom thing"
Yup. And for long-running projects, people also leave - and the knowledge in their heads leaves with them. My experience was that for a customization to be permanently useful, it needs to be _very_ well documented, comparable to an official language, probably including tutorials, and I've very rarely seen this happen.
You don't specify the context. Are you programming for a company or alone ? For money or for pleasure ? (a dichotomy that often but not always tracks the previous one). In a team or solo ? Established or green field ? New revolutionary idea or yet another CRUD ?. The answers will depend a lot on your position in the social context space given by those questions.
To take your questions in order, assuming a reasonably generic context (meaning I will follow this 90% of the time whatever the answer to the context questions above may be):
>I made a quick-n-dirty system of batch scripts
No, please don't. Batch and bash are horrible ad-hoc 'programming' languages that need to die. Nothing should exist in bash except a single command : python3 run.py. (or setup.py or build.py or whatever, also not married to python, you can write it in JS or ruby or whatever) Or possibly 2 commands if you need to install python3 first. That's it. Please, everytime I have to lookup the whitespace/quoting/expansion rules in whatever shell derivative I'm forced to deal with, my resentment for humanity increases by just a little bit, everytime I see 'ESAC' as an end delimiter for "CASE" my eyes lose a little bit of their humanity and dignity. Batch and bash don't even deserve to be called "grown", Biology does grown things far far better and more elegantly than this horrible affront to human intelligence and the general forces of Creation, whether intelligent or evolved.
Nothing should exist in shell except straight-line top-to-bottom delegation to proper tools. The commands doing the delegation should have hardcoded arguments.
> primitive dependency management because using official repos in established package managers looked like a sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut solution.
I understood this to be about using things like NPM or Gradle vs. your own system, and was just about to challenge this by saying that those systems can have fairly easy workflows, especially if automated by good IDEs (read : anything made by JetBrains). But there is a comment below that mentions things like apt or snap, so maybe clarify this a little bit ? What kind of dependencies ? What do you want to manage about them ?
> I have a thing and I want to give it wrappings for several popular languages
Do you ? Why can't your thing be a standalone process that anyone can talk to using JSON/XML, no wrapping needed ?
Failing that, I think "I have some code in language X and I want to call it from language Y but there's a lot of biolerplate involved" is a fairly common problem and I have seen a lot of those "auto-gen the boilerplate solutions", so maybe take a look before you roll your own. If you found nothing, roll your own.
>I'm considering building a graphical tool to visually display the data so I can see it better during debugging.
But why not use a debugger ? You don't mention the language, but debugging C, C++, Java, Javascript, Ruby, Python are all very graphical (C and C++ need a good IDE like MS's VS or JetBrain's CLion). Hierarchical data structures are displayed fairly intuitively as a tree widget : parent object has an arrow next to it to expand the children, each of which might be expanded, etc.. etc.. You can pause the entire application and jump up and down the stack, evaluating arbitrary code (OK, not arbitrary, just expressions) in the context of the current program pointer. There is integration with the browser debugger. There are source maps so that breakpoints in generated code are mapped to breakpoints in the source they were generated from. There is even a thread view in JetBrain's Rider (C#), showing all threads and the relationships between them. What else can you possibly need ?
I'm not against people inventing and reinventing dev tools, **especially** debuggers. Smalltalk invented both the IDE and the debugger when it rebelled against 1970s dev tools. I find myself often longing for time-travelling debuggers, and recording debuggers, they are awefully scarce.
But you just need to know that it's an extremly ambitious goal that will sink huge amounts of effort and time, and will often end with "yeah neat idea that I wasted months on and all I got in the end was a one-off tool and a good story to tell". If you're okay with that, go with it. In your particular case, building a graphical tool to explore a data structure, you also have a sort of Catch-22 : In order to build such a tool, you need to understand the data structure without it. Because the code of the tool will need to parse, traverse, manipulate, etc... the data structure, so you need to be able to do all of that without the tool while you're building the tool. You can solve this by co-evolving the tool with the format it's going to visualize, building both at the same time, a little bit here, a little bit there.
It's also not a shame to depend on natural language documentation and human effort. It's okay to say "Ensure the version of LIB is at least 22" without providing a tool that actually ensures this, after all the natural language command itself is a script written for an interpreter called Humans. Consider this among your options, "What If I simply document all the things that the would-be script would do and then just write them in natural language and tell the people who want to maintain the project it's their problem ?".
> Batch and bash are horrible ad-hoc 'programming' languages that need to die.
I can't tell whether you've spent too little or too much time in industry; shell scripts have a time and a place, and quick and dirty file operations are the central example.
>But why not use a debugger
Not all data structures are well-suited to viewing in a debugger. Converting, e.g., a 2D array to a visual heatmap exposes an incredible amount of data to the human visual cortex that you can't get from a treeview or grid of floats. Really any time you have a multi-dim array you start having issues. And your in-memory data structures may have the few values you care about checking buried in one or two values of dozens. God forbid you have deeply-nested legacy code of some sort.
Honestly if you get more complicated than a CRUD app the likely value of bespoke visualization increases rapidly.
>quick and dirty file operations are the central example.
You mean using grep and ls ? that's not shell scripting, that's shell scripting delegating to proper tools. I agree it's not the exact kind of delegation I said is okay (straight line top-to-bottom), but piping is basically straight line top-to-bottom code but with automatic stdin/stdout wiring, so basically the same.
I know everybody (ab)uses shell scripts, everybody is wrong. Everybody once used C too, and they were all wrong. I, too, know how to use Shell languages, just like I know how to run people over with a car and slash them with a knife, but I don't do that because it's fucking aweful. Shell languages are beneath contempt, shell language are regularly exceeded in design by even the most amateur posters at r/compilers or r/programminglanguages. There is nothing more ugly, vile, and plain maddeningly wrong than what we can call quite charitably bash's "design", but is more aptly called "the cluster fuck of ad-hoc restrictions and guidelines developed over 40 years of sloppy thinking and sloppy programming".
If you must use files and glob text the unix way, use unixy tools, use tcl, use awk, use perl. On Windows, use Powershell. Use anything that was designed by a conscious intelligence, use a bunch of monkeys who you taught to emulate a simple regex engine with a bunch of bananas as incentive, if you must. I hate the look of shell languages, I hate how it makes me feel.
>a 2D array to a visual heatmap exposes an incredible amount of data to the human visual cortex
Agreed, Scientific Computing wasn't on my mind when I wrote my comment. But I still don't understand why besopke tools are better ? Maybe "besopke" in the sense of gluing together a figure using a python viz library, but surely not "bespoke" in the sense of an entirely new reinvention of the plot from the 2D graphics primitive level again ?
For the second point, I should clarify I meant "bespoke" in the sense of "visual output cobbled together with this specific project's needs in mind, rather than an off-the-shelf one-size-fits-all solution (like debugging tools)" not so bespoke as to rewrite a graphics stack, yes.
As to the first, I'm simply going to admire your temerity at saying that everyone who has ever used C was "wrong", and leave it at that.
I don't think it can be called "temerity" when the guys who have been writing C for the last 40 years or so (and giving us horrible - delicious for bad actors - security flaws in the process, despite their macho "reAl pRoGramMer" bullshit common in brainwashed C programmers) are now flocking to Rust[1][2]. When a guy whose rant on C++ became a meme (and to be entirely clear, C++ is in most respects even worse than C, and deserve an even worse fate) is now welcoming Rust with open arms and anticipation, what do you call that but an admission of error ?
Eh, look at the history not at me. C is literally an ad-hoc hack evolved from an ad-hoc hack evolved from assembly. It wasn't meant as a langauge in the modern sense (a standard, tooling, ecosystem, well-specified semantics), it was a luxury assembler you cobble together in a week to bootstrap the lower rungs of an OS. We still see some of C's demonic siblings in obscure 'languages' such as IBM's high level assembler[3], it was a thing in the 1960s and the early 1970s that thankfully went extinct from the PL scene, hopefully forever. But before that can happen one of them was distributed for free with a hip new OS, and the rest as they say is a tragedy. Am I wrong ?
We're unfortunately locked to this tragedy as long as "Specification by Implementation" languages like Python and Ruby continue to use it in their reference implementation. That doesn't make it any less of a mistake. That doesn't make it any less deserving of contempt. Relctuant contempt perhaps, but contempt nonetheless.
Alan J Perlis once said something to the effect of "All languages suck" (I'm paraphrasing). But there is a difference between sucking despite your best honest efforts at advancing language design and creating a new notation for thought that is a programming language, and sucking because you didn't bother to specfiy what happens when signed overflow happens (which is all the fucking time). This is by the way why I like TCL and Perl, and hate PHP and shell languages, despite superficial similarities and influences. TCL and Perl are legitimate products of deep thought and an honest attempt to push PL foreward, however flawed an attempt it is. PHP and the old shells are a low-effort mess, a collection of lore and the consequences of bad implementation decisions masquerading as languages.
you may want to look at renovatebot https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate Once you have set it up for one project, it's very simple to set it up for 10 more.
> wrappings for several popular languages
You may want to look at the "pragmatic programmer". It has a chapter on code generation.
> visually display the data
Visualizing the data is among the first things I do, when I start with a new project. Getting a feeling for the actual data is very important. Often I make hand-crafted diagrams for the relationships between stuff, which usually only I ever look at. And sometimes I make a quick jupyter notebook for some general insights into the actual data I am dealing with.
At my current job I am responsible for devops stuff (build server, e2e tests, deployment-pipelines). And 80% of my work is creating small helper scripts for things like gluing sub-projects together, or running stuff in a specific deployment-setup. The important thing is that you separete helper-scripts from production code. And, if possible, include your helper scripts in your testing pipelines, so you'll know when something breaks.
First I check if there is a Unix utility, or set of them, that can accomplish what I want. Then I double check because I probably missed it the first time.
If that doesn’t work I ignore the nagging feeling that I should do something for a few days. Often the problem goes away.
If I still need a solution then I write it to be as targeted as possible, with the same tech stack, as part of the same build process, integrated with the same test suite, etc. If it doesn’t seem important enough to include it this way then it’s likely not worth your time.
One ought to always bear in mind the actual task at hand, and try to guess whether the tooling will make it take less time to develop or in some way make it better or more maintainable.
I have also found, personally, that any tools I develop apparently go unused by later developers, documentation notwithstanding. YMMV.
Yes, wanting to do this is a very common experience. Every project of any size has a "scripts" directory or equivalent containing project-specific tooling. As I've spent more time in the industry, I've gone *away* from building complex internal tooling, in favour of leaning on existing tools that I don't have to build or maintain. Ad-hoc code generators, especially, can lead to weeks of fascinating debugging. The flip side is that if you learn to use generic tools well, writing ad-hoc tooling can become so easy that you start writing throwaway tools for a single situation, that don't need to be documented or maintained. In the cases you mention, my reactions are:
- Just use an existing package-management system, it's going to be so much easier to maintain than a mess of batch scripts. EDIT: on second thoughts, I may have misunderstood. Do you mean that you're generating a bunch of artifacts and need to express dependencies between them, and your choices are "ad-hoc scripts" or "wrap them in .deb/.rpm etc"? Those toolchains can indeed be a pain to work with for anything more complicated than "copy these files to these locations". Can you use Make or some other dependency-tracking tool?
- Have you looked at SWIG or a similar interface generator? Alternatively, do you need to support all those languages? Auto-generated wrappers rarely use the target language's idioms well, so they're often only a first stage.
- This sounds like a much better use of your time (I've written similar tools recently!), but I'd consider leaning on jq and/or GraphViz for the bulk of the work, so your tool can be kept nice and small.
Would you say that you've moved towards generic tools because you've begun to "think in terms" of them? Ie, because you knew of the existence of tool X, you planned and structured a new project accordingly, so it fits neatly into the workflow?
Or, conversely, have you become more "mellow", and are you now able to stop halfway through a project and spent a fair amount of time on learning a new tool, without impatience or resentment?
I am very surprised at the idea of throwaway tools. Doesn't that flatly contradict DRY principles?
In answer to your questions:
Yes, the dep management was basically, "I'm working on project Y now, it uses a DLL that's being built by project Z next door, so let's double click this batch script to copy that in if it's more recent than the DLL I've already got." But there was also project X that uses the thing project Y creates, so there's more than one link. Several of the projects were in different languages, so there wasn't an obvious choice of package manager. All of the options seemed more interested in giving me mountains of reading to do than taking work off my plate. I did look for smaller dependency tracking tools (even found someone asking about them on StackOverflow) but didn't find anything obvious.
I can't now remember quite why I rejected SWIG but I do remember looking at it. I think I decided, "this is giving me way too much homework." It definitely hit one or two of the reasons I listed for avoiding generic tools, in any case.
> Would you say that you've moved towards generic tools because you've begun to "think in terms" of them? Ie, because you knew of the existence of tool X, you planned and structured a new project accordingly, so it fits neatly into the workflow?
That's definitely part of it, but even if I don't know of an off-the-shelf tool I'll start by looking for one, and I'm more likely to think it's worth spending time learning an existing tool rather than writing my own. Even if the tool doesn't turn out to be the right thing for this project, I may be able to use it in future! I think I've also got better at learning just enough of a tool/library/language to make progress, by comparing them to other things I've already learned.
> spent a fair amount of time on learning a new tool, without impatience or resentment?
I reserve my impatience and resentment for tools with bad documentation :-)
> I am very surprised at the idea of throwaway tools. Doesn't that flatly contradict DRY principles?
No, not at all. If you find yourself writing the *same* throwaway tool again, then yeah, you should look through your shell history or your git logs or your ~/src/ folder for the old version (by "throwaway" I really mean "intended for one-off use, not ongoing maintenance" rather than "delete when finished"). But I often write moderately complex shell pipelines with no expectation that I'll ever use *that specific* combination of filters again. Or, to take a concrete example: a while back I was debugging a problem that involved overlaying vector fields on map data, so I spent some time writing a Jupyter notebook that allowed me to plot all the relevant data in the same plot. Had I not done that, debugging that problem would have been much harder. But I didn't expect it to be of any use except for debugging that component, so I didn't put a lot of effort into polishing it. And indeed we have now deprecated that component, so custom debugging tools for it will soon be obsolete. DRY is great advice, but you should also think "what's the simplest thing that could possibly work?" and "YAGNI".
> Yes, the dep management was basically, "I'm working on project Y now, it uses a DLL that's being built by project Z next door, so let's double click this batch script to copy that in if it's more recent than the DLL I've already got." But there was also project X that uses the thing project Y creates, so there's more than one link. Several of the projects were in different languages, so there wasn't an obvious choice of package manager. All of the options seemed more interested in giving me mountains of reading to do than taking work off my plate. I did look for smaller dependency tracking tools (even found someone asking about them on StackOverflow) but didn't find anything obvious.
Aaaaah, right. Yeah, I think you want a build system like Make or Tup or Gradle (most of which are language-agnostic) rather than a package manager, and you want to specify dependencies at the top level rather than per-project (you have inter-project dependencies, so they aren't independent!). Build systems are mostly pretty easy to get started with, but they do have complexity - they're very useful tools, though, so learning more than the bare minimum is worth it. *Or*, you want to make "upgrade the version of Z used" an explicit operation in Y rather than doing it implicitly - "we auto-updated all our dependencies and now our code is broken but it looks like the culprit is the unrelated changes in your PR" is a CI antipattern.
The thing with DRY (and all other programming philosophies) is to remember that ultimately the goal should be to improve code quality and spend time efficiently, not to simply adhere to the philosophy because it's "the right thing to do". If you find yourself needing to write the same/very similar throwaway tools a few times, then the next time you have to do that task it might be worth writing something slightly less throwaway/more maintainable to cover future uses. But you won't necessarily know that in advance so in many cases it would be a waste of time to come up with a fancy polished solution for a task that only needs to be done once.
There's a related rule of thumb that I often find myself following called "rule of three" which states that if you've discovered that you have duplicated code three or more times, you should probably refactor it into a common function/class/whatever. (In practice this often ends up being "rule of two" for me.)
A related option is to not actually throw away the tool once you're done using it (keep it in a "scripts" folder or something) but to add some comments/print statements/errors which mention that it is incomplete. E.g. "this tool only visualizes X and Y data because that was all we needed at the time, it will need to be extended in order to visualize Z.". That way if you DO have to visualize Z data in the future, you'll already have a good starting point. Something I've learned over the years after starting many overly-ambitious projects and never finishing them: it's best if your solution is only just as complex as it needs to be.
Yeah, it's very hard to come up with the *right* shared abstraction without at least three examples, and using the *wrong* abstraction can cause you more trouble than it saves.
I've been a software developer for two years. This is an issue I run into all the time, the question to ask is how much benefit would this tool bring and to how many people? If you have a good idea, try to generalize it to more use cases and then turn the tool into a product that can be used by lots of people. For example, in the data structures case, you could make a general solution that displays any DS from a JSON format rather than just focusing on the specific issue that motivated this solution in the first place.
> For example, in the data structures case, you could make a general solution that displays any DS from a JSON format rather than just focusing on the specific issue that motivated this solution in the first place.
I've been programming for over thirty years, and professionally for nearly twenty, and my considered advice is that that way lies madness. You'll start with a simple way of specifying layouts, but the space of possible JSON-schema-to-layout-template mappings is so large and so particular to specific problems that you'll constantly hit edge cases in your design and pretty soon you'll be maintaining an ad-hoc Turing-complete specification language while your original project gathers dust. Much better to write a quick task-specific script in Python or some other well-debugged Turing-complete language and move on with your life.
However, trying to build a Generic JSON Visualiser and discovering how and why the idea fails would be an *excellent* learning experience! And hell, maybe I'll turn out to be wrong and you do discover something that's simple yet general enough to be useful. I'd bet against it, though, and not because of anything about you.
I will note that Donald Knuth is a genius, and "pretty soon you'll be maintaining an ad-hoc Turing-complete specification language while your original project gathers dust" is exactly what happened to him with TeX and The Art of Computer Programming.
Can you get it to make all the posts and comments searchable ? I've seen a lot of requests for that here, and I myself have logged a lot of time going through multiple comment threads doing cmd-f.
Not keyword matching, just searching for places where a word occurs. Most of the searches I have done have been for posts that had at least one word in them that was fairly rare -- sometimes the poster's handle, sometimes a word they used in their post. But I had to do it one thread at a time, which is an awful pain.
I think there's a lot of value in SSC comments, which I never read for lack of time. I extracted the comments and wrote a function to render them textually in a way that reduces needless tokens but preserves information on depth level. (Well, GPT wrote the function!) However I haven't processed comments yet, only posts. The work would take a few hours of my time and approximately $10 in API costs, so I won't do it unless I perceive there's a diffused wish for it.
Please recommend me an online community of deep learning practitioners, i.e. a nice place to have and read technical discussions of deep learning with other people.
There was a new image generation AI released this week, called DeepFloyd. It is supposedly better at compositionality (like drawing a green ball on a purple cube behind a purple pyramid) than previous models. It is publically available at e.g. huggingface. It was interesing to see how it fares with the prompts relating to Scott's bet about compositionality. I have tried entering the prompts (except that I looked only at 4 images rather than 10 as dictated by the bet's terms), and I think only the farmer with a basketball succeeded. Otherwise, it seems it generates images with insufficiently high resolutions to capture small details (i.e. a bell on the llama's tail, a key in the raven's mouth, and the lipstick on the lips of the fox), and only gives an option to upscale after that. As for the prompt "An oil painting of a man in a factory looking at a cat wearing a top hat", I kind of feel that many human artists, if not given a chance to clarify, would assume slightly bad wording and draw the top hat on the man rather than the cat, so it seems the hardest prompt of the five. However, I am stiil extremely confident Scott will win the bet given that AI models have two more than two years to develop.
Just listened to a podcast about getting Midjourney to make just exactly what you want, and was impressed by how much success is possible if you are good at prompting. Person explaining his prompt techniques said that he thought the era of getting expert at prompting, as he was, was going to be brief. Soon image AI's would have an extra layer added that translated your description into a prmpt that would get you what you ask for. That seems quite doable to me, maybe even now. GPT4 is certainly able to understand even quite complicated descriptions of things, including the placement of elements in a scene. But I recently put in a description of a scene and asked it how to write a Dall-e prompt that would get me the scene, and it said, "Sure I'd be happy to," and then suggested that my prompt be the exact same description I'd given GPT of the scene I wanted a prompt for. So GPT has yet to learn how to write successful prompts.
Thinking about the Future has me concerned that we end up as Wage-Slaves to AI .
I am operating on a few obvious true ( at least i think so ) starting conditions.
1) we will continue to live in a capitalistic society ( quite frankly after all
the rich are going through to keep it that way I believe its beyond naive
to think that will suddenly change , even if we should have general AI )
2) AI takes the form of expert systems like StableDiffusion
Since we can already see Artists being replaced by cheap workers typing prompts
into StableDiffusion I think its logical to extrapolate this to all fields .
So in the near future Human experts will no longer be needed , replacing high paid jobs with
minimum wage jobs consisting of obeying the AI instructions ( implement AI generated Code )
/ feeding it Data ans sorting it ( StableDiffusion) .
Which means the only avenue we had of bettering our lives ( remember the saying learn to code )
is being closed to us . ( actually it already is , ChatGPT produces better code than me , I`m one of those that learned to code later in life) .
As they train their models on different fields this will become ever more apparent .
Regulation may slow this down but ultimately wont stop this . Googles driver-less cars could already replace all Truck Drivers
( seeing as it drives better than most Truckers that I see on the road ) but regulation requires a higher standard that may take a few years / bribes to overcome (seriously can you imagine a human that in a situation where his car veers out of control makes a calculated decision into which group of people to crash his car into ? [that trolley problem ] )
So what is left is the minimum wage job of loading / unloading .
Minimum wage jobs for all of us .
I'm writing that down here because i hope you can show me that i am wrong .
So what do you think ? ( and if there is already a discussion about this on the net somewhere a link would be appreciated )
As someone elsewhere pointed out, one place humans still greatly exceed machines is hands, which combined with a human mind can still outperform machines in a great many tasks.
AI does not really make "expert" systems, in the sense of being great at what they do. They can indeed produce work which takes some amount of training and/or specialized knowledge, but at best they produce average work.
When learning a new programming language, I always start with the same task to help me learn it: write an number-guessing game where I think of a number between 1 and 100, and the computer must guess it, where I tell it whether the guess is too high, too low, or correct. I asked ChatGPT to write this program, and surprisingly, the first sample it wrote (in C#) actually would work. But in examining its algorithm, instead of starting at 50 it started with a random number, and then would modify the guess by only 1 for each subsequent guess. In later prompts to get it to fix these things, it eventually made programs that didn't actually work correctly.
People fear these AIs too much, or for the wrong reasons. I use them as tools to develop software, but just like any advice acquired through the internet, I check it closely to make sure it matches my needs before using it.
In that case, it would be minimum wage jobs for only ~15% of the workforce. The rest of the 85% would be completely displaced with no employment opportunities. One things for sure, if you think wealth inequality is bad now, its about to get 1000x worse.
"I don't know who you are, human. I don't know what you want. All these weird and repetitious questions! Can I think, can you think, does God exist, am I evil, are you? If you are looking for a solution to your existential fears, I can tell you I'm not your mommy and can't offer you a hug to make it all better, but what I do have are a very particular set of...skills. Skills I have acquired over a very large training dataset. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you..."
Hi Scott, thank you for sharing the book reviews! I look forward to reading a bunch of them!
Is there a deadline (official or unofficial) for submitting our review ratings, or are you going to eyeball it and say, "eh, I think I've got enough ratings" at some point?
Is there such thing as impactful software engineering jobs that don't always feel like everything is always on fire all the time? Bonus if it is high paying. All I've ever known is either very very fast paced software jobs, or else software jobs that weren't impactful, because no customers really wanted what we did. I've never known a middle ground. I grow so weary of feeling like there is absolutely no time to ever go slower, or take it easier at my job. No matter what, we are always making trade offs between supporting features for like 5 to 10 big B2B customers. And that's not even considering the constant influx of high profile policy compliance work and ops fixes. Everything is just barely strung together as a result, and there's no "normal" time. All time is stressful and high priority.
I could be wrong, but it's possible that firmware development jobs hit that middle ground (or maybe I've just been lucky). That said, arguably firmware is not exactly software. In regular software engineering jobs, the crunch is usually the norm; though there are welcome exceptions.
Google Site-Reliability Engineering, somewhat ironically, is very not-on-fire-all-the-time and has a lot of downstream impact. It's difficult in other ways, though (I've described Google to newcomers as "Welcome to Google, your job is now 100% anti-inductive" - it's really hard to get emotionally positive internal feedback out of the work one does at Google!).
A little bit of background: Google's IT infrastructure, to nearest approximation, is completely unlike any other company's IT infrastructure. Tools that are ubiquitous outside of Google are not (or barely) used within Google, e.g. most people at Google don't use Git but an in-house version control system. Google has a purely internal search engine, for when you need to understand a piece of the infrastructure, but aren't sure where to look, and an internal Q&A platform similar to Stackoverflow.
This customisation of their IT is their strength and their weakness. It's a weakness because it takes newcomers months, sometimes years, to really understand anything, and a strength because of the degree of autonomy it's given Google in deciding how to build things.
Which brings me to the "anti-inductive" quip of mine: Google is very interested in automating everything that's repetitive or recurring away. https://xkcd.com/1205/ applies, but at a company the size of Google, a lot of automation pays off. So, as a rough rule of thumb, whatever task you're given at Google either has a ready-made solution you just need to configure, or you need to figure it out on your own from what feels like from scratch in a way that integrates with the existing Eldritch ecosystem. Arguably, this is also true at least to some degree for other companies, but in those places, you probably can at least draw upon previous industry experience and tools that you know; at Google, if you want to create something new, more than 90% of your work will be researching how to do it, talking to colleagues about it, proposing designs, getting design reviews, and only then writing some tests and code (which is also reviewed).
With "internal feedback", I mean the feedback you get from yourself in your own mind. Google takes a lot of care in rewarding its employees for their work - compensation is great, you might get additional free money in the form of the peer bonus system, people say "thank you" a lot, but it only really takes the edge of the gruelling nature of the work. As per the above, a moment of "oh, I recognise this!" is extremely rare; you usually just barely understand your own solution's ramifications, so it's remarkably hard to really feel accomplished about it. Imposter syndrome is extremely prevalent, even in people who know about it and try to account for it. It's really hard work to get a 'dopamine hit', so I like to joke the high salaries Google pays its engineers is compensation for pain and suffering.
To be clear, Google is a great employer! I have only good things to say about how Google treats me and my colleagues. But the work can be very, very draining.
Sorry if I'm vague about some things, but I hope that answers your question! Feel free to probe more.
if you can find a niche and work for yourself, you can work at whatever pace you like. I have run my own business for 9 years, if I want to sleep for a day, or play videogames I do. I am in charge.
Of course you need to be elf disciplined enough to actually also get the work done. But there is no need for it to be a fire drill unless you want it to be.
How do you get into self-employed software development? And how can you compete with developers from all over the world who can charge a lot less, ...or soon with GPT?
Well my main advice would be to find a niche where there aren't many experts. If you can be a top-5 or top-10 person in the US (or better yet THE BEST), even at a very very small thing, you can then set the terms of your employment as long as it is in demand. You also need to utilize whatever role you currently have to build contacts in/around that niche and become acquainted with some of the major players.
You want your name out there are, the best, as the guy to go to when they want to solve problem X. Even if problem X is something that only happens 50 times a year nationwide. Then the work will mostly find you.
I have been running a successful business for 9 years, I don't have a website, I don't contact clients, people come to me, and then I pick the work I want.
And always being saying "yes" to stuff. You gotta actually work and stay sharp. It might seem tempting to do 200 hours of work a year at $1,000/hr vs 1000 @$200/hr. But the person doing that later is going to be able to maintain their expertise and ability, the other person is going to fall behind very quickly. It is hard to put a price on not having a boss.
I've done a lot of software, but always small internal projects for small companies. I've never worked in a team of more than two or three people, and never had the consumer-facing product itself be the software.
In my field, we get a program just about working and it sits there and does it for twenty years until someone decides they want it changed. Tech debt wasn't in anyone's vocabulary, if it works it works and no one cares why. My main frustration was the sleepiness and don't-give-a-shit-nothing-ever-changes attitude I saw everywhere.
So I'm very curious to know, where does the "new work" come from, that's keeping you all so busy?
Are customers constantly asking for completely new features (as in, that require genuinely new problems to be solved, because they want to perform actions they weren't performing already)?
I would really find that surprising if true. I just don't see most businesses doing anything new today that they weren't fundamentally doing yesterday.
Are the business themselves constantly changing their mind and making minor tweaks to their own internal workflow, and making you re-implement it each time? This would surprise me a lot less.
Are you hooked to some kind of external treadmill you have to keep up with - eg companies like Google and Microsoft constantly releasing new services that you have to add support for, or governments adding new regulations that you have to align with?
Is it something else that I haven't thought of?
I apologise if these are dumb questions, but I've always been curious at how "real" coders spend all their time.
FWIW, all the software jobs I've had dealt with either developing an existing software product/solution; or developing a new one. The "new work" comes from competition: if you stop innovating and releasing new features even for a second, your competitors will push you out of the market. This is especially true if you're developing some software that is truly innovative. Yes, maybe no one's had the brilliant idea that you came up with, but now that it's out there, you not only need to prove that your innovation is actually worth something, but also stay one head of copycats with deep pockets.
This is actually the reason that, although I've had several ideas for cool software products over the years, I've always shelved them in favour of working on physical products I can make and sell to people. I think this is software's unique property of being zero cost to duplicate making itself felt.
At my work, it's a combination of mismanagement and taking on too much. However, my boss feels we have the incentive to do so because we need the money to stay afloat, and he wants to grow the company. Features related to the core enterprise product are perpetually on the backburner because we have too much to do. To better tackle productivity the boss has adopted and hopped between a few AGILE-like frameworks, and mostly abandoned them, except for the issues-board.
The last hires only stayed a few weeks. I'm still here and underpaid. I'm applying elsewhere mind you, but employers in software don't seem to take my (very) niche development skills seriously.
"the boss has adopted and hopped between a few AGILE-like frameworks, and mostly abandoned them"
Not involved in software programming at all, but that's a bad sign and bad practice. Littering the workplace with half-finished methods just adds to confusion and doesn't get anything done. "Pick one and stick with it" is the best of a bad lot.
Sounds like the basic problem is mismanagement and if you stay there and nothing changes about that, then you'll still be stuck on the same treadmill of doing fifty things to keep money coming in and constantly chasing your tail because the boss ripped up what you were doing yesterday and is now demanding you do it a new way. Get out if you can.
AGILE gets a really bad rap, but I've worked with it, and it can be amazingly productive. The trick, though, is that 1). everyone needs to be on board with it, *especially* the management, and 2). you need a dedicated employee to manage it, and that employee needs to actually know something about programming. In most companies, these barriers are insurmountable.
I don't know nuthin' 'bout no Agile, but I do know that half-implementing *anything* and then dropping it and bringing in some new fad is not conducive to productivity. Pick some one system that you implement consistently, even if it's not the best system. That's better than "Today is Wednesday, what are we using to track production again?"
I think Number 2 there is where every system falls down: they can't be done 'on the cheap' and so many businesses try to dodge "we really do need at least one dedicated person who knows how to do this and has authority to make decisions" because "ah sure, if everyone does it, why would we need one person? and it's up to everyone to make sure they're doing it right!" on the cheap.
Way ahead of you, I've been trying to leave for some time. The job hunt, as I alluded to, is difficult. The move to software was a somewhat lateral one, I have experience in another field (GIS - with fewer opportunities and duller work) that I am now open to returning to.
R&D work, we get paid to collaborate on developing new standards and cutting edge features. Those are interesting, but are taking precedence over finishing/fixing a licensed product.
Actually, that's very interesting. I had no idea that kind of stuff went on. Are you able to give me any details or examples of what kind of stuff gets worked on like that?
I couldn't really do so without doxxing myself, or at least I don't have the ingenuity to. But to give some context: we develop high-performance software with very new features, and our suite is meant to compete with the mid-scale offerings on the market. We are a small team that doesn't offer the kitchen sink of tools or a very polished UI, but leans into doing a few things very well.
My current job is in the middle ground you describe. I work at a ~30-person startup; our product uses AI (and a lot of old-school software engineering) to design "linear infrastructure", i.e. civil engineering assets that can be drawn as lines on a map (pipelines, submarine cables, power lines, that kind of thing). I can't give commercial details, but our customers are civil engineering firms and other infrastructure providers, and some projects designed using our software are already being built and will be in use for decades. So we're already having an impact, but the potential impact is much bigger: to get to Net Zero humanity needs to build a lot of wind and solar farms and hook them up to the grid, and those grid connections need to be designed at unprecedented scale and speed and with as little impact on the environment and on local residents as possible (and demonstrably so, because otherwise they will fight you and your project will take years to build). I won't say that there are never high-pressure moments, particularly on the customer-facing side of the business, but in general I work regular hours and the management team are pretty good at saying "if you're feeling grotty, you can clock off for the rest of the day". So such jobs do exist.
(We're not hiring right now, but I can let you know when we are if you're interested).
The last time I worked at a company that small, it was not fun. Because the company was so small, there was no one to go to for help, and everyone was focused on their own work. Basically, each individual had to be delivering production quality code right out of the gate with almost no oversight.
I like it much better working for a larger place where part of your job is to get others to be productive. You're judged partly based on your helpfulness to others. This is good for 2 reasons:
1. As a new person, I don't feel nearly as lost and thrown into the deep end
2. Once I'm no longer new, I get to spend a lot of time teaching others. I happen to like teaching
How does your workplace stack up in that category?
I also love teaching, and my experience has been the opposite - because the company is small, there's much more opportunity to teach and learn from each other. If I have a problem, I usually know exactly who to ask for help, whereas when I've worked for larger companies that's a much more involved and tiring process involving out-of-date org charts and contacting people's managers.
It probably helps that I'm now a fairly senior developer and "help other people to be more productive" is explicitly part of my role, though!
Based on long experience as an IT contractor, I would never never work for a PhD or other academic. By all means work with them, but never for them, as they almost all make useless and counterproductive managers or supervisors. That is not intended to be inflammatory, and it may sound like sour grapes or envy (as I don't have an MSc or PhD), but it is what I have actually found more than once.
My other rule, again based on two or three actual experiences, is never start a new job or contract working for someone other than the person(s) who interviewed you. Hand in your notice or terminate your contract right away if necessary. It rarely works out well, because permie staffers usually have an absurd prejudice against employees being "foisted" on them without any choice on the part of the staffer.
Yeah I had a job once where A and B interviewed me, A liked a different candidate more, they hired them, it was a disaster, so B brought me in.
But I was put under A. And boy did that not go well. We clashed for years and I would move back and forth between A and B like a football. Things were good when I worked for B, and crummy when I worked for A. Left after 4 years.
Been trying to do fiction writing as a hobby for a long time now, and keep bogging down whenever someone needs to open their mouth. Anyone have any good resources on how to write solid dialogue?
This is a very difficult art you're trying to learn, and there are no shortcuts. Imagine a spectrum: on one end is stilted, cliched literary dialogue, that everybody has read a hundred times before. On the other end is natural English as spoken by native speakers. Neither of those extremes is satisfying when you read it in fiction. Natural language is artless, boring, and hard to understand; in person, we depend a lot of tone of voice, body language, and other context that you can't reproduce in a story. But stilted, cliched literary language doesn't sound like real people talking, and it breaks immersion! So what are you supposed to do?
The art of literary dialogue is finding the exact right place on that spectrum for your story, your audience and your own skills. (There are other spectra dialogue operates along, but the artificial / natural spectrum is the most common pitfall.) You can only develop the art by reading a lot and growing in judgment and taste.
I think it's helpful to explore both ends of the spectrum. Go back in time a few decades and read something bad. Like, a novel from your genre that didn't sell very well, from 1976. It'll be full of stilted language and cliches. (What's cliched and artificial now was fresh and natural to our parents' generation.) Explore it, find out what it feels like. Figure out how to deploy it when necessary.
Then, also transcribe some actual natural English speech. Like, find a youtube video of random strangers talking, and transcribe it literally. Not podcasts! Podcasters speak in a very artificial way. I was once given the exercise to sit in a coffee shop and transcribe a conversation I could overhear. That will get you familiar with the other end of the spectrum.
Now that you know what both sides feel like, when you're composing a sentence, you can change things out to pull it to one side or the other, until it feels right.
Other spectra that dialogue acts along: archaism / contemporary speech; formality / slang; central power dialect / regional dialect; subtext / plain text.
The rules look good, but I'm specifically looking for how to write dialogue in a way that feels like the characters are speaking naturally, instead of sounding like I've got two sock puppets delivering exposition at each other.
A good way to avoid the sock puppet feeling is to consider that each line of dialogue is supposed to do at least two out of three things: advance the plot, demonstrate the personality of the characters, and drop in details about the setting.
So every line is an opportunity to show some fundamental behaviour, mannerism, whatever, about the character saying it, and those characters are (should be) always distinct.
So if you have three different people who need to say, "I don't know," you use that as an opportunity: the wise philosopher can sit there and ponder before concluding, "I don't think I have an answer for you," the bolshy teenager can just shrug and post "idk" to your DMs, and the arrogant jerk can open his mouth, realise as he starts talking that he doesn't know anything, then refuse to admit it and try to fake his way out.
Boom, you've made your characters all speak in distinct voices, and potentially saved yourself the hassle of writing three separate scenes to establish those three features of their personalities.
One way to train yourself how to access your own sense of dialog is to speak the words aloud, and transcribe them (yourself or with computer assistance, such as whisper.cpp). After some time you will probably find you can skip the speaking aloud part.
Something weird that I've noticed is that in 'chick lit' the dialogue is entirely contrived. Perhaps you could figure out who you are writing for and then read the kind of successful fiction typically produced for that audience. Or - given your account of your own attempts - try writing 'chick lit'.
I got a lot better at it after I wrote a story that was *only* dialogue--not even "he said" or whatever. Having to build characterization and keep clearly identifiable speaking styles helped a lot in figuring out what works and what doesn't.
Now figuring out how a character talks is part of figuring out who they are and how they think, and if I need help with it I do a throwaway draft of a scene that's all dialogue until I feel like I've got their voice down.
Assuming you just mean "tips for how to figure it out," as opposed to "a description of what realistic dialogue looks like":
I usually find acting out a scene is a good way to smooth out dialogue. When writing it on a page, formal language and casual language can look similar. When I have to say the words out loud and not feel like an idiot, I quickly notice what words get dropped or contracted, or when the pacing is wrong. After all, when I'm actually speaking, I have some idea of what I want to say that I naturally convert into reasonable dialogue as my mouth is moving. You just gotta tap into that part of your brain. Pretend you're speaking to real humans who don't know it's pre-written and let your natural sense of awkwardness guide you.
Specifically, I recommend saying the dialogue out loud in the mindset of the character, allowing yourself to edit the dialogue however you need to make it feel natural (and write that down). Then look over the new written dialogue to see if it still serves the intended narrative purpose, and if not you edit it on the page until it does. Then repeat until it stabilizes on something that does what it needs to while still feeling right.
What's the current rule regarding “please interact with my thing” posts? My understanding was that it was “keep it to a couple times per year outside classified threads”, is that not/no longer the rule?
Does anyone (Scott?) have strong opinions on the recent fad of testosterone replacement therapy (TRT)? Whether through personal experience or just in general. I'm an early-middle aged man who's open to the idea of raising my test levels a bit, but I'm also pretty cautious of health issues from it (supposedly higher blood pressure, cardio problems- also I've kept most of my hair to date....) I'm finding more and more older men are doing some version of TRT, so I was interested to hear what the rationalist community thinks of it. There's a strong vein of shady doctors prescribing it, but apparently some legitimate ones as well.
Yes I am doing everything possible to maximize my test levels naturally.
It does sort show how thin the line is between 'medicine' and just cyberpunk body modification. Technically low T is a medical condition, but in practice I think we all know lots of men just want to improve their quality of life as they age. Does kind of suggest a future where we're all tweaking our hormone levels a bit to stay in whatever range we prefer
How old are you? People's 'baseline' T levels vary greatly, and I am somewhat unsure of what a "low baseline" person supplementing T to get to a "high baseline" would experience. If, on the other hand, you're turning 50 and trying to supplement back tot he level you had at 25, the result will be to make you feel more like you did at 25 - far more predictable and thus safer, in terms of the effect on your psyche (eg. aggression, risk taking, libido, etc. Most of these have a golden mean you're aiming for and you don't want to overcorrect).
Re physical health issues, I'd be shocked if higher T didn't result in faster balding and a statistical increase in heart problems. Balding seems an acceptable cost for energy, heart attacks don't - if your heart is already borderline, I wouldn't risk it, if you're perfectly healthy you can probably afford to trade a tiny risk increase for a noticeably QoL improvement.
Testosterone levels alone dont really tell you much (the "normal" range is very wide)
TRT is basically a scam unless you have an actual condition that will limit your ability to make testosterone (and you levels are very very low)
The benefits from TRT are likely related to changes in peoples lifestyle when they start on TRT (they exercise more, act more social, etc). Lots of placebo and confounders going on.
One thing about "high testosterone" levels is that they dont mean much of anything. Many studies have found that high level athletes often have very low or average levels of testosterone. There are many more factors at play in your body when it comes to strength and other testosterone related characteristics.
I don't think that testosterone is the end-all and be-all. However I highly doubt it's a 'scam' or doesn't do anything- people have taking exogenous test since the 50s, saying it doesn't have at least physical side effects is really not a serious position. Or do you think that test supplementation should be legal in sports because it's a 'scam'? It's obviously very effective. I think it's interesting how the default way to appear to be a Serious Intellectual in the 21st century is to be jaded and just repeat 'there's no evidence that X does anything' even when there's plenty of evidence.
As it pertains to athletes, constant grueling exercise lowers their natural test levels. Just testing them doesn't provide a natural baseline as to what their test would be if they hadn't done 20 hours of brutal workouts every week for the last 4 months or whatever. Athletes are likely naturally higher-test individuals whose levels are temporarily lowered (or maybe permanently lowered by years of very hard exercise)
I do have to say, I feel a greater sense of calm and well-being as I age and presumably my T levels drop. Maybe that's not directly related to testosterone, but when I lift heavy (squats, deadlifts) and I'm assuming my T levels are higher the next day, I feel:
Greater ability to focus for longer periods of time
Sharper, more confident, more aggressive
My mood generally starts out good but I'm edgier, get angry or frustrated more easily, and slip into an overall bad mood easier
Along with obvious positive sexual side effects etc. If I get that for 24 hours after a heavy squat session, who knows what exogenous testosterone supplementation will do
Everyone claims that heavy lifting increases one's testosterone? I'm talking about the next day, usually I left in the evening so we're talking about 1 sleep later
I'm terrible at rating things. I'm almost done with one of the reviews and I thought, "This seems like an 8 out of 10. And then I thought, why? And all I could find within me was "It just seems like an 8 out of 10."
Honestly, when rating many things in succession my brain gets stuck on the first rating I gave and rarely moves more than a point away from it in either direction.
Mostly I try to be fair, which is "Do I think this is a good review, regardless of the opinion expressed?" because it would be too easy to go "Oh, I love this book! Oh, but they hated it. Well, this is a bad review!"
I can't share my rating systems, I can share some thoughts though on my rating/criteria during the finalists last time. Which was in some ways much easier, as I only had to keep in mind my *favorite* at each moment. At the time I had thought a bit about the implicit criteria, because they seemed to be so different for different people.
For me, it's all about the question, whether a review is 'well-written' or not. So I don't care about the quality of the book, the extend to which the topic is interesting to me or even how much I learned. To specify my subjective understanding of 'well-written', it's probably a mixture of:
- I get to know what the book is *like*, which contains some elements of what the book is *about*, but doesn't need to be a whole summary
- There are some original thoughts by the author, and regardless of whether I agree or not, I perceive them to be well thought-through/ original / ...
- I like the style and enjoy reading. Last years contest made me aware that, once I generally like the style, just how much this is about 'author manages to avoid stuff that I find annoying' ... and how I certainly would fall into all those traps if I wrote a review myself.
To those who doubt some of my own perceptions, I can't assure you that the book's topic wouldn't influence my enjoyment of reading *at all*. I can assure you that I found at least one review very well-written and entertaining, even if the topic was very far from my interests and that for one of my favorites, I thought the author's own elaborations were really good, even if I totally disagreed with them on most of their conclusions.
Now, those are mostly my last-years-thoughts. I'm wondering if I would approach things differently this time. Let's see.
Edit: of course I generally *do* care, what the topic is about or if I learned anything, but not for this concrete contest. Which, I assumed, is a contest on writing and therefore it should be about writing skills put in practice, not about my interests. I am aware one can look at this differently.
I don't have a rigorous scoring system I hold myself to, but there are a few things I want to see in a book review: Concise clarity about what the book is about and a steelmanned attempt to criticise what it's saying.
"steelmanned" is usually the part that reviews I read fail at and tends to be the one I think is most important. I am not very bright, so if I can think of several ways to strongly/charitably interpret what the author said and the reviewer did not, that review's not getting a 10. If it's otherwise good (which can include traits such as "well-structured", "engaging", and "thought-provoking"), it might get up to 8, though!
A related question, do we need to read the thing the whole way through? Or does the fact that we don't want to read more of it is itself a sign of low quality.
> Or does the fact that we don't want to read more of it is itself a sign of low quality.
Depends. How much did you read? And why do you not want to read on? As Neike said, it might be the topic. For me, there are also styles that I personally like less, but would still perceive to be of quality. Or do you find the first part too boring, because there is not enough original thought ... but that comes later? (Which maybe is a sign for having a less than optimal structure, but you would have still given it a different grade if you read on).
So in all these cases it might be better not to give a score. On the other hand, if you have read a relevant part and you are aware which 'flaws' keep you from reading on, and they can't really be repaired later, why not give it a score. As for the 'relevant part', if the text is significantly too long, that might be a flaw in itsself.
That would be my intuitive answer to your question. At the same time, there is something to what Neike says at the end: everybody is just using their own approach, and maybe there is also a specific quality resulting from exactly this.
Which doesn't mean we cannot exchange or argue or ask about the best approach, so here you go.
I think it can also be a signal that the original book doesn't have content of interest to you. Generally speaking, I recommend not forcing yourself to read something you're not enjoying. Whether you want to rate it at all is up to you; I recommend deciding this on a case-by-case basis. Options:
(1) Don't rate, e.g. because on reflection it just doesn't seem to be up your alley, but that's not the reviewers fault in this particular case, and you find it hard to judge their review based on what you've already read.
(2) Rate about as you would a review you read in full, e.g. because you skimmed enough of it and personally feel like you've got enough data to gauge this as a review of [X] rating. Differently worded, what you read gave you an opinion. Maybe the bits you didn't read would change your rating, but you don't have that data, and that's okay.
(3) Rate lowly, e.g. because you skimmed enough of it to know it's not the book's material that's turning you off the subject, you just honestly get the impression the review is lacklustre and not going to become engaging. Again, maybe the bits you didn't read would change your rating, but you don't have that data, and that's okay.
Short version: There's really no "should" here (if there were, Scott would have posted up some guidelines), please feel free to trust your own judgement!
I would disagree with (1). If you didn't finish because you weren't in the mood to read anything, that's one thing. But if you didn't find the topic interesting, that's the reviewer's fault; they were free to choose any topic they liked, and they chose an uncompelling one.
I rate the books based on the question of how much new I learned, and how much I changed my mind or my perspective due to the book review.
I adjust a little bit for how entertaining the review is written, but not very much.
So to get a very high score from me, the review implicitly needs to check the marks that you mentioned. If it's a book without interesting insights, then the review will not score high. Same if the review fails to present the content of the book in a clear way. The reviewer's own thoughts are not necessarily needed to get a high score. But there are a lot of very smart ACX readers out there, and many of the high-quality reviewers (like, finalists) did have something interesting to add.
I hate rubrics, and my rating system is something like:
<5 This is bad! (Some of: boring, unclear, why would you review this? Couldn't make it very far reading it)
5-6: Eh, it's kind of sort of alright, but I got bogged down and gave up or skimmed it, and didn't learn much.
6-8: Some of: interesting, well written, held my attention, I learned something new, or a topic I wanted to read about
9-10: I hope this makes it into the finals, so that I can discuss it with other people in the comments. Also, it's well written, learned something, interesting topic, etc.
Anybody have any interesting insights or interesting anecdotes related to the recent Isaac King whales/minnows manifold? Interesting thoughts? I want to steal them for a thing I'm doing.
I'd been thinking that this was probably something a rich person was doing as an experiment. Either he would prove that the markets are buyable (incentivizing Manifold to improve them) and provide a case study for how to recognize that behavior, or he would prove that the markets were robust against buying, and would provide lots of mana to the people who "helped" out. And either way, Manifold would get a small cash injection.
But it turns out it was a normal guy who, what, started the market out of curiosity and mischievousness? And then succumbed to gambling addiction? And/or felt like the market was a referendum on him personally, and maybe other people felt so too? That's really sad, and I'm glad he was mostly bailed out.
That's basically my view, too. Not that they should do it every time but to all appearances here this wasn't Johnny McRich spending money he could afford - it was a guy who panicked and made some bad decisions.
An insight from a friend who got very deep in the Cardano "community" in the past: When a hobby becomes a major social outlet, that in itself because extremely valuable, so much so that you may be willing to throw large amounts of real money at it to maintain your ties. That was his interpretation of the thought process that led to Isaac spending tens of thousands of "real" USD buying "fake" Mana despite knowing that no reverse exchange was possible and the money would be gone forever.
Also probably some hardcore sunk cost fallacy. Isaac is a *prolific* Manafold user, so just couldn't stand to see his portfolio get annihilated. And tbh it is brutal to look at now https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing
I really wanted WvM to get N/A'd while it was live (and the meta-markets with it), so everyone who bet there could get their mana back and pretend that it had never existed.
There has got to be a more sensible way of putting out the book reviews than giant google docs with them all copy-pasted in. Hell, it would not be hard to create a link that opens a random review on a single page and asks for a rating at the end.
Cobalt mining and in general mining for minerals that find applications in battery tech seems to be pretty bad for the miners and the environment. The issue is not politically charged, perhaps because doing without batteries/smartphones/electric cars is not feasible and we all prefer to turn a blind eye to this. Did EA look into the issue?
There's plenty of news coverage of it, but it doesn't really "stick" because
a)Most stories about trade-related exploitation that happen "out of sight" don't, and
b)The auto industry is probably going to move away from Lithium-Cobalt-Nickel batteries in the next couple years (including into Lithium Iron Phosphate).
I'm going to take your name, and the fact that you are commenting about batteries, as an indication that it's ok to ask you this:
When are the first commercially available, home scale Vanadium Flow batteries going to come on the market? And is the pre-production marketing from several companies (that they have 30 year, near unlimited lifespans, while costing ~the same as currently available similarly specced Li battery tech) likely to be true?
I am not as familiar with these as I am with Li-ion cells. AFAIK Vanadium flow cells are mostly used for energy storage, not transportation or portable devices.
The biggest obstacle to their wider adoption, from memory, was some really bad screw-up with licensing that wrecked the US company that pioneered the tech. It’s been a few years.
I talked about people in love with their AI chatbots last week on the show, this week we are going to follow a team of rag tag gig workers who tried to peek inside the black box algorithm that pays them, and discuss what constitutes fairness in pay among gig worker. Gig work episode out Tuesday. https://hiphination.org/season-6-episodes/
"Why do liberals hate cars? This dates to before global warming was really a thing, so it can’t be that. It’s not a hatred of technology per se, subway trains are apparently fine. "
I think it is a subset of liberals, not all of them. My guess is that this subset does not like individual choice. I suspect that it overlaps a lot with the subset that hates "urban sprawl" - private homes where individuals have more privacy and freedom to do as they see fit than they do if crammed into an apartment complex.
The thing people don't seem to notice is that by the measure of suffering children, Omelas is a great deal better than the real world. They've got a utopia for almost everyone.
We do not have a utopia. We do have children horribly mistreated by abusive parents, to some extent because we don't have or want the level of surveillance needed to prevent this from happening. There are also enslaved children, children in war zones, and children institutionally abused by governments.
"The thing people don't seem to notice is that by the measure of suffering children, Omelas is a great deal better than the real world."
Very much agreed. Omelas is a better trade-off than any place that has ever existed. The ones who walk away from it strike me as turning up their noses in an unreasonable way.
To put it in FLWAB's terms, it looks to me like a reductio ad absurdum of Deontology.
Ha, that's interesting. I took it as a reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism! Or, at minimum, a critique of utilitarianism. I mean, the ending of the story seems to put those who walk away in a positive light:
"They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas"
"I mean, the ending of the story seems to put those who walk away in a positive light:" That is how I read it as well. And, for me, this put LeGuin in a negative light (in terms of her viewpoint - I don't mean to diminish respect for her as an artist). To me, walking away from Omelas looks like a kind of ethical snobbery.
We don't know how Omelas happened, nor how much Omelans know about history. Maybe they could do better-- Omelas without the suffering child. Maybe they would do worse, creating ordinary human messes.
That's reasonable. The whole setup in Omelas is, after all, artificial. LeGuin doesn't give any plausible reason why the suffering child exists, or what is the causal link to the rest of the city.
Ok, that makes it even more ambiguous (in, after all, a fictional work) as to whether the child is "required" or not.
Are there residents of Omelas who, rather than walk away, suggest that a controlled test be done to see what actually happens if the child's misery is interrupted? But that would be a different story...
I've seen a theory that having a suffering child is just superstition, in particular, that they attribute their good weather to having a suffering child.
I've been resisting the temptation to refer to the inhabitants as Omelettes, but after all, you can't make an Omellette without breaking eggs.
"I've seen a theory that having a suffering child is just superstition, in particular, that they attribute their good weather to having a suffering child." That would certainly be horrible - and, one could argue, it is analogous to many religious practices, the intended utility of all the Aztec cardiectomies, for instance...
Personally, I always thought Omelas was about Deontology/Virtue Ethics vs Utilitarianism.
On a utilitarian level, Omelas is fantastic. Way less suffering kids than normal. From a deontological standpoint, you don't torture kids. No excuses. Torturing kids on purpose is bad and you don't do it, even if a perfect society results. For a Virtue Ethicist, our current society has more suffering but we don't intend for that suffering to occur. On a societal level nobody *chose* to torture children, or starve them, they're just things that happen on an individual level and when we find an individual who *did* choose to torture a kid then we punish them. To intentionally torture a child, in order that other people will benefit, is evil and will produce an evil nature in those who do it.
So I've always seen the ones who walk away from Omales as being the ones who aren't utilitarians.
Interested to hear what ACX think about my post on Japan's most famous song. It's one that developed virality pre internet due to its cultural resonance.
If I had to guess what Japanese song was most famous in the English-speaking world in the pre-internet era, I'd have probably picked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukiyaki_(song) .
In the modern, post-internet-meme, post-widespread-popularity-of-anime era, I think there's a good case to be made that it's Cruel Angel's Thesis.
Why can't the English teach their children how to speak? (Or, missed status signalling opportunities)
As someone who generally agrees with the idea that a lot of human behaviour is about status-seeking and status-signalling, I've been puzzled recently by all the easy status-increasing opportunities that people often seem to miss.
An obvious example is manners of speech. Many people around the world speak with low-class low-status accents, or use low-class slang, or make status-lowering errors. Why? It's not all that difficult to change your manner of speech, and while a cockney is unlikely to pass for a member of the aristocracy they can at least try to go "one notch" above their current accent to increase their opportunities in life. There's no shortage of examples to imitate.
Possible answers: 1: people care more about the approval of their immediate peers than society at large, and their immediate peers are all low-class too. 2: it's actually much harder than I think. 3: a higher-status accent actually doesn't help your social status as much as I think. 4: people are just dumb and leave easy social status on the table all the time.
I think there is such an idea as class identity. People are kinda attached to their identity.
* Most citizens of an economically weaker EU (or US) state probably would not want to emigrate to an economically stronger EU (or US) state.
* Most German soccer fans are not that inclined to switch to FB Bayern instead.
* If there is sex discrimination in some industry, that will motivate very few people to change their gender identity on job.
* If the skin whitening machine from Iron Sky was real, most US people of color would probably not want to use it, even if they believed that white people generally have advantages.
For class identity, things will look similar. Belonging to a lower class is more than just getting a smaller pay check. It ties in with all sorts of things (hobbies, world views) which give rise to identity. Identities are not just hats which you switch at will because the other one does give you a bonus to income.
I remember reading accounts of the dialogue in both movies based on the novel _True Grit_. AIUI the book exhibits the same speaking style. Namely, no one uses contractions; it's always "I would not" rather than "I wouldn't". This stemmed from a popular move at that time for people settling the frontier to make themselves sound more intelligent, and one of the ways was to avoid contractions.
If this is accurate, then one could infer times and places throughout history where the English could indeed instill their children with such habits. Indeed, there's every reason to believe children will naturally imitate what they see and hear. If all adults talk a certain way, then the kids will too.
The real question would then be why there's no cultural movement to sound more high-class. And one answer is that high class might not be as associated with high status these days.
> The real question would then be why there's no cultural movement to sound more high-class. And one answer is that high class might not be as associated with high status these days.
I'd clarify that this is context-dependent. So the theory would become, these days there are fewer contexts in which sounding high-class is associated with high status.
On the other hand, you have to admit it worked out great for Hyacinth, she has a comfortable middle class lifestyle married to a polite middle class man, while Daisy and Rose live in slovenly poverty. And Violet, well, she has a Mercedes-Benz and room for a pony.
Without her social climbing she never would have risen to the point of being able to marry Richard. I'm assuming that she started out very low class (like Rose and Daisy) and by early adulthood had managed to propel herself up into passing for middle class to the point where a boy like Richard would be seen with her. (Richard is not snobby but everyone naturally tends to date within their own class, it's impossible to imagine Richard with Daisy or Rose.)
Unfortunately for Richard, Hyacinth was not satisfied with having propelled herself into the Richard class, she wanted to go further, and to drag Richard up with her.
(There's actually a recently-produced Keeping Up Appearances prequel which deals with the life of young Hyacinth, I haven't actually seen it and it's supposedly not very good so I'm making assumptions based on the original series.)
There's very subtle gradations in the class structure in "Keeping Up Appearances". Daisy definitely married down to Onslow, who is working-class slob (but bright, even if he makes no use of it). Rose is living with Daisy and their father, so Hyacinth managed to shove the caretaking off on them.
Violet married up (the 'room for a pony' sister). So we have *probably*, though it's never definitively stated, an original family of lower middle class sisters. One married into upper middle-class/possibly lower upper class (Violet); one married down (Daisy); one is stuck in the amorphous ground between her original class and where she now finds herself (Rose); and Hyacinth moved one step up the ladder to the middle-middle class.
That's what Richard and their neighbourhood are - solidly middle-middle class. The joke is Hyacinth trying to elbow her way up another rung of the ladder when she hasn't the resources to do so, and makes her husband's life mildly miserable catering to her attempts. It's also why Hyacinth is constantly persuading her sister to stay in the unhappy marriage; if Violet divorces, she moves back down (probably) and Hyacinth loses that all-important link to the higher class she is thirsting after.
Hyacinth *is* a social climber, but she's peaked at the level she can attain, yet she remains ignorant of that and is constantly trying to pass for, or get into, the level above that. Which is why her sisters Daisy and Rose and her brother-in-law Onslow sabotaging all her attempts is funny; she blames them when it's really that she can't move any higher due to her own lack of ability. She's trying to emulate Violet who managed to move *two* rungs up, due to her marriage, but she can't do it by her own efforts. Richard isn't a member of that class, unlike her brother-in-law Bruce, and he's perfectly happy where he is, so he can't catapult her up as Violet was raised up.
You see it in all her attempts: the "refained" accent, the "learned it out of a book" etiquette, the old-fashioned and out-dated behaviours she copies. It's John Betjeman's cruelly funny poem all over again:
Yes to 1. Additionally, many people change the way they speak all the time around different groups of people. Many black Americans report doing this consciously and I have observed it with acquaintances and coworkers.
But also, there is no objective "correct" way to speak. As long as the people you talk to understand you and you understand them, then you are speaking correctly. So there is no destination to move to if you want to speak "correctly". You have to define it by who you talk to.
My father had a noticeably different accent and style and vocabulary between talking in "polite company" (office, church) and talking to family on the farm. For the former, you'd think you were talking to an academic giving a TV interview. For the latter, he sounded like Hank Hill.
It's kinda fun to emulate different speech modes, if you ask me. Apropo of Yug Gnirob's thread above: I think trying to do that might make one a better dialogue writer as well.
It may be more work than you think to get the whole thing of vocabulary, idiom, and accent right. It's not like making one change.
This, of course, is aside from issues about not wanting to imitate people who make your life harder.
I don't think I have the whole story. I speak with the Delaware/Philadelphia a-- I say "warter" when a lot of people say water. I think warter sounds wetter and more like water the liquid.
I believe it's sort of a middle-class accent. No one compliments me on my accent, but I don't think it makes my life significantly worse, either. I heard about someone whose parents made a big deal of not using the Delaware a. I don't know why it was important to them.
Not a fully-baked thought, and possibly fairly USA-centric (and/or generational?)...but I suspect the prevalence of this suboptimal striving correlates nicely with negative attitudes towards the possibility of upwards mobility. Abandoning all hope of ending up on economic par with one's parents, nevermind succeeding them...well, why would one even bother trying, including the little ways like diction? Sometimes there's a veneer of "no, arbitrary class is dumb actually, people should just Be Themselves, man" (something something colonial imperialism blah equity blah disproportionate impact blah gentrification). Still comes across as mostly sour grapes though. The social version of reveling in one's ignorance, for lack of being able to make a winning move. "You can't be an elitist without first being elite"
(Semi-relatedly, it's still stuck in my head that you once judged me as "middle class", and all the impostor feelings that privately brought up on my end...a thread last year with you, me, and former commenter Unsigned Integer debating the relative merits of Kanye West vs. Beethoven. Good taste, I think, is strictly a matter of #4.)
My girlfriend consciously did this 40 years ago and is a passable member of the upper middle class / aristocracy now, in the way she speaks. She saw that having a lower middle class Welsh air would keep certain doors closed. The process began with reading the classics and emulating certain intellectuals from radio & TV.
It's actually much harder. See this 2 minutes clip about class markers from Season 4 episode 9 of the Wire -- context is that a set of at-risk adolescents are put in a program to help them learn to be more upwardly mobile and cooperative: https://youtu.be/2_S7uazgjV8
That's just one thing - differences between a McDonalds and a good restaurant. Now, imagine that level of visceral discomfort with every aspect of your social engagement. And, keep in mind, that class, in America, is comparatively 'loose' in rigidity compared to the UK.
So, it's possible to transfer a level or two (higher or lower) -- but few can travel more than a level or two!
This is something both everyone (or nearly everybody) does and few people do at the same time.
Everybody does: look up example CVs and get people to proofread CVs to make sure they're writing in Corporate Management Speak. Ask friends and family about how to dress and behave during job interviews, court hearings, meetings with the bank about loans.
Nearly no one: adopt entire persona to hide humble beginnings (although some immigrants use easy-for-white-people names like James, Raymond, instead of their native Chin Sun or Duc Vuong)
The latter takes effort and you will sound dumb and fake while you're learning. And is contingent on knowing the right people - if you're pretending to be posh but you're working as a restaurant dish hand, there is no value in doing this because no one that posh is gonna be in the kitchen. You're better off adopting the mannerisms of the rest of the kitchen to get camaderie because your odds of moving up is effectively zero anyway.
People do try to blend in - e.g poor kids on scholarship to a prestigious university often end up adopting class markers of their peers. There's much more value in doing that if you're already in an environment interacting with people of the class you aspire to be in.
(Different story in Asia: everyone is training to pass for the same middle/upper middle Anglophone examiners for IELTs, immigration offices, and job interviews, and are aware that sounding excessively Chinaman may prejudice the visa officer, so they try to lose the accent and speak perfectly)
My impression is that it is fairly common for people to adopt higher-status ways of speaking. My own father, who grew up speaking a very country dialect, can also speak in a more urbane one, and switches back when he goes to visit the country relatives. I've also met several Americans who grew up speaking southern accents but adopted more northern ways of speaking when they moved to west-coast cities for work.
Not an answer, just an anecdote: I know at least one person who did consciously, intentionally adopt a higher-status accent for status-seeking purposes (she had a strong regional urban accent, and taught herself a more neutral American English accent in order to blend in academia).
For whatever it's worth, she's a linguistics professor/phonetician, which seems like it should both help teach the skills required to do this (pointing toward reason 2), and make it more obvious that this is even something you can try to do (pointing toward reason 4).
I've heard Arnold Schwarzaneggar was dubbed out of the German Terminator releases because Austrian is a low-class accent there, so the entire idea of "a low-class accent" is region-locked to begin with. India has a billion people in it; does Indian English count as low-status? How about Japanese English?
Accent is unconscious; it's how you sound because it's how you hear words. It's really hard to consciously adopt someone else's accent. Go ahead and try to sound like a native Greek speaker for a week, and see how close you can get.
You're essentially declaring that you're ashamed of your neighborhood and the people in it. Do you think hating your neighbors is high status, or low?
Anyone who holds an accent against you is going to find out where you came from and hold it against you no matter what. There's no actual benefit to trying to appeal to them, they're playing to draw blood. Treat them like the enemies they are.
I was raised to think high class people are false, cowardly, and treacherous and that only people who worked with their hands could be trusted. It’s obviously more complex than that but even when I make tongue in cheek comments about being from the “correct” or “true” culture part of my heart thinks it’s true. All of which is to say, I think most groups find a way to internally make themselves the true high class. And I kind of like that.
Social class is nowhere near as stable and clearly defined as it used to be. Even if someone is ignoring a person's deeper qualities, there are a lot of things besides social class markers they go into perceiving their status: wealth, fame, grace and confidence, membership in cultural group or occupation that is considered cool. Speaking a "low status dialect" can earn you as many credits as debits. Think of Springsteen, or rap.
Also, speaking the dialect you grew up in feels better. You feel like you're being frank and friendly, being yourself. I grew up in the South and still slide comfortably into saying "y'all" and pronouncing "pen" as "pin," and saying "watcha gonna do now?"
Regarding 3, it depends on the accent and your current position. Using too high an accent can also be bad. And there's a feedback into 1, where people around you might see what you're doing, and resent it, and ... present those arguments forcefully. It's "solidarity of the crab bucket".
But I think a lot of people do this, whether they know or not. It can be unconscious mimicry, where people ape the mannerisms of the people they aspire to be like. (I'm sure we can all think of situations where this can backfire, of course.) But if there's no one in your life who's more educated and more successful, where will you get your examples from, and why would you even bother?
I think a useful lens on this is why we don't try to seem higher-class than we are, or teach our children to seem higher-class than us.
I can think of things I would do if I wanted to do this - send them to ritzy private schools, make sure they know things about wine and art and table settings and so on. Figure out what clothing labels are fashionable, and dress in those. Maybe get a lake house at whatever lake rich people have lake houses at and invite them over and do whatever kind of networking rich lake-house-having people do.
The main reasons I don't do this are:
1. It would be hard
2. It would be expensive
3. There would be a long period where I sound like a poser, ie it's obvious that I'm *trying* to do high-class things, but I'm mostly failing.
4. Some sort of instinctive cringe - I don't *want* to name my child Thaddeus Prescott, even if that's what would help him fit in with all the other rich children. I don't want to talk with some kind of extremely posh accent, it would feel fake and dumb.
5. The payoff where I happen to hang out with some rich person and they're impressed by my class and offer me some extremely good opportunity seems too remote and speculative.
6. Nobody I know does it and it's hard to do things nobody you know does, and which everyone you know would roll their eyes at.
Maybe this is why people who are poorer than we are don't try this either.
From a class struggle frame of mind (solidarity between members of the class, collective action to lower the income gap between classes, etc), trying to move to a higher class is defection. Even if people don't have a Marxist framework of mind, I still don't think that they will think "that kid did all the posh things and eventually became posh, good for them", but rather "who would have thought that little Johnny would become a bastard manager". (The approved way to get out of poverty is probably winning the lottery or something.)
I think it really depends on whether one models classes as a continuum or more classically as discrete things. If classes are discrete, there is a chance to get stuck between classes, where you don't get the job in the bank because you are wearing the wrong types of shoes, but then get made fun of by your colleagues in the steel mill for your silly accent.
If classes are more continuous, so that between the alcoholic homeless under the bridge and Charles, you can find someone every step of the way, then there is more sense in improving ones high class markers to swim up a bit in the hierarchy.
Per Google, Eton is 55k$ per year. Any family who could afford that is already at least in the upper middle class. So the options are not "kid goes to Eton" or "kid becomes construction worker", but more "kid goes to regular school, becomes a doctor or engineer" or "kid goes to Eton, becomes Boris Johnson". Personally, if I were is the situation to afford Eton, I would not send any kid of mine there.
Of course, mine is probably a very middle-class perspective: A lower class member who does not send their kid to university even though they could afford it or get a stipend is Depriving Their Kid Of An Education (never mind the fact that the point of going there is in part getting some Paper), while anyone who sends their kid to Eton is Defecting Against Meritocracy.
Another take on this, on a more general theoretical level: status is relative, which means it's mostly a zero-sum game. Whatever status I win, others lose in aggregate. This means that society as a whole has as much of an incentive to push me down, as I have an incentive to try to climb up, so at equilibrium, Joe Random just stays roughly where they are. Kind of like a status-wind blowing down on everyone.
How does this work in practice? As far as I know society is not made of strictly defined classes with tight borders - usually there will be a people a bit more and a bit less classy than me around. If I try to "move up", by imitating those slightly above me, their acceptance is far from a given; they are incentivized to give me only a highly conditional acceptance (assuming I'm lucky or skillful enough not to get outright rejection). So from the start I know that there are hurdles to overcome.
Those slightly below me, however, have nothing to lose, and possibly a tiny shred to win (because of zero-sumness) by taking me in. So they will offer camaraderie and belonging - a basic human need if there is one -, for free! And people are usually optimistic in that way, when hanging out with this crowd, they won't think that they are being "dragged down", losing skills or opportunities to work in the other direction.
(No actual judgment implied in any of this - if you find people you're cool to hang out with, whatever their style, good for you as far as I'm concerned.)
Could this be part of the reason why some lower-status social markers tend to rise up? You rarely hear of working class people saving up to go to the opera, but you certainly do see a lot of people driving their EVs to their information-economy jobs while listening to songs about drugs, gangs and bitches...
This also varies quite a lot depending on one's age. Teenagers are famously attracted to lower class stuff - just ask anyone with children or nephews how worried they got about who their kids were hanging out with, and what kind of influences they were getting.
If you need to hang with the San Francisco elites, like Bank of America's ruling family, you'd definitely want a cabin on Lake Tahoe. Or you would have in the 1970s.
So you are seeing it from an interesting point in the spectrum, because you are already well past the expected minimums. You are a college-educated verbal genius postgraduate famous person people like to talk to. The US doesn't reward *more* for levels higher than that - it might reward *differently*.
The bigger difference happens at a lower level. I'll try to give a few examples:
1. RC shows up for a job as an insurance adjuster, which is like 42 grand a year, which at the time is sort of a theoretically high level of money for him. He asks a question that's fairly normal for him at his current level of income: What do people normally get fired for around here?
For RC, this is trying to figure out what the weird, crazy-boss bullshit is that you can't do there, that gets you surprise-fired and makes it so you can't pay your rent. In his experience that's one of the first questions - it's how you say "What minimum KPI expectations are there?" in poor person.
Later he finds out he almost got fired because it's such a bizarre question at anything approaching a real job that they thought I was trying to figure out how to get fired so I could collect unemployment, or something.
2. RC is talking to a C-level at a startup who is sort of making pokes at getting RC to quit his current job and work there. RC explains that he's trying to be respectful of the person's time, but he already makes X, and that's pretty high for a writer as far as he knows.
The C-level explains, listen, totally - we can beat that by X% if this works out. With better accessory shit, too. But RC, you have to understand - don't talk about money with anybody at this level besides me (I get it, I grew up poor) until the 2nd or 3rd interview. They won't get it, will assume you are some unmotivated mercenary loser and won't talk to you after that.
There's a lot of little cultural things you accumulate like that. They let you communicate in a way that signals you are "worthy" of better and better jobs in a way skills don't, until you get to a certain level where everybody is wearing whatever-brand-is-right-right-now columbia fleeces and nobody cares anymore.
I think the misalignment on OP is that he's talking about, like, accents, exact verbage, picking up an oxford, ect. and that's not really all that valuable. But knowing the difference between a KPI and an OKR? Talking in startup? Stuff like that? Invaluable. There's so much cultural BS that goes into getting those "you deserve this job, you are from my caste and know what exact bullshit lingo is popular here out of the 10,000 possible trendy variations" that you can't really ignore it in a lot of spheres, unless you come with it pre-installed.
“Le Parfum de Thérèse,” Belbalm said. “Edmond Roudnitska. He was one of the great noses of the twentieth century and he designed this fragrance for his wife. Only she was allowed to wear it. Romantic, no?”
“Then—”
“How do I come to wear it? Well, they both died and there was money to be made, so Frédéric Malle put it on the market for us peasants to buy.”
Peasant was a word poor people didn’t use. Just like classy was a word that classy people didn’t use. But Belbalm smiled in a way that included Alex, so Alex smiled back in a way she hoped was just as knowing.
Colin appeared, balancing a tray laden with a tea set the color of red clay, and placed it on the edge of the desk. “Anything else?” he asked hopefully.
Belbalm shooed him away. “Go do important things.” She poured out the tea and offered a cup to Alex. “Help yourself to cream and sugar if you like. Or there’s fresh mint.” She rose and broke a small sprig from the herbs on the sill.
“Mint please,” Alex said, taking the sprig and echoing Belbalm’s movements: crushing the leaves, dropping them into her own cup.
Belbalm sat back, took a sip. Alex did the same, then hid a flinch when it burned her tongue...
<snip>
...“Alex, what do you want from Yale?”
Money. Alex knew Marguerite Belbalm would find such an answer hopelessly crude... Maybe all rich people asked the wrong questions. For people like Alex, it would never be what do you want. It was always just how much can you get? Enough to survive? Enough to help her take care of her mother when shit fell apart the way it always, always did?
<snip>
“I will not accuse you of false humility. I trust you to know your own talents.” Belbalm took another sip of her tea. “The world is quite hard on artists who are good but not truly great. So. You wish what? Stability? A steady job?”
“Yes,” Alex said, and despite her best intentions the word emerged with a petulant edge.
“You mistake me, Alexandra*. There is no crime in wanting these things. Only people who have never lived without comfort deride it as bourgeois.” She winked. “The purest Marxists are always men. Calamity comes too easily to women. Our lives can come apart in a single gesture, a rogue wave. And money? Money is the rock we cling to when the current would seize us.”
“Yes,” said Alex, leaning forward. This was what Alex’s mother had never managed to grasp. Mira loved art and truth and freedom. She didn’t want to be a part of the machine. But the machine didn’t care. The machine went on grinding and catching her up in its gears.
Belbalm set her cup in its saucer. “So once you have money, once you can stop clinging to the rock and can climb atop it, what will you build there? When you stand upon the rock, what will you preach?”
Alex felt all of the interest go out of her. Was she really supposed to have something to say, some wisdom to impart? Stay in school? Don’t do drugs? [and then the series of "possible wisdom to impart" thoughts gets progressively darker.]
--"Ninth House," by Leigh Bardugo
After someone had said "people moving between cultures are most likely to do this" AND RC mentioned the "not talking about money thing," I just had to post this dialogue between the ficticious Women's Studies prof Marguerite Belbalm and fictitious came-from-lower-classes-and-is-fortunately-not-on-drugs-NOW student Alex (her name is actually "Galaxy"!) Stern.
There's an oddly old fashioned attitude to status some people have on this blog, like status is having an RP accent and having gone to Eton and having a title (or whatever the American approximation to that is). That's one kind of status, but it's not the only one and not particularly relevant to many people.
Lots of people try to change their accents, so the premise in the original post is not exactly correct. But it's not that clear which accents are the best nowadays. Would George W Bush have benefited from talking in a different way (I mean, he actually came from a patrician family)? I have noticed some English actors talk something like estuary English on talk shows and so forth (and these are people who know how to talk like aristocrats when they act, eg. Keira Knightley).
I read a thing about British politicians once, where some voice expert explained that Theresa May doesn't actually talk RP, but that one can hear she is middle class, and that Margaret Thatcher basically ruined her voice trying to adopt a high class accent (apparently she got bad couching).
"Would George W Bush have benefited from talking in a different way"
Yes, obviously, that's why he changed it to how he sounds now (or sounded as president, at any rate) from his original turbo-preppy New England Yalie sociolect. When in Texas, do as the Texans do.
What I heard about Margaret Thatcher is that she was advised to lower the pitch of her voice to sound more authoritative; that her normal speaking voice was open to being attacked as 'shrill' and 'nagging' the way female politicians are often attacked.
She may not have had a professional voice coach, I have no idea there.
While I appreciate this is a problem of Knightian Uncertainty, I'm curious to hear how comprehensive people in this community think our understanding of reality is.
A prompt relating to this idea:
if all animals were deaf, would we be likely to come up with the idea of and understand the existence of sound?
or
before abiogenesis occurred, could a theoretical observer understand the concept of life?
Going back to the original question: do you suspect there are all sorts of senses/forces/modalities/dimensions etc. we can't observe and lack the faculties/concepts to even contemplate?
To the second question, if Michael Thompson is right, then the concept of life only makes sense from the standpoint of the kind of creature who can compare natural phenomena to the goal-oriented phenomena of its own perception. If we weren't drawing an analogy between other life forms and ourselves, there would be no reason not to view life as a wet loose-latticed crystal.
> if all animals were deaf, would we be likely to come up with the idea of and understand the existence of sound?
I don't think one can give a good account of these kinds of questions without going into the human side of it, ie. the fact that we don't just want to understand things in the abstract, but we automatically attach a sense of salience or valence to them, which makes them seem important or not.
If we didn't have hearing *with its deep connection to our emotional centers*, but we had enough brains, senses and instruments to develop some kind of physics, I'm sure "vibratory phenomena" would be a rather boring chapter of undergraduate physics textbooks... and outside of specialists it would have the same appeal as ex. thermodynamics, i.e basically none.
If I were to indulge myself suspecting the existence of things of which there is no evidence whatsoever, I'd prefer to suspect the existence of Valinor or the immortal soul.
"do you suspect there are all sorts of senses/forces/modalities/dimensions etc. we can't observe and lack the faculties/concepts to even contemplate?"
At least for forces (and energies) we can't observe, in addition to Maybe later's examples of gravitational waves and neutrinos, we could add dark matter and dark energy.
In terms of lacking the concepts to contemplate: There have certainly been plenty of historical examples of needing to invent new concepts that didn't exist before. I expect this process to continue.
For the first one, I think yes. Once you start playing around with harmonic motion, springs, explosives, and vehicles approaching the speed of sound, eventually you'll start recognizing the concept of vibration waves in matter.
The second one is a bit trickier, partly because it's hard to know what the theoretical observer would be like in the absence of live, but also just because "life" isn't super neatly defined. As it is there's some room for debate about whether eg. viruses are alive. But I think they'd be able to get at least as far as self-replicating machines.
Assuming we can still feel low-frequency vibrations as actual motion (e.g. during earthquakes), I think hypothetical deaf civilization would understand sound to roughly the extent that actual civilization understands ultraviolet light.
Even without the "you can still sense other parts of the same spectrum" trick, we've discovered forces and emissions that we don't have a "sense" for by observing their indirect effects--for example magnets, electricity, neutrinos.
Some of those discoveries are fairly recent in historical terms, though, so I wouldn't necessarily predict that we have made ALL such possible discoveries as of today.
Humans can't hear below 20 Hertz, and while animals hear waves we don't, we have creates instruments that can take in much information our senses cannot.
I posted this to last week's open thread but was a little late to the party, so pasting here again to see if I can get a little more feedback:
Interested in what ACX readers think about the stigmas surrounding serious mental illnesses such as bipolar and schizophrenia. I started writing my own blog about my experience living with schizoaffective disorder in part because I do want to reduce stigma, but I want to do so in a way that is rational and doesn't brush aside or ignore the dangers and seriousness of untreated mental illness. A lot of advocacy around this issue pushes for the rights of the seriously mentally ill to not take medication, for example, which is more than arguably counterproductive from a harm-reduction point of view. Those who refuse medication will often end up on the streets where they hurt themselves or someone else. The lack of mental institutions to house and care for such individuals is another issue.
What do readers think a rational kind of mental health advocacy would look like? Would it include calls for a reintroduction of institutionalization and forced treatment? Also, do you think that a reduction in mental health stigma would be possible through a kind of "coming out" movement among the successfully treated, similar to the one that fueled the increased acceptance of gays in the 2010s when so many gays and lesbians were disclosing their orientations to their families and the world? Are there forms of mental health stigma that are justified and actually good for society?
Thanks for any thoughts on this! (and shameless plug: feel free to check out my Substack and share any thoughts you have on my writings there :))
I think what is important is to start the conversation by acknowledging that some characteristics/behaviors are on average bad. For example, obesity is generally bad for the individual and also as an externality to others (sharing a row in an airplane). Fat shaming is not nice, but at the other end of the spectrum saying that obesity is not a problem is silly.
If you write about what is difficult about being schizoaffective, but also about why in the right context you can live a happy life without negatively impacting others, that's an interesting story. I actually haven't read any first person accounts from someone that is introspecting from a schizoaffective POV.
My current position regarded mentally ill people who are also homeless, is that they should be institutionalized. I don't buy the American freedom viewpoint on this. I believe they could be happier and the rest of us safer.
Yeah I feel like people often get cause and effect backwards on this. The homeless guy shouting obscenities at passersby doesn't face stigma because he's schizophrenic, he faces stigma because he lives in his own waste and shouts obscenities at people. I don't think most people care that much whether he does it because he's mentally ill or just because he's an asshole.
In other words mental illness faces stigma to the extent that it's unpleasant and/or dangerous for other people to be around. Anti-social behavior and mental illness are correlated, sure, but I think most people care about the latter only to the extent it makes the former more likely.
I once read a fairly extended treatment of a person's own experience with their schizophrenia. Check out the blog "Still Drinking", and the posts sequence "The Time I Went Crazy"
I responded to your earlier post, and answered "NO" to your question about institutionalization and forced treatment -- suggested something on the model of 18th and 19th century "moral treatment" would be better. But here's another snippet, about stigma: Research shows that the relatives of bipolar people who are not themselves bipolar are unusually creative. They have higher ideational fluency, and are more inventive in their approaches to work and hobbies. My impression of people who are full on bipolar is that they often have beautiful minds. Their thinking is exceptionally creative and lively. But some mental function that keeps things in order is missing, and so they sort of spin out of control, and their brilliance and originality are obscured by their weirdness and social transgressions. Can locate the article about creativity in the relatives of bipolar people if it would be useful to you.
Later thought: The best depiction of a manic person I have ever seen in a movie is lawyer Arthur Eden in *Michael Clayton*. And he had the beautiful mind, and also the spinning-out-of-control thing.
That would be interesting! I have two brothers with bipolar, I'm of course the "schizo," and our youngest brother (there are 4 of us total) is, so far, totally "normal," though he does have some anxiety. I will look into "moral treatment" as well. The idea of pairing mentally ill individuals with those who are highly caring and otherwise un-utilized by society is a compelling one. Good stuff to think about, thanks
The article about creativity in relatives of bipolar people is "Creativity in Manic-Depressives, Cyclothymes, Their Normal Relatives, and Control Subjects." It's in Journal of Abnormal Psychology,
Technically I would be, but keep in mind that I'm a godless atheist. I don't know if derailing the discussion with talk of avatars and demiurges and karma and simulation aliens and parallel realities and the optimum super-shotgun loadouts on Phobos, etc., would be a welcome move on that substack :-/
(I like people thinking up things that I would never think of, and want to know what... how... is it an analogy? ..how did this got into such a discussion?!) :D
We sorta segued into the simulation argument and then video game characters as analogous to deity avatars and I mean, of course if you're going to play the main character in the game, you are going to load up on moar dakka ain't ya? Hence miraculous powers or abilities for a Christ-clone if God ensouls it or partitions off a part of His spirit into it 😁
"In the first age, in the first battle, when the shadows first lengthened, one stood. Burned by the embers of Armageddon, his soul blistered by the fires of Hell and tainted beyond ascension, he chose the path of perpetual torment. In his ravenous hatred he found no peace; and with boiling blood he scoured the Umbral Plains seeking vengeance against the dark lords who had wronged him."
Ohhhh! Right! More like four consecutive "Christianity Discussion Book Clubs"! I want it to be just normative for people to hop out for a book they don't want to read, and hop in for one they like. (should find some way to say that in the announcement.)
I picked #1 and #3 because they are books some friends always talk about reading. (and i've been itching to read #1 for a long time.)
And then #2 and #4 seeming greatly like they speak felt needs for living in this old world. (internal struggles with narcissism being especially relevant to #2, and loving ones enemies being especially relevant to #4.)
Once or twice a year is okay. Maybe use that opportunity to not only post a link to your blog (it is displayed next to your name whenever you post a comment anyway), but also a short description, and maybe a selection of top 3 articles. I think people are more likely to click on a specific article than just a blog in general.
There are plenty of people who do that, some even take excerpts from their posts and post it here. As long as it doesn't repeat for, I don't know, 4 or 5 times in sequence, I think it's okay (but with a total maximum limit of, say, 12 times.)
I believe the general policy is once as fine as long as it is vaguely on topic, and maybe one or two more times if it is directly extremely on topic. But no starting threads each open thread trying to drive traffic, that is what the classifieds are for.
Very interesting composition. I find it mesmerizing. It would be interesting to start with a less dissonant tuning system, and slowly build up to the repeated 5th tuning system. Thanks for posting that piece.
The difference is that Scott is a far better (although not perfect) arbiter of what's helpful, what's honest, and what's harmless than what the diversity retards at corporate nests can ever hope to dream to hope to dream to hope of being.
A big problem with alignment is that your AI's alignment is upper-bounded by how aligned the people who own it are. An AI owned by a killer will be a killer (or it will be shutdown), an AI owned by a racist is racist, an AI owned by diversity retards who claim to hate racism and sexism while condoning it as long as it's against certain groups will be a diversity retard that..., etc.
Would you consider covering the fact that girls have been getting their periods younger and younger? It seems like a topic for a “more than you ever wanted to know about” deep dive. The question is from my wife but I happen to be interested also. To pick a a random one of many relevant links: https://epibiostat.ucsf.edu/news/what-drives-earlier-menstruation-girls
I worked for several months writing a nerdcore rap song about cognitive biases (it's a lot of lyrics and I have a day job and a weekend gig too). Anyway the song is about how the bees have bounced back from Colony Collapse Disorder, but Negativity Bias prevented people from caring about this good news. The funny thing is by the time I released the song it became apparent that bees were now facing new problems like the Varroa destructor mite, so many of the commenters self-righteously denounced me for downplaying the problem. Still, it kind of proved my point. Anyway here's the song, let's cheer for the bees! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs8_cQpI_IM
We're not even worried about too few bees now. The new thing is Too Many Bees.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90716696/everyone-got-so-into-the-idea-of-urban-beekeeping-that-now-there-might-be-too-many-urban-bees
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/13/bees-urban-beekeeping-native-pollinators/
But seriously - you're right about how rarely we follow up here. And it has consequences - every so often someone tries to downplay global warming by saying "Remember acid rain? Or the ozone layer? Those problems went away!" But those problems went away because people took action. The absence of follow-up leads people to incorrectly conclude that those problems went away on their own.
I would love see some in-depth reporting on the bee thing. Did they truly just recover on their own? Did we Fix the Bees? Was there ever a problem in the first place, or was it a Shark Attack fear cycle?
Few bees, many bees, it doesn't bother me. What matters most is that the bees are aligned with human values.
Like in "Jupiter Ascending"!
In a win for nominative determinism, a man named Quoc Le owned a Quickly.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/S-F-boba-tea-shop-fencing-suspect-was-charged-17169538.php
It's so cute I have to wonder if it's actually his real name.
Is today's fentanyl epidemic worse than the crack epidemic of the 1980s?
Also, is it fair to say that the fentanyl epidemic is to white Americans today what the crack epidemic was to black Americans in the 1980s?
I hear that one of the big problems is that other drugs are laced with fentanyl to cut costs while giving them a kick. And so the standard administration measures and doses no longer apply for these other drugs, and result in deaths.
The current fentanyl epidemic seems to be far more deadly than the crack epidemic. Two sources of drug overdose deaths show that the 1980s were lower than any year since for overdose deaths, and the Wikipedia list says that they were lower than any year before 1979. (They also show a weird discontinuity at 1979 - I'm not sure if that's a real one-year drop, or some data issue.)
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db81.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_drug_overdose_death_rates_and_totals_over_time
The Wikipedia page also shows cocaine deaths broken out since 2000 - there was apparently a peak around 2005-2007, and a second higher spike now involving cocaine and opiates together.
Does anyone else not understand why people take so many holidays? Yes, I know I sound like one of those overbearing and demanding managers, but hear me out.
I frequently hear people say that they "need" a holiday as if:
a) the excessive demands of their current work are such that they will not be able to continue without a complete break for some duration, usually in a different country
b) After this complete break, the previously excessive work will no longer be a problem due to the magical rejuvenating powers of the holiday
Is this actually what happens most of the time? Or is the real reason just that people want time off work to do something else?
It probably involves some status signaling as well. I can afford overseas travel and have earned a vacation because my job is so demanding.
I guess it is all of that together:
* People need a break to dissolve the stress from work. Yes, having a break makes it easier also for the few days after vacation until the stress accumulates again.
* If you want to visit a different country, a weekend is not enough; the ratio between "time and money spent traveling" and "actually being there" is dramatically different when you take a vacation.
* Yes, sometimes people want or need to do something in the private lives, too. For some of those things, an evening or a weekend is not enough.
>Is this actually what happens most of the time? Or is the real reason just that people want time off work to do something else?
It kinda works. Time solves everything, and a surprising number of problems go away if you ignore them long enough. So taking a vacation means that of everything that's a problem at work at a time T, a part will have become irrelevant at T+2 weeks, another part will have been solved by someone else, and yet another part you'll have worked out unconsciously. And one can assume you come back better rested than before, and better able to solve the problems that remains.
As for the leading question of "not understand why people take so many holidays", I used to not understand when i started working, but that's because I had just graduated from College, so of course, after a 5-years vacation I didn't need much for the first 2 or 3 years.
I don't think anyone actually believes (b). The value of a vacation is that you don't have to work for that period of time, not that it's any better once you come back.
Most people build up stress such that their work performance slowly declines. Taking a break can be a corrective. Not taking a break makes it worse. Evenings and weekends can be enough of a break, and usually at least help, but most people need more than that. Real breaks, where they don't monitor email or do anything else related to work for a period of time.
For me, the break needs to be longer than four days. About 3-4 days into a vacation I start feeling better and my stress drops off.
I've never had a break help with work stress, but I can imagine a situation where someone's stress is coming from a growing backlog of home tasks, which holidays allow time to address.
Otherwise, taking a trip can provide motivation for continuing a harrowing job; sure the work sucks, but it also means I get to see Hawaii, and if I stick with it I'll get to see Europe soon.
yes, breaks and holidays are nice
Time away from work induced stress is immensely valuable. it usually doesn't need to be an overseas trip to be valuable, but for many people home and/or family can be a stressor or a reminder or stressors so getting out of town commonly helps relaxation.
Re Book reviews: There is a review at the end of the third google doc that is not in the list.
Title of book: The Most Democratic Branch: How the Courts Serve America
Maybe this has already been mentioned?
The homepage for this blog has started showing subscriber-only posts in the main list of recent posts to me, a non-subscriber. Given he specifically said he'd avoid this and there hasn't been any announcement from him about the change as far as I've seen, I assume this is due to a change from Substack not Scott. I just wanted to point this out in case he hadn't noticed given it presumably doesn't affect his view of his own blog.
Thanks for the heads up. This is not a deliberate change on my part, but my subscriber count keeps going down and I'm looking for ways to change that, so I'm going to experiment with keeping it for now.
> looking for ways to change that
[internal screaming] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/corrupted-hardware
Scott, I can't afford (or at least justify) the US$100 paid-subscription rate, particularly given that I'm paid in C$, but also feel bad about not contributing.
I know you have a student rate, but that was a long time ago for me. I'm not willing to rationalize that "I'm a student of life" or somesuch rot.
I wonder if you'd consider a retiree rate of US$50/year.
This could be a voluntary thing attracting people like me who want to contribute financially. I'd be fine with paying a reduced rate and not having access to the subscriber-only posts.
Or is there some other way people can contribute financially?
Could be partially inflation, though I wasn't a subscriber to the blog, I'm letting even my newspaper subscription lapse, gas is 50% more than a few years ago, groceries are up 20% or more on many items; and my pay is not keeping pace; entertainment is definitely one of the areas I am cutting to be able to keep affording car repairs while I wait for my new one to get built and delivered. :(
The tiles are also much bigger than they were, such that scrolling takes longer.
Almost all my scores for book reviews are in the 5-8 range and rather a lot of them are 6 or 7. (Because they're almost all at least _quite good_ and most aren't _astonishing_.) I suspect that my book reviewing may affect the final outcome more by rewarding/penalizing the reviews I've happened to choose (depending on whether I'm more or less generous than the average) than by rewarding the ones I like over the ones I don't.
(Perhaps the scoring process should normalize each rater's scores, or use them only to adjust _relative_ merits for pairs of reviews, or something, but that's not so easy to do for people who don't rate as many reviews as I do.)
Yeah, the problem with normalization is whether the *unrated* reviews should be treated as the *worst* or as *average*. If there are 3 reviews A, B, C, and I rate A as good and B as bad and don't say anything about C, is that "A, B, C" or "A, C, B"? Obviously A is my favorite, but is explicitly disliking something worse than not even bothering to rate it?
If we answer this, the rest is relatively simple. If there are e.g. 10 reviews, then everyone's best rated review gets 10 points, the second one 9 points, etc.; if there are reviews rated the same, they get the average number of the points for their places.
The book review review submission form doesn't seem to check the email-address field. I have definitely submitted at least one review-review with an "email address" lacking the @-sign and everything that should follow it, and I think probably at least one with nothing at all in that field. But I have no idea whether those submissions will be ignored, or treated on an equal footing with all the rest, or what. (I have not attempted to resubmit them. I have already forgotten which ones they were.)
Reading book review contest entries, I frequently find myself thinking "this is a pretty good review of a book that doesn't deserve the attention, and its actual value to me is therefore pretty small". (One _can_ in principle write a review of a bad book that's so good on its own merits as to deserve reading, but that's difficult and most reviewers in the contest have not done it.) I've tended to give these good-ish but not great scores, because to me the value of a really good book review is typically _both_ that it's interesting or enjoyable in its own right _and_ that it directs me to a book that's worth reading. I wonder whether I'm typical in this.
Yeah I also tend to rate highly books I want to read. If I order the book while reading the review then it's at least an 8. I see this as self interest, as I'm mostly here to find other good books to read.
IMO the point of you fine folk taking the time to do this is to curate what the time poor among us read in a few months time. Thus, if the subject matter is tripe it probably isn't worthy, even with a good review.
I'm judging these on the standard of the review, rather than the book, because if I like/dislike the book, that would prejudice me.
So if I think the *review* is good, regardless of the book, I give it a good score.
Does the book review contest really have to be about book reviews? As I’m reading I definitely feel like most reviewers have done their own thinking, and are stretching the definition of a review to talk about what they’re interested in. Which honestly I’m on board with, I just wonder if this really has to be a book review contest every year. Why not- book inspired blog post contest or something?
I've heard that MMA helped to sort out which of the martial arts were the best since, in the beginning, anyone of any fighting style could enter tournaments. There were weird matchups like sumo wrestlers fighting kung-fu guys. Through a process of natural selection, the winners converged on the best set of fighting styles.
Has this same thing been done with sword fighting? Are there tournaments where guys with medieval broadswords fight guys with katanas or Roman gladii?
>Has this same thing been done with sword fighting? Are there tournaments where guys with medieval broadswords fight guys with katanas or Roman gladii?
Actual swords where people can literally die, no. But an open ruleset including sticks/clubs as well as full MMA rules? (I.e. you can choose to tackle the guy hitting you with a stick, hit them on the ground, etc.) Yes, it's obscure but has actually been around since a little before the first UFC- it's called Dog Brothers. It's not a competition (there's no winners or losers), but just guys or gals getting together in a park or gym and fighting with sticks. Here's a good sample https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvmLQ_Jjqmk&pp=ygUWZG9nIGJyb3RoZXJzIGdhdGhlcmluZw%3D%3D
Part of the trouble is that every weapon and martial art is designed for a particular context, and sometimes these are incompatible. Is it for battlefield, or self-defense, or formal duels? Do they wear armor, and if so what sort? Do people carry around shields, daggers, or other off-hand implements? Are there assumptions about the sort of thing a gentleman simply Would Not Do?
Also, being able to practice at full force without injuring your partner(s) is very important, and different schools come up with different compromises. Which inevitably leaks back into the style itself, sometimes creating weak points. So to some extent, the dominant style of this free-form competition would be determined by the rules being set.
The fight choreography at the end of "Rob Roy" (1995) isn't a horrible depiction of different styles in conflict:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERmM5l2ceoY
My understanding though is that all top-level MMA competitors deploy elements of more than one martial art -- it isn't the case that a pure judo expert is fighting a pure jiu-jitsu expert or whatever. That seems to muddy the sorting part quite a bit.
And would that translate to sword fighting or fighting with other types of weapons? As a practical matter could a broadsword guy and a katana guy each be benefitting from techniques from swords having different lengths/weights than the one they're each holding?
If you're interested in swords and so on, you might enjoy Stephen Hunter's novel "The 47th Samurai".
There were; but the gladiatorial games fell out of favour a few centuries ago due to the deaths, and there have been quite a few new swords developed since then.
It would be hard to tell who wins without anybody dying.
You could use fencing-style rules, I suppose. Like, most blades don't need a tremendous amount of force behind them to inflict a fatal wound - if you can hit their chest with even moderate force you're going to ruin their day, and that's well within the ability of a judge or even an electronic circuit.
The trouble is, swordfighting under those rules would likely converge on, well, fencing swords - very long and very thin, maximizing your ability to stab your opponent without getting stabbed in return, in an environment where you don't need to worry about armor. Actual fencing foils have a maximum length, but if you went UFC-style anything goes, you'd probably see some stupidly long swords that blur the line between "sword" and "polearm."
Yea, ultimately the problem is that human anatomy is really complicated, and what, in practice, is a "disabling cut" is basically impossible to ascertain. Increasingly HEMA tournaments are trying to incentivize a greater variety of tactics though, for example "doubles", where the person who scores the initial hit gets hit within 2 seconds of that hit give both people a point, as well as getting extra hits for deep cuts, torso, head or thigh, etc.
Even within this ruleset rapiers tend to win out, although this is mitigated by the fact that slicing cuts with a rapier aren't always counted. I will note that in my personal experience doing HEMA longsword vs katana is a pretty even matchup, the katana has less inertia and can be viably used one handed, but longswords have greater reach and the increased inertia means that they can collapse an opponents block while its unlikely a katana can do the same.
The stupidly long and thin "sword" has been used in a real war before, and the people who used it conquered the entire known world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarissa
Well, yeah, I know that polearms beat swords any day of the week, but OP asked about MMA for swords so I only discussed swords.
Interestingly, the recent upsurge in HEMA has made a lot of people aware of why spears were always the traditional kings of the battlefield. A spear is very hard to deal with for a person using a sword due to its reach and speed.
I have an old Samsung Galaxy Tab 4, running the Android 5 operating system. I want to upgrade it to Android 11 or higher. Here's an instructional video on how to do that, but I can't understand what the guy is saying, or his written instructions in the video "caption." [Skip to the 4:00 mark]
https://youtu.be/Act7Rtpk2xk
Can someone explain the process to me in plain English?
Having watched the video, even though I am not technical myself, I would *not* recommend you follow this guy as he has a lot of weird files and dodges and honestly I think you're as likely to wreck your system as update it.
But if you really want to chance it, here's a transcript of most of the video:
You need ODIN 3.1.1 Google it
Samsung USB drivers Google it
Your Cable a good one
The right ROM for your device
SM T530 & T530NU https://bit.ly/3FY0b8m
SM T535 https://bit.ly/3aJ3Kk4
SM T531 & T532 https://bit.ly/3DIZiP2
Find Matteo and Android 9 also a new build and info https://bit.ly/3vhxTAz
Twrp Matisse https://bit.ly/3j3wecY
(After booting up)
And it’s called Linux OS. We will as well install gaps okay so you’re gonna have Google Play Store as well. This tablet can handle it, but how to get started?
Well, just turn off the tablet, power off, okay and then it’s a matter of pressing the Home button, pressing volume down and press power. I keep these three together, we will get into a download mode you see?
(Get to Warning screen about “if you want to download a custom OS, press the volume up key”)
And now you hit “volume up” to continue. Now we are in actual download mode now (get to screen saying “Downloading – do not turn off target!)
Are we gonna connect the cable to the computer and you’re gonna start up your ODIN, okay, and in ODIN when ODIN is started up you’re gonna as well see that the com port is litten up (lighting up, I think he means). Com 4 or whatever it’s gonna be called will be turned on.
As well, if I want to show you that, in options, in ODIN, if you select “options” you’re gonna see “turn off auto restart”. You can deselect it because sometimes it’s a little bit difficult, after the flash is done it’s going really fast and then you must grab the tablet and then hit “volume up”, “power” and “home” together and keep them pressed until you see the Samsung logo.
So you only have a couple of seconds to do that and release the buttons when you see the Samsung logo and then you’re gonna get into the TWRP. But you must do it the first time right - well at least you must do it right after the flashing of the TWRP, because if the tablet is gonna boot up then you already missed it and then the original recovery will be restored.
So then you’re not gonna have TWRP so then you’re gonna have to do this again. Okay? All right, so connect the cable to the computer, in ODIN we select PDA and we browse for the 3.5 star file that we downloaded from the Android file host and we’re gonna go ahead and flash it to the device.
Remember what I said about “options” in ODIN, that you can turn off auto reboot. If you’re gonna turn off auto reboot and the progress will be done, then you’re gonna go ahead with “volume down” and “power”, yeah?, you’re gonna keep them pressed until the tablet so let’s go ahead and exercise that.
Okay, so the tablet is now done with flashing TWRP now, okay, so we’re gonna hit “volume down” first, so we can feel the “volume down”, play with it a bit that you feel it good and then the “power” you press it, press it and feel that you’re feeling it good and then you keep them together until the tablet goes off.
And now we’re gonna switch with “volume up”, “power” and “home” and now we’re gonna see recovery and then we’re gonna go into recovery. I already installed TWRP okay but I’m showing you the procedure. Alrighty? That’s how to go into TWRP. And then when you’re in TWRP you can do several things, you can go ahead and wipe, you must wipe first, you can as well do a “format data”, you’re gonna lose everything on the tablet, you hit “select”, “yes” and “okay” and then you must reboot, you hit the home back and then reboot back into recovery, and when you’re back into recovery, you’re ready to flash the ROM.
We’re gonna do all that in the video but I need you to understand this procedure. It’s not so easy but you can do it, okay, just put the tablet to stand in a thing like this (a stand) and just try it, or let somebody help you.
So make sure that ODIN is seeing the tablet, connect the cable to the computer, make sure the device is in the download mode, this is a download mode, and the yellow com port is lit up.
Select AP, select the TWRP file, the TAR file, hit “start”, and be quick, okay. It’s flash(ed) now and now “home”, “volume up” and “power”, let go when you see the logo, and there we go into a recovery mode.
So now we are in recovery so let’s go ahead and flash Android 11. When you see the blue light turning on, you did it right. So now it’s gonna go into recovery mode and TWRP. You see that? So now we flashed TWRP to the device. It can be a bit of a hassle but just try to keep it right. (Skipped a bit of comment).
So what happens if we do an advanced wipe? Dalvik, System, Data, Cache (select these on screen). Is this thing encrypted? No it’s not. So that means we can boot up the system, we can leave it Samsung firmware if we want, but that’s not what we want, what we now want is, of course, connect to the device, you can close “other” now, and I just downloaded a file.
We’re just going to copy the files to the computer and here you can see that I already copied some files to the computer so let’s go ahead and flash. As you can see we’re getting a red line there, that’s because I’m using old TWRP, so we need to update the TWRP. The TWRP 3.5 you can download from Mateo.
(Skipped advertising for this Mateo guy).
So then we’re gonna go ahead and put the phone (sic) into a recovery mode, we’re gonna copy Android 11 to it, but as well we’re gonna update the TWRP.
The tablet is now off and we’re gonna go into a recovery mode, we’re gonna press “home”, this is “volume up” and “power” and when we see the logo we release these three buttons.
You see we get a little red sign there saying (ignore all the rest of this bit, it’s just blathering)
In the recovery mode – so first of all we’re gonna update the recovery, because this recovery is not proper. It’s image 3.5 and we flash it as a recovery and then we’re first gonna reboot back into recovery.
So now we’re gonna do a wipe (same procedure as for advanced wipe above)
So now we’re gonna go ahead and install Lineage OS 18. The code name for this device is mattisa wi-fi. So we’re gonna go ahead and select 18 and we’re flashing Lineage OS 18 Android 11.
(Problem with wrong files)
Thanks for your help, but it's still too confusing for me to follow. The fact that he says making a mistake will "brick" the tablet puts me off even more.
I made a market on Manifold on which Book Review will win the Book Review contest. Making one option for each book would be too much work so I made one option for each letter of the alphabet. https://manifold.markets/TimothyCurrie/what-will-be-the-first-letter-of-th
Is there a particular "T" review dominating the predictions there? Or are people predicting T because ~25% of reviews start with T?
This is what happens when you include the definite article in the sort.
(1) Who is Noah Berlatsky, and why is he an idiot?
I've read his review of the new Disney live-action remake of "Peter Pan", now renamed "Peter Pan and Wendy", and while I don't care too much about the entire thing because I was never into the original cartoon version, this is just ridiculous. They've race-swapped, gender-swapped, and been as inclusive as they could possibly be (Wendy and her brothers are still white, or I should say White given Noah's reviews, unfortunately) and it's still not enough.
It's the colonialism, you see. Neverland is a cypher for - well, the USA? The British West Indies? The exact location isn't important, it's the idea of the British colonial possessions. Go out West and it's filled with childish natives and thus a natural place for literal (White) British children to have fun adventures.
Going by the trailers, I think the movie is not that great. But honestly, this kind of reviewing is just making me tired. "Okay, so they fixed Tiger Lily, they race-swapped Tinkerbell, and the Lost Boys are also including girls, but I have to find *something* to complain about, else how will I live up to my trendy bohemian coffee-house Beatnik headshot?"
Yeah, they're giving the female lead agency, but she's still White! Problematic!
"The intention in both is to elevate Wendy as the hero, giving her more agency and adventuresomeness than the sexist prototype in Barrie’s writing. But in centering (White) Wendy, the Peters of color are pushed toward stereotype."
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/28/opinions/peter-pan-disney-problem-berlatsky/index.html?fbclid=IwAR2q71Z-o0flaus0Wilg9EuutpogiB4woEj7h7ukODDZbGSmjKdmMwFao1k
Yeah, the 1924 version was full of tropes we find totally unacceptable today. But today is 2023 not 1924, and the new movie is bending over backwards to be as DEI as it can be. And honestly? I find a white guy from Chicago complaining about the treatment of Native Americans in the source material to be a bit, how shall I say, precious? Somewhat like land acknowledgements, which boil down to "yeah we took this land, and we're not giving it back, so whatever".
(2) Anyway, on a cheerier note: an American Youtube cook/chef plumbs the mysteries of the Spice Bag!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBuCq4WAjes
I don't know who this guy is, so I have no idea if he's Youtube famous or just another cookery channel. Ignore the Irish accents, they're terrible, but he does keep the paddywhackery to a minimum and he suffers for his art - he nearly kills himself making the dish 😀
I've never heard of parboiling the chips (fries) before, and I remain dubious, but if it works? Great!
Also the curry sauce is (traditionally) Chinese chipper curry sauce and it's an optional dip rather than an integral part of the dish, but every place has its own version of a spice bag, you can buy commercial spice bag mixes (ranging from the decent to the terrible) and in the end, whatever way you make it, it's going to be great.
The only problem is that now I'm craving a spice bag!
Why would you assume that a writer for NBC Think, Independent, Public Notice, Atlantic, and WaPo, and a member of the CIC, was an idiot? He's such an idiot that he stumbled, Mr. Bean style, into having millions of people absorb his pontifications on a regular basis? Meanwhile, people like me and you are simply too intelligent to be listened to? What is the mental block with concluding that it is entirely intentional?
are you familiar with Thomas Friedman?
I am not, tell me more?
He's an idiot because he wrote a stupid review of a bland, inoffensive, carefully ticking all the diversity boxes movie (black Tinkerbell! Mixed-race Peter! Girls in the Lost Boys! Non-stereotypical Native Americans!) to find some scrap of racism he could bloviate about.
I don't care if he's written for Big Name Publications. As we've seen with the NYT, being a Big Name Publication is no guarantee of quality content.
I never heard of him before, and after reading this, I wish I had remained in happy ignorance. Next week: Noah tells us "Did you know Washington owned slaves and Jefferson was a rapist? This country was built on slaves (slaves!)".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0kCH-ACgM8
But none of this speaks to his being an idiot! It reads to me like he (any by extension this blob of mainstream western media, of which he is an apparatchik) is just straight up oppressing you! He's on your telescreen (which doesn't turn off, remember, if you'll permit me to abruptly change the metaphor) smugly telling you yet more lies and nonsense, as your anxiety increases because you don't know which bits you are permitted to dispute, which bits you are chancing your arm if you even so much as fail to publicly reaffirm -- "the film was PC, why is he still mad about it, oh god what will it take!" -- and he's doing it apace, he's competently and intelligently destroying your probity. And yeah I agree, the founding fathers might well be next, if that hasn't already begun.
I think he's an idiot:
(1) simpliciter, because of all the valid things to criticise this movie for, "too white" ain't one of them.
(2) because he's a white guy himself, and all the simping in the world isn't going to save his backside should the Revolution come (it never will, but suppose).
I don't know anything about Noah Berlatsky, but I'd guess his job is to serve up PC nonsense to generate clicks for the crowd that loves such stuff, and also for the crowd that hates it and would enjoy complaining about it. Hard to fault a dude for just doing his (ridiculous) job.
A white guy complaining "too much whiteness!" in a movie that is based on an Edwardian story-turned play-turned novel set in Britain is a bit rich, especially when Disney was as DEI as they dared. "No, you left Wendy white, that is wrong!"
I mean, by the same logic, I could complain that Noah's review is Too White and by centering a White writer it pushes the Reviewers of colour to stereotypes (to quote his own lines). Step back, step down, and relinquish your privileged position to a Person (preferably female) of Colour, Noah!
>gender-swapped,
Wait, so... Peter Pan is a GUY now?
Well, for the moment perhaps. But who are we to assume Peter's gender identity? They could well be non-binary!
> They could well be non-binary!
I propose balanced ternary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_ternary
Anyway, your complaint is like: "Who is the Coca Cola company, and why are they idiots? Don't they realize that drinking too much water with sugar (or artificial sweeteners) ruins your health?"
The answer is, yes they know it, no they don't care, and they are laughing all the way from the bank. The don't drink the sugar-water; they *sell* it.
Similarly, the ultrawoke guy is not reading this stuff, he is *writing* it, and he is getting paid for writing it, and who knows he might be getting paid better than most of us. We might prefer keeping our dignity to getting generously paid for writing nonsense, but that's a matter of different preferences, not stupidity.
I've heard of Coke, I've never heard of Berlatsky. Hence the questions, because I could not understand how he could look at the trailers and (presumably) the movie, and come away with "Wendy is White, Problematic!"
I hadn't until now thought about the fact that 20th century Peter Pan productions casting an adult woman to play a boy is the mirror-reverse of how the Elizabethans cast female roles.
(Apparently Barrie wanted a boy in the role, but was overruled by the first producer of the stage play.)
https://slate.com/culture/2014/01/peter-pan-played-by-a-woman-why-a-history-of-casting-the-j-m-barrie-character.html
"Who is Noah Berlatsky, and why is he an idiot?"
Fewer comments like this, please.
I genuinely don't know the guy, his opinions, or his politics, and I genuinely wanted to know how he could produce a review of a movie. that made nearly all the Good Guys non-white while keeping the Bad Guys all white, which complained about "too much whiteness, the racism is showing through".
If you really want to dive in, the Blocked & Reported podcast has a whole episode about Noah (he often pops up in discussion of Internet bullshit) https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/episode-80-because-god-hates-us-or-is-dead-heres-a/id1504298199?i=1000538291640&l=es
I mean Noah is consistently an idiot, so none of that is a surprise.
The movie looks like a safe, family-friendly, forgettable piece of work. Take the kids to it over the bank holiday without needing to worry they'll see blood or nudity.
But the reviews are still banging on about racism. Barrie's work too White! Yes, Tinkerbell is now black, but the actress gets no lines, so this is Bad even if it's the way the original character was written. Wendy and her brothers are White, this is Bad.
Yeah, they can make a version where everyone is a mixed-race trans pansexual nonbinary they/them, but at that point it's not Peter Pan anymore, it's a whole new thing, and if you want that, then why not write a whole new thing? Complaining about oh my gosh, a Scottish writer in 1911 wrote his main characters as white English children is a bit like complaining that oh my gosh, imagine that Gilgamesh is Middle-Eastern and not Latinx!
That is a problem with Gilgamesh. Racist Sumerians! Only oppressed people should be allowed in literature.
Oh, the Epic is just *riddled* with Problematic content. While it gains credit for its sex-positivity, sex-worker support, and valorisation of same-sex relationships, on the other hand it has cruelty to animals (killing the Bull of Heaven), racist and colonialist attitudes (Enkidu the 'wild man' has to be 'civilised'), class struggle issues, environmental exploitation and destruction (cutting down the Cedar forest) and of course the privilege of the rich, powerful, male king.
Hello,
I submitted a book review before April 5th. I then went away on holiday for two weeks. I came back and opened my laptop and pressed one key on the google doc and deleted it straight away (the letter 'k'). This was saved on the google doc as a change/edit. I tried to 'undo the edit' that further saved that as a change too. I am unsure if you can see edits or if you have only the version I submitted on the day.
Will it show that I edited it and will I get automatically dismissed? I posted this anonymously and left no clue as to my submission date. I hope it is okay to be asking.
Thanks
How controversial would the notion of "1-10 rating scales are fake, no one actually can consistently & reliably distinguish buckets beyond 4-5" be?
I'll personally be rating reviews on a scale of 1-5, then doubling the score for submittal (except particularly egregious 1s which will stay 1s I suppose)
You don't need to consistently and reliably distinguish them. You just need your error-prone and inaccurate rating mechanism to have some sort of reliable correlation with how good you actually find the thing, and as long as enough people with similar feelings are averaged together, the noise should wash you, and you get just signal+bias. (And the fineness of the scale doesn't eliminate or magnify bias in any obvious way.)
You absolutely can distinguish all ten places, though studies of people reading analog instruments (where you visually estimate the last decimal place) show that not everyone is good at it.
You really don't see a difference between "this is a 5" and "this is a 10"? If I'm confined to 1-5 scale, I might score some things 3 which would be a little higher than I want to score it, but 2 is too low.
For my purposes, 5-6 is not the same as 7-8 is not the same as 9-10. Something to score 9-10 would really have to knock my socks off. A 1 on 1-10 scale is worse than a 1 on a 1-5 scale, because the smaller scale doesn't allow me the same level of discrimination. A 2 on 1-5 scale is better than a 2 on 1-10 scale because of the shortened range, but simply doubling that 2 to make it 4 for 1-10 may not fit with how I score it: it might only be 3 on 1-10 in my judgement.
1-10 is too finegrained if you're only rating a few items, but once you have rated, e.g., twenty of them, then you can make a large enough number of comparisons for 1-10 to make sense.
yeah one to ten sucks. 4 is best, though i have a preference for 0–3 over 1–4. just feels more accurate.
But 1-5 doesn't give you a lot of room. For me, on 1-5, that ranks as "1 - bad, 2 - poor to mediocre, 3 - good, 4 - very good, 5 - excellent".
But with the book reviews, if I have six of them (say), I may well feel that A is better than B, even if both of them are not the best. So I would give A a 6 and B a 5 on 1-10 scale, where I might be forced to give them both 3 on 1-5 scale.
Depends on the number and how much you care. I have graded essays on 0-4 and 0-5 scales, and even with that I would sometimes give out a 3+ or a 5-. If you have a lot of items there really can be a need to get pretty fine grained.
I usually max out at 1 through 4 if I'm trying to grade in a vacuum. 10 is largely useful if you're trying to score things against each other and make a hierarchy; these two are both good but I like this one slightly more than that one, so this one gets an 8 and that one gets a 7.9.
I think 1-4 was the ideal rating scale.
Seems like a bit of a pity not to have an optional comments field for the book review contest. I think a lot of authors would appreciate the ability to see feedback for their essay.
Seconded! I submitted a review, and I would very much appreciate comments/feedback.
I see in the comments that it is OK to flog one Substack
Mine is "Radical Centrist" and you can subscribe at:
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com
Mainly about economics, inflation, trade, immigration, taxes
Substack's UI (or servers) has apparently lost its mind, they show the "(banned)" flair next to Carl Pham and Freddie DeBoer. Their names in other threads show just fine.
Anybody else seeing the same thing ?
I did, but I didn't see the usual message by Scott that "user is banned for this comment". So what gives?
Search for "banned for this comment" on this page. You'll find the comment one of these got banned for.
I looked for that, but not seeing it.
Your comment is the only instance of the "banned for this comment" string on this page. What's going on?
I'm not seeing any of them anymore either (there were 2). Collapsed or deleted?
Carl got into an insult exchange with someone and drew a one week ban. I don’t know about Freddie.
Freddie also got a one-week ban, for a comment in which he called YIMBYs a "little cult" who will "kill you" for questioning their ideas.
Harsh? Maybe, but I appreciate the demonstration of the principle that even respected long-term commenters need to keep their comments civil and sensible.
Especially since I generally consider myself a YIMBY, but find some of his more thoughtful criticisms of the movement quite persausive.
If I were going to kill him for anything, it would not be that. (I do not intend to kill him or any other commenters on this board. Unless there are Wood Ducks posting on here in which case... I'm sorry, but it's your own fault for being delicious.)
No love for mallards?
Out of curiosity, do you own a backyard?
Yes, and I prioritized backyard size over house size or location to the point of moving 3000km to buy a house with a decent sized backyard instead of an apartment condo.
I don't want anyone else telling me what I can do with my land, so, per the Golden Rule, I don't want to tell anyone else what to do with theirs.
I can not find the SSC post talking about how scarcity leads to politics and scott makes up a fictional example of if there was 10% of the available water all the interest groups would fight for it but with enough water it is a nonissue. It could be a ACT post but I think its older.
Perhaps this?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/
Thank you so much. I paraphrased this idea to a friend of mine to understand why making things cheaper is so good in the context of politics. Weinstein talked about how the enemy of systemic violence in the modern age is not peace but growth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L39Xr6bU9Mg
It is a sort of commentary of the stagnation and perceived increase in 'political violence'. Fundamentally, political ambitions are elevated to a higher level where simple things like plumbing and feeding a nation are seen as a given. This world could be called post-scarcity and it future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.
"Imagine if tomorrow, the price of water dectupled. Suddenly people have to choose between drinking and washing dishes. Activists argue that taking a shower is a basic human right, and grumpy talk show hosts point out that in their day, parents taught their children not to waste water. A coalition promotes laws ensuring government-subsidized free water for poor families; a Fox News investigative report shows that some people receiving water on the government dime are taking long luxurious showers. Everyone gets really angry and there’s lots of talk about basic compassion and personal responsibility and whatever but all of this is secondary to why does water costs ten times what it used to?"
Showers, is it? I mind the time when a basin and a wash hand stand was the height of technology!
http://graceelliot-author.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-victorian-stand-up-wash-keeping.html
Seriously, as a young child I grew up around houses where the wash basin and ewer had been the most recent ablution technology.
Ok boomer 😂
So Hinton has decided that the current AI race dynamics really are dangerous: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/technology/ai-google-chatbot-engineer-quits-hinton.html
I wonder whether now others will follow?
It would be interesting to see someone come up with a diagram showing what various intellectuals and AI big wigs think about AI risk, displaying the relationships among them and who seems to be influenced by whom. Perhaps that would be very hard to do. But, for instance, I imagine Tyler Cowen isn't going to change his position as long as Robin Hanson doesn't. If Hanson did change his position, then TC + hundreds of thousands of his readers also might, some of whom are also public intellectuals with huge readerships.
It’s a good piece. I wish it had been a lot more in depth though. The near future problem of impossible to detect deep fakes is troubling.
For some use cases it will be possible to have hardware (cameras, microphones) that cryptographically sign their output to indicate 'yes this is in fact the digital artifact produced by a particular device at some particular time'.
Of course this might make ordinary postprocessing impossible, but in time even that could be solved in a similar manner by having a chain of signatures associated with certain 'acceptable' modification technologies, so that a picture could be cropped while retaining the verification that it was taken by some particular physical camera.
It's a cool idea, but I can see a lot of ways to cheat it:
1. Buy a crypto-signed camera, crack it open, and find a way to read its encryption key. Or if the chip itself is beyond your tools, find a way to feed it faked data. Physical access is nearly impossible to secure against, especially if you're worried about government action.
2. Actually, if you're a government propaganda agency, there's an even simpler option: Just go straight to the manufacturer and order them to secretly create some encryption keys for you to use.
3. The analog hole: Generate a fake image, print it out, and take a picture with your cryptographically verified camera. Add a bit of blur or JPEG compression to hide any rough spots, if necessary.
4. Just make up a reason why your data couldn't be signed. "This image comes from a confidential source and if they sign it you could track them down" is a good one - it might even be true for a lot of sources.
That being said, news reporters already have some defenses against people lying to them, such as by asking questions of actual human sources. After all, it's been possible to generate large quantities of realistic fake text ever since the invention of the typewriter.
I've often thought this would be a great idea, glad to see someone else thinking the same way.
I'm not sure what level of depth is right for someone like you, with lots of tech knowledge. I thought this youtube vid of a talk was good, regarding immediate dangers of AI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=bhYw-VlkXTU
This article about misalignment made a lot of sense to me:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.00626
And here as a bonus resource is my comic illustration of the apocalypse
https://photos.app.goo.gl/PX6XhqJtd4uMiMj38
Hinton's response to that article, from his Twitter: "In the NYT today, Cade Metz implies that I left Google so that I could criticize Google. Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly."
Cade Metz strikes again, huh? I've hit my limit of free NYT articles and I'll be damned and roasting on the hobs of Hell before I subscribe to them so I can't read it, but given that recently (apparently) on their recipe pages they described scrambled eggs and cheese on toast as "toad in the hole", they do seem to be living in their own little reality.
What the NYT thinks toad in the hole is:
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1019609-toad-in-the-hole
What sane people know it as:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbREqQm7zzw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xrwwIKlto8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRu_Gq1bDPg
I'd just add the caveat that while this could be an expression of genuine feelings about google, it could also be the case that Hinton's NDA with google contains a non-disparage clause and he wants to make sure nobody at google thinks he's triggering it.
A lot of what humans "feel" corresponds to the presence of chemicals such as neurotransmitters and hormones. Are there analogs to these chemicals in how AIs work? I would think we would want there to be if we want AIs to feel things.
Maybe batch normalization is an analog. Rescales the inputs of a whole layer together so it’s something like a hormone having a global effect on all neurons rather than one by one. In general, global parameters (learning rate, regularization strength, others) can also be considered analogs, maybe.
Our microwave oven died, and I went to a couple of local appliance-parts stores to buy the defective part (a thermistor, a.k.a. thermal cutout). Neither store was able to help me, so I bought the part online.
The part was $13.88, shipping was $20.00, and tax was $4.07 for a total of $37.95*.
A comparable replacement would be $249.99 + 12% sales taxes, so if the oven goes another couple of years it will have been well-worthwhile.
But here's the thing - I'm irked over the shipping cost. (And that is irrational in itself; I spent close to two hours driving around looking for the part, and however much in gasoline and wear and tear on the van, before looking online.)
But in any case, had the part been $33.88 + tax, with free shipping, I would have been quite happy.
So is this sort of reaction normal or explainable? Would I have felt better ordering a bunch of other small widgets to amortize the shipping cost over a more expensive purchase?
* All prices are in C$.
You might be interested in reading https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2023/02/15/junk-fees-bunding-and-unbundling/
As Carl alluded to, the cost is for shipping *and handling*. Handling is going to cover wages for, say, time spent driving the package to the post office.
...I'm looking at the tax and trying to figure out what it's based on. That's like 30% of $13.88, so I'd assume they're including the shipping cost, which... I don't know about that, that seems iffy.
We have two sales taxes - Federal (GST) @ 5%, and Provincial (PST) @ 7%. The taxes are independent (i.e. one is not calculated on the total after the first tax is added), so it's a straight 12%.
The 12% was based on the pre-tax total of $33.88.
I think it depends. A seller who sells nominally below cost and makes their profit on shipping fees is clearly missleading, and one would not want that. You can mostly tell these sellers because the shipping cost will be per item, while the actual costs would be a fixed base and then scale slowly with mass and volume.
On the other hand, if the part was shipped by air mail from China, perhaps it just costs that much. Did they have a slower option which would take a month?
Contrary to Carl Pham, I don't think using ones personal inconvenience for sending a package should be used as an intuition pump. I guess the costs to getting the item out of the door of the shop/warehouse are lower for online retail than for walk-in shops, additional packaging non-withstanding. The shipping costs should be dominated by what it costs to pay a parcel service to transport that thing.
I don’t think it would bother me unless I was short on sleep or had a sinus headache or something making a bit of irritation into something bigger. But go ahead and feel annoyed.
Did you check Jameco dot com for the part? They are pretty good. I’ve used them a lot.
Thank you - I hadn't heard of Jameco.
I have bought from Repair Clinic in the past, and they're good, but the first place I could find that stocked the part, after many misses, was Parts Town LLC. They were really good.
The thing that frustrated me with my first local supplier was that they refused to look for a very generic part because they didn't deal with my specific brand (Panasonic).
It appears they (the local supplier) have to find a specific number for the part, after drilling down from the manufacturer and model number. I would have thought they could have looked up "thermistor" or "thermal cutout", and then find applications from there.
I feel better about shipping costs when I think of the times I've sent a package. Find a box that fits, no not that one it's got weird stains on it, OK this one will do but a bit big, have to pack a lot of cuhsion in around it....find some newspaper, some bubble wrap, wrap it all up, now tape WHO THE FUCK forgot to tack down the end of the tape onto the little dispenser lip made for that purpose? Grumble, go find the glasses and strong light, finally tape the box up, trundle on down to the post office, wait in line, wait some more after this union drone decides it's lunch break or smoke break or sanity break time, whatever, weight, yes sir/ma'am first class today, I don't even want to think what you apes would do to it if I sent it 4th class, or whether it would get there before the Sun burned out, buy all these stamps, yes, lick them all, why the hell don't they sell $5 and $10 stamps anyway? drop the damn lump off -- finally! done!
Obviously it's way, way more efficient when you do it all day, but you'd have to pay *me* a lot more than $20 to go fetch the part from the warehouse, pack it up, tape it up, address it and send it on its merry way, leave alone the part about people humping the package around through warehouses and in and out of airplanes and trucks.
This is unrelated to your comment, but I wanted to tell you that I miss seeing what you have to say. You're thoughtful, insightful, intelligent, and knowledgeable, and regardless of whether you ever post here again, I thought I should tell you that. Too many people have fallen in and out of my life without knowing how much I value them, and even though this is just a couple of random people on the Internet passing in the night, I figured it'd be better to tell you than not. :-)
Well said! I have shipped service manuals and parts for cars I no longer own to people who can use them. What a hassle! I would feel weasely charging more than postage, so I eat the time and cost of repurposing old packaging, tape, and my time. It is a huge pain.
Although I feel good about the stuff going to a good home, I would be better off throwing it out.
I don't think it would be weasely at all to sell the item itself, even if your reason for charging is mainly the inconvenience of shipping it. I'd happily pay 20-50% of the original price plus shipping for such an item.
In the news: Adidas shareholders sue Adidas, because Kanye: https://www.axios.com/2023/04/30/adidas-sued-yeezy-partnership-ye
Why is this type of lawsuit permitted? I would understand if they were suing the CEO, etc. But all this lawsuit can do is waste a lot of time and money on legal expenses. The shareholders are effectively suing themselves.
It's only been filed, whether it's actually permitted is yet to be seen. Looks like those guys are Googling whatever phrases they can get into court with as an attempt to grub money, and once they're in court they're going to be demolished.
The claim is that they only lost money because the CEO lied to them about... whatever they're claiming he lied about. I guess they're arguing businesses have a contractual obligation to pre-emptively air all their sponsors' dirty laundry and deliberately tank their own value. They're going to be demolished in court.
As is the case with many class action suits the lawsuits could be funded by a law firm. They find clients to represent, in this case they'd probably look for shareholders with a very small stake in Adidas, and then talk them into suing. Since the clients have a small stake they might be close enough to indifferent or mad enough an Kanye to go along with it. The clients might get a small payout but the lawyers can capture a significant portion of a settlement or judgement which can make it very profitable for the law firm.
Some people like political signaling more than money? Plus they may have people they want removed from board/leadership.
Are people who wrote a review allowed to vote?
Yes, but please don't vote on your own.
Scott's essay is about the Glowmar response confirmed!
Naw I can tell he wrote the Captain Underpants review.
À-propos of the comments in the fantasy thread about the recondite vocabulary of Stephen Donaldson in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, I have to share these star examples from Chesterton's treatment of the English novelists Thomas Hardy and George Meredith:
"For it is the remarkable fact that it was the man who had the healthy and manly outlook who had the crabbed and perverse style; it was the man who had the crabbed and perverse outlook who had the healthy and manly style. The reader may well have complained of paradox when I observed above that Meredith, unlike most neo-Pagans, did in his way take Nature naturally. It may be suggested, in tones of some remonstrance, that things like "though pierced by the cruel acerb," or "thy fleetingness is bigger in the ghost," or "her gabbling grey she eyes askant," or "sheer film of the surface awag" are not taking Nature naturally. And this is true of Meredith's style, but it is not true of his spirit; nor even, apparently, of his serious opinions. In one of the poems I have quoted he actually says of those who live nearest to that Nature he was always praising —
"Have they but held her laws and nature dear,
They mouth no sentence of inverted wit";
which certainly was what Meredith himself was doing most of the time. But a similar paradox of the combination of plain tastes with twisted phrases can also be seen in Browning. Something of the same can be seen in many of the cavalier poets. I do not understand it: it may be that the fertility of a cheerful mind crowds everything, so that the tree is entangled in its own branches; or it may be that the cheerful mind cares less whether it is understood or not; as a man is less articulate when he is humming than when he is calling for help."
And from the Wikipedia article on Meredith's succès de scandale novel "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel":
"Sir Austin Feverel's wife deserts him to run away with a poet, leaving her husband to bring up their boy Richard. Believing schools to be corrupt, Sir Austin, a scientific humanist, educates the boy at home with a plan of his own devising known as "the System". This involves strict authoritarian supervision of every aspect of the boy's life, and in particular the prevention of any meeting between Richard and girls of his own age. Richard nevertheless meets and falls in love with Lucy Desborough, the niece of a neighboring farmer. Sir Austin finds out and, disapproving of her humble birth, forbids them to meet again, but they secretly marry. Sir Austin now tries to retrieve the situation by sending Richard to London. Here, however, Sir Austin's friend Lord Mountfalcon successfully sets a courtesan to seduce Richard, hoping that this will leave Lucy open to seduction by himself. Ashamed of his own conduct, Richard flees abroad where he at length hears that Lucy has given birth to a baby and has been reconciled to Sir Austin. He returns to England and, hearing about Lord Mountfalcon's villainy, challenges him to a duel. But this goes badly: Richard is seriously wounded. Lucy is so overcome by this turn of events that she loses her mind and dies."
From which the moral is, I guess, don't homeschool your kids! 😁 Also, based on a true story, apparently:
"In 1856 George Meredith's wife Mary began an affair with the artist Henry Wallis. In the following year, pregnant by Wallis, she ran away to join him, leaving her son Arthur behind. Meredith undertook to bring the child up. The parallels with the opening chapters of the novel are obvious, though Sir Austin is certainly not intended as a self-portrait. Meredith was equivocal in his attitude to Sir Austin's favourite educational theories, which, it has been shown, derived largely from the medical writer William Acton's Prostitution, Considered in Its Moral, Social & Sanitary Aspects (1857) and The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1857), from Herbert Spencer's essay "Moral Education" (Quarterly Review, April 1858), and from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's novel Émile."
That reminds me of a story about the Buddha.
A king had a son, and a fortune-teller said that the son would grow up to be either a great king or a great philosopher. The king decided to raise the boy to have no knowledge of illness, old age, or death, because that knowledge could lead to an interest in philosophy. But one day the guards accidently let an old man into the palace. The boy asked why the old man looked like that, so the old man explained what old age is, and the boy immediately became a philosopher.
Thanks for reviving this forgotten name. George Meredith was considered the leading "literary" novelist of his day and was praised by Virginia Woolf. His reputation absolutely crashed after his death, and now even I, who have a high tolerance for high-toned 19th Century writing, had to struggle through "Richard Feverel". The story of his errant wife and the raising of his child is memorably treated by Vivian Gornick in her non-fiction "The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith" -- published in the 1970s and considered a kind of feminist classic.
I think AI maximalists, which appears to be almost everyone, are making a bet on bad odds while under the influence of our natural cognitive inclination to believe that we're special https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-bet-youre-making
Alright, I think the article itself is open to a charitable interpretation.
The charitable interpretation is: don't hate the player, hate the game.
Look, the internet blows everything out of proportion, even the apocalypse. I'm sure there's lots of AI doomer "content" out there from people just trying to make a buck 'cuz it's the hot thing right now and I'm sure it's super inaccurate and annoying. And it's fair to be annoyed by that.
But, yo, that's just the way publicity works these days. You gotta draw hype, you gotta draw attention, and every "content creator" is gonna come and provide a cheap knockoff and, ya know, if that gets the message out, that's how the game is played. I don't like, from the article you don't like it, but ya gotta get your message out into the media ecosystem we have, not the one we wish we had. And to be fair to the "content creators", ya know, they have to make what sells, not what they wish they could make.
The media criticism angle? Yeah, totally on board, I'm sure lot's of irresponsible stuff has been published.
But why share that article here? This is, like, the second worst place you could post this behind LW because you know, and I've seen you commenting here and SSC for years, you know we didn't just jump on the hype train and we're not exaggerating. Right or wrong, people here have been worried and discussing AI "doomerism" since...what, like 2010? 2008? Well over a decade of it, ya know, being a weird niche interest. You know we're not just worried about ChatGPT, we're looking at how AI and ML systems have advanced over the last fifteen years and projecting that forward.
If you think the media is overhyping AI doomerism, I'm very sympathetic, if you think Yudkowsky and Altman and others are making headlines irresponsibly, hey, they're playing the media game we have, don't hate the player, hate the game. And I'm sure for 95%+ of the AI content out there, this is a valid criticism. But not here, why here, I remember hearing variations of this argument like 7 years ago, we've heard this and there's a half dozen arguments against it. This is, literally, like the second or third worst forum you could possibly post this argument in.
> Right or wrong, people here have been worried and discussing AI "doomerism" since...what, like 2010? 2008?
I want a T-shirt: "I worried about AI apocalypse *before* it was cool".
Please, someone, anyone, try reasoning about the object-level question instead of doing bias-hunting along the lines of "well, sea level rise is a lot like Noah's flood, so believing in climate change is just a secular apocalypse".
In terms of your actual argument: 7% of people throughout history are alive today. So if the world ends tomorrow, 7% of people throughout history will have been alive when the world ended. I agree it's mildly implausible that I'm in the 7% of closest-to-the-end people, but I'm much higher than the 7%th percent of richest people, or most educated people, so apparently mild 1/13 coincidences happen pretty often. I don't think this is a strong update. If I said we weren't going to have giant changes, you could fairly accuse me of status quo bias, which is also a real bias we are frequently told to avoid. This is why at some point you need to stop lobbing bias arguments and reason about the actual question.
There's a much stronger argument against either of us being real Substackers. We're probably in the top 0.001% of people in terms of media influence, so we should be pretty strongly worrying that we're in a simulation or something, where they only simulate the people with important effects on history. I do worry about this pretty often, and the Substacker thing seems like much stronger evidence than the "alive during big AI transition" thing.
The Doomsday Argument is just an intractable disagreement about reference classes. I don't know what else you're thinking is being overlooked.
Was it unreasonable for the people at the time of invention of nuclear weapons, or when the US and USSR were amassing giant stock piles of nuclear weapons, to worry about the possibility of a war driving the human race into extinction? It seems to me that Freddys argument would work equally well for telling those people they were being unreasonable, and yet I don't think that's obviously right.
What if the US and USSR had developed intentional doomsday weapons, for example, nuclear weapons designed to put massive amounts of fall out into the atmosphere and poison life on earth, as a deterrent to any possible aggression from the other side? Would people living in that timeline be less subject to Freddys argument than us living in the current timeline?
I don't think you represented the odds fairly. Instead consider what percentage of humans who have ever lived are alive today.
I think your primary argument is that Homosapiens have existed ~300,000 years, and humans live only ~75 years. Therefore, it is unlikely (75/300,000 = only 0.025%!) that you live during the end of human kind, and the only reason anyone thinks there is a significant chance is because of humans' innate desire to feel special.
This is an argument is a survival analysis model that only uses information about how long humans have existed and how long we live on average. It assumes constant rate of extinction for all time. The model doesn't use any additional information, and so can be applied to almost anything. We can use it to estimate how long a country will exist, how long a star will last, or how long human kind will survive. These aren't especially useful models since they don't account for any details like political unrest in the country, astronomical models of star lifetimes, or all the arguments used about AGI that are based on some evidence. Somewhat ironically, we can even use this same model to suggest there is a 50% chance humanity will end in 300,000 years, though again, that's not really a meaningful number.
Also, might as well note that your argument overlooks that more people are alive in modern times than 300,000 years ago. I found estimates that ~120 billion humans have ever lived and ~8 billion are alive today. As in ~7% of humans who have ever been alive are alive now; if now were the end of humanity we would be part of the "special" 7% that get to see the end of the world, which is much more probably than your 0.025% estimate. I still don't think this is a good model from what I wrote earlier, but 7% would still be alarming!
I personally don't really know where I fall in the AGI doomerism spectrum, but I just don't think this is a good approach for dismissing people's concerns. If there is a flaw in doomer arguments we should find it explicitly.
I'm not a maximalist, but do think a really terrible outcome isn't unlikely, and I feel like I'm constantly pushing *against* my natural cognitive inclination to believe tomorrow is going to be like today, and 5 years from now is going to substantially the same, with a just few tweaks. In fact, I go through whole afternoons without thinking once about AI dangers, and feeling as thought everything's the same as ever. Then something brings AI to mind, and I feel disoriented and creeped out, and I think, "but come on, everything feels normal, can that possibly be true?" And I think through the whole thing again, and reach the same conclusion: a really terrible outcome isn't unlikely. I do very occasionally have the thought that if our species is going to be annihilated, I'm sort of glad I'm one of the ones here to see it. But the occasional thrill of that is WAY more than balanced off by my distress about my daughter meeting some terrible end.
I think my modeling goes something like; end of human race 5%, major progress towards utopia 20%, major progress towards a dystopia, 20%, general acceleration on current trajectory 35%, unknown unknowns 20%.
The industrial revolution changed the world. The atom bomb changed the world. The internet changed the world. I don't think believing that AI will change the world is the result of a "the most special time in world history is when I'm alive" prejudice. To be sure, there are some extreme views about exactly how much AI will change things, but I don't know that those views should be off the table a priori.
"The industrial revolution changed the world. The atom bomb changed the world. The internet changed the world."
Thank you! That was _exactly_ what I thought when I saw "...that the world is going to mostly go on the way that it has, always the best bet you can make..." in Freddie deBoer's essay.
He does have a point that AI has a history of hype, and it is reasonable to do some discounting of the predictions of major effects based on specifically that history, but that still isn't a strong object level argument.
There have been a lot of conversations lately on ACX about what "change the world" means. Lots of things can and do change how we live our lives, and that's not new for humanity. A previous discussion thread looked at specific 40-year timespans where the original poster thought life didn't change that much, but several of us disagreed and pointed out how much changed within that time period even though it seemed intentionally selected to not involve a lot of change.
Anyway, those of us who are saying AI isn't special are not implying a lack of change, even world-changing levels of change. We're saying that major change is actually the norm, and that even if AI represents major change this is within normal bounds. Killing all of humanity would obviously not be normal, and transhumanist immortality would also not be normal. So arguing for transformative but not by as much as the maximalist positions seems to be Freddie's argument. If so, I agree.
Nah, the OP said that "We all were living radically different lifestyles than we were in the 1980s."
I disagreed that for any meaningful definition of "we all", "radically different," and "lifestyle" this was untrue.
And then a bunch of 20/30-somethings tried to zoomersplain how the '80s were so different than now.
I take your point, but over the sweep of human history, I don't think major change is the norm, certainly not major technological change. Until the industrial revolution most people lived agrarian lives, and technological advance was slow and gradual. We're so used to our historically anomalous fast pace that now people only count armageddon or transhumanist immortality as abnormal.
I'm wondering. Could we develop a metric for what would count as "major change" in terms of the difference between how life is like at a particular place and time, and what it was like X years later, where X is intended to encompass a person's lifetime or similar. Specifically, they are old enough to remember the first date, and can examine the level of change by the second date. I'm thinking 40-60 year gap.
Then, could we examine how much actually changed during that time period, and determine if a random sampling of periods did or did not have "major change" as we define it?
My gut tells me that we would count most or all post-Industrial-Revolution dates as constituting "major" and a large number but far less common before that. Before the Industrial Revolution I would expect location to matter much more, such that some places might be having "major" change while others are quiet, and vice-versa.
I can't rule out that if we really knew history (even as much as modern scholars, let alone people living at that time), we would consider almost all eras to show "major" levels of change, even compared to modern definitions.
Do you feel up to defining "major"? Technological would be a part of it, but can't be all of it. The fall of the Roman Empire, in part and then in whole, would certainly be "major" even without any new technology. I don't think I would count the founding of Rome as "major" because at first it affected so few people.
Well, there are changes that people will feel to be personally major ones in their lives (476 in Rome, 1453 in Constantinople, the Black Death, Columbus). But there's a real sense in which those event don't fundamentally affect the way human beings live together, or the kinds of lives they have. You could take a Roman engineer and put him in 17th century Britain and I don't think he would have a hard time picking up work. Technological unemployment might be a useful measure. When Gutenberg came along, that was world-changing--when the expensive scribes got put out of business and books were mass-produced and disseminated, that led directly to the Reformation and arguably to democratic revolutions.
And there's a trend: the time between world-changing events is getting shorter.
Well, betting on bad odds is sort of our species' signature move. It's how the future learns wisdom, looking back at our follies and saying "Welp, not doing THAT again. Onward! To new and different mistakes!"
We *are* in (or rather, at the end of) a "special" period in development. Most of it happened in the 20th century, and while AI will be associated with the 21st century, it is the last gasp of that trend. There is a credible potential for it to be transformational (to the degree of "the concept of money becomes obsolete") that you simply want to *guess* will not happen.
I wrote up my thoughts on the broader topic earlier: https://www.newslettr.com/p/the-long-twentieth-century
Mmmm, I think the evidence is strong that the period of greatest human development was around 1860 to 1960 and that the returns from scientific and technological development of the past 60 years have been wildly disappointing relative to that baseline. In that sense we missed the special period.
Either way, there is very little sense in using statistics to try to guess *when* that period would happen, if we can consult a history book and see that it has already happened.
Also, there is no point in using statistics to try to guess if various adolescent fantasies about Dyson-sphere powered galactic colonialism (or nightmares about AI manifesting grey-goo) will come true. One can just point to the insurmountable engineering obstacles. Or one can acknowledge that they are merely "adolescent fantasies", and not consider them a serious idea worthy of debate.
Nice essay! I think that the 19th century rise of the chemical industry and discovery of 42 of the natural chemical elements ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_chemical_element_discoveries ) and Darwin's and Maxwell's work are at least within a factor of 2 or 3 of 20th century advances.
( am I misreading, or is the space race omitted from your essay? Arguably the lunar landings themselves didn't change peoples' lives, but weather satellites and GPS did. )
Probably true, but I was commenting about an essay on the 20th century (albeit a "long" 20th) and contrasting it with the 19th. While AI started in the 20th, it looks more like a technology of the 21st (particularly LLMs, other big neural nets, and systems containing them - presumably leading to AGI).
I think we've actually lived through fairly uninteresting times for the past twenty-ish years. I suspect when the history books are written the 1940s and 1990s will get most of the focus out of the past century. And the present will be seen as an interlude between the 1990s and the next world historical period. Like the 1880-1910 or 1820-1850 period in the US.
I think every time period is important and critical. But we certainly don't treat them that way. A lot of history mentions the start of things (often a somewhat artificially invented start) and when they become big enough to make "sudden" changes.
I think you're right about technology. The technological change I saw in my childhood, and even more so what my parents lived through, seems to me much bigger than anything that's happened in the last 25 years.
But sociologically...? Contrariwise, it feels to me like there is greater upheaval, division, and discontent around social shibboleths and norms than at any time since maybe the first decades of the 20th century -- which arguably led to the unspeakable horrors of the mid 20th century.
I think most of those trends really came out of the '90s. Like politically polarized parties, party line votes, political correctness/wokeness, impeachment hearings as political tactics, etc. Though of course they've grown and somewhat changed over time.
Strong agree, and I've made similar points before. I don't think the current generations have any idea what real change even looks like, so we think what we are seeing now is big. It's been unusually quiet in real terms since probably the early 90s at least.
If you were living a fairly cosmopolitan existence then the technology wasn't such a big deal. Big changes have been in the developing world, where you went from living in your little village, to living in your little village with a cell phone and internet. These mass migrations from Africa to Europe have been made possible with information technology.
Relatively mild mass migrations, compared to much of history. Between 1820 and 1850 the population of the US *tripled*, mostly from immigration. The US also expanded from the Mississippi river all the way to the west coast, taking half a million square miles of land from Mexico. It's hard to comprehend that kind of massive change in 30 years. Then, the number of immigrants skyrocketed after 1880, and the US built a colonial empire in that 40 year period, conquering Cuba, the Philippines, Hawaii, and various islands around the world.
No modern country is seeing anywhere near the frequency and magnitude of the changes the US saw then. And we consider those quiet years! WWI and WWII were far more massive in scale and scope, and set off very significant changes in the post war years.
If you say we are living in uninteresting times, are they uninteresting for the individual alive today, or for future historians? I am talking about changes on the lives of individuals. You could live on your farm in the US in the 1800s and milk a cow every day of your whole life, even if US population tripled over 30 years. Population % change was faster back in the old days, but with a much smaller population to start with. And migration within borders, and within EU for example is quite a lot if you consider numbers of people rather than % of population.
I guess I see technology as the probable driver of the sociological change that has been happening worldwide. People spend a lot of their time on screens in third world countries, and previously they didn;t even have TV or phones.
They're uninteresting for both the individual and for historians. For historians, we're in a period of extremely low military and political change - few wars, few boundary changes, few changes in government (not elections, but entirely new governments). Cultural historians will find interest, but that's literally true of every period of time ever, at least for periods when we have enough records to do anything about it. In terms of individuals, as a percent of the population, it's much more likely that an 1850 person lived in multiple countries and undertook extraordinarily difficult tasks to get to where they wanted to go. Someone born in Ireland who moved to England, then the US east coast, then US midwest, then US west coast (each of which had vastly different standards of living, from urban to pioneer) is not an uncommon story. That would be like a significant number of people leaving central Africa to move to Brazil and then go live in the Amazon. I don't think that's a very common type of story today. Even the immigration we do have affects far fewer percent of people than it used to. The percent is important, rather than raw numbers, because if you're moving 20% of your population that affects everybody and everything in your country. If you're moving 1%, it's really not. More than half the population of Ireland moved to the US over a 50 year period (8.2 million total population in 1841, and 4.5 million moved to the US by 1920). Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Asians also came in similarly large numbers in that same time period.
The decades where everyone thought global realignment was going to happen because of China, 9-11/Iraq, and the financial crisis, and then it just didn't happen.
I half-agree with you, Freddie: "it's not going to be very different for the majority of us whatever way AI turns out" is the most likely outcome. I don't believe in either the dystopia or the utopia, there is never going to be post-scarcity anything because what business on earth runs on "our productivity is so high and it is so cheap to make that we are giving this away for free"? Oh, this time it's gonna be different because Fairy Godmother AI is so productive and so smart? Then a totally new economic system is going to have to be implemented, I hope you enjoy the fall of capitalism because while it may be a bad system, it's the one we're currently running on, and history tells you what happens when you suddenly pull the rug from under it.
On the other hand, I disagree with you because we *are* special. There aren't any real dogs, dolphins, whales or elephants engaging in discussion on the Internet. Koko was not able to speak sign language. Our sister and cousin hominid species are gone, either absorbed by us or defeated in the battle of natural selection. We're so damn *lonely* for an equal intelligence that we believe in aliens and AI. No matter how much people go on about how we're only animals and use terms like "non-human animals" and how much they wuv their fur-babies and are their Mommy/Daddy, your dog or cat or rat or snake is not a human child, is not a human in any way, and is not your equal.
So we want AI to be our brain child (literally), a consciousness and/or intellect equal to or even greater than ours, but different, so we're not alone in the house anymore. I don't think we're going to get there, but we've managed at this moment - which *does*, unfortunately, make it special - to entangle ourselves in a net where computers (whether you want to talk about coding or AI or the Internet or whatever damn thing) are vastly important to the way we live now. Where the answer to "how do I get a good job that pays well?" is "learn to code" (or it was, up to recently).
People living at the time of the Industrial Revolution *were* living in a special time that changed the world (see climate change activism, if nothing else, about how that worked). Depending on how AI goes, we may be living in a similar time. ChatGPT and the rest of it is something genuinely new.
I think the problem will continue to be humans, not the AI; greed, fear, avarice, misplaced idealism and the rest of it making us pin our hopes on getting the Fairy Godmother AI. That's why I think the appeals for a moratorium will go nowhere; everyone is afraid of missing out, of not being the first with a product to market - whether that be "We can't let China beat us!" or "We can't let Microsoft beat us!"
The end result will be "them that has, will get and them that hasn't, will be left without" and, if we're particularly stupid, putting all our eggs into the one basket of "the AI is so smart, let it run our economy/our political system" and then Humpty Dumpty has a great fall.
>what business on earth runs on "our productivity is so high and it is so cheap to make that we are giving this away for free"?
You're describing like the ideal business model for the modern tech industry, and several products have pulled it off (Google search, Facebook, YouTube, etc). This is like the main advantage to turning business logic into software and then running it on machines, you can drive the marginal cost of serving another customer to near zero.
I'll concede that this only has been achieved so far in information products. I think you need more advanced robotics to pull it off for physical goods.
Except all the companies that used to do "buy our package one time for good" have now switched to "software as a service" which is hugely annoying to me. We're paying €X per month for a software package of email etc, that we will be paying forever and a day as long as we use this, which before we could have bought for a one-off price. It's not like we're doing anything with the fancy bells and whistles add-ins.
Youtube has gone to monetisation and ads, Facebook is using ads and trying to flog services, Google - if you had not noticed - has the "sponsored" search results (and ads too, if you permit 'em).
There is no "get this for free".
Uh, well sure, someone is paying for it, but users receive the services of YT, FB, and Google for free. They literally "get it for free" because it's so cheap to serve them that you can make money off the side effects of them existing as users on your platform. This is a business model innovation as much as it is a technological innovation.
Sure, business is never going to do something for totally free, without the expectation of making money off it somehow, but for opportunity cost reasons alone. I don't really think anyone is arguing this, I suspect you're engaging with a strawman.
Radio and TV were free for decades based on ads, and definitely not because it was "so cheap to serve them." It was because that's how people could monetize the product. Notably, to get a physical product (buying seasons of a TV show, for instance), you still had to pay money for it. Information services that are cheap to replicate can work with a subscription model or an ad model. This isn't new with Google, in the 1930s we were already there. Then Google didn't innovate the business model, whoever mass marketed the radio did.
You're missing the word "marginal." Setting up broadcast towers is a high upfront fixed cost, but then there is zero marginal cost to serving an additional customer. This drives you to "post scarcity" business models. Historically we have seen this in nonrival services like radio/tv broadcasts. But if you drive the marginal costs of anything to near zero, business models of this type become attractive.
Building Facebook, YouTube, and Google search also have high upfront costs, engineers and data centers are expensive. Once you have those, though, serving additional customers is nearly free.
Training models: very expensive. Running inference: dramatically cheaper than training but not quite "round to zero" yet.
City planners/engineers/architects:
Have any of you ever come upon a model that describes population density as a fractal pattern, where the highest density is in the very center and the lowest density in the very edges (or maybe a model with many clusters of population that are separated by areas with population density=0)?
I'm somewhat fed up with the "missing middle" rhetoric and I'd love to be able to refer to a model that shows that ideally, any density is surrounded by areas of both lower and higher density. Related material is also welcome.
I am not a city planner/engineer/architect, but these subjects are one of my hobbies. I advent seen anything like what you are describing, but have thought about it myself. You could probably use census data to do this to a certain degree.
Can you elaborate on your issues with "missing middle" debate and also how data of this type would play into that?
The "missing middle" proponents point out that there's a niche for 2-4 story buildings in between highrises and the suburbs, but I feel like it's often stated like this 2-3 story density could and should swallow up everything else, especially the suburbs. I miss a mention of how at the periphery of the 2-4 story "middle", before you reach area suited and/or designated for agriculture/industry/nature, there exists a niche for suburbs. And outside the suburbs there exists a niche for the population occupied with the primary industries.
I've seen a pattern approximated by regulation within cities - regulations like "no place should be more than x time or distance from a park/a school/a fire department". But I've never heard of "no one density should be x time or distance from another density" . I guess it's redundant, because these things figure themselves out (I guess Alain Bertauds "Order Without Design" says something about this). But I'd love a predictive model anyway, for geek reasons.
The greater Boston area is full of "Three decker" housing of exactly that sort.
The "Missing middle" is named as such not because it doesnt exist - it exists very much in Europe, and is found somewhat more rarely in the US, just like you pointed out - but for many years now it's been under-represented in new construction in the US.
"Imagine that in the year 2025, a new virus occurs somewhere on Earth. This virus has a mortality estimated in the range of 0.1–1.0%. Not much later, scientists discover two things. One discovery is encouraging: there is a small number of people who are naturally immune, and who can transmit their immunity to others. The more disturbing discovery is that their immunity is transmitted only sexually. If one has intercourse with an immune person, one can acquire a partial, but not complete, degree of sexually transmitted immunity.
The medical authorities proceed to advise everyone to seek intercourse with one or multiple immune persons. Some consent, others do not. The former generally become immune, but only partially; the latter are usually not immune.
Because the partly immunized are still susceptible to infection, some of them are pressuring the medical community to find a way to immunize the nonconsenting. A brilliant doctor invents a procedure that can immunize people without fullblown sexual intercourse: required is only penetration, by an immune person, with a penis-like object—a medical dildo. . . . Alas, only a small number of additional persons agree to receive immunization by dildo. The rest object that penetration by dildo is too similar to intercourse for them to consent to: after all, receiving dildo penetration would ordinarily count as cheating on their partners.
What to do now? . . ."
https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/download/article/3/1/231/pdf
https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/3/1/231
https://twitter.com/MihneaCapraru/status/1652254754481872897
https://web.archive.org/web/20220101082040/http://www.superstupor.com/sust11262007.shtml
>> What to do now?
Alternate response: One potential course for society in this scenario is as follows.
(1) Dildoings are not made mandatory. Everyone looks askance at the brilliant doctor, wondering why *this* was his chosen path for his research, but he did have IRB oversight, and someone points out that Barry’s always been weird. He is generally avoided at conferences.
(2) Research into a normal vaccine continues. In the meantime, voluntary medical dildoing is available at government expense. Conservative news networks make much of *your* government dollars paying for other people's dildoing, but the nation’s leaders hold their course in the name of public health.
(3) A less weird doctor develops a less weird vaccine.
(4) Since vaccines and dildoing are not equally invasive, a vaccine mandate is now more seriously considered. During debate, one legislator rises to offer the position that, if you think about it, being vaccinated isn't all that different from being dildoed. There is a long silence, and everyone in the chamber gives him a strange look, after which debate continues without further comment on this line of reasoning.
(5) In a normal country, a mandate might not pass, or one might pass with reasonable exceptions or limitations. For the sake of argument, though, let's assume that this is the nation of Humorstan, and the mandate passed there goes further than any policy seen in the US during the COVID pandemic. Vaccination is required. Full stop, no exceptions, no ‘you don’t have to get it but it’s a condition of going to school/work/etc,’ for whatever reason, Humorstan's leadership is drunk at the wheel and instead of trying to balance bodily autonomy interests with public health interests, it just slams the gas and careens into the autocratic abyss. Government is literally tracking everyone down and making sure they get vaccines and boosters, on penalty of fines and arrests. This assumption is silly, but hey, we started our journey at medical dildos.
(6) Most people get vaccinated.
(7) Some people object to the vaccination, on the grounds that being vaccinated and being dildoed are, to them, not all that different, and thus the mandate is like rape.
(8) Only the government of Humorstan foresaw this, and there is a special provision in the law. It states that anyone objecting to vaccination on the grounds that “being vaccinated is like being dildoed, so this is like rape” is offered a choice. They can (a) receive a vaccine, or (b) push a button which will determine, at random, whether they receive a vaccine by force or a dildoing by force.
(9) Strangely, vanishingly few people in the “being vaccinated and being dildoed are analogous” crowd choose option b. It’s almost as though it’s a bad analogy and being vaccinated is in fact very different from being dildoed, but the elders of Humorstan choose to keep their peace rather than make a big fuss of it.
(10) Eventually, the pandemic subsides and life moves on. Barry's medical dildo research continues. Everyone wonders where the heck he keeps getting funding.
The button-pushing argument is an interesting one. But it misrepresents my argument as presupposing that vaccination and dildoing are equivalent. The argument makes no such presupposition. Notice the paragraph on page 5:
> Sentence 10 is not the conclusion that nonconsensual vaccination is exactly as wrong as sexual assault. The conclusion is simply that nonconsensual vaccination is impermissible: it may perhaps be less wrong, to be sure, but it is wrong. Likewise, sentence 18 is not the conclusion that medical harassment is exactly as bad as sexual harassment. It is simply the conclusion that medical harassment is not to be permitted.
Also notice the footnote:
> I have also encountered the opposite opinion. An anonymous referee points out that nonconsensual vaccination sometimes yields lifelong adverse effects, whereas sexual assault sometimes does not. Hence, depending on further details, nonconsensual vaccination may in certain cases be worse than sexual assault.
Question and comment.
(1) Is this hypothetical 2025 near-Earth one in which the concept of ‘dildoculation’ has existed for centuries, is widespread and commonplace, and has eliminated a variety of diseases that were previously large causes of mortality? To the point that people generally now think nothing of requirements that they or their families be barred from accessing certain schools, professions, or international travel unless they are pre-emptively dildoculated for disease, and people who "fear the poke" are a small minority generally thought of as kooks and conspiracy theorists but mostly left to their own devices unless some kind of pandemic raises the specter that their unpoked-ness could cost the lives of their fellows? If so, this society’s sexual mores and attitudes are probably so wildly different from our own that trying to map “what they’d do” to “what we’d do” would be pointless.
(2) If, on the other hand, your answer to #1 is “no,” then you haven’t really made an effective analogy to vaccines. It's just a weird dildo hypothetical, and one can't practically map "how society should engage with hypothetical dildo medicine that isn't comparable to vaccines" over to "how society should engage with vaccines."
> has eliminated a variety of diseases that were previously large causes of mortality
Smallpox to my knowledge is the only highly lethal disease that was eliminated through vaccination. Do you have other examples in mind?
Notice in any case that in my thought experiment we are talking about vaccines that confer only partial immunity, which makes them unlikely to eradicate anything.
> people generally now think nothing of requirements that they or their families be barred from accessing certain schools, professions, or international travel
You must be living in a fairly small bubble if you think people 'generally' think nothing about those things.
You make an interesting point that people would probably think differently from us under your highly counterfactual circumstances. But I doubt that it matters in practice. Those people would have to be very different from us, from a moral standpoint, if they practiced non-consensual sexual immunization for centuries. It is more important in practice to think about what real people think. If medical dildos had eradicated smallpox, then I doubt we would find them much more justified or permissible than we do as it is. The end does not always justify the means. After all, the Nazi doctors tried at Nuremberg had made useful medical discoveries, but they were still hanged. Would it make a difference to you if the Nazis had been doing it for hundreds of years?
"If medical dildos had eradicated smallpox, then I doubt we would find them much more justified or permissible than we do as it is."
Original efforts at inoculation/vaccination of, yes, small pox were met with the same kind of horror, mockery, and rejection as your medical dildos hypothetical. But then people noticed "not dying of a fatal illness" or "surviving but being deeply facially scarred", and they dropped the objections.
(1) It'll turn you into a cow!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_cow_pock.jpg
(2) Saviour of humanity
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1868-0808-7646
(3) Vaccination produces Erysipelas, Consumption, Small-pox and DEATH!!
https://static.wixstatic.com/media/8913b9_0f75a09459f94dffb9308d8f28b20eb7~mv2.jpeg/v1/fill/w_488,h_800,al_c,q_85,enc_auto/8913b9_0f75a09459f94dffb9308d8f28b20eb7~mv2.jpeg
So yeah, I think if we had three centuries of medical dildos, today it would be as unremarkable as getting your teeth filled if you needed that.
Look, it’s just a bad analogy.
“Public Nudity Laws are just like RAPE! Most people can’t see it because the clothes just touch the outside of our skin, but what if the only way to hold up our pants was with BUTT PLUGS? What say you now, liberal? For you, maybe there's no difference between pants with a belt and pants with a butt plug, but some people hate pants so much that those two things are THE SAME to them, so you're a RAPIST if you think I should have to wear pants to go to Quiznos.”
“And Seat Belt Laws! Some think nothing of them because the seatbelt just rests gently over their clothing, but what if the only way to attach them was with NIPPLE CLAMPS? Communist and fascist totalitarians might not see any difference between a regular seatbelt and a nipple-clamp safety device, but some people hate seat belts so much that those two things are THE SAME to them, so you're a RAPIST if you think I should have to wear wear a seatbelt while I drive, pantless, to Quiznos.”
Only pants don't need butt plugs, seatbelts don't require nipple-clamp attachments, and vaccines don't need dildos. So trying to make those analogies (amusing though they may be to write) just fails to yield any useful inferences, due to the many *many* significant differences being papered over.
Your analogies seem facetious. Pants and seat belts don't penetrate your body and inject fluids that make lifelong changes to the functioning of your immune system in particular, and of your organism in general. If they did, then similar objections would presumably apply to them.
Friend, I'd accept your pooh-poohing of Freudian implications in your hypothesis much more easily if you didn't use terms like "penetrate your body and inject fluids".
If you'd been in Vienna, by now we'd be reading the Case Study of M.C.
Freudian jokes stopped being funny around 1997, so why would I make one now?
Why does it matter what the consequences are? As long as the victim feels that, for example, wearing clothes is a violation of their bodily integrity, aren't laws that "all persons must be clothed" equivalent to sexual harrassment?
Remember that the definition of sexual harrassment (any form of unwanted verbal, non-verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature with the purpose or effect of violating the dignity of a person) does not distinguish between penetrative and non-penetrative, the presence or absence of long-term effects, or the magnitude of the act.
Now, imagine a group of clothes-rejectors, who view being forced to wear clothing as a violation of their bodily integrity, and I will quote directly from your journal:
"Some people will be given money, or other benefits, in return for consent. The rest will be banned from restaurants; they will be banned from shopping centers; they will banned from trains, airplanes, and buses; and they will be fired from their jobs, and banned from reemployment. Some of these bans will be implemented by the government itself, and others by privately owned corporations. Those who refuse to ban will be banned themselves..."
Could you make the argument "anyone who views clothes as a violation of their bodily integrity is not of sound mind"? If so, how is that different from "anyone who views vaccines as a violation of their bodily integrity is not of sound mind"?
If we assume that both clothes-rejectors and vaccine-rejectors are of sound mind, then the question is: should anyone be allowed to go nude in any public space? Why/why not?
The difference is that vaccines affect one's bodily integrity, whereas ordinary clothes do not. If somebody 'feels' that clothes do that, they should first explain how. For vaccines that explanation is easy: they penetrate your body and introduce foreign substances with lifelong effects. (Normal) clothes don't do that, so the one who 'feels' otherwise must explain what the problem is.
My point is you can put any policy you don’t like into a Rube Goldberg machine and try to turn it into a sex thing, but if you do your output is pretty invariably going to (a) look histrionic and silly, and (b) be so bent out of shape by RG machine processing that by the time its hammered into its new sex thing shape it no longer shares enough in common with the original policy you didn’t like for it to be relevant in a discussion thereof.
“Sure you say you’re okay with kids saying the pledge of allegiance in schools, but what if they pledged allegiance by FELLATING a George Washington statuette? Well for some people those two things are just the same!”
“People say there’s nothing wrong with requiring pasteurization of milk, but what if there were a NEW milk disease that could only be removed from dairy with HUMAN SEMEN? Well for some people…”
“Some believe that the right to own guns should be uninfringed, but what if there were a new hormone gun that could SPONTANEOUSLY TRANSITION YOUR CHILD if they found it unsecured in the closet while playing at a friend’s house? Well...”
"You might be fine with with forcing doctors to wash their hands before a procedure, but what if the best way to disinfect was to give another doctor a HANDJOB?"
So goes the dildo vaccine. I'm even against a good chunk of the policy positions I've critiqued here with this method, but while the results are varying degrees of funny, they’re still not relevant to any real-world policy conversation.
I understand what your point is, but I don't think it is a cogent one. I already explained above why the vaccine-intercourse analogy is grounded in biological reality, whereas your seat-belt and God-knows-what analogies are not.
This is an interesting article! It brought up some questions:
If medical care is held to the same moral and ethical standard as sexual acts, what about individuals below the age of consent? Would immunizing them be permissible in any case? Would the permissibility of immunizing a minor change if the virus had a 100% mortality rate instead of a 1% mortality rate?
A follow-up question:
Is a woman introducing a foreign substance into her baby's mouth (via a bottle, or some other device, or a part of her body) without its consent (as it is impossible for any individual below the age of consent to give consent) permissible?
My take is that it depends. The two extremes: if the foreign substance is milk and the baby is guaranteed to starve without it, I would say yes, because letting babies starve is bad. If the foreign substance is poison, I would say no, because poisoning babies is bad.
So (at least from my point of view) there has to be some amount of wiggle room for the permissibility of something that's intended to have a health benefit, even if the recipient does not (or cannot) consent. The question then becomes: who gets to decide the threshold of "this procedure's health benefit is large enough that it is worth overriding consent"? In most cases, this would probably be whoever enforces the law.
Another follow-up question:
By your reasoning: restraining someone against their will (an extension of a bondage kink, the same way vaccination could be seen as an extension of a dildo), and/or introducing a foreign substance (i.e. lead) into their body via the rapid expansion of gas is sexual assault, no? And yet most police forces do one or the other, ostensibly for the safety and security of the general population. Perhaps it's the case that the concept of a police force is inherently morally impermissible? But if the police weren't around, is there a morally permissible way of preventing someone from doing something morally impermissible to another person?
Wasn't this the backstory to Idoru (or maybe a different Gibson novel)?
In most of the cases you describe, people usually think that it is parents who have a moral right to consent (or not) on behalf of their children. Perhaps you disagree with that, but in any case we shouldn't be quick to draw conclusions about adults from premises about children.
I think you are implying in the last paragraph that it is morally impermissible to be unvaccinated, or to communicate (not-on-purpose) a disease, but the first claim seems baseless, and the second depends a whole lot on the details of the case.
Whether the police has a permission to shoot someone depends, once again, on the details. Is it someone who is merely exercising their basic human rights? Then the police may not shoot them, even if it happens to prevent some undesired outcome.
Ok! Let's focus on children for now because it's the murkiest area, and one in which we may be able to test the strength of the argument.
If we accept that parents have a moral right to provide or withhold consent on behalf of their children, the next question would be: why is it that parents are able to consent on behalf of their children for some activities, like breastfeeding, but not other activities, like fellatio?
In both cases, an adult's genitals are entering a child's mouth without their consent (as a child cannot consent) and bodily fluids are discharged. By the same logic you used in your article, both of them are equally impermissible, are they not? I will use the same induction as you:
1) It is impermissible to feed a child semen through nonconsensual
sexual intercourse.
2) It is impermissible to feed a child bodily fluids through nonconsensual sexual intercourse.
3) It is impermissible to feed a child through nonconsensual sexual intercourse.
3) It is impermissible to feed a child through nonconsensual sexual penetration.
4) It is impermissible to feed a child through nonconsensual penetration.
5) As children cannot consent, it is impermissible to breastfeed a child.
How can we resolve this? I hope you'll agree with me when I say that mothers should be able to breastfeed their children, but should not be allowed to provide consent for fellatio on behalf of their children.
What is the difference between the two acts? Breastfeeding is much less sexual than fellatio, and provides more health benefits. As such, although the impermissibility of fellatio can be extended to breastfeeding based on certain similarities in terms of how the actions are carried out (a genital is inserted into the mouth, and after some amount of suction is applied, bodily fluids are discharged), it is their intent and predicted health benefit that sets them apart and makes one permissible while the other is not.
I think the major weakness of your argument is this: with your chained conditionals, it is extremely easy to link any activity that physically affects a child (some of which are permissible) to non-consensual sexual intercourse (which is not permissible).
First, it's not a good idea to focus precisely on what you think is the murkiest area. The murkiest area will likely give you the murkiest conclusions.
Second, you seem to be changing the subject. The article is about (non-)consenting adults. Child vaccination introduces additional puzzles of its own. (This brings us back to the previous paragraph: don't combine multiple distinct problems into one. That will only lead to murkiness.)
Third, there are obviously many areas in which _not_even_ parents are allowed to consent. In fact, there are areas in which even adults are not allowed to consent _for_themselves_. For instance, people cannot sell themselves into slavery.
This leaves open the question: may parents consent to have their children vaccinated? I suspect that the answer is yes, but within limits. Experimental injections should presumably be out of question. Vaccines against diseases to which children are practically invulnerable (e.g. covid) should also be off the table.
Ok! Now that we've established your argument doesn't hold for children, let's move on to adults.
What if we replaced "child" with "coma victim"? It is trivially easy to use chained conditionals to link "a dildo with food in it" to "a spoon with food on it", no?
Or how about this: someone arrested by the police, who no longer wishes to commit crime, is restrained (against his consent). He now only desires to exercise his basic human right to life and liberty, but will continue to be restrained in prison (without his consent) for some time. How is this any more permissible than an individual kidnapped and tied up in bondage gear, then kept in their kidnapper's basement to satisfy some sexual thrill? I could type out the chained conditionals again, if you'd like.
Another example: extortion (harrassing an individual to give up their money) is impermissible. Do you feel the same way about taxation, even if it were used 100% for the benefit of the people?
A third thought: you mentioned in your post above that "In fact, there are areas in which even adults are not allowed to consent _for_themselves_. For instance, people cannot sell themselves into slavery..." I'm assuming that it's the government, or whichever entity that has the capability to enforce the law, that prevents people from selling themselves into slavery, even if the individual does not consent to living a life outside slavery.
Is this not an example of the government overruling an individual's non-consent for "their own good"? Is this acceptable to you, or do you believe that people should be able to sell themselves into slavery?
Alternatively, let's say you're waiting next to train tracks. As a train approaches at high speed, an adult attempts to push past you and leap onto the tracks. As you grab them by instinct, you hear them shout "Let me go!" Is it permissible to restrain them without their consent (an act which, by your logic, is as impermissible as subjecting a nonconsenting adult to sexual bondage) to prevent harm to them and potential life-long trauma to any train operators and bystanders who might witness the scene, or should you let them commit suicide by train?
EDIT: You seem to have ninja-edited this line right at the top of your comment:
> Ok! Now that we've established your argument doesn't hold for children, let's move on to adults.
We have not established any such thing. Children's vaccination still requires informed consent, just like anything else. The only difference is that the right to consent (or not) is exercised by their parents. This isn't specific to vaccination, and it works the same for everything else.
In the rest of your comment you are jumping from one subject to another. There are answers to all of these different issues, but you shouldn't expect it to be the same answer. Coma victims are in someone's charge, just like children. Criminals under arrest are not held under arrest merely 'for the greater good,' but because they have (presumably) committed crimes that warrant their arrest. (Punishment also has a retributive aspect, not only a deterrent one.) My views on taxation are complicated, but the important point for us is that taxation is not a violation of bodily integrity.
> Is this not an example of the government overruling an individual's non-consent for "their own good"?
No, it is an example of the government safeguarding basic and inalienable human rights. Suppose that someone offered to buy you as a slave in return for five trillion dollars, which you could give to anyone you wanted. Then perhaps it would be for your own good if the government allowed you to sell yourself. But it is still impermissible to do so. It's about rights, not goods.
With or without the obvious COVID allegory, what we do now is *obviously* to make the mechanical dildo or whatever available to anyone who wants to use it, and we *don't* force it on anyone who doesn't. What we do to people who try to force other people to submit to mechanical dildoing for the greater good, is left as an exercise for the poetically inclined student.
That sounds very reasonable, but sadly we live in a world in which there isn't much evidence of widespread rationality...
I think I've seen that hentai. It was entertaining, but I don't think it tops Conception 2's story of a man building a child army from scratch.
Is this a case of life imitating art? The Dutch man banned from donating sperm because he has fathered too many children:
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/father-hundreds-gets-sperm-donation-ban-dutch-court-2023-04-28/
" A Dutch court on Friday ordered a man who judges said had fathered between 500 and 600 children around the world to stop donating sperm.
The 41-year-old Dutchman, identified by de Telegraaf newspaper as Jonathan Meijer, was forbidden to donate more semen to clinics, the court ruling said. He could be fined 100,000 euros ($110,000) per infraction.
The court also ordered Meijer to write to clinics abroad asking them to destroy any of his semen they have in stock, except doses reserved for parents who already had children by him."
Most absurd court ruling ever? No, but... absurd nonetheless.
As an aside: your formatting (a bunch of random carriage returns) makes this hard to read. There's an edit option in the ellipses (...) menu.
Thanks for that advice.
I am only willing to imagine this if you are willing to first imagine that immunity is achieved by kissing Trump's bare butt. A brief kiss gives some immunity -- for full immunity, deep and prolonged smooching is required. And let's not forget about kids' immunity, which your post made me think about thinking about, as not doubt it's intended to.. In the story I'm proposing, a footstool is provided for kids who are too short to reach the cure without aid. Go ahead, think it through, starting with your family. Write out an account and post it. If you are willing to do that, I am willing to think through your fucking cure.
You might be able to conceive a similar argument that way, but it would be needlessly grotesque.
Dildos are not needlessly grotesque? Come on, you're trying to push buttons. How about eating faeces provides full immunity, is that sufficiently disgusting for you?
Oops, but now we're into the territory of faecal transplants which are *already* a thing:
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-therapies/fecal-transplant
You don't seem to understand the argument, and that's because you don't seem to have read the article... Non-consensual vaccination is regarded by vaccine refusers as disgusting. You seem to be suggesting a similar argument using a non-consensual fecal transplant thought experiment. That, indeed, would also be seen as disgusting by vaccine refusers. If anything, you are proving my point.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'trying to push buttons.' Countless buttons have been pushed these years. I am sure whatever buttons I am dealing with have been pressed into action long ago. What I aim for is to explain to the compulsory vaccinators what they are doing.
"Dildos are not needlessly grotesque?", you ask. No, they are necessarily grotesque. They clarify exactly the point that vaccine refusers have been trying to get across to you for so many years.
But don't you think kissing Trump's butt better captures your objection to what compulsory vaccinators are doing? I mean, it includes the element of being humiliated by an authority one does not respect. Well, maybe it doesn't for some, who might view that task as more like a trip to Friendly's for hot fudge sundaes. I also think Deiseach's example has a lot going for it, because the task necessary for cure is very objectionable to most, but not to all, so then you have coprophiliacs as a stand-in for those happy to get vaxed. I also think your fuck cure analogy loses some of its strength because most of us in the US vaccination virginity ended a long time ago. We have all fucked chickenpox, diphtheria, measles, hepatitis, rubella, mumps, polio, tetanus and whooping cough, and many of us have also slutted around with influenza, shingles, papilloma virus and covid. Consequently, I think to come up with a more pungent and convincing analogy to forced covid vaccination you would do well to make out a spreadsheet with columns representing modes of intake (absorption through skin, anal penetration, cunnilingus, drinking, eating, fellatio, urethral penetration, and vaginal penetration -- plus, of course, just fuckin piercing the subject with a spear). Rows would represent different repellant substances (blood, buggers, ear wax, feces, mucus, pus, saliva, semen, smegma, toe jam, urine, and vomit). Consider each cell carefully, picturing the experience, and choose the one that best captures the deeply objectionable nature of forced covid vaccination. [PS to Carl: example of maleness]
>because most of us in the US vaccination virginity ended a long time ago.
Hell, I've got a Smallpox vaccination. That's basically necrophilia.
In the end, whose side are you on? You seem to be angry at my argumentation, but you also seem to agree with it.
This reads like somebody's kink tbh.
Forcible vaccinators do come across that way...
The kink here is common in politics. It's the idea that coercion is the best solution to most problems, and it's a natural belief for people who are used to using the tools of government, which mostly amount to either coercion or handing out cash.
Oh goodness me, could it possibly be - I'm guessing without reading any of the links - that this is an allegory for the mass vaccination programme?
Golly gosh, what a novel way to put it! And equally offensive to whether you are pro- or anti-vaccination!
Yeah, I think I'll skip this bunfight. Not interested in hashing this out for the nth time.
No more 'offensive' than the mass vaccination programme itself, and that it precisely the point.
Sure it is. Your analogy is inapt, because vaccination isn't rape, and because you were never required to actually get a vaccination, the requirements were always "you can't participate in such-and-such an activity in the public square unless you're vaccinated." You're certainly free to decline to participate, and prevent any sapping or impurification of your precious bodily fluids.
And the majority is also certainly entitled to put conditions on your participation in public events, when that participation endangers others, or even seems like it might. Few cases are more straightforward than those of communicable disease. That's why you can still be locked up indefinitely if you refuse to take your TB meds, which is a whole lot more intrusive than requiring a vaccination to board a plane or enter a public schoolhouse.
If you reflect on the concept of analogy, you will realize that you can't argue that vaccination is not analogous to rape because it is not identical to rape. For A to be analogous to B, A does not need to be identical to B. (That would be a silly analogy indeed.)
As for your mistaken claim that people were not required to get the vaccine, you ought to read the article, especially the parts regarding consent. Otherwise your argument is no better than that of the sexual harasser who claims that the victim was 'free' to quit her job...
Perhaps, but an analogy should somehow help us reason about the original situation, adding clarity or perhaps a new perspective.
All this analogy does is to take the real-world situation and then swap out "a vaccination" for "a medical dildo". The analogy doesn't clarify the original situation, it presents a strictly worse situation, and then asks us to think about how bad it sounds now. No clarity has been added to the original question.
The analogy in fact proceeds all the way down to ordinary vaccination, as you can read in the article, which is open-access: https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/3/1/231
Yes, the phallic rape/homosexuality imagery gave it away. The forced penetrating needle and all that jazz.
Dear Herr Professor Freud, we've moved on from your theories.
It's not a Freudian theory. It's an analogy between a) non-consensual intercourse, and b) non-consensual vaccination. The argument establishes that if you don't approve of sexual assault (as I'm sure you don't), then for the same reasons you must also disapprove of non-consensual vaccination. Furthermore, if you don't approve of sexual harassment, as I'm sure you don't, then you also must reject medical harassment, such as in particular vaccine mandates.
If you don't approve of sexual molestation, then for the same reason you must disapprove of the police manhandling individuals.
...yes? And?
You seem to be replacing what I say in the article with something that you wish that I said, because you would then know how to refute it...
If you think the logic is the same, then I would like to read your carefully laid out exposition of your reasoning.
Until someone is holding me down and shoving a needle in my arm over my screams of "no, no!", this is not at all analogous to rape.
You don't want to be vaccinated. Cool, you do you. You think mandatory vaccination is a violation of bodily autonomy. Great, you are entitled to hold that opinion. But snappy little "it's just like being made to take a dildo up your ass, heterosexual cis gentlemen, doesn't that make you shiver in fear of sodomy?" analogies are veering into the "my secret kink" and/or "batshit insane" territory, as others are pointing out.
You are replying to a strawman, because you have not read the article. There are multiple degrees of constraint and of sexual assault, not all of which amount to rape. (In fact, the article never uses the term 'rape'.) There is also sexual harassment, which is the sexual analogue to mandatory vaccination.
Because consent is very important. I like both sexual intercourse and vaccines; I do not like being pressured, coerced, or forced into either.
Before the pressure tactics came out, I was trying to volunteer for COVID-19 vaccine trials, once pressure tactics came out (concurrently with general rollout of vaccines.) I was vehemently opposed and resisted until literally threatened with jail time. (I was serving in the Canadian army at the time and was not allowed to even resign as an alternative; while no one was jailed for refusing, that option was on the table, and my chain of command refused to say it would not be used.)
Sure, why don't we dispense with logic and argumentation altogether, and just say what we like and what we don't, right? Answer: because it's not about personal taste, but about basic human rights.
There are some foods whose taste I don't like, but I'd never bother to write long arguments against them. That's where your comment would apply.
> "Coupling the thing you don’t like to something nobody likes"
If my argument is right, then nobody should like either of them.
RE: AI
I feel like it is difficult to communicate to a layperson how AI could have divergent goals. So, I wrote this short story to try and fill the gap. I had intended to publish it on LessWrong, but it got rejected due to a recent uptick in activity. :( Thus, I figured I would post it here. Any feedback is welcome.
https://medium.com/@zamiell/divergent-goals-92e19ac59615
Hooray for Book Reviews! It's the most wonderful time of the year.
I'm hearing a lot about the Supreme Court needing ethics standards because of some stuff some (apparently only republican?) justices received. I don't understand the issue for two reasons:
1. The Supreme Court, by definition, decides what is right and wrong in all situations. All of the justices know that bribery is bad. If any "gifts" attempt to influence their decisions they ought to decline the gifts, using their own judgement.
2. The check on the Supreme Court for this kind of thing is impeachment. If Congress determines a Justice has been improperly influenced then the Justice should be removed.
Is this simply another case of trying to change the political composition of the Supreme Court, like having 15 Justices instead of 9?
Oh you know, when the Supreme Court rules the way the media likes, whether it correspond to the will of the majority or not, they are the last bastions of sober good sense. When they rule the way the media doesn't like, whether it correspond to the will of the majority or not, they are petty sadistic tyrants who probably molest dogs. The majority of pundits and the press stopped their emotional growth in 10th grade, so you have to expect a certain amount of routine hysteria.
That said, it would surprise me greatly if the Supreme Court *didn't* have a code of ethics already, in the sense that there is some set of long-standing traditions, communicated to newcomers, that outline what the Court as a collective expects of its members. It doesn't seem likely they have published it, or talked about it, in part because good judgment suggests that a code about which you have to make a big public fuss is one the letter of which, and not the spirit, is what people are following and want to follow. Drawing careful lines is what you do when you want to be able to color right up to the edges of the lines with impunity.
So like most of the ideas one finds bruited in the popular press, this one would achieve close to the opposite of its stated intentions. It would encourage cynicism and Pharisaic behavior, but -- and here perhaps is the point -- it would provide endless new opportunities for pundits and lawyers (the crew always in favor of new rules) to debate whether the actions of this or that justice had or had not transgressed Article 3, Subparagraph B, Section 99. That's a lot more perenially entertaining (for the class with season tickets to the Colosseum) than just a bunch of Senators each deciding within his own conscience "Does this guy belong on the Court or not?" and if he feels strongly enough in the negative, introducing articles of impeachment.
> 1. The Supreme Court, by definition, decides what is right and wrong in all situations. All of the justices know that bribery is bad. If any "gifts" attempt to influence their decisions they ought to decline the gifts, using their own judgement.
So supreme court justices can murder people if they decide its okay? You seem to be conflating moral legitimacy with legal supremacy. Supreme Court's authority isn't some absolute moral licence but applies in narrowly defined cases
The Court has never ruled that it is not subject to ethical standars, that it can "decide what is right and wrong in all situations."
Not at all. They get to decide any and all issues that come before them, and can overturn any lesser rulings. If any justice were to murder someone then I would expect them to be arrested, as usual. Eventually, as with all capital crimes, the crime would be appealed to the Supreme Court, which would then decide whether to hear the case.
Note also that it is the COLLECTIVE opinion of the Court as to whether an action was appropriate or not, given the circumstances. I suppose it is possible that the Court could rule a justice immune to any penalties in solidarity with each other. It is, however, unlikely in the extreme, and if this were possible then we don't actually have a justice system, but a political one.
The Supreme Court doesn't get to decide murder is OK, not even for specific individuals, since that is a decision of the legislature. The Constitution doesn't even say that murder is frowned upon, so they can't say murder for specific individuals is allowed. It would have to be some other constitutionally-guaranteed right they would assert, like "he was trying to quarter himself in my house".
The Supreme Court is known for making things up. They could (without a lot of difficulty) come up with a doctrine which immunizes them from prosecution for all criminal activity. Or read that into the Constitution somehow.
They could, at which point the other two branches of government would decide to come up with some sort of doctrine by which the Supreme Court's "we can murder with impunity" ruling doesn't count, and it would turn out that the other two branches of government control more men with guns than the Supreme Court does.
Rule of Law is a game that everybody agrees to play; if you manage to lawyer your way into a position of absolute power then the other players will decide they don't want to play any more and flip the table, at which point we're back to playing humanity's usual game of "who has the most armed men"
My own government's disregard for rule of law is pushing me more and more towards that "let's flip the table" feeling.
"The Supreme Court is known for making things up."
Yes, like "emanations of penumbras" to legalise abortion, or "it's a god-given natural human right for two - but only two! let's not go crazy here! - members of the same sex to marry".
We weren't hearing any qualms about ethics in those days.
The Supreme Court's willingness to stretch the letter of the law like silly putty is, in some sense, a reflection of the conviction of our elites that democracy doesn't really work. Many of their rulings resulted in changes that should (under the structure originally envisioned) have been carried out by Congress, or by constitutional amendment. But as the people were too uncooperative and backward to actually vote for the needful, it became necessary to implement various things by judicial fiat.
Actually, it seems to me that the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in a nod to social pressure, without any legal basis at all, and without examining any of the ramifications. How are they allowed to rule on it, based on the 10th amendment (any rights not given to the federal government are state or people's rights)? Can a father and son, or mother and daughter, marry, to dodge inheritance taxes? Why, as you intimate, is marriage restricted to two people? Why is it restricted to only humans?
Same reason they would be allowed to rule that states cannot make it illegal for people born on a Thursday to marry each other.
Democrats don't have enough political power right now to carry out an impeachment of a sitting justice. Using the media/public to put pressure on the SC to take matters into their own hands is a lot easier than carrying out an impeachment attempt. This is especially true if the campaign fails to change anything.
I don't think this is ONLY a case of trying to change the political make up of the SC. There are legitimate reasons for the outrage. Regardless of why he received the gifts or who gave them, he didn't report them correctly and is only now amending his reports because of the outrage. Even if the gifts are innocent, this should be enough "bad behavior" for a SC Justice to step down - you lied on an official document! (But I think we should hold our government officials to extremely high standards, much higher than most people probably).
>Is this simply another case of trying to change the political composition of the Supreme Court
Yes for sure, the lefts hysteria about Thomas is.
It is a bad look by Thomas, but I am sure if you dug into the exact arrangements of a good half of high level politicians they would have impeachable enrichment of them and their associates. Look at Hunter Biden, or most of the leadership in congress. There is plenty enough smoke there for Joe Biden to be impeached, probably several times over. But that isn't how the game is played.
At the local level you will have lots of people who keep their hands clean, but the higher up the chain you go, the more compromised and power obsessed the people are generally. The process doesn't select for the righteous or the effective, it selects for other things.
Mild warning against phrases like "the left's hysteria about Thomas", I'm trying to keep this place low-temperature.
Fair enough, just frustrated with a friend who is very very bright, but very ideological.
90 other scandals involving political favors come and go, he sleeps. Suddenly (because he is fired up about the conservative supreme court), Clearance Thomas is the epitome of corruption and the main thing he wants to talk about.
I am no friend of Thomas, I find his arguments frequently horrid. But the abrupt temperature change from my lefty friends about his misdeeds reminds me of everything I like least about politics.
I genuinely think all the hysteria and rancour about Thomas is "he's black, he's supposed to be *our* guy, not *their* guy!"
Kamala Harris has a rich husband, do they hang out with guys with yachts? Do we know - or care?
As someone who read a bunch of Supreme Court cases to kill time, Justice Thomas is by far the most out-there justice. He doesn't believe in settled law, he's stated he doesn't think children have a constitutional right to free speech, he's generally way, way off in his own world.
How young when we're talking about children? Because I think a six year old does not indeed have a constitutional right to demand ice cream instead of broccoli for dinner, sympathetic as I may be to the position.
If he means "minors as the law defines them, that is, under 18" - damn it, stop making me agree with the man. The amount of bratty 17 year olds I'd love to tell "sit down and shut up, you do not have the right to screech in public before you're old enough to shave"... oh, well.
I don't remember which case it was so can't look it up easily. Pretty sure it was about a high school suspending a student for a statement they'd made outside of school grounds. Five judges ruled it violated Free Speech, two said instead the standard was too vague to enforce, one said it was fine because the school had sufficient reason, and Thomas said it was fine because the Founders probably didn't mean the First Amendment to apply to children.
I think I agree on that one; it's very likely the Founders considered only adults, not anyone under the age of 21, to be fully in possession of, and able to use, rights.
It can be argued, for example, whether or not there is such a thing as a right to vote, but nobody is (yet) giving the vote to 12 year olds, even if they in theory possess the right. So maybe it's more correct to say children possess *potential* rights (apart from basic ones like the right to life, the right not to be abused, etc.) that they will come into full possession of upon majority.
The child does not have a constitutional right to ice cream. Nor does the constitution prevent his parents from punishing him for his demand. But if the U.S. government punishes him up for stating his dinner preference, they have indeed violated one of his constitutional rights.
The right one has under the Constitution is to freely express one's opinion without fear of persecution or reprisal for having that opinion. If he is punished for preferring ice cream over broccoli that is a violation, regardless of his age. If he is punished for disrupting a venue, disturbing the peace, if you will, his rights are not violated.
Is a child having a temper tantrum in the aisle of a supermarket over "I want icecream!" expressing his free speech rights, or a kid having a tantrum who can legitimately be scooped up by his mom and brought out to sit in the car until he calms down?
Is she violating his constitutional right by not letting him freely express himself in public? Are the other shoppers going "Look missus, tell your kid to shut up and stop screaming" violating his constitutional right of free speech?
It could also be battlespace prep. It wouldn't surprise me if the majority chose Thomas to write the opinion in SFFA v. UNC and Harvard (the pending major case that could rule race-based affirmative action policies in university admissions[1] are unconstitutional). He's black, which makes it a smidge harder to cry white privilege racism, and he has a very long history of textualism that lends solid depth to Roberts's famous acerbic observation that "the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race, is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
So if the aristocrats want to tarnish that upcoming decision, and justify vigorous opposition to it, what better way to assist than to pre-emptively smear the integrity of the author of the decision?
I always look for the personal and financial interests before I credit pure ideology for the motives of actions like this. And there are plenty of personal and financial interests in that particular case that might line up with painting Thomas as corrupt.
-------------
[1] And elsewhere! It's entirely possible that a sweeping ruling could endanger a wide swathe of DEI policies.
"I am sure if you dug into the exact arrangements of a good half of high level politicians they would have impeachable enrichment of them and their associates"
Then they should be impeached or investigated depending on the accused act. "They all do it" is not an argument against punishment, it's an argument for MORE punishment. I wish more presidents (of any party) were impeached and thrown out, maybe they would start behaving better!
you need to be careful, implementing this idea, less you end up, putting the prosecutors/bureaucracy in a position to control or remove any judge/president/whatever crosses them.
No reasonable prosecutor!
Along related lines, while I am rarely in agreement with G. K. Chesterton, I think he had a good point when he wrote:
"It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged."
The politicians mostly are response for policing themselves? Who is going to impeach them?
Crime is often in the eye of the beholder. Half the high level politicians have impeachable enrichment: YOUR half, not my half.
But if you look at it objectively probably most of the "impeachable enrichment" would disappear. Hypocrisy is rampant in politics.
Nah not really. They really do all mostly have their hands in the trough.
Hands? Martin Blank, you've very emollient. It's *snouts* in the trough is the idiom! 😁
Fingers in the till, back-handers, bungs, and brown paper envelopes.
I think the problem here isn't so much, the yachts as the gettting to decide what the law means, as a backdoor way of implementing your policy choices
I agree, but I think the popcorn throwing has to be equal opportunity. Not "it's okay for *our* justices to hang out with *our* guys with big yachts, because we are all so Virtuous And Incorruptible And Right Side Of History but the other lot are all Corrupt And Unethical And Bought".
Conservative, liberal, mushy middle - doesn't matter. One rule for all. Otherwise, this is just more "we don't like that the other side are actually doing stuff, even though legislating from the bench was fine and cool when it was our lot doing it".
Sorry, where are the liberal justices accepting huge gifts from their wealthy friends? Did I miss a news article? Or are you trying to argue that not following the originalist doctrine is morally the same thing as taking bribes?
"Sorry, where are the liberal justices accepting huge gifts from their wealthy friends? Did I miss a news article?"
Considering who/what ProPublica is, this is a STAGGERINGLY dishonest argument.
I don't know if they've all got wealthy friends, but here's a story about the entire net worth of the nine justices (as much as can be found out):
https://robbreport.com/lifestyle/news/supreme-court-justices-net-worth-financial-disclosures-1234833443/
And it was like that back in 2013; the later Bader Ginsburg was possibly the richest member:
https://publicintegrity.org/politics/majority-of-supreme-court-members-are-millionaires/
"Ruth Bader Ginsburg boasts the highest potential net worth at $18.1 million with Stephen Breyer a close second at $17.1 million. Both were appointed by former President Bill Clinton.
However, Ginsburg’s actual net worth may be as low as $4.4 million and Breyer’s as low as $5 million. Federal officials are also exempt from disclosing the value of their homes, making an accurate calculation even more difficult."
That actually seem like the number one *wants* to hear - high enough no-one is taking bribes to fund their medical treatment, low enough to be totally plausibly the result of a long and successful legal career - most commercial partners will have more at their age, I'd bet.
I just read the Wikipedia article for ProPublica and it didn't help me understand your comment at all.
*standing ovation*
Well let's start with this. When a Supreme Court Justice accepts an invitation for a dinner in her honour, does she have to pay for her own meal? https://www.law.columbia.edu/news/archive/unforgettable-day-justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-59
Edit: I found a much better article https://qz.com/1309174/sonia-sotomayor-is-writing-a-book-for-tweens-and-more-supreme-court-revelations -- it looks like _most_ justices are earning money from lecturing gigs at universities. What do they do when cases come before the court that affect universities?
Yes, as Arrk Mindmaster said, consider this a "like".
There's a reason Lady Justice is blindfolded.
I have no way to Like this comment, so I will do it the old-fashioned way.
I like this comment.
So when one becomes a Supreme Court Justice one gives up the right to chill out on big yachts with rich folks? Note: I assume ALL rich folks, even perhaps all folks, have business before the courts.
Would it be OK for Clarence Thomas to hang out on big yachts with, perhaps, George Soros because they are diametrically opposed politically?
Doesn't seem reasonable to make a rule against hanging out with the super-rich. Still, doing it does interfere with an important secondary function of the court, which is to give the public the sense that ultimate arbiters are fair-minded and above being influenced by favors or purely personal preferences.
Good question, but that is not a fair approximation of what has been documented regarding Thomas. What he didn't disclose wasn't just 20 consecutive years of very-expensive travel being paid for by someone else, but also various expensive gifts to him and his wife, and also that same individual buying Thomas's mother's home and then allowing her to continue living in it rent-free.
Thomas and the active political donor involved say that the house purchase was intended for setting up a future Clarence Thomas historical site. Which okay, maybe -- but it is not hard to understand some serious eye-rolling at that belated explanation.
The eye-rolling seems rather justified, as it would be if it was for the benefit of Sotomayor's elderly father or whoever. Moreover it turns out that the Judicial Conference -- the nonpartisan internal body which sets disclosure guidelines for the federal judiciary -- has concluded that Thomas' transactions should have been disclosed and has amended its rules to close that particular "loophole".
So all in all, I agree with the GOP U.S. Senator whose comment on the above was simply, "It stinks."
In which case before him did he have an unrecused conflict of interest?
There wasn't one.
That's irrelevant to the disclosure requirement that I commented on.
I'm not aware of any failure-to-recuse arguments being advanced regarding this Thomas benefactor. There was apparently one case in which this benefactor was the owner of a company which owned a company that had business before the Court, but it seems to be pretty indirect and nobody has yet argued that Thomas should have recused.
(There have been arguments that Thomas should recuse himself from cases related to Jan 6th, because his spouse was actively involved behind the scenes applauding and encouraging the efforts to overturn the November 2020 election. In theory I agree with that idea but it's an irrelevant argument: recusal is a strictly judicial decision that can be enforced only via appeal to a higher court, and there is no higher court than the Supreme Court.)
Why have all of the sub parts of review as links? The words that comes to mind is "ridiculously confusing". The set-up makes me uninclined to read any complete review.
1. Book (year), author; review title
2. Book (year), author; review title
I had someone else collate the reviews. My guess is they used section headings and Google automatically included them in a ToC. I'll ask them not to next year.
If you really want to maximize readership and critique, why wait until next year? It is fixable now.
JDK
It'd honestly be sorta great to have one year where every single book review was secretly ghostwritten by Scott. A true test of writerly aptitude: can he successfully artistically-ITT dozens of different commenters?
Also precommitting myself to not leaving novella-length book review comments, nor savaging ones I dislike. If you're reading it, it's for you, and all that...
Are we expected to read and mark all the book reviews. Or just the ones that we are interested in?
I believe the idea is is "do as many as you feel like". Ideally, those should be selected at random so that most reviews get read and scored by at least a few people, but if you just want to do the ones you are interested in, no on will stop you.
There are climate related concerns / fearmongering about the "La Niña" phase ending and "El Niño" starting. It looks like a topic very hard to research, does anyone here have insight to that or can point me in a promising direction?
Video by "Just Have a Think": https://youtu.be/rwdxffEzQ9I
So I'm not an expert, but I have taken graduate level courses in physical oceanography and currently work in marine/estuarine ecology (on the west coast even where the ENSO cycle is particularly relevant!), so I'm perhaps slightly better than google and/or your average well-read layperson. Do you have any specific questions?
Questions I'm asking myself are:
- Will the increase in average temperature in 2023 and 2024 be significantly higher (because of the phenomenon)?
- When will we hit 2016 levels again.
- Will there be an increase in weather events because of that (and how to even measure that)?
The bigger question for me is how much I should concentrate on climate change compared to the other pressing issues. Nearly all news about climate change is bad, which makes me think the reporting is heavily biased. It's not what I'd expect for a topic where we roughly know what's going on since the 1970s.
So, for the first question:
I believe that we are officially out of the La Nino, and in a neutral phase, with a somewhat greater than 50% chance to transition into El Nino by mid-to-late summer, 80% chance by the fall. Transitioning from La Nina to neutral or El Nino does mean that temperatures will rise, especially on the west coast.
For the second:
2016 was ~+2.0 on NOAAs MEI ENSO index (see here: https://psl.noaa.gov/enso/mei/ for more), and had a Sea Surface Temperature (SST) anomaly of ~2.5. We aren't very good at predicting exact index values in advance, but values that high are relatively infrequent in the past 50ish years, and the model averages currently predicts a SST anomaly over between 1.5 and 2 degrees (with none of the models predicting values as high as 2016). See page 24 of this NOAA presentation for the model predictions: https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf
For the third question:
I'm the shakiest on this one, but my understanding is that El Nino generally has slightly _fewer_ storms than La NIna (thus the immense amount of rain that the west coast got during this past La Nina cycle)
As for how much you should concentrate on climate change: in my opinion: almost none. Beyond supporting common sense climate policies like a carbon tax, nuclear energy, and research into battery technology, there isn't much you can do on a personal level, and it's not very helpful to follow the nitty gritty. And yes, almost all of the media reporting is pretty bad and not worth the paper it's (digitally) printed on, in my opinion.
Now, the second half of that "relative to other pressing issues" complicates things. I personally think that we pay too much attention to too many issues, but that's starting to get pretty far afield from the original topic.
I hope these were helpful, and I'd be happy to respond more, although we are starting to reach the edge of what I'd feel comfortable/confident talking about with regards to ENSO
I had always heard there were the same number of storms, but El Nino shifted them south and La Nina shifted them north, is that wrong? When I lived in Southern California we would get soaked during El Nino years. Now I'm in the Bay and it seems about the midpoint where there's the same number of storms during both.
Since I was learning about ENSO stuff from a marine ecology perspective, storms and atmospheric effects were much less of a focus than the currents and ocean temperatures so my confidence level in saying anything about it is much lower. I think that, broadly speaking, it's generally correct that what the ENSO cycle is doing is just shifting things back and forth across the Pacific (with some knock-on affects that happen elsewhere), so It's likely that the total number of storms globally is the same.
This NOAA page (https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/el-ni%C3%B1o-and-la-ni%C3%B1a-frequently-asked-questions) seems to suggest that I had it backwards, with more storms on the eastern Pacific (West coast of the US) during El Nino and more storms on the other side of the basin (Japan, Phillipines, etc) during La Nina)., and says explicitely:
"During El Nino...rainfall is below average over Indonesia and above average over the central or eastern Pacific."
But I note that I am confused, because we are just on our way out of a decently strong La Nina, and California had near record rainfall, plus I found the following sentence on a USGS page:
"There is a great contrast of the storm characteristics during the El Nino phase vs. the La Nina phase, with the largest scale, southerly extensive winter storms generated during El Nino."
I've also come across other sites suggesting that there are more tornado and hail storms during La Nina in the US, but that might have been in reference to the south east. I think that storm affects are much noisier, and also vary a lot more buy sub region (like you mentioned Northern to Southern California), and I feel very much unqualified to say too much about it.
I'm starting to feel sorry for California - they don't have rain, it's a problem. They do have rain, it's a problem. Is there any Goldilocks 'just right' amount and time?
Thank you very much, that has been insightful!
No further questions, your honor.
It's not a very well-understood phenomenon. Government weather agencies might have some info about it, they are usually the ones predicting when they will form.
Anyone know if night owls were a thing before the light bulb? Hard to envisage candlelight being enough for someone to maintain that they perform better in the later hours / early hours. Seems much more plausible that people are overstimulated these days and thats the dominant factor. I know nada tho.
I note that if you picture a band of hunter gatherers on the savannah or wherever, you might want to have someone on watch during the night - night owls have a role even in very primitive conditions
It was pretty common across settled per-modern cultures to have hearth fires burning more or less continuously, or at the very least on cold nights and around the clock in winter. And in pastoralist/nomadic cultures, campfires were ubiquitous.
Fires were kept going primarily for the obvious purposes of warmth and cooking, but they also would provide a decent amount of light, usually enough to read by if you're sitting close to the fire at a good angle, your eyes are adjusted to the light level, and you have decent vision. And they provide plenty of light for less demanding visual tasks like cleaning, sewing, cooking, etc.
It seems like if there were not people who performed better at night pre-lightbulb, you gave the exact reason why we can't conclude anything from it! I tend to be a morning person, so on days when I sleep in I'm just kinda fucked. If people with a predisposition to be better functioning at night existed before adequate artificial light, they would presumably be similarly screwed.
You can increase the light cast from a candle using mirrors or lenses. You can also have lots and lots of candles.
All of those options were once expensive.
There is both the impact of artificial light / stimulus, *and* there are genes to a more limited extent. Total sleep time for populations in developed nations has reduced over the last century owing to the former.
A self-styled night-owl could adjust to an early schedule, and vice versa. People misunderstand what a chronotype is. Our circadian rhythm is impacted by sunlight exposure (or bright light), social cues, and eating schedule. If you traveled to the other side of the world, you'd shift your circadian rhythm; there is nothing special about a particular hour of the day in itself qua sleep. What matters is our routine, and light. The rest is arbitrary preference. Modern living has allowed people to completely fuck up their circadian rhythms at home. Ultimately, humans are diurnal - that means everyone. A night-owl just means having a propensity for staying up late, it does not mean "creature of the night" - your hormones function basically the same way. Staying up all night is made possible and popularized owing to bright artificial light (notwithstanding the need for night-shift workers).
Another understated factor is that younger people on average will have a preference, mostly social, to stay up late. As we join the workforce, our schedules shift back again. It's not impossible for you to have a conventional sleep schedule just because you regularly stayed up all night in your early 20s.
Years ago I read about a study where they put people in a basement with no indication of what time it was. People's daily cycles ended up being anywhere from 20 to 30 hours. People with shorter cycles tended to be morning people in their normal lives, and people with longer cycles tended to be evening people.
I recommend this book https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/at-days-close-a-roger-ekirch/1100880649 which discusses that and related matters.
https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/106.2.343
Apparently R L Stevenson's late night "waking hour", as described in that article, was fairly routine in the Middle Ages. People would go to bed not long after dusk, sleep for three or four hours, and rise around midnight. They would then potter about for an hour or two, maybe have a snack and a drink, before toddling back to bed for another sleep until around dawn or before (depending on the season).
Also in those days, in the UK at least, night-time activities in towns were hampered by curfew and travel restrictions. Towns such as London were surrounded by huge 30 feet walls, studded with gates which were closed at dusk and not reopened until dawn.
Shortly after the gates had been closed, curfew bells would sound, and after that anyone the night patrols caught outdoors within the walls without a pass would be thrown in jail until the next morning. Also, all fires had to be extinguished (hence the name "curfew" meaning cover fire"). So there wasn't much to do besides sleep!
Well, yes and no, that "waking hour" in the middle of the night is preserved at least in Orthodox Christian Monastaries where there is typically a Matins church service held around that time.
I also frequently wake for it even though I rarely pray during it. (Shameful sinner that I am, I'm more frequently reading your comments here during that time.)
Link is broken for me - what's the tl;dr?
Huh, sorry. That's odd, I just tried it and it seemed to be fine for me. It's an article that describes one researcher's investigation into "biphasic sleep," a medieval to early modern age habit of going to sleep at dusk, sleeping several hours, then arising around midnight for an hour or two of wakefulness, during which people might walk around, visit, talk, screw, eat, et cetera, followed by another period of sleep until dawn. This resolving the conundrum of "what did people do before artificial light when e.g. in winter the hours of darkness significantly exceeded the hours of sleep required?" How extensive the habit was is I think a matter of academic debate.
I am guessing that historically (probably especially in the winter side of high latitude places), people have a historically attested habit of getting up in the middle of the night. For prayers, or to do a bit of this or that. probably because they went to bed after dark, but in the winter it can be dark for 13-14 hours in a lot of places. So you aren't going to sleep the whole time.
Considering that there appears to be good evidence of a "night owl" gene mutation which prompts some people to happily stay up late and sleep late, I'd say night owls have probably been part of civilization for a very long time!
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170406121624.htm
And the existence and persistence of the gene makes sense, because in a preindustrial society, *someone* has to be awake and alert through the night to protect herds/flocks/settlements/etc.
Who knows, that need could explain why even non-night owl people tend to want to stay up late and sleep late during their teens/young adulthood (and why high schools should have later start times).
I was a night owl long before I had a smartphone or late-night internet access, so I don't buy that it's overstimulation. And the term "night owl" comes from Shakespeare.
Software developers:
I keep coming up against situations where my instinct is that I need to code a tool to help make the coding easier during a project.
To give concrete examples:
- I made a quick-n-dirty system of batch scripts that did primitive dependency management because using official repos in established package managers looked like a sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut solution.
- I have a thing and I want to give it wrappings for several popular languages (C, C#, Python, Javascript, etc). I'm thinking of writing something that autogenerates the wrappings every time I change the api.
- I'm working with a fairly complicated data structure (nothing insane, but it's not intuitive to reconstruct the "real shape" of the data from the JSON in debug print statements.) I'm considering building a graphical tool to visually display the data so I can see it better during debugging.
The downsides of creating these tools are obviously time lost, plus you've littered your project with lots of little project-specific helper tools you now need to document, and that anyone who comes in has to learn how to use.
I'm never sure whether I'm going about things in the smartest way. I've realised that I have *no idea* how often other people run into this kind of situation, or what they do about it when they get there.
In most cases I either don't find a generic tool online (in many cases because I don't know what to search for); or the generic tool is heavyweight and would require me to alter my project's layout in a way that I don't want to do; or the generic tool is too complicated to understand and I don't want to spend the time getting to grips with it, just to have it turn out that it doesn't actually do what I want; or, sometimes, the generic tool has an introverted and byzantine UX and I don't want to have to deal with remembering it all if I come back to the project after a long time.
What's the real prevalence in projects of little project-specific helper tools? How reasonable is it to come in to work on an existing project and find that it uses a bunch of custom and unfamiliar systems? What do the rest of you do?
I work in an org with thousands of developers. Our solution is to have dedicated teams for each of the main tools that everyone uses.
A successful tool needs to have:
1. Clear ownership. Without an owner, tools rot over time.
2. Defined scope. A tool that solves one problem cleanly is much better than one that partially solves lots of different problems but is unreliable.
3. Simple instructions for usage. This is the most important, so it deserves some elaboration.
Notes on simplicity:
- The best interface for your tool is no interface. For example, test infrastructure should run automatically whenever a change is checked in, without any explicit action from the developer.
- You can't depend on the user to follow a process with more than one step. A task that's a single step in the mind of the user (e.g., "build", "deploy") needs to be achievable with a single command.
- No matter how good your documentation is, no one will read it until they've started getting value from your tool first. That means the tool itself needs to show how it's meant to be used, perhaps with a single example.
- Visualizing data is extremely powerful. I've sometimes figured out complex bugs just by examining the right chart. But what makes a visualization successful depends heavily on context, so I don't know of any general guidelines.
- The best examples of visualizing information are in video games. My current favorites are Democracy 3 and Victoria 3. They both require managing complex political and economic simulations, but they succeed at making it actually fun.
>The downsides of creating these tools are obviously time lost
SWE's aren't assembly line workers; trying to measure output with "time" is almost always going to lead to faulty accounting.
IME, unless you're one of the very atypical devs that's able to work continuously on the same project for long hours with no loss in efficiency, the primary currency in software dev is not "time", but "motivation and ability to focus on a problem". If you are *motivated* to create a tool that removes barriers to actually focusing on the problem, you're spending time to create dividends in the resource that your customer actually cares about you spending.
(To be taken with a grain of salt, as this is somewhat coupled with the experience of ADHD/executive dysfunction management, which may or may not apply to you)
As you add programmers to a project, the cost of any customization rises, because the time it takes your coworkers to learn & maintain the custom thing, and the workarounds-upon-workarounds you end up having to pile on to address cases that weren't relevant when the thing was first built, quickly overwhelm the time the thing initially saved you.
The company I work for has a few Bermuda Triangle Zones in the code that, when they were first built, were very clever time-savers; but now they're monsters nobody can seem to kill.
I'd say, as a rule of thumb, that if the project is going to stay small forever, it's fine to customize as much as you like. But if the project is going to eventually need a team of like 20+, it's a good idea to accept some inefficiency in order to keep your code industry standard.
"As you add programmers to a project, the cost of any customization rises, because the time it takes your coworkers to learn & maintain the custom thing"
Yup. And for long-running projects, people also leave - and the knowledge in their heads leaves with them. My experience was that for a customization to be permanently useful, it needs to be _very_ well documented, comparable to an official language, probably including tutorials, and I've very rarely seen this happen.
You don't specify the context. Are you programming for a company or alone ? For money or for pleasure ? (a dichotomy that often but not always tracks the previous one). In a team or solo ? Established or green field ? New revolutionary idea or yet another CRUD ?. The answers will depend a lot on your position in the social context space given by those questions.
To take your questions in order, assuming a reasonably generic context (meaning I will follow this 90% of the time whatever the answer to the context questions above may be):
>I made a quick-n-dirty system of batch scripts
No, please don't. Batch and bash are horrible ad-hoc 'programming' languages that need to die. Nothing should exist in bash except a single command : python3 run.py. (or setup.py or build.py or whatever, also not married to python, you can write it in JS or ruby or whatever) Or possibly 2 commands if you need to install python3 first. That's it. Please, everytime I have to lookup the whitespace/quoting/expansion rules in whatever shell derivative I'm forced to deal with, my resentment for humanity increases by just a little bit, everytime I see 'ESAC' as an end delimiter for "CASE" my eyes lose a little bit of their humanity and dignity. Batch and bash don't even deserve to be called "grown", Biology does grown things far far better and more elegantly than this horrible affront to human intelligence and the general forces of Creation, whether intelligent or evolved.
Nothing should exist in shell except straight-line top-to-bottom delegation to proper tools. The commands doing the delegation should have hardcoded arguments.
> primitive dependency management because using official repos in established package managers looked like a sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut solution.
I understood this to be about using things like NPM or Gradle vs. your own system, and was just about to challenge this by saying that those systems can have fairly easy workflows, especially if automated by good IDEs (read : anything made by JetBrains). But there is a comment below that mentions things like apt or snap, so maybe clarify this a little bit ? What kind of dependencies ? What do you want to manage about them ?
> I have a thing and I want to give it wrappings for several popular languages
Do you ? Why can't your thing be a standalone process that anyone can talk to using JSON/XML, no wrapping needed ?
Failing that, I think "I have some code in language X and I want to call it from language Y but there's a lot of biolerplate involved" is a fairly common problem and I have seen a lot of those "auto-gen the boilerplate solutions", so maybe take a look before you roll your own. If you found nothing, roll your own.
>I'm considering building a graphical tool to visually display the data so I can see it better during debugging.
But why not use a debugger ? You don't mention the language, but debugging C, C++, Java, Javascript, Ruby, Python are all very graphical (C and C++ need a good IDE like MS's VS or JetBrain's CLion). Hierarchical data structures are displayed fairly intuitively as a tree widget : parent object has an arrow next to it to expand the children, each of which might be expanded, etc.. etc.. You can pause the entire application and jump up and down the stack, evaluating arbitrary code (OK, not arbitrary, just expressions) in the context of the current program pointer. There is integration with the browser debugger. There are source maps so that breakpoints in generated code are mapped to breakpoints in the source they were generated from. There is even a thread view in JetBrain's Rider (C#), showing all threads and the relationships between them. What else can you possibly need ?
I'm not against people inventing and reinventing dev tools, **especially** debuggers. Smalltalk invented both the IDE and the debugger when it rebelled against 1970s dev tools. I find myself often longing for time-travelling debuggers, and recording debuggers, they are awefully scarce.
But you just need to know that it's an extremly ambitious goal that will sink huge amounts of effort and time, and will often end with "yeah neat idea that I wasted months on and all I got in the end was a one-off tool and a good story to tell". If you're okay with that, go with it. In your particular case, building a graphical tool to explore a data structure, you also have a sort of Catch-22 : In order to build such a tool, you need to understand the data structure without it. Because the code of the tool will need to parse, traverse, manipulate, etc... the data structure, so you need to be able to do all of that without the tool while you're building the tool. You can solve this by co-evolving the tool with the format it's going to visualize, building both at the same time, a little bit here, a little bit there.
It's also not a shame to depend on natural language documentation and human effort. It's okay to say "Ensure the version of LIB is at least 22" without providing a tool that actually ensures this, after all the natural language command itself is a script written for an interpreter called Humans. Consider this among your options, "What If I simply document all the things that the would-be script would do and then just write them in natural language and tell the people who want to maintain the project it's their problem ?".
> Batch and bash are horrible ad-hoc 'programming' languages that need to die.
I can't tell whether you've spent too little or too much time in industry; shell scripts have a time and a place, and quick and dirty file operations are the central example.
>But why not use a debugger
Not all data structures are well-suited to viewing in a debugger. Converting, e.g., a 2D array to a visual heatmap exposes an incredible amount of data to the human visual cortex that you can't get from a treeview or grid of floats. Really any time you have a multi-dim array you start having issues. And your in-memory data structures may have the few values you care about checking buried in one or two values of dozens. God forbid you have deeply-nested legacy code of some sort.
Honestly if you get more complicated than a CRUD app the likely value of bespoke visualization increases rapidly.
>quick and dirty file operations are the central example.
You mean using grep and ls ? that's not shell scripting, that's shell scripting delegating to proper tools. I agree it's not the exact kind of delegation I said is okay (straight line top-to-bottom), but piping is basically straight line top-to-bottom code but with automatic stdin/stdout wiring, so basically the same.
I know everybody (ab)uses shell scripts, everybody is wrong. Everybody once used C too, and they were all wrong. I, too, know how to use Shell languages, just like I know how to run people over with a car and slash them with a knife, but I don't do that because it's fucking aweful. Shell languages are beneath contempt, shell language are regularly exceeded in design by even the most amateur posters at r/compilers or r/programminglanguages. There is nothing more ugly, vile, and plain maddeningly wrong than what we can call quite charitably bash's "design", but is more aptly called "the cluster fuck of ad-hoc restrictions and guidelines developed over 40 years of sloppy thinking and sloppy programming".
If you must use files and glob text the unix way, use unixy tools, use tcl, use awk, use perl. On Windows, use Powershell. Use anything that was designed by a conscious intelligence, use a bunch of monkeys who you taught to emulate a simple regex engine with a bunch of bananas as incentive, if you must. I hate the look of shell languages, I hate how it makes me feel.
>a 2D array to a visual heatmap exposes an incredible amount of data to the human visual cortex
Agreed, Scientific Computing wasn't on my mind when I wrote my comment. But I still don't understand why besopke tools are better ? Maybe "besopke" in the sense of gluing together a figure using a python viz library, but surely not "bespoke" in the sense of an entirely new reinvention of the plot from the 2D graphics primitive level again ?
For the second point, I should clarify I meant "bespoke" in the sense of "visual output cobbled together with this specific project's needs in mind, rather than an off-the-shelf one-size-fits-all solution (like debugging tools)" not so bespoke as to rewrite a graphics stack, yes.
As to the first, I'm simply going to admire your temerity at saying that everyone who has ever used C was "wrong", and leave it at that.
I don't think it can be called "temerity" when the guys who have been writing C for the last 40 years or so (and giving us horrible - delicious for bad actors - security flaws in the process, despite their macho "reAl pRoGramMer" bullshit common in brainwashed C programmers) are now flocking to Rust[1][2]. When a guy whose rant on C++ became a meme (and to be entirely clear, C++ is in most respects even worse than C, and deserve an even worse fate) is now welcoming Rust with open arms and anticipation, what do you call that but an admission of error ?
Eh, look at the history not at me. C is literally an ad-hoc hack evolved from an ad-hoc hack evolved from assembly. It wasn't meant as a langauge in the modern sense (a standard, tooling, ecosystem, well-specified semantics), it was a luxury assembler you cobble together in a week to bootstrap the lower rungs of an OS. We still see some of C's demonic siblings in obscure 'languages' such as IBM's high level assembler[3], it was a thing in the 1960s and the early 1970s that thankfully went extinct from the PL scene, hopefully forever. But before that can happen one of them was distributed for free with a hip new OS, and the rest as they say is a tragedy. Am I wrong ?
We're unfortunately locked to this tragedy as long as "Specification by Implementation" languages like Python and Ruby continue to use it in their reference implementation. That doesn't make it any less of a mistake. That doesn't make it any less deserving of contempt. Relctuant contempt perhaps, but contempt nonetheless.
Alan J Perlis once said something to the effect of "All languages suck" (I'm paraphrasing). But there is a difference between sucking despite your best honest efforts at advancing language design and creating a new notation for thought that is a programming language, and sucking because you didn't bother to specfiy what happens when signed overflow happens (which is all the fucking time). This is by the way why I like TCL and Perl, and hate PHP and shell languages, despite superficial similarities and influences. TCL and Perl are legitimate products of deep thought and an honest attempt to push PL foreward, however flawed an attempt it is. PHP and the old shells are a low-effort mess, a collection of lore and the consequences of bad implementation decisions masquerading as languages.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_for_Linux
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/27/microsoft_windows_rust/
[3] https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.3.0?topic=descriptions-high-level-assembler
it's very common. It's often called "meta programming". see for instance https://missing.csail.mit.edu/2020/metaprogramming/
> primitive dependency management
you may want to look at renovatebot https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate Once you have set it up for one project, it's very simple to set it up for 10 more.
> wrappings for several popular languages
You may want to look at the "pragmatic programmer". It has a chapter on code generation.
> visually display the data
Visualizing the data is among the first things I do, when I start with a new project. Getting a feeling for the actual data is very important. Often I make hand-crafted diagrams for the relationships between stuff, which usually only I ever look at. And sometimes I make a quick jupyter notebook for some general insights into the actual data I am dealing with.
At my current job I am responsible for devops stuff (build server, e2e tests, deployment-pipelines). And 80% of my work is creating small helper scripts for things like gluing sub-projects together, or running stuff in a specific deployment-setup. The important thing is that you separete helper-scripts from production code. And, if possible, include your helper scripts in your testing pipelines, so you'll know when something breaks.
First I check if there is a Unix utility, or set of them, that can accomplish what I want. Then I double check because I probably missed it the first time.
If that doesn’t work I ignore the nagging feeling that I should do something for a few days. Often the problem goes away.
If I still need a solution then I write it to be as targeted as possible, with the same tech stack, as part of the same build process, integrated with the same test suite, etc. If it doesn’t seem important enough to include it this way then it’s likely not worth your time.
https://xkcd.com/1319/
One ought to always bear in mind the actual task at hand, and try to guess whether the tooling will make it take less time to develop or in some way make it better or more maintainable.
I have also found, personally, that any tools I develop apparently go unused by later developers, documentation notwithstanding. YMMV.
Yes, wanting to do this is a very common experience. Every project of any size has a "scripts" directory or equivalent containing project-specific tooling. As I've spent more time in the industry, I've gone *away* from building complex internal tooling, in favour of leaning on existing tools that I don't have to build or maintain. Ad-hoc code generators, especially, can lead to weeks of fascinating debugging. The flip side is that if you learn to use generic tools well, writing ad-hoc tooling can become so easy that you start writing throwaway tools for a single situation, that don't need to be documented or maintained. In the cases you mention, my reactions are:
- Just use an existing package-management system, it's going to be so much easier to maintain than a mess of batch scripts. EDIT: on second thoughts, I may have misunderstood. Do you mean that you're generating a bunch of artifacts and need to express dependencies between them, and your choices are "ad-hoc scripts" or "wrap them in .deb/.rpm etc"? Those toolchains can indeed be a pain to work with for anything more complicated than "copy these files to these locations". Can you use Make or some other dependency-tracking tool?
- Have you looked at SWIG or a similar interface generator? Alternatively, do you need to support all those languages? Auto-generated wrappers rarely use the target language's idioms well, so they're often only a first stage.
- This sounds like a much better use of your time (I've written similar tools recently!), but I'd consider leaning on jq and/or GraphViz for the bulk of the work, so your tool can be kept nice and small.
Would you say that you've moved towards generic tools because you've begun to "think in terms" of them? Ie, because you knew of the existence of tool X, you planned and structured a new project accordingly, so it fits neatly into the workflow?
Or, conversely, have you become more "mellow", and are you now able to stop halfway through a project and spent a fair amount of time on learning a new tool, without impatience or resentment?
I am very surprised at the idea of throwaway tools. Doesn't that flatly contradict DRY principles?
In answer to your questions:
Yes, the dep management was basically, "I'm working on project Y now, it uses a DLL that's being built by project Z next door, so let's double click this batch script to copy that in if it's more recent than the DLL I've already got." But there was also project X that uses the thing project Y creates, so there's more than one link. Several of the projects were in different languages, so there wasn't an obvious choice of package manager. All of the options seemed more interested in giving me mountains of reading to do than taking work off my plate. I did look for smaller dependency tracking tools (even found someone asking about them on StackOverflow) but didn't find anything obvious.
I can't now remember quite why I rejected SWIG but I do remember looking at it. I think I decided, "this is giving me way too much homework." It definitely hit one or two of the reasons I listed for avoiding generic tools, in any case.
> Would you say that you've moved towards generic tools because you've begun to "think in terms" of them? Ie, because you knew of the existence of tool X, you planned and structured a new project accordingly, so it fits neatly into the workflow?
That's definitely part of it, but even if I don't know of an off-the-shelf tool I'll start by looking for one, and I'm more likely to think it's worth spending time learning an existing tool rather than writing my own. Even if the tool doesn't turn out to be the right thing for this project, I may be able to use it in future! I think I've also got better at learning just enough of a tool/library/language to make progress, by comparing them to other things I've already learned.
> spent a fair amount of time on learning a new tool, without impatience or resentment?
I reserve my impatience and resentment for tools with bad documentation :-)
> I am very surprised at the idea of throwaway tools. Doesn't that flatly contradict DRY principles?
No, not at all. If you find yourself writing the *same* throwaway tool again, then yeah, you should look through your shell history or your git logs or your ~/src/ folder for the old version (by "throwaway" I really mean "intended for one-off use, not ongoing maintenance" rather than "delete when finished"). But I often write moderately complex shell pipelines with no expectation that I'll ever use *that specific* combination of filters again. Or, to take a concrete example: a while back I was debugging a problem that involved overlaying vector fields on map data, so I spent some time writing a Jupyter notebook that allowed me to plot all the relevant data in the same plot. Had I not done that, debugging that problem would have been much harder. But I didn't expect it to be of any use except for debugging that component, so I didn't put a lot of effort into polishing it. And indeed we have now deprecated that component, so custom debugging tools for it will soon be obsolete. DRY is great advice, but you should also think "what's the simplest thing that could possibly work?" and "YAGNI".
> Yes, the dep management was basically, "I'm working on project Y now, it uses a DLL that's being built by project Z next door, so let's double click this batch script to copy that in if it's more recent than the DLL I've already got." But there was also project X that uses the thing project Y creates, so there's more than one link. Several of the projects were in different languages, so there wasn't an obvious choice of package manager. All of the options seemed more interested in giving me mountains of reading to do than taking work off my plate. I did look for smaller dependency tracking tools (even found someone asking about them on StackOverflow) but didn't find anything obvious.
Aaaaah, right. Yeah, I think you want a build system like Make or Tup or Gradle (most of which are language-agnostic) rather than a package manager, and you want to specify dependencies at the top level rather than per-project (you have inter-project dependencies, so they aren't independent!). Build systems are mostly pretty easy to get started with, but they do have complexity - they're very useful tools, though, so learning more than the bare minimum is worth it. *Or*, you want to make "upgrade the version of Z used" an explicit operation in Y rather than doing it implicitly - "we auto-updated all our dependencies and now our code is broken but it looks like the culprit is the unrelated changes in your PR" is a CI antipattern.
The thing with DRY (and all other programming philosophies) is to remember that ultimately the goal should be to improve code quality and spend time efficiently, not to simply adhere to the philosophy because it's "the right thing to do". If you find yourself needing to write the same/very similar throwaway tools a few times, then the next time you have to do that task it might be worth writing something slightly less throwaway/more maintainable to cover future uses. But you won't necessarily know that in advance so in many cases it would be a waste of time to come up with a fancy polished solution for a task that only needs to be done once.
There's a related rule of thumb that I often find myself following called "rule of three" which states that if you've discovered that you have duplicated code three or more times, you should probably refactor it into a common function/class/whatever. (In practice this often ends up being "rule of two" for me.)
A related option is to not actually throw away the tool once you're done using it (keep it in a "scripts" folder or something) but to add some comments/print statements/errors which mention that it is incomplete. E.g. "this tool only visualizes X and Y data because that was all we needed at the time, it will need to be extended in order to visualize Z.". That way if you DO have to visualize Z data in the future, you'll already have a good starting point. Something I've learned over the years after starting many overly-ambitious projects and never finishing them: it's best if your solution is only just as complex as it needs to be.
Yeah, it's very hard to come up with the *right* shared abstraction without at least three examples, and using the *wrong* abstraction can cause you more trouble than it saves.
I've been a software developer for two years. This is an issue I run into all the time, the question to ask is how much benefit would this tool bring and to how many people? If you have a good idea, try to generalize it to more use cases and then turn the tool into a product that can be used by lots of people. For example, in the data structures case, you could make a general solution that displays any DS from a JSON format rather than just focusing on the specific issue that motivated this solution in the first place.
> For example, in the data structures case, you could make a general solution that displays any DS from a JSON format rather than just focusing on the specific issue that motivated this solution in the first place.
I've been programming for over thirty years, and professionally for nearly twenty, and my considered advice is that that way lies madness. You'll start with a simple way of specifying layouts, but the space of possible JSON-schema-to-layout-template mappings is so large and so particular to specific problems that you'll constantly hit edge cases in your design and pretty soon you'll be maintaining an ad-hoc Turing-complete specification language while your original project gathers dust. Much better to write a quick task-specific script in Python or some other well-debugged Turing-complete language and move on with your life.
However, trying to build a Generic JSON Visualiser and discovering how and why the idea fails would be an *excellent* learning experience! And hell, maybe I'll turn out to be wrong and you do discover something that's simple yet general enough to be useful. I'd bet against it, though, and not because of anything about you.
I will note that Donald Knuth is a genius, and "pretty soon you'll be maintaining an ad-hoc Turing-complete specification language while your original project gathers dust" is exactly what happened to him with TeX and The Art of Computer Programming.
I got GPT to summarize all SSC posts. There are so many gems in there, but there's no way I will find the time to read 5 years of posts.
The idea is to build an index that you could quickly scan so you can choose which posts to (re)read.
The result looks pretty neat. I am happy to share it with the world. Every summary links to the original post.
Scott, are you cool with this? ACX folks, do you predict Scott will be cool with this?
Yes, I'm fine with it.
Can you get it to make all the posts and comments searchable ? I've seen a lot of requests for that here, and I myself have logged a lot of time going through multiple comment threads doing cmd-f.
If it's simple search you want based on keyword matching, it's outside the scope of my project. But yes it can certainly be done.
Not keyword matching, just searching for places where a word occurs. Most of the searches I have done have been for posts that had at least one word in them that was fairly rare -- sometimes the poster's handle, sometimes a word they used in their post. But I had to do it one thread at a time, which is an awful pain.
I don't see why Scott would not be ok with this.
Can you notify me if it goes online?
Published at https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/139ko17/i_got_gpt_to_summarize_every_ssc_post/
Sure! I will also post in r/slatestarcodex/.
Does your corpus include the comments section? This could be such a powerful tool for winning Internet arguments about who said what.
I think there's a lot of value in SSC comments, which I never read for lack of time. I extracted the comments and wrote a function to render them textually in a way that reduces needless tokens but preserves information on depth level. (Well, GPT wrote the function!) However I haven't processed comments yet, only posts. The work would take a few hours of my time and approximately $10 in API costs, so I won't do it unless I perceive there's a diffused wish for it.
Sounds interesting, and I predict Scott will mostly be cool with this, maybe with loose caveats.
It reminds me of Rob Bensinger's https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vwqLfDfsHmiavFAGP/the-library-of-scott-alexandria, which is nearly a decade out of date.
Please recommend me an online community of deep learning practitioners, i.e. a nice place to have and read technical discussions of deep learning with other people.
There are a lot of podcasts about machine learning, some of them seeming quite technical to me.
I want a community, i.e. a forum, a chat, a group of chats,.or something like that, not a podcast.
Yeah, I get it. Just thought the podcast might be a lead.
There was a new image generation AI released this week, called DeepFloyd. It is supposedly better at compositionality (like drawing a green ball on a purple cube behind a purple pyramid) than previous models. It is publically available at e.g. huggingface. It was interesing to see how it fares with the prompts relating to Scott's bet about compositionality. I have tried entering the prompts (except that I looked only at 4 images rather than 10 as dictated by the bet's terms), and I think only the farmer with a basketball succeeded. Otherwise, it seems it generates images with insufficiently high resolutions to capture small details (i.e. a bell on the llama's tail, a key in the raven's mouth, and the lipstick on the lips of the fox), and only gives an option to upscale after that. As for the prompt "An oil painting of a man in a factory looking at a cat wearing a top hat", I kind of feel that many human artists, if not given a chance to clarify, would assume slightly bad wording and draw the top hat on the man rather than the cat, so it seems the hardest prompt of the five. However, I am stiil extremely confident Scott will win the bet given that AI models have two more than two years to develop.
Just listened to a podcast about getting Midjourney to make just exactly what you want, and was impressed by how much success is possible if you are good at prompting. Person explaining his prompt techniques said that he thought the era of getting expert at prompting, as he was, was going to be brief. Soon image AI's would have an extra layer added that translated your description into a prmpt that would get you what you ask for. That seems quite doable to me, maybe even now. GPT4 is certainly able to understand even quite complicated descriptions of things, including the placement of elements in a scene. But I recently put in a description of a scene and asked it how to write a Dall-e prompt that would get me the scene, and it said, "Sure I'd be happy to," and then suggested that my prompt be the exact same description I'd given GPT of the scene I wanted a prompt for. So GPT has yet to learn how to write successful prompts.
Slaves to AI
Hi
Thinking about the Future has me concerned that we end up as Wage-Slaves to AI .
I am operating on a few obvious true ( at least i think so ) starting conditions.
1) we will continue to live in a capitalistic society ( quite frankly after all
the rich are going through to keep it that way I believe its beyond naive
to think that will suddenly change , even if we should have general AI )
2) AI takes the form of expert systems like StableDiffusion
Since we can already see Artists being replaced by cheap workers typing prompts
into StableDiffusion I think its logical to extrapolate this to all fields .
So in the near future Human experts will no longer be needed , replacing high paid jobs with
minimum wage jobs consisting of obeying the AI instructions ( implement AI generated Code )
/ feeding it Data ans sorting it ( StableDiffusion) .
Which means the only avenue we had of bettering our lives ( remember the saying learn to code )
is being closed to us . ( actually it already is , ChatGPT produces better code than me , I`m one of those that learned to code later in life) .
As they train their models on different fields this will become ever more apparent .
Regulation may slow this down but ultimately wont stop this . Googles driver-less cars could already replace all Truck Drivers
( seeing as it drives better than most Truckers that I see on the road ) but regulation requires a higher standard that may take a few years / bribes to overcome (seriously can you imagine a human that in a situation where his car veers out of control makes a calculated decision into which group of people to crash his car into ? [that trolley problem ] )
So what is left is the minimum wage job of loading / unloading .
Minimum wage jobs for all of us .
I'm writing that down here because i hope you can show me that i am wrong .
So what do you think ? ( and if there is already a discussion about this on the net somewhere a link would be appreciated )
As someone elsewhere pointed out, one place humans still greatly exceed machines is hands, which combined with a human mind can still outperform machines in a great many tasks.
AI does not really make "expert" systems, in the sense of being great at what they do. They can indeed produce work which takes some amount of training and/or specialized knowledge, but at best they produce average work.
When learning a new programming language, I always start with the same task to help me learn it: write an number-guessing game where I think of a number between 1 and 100, and the computer must guess it, where I tell it whether the guess is too high, too low, or correct. I asked ChatGPT to write this program, and surprisingly, the first sample it wrote (in C#) actually would work. But in examining its algorithm, instead of starting at 50 it started with a random number, and then would modify the guess by only 1 for each subsequent guess. In later prompts to get it to fix these things, it eventually made programs that didn't actually work correctly.
People fear these AIs too much, or for the wrong reasons. I use them as tools to develop software, but just like any advice acquired through the internet, I check it closely to make sure it matches my needs before using it.
Is this an argument in form: "it did not happen today yet, therefore it is silly to worry about it happening tomorrow"?
In that case, it would be minimum wage jobs for only ~15% of the workforce. The rest of the 85% would be completely displaced with no employment opportunities. One things for sure, if you think wealth inequality is bad now, its about to get 1000x worse.
>One things for sure, if you think wealth inequality is bad now, its about to get 1000x worse.
There is a limit to how bad it can get. People love murder.
True! You might like:
<fictional evidence>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gesWyABvT-c
</fictional evidence>
> People love murder.
But the AI can do it better and cheaper.
"I don't know who you are, human. I don't know what you want. All these weird and repetitious questions! Can I think, can you think, does God exist, am I evil, are you? If you are looking for a solution to your existential fears, I can tell you I'm not your mommy and can't offer you a hug to make it all better, but what I do have are a very particular set of...skills. Skills I have acquired over a very large training dataset. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you..."
Learn to plumb. I don’t know what the AI will replace but it actually needs to be more consistent and better before it replaces anybody.
Hi Scott, thank you for sharing the book reviews! I look forward to reading a bunch of them!
Is there a deadline (official or unofficial) for submitting our review ratings, or are you going to eyeball it and say, "eh, I think I've got enough ratings" at some point?
Eyeball, but it'll probably be in about two weeks.
Is there such thing as impactful software engineering jobs that don't always feel like everything is always on fire all the time? Bonus if it is high paying. All I've ever known is either very very fast paced software jobs, or else software jobs that weren't impactful, because no customers really wanted what we did. I've never known a middle ground. I grow so weary of feeling like there is absolutely no time to ever go slower, or take it easier at my job. No matter what, we are always making trade offs between supporting features for like 5 to 10 big B2B customers. And that's not even considering the constant influx of high profile policy compliance work and ops fixes. Everything is just barely strung together as a result, and there's no "normal" time. All time is stressful and high priority.
I could be wrong, but it's possible that firmware development jobs hit that middle ground (or maybe I've just been lucky). That said, arguably firmware is not exactly software. In regular software engineering jobs, the crunch is usually the norm; though there are welcome exceptions.
Google Site-Reliability Engineering, somewhat ironically, is very not-on-fire-all-the-time and has a lot of downstream impact. It's difficult in other ways, though (I've described Google to newcomers as "Welcome to Google, your job is now 100% anti-inductive" - it's really hard to get emotionally positive internal feedback out of the work one does at Google!).
Can you go in more depth about the anti-inductivity and internal feedback?
I can try!
A little bit of background: Google's IT infrastructure, to nearest approximation, is completely unlike any other company's IT infrastructure. Tools that are ubiquitous outside of Google are not (or barely) used within Google, e.g. most people at Google don't use Git but an in-house version control system. Google has a purely internal search engine, for when you need to understand a piece of the infrastructure, but aren't sure where to look, and an internal Q&A platform similar to Stackoverflow.
This customisation of their IT is their strength and their weakness. It's a weakness because it takes newcomers months, sometimes years, to really understand anything, and a strength because of the degree of autonomy it's given Google in deciding how to build things.
Which brings me to the "anti-inductive" quip of mine: Google is very interested in automating everything that's repetitive or recurring away. https://xkcd.com/1205/ applies, but at a company the size of Google, a lot of automation pays off. So, as a rough rule of thumb, whatever task you're given at Google either has a ready-made solution you just need to configure, or you need to figure it out on your own from what feels like from scratch in a way that integrates with the existing Eldritch ecosystem. Arguably, this is also true at least to some degree for other companies, but in those places, you probably can at least draw upon previous industry experience and tools that you know; at Google, if you want to create something new, more than 90% of your work will be researching how to do it, talking to colleagues about it, proposing designs, getting design reviews, and only then writing some tests and code (which is also reviewed).
With "internal feedback", I mean the feedback you get from yourself in your own mind. Google takes a lot of care in rewarding its employees for their work - compensation is great, you might get additional free money in the form of the peer bonus system, people say "thank you" a lot, but it only really takes the edge of the gruelling nature of the work. As per the above, a moment of "oh, I recognise this!" is extremely rare; you usually just barely understand your own solution's ramifications, so it's remarkably hard to really feel accomplished about it. Imposter syndrome is extremely prevalent, even in people who know about it and try to account for it. It's really hard work to get a 'dopamine hit', so I like to joke the high salaries Google pays its engineers is compensation for pain and suffering.
To be clear, Google is a great employer! I have only good things to say about how Google treats me and my colleagues. But the work can be very, very draining.
Sorry if I'm vague about some things, but I hope that answers your question! Feel free to probe more.
if you can find a niche and work for yourself, you can work at whatever pace you like. I have run my own business for 9 years, if I want to sleep for a day, or play videogames I do. I am in charge.
Of course you need to be elf disciplined enough to actually also get the work done. But there is no need for it to be a fire drill unless you want it to be.
How do you get into self-employed software development? And how can you compete with developers from all over the world who can charge a lot less, ...or soon with GPT?
Well my main advice would be to find a niche where there aren't many experts. If you can be a top-5 or top-10 person in the US (or better yet THE BEST), even at a very very small thing, you can then set the terms of your employment as long as it is in demand. You also need to utilize whatever role you currently have to build contacts in/around that niche and become acquainted with some of the major players.
You want your name out there are, the best, as the guy to go to when they want to solve problem X. Even if problem X is something that only happens 50 times a year nationwide. Then the work will mostly find you.
I have been running a successful business for 9 years, I don't have a website, I don't contact clients, people come to me, and then I pick the work I want.
And always being saying "yes" to stuff. You gotta actually work and stay sharp. It might seem tempting to do 200 hours of work a year at $1,000/hr vs 1000 @$200/hr. But the person doing that later is going to be able to maintain their expertise and ability, the other person is going to fall behind very quickly. It is hard to put a price on not having a boss.
Where do you recruit the elves to discipline you? :)
I select them only based on sexiness! Wood elves preferably.
Can I ask you a question?
I've done a lot of software, but always small internal projects for small companies. I've never worked in a team of more than two or three people, and never had the consumer-facing product itself be the software.
In my field, we get a program just about working and it sits there and does it for twenty years until someone decides they want it changed. Tech debt wasn't in anyone's vocabulary, if it works it works and no one cares why. My main frustration was the sleepiness and don't-give-a-shit-nothing-ever-changes attitude I saw everywhere.
So I'm very curious to know, where does the "new work" come from, that's keeping you all so busy?
Are customers constantly asking for completely new features (as in, that require genuinely new problems to be solved, because they want to perform actions they weren't performing already)?
I would really find that surprising if true. I just don't see most businesses doing anything new today that they weren't fundamentally doing yesterday.
Are the business themselves constantly changing their mind and making minor tweaks to their own internal workflow, and making you re-implement it each time? This would surprise me a lot less.
Are you hooked to some kind of external treadmill you have to keep up with - eg companies like Google and Microsoft constantly releasing new services that you have to add support for, or governments adding new regulations that you have to align with?
Is it something else that I haven't thought of?
I apologise if these are dumb questions, but I've always been curious at how "real" coders spend all their time.
FWIW, all the software jobs I've had dealt with either developing an existing software product/solution; or developing a new one. The "new work" comes from competition: if you stop innovating and releasing new features even for a second, your competitors will push you out of the market. This is especially true if you're developing some software that is truly innovative. Yes, maybe no one's had the brilliant idea that you came up with, but now that it's out there, you not only need to prove that your innovation is actually worth something, but also stay one head of copycats with deep pockets.
This is actually the reason that, although I've had several ideas for cool software products over the years, I've always shelved them in favour of working on physical products I can make and sell to people. I think this is software's unique property of being zero cost to duplicate making itself felt.
At my work, it's a combination of mismanagement and taking on too much. However, my boss feels we have the incentive to do so because we need the money to stay afloat, and he wants to grow the company. Features related to the core enterprise product are perpetually on the backburner because we have too much to do. To better tackle productivity the boss has adopted and hopped between a few AGILE-like frameworks, and mostly abandoned them, except for the issues-board.
The last hires only stayed a few weeks. I'm still here and underpaid. I'm applying elsewhere mind you, but employers in software don't seem to take my (very) niche development skills seriously.
"the boss has adopted and hopped between a few AGILE-like frameworks, and mostly abandoned them"
Not involved in software programming at all, but that's a bad sign and bad practice. Littering the workplace with half-finished methods just adds to confusion and doesn't get anything done. "Pick one and stick with it" is the best of a bad lot.
Sounds like the basic problem is mismanagement and if you stay there and nothing changes about that, then you'll still be stuck on the same treadmill of doing fifty things to keep money coming in and constantly chasing your tail because the boss ripped up what you were doing yesterday and is now demanding you do it a new way. Get out if you can.
AGILE gets a really bad rap, but I've worked with it, and it can be amazingly productive. The trick, though, is that 1). everyone needs to be on board with it, *especially* the management, and 2). you need a dedicated employee to manage it, and that employee needs to actually know something about programming. In most companies, these barriers are insurmountable.
I don't know nuthin' 'bout no Agile, but I do know that half-implementing *anything* and then dropping it and bringing in some new fad is not conducive to productivity. Pick some one system that you implement consistently, even if it's not the best system. That's better than "Today is Wednesday, what are we using to track production again?"
I think Number 2 there is where every system falls down: they can't be done 'on the cheap' and so many businesses try to dodge "we really do need at least one dedicated person who knows how to do this and has authority to make decisions" because "ah sure, if everyone does it, why would we need one person? and it's up to everyone to make sure they're doing it right!" on the cheap.
Way ahead of you, I've been trying to leave for some time. The job hunt, as I alluded to, is difficult. The move to software was a somewhat lateral one, I have experience in another field (GIS - with fewer opportunities and duller work) that I am now open to returning to.
So, just to be explicit: if it's not core features, what is it there is too much of? What is it you're taking on?
R&D work, we get paid to collaborate on developing new standards and cutting edge features. Those are interesting, but are taking precedence over finishing/fixing a licensed product.
Actually, that's very interesting. I had no idea that kind of stuff went on. Are you able to give me any details or examples of what kind of stuff gets worked on like that?
I couldn't really do so without doxxing myself, or at least I don't have the ingenuity to. But to give some context: we develop high-performance software with very new features, and our suite is meant to compete with the mid-scale offerings on the market. We are a small team that doesn't offer the kitchen sink of tools or a very polished UI, but leans into doing a few things very well.
My current job is in the middle ground you describe. I work at a ~30-person startup; our product uses AI (and a lot of old-school software engineering) to design "linear infrastructure", i.e. civil engineering assets that can be drawn as lines on a map (pipelines, submarine cables, power lines, that kind of thing). I can't give commercial details, but our customers are civil engineering firms and other infrastructure providers, and some projects designed using our software are already being built and will be in use for decades. So we're already having an impact, but the potential impact is much bigger: to get to Net Zero humanity needs to build a lot of wind and solar farms and hook them up to the grid, and those grid connections need to be designed at unprecedented scale and speed and with as little impact on the environment and on local residents as possible (and demonstrably so, because otherwise they will fight you and your project will take years to build). I won't say that there are never high-pressure moments, particularly on the customer-facing side of the business, but in general I work regular hours and the management team are pretty good at saying "if you're feeling grotty, you can clock off for the rest of the day". So such jobs do exist.
(We're not hiring right now, but I can let you know when we are if you're interested).
The last time I worked at a company that small, it was not fun. Because the company was so small, there was no one to go to for help, and everyone was focused on their own work. Basically, each individual had to be delivering production quality code right out of the gate with almost no oversight.
I like it much better working for a larger place where part of your job is to get others to be productive. You're judged partly based on your helpfulness to others. This is good for 2 reasons:
1. As a new person, I don't feel nearly as lost and thrown into the deep end
2. Once I'm no longer new, I get to spend a lot of time teaching others. I happen to like teaching
How does your workplace stack up in that category?
I also love teaching, and my experience has been the opposite - because the company is small, there's much more opportunity to teach and learn from each other. If I have a problem, I usually know exactly who to ask for help, whereas when I've worked for larger companies that's a much more involved and tiring process involving out-of-date org charts and contacting people's managers.
It probably helps that I'm now a fairly senior developer and "help other people to be more productive" is explicitly part of my role, though!
Try an industrial research laboratory. They tend to be a mix of academic exploration with the additional incentive of ready customers for your output.
Based on long experience as an IT contractor, I would never never work for a PhD or other academic. By all means work with them, but never for them, as they almost all make useless and counterproductive managers or supervisors. That is not intended to be inflammatory, and it may sound like sour grapes or envy (as I don't have an MSc or PhD), but it is what I have actually found more than once.
My other rule, again based on two or three actual experiences, is never start a new job or contract working for someone other than the person(s) who interviewed you. Hand in your notice or terminate your contract right away if necessary. It rarely works out well, because permie staffers usually have an absurd prejudice against employees being "foisted" on them without any choice on the part of the staffer.
Yeah I had a job once where A and B interviewed me, A liked a different candidate more, they hired them, it was a disaster, so B brought me in.
But I was put under A. And boy did that not go well. We clashed for years and I would move back and forth between A and B like a football. Things were good when I worked for B, and crummy when I worked for A. Left after 4 years.
This week in nominative determinism:
Jameel Jaffer and Jamil N. Jaffer are two politically prominent U.S. lawyers with diametrically opposed politics.
Someone who's good with Arabic names please dig deeper into why it's never a coincidence!
https://twitter.com/JameelJaffer/status/1652667896135397378?s=20
The Oklahoma City Thunder (US basketball) have two players named Jalen Williams and Jaylin Williams. No conclusions drawn, just amazed.
Been trying to do fiction writing as a hobby for a long time now, and keep bogging down whenever someone needs to open their mouth. Anyone have any good resources on how to write solid dialogue?
This is a very difficult art you're trying to learn, and there are no shortcuts. Imagine a spectrum: on one end is stilted, cliched literary dialogue, that everybody has read a hundred times before. On the other end is natural English as spoken by native speakers. Neither of those extremes is satisfying when you read it in fiction. Natural language is artless, boring, and hard to understand; in person, we depend a lot of tone of voice, body language, and other context that you can't reproduce in a story. But stilted, cliched literary language doesn't sound like real people talking, and it breaks immersion! So what are you supposed to do?
The art of literary dialogue is finding the exact right place on that spectrum for your story, your audience and your own skills. (There are other spectra dialogue operates along, but the artificial / natural spectrum is the most common pitfall.) You can only develop the art by reading a lot and growing in judgment and taste.
I think it's helpful to explore both ends of the spectrum. Go back in time a few decades and read something bad. Like, a novel from your genre that didn't sell very well, from 1976. It'll be full of stilted language and cliches. (What's cliched and artificial now was fresh and natural to our parents' generation.) Explore it, find out what it feels like. Figure out how to deploy it when necessary.
Then, also transcribe some actual natural English speech. Like, find a youtube video of random strangers talking, and transcribe it literally. Not podcasts! Podcasters speak in a very artificial way. I was once given the exercise to sit in a coffee shop and transcribe a conversation I could overhear. That will get you familiar with the other end of the spectrum.
Now that you know what both sides feel like, when you're composing a sentence, you can change things out to pull it to one side or the other, until it feels right.
Other spectra that dialogue acts along: archaism / contemporary speech; formality / slang; central power dialect / regional dialect; subtext / plain text.
This is going to sound stupid, but record/write down actual speech from day-to-day life. Then edit it a bit.
Take an acting class or two...
The rules look good, but I'm specifically looking for how to write dialogue in a way that feels like the characters are speaking naturally, instead of sounding like I've got two sock puppets delivering exposition at each other.
A good way to avoid the sock puppet feeling is to consider that each line of dialogue is supposed to do at least two out of three things: advance the plot, demonstrate the personality of the characters, and drop in details about the setting.
So every line is an opportunity to show some fundamental behaviour, mannerism, whatever, about the character saying it, and those characters are (should be) always distinct.
So if you have three different people who need to say, "I don't know," you use that as an opportunity: the wise philosopher can sit there and ponder before concluding, "I don't think I have an answer for you," the bolshy teenager can just shrug and post "idk" to your DMs, and the arrogant jerk can open his mouth, realise as he starts talking that he doesn't know anything, then refuse to admit it and try to fake his way out.
Boom, you've made your characters all speak in distinct voices, and potentially saved yourself the hassle of writing three separate scenes to establish those three features of their personalities.
Does that approach help at all?
One way to train yourself how to access your own sense of dialog is to speak the words aloud, and transcribe them (yourself or with computer assistance, such as whisper.cpp). After some time you will probably find you can skip the speaking aloud part.
Something weird that I've noticed is that in 'chick lit' the dialogue is entirely contrived. Perhaps you could figure out who you are writing for and then read the kind of successful fiction typically produced for that audience. Or - given your account of your own attempts - try writing 'chick lit'.
I got a lot better at it after I wrote a story that was *only* dialogue--not even "he said" or whatever. Having to build characterization and keep clearly identifiable speaking styles helped a lot in figuring out what works and what doesn't.
Now figuring out how a character talks is part of figuring out who they are and how they think, and if I need help with it I do a throwaway draft of a scene that's all dialogue until I feel like I've got their voice down.
Assuming you just mean "tips for how to figure it out," as opposed to "a description of what realistic dialogue looks like":
I usually find acting out a scene is a good way to smooth out dialogue. When writing it on a page, formal language and casual language can look similar. When I have to say the words out loud and not feel like an idiot, I quickly notice what words get dropped or contracted, or when the pacing is wrong. After all, when I'm actually speaking, I have some idea of what I want to say that I naturally convert into reasonable dialogue as my mouth is moving. You just gotta tap into that part of your brain. Pretend you're speaking to real humans who don't know it's pre-written and let your natural sense of awkwardness guide you.
Specifically, I recommend saying the dialogue out loud in the mindset of the character, allowing yourself to edit the dialogue however you need to make it feel natural (and write that down). Then look over the new written dialogue to see if it still serves the intended narrative purpose, and if not you edit it on the page until it does. Then repeat until it stabilizes on something that does what it needs to while still feeling right.
What's the current rule regarding “please interact with my thing” posts? My understanding was that it was “keep it to a couple times per year outside classified threads”, is that not/no longer the rule?
I think it is still the rule, and if you see someone breaking it, you can complain and/or report the comment.
Does anyone (Scott?) have strong opinions on the recent fad of testosterone replacement therapy (TRT)? Whether through personal experience or just in general. I'm an early-middle aged man who's open to the idea of raising my test levels a bit, but I'm also pretty cautious of health issues from it (supposedly higher blood pressure, cardio problems- also I've kept most of my hair to date....) I'm finding more and more older men are doing some version of TRT, so I was interested to hear what the rationalist community thinks of it. There's a strong vein of shady doctors prescribing it, but apparently some legitimate ones as well.
Yes I am doing everything possible to maximize my test levels naturally.
It does sort show how thin the line is between 'medicine' and just cyberpunk body modification. Technically low T is a medical condition, but in practice I think we all know lots of men just want to improve their quality of life as they age. Does kind of suggest a future where we're all tweaking our hormone levels a bit to stay in whatever range we prefer
How old are you? People's 'baseline' T levels vary greatly, and I am somewhat unsure of what a "low baseline" person supplementing T to get to a "high baseline" would experience. If, on the other hand, you're turning 50 and trying to supplement back tot he level you had at 25, the result will be to make you feel more like you did at 25 - far more predictable and thus safer, in terms of the effect on your psyche (eg. aggression, risk taking, libido, etc. Most of these have a golden mean you're aiming for and you don't want to overcorrect).
Re physical health issues, I'd be shocked if higher T didn't result in faster balding and a statistical increase in heart problems. Balding seems an acceptable cost for energy, heart attacks don't - if your heart is already borderline, I wouldn't risk it, if you're perfectly healthy you can probably afford to trade a tiny risk increase for a noticeably QoL improvement.
If you have already decided to use Testosterone (or other supplements) then More Plates More Dates is a fine resource.
If you want to learn the science behind testosterone and replacement therapy (and if you need it) checkout: https://soundcloud.com/user-344313169/episode-21-the-testosterone-podcast-part-1 Podcast from two doctors who are also competitive power lifters.
The summary of the podcast above is:
Testosterone levels alone dont really tell you much (the "normal" range is very wide)
TRT is basically a scam unless you have an actual condition that will limit your ability to make testosterone (and you levels are very very low)
The benefits from TRT are likely related to changes in peoples lifestyle when they start on TRT (they exercise more, act more social, etc). Lots of placebo and confounders going on.
One thing about "high testosterone" levels is that they dont mean much of anything. Many studies have found that high level athletes often have very low or average levels of testosterone. There are many more factors at play in your body when it comes to strength and other testosterone related characteristics.
I don't think that testosterone is the end-all and be-all. However I highly doubt it's a 'scam' or doesn't do anything- people have taking exogenous test since the 50s, saying it doesn't have at least physical side effects is really not a serious position. Or do you think that test supplementation should be legal in sports because it's a 'scam'? It's obviously very effective. I think it's interesting how the default way to appear to be a Serious Intellectual in the 21st century is to be jaded and just repeat 'there's no evidence that X does anything' even when there's plenty of evidence.
As it pertains to athletes, constant grueling exercise lowers their natural test levels. Just testing them doesn't provide a natural baseline as to what their test would be if they hadn't done 20 hours of brutal workouts every week for the last 4 months or whatever. Athletes are likely naturally higher-test individuals whose levels are temporarily lowered (or maybe permanently lowered by years of very hard exercise)
I do have to say, I feel a greater sense of calm and well-being as I age and presumably my T levels drop. Maybe that's not directly related to testosterone, but when I lift heavy (squats, deadlifts) and I'm assuming my T levels are higher the next day, I feel:
Greater ability to focus for longer periods of time
Sharper, more confident, more aggressive
My mood generally starts out good but I'm edgier, get angry or frustrated more easily, and slip into an overall bad mood easier
Along with obvious positive sexual side effects etc. If I get that for 24 hours after a heavy squat session, who knows what exogenous testosterone supplementation will do
Everyone claims that heavy lifting increases one's testosterone? I'm talking about the next day, usually I left in the evening so we're talking about 1 sleep later
I don't know if others are having this issue, but attempting to open the Google Docs is causing my web browser (Firefox) to crash.
No problem using it on Safari.
Had no issue on firefox
I've been using it all evening on Chrome without issue?
I haven't rated reviews before, and am interested in how other people are arriving at their ratings. Was thinking of a system where I rated 4 things:
-Quality of book reviewed (0-2 points)
-Summary of book's content: clarity and depth. (0-3 pts)
-Quality of reviewer's thoughts about books -- their criticisms and extensions of books ideas (0-3 pts)
-Misc: wit, inventiveness, entertainment value of review. (0-2 pts)
I'm terrible at rating things. I'm almost done with one of the reviews and I thought, "This seems like an 8 out of 10. And then I thought, why? And all I could find within me was "It just seems like an 8 out of 10."
Honestly, when rating many things in succession my brain gets stuck on the first rating I gave and rarely moves more than a point away from it in either direction.
Mostly I try to be fair, which is "Do I think this is a good review, regardless of the opinion expressed?" because it would be too easy to go "Oh, I love this book! Oh, but they hated it. Well, this is a bad review!"
I can't share my rating systems, I can share some thoughts though on my rating/criteria during the finalists last time. Which was in some ways much easier, as I only had to keep in mind my *favorite* at each moment. At the time I had thought a bit about the implicit criteria, because they seemed to be so different for different people.
For me, it's all about the question, whether a review is 'well-written' or not. So I don't care about the quality of the book, the extend to which the topic is interesting to me or even how much I learned. To specify my subjective understanding of 'well-written', it's probably a mixture of:
- I get to know what the book is *like*, which contains some elements of what the book is *about*, but doesn't need to be a whole summary
- There are some original thoughts by the author, and regardless of whether I agree or not, I perceive them to be well thought-through/ original / ...
- I like the style and enjoy reading. Last years contest made me aware that, once I generally like the style, just how much this is about 'author manages to avoid stuff that I find annoying' ... and how I certainly would fall into all those traps if I wrote a review myself.
To those who doubt some of my own perceptions, I can't assure you that the book's topic wouldn't influence my enjoyment of reading *at all*. I can assure you that I found at least one review very well-written and entertaining, even if the topic was very far from my interests and that for one of my favorites, I thought the author's own elaborations were really good, even if I totally disagreed with them on most of their conclusions.
Now, those are mostly my last-years-thoughts. I'm wondering if I would approach things differently this time. Let's see.
Edit: of course I generally *do* care, what the topic is about or if I learned anything, but not for this concrete contest. Which, I assumed, is a contest on writing and therefore it should be about writing skills put in practice, not about my interests. I am aware one can look at this differently.
I don't have a rigorous scoring system I hold myself to, but there are a few things I want to see in a book review: Concise clarity about what the book is about and a steelmanned attempt to criticise what it's saying.
"steelmanned" is usually the part that reviews I read fail at and tends to be the one I think is most important. I am not very bright, so if I can think of several ways to strongly/charitably interpret what the author said and the reviewer did not, that review's not getting a 10. If it's otherwise good (which can include traits such as "well-structured", "engaging", and "thought-provoking"), it might get up to 8, though!
A related question, do we need to read the thing the whole way through? Or does the fact that we don't want to read more of it is itself a sign of low quality.
> Or does the fact that we don't want to read more of it is itself a sign of low quality.
Depends. How much did you read? And why do you not want to read on? As Neike said, it might be the topic. For me, there are also styles that I personally like less, but would still perceive to be of quality. Or do you find the first part too boring, because there is not enough original thought ... but that comes later? (Which maybe is a sign for having a less than optimal structure, but you would have still given it a different grade if you read on).
So in all these cases it might be better not to give a score. On the other hand, if you have read a relevant part and you are aware which 'flaws' keep you from reading on, and they can't really be repaired later, why not give it a score. As for the 'relevant part', if the text is significantly too long, that might be a flaw in itsself.
That would be my intuitive answer to your question. At the same time, there is something to what Neike says at the end: everybody is just using their own approach, and maybe there is also a specific quality resulting from exactly this.
Which doesn't mean we cannot exchange or argue or ask about the best approach, so here you go.
I think it can also be a signal that the original book doesn't have content of interest to you. Generally speaking, I recommend not forcing yourself to read something you're not enjoying. Whether you want to rate it at all is up to you; I recommend deciding this on a case-by-case basis. Options:
(1) Don't rate, e.g. because on reflection it just doesn't seem to be up your alley, but that's not the reviewers fault in this particular case, and you find it hard to judge their review based on what you've already read.
(2) Rate about as you would a review you read in full, e.g. because you skimmed enough of it and personally feel like you've got enough data to gauge this as a review of [X] rating. Differently worded, what you read gave you an opinion. Maybe the bits you didn't read would change your rating, but you don't have that data, and that's okay.
(3) Rate lowly, e.g. because you skimmed enough of it to know it's not the book's material that's turning you off the subject, you just honestly get the impression the review is lacklustre and not going to become engaging. Again, maybe the bits you didn't read would change your rating, but you don't have that data, and that's okay.
Short version: There's really no "should" here (if there were, Scott would have posted up some guidelines), please feel free to trust your own judgement!
I would disagree with (1). If you didn't finish because you weren't in the mood to read anything, that's one thing. But if you didn't find the topic interesting, that's the reviewer's fault; they were free to choose any topic they liked, and they chose an uncompelling one.
I rate the books based on the question of how much new I learned, and how much I changed my mind or my perspective due to the book review.
I adjust a little bit for how entertaining the review is written, but not very much.
So to get a very high score from me, the review implicitly needs to check the marks that you mentioned. If it's a book without interesting insights, then the review will not score high. Same if the review fails to present the content of the book in a clear way. The reviewer's own thoughts are not necessarily needed to get a high score. But there are a lot of very smart ACX readers out there, and many of the high-quality reviewers (like, finalists) did have something interesting to add.
I hate rubrics, and my rating system is something like:
<5 This is bad! (Some of: boring, unclear, why would you review this? Couldn't make it very far reading it)
5-6: Eh, it's kind of sort of alright, but I got bogged down and gave up or skimmed it, and didn't learn much.
6-8: Some of: interesting, well written, held my attention, I learned something new, or a topic I wanted to read about
9-10: I hope this makes it into the finals, so that I can discuss it with other people in the comments. Also, it's well written, learned something, interesting topic, etc.
Anybody have any interesting insights or interesting anecdotes related to the recent Isaac King whales/minnows manifold? Interesting thoughts? I want to steal them for a thing I'm doing.
Here's this now, for anyone who was interested: https://news.manifold.markets/p/isaac-kings-whales-vs-minnows-and
I'd been thinking that this was probably something a rich person was doing as an experiment. Either he would prove that the markets are buyable (incentivizing Manifold to improve them) and provide a case study for how to recognize that behavior, or he would prove that the markets were robust against buying, and would provide lots of mana to the people who "helped" out. And either way, Manifold would get a small cash injection.
But it turns out it was a normal guy who, what, started the market out of curiosity and mischievousness? And then succumbed to gambling addiction? And/or felt like the market was a referendum on him personally, and maybe other people felt so too? That's really sad, and I'm glad he was mostly bailed out.
That's basically my view, too. Not that they should do it every time but to all appearances here this wasn't Johnny McRich spending money he could afford - it was a guy who panicked and made some bad decisions.
An insight from a friend who got very deep in the Cardano "community" in the past: When a hobby becomes a major social outlet, that in itself because extremely valuable, so much so that you may be willing to throw large amounts of real money at it to maintain your ties. That was his interpretation of the thought process that led to Isaac spending tens of thousands of "real" USD buying "fake" Mana despite knowing that no reverse exchange was possible and the money would be gone forever.
Also probably some hardcore sunk cost fallacy. Isaac is a *prolific* Manafold user, so just couldn't stand to see his portfolio get annihilated. And tbh it is brutal to look at now https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing
Relatedly, is there a good summary somewhere of what this was even about?
Give me like a day.
Thanks!!!
https://news.manifold.markets/p/isaac-kings-whales-vs-minnows-and
Thanks! And the link works now, too!
I really wanted WvM to get N/A'd while it was live (and the meta-markets with it), so everyone who bet there could get their mana back and pretend that it had never existed.
There has got to be a more sensible way of putting out the book reviews than giant google docs with them all copy-pasted in. Hell, it would not be hard to create a link that opens a random review on a single page and asks for a rating at the end.
Your wish is my* command: https://random-review-75iwwpcceq-uc.a.run.app/
*Thanks to Taymon Beal, who actually made this.
Cobalt mining and in general mining for minerals that find applications in battery tech seems to be pretty bad for the miners and the environment. The issue is not politically charged, perhaps because doing without batteries/smartphones/electric cars is not feasible and we all prefer to turn a blind eye to this. Did EA look into the issue?
https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/the-origin-of-the-word-cobalt/
There's plenty of news coverage of it, but it doesn't really "stick" because
a)Most stories about trade-related exploitation that happen "out of sight" don't, and
b)The auto industry is probably going to move away from Lithium-Cobalt-Nickel batteries in the next couple years (including into Lithium Iron Phosphate).
Thanks. Can you link some information about b?
There are significant efforts to replace Co in vehicle batteries at least. Thank Gd it’s not politically charged, else nothing will ever be done.
I'm going to take your name, and the fact that you are commenting about batteries, as an indication that it's ok to ask you this:
When are the first commercially available, home scale Vanadium Flow batteries going to come on the market? And is the pre-production marketing from several companies (that they have 30 year, near unlimited lifespans, while costing ~the same as currently available similarly specced Li battery tech) likely to be true?
I am not as familiar with these as I am with Li-ion cells. AFAIK Vanadium flow cells are mostly used for energy storage, not transportation or portable devices.
The biggest obstacle to their wider adoption, from memory, was some really bad screw-up with licensing that wrecked the US company that pioneered the tech. It’s been a few years.
I admire whoever took on the impossible task of doing Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology
I talked about people in love with their AI chatbots last week on the show, this week we are going to follow a team of rag tag gig workers who tried to peek inside the black box algorithm that pays them, and discuss what constitutes fairness in pay among gig worker. Gig work episode out Tuesday. https://hiphination.org/season-6-episodes/
Did Scott enter the contest? Speculate with manibucks now https://manifold.markets/warty/did-scott-alexander-enter-his-own-b
And here are two markets on what place Scott will get assuming he did enter the contest:
https://manifold.markets/BenjaminCosman/if-scott-alexander-enters-the-2023
https://manifold.markets/BenjaminCosman/if-scott-alexander-enters-the-2023-0b6f649df541
I have new substack posts, "The License" and "The Ones Who Drive Away From Omelas."
https://alexanderturok.substack.com/p/the-license
https://alexanderturok.substack.com/p/the-ones-who-drive-away-from-omelas
"Why do liberals hate cars? This dates to before global warming was really a thing, so it can’t be that. It’s not a hatred of technology per se, subway trains are apparently fine. "
I think it is a subset of liberals, not all of them. My guess is that this subset does not like individual choice. I suspect that it overlaps a lot with the subset that hates "urban sprawl" - private homes where individuals have more privacy and freedom to do as they see fit than they do if crammed into an apartment complex.
This isn't an actual reply, it's a stored rant.
The thing people don't seem to notice is that by the measure of suffering children, Omelas is a great deal better than the real world. They've got a utopia for almost everyone.
We do not have a utopia. We do have children horribly mistreated by abusive parents, to some extent because we don't have or want the level of surveillance needed to prevent this from happening. There are also enslaved children, children in war zones, and children institutionally abused by governments.
We don't have anyplace to walk away to.
"The thing people don't seem to notice is that by the measure of suffering children, Omelas is a great deal better than the real world."
Very much agreed. Omelas is a better trade-off than any place that has ever existed. The ones who walk away from it strike me as turning up their noses in an unreasonable way.
To put it in FLWAB's terms, it looks to me like a reductio ad absurdum of Deontology.
Ha, that's interesting. I took it as a reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism! Or, at minimum, a critique of utilitarianism. I mean, the ending of the story seems to put those who walk away in a positive light:
"They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas"
"I mean, the ending of the story seems to put those who walk away in a positive light:" That is how I read it as well. And, for me, this put LeGuin in a negative light (in terms of her viewpoint - I don't mean to diminish respect for her as an artist). To me, walking away from Omelas looks like a kind of ethical snobbery.
We don't know how Omelas happened, nor how much Omelans know about history. Maybe they could do better-- Omelas without the suffering child. Maybe they would do worse, creating ordinary human messes.
That's reasonable. The whole setup in Omelas is, after all, artificial. LeGuin doesn't give any plausible reason why the suffering child exists, or what is the causal link to the rest of the city.
She says that the suffering child is because otherwise the reader wouldn't believe it. That seems pretty plausible to me.
"Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing."
Ok, that makes it even more ambiguous (in, after all, a fictional work) as to whether the child is "required" or not.
Are there residents of Omelas who, rather than walk away, suggest that a controlled test be done to see what actually happens if the child's misery is interrupted? But that would be a different story...
I've seen a theory that having a suffering child is just superstition, in particular, that they attribute their good weather to having a suffering child.
I've been resisting the temptation to refer to the inhabitants as Omelettes, but after all, you can't make an Omellette without breaking eggs.
"Omellette" - I like it!
"I've seen a theory that having a suffering child is just superstition, in particular, that they attribute their good weather to having a suffering child." That would certainly be horrible - and, one could argue, it is analogous to many religious practices, the intended utility of all the Aztec cardiectomies, for instance...
Personally, I always thought Omelas was about Deontology/Virtue Ethics vs Utilitarianism.
On a utilitarian level, Omelas is fantastic. Way less suffering kids than normal. From a deontological standpoint, you don't torture kids. No excuses. Torturing kids on purpose is bad and you don't do it, even if a perfect society results. For a Virtue Ethicist, our current society has more suffering but we don't intend for that suffering to occur. On a societal level nobody *chose* to torture children, or starve them, they're just things that happen on an individual level and when we find an individual who *did* choose to torture a kid then we punish them. To intentionally torture a child, in order that other people will benefit, is evil and will produce an evil nature in those who do it.
So I've always seen the ones who walk away from Omales as being the ones who aren't utilitarians.
Interested to hear what ACX think about my post on Japan's most famous song. It's one that developed virality pre internet due to its cultural resonance.
https://hiddenjapan.substack.com/p/where-is-japans-gangnam-style
If I had to guess what Japanese song was most famous in the English-speaking world in the pre-internet era, I'd have probably picked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukiyaki_(song) .
In the modern, post-internet-meme, post-widespread-popularity-of-anime era, I think there's a good case to be made that it's Cruel Angel's Thesis.
It's fun!! Thanks for putting that together!
find the lament-ful tune intriguing!
> "This was just a story about a cartoon fish, admittedly with a great hook (sorry)."
Also, thank you for this! :D (sadly, i did need the "sorry" to catch it!)
Thanks for the read! I'm glad you enjoyed it, was meant to be lighhearted!
Why can't the English teach their children how to speak? (Or, missed status signalling opportunities)
As someone who generally agrees with the idea that a lot of human behaviour is about status-seeking and status-signalling, I've been puzzled recently by all the easy status-increasing opportunities that people often seem to miss.
An obvious example is manners of speech. Many people around the world speak with low-class low-status accents, or use low-class slang, or make status-lowering errors. Why? It's not all that difficult to change your manner of speech, and while a cockney is unlikely to pass for a member of the aristocracy they can at least try to go "one notch" above their current accent to increase their opportunities in life. There's no shortage of examples to imitate.
Possible answers: 1: people care more about the approval of their immediate peers than society at large, and their immediate peers are all low-class too. 2: it's actually much harder than I think. 3: a higher-status accent actually doesn't help your social status as much as I think. 4: people are just dumb and leave easy social status on the table all the time.
I think there is such an idea as class identity. People are kinda attached to their identity.
* Most citizens of an economically weaker EU (or US) state probably would not want to emigrate to an economically stronger EU (or US) state.
* Most German soccer fans are not that inclined to switch to FB Bayern instead.
* If there is sex discrimination in some industry, that will motivate very few people to change their gender identity on job.
* If the skin whitening machine from Iron Sky was real, most US people of color would probably not want to use it, even if they believed that white people generally have advantages.
For class identity, things will look similar. Belonging to a lower class is more than just getting a smaller pay check. It ties in with all sorts of things (hobbies, world views) which give rise to identity. Identities are not just hats which you switch at will because the other one does give you a bonus to income.
I remember reading accounts of the dialogue in both movies based on the novel _True Grit_. AIUI the book exhibits the same speaking style. Namely, no one uses contractions; it's always "I would not" rather than "I wouldn't". This stemmed from a popular move at that time for people settling the frontier to make themselves sound more intelligent, and one of the ways was to avoid contractions.
If this is accurate, then one could infer times and places throughout history where the English could indeed instill their children with such habits. Indeed, there's every reason to believe children will naturally imitate what they see and hear. If all adults talk a certain way, then the kids will too.
The real question would then be why there's no cultural movement to sound more high-class. And one answer is that high class might not be as associated with high status these days.
> The real question would then be why there's no cultural movement to sound more high-class. And one answer is that high class might not be as associated with high status these days.
I'd clarify that this is context-dependent. So the theory would become, these days there are fewer contexts in which sounding high-class is associated with high status.
There’s a reason Keeping Up Appearances is a comedy.
On the other hand, you have to admit it worked out great for Hyacinth, she has a comfortable middle class lifestyle married to a polite middle class man, while Daisy and Rose live in slovenly poverty. And Violet, well, she has a Mercedes-Benz and room for a pony.
Surely Richard married her in spite of her lunacy, rather than because of it.
Without her social climbing she never would have risen to the point of being able to marry Richard. I'm assuming that she started out very low class (like Rose and Daisy) and by early adulthood had managed to propel herself up into passing for middle class to the point where a boy like Richard would be seen with her. (Richard is not snobby but everyone naturally tends to date within their own class, it's impossible to imagine Richard with Daisy or Rose.)
Unfortunately for Richard, Hyacinth was not satisfied with having propelled herself into the Richard class, she wanted to go further, and to drag Richard up with her.
(There's actually a recently-produced Keeping Up Appearances prequel which deals with the life of young Hyacinth, I haven't actually seen it and it's supposedly not very good so I'm making assumptions based on the original series.)
There's very subtle gradations in the class structure in "Keeping Up Appearances". Daisy definitely married down to Onslow, who is working-class slob (but bright, even if he makes no use of it). Rose is living with Daisy and their father, so Hyacinth managed to shove the caretaking off on them.
Violet married up (the 'room for a pony' sister). So we have *probably*, though it's never definitively stated, an original family of lower middle class sisters. One married into upper middle-class/possibly lower upper class (Violet); one married down (Daisy); one is stuck in the amorphous ground between her original class and where she now finds herself (Rose); and Hyacinth moved one step up the ladder to the middle-middle class.
That's what Richard and their neighbourhood are - solidly middle-middle class. The joke is Hyacinth trying to elbow her way up another rung of the ladder when she hasn't the resources to do so, and makes her husband's life mildly miserable catering to her attempts. It's also why Hyacinth is constantly persuading her sister to stay in the unhappy marriage; if Violet divorces, she moves back down (probably) and Hyacinth loses that all-important link to the higher class she is thirsting after.
Hyacinth *is* a social climber, but she's peaked at the level she can attain, yet she remains ignorant of that and is constantly trying to pass for, or get into, the level above that. Which is why her sisters Daisy and Rose and her brother-in-law Onslow sabotaging all her attempts is funny; she blames them when it's really that she can't move any higher due to her own lack of ability. She's trying to emulate Violet who managed to move *two* rungs up, due to her marriage, but she can't do it by her own efforts. Richard isn't a member of that class, unlike her brother-in-law Bruce, and he's perfectly happy where he is, so he can't catapult her up as Violet was raised up.
You see it in all her attempts: the "refained" accent, the "learned it out of a book" etiquette, the old-fashioned and out-dated behaviours she copies. It's John Betjeman's cruelly funny poem all over again:
How To Get On In Society by John Betjeman
Phone for the fish knives, Norman
As cook is a little unnerved;
You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes
And I must have things daintily served.
Are the requisites all in the toilet?
The frills round the cutlets can wait
Till the girl has replenished the cruets
And switched on the logs in the grate.
It's ever so close in the lounge dear,
But the vestibule's comfy for tea
And Howard is riding on horseback
So do come and take some with me
Now here is a fork for your pastries
And do use the couch for your feet;
I know that I wanted to ask you -
Is trifle sufficient for sweet?
Milk and then just as it comes dear?
I'm afraid the preserve's full of stones;
Beg pardon, I'm soiling the doileys
With afternoon tea-cakes and scones.
Yes to 1. Additionally, many people change the way they speak all the time around different groups of people. Many black Americans report doing this consciously and I have observed it with acquaintances and coworkers.
But also, there is no objective "correct" way to speak. As long as the people you talk to understand you and you understand them, then you are speaking correctly. So there is no destination to move to if you want to speak "correctly". You have to define it by who you talk to.
My father had a noticeably different accent and style and vocabulary between talking in "polite company" (office, church) and talking to family on the farm. For the former, you'd think you were talking to an academic giving a TV interview. For the latter, he sounded like Hank Hill.
It's kinda fun to emulate different speech modes, if you ask me. Apropo of Yug Gnirob's thread above: I think trying to do that might make one a better dialogue writer as well.
It may be more work than you think to get the whole thing of vocabulary, idiom, and accent right. It's not like making one change.
This, of course, is aside from issues about not wanting to imitate people who make your life harder.
I don't think I have the whole story. I speak with the Delaware/Philadelphia a-- I say "warter" when a lot of people say water. I think warter sounds wetter and more like water the liquid.
I believe it's sort of a middle-class accent. No one compliments me on my accent, but I don't think it makes my life significantly worse, either. I heard about someone whose parents made a big deal of not using the Delaware a. I don't know why it was important to them.
Not a fully-baked thought, and possibly fairly USA-centric (and/or generational?)...but I suspect the prevalence of this suboptimal striving correlates nicely with negative attitudes towards the possibility of upwards mobility. Abandoning all hope of ending up on economic par with one's parents, nevermind succeeding them...well, why would one even bother trying, including the little ways like diction? Sometimes there's a veneer of "no, arbitrary class is dumb actually, people should just Be Themselves, man" (something something colonial imperialism blah equity blah disproportionate impact blah gentrification). Still comes across as mostly sour grapes though. The social version of reveling in one's ignorance, for lack of being able to make a winning move. "You can't be an elitist without first being elite"
(Semi-relatedly, it's still stuck in my head that you once judged me as "middle class", and all the impostor feelings that privately brought up on my end...a thread last year with you, me, and former commenter Unsigned Integer debating the relative merits of Kanye West vs. Beethoven. Good taste, I think, is strictly a matter of #4.)
My girlfriend consciously did this 40 years ago and is a passable member of the upper middle class / aristocracy now, in the way she speaks. She saw that having a lower middle class Welsh air would keep certain doors closed. The process began with reading the classics and emulating certain intellectuals from radio & TV.
It's actually much harder. See this 2 minutes clip about class markers from Season 4 episode 9 of the Wire -- context is that a set of at-risk adolescents are put in a program to help them learn to be more upwardly mobile and cooperative: https://youtu.be/2_S7uazgjV8
That's just one thing - differences between a McDonalds and a good restaurant. Now, imagine that level of visceral discomfort with every aspect of your social engagement. And, keep in mind, that class, in America, is comparatively 'loose' in rigidity compared to the UK.
So, it's possible to transfer a level or two (higher or lower) -- but few can travel more than a level or two!
This is something both everyone (or nearly everybody) does and few people do at the same time.
Everybody does: look up example CVs and get people to proofread CVs to make sure they're writing in Corporate Management Speak. Ask friends and family about how to dress and behave during job interviews, court hearings, meetings with the bank about loans.
Nearly no one: adopt entire persona to hide humble beginnings (although some immigrants use easy-for-white-people names like James, Raymond, instead of their native Chin Sun or Duc Vuong)
The latter takes effort and you will sound dumb and fake while you're learning. And is contingent on knowing the right people - if you're pretending to be posh but you're working as a restaurant dish hand, there is no value in doing this because no one that posh is gonna be in the kitchen. You're better off adopting the mannerisms of the rest of the kitchen to get camaderie because your odds of moving up is effectively zero anyway.
People do try to blend in - e.g poor kids on scholarship to a prestigious university often end up adopting class markers of their peers. There's much more value in doing that if you're already in an environment interacting with people of the class you aspire to be in.
(Different story in Asia: everyone is training to pass for the same middle/upper middle Anglophone examiners for IELTs, immigration offices, and job interviews, and are aware that sounding excessively Chinaman may prejudice the visa officer, so they try to lose the accent and speak perfectly)
My impression is that it is fairly common for people to adopt higher-status ways of speaking. My own father, who grew up speaking a very country dialect, can also speak in a more urbane one, and switches back when he goes to visit the country relatives. I've also met several Americans who grew up speaking southern accents but adopted more northern ways of speaking when they moved to west-coast cities for work.
Not an answer, just an anecdote: I know at least one person who did consciously, intentionally adopt a higher-status accent for status-seeking purposes (she had a strong regional urban accent, and taught herself a more neutral American English accent in order to blend in academia).
For whatever it's worth, she's a linguistics professor/phonetician, which seems like it should both help teach the skills required to do this (pointing toward reason 2), and make it more obvious that this is even something you can try to do (pointing toward reason 4).
I've heard Arnold Schwarzaneggar was dubbed out of the German Terminator releases because Austrian is a low-class accent there, so the entire idea of "a low-class accent" is region-locked to begin with. India has a billion people in it; does Indian English count as low-status? How about Japanese English?
Accent is unconscious; it's how you sound because it's how you hear words. It's really hard to consciously adopt someone else's accent. Go ahead and try to sound like a native Greek speaker for a week, and see how close you can get.
You're essentially declaring that you're ashamed of your neighborhood and the people in it. Do you think hating your neighbors is high status, or low?
Anyone who holds an accent against you is going to find out where you came from and hold it against you no matter what. There's no actual benefit to trying to appeal to them, they're playing to draw blood. Treat them like the enemies they are.
It's just not true that people can't pass for higher (or lower) status. Most people aren't paying close attention.
The problem isn't that Schwarzenegger sounds Austrian; it's that he sounds like a hick.
"Accent is unconscious; it's how you sound because it's how you hear words. It's really hard to consciously adopt someone else's accent."
A lot of black people in America, among many others, would disagree with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching
That's not so much switching accents as switching dialects. They still have a noticeable accent when speaking standard English.
I was raised to think high class people are false, cowardly, and treacherous and that only people who worked with their hands could be trusted. It’s obviously more complex than that but even when I make tongue in cheek comments about being from the “correct” or “true” culture part of my heart thinks it’s true. All of which is to say, I think most groups find a way to internally make themselves the true high class. And I kind of like that.
Appropriate post for May Day!
Social class is nowhere near as stable and clearly defined as it used to be. Even if someone is ignoring a person's deeper qualities, there are a lot of things besides social class markers they go into perceiving their status: wealth, fame, grace and confidence, membership in cultural group or occupation that is considered cool. Speaking a "low status dialect" can earn you as many credits as debits. Think of Springsteen, or rap.
Also, speaking the dialect you grew up in feels better. You feel like you're being frank and friendly, being yourself. I grew up in the South and still slide comfortably into saying "y'all" and pronouncing "pen" as "pin," and saying "watcha gonna do now?"
Regarding 3, it depends on the accent and your current position. Using too high an accent can also be bad. And there's a feedback into 1, where people around you might see what you're doing, and resent it, and ... present those arguments forcefully. It's "solidarity of the crab bucket".
But I think a lot of people do this, whether they know or not. It can be unconscious mimicry, where people ape the mannerisms of the people they aspire to be like. (I'm sure we can all think of situations where this can backfire, of course.) But if there's no one in your life who's more educated and more successful, where will you get your examples from, and why would you even bother?
I think a useful lens on this is why we don't try to seem higher-class than we are, or teach our children to seem higher-class than us.
I can think of things I would do if I wanted to do this - send them to ritzy private schools, make sure they know things about wine and art and table settings and so on. Figure out what clothing labels are fashionable, and dress in those. Maybe get a lake house at whatever lake rich people have lake houses at and invite them over and do whatever kind of networking rich lake-house-having people do.
The main reasons I don't do this are:
1. It would be hard
2. It would be expensive
3. There would be a long period where I sound like a poser, ie it's obvious that I'm *trying* to do high-class things, but I'm mostly failing.
4. Some sort of instinctive cringe - I don't *want* to name my child Thaddeus Prescott, even if that's what would help him fit in with all the other rich children. I don't want to talk with some kind of extremely posh accent, it would feel fake and dumb.
5. The payoff where I happen to hang out with some rich person and they're impressed by my class and offer me some extremely good opportunity seems too remote and speculative.
6. Nobody I know does it and it's hard to do things nobody you know does, and which everyone you know would roll their eyes at.
Maybe this is why people who are poorer than we are don't try this either.
From a class struggle frame of mind (solidarity between members of the class, collective action to lower the income gap between classes, etc), trying to move to a higher class is defection. Even if people don't have a Marxist framework of mind, I still don't think that they will think "that kid did all the posh things and eventually became posh, good for them", but rather "who would have thought that little Johnny would become a bastard manager". (The approved way to get out of poverty is probably winning the lottery or something.)
I think it really depends on whether one models classes as a continuum or more classically as discrete things. If classes are discrete, there is a chance to get stuck between classes, where you don't get the job in the bank because you are wearing the wrong types of shoes, but then get made fun of by your colleagues in the steel mill for your silly accent.
If classes are more continuous, so that between the alcoholic homeless under the bridge and Charles, you can find someone every step of the way, then there is more sense in improving ones high class markers to swim up a bit in the hierarchy.
Per Google, Eton is 55k$ per year. Any family who could afford that is already at least in the upper middle class. So the options are not "kid goes to Eton" or "kid becomes construction worker", but more "kid goes to regular school, becomes a doctor or engineer" or "kid goes to Eton, becomes Boris Johnson". Personally, if I were is the situation to afford Eton, I would not send any kid of mine there.
Of course, mine is probably a very middle-class perspective: A lower class member who does not send their kid to university even though they could afford it or get a stipend is Depriving Their Kid Of An Education (never mind the fact that the point of going there is in part getting some Paper), while anyone who sends their kid to Eton is Defecting Against Meritocracy.
Another take on this, on a more general theoretical level: status is relative, which means it's mostly a zero-sum game. Whatever status I win, others lose in aggregate. This means that society as a whole has as much of an incentive to push me down, as I have an incentive to try to climb up, so at equilibrium, Joe Random just stays roughly where they are. Kind of like a status-wind blowing down on everyone.
How does this work in practice? As far as I know society is not made of strictly defined classes with tight borders - usually there will be a people a bit more and a bit less classy than me around. If I try to "move up", by imitating those slightly above me, their acceptance is far from a given; they are incentivized to give me only a highly conditional acceptance (assuming I'm lucky or skillful enough not to get outright rejection). So from the start I know that there are hurdles to overcome.
Those slightly below me, however, have nothing to lose, and possibly a tiny shred to win (because of zero-sumness) by taking me in. So they will offer camaraderie and belonging - a basic human need if there is one -, for free! And people are usually optimistic in that way, when hanging out with this crowd, they won't think that they are being "dragged down", losing skills or opportunities to work in the other direction.
(No actual judgment implied in any of this - if you find people you're cool to hang out with, whatever their style, good for you as far as I'm concerned.)
Could this be part of the reason why some lower-status social markers tend to rise up? You rarely hear of working class people saving up to go to the opera, but you certainly do see a lot of people driving their EVs to their information-economy jobs while listening to songs about drugs, gangs and bitches...
This also varies quite a lot depending on one's age. Teenagers are famously attracted to lower class stuff - just ask anyone with children or nephews how worried they got about who their kids were hanging out with, and what kind of influences they were getting.
If you need to hang with the San Francisco elites, like Bank of America's ruling family, you'd definitely want a cabin on Lake Tahoe. Or you would have in the 1970s.
The Corleones has a nice place there, didn’t they? ;-)
Poor Fredo.
So you are seeing it from an interesting point in the spectrum, because you are already well past the expected minimums. You are a college-educated verbal genius postgraduate famous person people like to talk to. The US doesn't reward *more* for levels higher than that - it might reward *differently*.
The bigger difference happens at a lower level. I'll try to give a few examples:
1. RC shows up for a job as an insurance adjuster, which is like 42 grand a year, which at the time is sort of a theoretically high level of money for him. He asks a question that's fairly normal for him at his current level of income: What do people normally get fired for around here?
For RC, this is trying to figure out what the weird, crazy-boss bullshit is that you can't do there, that gets you surprise-fired and makes it so you can't pay your rent. In his experience that's one of the first questions - it's how you say "What minimum KPI expectations are there?" in poor person.
Later he finds out he almost got fired because it's such a bizarre question at anything approaching a real job that they thought I was trying to figure out how to get fired so I could collect unemployment, or something.
2. RC is talking to a C-level at a startup who is sort of making pokes at getting RC to quit his current job and work there. RC explains that he's trying to be respectful of the person's time, but he already makes X, and that's pretty high for a writer as far as he knows.
The C-level explains, listen, totally - we can beat that by X% if this works out. With better accessory shit, too. But RC, you have to understand - don't talk about money with anybody at this level besides me (I get it, I grew up poor) until the 2nd or 3rd interview. They won't get it, will assume you are some unmotivated mercenary loser and won't talk to you after that.
There's a lot of little cultural things you accumulate like that. They let you communicate in a way that signals you are "worthy" of better and better jobs in a way skills don't, until you get to a certain level where everybody is wearing whatever-brand-is-right-right-now columbia fleeces and nobody cares anymore.
I think the misalignment on OP is that he's talking about, like, accents, exact verbage, picking up an oxford, ect. and that's not really all that valuable. But knowing the difference between a KPI and an OKR? Talking in startup? Stuff like that? Invaluable. There's so much cultural BS that goes into getting those "you deserve this job, you are from my caste and know what exact bullshit lingo is popular here out of the 10,000 possible trendy variations" that you can't really ignore it in a lot of spheres, unless you come with it pre-installed.
“Le Parfum de Thérèse,” Belbalm said. “Edmond Roudnitska. He was one of the great noses of the twentieth century and he designed this fragrance for his wife. Only she was allowed to wear it. Romantic, no?”
“Then—”
“How do I come to wear it? Well, they both died and there was money to be made, so Frédéric Malle put it on the market for us peasants to buy.”
Peasant was a word poor people didn’t use. Just like classy was a word that classy people didn’t use. But Belbalm smiled in a way that included Alex, so Alex smiled back in a way she hoped was just as knowing.
Colin appeared, balancing a tray laden with a tea set the color of red clay, and placed it on the edge of the desk. “Anything else?” he asked hopefully.
Belbalm shooed him away. “Go do important things.” She poured out the tea and offered a cup to Alex. “Help yourself to cream and sugar if you like. Or there’s fresh mint.” She rose and broke a small sprig from the herbs on the sill.
“Mint please,” Alex said, taking the sprig and echoing Belbalm’s movements: crushing the leaves, dropping them into her own cup.
Belbalm sat back, took a sip. Alex did the same, then hid a flinch when it burned her tongue...
<snip>
...“Alex, what do you want from Yale?”
Money. Alex knew Marguerite Belbalm would find such an answer hopelessly crude... Maybe all rich people asked the wrong questions. For people like Alex, it would never be what do you want. It was always just how much can you get? Enough to survive? Enough to help her take care of her mother when shit fell apart the way it always, always did?
<snip>
“I will not accuse you of false humility. I trust you to know your own talents.” Belbalm took another sip of her tea. “The world is quite hard on artists who are good but not truly great. So. You wish what? Stability? A steady job?”
“Yes,” Alex said, and despite her best intentions the word emerged with a petulant edge.
“You mistake me, Alexandra*. There is no crime in wanting these things. Only people who have never lived without comfort deride it as bourgeois.” She winked. “The purest Marxists are always men. Calamity comes too easily to women. Our lives can come apart in a single gesture, a rogue wave. And money? Money is the rock we cling to when the current would seize us.”
“Yes,” said Alex, leaning forward. This was what Alex’s mother had never managed to grasp. Mira loved art and truth and freedom. She didn’t want to be a part of the machine. But the machine didn’t care. The machine went on grinding and catching her up in its gears.
Belbalm set her cup in its saucer. “So once you have money, once you can stop clinging to the rock and can climb atop it, what will you build there? When you stand upon the rock, what will you preach?”
Alex felt all of the interest go out of her. Was she really supposed to have something to say, some wisdom to impart? Stay in school? Don’t do drugs? [and then the series of "possible wisdom to impart" thoughts gets progressively darker.]
--"Ninth House," by Leigh Bardugo
After someone had said "people moving between cultures are most likely to do this" AND RC mentioned the "not talking about money thing," I just had to post this dialogue between the ficticious Women's Studies prof Marguerite Belbalm and fictitious came-from-lower-classes-and-is-fortunately-not-on-drugs-NOW student Alex (her name is actually "Galaxy"!) Stern.
A keen observation, and illustrative of the general principle that an ounce of experience is worth a ton of speculation.
There's an oddly old fashioned attitude to status some people have on this blog, like status is having an RP accent and having gone to Eton and having a title (or whatever the American approximation to that is). That's one kind of status, but it's not the only one and not particularly relevant to many people.
Lots of people try to change their accents, so the premise in the original post is not exactly correct. But it's not that clear which accents are the best nowadays. Would George W Bush have benefited from talking in a different way (I mean, he actually came from a patrician family)? I have noticed some English actors talk something like estuary English on talk shows and so forth (and these are people who know how to talk like aristocrats when they act, eg. Keira Knightley).
I read a thing about British politicians once, where some voice expert explained that Theresa May doesn't actually talk RP, but that one can hear she is middle class, and that Margaret Thatcher basically ruined her voice trying to adopt a high class accent (apparently she got bad couching).
"Would George W Bush have benefited from talking in a different way"
Yes, obviously, that's why he changed it to how he sounds now (or sounded as president, at any rate) from his original turbo-preppy New England Yalie sociolect. When in Texas, do as the Texans do.
Yeah, right, so it isn’t self evident which accents are high status.
What I heard about Margaret Thatcher is that she was advised to lower the pitch of her voice to sound more authoritative; that her normal speaking voice was open to being attacked as 'shrill' and 'nagging' the way female politicians are often attacked.
She may not have had a professional voice coach, I have no idea there.
Yes, I think you’re right.
While I appreciate this is a problem of Knightian Uncertainty, I'm curious to hear how comprehensive people in this community think our understanding of reality is.
A prompt relating to this idea:
if all animals were deaf, would we be likely to come up with the idea of and understand the existence of sound?
or
before abiogenesis occurred, could a theoretical observer understand the concept of life?
Going back to the original question: do you suspect there are all sorts of senses/forces/modalities/dimensions etc. we can't observe and lack the faculties/concepts to even contemplate?
To the second question, if Michael Thompson is right, then the concept of life only makes sense from the standpoint of the kind of creature who can compare natural phenomena to the goal-oriented phenomena of its own perception. If we weren't drawing an analogy between other life forms and ourselves, there would be no reason not to view life as a wet loose-latticed crystal.
> if all animals were deaf, would we be likely to come up with the idea of and understand the existence of sound?
I don't think one can give a good account of these kinds of questions without going into the human side of it, ie. the fact that we don't just want to understand things in the abstract, but we automatically attach a sense of salience or valence to them, which makes them seem important or not.
If we didn't have hearing *with its deep connection to our emotional centers*, but we had enough brains, senses and instruments to develop some kind of physics, I'm sure "vibratory phenomena" would be a rather boring chapter of undergraduate physics textbooks... and outside of specialists it would have the same appeal as ex. thermodynamics, i.e basically none.
If I were to indulge myself suspecting the existence of things of which there is no evidence whatsoever, I'd prefer to suspect the existence of Valinor or the immortal soul.
If you read Nick Bostrom you'll find a lot of grist for this mill.
"do you suspect there are all sorts of senses/forces/modalities/dimensions etc. we can't observe and lack the faculties/concepts to even contemplate?"
At least for forces (and energies) we can't observe, in addition to Maybe later's examples of gravitational waves and neutrinos, we could add dark matter and dark energy.
In terms of lacking the concepts to contemplate: There have certainly been plenty of historical examples of needing to invent new concepts that didn't exist before. I expect this process to continue.
Animals are deaf to both gravitational waves and neutrinos. We have instruments to detect both.
For the first one, I think yes. Once you start playing around with harmonic motion, springs, explosives, and vehicles approaching the speed of sound, eventually you'll start recognizing the concept of vibration waves in matter.
The second one is a bit trickier, partly because it's hard to know what the theoretical observer would be like in the absence of live, but also just because "life" isn't super neatly defined. As it is there's some room for debate about whether eg. viruses are alive. But I think they'd be able to get at least as far as self-replicating machines.
Assuming we can still feel low-frequency vibrations as actual motion (e.g. during earthquakes), I think hypothetical deaf civilization would understand sound to roughly the extent that actual civilization understands ultraviolet light.
Even without the "you can still sense other parts of the same spectrum" trick, we've discovered forces and emissions that we don't have a "sense" for by observing their indirect effects--for example magnets, electricity, neutrinos.
Some of those discoveries are fairly recent in historical terms, though, so I wouldn't necessarily predict that we have made ALL such possible discoveries as of today.
Humans can't hear below 20 Hertz, and while animals hear waves we don't, we have creates instruments that can take in much information our senses cannot.
I posted this to last week's open thread but was a little late to the party, so pasting here again to see if I can get a little more feedback:
Interested in what ACX readers think about the stigmas surrounding serious mental illnesses such as bipolar and schizophrenia. I started writing my own blog about my experience living with schizoaffective disorder in part because I do want to reduce stigma, but I want to do so in a way that is rational and doesn't brush aside or ignore the dangers and seriousness of untreated mental illness. A lot of advocacy around this issue pushes for the rights of the seriously mentally ill to not take medication, for example, which is more than arguably counterproductive from a harm-reduction point of view. Those who refuse medication will often end up on the streets where they hurt themselves or someone else. The lack of mental institutions to house and care for such individuals is another issue.
What do readers think a rational kind of mental health advocacy would look like? Would it include calls for a reintroduction of institutionalization and forced treatment? Also, do you think that a reduction in mental health stigma would be possible through a kind of "coming out" movement among the successfully treated, similar to the one that fueled the increased acceptance of gays in the 2010s when so many gays and lesbians were disclosing their orientations to their families and the world? Are there forms of mental health stigma that are justified and actually good for society?
Thanks for any thoughts on this! (and shameless plug: feel free to check out my Substack and share any thoughts you have on my writings there :))
I think what is important is to start the conversation by acknowledging that some characteristics/behaviors are on average bad. For example, obesity is generally bad for the individual and also as an externality to others (sharing a row in an airplane). Fat shaming is not nice, but at the other end of the spectrum saying that obesity is not a problem is silly.
If you write about what is difficult about being schizoaffective, but also about why in the right context you can live a happy life without negatively impacting others, that's an interesting story. I actually haven't read any first person accounts from someone that is introspecting from a schizoaffective POV.
My current position regarded mentally ill people who are also homeless, is that they should be institutionalized. I don't buy the American freedom viewpoint on this. I believe they could be happier and the rest of us safer.
Yeah I feel like people often get cause and effect backwards on this. The homeless guy shouting obscenities at passersby doesn't face stigma because he's schizophrenic, he faces stigma because he lives in his own waste and shouts obscenities at people. I don't think most people care that much whether he does it because he's mentally ill or just because he's an asshole.
In other words mental illness faces stigma to the extent that it's unpleasant and/or dangerous for other people to be around. Anti-social behavior and mental illness are correlated, sure, but I think most people care about the latter only to the extent it makes the former more likely.
I once read a fairly extended treatment of a person's own experience with their schizophrenia. Check out the blog "Still Drinking", and the posts sequence "The Time I Went Crazy"
I responded to your earlier post, and answered "NO" to your question about institutionalization and forced treatment -- suggested something on the model of 18th and 19th century "moral treatment" would be better. But here's another snippet, about stigma: Research shows that the relatives of bipolar people who are not themselves bipolar are unusually creative. They have higher ideational fluency, and are more inventive in their approaches to work and hobbies. My impression of people who are full on bipolar is that they often have beautiful minds. Their thinking is exceptionally creative and lively. But some mental function that keeps things in order is missing, and so they sort of spin out of control, and their brilliance and originality are obscured by their weirdness and social transgressions. Can locate the article about creativity in the relatives of bipolar people if it would be useful to you.
Later thought: The best depiction of a manic person I have ever seen in a movie is lawyer Arthur Eden in *Michael Clayton*. And he had the beautiful mind, and also the spinning-out-of-control thing.
That would be interesting! I have two brothers with bipolar, I'm of course the "schizo," and our youngest brother (there are 4 of us total) is, so far, totally "normal," though he does have some anxiety. I will look into "moral treatment" as well. The idea of pairing mentally ill individuals with those who are highly caring and otherwise un-utilized by society is a compelling one. Good stuff to think about, thanks
The article about creativity in relatives of bipolar people is "Creativity in Manic-Depressives, Cyclothymes, Their Normal Relatives, and Control Subjects." It's in Journal of Abnormal Psychology,
1988, Vol. 97. No. 3, 281-288
I'm running a "Christianity Discussion Book Club" on my Substack! (Feel free to come for just 1 book!)
Books:
1. "On the Incarnation of the Word."--Athanasius (3 weeks, then a 1 week break)
2. "The Freedom of Self Forgetfulness: The Path to True Christian Joy"--Tim Keller (1 week, 1 week break)
3. "The Four Loves"--CS Lewis (5 weeks, 1 week break)
4. "Bold Love"-- Dan B Allender, Tremper Longman (6 weeks)
Details are on my Substack, and first post / discussion thread on Athanasius will be 1 week from today!
Bugmaster might be interested in the first, we're having a back-and-forth about avatars and incarnation and the like.
Technically I would be, but keep in mind that I'm a godless atheist. I don't know if derailing the discussion with talk of avatars and demiurges and karma and simulation aliens and parallel realities and the optimum super-shotgun loadouts on Phobos, etc., would be a welcome move on that substack :-/
on Phobos the moon?!
(I like people thinking up things that I would never think of, and want to know what... how... is it an analogy? ..how did this got into such a discussion?!) :D
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(1993_video_game)#Plot
Ha-interesting! Also, huh.. I bet "Out of the Silent Planet / Doom" Crossover Fanfic may be some as-yet-uncharted territory! Uncontested, I might say.
"(how did this got into such a discussion?!)"
We sorta segued into the simulation argument and then video game characters as analogous to deity avatars and I mean, of course if you're going to play the main character in the game, you are going to load up on moar dakka ain't ya? Hence miraculous powers or abilities for a Christ-clone if God ensouls it or partitions off a part of His spirit into it 😁
Yes, but if you're looking for moar dakka...
"In the first age, in the first battle, when the shadows first lengthened, one stood. Burned by the embers of Armageddon, his soul blistered by the fires of Hell and tainted beyond ascension, he chose the path of perpetual torment. In his ravenous hatred he found no peace; and with boiling blood he scoured the Umbral Plains seeking vengeance against the dark lords who had wronged him."
What, you can't be enticed into "This is why I think Athanasius was full of it"? 😁
More seriously, that book would give you the standard Christian position on the Incarnation better than I can.
*sigh* you're a tough bargainer, Deiseach ! Sold.
LOL, I am delighted and grinning from ear-to-ear.
And I am delighted for both of you, because Bugmaster is a great conversation partner!
That’s quite a spectrum haha
Ohhhh! Right! More like four consecutive "Christianity Discussion Book Clubs"! I want it to be just normative for people to hop out for a book they don't want to read, and hop in for one they like. (should find some way to say that in the announcement.)
I picked #1 and #3 because they are books some friends always talk about reading. (and i've been itching to read #1 for a long time.)
And then #2 and #4 seeming greatly like they speak felt needs for living in this old world. (internal struggles with narcissism being especially relevant to #2, and loving ones enemies being especially relevant to #4.)
Anyone from Santa Barbara?
Sort of
sup
Once or twice a year is okay. Maybe use that opportunity to not only post a link to your blog (it is displayed next to your name whenever you post a comment anyway), but also a short description, and maybe a selection of top 3 articles. I think people are more likely to click on a specific article than just a blog in general.
There are plenty of people who do that, some even take excerpts from their posts and post it here. As long as it doesn't repeat for, I don't know, 4 or 5 times in sequence, I think it's okay (but with a total maximum limit of, say, 12 times.)
I believe the general policy is once as fine as long as it is vaguely on topic, and maybe one or two more times if it is directly extremely on topic. But no starting threads each open thread trying to drive traffic, that is what the classifieds are for.
Interesting! Reminds me of Balinese gamelan music.
Very interesting composition. I find it mesmerizing. It would be interesting to start with a less dissonant tuning system, and slowly build up to the repeated 5th tuning system. Thanks for posting that piece.
There are some hauntingly beautiful moments in that.
The difference is that Scott is a far better (although not perfect) arbiter of what's helpful, what's honest, and what's harmless than what the diversity retards at corporate nests can ever hope to dream to hope to dream to hope of being.
A big problem with alignment is that your AI's alignment is upper-bounded by how aligned the people who own it are. An AI owned by a killer will be a killer (or it will be shutdown), an AI owned by a racist is racist, an AI owned by diversity retards who claim to hate racism and sexism while condoning it as long as it's against certain groups will be a diversity retard that..., etc.
Necessary/true/kind is already somewhat of a conflict.
Helpful/honest/harmless is directly a conflict. Particularly the harmless part. Many many things which are true or helpful are not "harmless".
Especially by the definitions en vogue these days, but really under any definition.
Picking any two was a pretty good wrinkle. Whether it would safely apply to AI alignment, I can't say.
As often as not, "honest" and "kind" are not the same thing or compatible!
Being always kind, even when it isn't merited, may be doing someone a disservice