I'm a first-year osteopathic medical student, which means that I learn all of the normal stuff that an MD learns (we take the same board licensing exam), and then they add on a bunch of physical therapy, chiropractic techniques, and woo-woo fantasy. I chose this over the traditional allopathic schools I got into mostly because I have a strong contrarian and anti-authoritarian streak, plus geographical preference.
I'm wondering if Scott has written at all specifically about osteopathic medicine, or if you're reading this @Scott, if you have any plans to do so. I think it's neat when we learn obviously-effective PT techniques to help with aches and pains; I am skeptical but optimistic about the lymphatic treatments we give to improve immune function; and I once had a lecturer tell me he could improve a patient's insulin sensitivity with the power of massage, which I am THOROUGHLY skeptical about. These same physicians often cite 30-person studies from the 1980s, which is... worrisome. I'd love a SSC-style meta-analysis, but I would also appreciate any friendly ACX readers pointing me in the direction of a good meta-analysis!
I've been very curious about Scott's opinions on Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degrees too, especially given he went to medical school overseas at a point where "DO or overseas MD" was a common question for students who didn't match US MD (nowadays it's much more skewed DO). I'd enthusiastically read a post about it, both regarding osteopathic medicine itself and the history of the DO degree.
I dont have a specific meta analysis to recommend but I would check out PainScience and Paul Ingraham. He's a rationalist Canadian massage therapist who was essentially harrassed out of the profession for being skeptical. He writes about and reviews a lot of manual therapy science. I don't know the name of this article off thetop of my head but i believe he reviewed a new study recently about manual lymph treatments, one of the things used in hospirals and usually considered legitimate, that had much less promising results.
For any later-readers, I found the following articles to be generally well-written and particularly germane to the Osteopathic Manipulation curriculum I'm currently immersed in, with relevant analogous DO-specific terminology noted:
I just got my monthly credit card statement from Citibank, and it says that my balance is $0.00, and that the minimal payment of $0.00 is due on the due date.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure this is funny. If their software has gone nuts and actually sent me the bill for $0.00, which had never happened before, I wouldn't put it past it to report my overdue payment to credit agencies, affecting my credit history.
Ideas? I could waste a stamp and a check to make sure they receive my $0.00 payment, but that seems silly. Does anyone know for a fact that my credit history would not be affected by missing a $0.00 payment?
Agreed that it's probably a non-issue. But if someone is worried about their credit card company sending them bills with nonsense balance-due numbers, I'm not sure "arrange for your bank account to always feed the credit-card company whatever they say" is going to eliminate that worry.
I haven't used Citibank, but back when my credit card company only required payments every other month, they'd send the $0 minimum statements, I'd do nothing and nothing would happen. Pretty sure that's just a stock form they've got with plug-in numbers.
Or are you saying your balance is not actually $0 and you know you owe a payment? In which case pay the payment.
Thank you for the info. The balance ought to be $0, as I haven't used that card since last year. I wish I could generalize from your experience, but unfortunately I don't think I can derive what Citibank might do based on what your credit card company did some years ago. Many things have changed not for the better since then.
Nah, thank you, though. Part of my problem is that I make money looking at code. Makes me wonder in this case if the fact that it failed in one place doesn't mean that it fails in the other.
However I just had the thought that most likely this would not be the first failure of this kind on the part of a credit card company, and that credit report companies most likely had to learn to ignore this before. Maybe I'll just ignore this, indeed.
Just wondering, from the discussion about criminal violence here, how many readers have been in prison or have first-hand knowledge of this world, Or do you all just read newspapers/substack?
I was under arrest for about an hour once. Canadian customs authorities were holding me on suspicion of bringing pot across the border. After the vehicle and I were thoroughly searched I was back on my way to Yellowknife.
I mean geez, just because I had shoulders length hair and there were flowers on the side of my van and my canoe had an American flag design they pick me to search? What’s up with that, man?
So...pretty sure this is bait but on the off chance it's sincere, yeah, I have, what were you expecting in the conversation?
I mean, I'm scanning where you've posted in this thread and there's a...not terribly productive conversation on media and racial crime stuff. There's lots of people involved in the prison system, probably about as many in the jail system. What would you expect, say, a nurse or a dental scheduler or an electrician working in a prison or jail to add to that conversation?
Literally, there's tens of thousands of people professionally involved in prisons and jails but, like, what do you expect them to contribute to a discussion of media bias? Especially because publicly discussing most aspects of their job on social media isn't, like a firing offense but's it's a significant no-no.
In the American system, you can think of jail as being for short-term, local processing while prison is for long-term, statewide imprisonment.
So, if you commit a crime, you don't go to prison, you go to the local county jail. While your trial is ongoing, you're usually in jail. Once you're convicted, however, say for 7 years, you'll get transferred to a state prison where you'll serve the remainder of your sentence. Prisons are usually preferrable to stay in, both because they're better funded but also the population is more stable, there's more of a routine, and so it's more predictable and stable.
There's lots of situations where someone might need to be imprisoned temporarily and held for a short period of time while the legal and judicial bureaucracy decides what to do with them. That's what jails do. Once a decision has been made, by a judge or jury or whatever, that someone needs to be imprisoned long-term, you send them to a facility specialized for long-term imprisonment. That's a prison.
Just to be clear, jails are for both people awaiting trial/conviction/sentencing, and people convicted of minor crimes that call for short periods of incarceration - sometimes as long as a year, but usually much less.
I do wonder why meat eating people dislike this though ? Talk about hating the messenger. Is it not the truth ?
I can imagine the objections along the angle of "If you accepted a waiter position, then you tacitely approve of killing animals. Your work is not a place for your activism" and I wholeheartedly agree. But my impression/prior is that people would hate/make fun of this even if it's not a waiter doing it, just a friend or a random internet commenter or really just a stranger putting it on a billboard in the streets.
Related to low-trust: I've seen people not tell the truth to their ex about why the relationship ended. It's possible that in some cases, even the person who left didn't know, but I think that part of it is not wanting to tell the truth to someone they don't like any more. It's also possible that the truth would be embarrassing.
Compare and contrast: I struggled to tell my ex why I thought we needed to break up, because I still cared so much for them, and didn't want to hurt their feelings.
Oakland teachers have been on strike for a week now. It appears that the salary proposals from the union (OEA) and the district (OUSD) are very close, but the contentious issues are “common good” demands such as reparations for Black students, community authority over school budgets and housing homeless students. To me this seems wildly inappropriate on the part of the union, but they nonetheless have a lot of community support. Can somebody steel man the union position? I’m genuinely confused why these are remotely reasonable demands as part of a teacher contract negotiation.
American education is a mystery to me, so I am just wildly guessing here.
You said that these things "have a lot of community support", so a straightforward explanation would be: If you want someone's political support, you include the things they care about in your list of demands.
Steelman: Your job is not just about salary and time spent, but also about working conditions. For a teacher, the state of their students is a part of the working conditions. It is different to teach students who are okay and had enough sleep, or students who are sick and starving and whatever else. Teaching people who are physically unable to focus on learning is just a waste of everyone's time. (This explains only the part about homeless students.)
Carrots are one of the cheapest vegetables. They last a long time without refrigeration, they're easy to grow, and they are versatile. Why don't people just eat more carrots?
(Sweet potatoes are also a good option but I don't like them so much)
Carrots need a cooler climate than the worst-off places have.
I assume there's some agricultural reason why sweet potatoes aren't the solution, possibly that for really poor people, it's too expensive to grow them.
I think you're not imagining the constraints caused by serious poverty.
According to Wikipedia, the rice is patented, but can be used for free if the farmer does not make more than $10,000 per year.
I can understand a concern that widespread use of golden rice would effectively make all Africans hostages of Monsanto. Can Monsanto change their mind and say "actually, starting now, every farmer has to pay us 30% of their income regardless of how much they make" the next year?
The first idea is that a good effective altruist cause would be to develop a patent-free alternative, but I guess that is easier said than done.
I agree, but the uncertainty about what happens makes it difficult to evaluate how effective the golden rice would be.
Nancy asked whether this makes sense for effective altruism, and EAs always want to calculate how many dollars per QALY they have to spend. In this situation, the answer is: "as many, as Monsanto decides tomorrow".
If half the population produce golden rice, the market price for everything they buy will increase. Then when the 30% fee kicks in, the prices will probably not fall back down in a hurry.
Thanks for looking into the patent status-- that's a concern, but is it more important than people dying or going blind on a huge scale?
In general, Effective Altruism specializes in easily repeatable and testable situations, so malaria nets are their sort of thing, and physical research projects aren't.
All I know about b-c yeast patents is that it doesn't seem to be patented from the way the guy in the video is talking.
My current notion is that maybe it could be made for the US market-- Americans like things with more vitamins (yes, I know it isn't sensible) and then find some way of getting it to poor regions.
I thought the point of GMOs is that they breed true, or at least as true as evolved creatures do-- it's not like hybrids which you need to keep buying for each generation.
I don't know whether b-c yeast could be used for a starter, so you generally only need to buy it once.
I asked my wife, who is a professional biochemist, although she doesn't do exactly this kind of stuff. In her opinion, genetically modifying plants is fairly easy nowadays. The golden rice was invented more than 20 years ago. Progress in genetics is fast; these days a small team of scientists in Slovakia would probably be able to develop a few plants like that, if someone paid them to. She expects that the actual problems would be *legal*, not related to biology.
There are probably all kinds of regulations; just doing the paperwork could be orders of magnitude more expensive than the research itself. Or it could just not be allowed for some reason, in which case you would need even more money for lobbying. Then the question is, how widely defined is the Monsanto patent for golden rice. Is it just "this specific plant with these specific modifications" or rather "any kind of rice modified to produce beta carotene" or even "any kind of plant modified to produce more of anything".
I expect that corporations would try to get their patents as wide as possible, using technical language to make it appear as if they are doing something deeply mysterious even when they are describing trivial things; expecting that the patent office does not have enough experts who would investigate each patent too deeply. (At least this is how it works with software patents.) And of course a corporation with deep pockets can afford to sue you even if you did not violate their patent; the idea is that "the process is the punishment" and even if you win you may be ruined financially.
I am not an expert, but seems to me that the actual problems with GMOs are usually legal, not biological. Specifically, you don't need to keep buying the seeds for each generation, but you still need to pay *royalties* for each generation.
In extreme cases, you will be sued even if you actually didn't want to grow the GMOs, but your crops got contaminated by wind or something. "You are growing my patented seeds, pay me!" and good luck hiring a lawyer if you are a poor African farmer.
Hmm, I don't know, math does not strike me as empirical and is definitely knowledge. I do think a new religion could be started, one riffing off of Taoism and Advaita Vedanta: these two are not incompatible with the current world, though I think the attitude of any new religion should be metaphysical agnosticism, which is incompatible with materialism.
> If God speaks directly to our soul, we still have to be able to *perceive our soul* to hear God — and if our soul is not part of the material world, then we can never hear God.
This presumes the primacy of physical reality and physical mind.
It could be that the mind/soul is where all perception actually occurs, with both inputs from the physical world and the metaphysical world coming through the same mystical channel, in the end.
Is that falsifiable? I don't see how offhand. Like most metaphysics, it's fundamentally not scientific.
Is it plausible? Ehhh... debatable.
Neither unfalsifiability nor implausibility actually show falsity, though.
Heres a link to a recent paper on the; "Collapse and the interplay between essentiality and impact in socioecological systems' (https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.107.054201) [....] developing a mathematical model to analyse the consequences of an additional dimension to sustainability beyond environemntal impact - product/activity essentiality. While environmental impact can lead to resources collapse, too much restriction on the use of essential resources can lead to social upheaval. [....] These concepts and their dynamics and simulate different scenarios to understand the relationships between these two possibilities."
Statement taken from the authors linkedin post, enjoy.
I can't edit my posts or report other people's posts (clicking on the "..." button under a post doesn't open the menu like it used to). Is this just me, or are other people having the same issue?
I'm seeing the same thing. I'd hazard a guess that Substack has decided to do some kind of horrible tracker-farming (though I can't conceive of what) with that menu and it's now being blocked by my adblocker, because when I turn my adblocker off the menu works, and looks different than it used to.
I'm still amazed that nobody serious is challenging Trump in the primary. No, DeSantis is not a serious candidate. Where are all the anti-Trumpers? WTF is going on!?
Disagree about DeSantis. I'd definitely bet on Trump to beat him, but I don't think his odds of winning are low enough to rule that out, and I think that qualifies him as "serious".
So I can think of two potential meanings of "serious" here:
The first is that "serious" means they have a decent shot of beating Trump in the primary. In this case, if not DeSantis then who? I mean, maybe Greg Abbot but...I struggle to imagine him doing better. Any challenger has to get some of Trump's base to flip to him and it's not clear to me who you have in mind that would do better than DeSantis.
The second is that "serious" means endorses policies within some spectrum you or some common entity considers acceptable or "serious". To which...the Republican base pretty clearly has different preferences, they've consistently expressed them over almost a decade at this point, and any candidate with your preferences has little to no chance of beating Trump in the primary.
And if it's the second...I mean, I too am shocked that my outgroup has not seen the infinite wisdom and sense of my ingroup's preferences and converted. Their continual refusal is baffling and maddening.
Because a significant portion of the Republican primary electorate are firmly planted with Trump. For one reason or another, he's their guy and they're sticking with him. That proportion is large enough that unless another GOP candidate can convince a supermajority of the remainder (who are split between multiple warring factions) to support them, Trump will still appear to be the frontrunner and most prominent member of the party.
Desantis has a nice enough resume, but he's shown no interest in directly engaging when Trump launches attacks against him. That might be the correct tactic for whatever longer-term goals he's pursuing, but he's basically conceding that Trump is his superior within the party and giving up the game in the process.
No, it's a reasonable strategy for dealing with Trump. Don't engage in a direct sledging match (which he'll win), focus on looking like a better-disciplined alternative with similar policies. Besides, slagging off Trump just makes you sound like a Democrat. You can always keep the option open of attacking Trump's shortcomings directly later on, but it's too early for that right now.
You could argue about whether it's the _optimal_ strategy for dealing with Trump, but it makes sense.
"Better-disciplined alternative with similar policies" doesn't really describe either Trump, with a culture-war focus to make up for a thin policy agenda, or Desantis, with a culture-war focus to make up for a deeply unpopular policy agenda.There's a theoretical 'elder statesman rising above the fray' pattern, but it's a bad fit for the 2020s Republican party.
If the question is a nonspecific "But will he fight for my interests?", refusing to engage *is* the loss, asked and answered. It's absolutely possible to attack Trump from the right, but for some mysterious reason that avenue has gone unexploited.
I'd think that a "deeply unpopular" agenda would have hurt his re-election margin. If you mean "Deeply unpopular with People Who Matter (meaning CA and NY)" well, those states have a zero chance of going red in 2024, so why bother pandering to them?
> I'd think that a "deeply unpopular" agenda would have hurt his re-election margin.
Why do you think it didn't? As I just said, both Trump and Desantis focus on culture war topics in lieu of traditional core policy concerns incl. healthcare and taxation. That's an area where Desantis is quite weak, and Trump is strong-ish by default due to general disinterest. You cannot highlight the weak points of a nonetheless successful candidate, declare all else equal by fiat, and conclude that their weak points are actually strengths. Elections are not monocausal.
It's also worth mentioning that the Florida Democratic Party is wildly incompetent, perhaps even more so than the California Republican Party. Measuring Desantis' strength by looking at margins in FL is going to overweight him to a modest degree.
Heh, yea. Within either party pretty much anytime, the governor of one of the nation's largest states who just easily won re-election is a highly plausible candidate for either spot on that party's national ticket.
Chris Christie is talking about it -- I think from hearing interviews with him that he will officially declare soon. I think he sees his role as specifically to submarine Trump and let someone else win.
Right, and this is why they're attacking him so hard right now with lawsuits and the like; the more they martyr him, the more the GOP base will be inclined to send him back up again as a symbolic gesture.
Biden/Harris is sufficiently terrible that any sensible Republican without too much baggage should be able to win, even beyond the usual margin-of-cheating.
Biden has definitely said he's going to run in 2024 so unless the party tells him quietly "No, Joe, time to sit by the fire with your slippers" that's that.
I think they're all probably side-eyeing each other to see who'll jump first, which means the first loser. Until it really gets down to the wire, let Trump and De Santis take all the heat.
Let me put it another way. Why are there so few big name candidates jumping into this race? Why doesn't it look like the GOP primary in 2016 or the Dem primary in 2020, in which an army of candidates competed to win? The recent primary this most resembles is the 2016 Dem primary, where almost nobody ran because the party had decided to coronate Hilary. Why has the GOP decided to coronate Trump instead of challenge him?
I realize that some argue that if too many people run, that will only help Trump since he can easily win a plurality in the primaries. But that merely assumes everyone would stay in the race too long, as opposed to the anti-Trumpers coalescing around whichever non-Trump candidate performs best, much like the Dems all pulled out after Biden won South Carolina in 2020. It wouldn't be the exact same as that, but the GOP could back whoever the second-best performing candidate is, assuming Trump has the actual lead. (Edit: To be clear, most of the Dem candidates pulled out after South Carolina because they were united in defeating Bernie.)
The current not-Trump strategy is to pick one guy, DeSantis, who looks good on paper in a traditional sense but has no charisma, no balls, a beta male in a contest to be the most alpha. But maybe I'm wrong, maybe DeSantis could be the guy to beat Trump. THE BEST WAY TO FIND THAT OUT would be for many candidates who look good on paper to jump into the ring and fight it out. Make it a contest. You know, don't be the 2016 Dems. The more candidates in the fight, the more likely someone will do some real damage to Trump, even if the person doing the damage won't be the person to win.
>Why are there so few big name candidates jumping into this race?
What name in the GOP is bigger than DeSantis? Other than Trump himself, and any has-beens like Romney who you may remember as being big in their day but aren't any more.
I made a list below of a bunch of plausible candidates. They may not be *bigger* names than DeSantis, but they all have resumes that give them a chance. Perhaps they are every bit as mediocre as deSantis, but betting on 4 horses with 5-1 odds gives you a better chance of picking a winner than going with one with 4-1 odds.
All of those names are smaller than DeSantis. Only Paul and Christie even come close.
And, were you even watching the 2016 campaign? The Republicans went with 4+ "horses" that might have each had 1-5 odds on their own, hoping that one of them would displace Trump. Whereupon they divided the ~60% "please not Trump" vote four ways, leaving Trump to win with the ~40% "neverRINO" vote.
Any Republican who wants the GOP's candidate in 2024 to be anyone but Donald Trump, wants the 2024 primary to be between Donald Trump and *one* other serious candidate. If Ron DeSantis is going to run, the choice of serious candidates is A: Ron DeSantis and B: people who are so much better (and better-known) than Ron Desantis that DeSantis will either withdraw or see most of his supporters defect to the other guy.
In 2016 the other Republican candidates did not take Trump's chances of winning seriously, and were not prepared for Trump's blunt, coarse style, which gave them all the vapors. Today everyone is familiar with Trump's style and knows that he is the favorite to win. The opportunity exists to coordinate against him, and the opportunity exists to use the democratic process of the primaries to find out which candidate fares best against him (See the 2020 Dem primary for how to do this.) Maybe it is DeSantis, maybe it is not, but a lot could be learned by having more horses in the race early to see which ones are fleeter of foot. That would be a better way to do things, IMO.
Now, of course, there are plenty of reasons plausible candidates do not want to run. As others in this thread have mentioned, they would take a huge political hit if they tried to coordinate against Trump and failed. I suppose I am being foolish for expecting anything from that crowd of politicians other than cowardice.
Tom Cotton, Greg Abbot, Brad Little, Eric Holcombe, Greg Gionforte, Mike Parson, Jim Pillen, Joe Lombardo, Chris Sununu, Mike DeWine, Kevin Stitt, Henry McMaster, Chris Christie, Rand Paul, Bill Lee, Glen Youngkin.
At least a few of those people would likely outperform DeSantis.
Whoever gets picked is going to be hammered as Worser Than Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Your Mean Fourth Grade Teacher Combined. Trump is pretty much the only one who has been able to shrug the attacks off and demonstrates he doesn't give a damn. He's not a great choice by any means, but what are they going to say about him?
"Ooh he's a sexual abuser" as per this lady in The Guardian?
"In this case, the question was “Who are you going to believe – a proven congenital liar or a 79-year-old, beloved advice columnist who offered significant corroboration for her version of events?”
Uh-huh, remind me again about "believe Tara Reade that Biden groped her", or is that not the same thing at all?
I don't understand why having a national profile is important at this stage. How many people outside Arkansas knew who Bill Clinton was at the start of 1991? How many people knew who Mitt Romney was at the start of 2007? Anyone who is a senator or governor has a shot if they can stand on a stage and sound presidential. Once you have a resume good enough to get on the ballot, it's all stagecraft. Perhaps none of those guys listed above have the stagecraft. I couldn't say because I haven't seen them in action. I have seen DeSantis in action, which is why I'm looking around desperately for someone else.
The internet era has obviously been good for commercial purposes. Has it been good for civic purposes? Probably not, We’ve mostly lost faith in institutions. In political parties, churches, Congress, The White House, The Pentagon, The FBI, The CIA, The Supreme Court, The Federal Reserve, the integrity of elections, The Bill of Rights...
In the civic realm, what have we gained from the internet? Despite thoughtful, entertaining blogs like this one, whose political pull is ~nil, it seems the internet has been a huge negative for civics.
> Has it been good for civic purposes? Probably not, We’ve mostly lost faith in institutions. In political parties, churches, Congress, The White House, The Pentagon, The FBI, The CIA, The Supreme Court, The Federal Reserve, the integrity of elections, The Bill of Rights...
Are you really going to just state this as a given? What's the evidence that the internet is causally implicated in this deterioration, as opposed to, say, decades of stagnant wages due to failed economic policies, declining life expectancy, increased wealth inequality, increased cost of living, and on and on?
It's not even a given that the public *should* have faith in some of those institutions! In what world has the Pentagon, CIA or the FBI proven themselves trustworthy? Do you think people have just forgotten the Iraq war they were lied into, the torture programs they "justified", or the entrapment efforts the FBI orchestrated against Muslims?
You have a high bar to clear before the internet appears even remotely plausible as the reason the public have lost faith in some institutions.
>Are you really going to just state this as a given?
I'm stating it as an opinion, of course. I try to avoid the bad habit of doing what Chesterton complains about: "A man these days cannot even state his own opinion without immediately adding "But I might be wrong." That goes without saying!" Quote is from memory, so I'm sure I butchered it but believe I got the gist of it.
The internet era has revealed that loss of faith, and to a lesser degree amplified it. Neither of those things is the same as having created it though....everything you list was well underway during the 1970s and 1980s but just didn't have any way to break through the old-media gatekeepers.
Syndicated talk radio (late 80s/early 90s) and then the spread of home online access (1990s into the early 00s) provided those ways, and also demonstrated that the traditional news media had no clue about how widely mistrusted it already was. Then social media platforms were invented (mid 00s) and pulled the lid the rest of the way off; then Obama in 2008/12 and especially Trump in 2016 demonstrated how to weaponize all of that politically.
Political parties, Congress, The White House, The Pentagon, The FBI, The CIA, and The Federal Reserve are all operating in the pursuit of interests that run counter to the average American's interests. Increasing distrust is a positive sign that public awareness is increasing.
I wouldn't put all churches in the same category, but the very large, prominent one that sheltered and moved the priest that abused my family member certainly wasn't operating in people's interests.
The Bill of Rights has much less influence on the activities of the government than its authors intended, I believe, but I would think is still a net positive by most people's reckoning.
At a simple level, the dominant paradigm of warfare has been a constant flux between technologies that favor a military built around small number of expensive elite troops (horses, longbows, aircraft and missiles) and technologies that favor a military based around a large number of cheap regular troops (gunpowder, mass production, possibly drones).
There's no reason to think that civics is any different; some technological paradigms empower establishment institutions, others empower the masses (I don't think either is inherently good or inherently evil; the best is probably a balance between the two). The internet era started as a transition from technologies that empower the establishment (ironically, mass media) to technologies that empower the individual (social media). The establishment doesn't want to lose power and is fighting back by trying to control the internet.
All of this is mostly unrelated to whether the establishment is trustworthy; loss of trust in most establishment institutions started well before the internet, but the mass empowering nature of the internet accelerated the process.
A lot of civic protest have been organized with the help of the internet. It makes this much easier. It has also allowed protesters to gain more attention in far away regions of the world.
To be clear, I think from the civics perspectives there are both advantages and disadvantages. I was just naming some of the former.
It feels truthy that the internet per se has led to greater distrust & polarisation. I certainly feel it. But if you break it down to the specific dynamics that cause this reaction, they seem to revolve specifically around social media. What that seems to have revealed is rank incompetence on the part of institutions, in the way they communicate. And clout-mining by a certain class of person who might, at one time, have been much less visible.
Throw into this the time spent connected to this maelstrom of discourse (mostly due to smartphones) and my intuition is that if you removed a handful of chatter platforms the picture would be quite different.
We started losing faith in most of those long before the Internet came around. Vietnam and MLK destroyed the FBI, CIA and Pentagon. Watergate destroyed the political parties. Churches have had pedophile scandals for a long while. The Supreme Court's history has mostly been naked politics with ad hoc reasoning. The Second Amendment has been a hot button topic since at least the 1800s. I assume concerns about integrity of elections probably predate elections. I don't know how controversial the Federal Reserve has been but I'm sure if it wasn't it was due to a lack of awareness in its existence.
What's that fallacy where you think one way, but assume the crowd thinks differently, and then it turns out the crowd agreed with you but likewise thought everyone disagreed with them? The internet's anonymity basically removed that. Now we've got furry communities and other weird crap that no one would be the first to admit to with their face attached.
Why blame the internet? I think it's proper to mistrust those who have shown that they should not be trusted. I don't think that what's actually bad for society is the lack of trust itself, but the deception which makes trust dangerous. I'd go as far as to say that the deception appears lazy and incompetent. I'd understand if it was just the media, as it can maximize conflict (here division) by keeping the ratio of skeptics close to 50% rather than just 5-10% like in the past.
Isn't it better to be without friends, than to be friends with somebody who betrayed you 3 times already? I think one should have at least that much self-respect.
More fundamentally, the increased selection and freedom has made it so that we are no longer forced to make friends with those in our local area. We are not attached to anywhere in particular, we can always just move, so the feeling of community and fellowship is eroding. Even the practice of identifying with specific things is on the decline, and we're therefore not seeing rivalry between websites and other such relics of the past. This might sound unrelated, but it's just a further generalization of the same issue that you're referring to. So it seems that institutions are also less dependent on us, that they don't have to appeal to our desires anymore. The process called "enshittification" is thus not limited to the internet.
We never get to see the alternative universe. Who knows what happened there? Maybe in our version we lose trust in institutions, while in the other version the same institutions, having our trust, did some horrible things.
"Trust in things that not only don't deserve it, and which are actively working to harm you, 'cuz Society." Is a very common argument that has never actually impressed me.
All surveys are showing trust in all institutions are significantly down since then (although Kennedy was indeed the high point in trust in government).
What I think is different now is that there is distrust all along the political spectrum, whereas in the 60s and 70s it was mostly just the left and far-libertarian right that was full of distrust.
Designer Karl Lagerfeld left $1,500,000 to his cat Choupette and, following his death. she has now duly inherited. If some hacker stole, say, $1,000,000 from the cat's account, could they be convicted of any crime? Is it illegal to steal from a cat?
The cat would never know the money had gone missing, and thus wouldn't suffer any angst at the loss. So, provided the hacker left enough in the account to pay for food and treats, and possibly vet's bills, to last the cat's lifetime, they couldn't be prosecuted for animal cruelty either.
Legally speaking, "money left to your cat" means "money left to a trust, run by a human who spends money to take care of the cat," meaning there would still be a person and legal entity that can be a victim of theft.
(Also, the state can and does go after people for "victimless crimes." You could argue that deterring hackers from breaking into people's bank accounts is a worthwhile cause even if in this case nobody would notice the money missing.)
Right. Stealing money from a trust absolutely is illegal no matter what or who the beneficiary of the trust is.
Also the trustee would have a legal ("fiduciary") duty to defend and preserve the trust's capital in ways such as helping authorities pursue criminal charges, filing civil suit to recover stolen assets, etc.
This reminds me somewhat of The Aristocats, a 1970ish Disney movie wherein the evil butler Edgar kidnaps Madame's cat Duchess and her three kittens, and abandons them out in the countryside. Presumably Edgar resented Madame's fortune being lavished on the kittens, and hoped to inherit the money himself.
Certainly the movie did not entertain the idea that Edgar was not a despicable villain. ;>)
The human race had eighty-five years to convince Karl Lagerfeld that any of its members should have that money. I don't know enough about Lagerfeld's life and death to know why that didn't happen, but from my knowledge of humanity, causes other than "Lagerfeld was an evil meanie" are at least plausible.
Please help me find the write up about how USA nuclear regulatory agency demands that “all reasonable” safety protocols are implemented which effectively means zero profit or efficiency improvements can be made.
I've been thinking about getting an AI to follow instructions in a complex game like Minecraft as a precursor to being able to do it in the real world. (I've only played Minecraft a little bit so excuse any inaccuracies in the details here.)
What I think you would need is to couple a bunch of language models at the high end with a bunch of reinforcement learning models at the bottom end. You'd give it an open-ended task like "collect fifty diamonds" or "build a nether portal" and it would use a language model to break that down into tasks, and then subtasks, and then sub-sub-tasks. There's enough "how to play Minecraft" guides out there already that this top level doesn't need to be capable of learning.
Then you'd have some mid-level routines that strategise on how to achieve specific goals given the state of the world. Something like "My current goal is to build a house. I have three pieces of wood. The current state of the game world is [X]. What should I do?" and it would spit out "Run north-east" because the known state of the game world includes a monster who is south-west of you. Maybe these mid-level routines need to be capable of some kind of learning from successes and failures.
Then you'd have low level routines trained with reinforcement learning that are capable of translating simple verbal commands like "go north-east" and "harvest the iron located at coordinates (-3,2,5) from your current position" into sequences of actual button pushes.
That's a basic ideal, you'd probably need some extra models to keep all these models lined up, and maybe some extra ones bolted to the side to give meta-level commentary on how all the other systems are performing. (Now I come to write this, I'm worried that this is basically what human consciousness is all about...)
Anyway, it seems like an interesting problem to solve, how do you construct a stack of models that can convert high-level LLM strategisation into a sequence of actual physical actions? And once you can do it in Minecraft, how far are you from doing it in the real world?
Yeah, the top layers are certainly similar to AutoGPT as I understand it, but also connecting that to lower-level models that can actually take physical real-world actions (or in this case real simulated-physical-world actions), translating low-level subgoals into sequences of movements, and "sensory" data into LLM-comprehensible descriptions.
Does anyone have any good Studio-side takes on the Writers Strike? Not that I'm saying I'm pro-Studio, but I'm genuinely curious about such takes - the takes you get in the media are almost universally pro-WGA, some of them to the point where it feels like they're just rewriting official statements from the guild.
I'm anti-union but definitely not pro-studio, since the studios have effectively formed a labour-buying union amongst themselves that's just as bad as the labour-selling unions.
The whole damn system needs to be burned down. Collective bargaining needs to be banned... or at least severely restricted to ensure that collective bargaining groups aren't allowed to retaliate against people who choose to make deals outside those groups. Right now if an individual writer wants to work and an individual studio wants to hire them, they effectively can't, because all the unions will retaliate against both parties.
Labour cartels should be as illegal as cartels in any other industry.
In general, there are fewer companies than employees, and the company owners network a lot, so no matter what the law says in theory, in practice the owners have countless opportunities to make all kinds of informal deals. It's only illegal if you can prove it, and even then it is usually just a slap on the wrist.
Suppose that we are both CEOs of companies that have cca 50% of market in a certain tiny industry each. We make a gentlemen's agreement never to hire each other's former employees. The deal is made verbally; we never put anything on paper. But we know that it is an iterated prisonners' dilemma; if one of us defects, the other will soon defect too. As long as we both keep the deal, it allows us to keep specialists' salaries lower than they could otherwise demand. How would they ever prove this? At a job interview, it is perfectly legal to ask for their CV. And if we see the other company there, we simply reject them for some bullshit reason.
If we tried making cartels illegal everywhere, I think we would also have to ban the CVs and make it illegal to ask for references from previous employers. Plus prosecute all ways to circumvent these bans, for example it would be illegal for companies to show their team members on their website (because this is how the tiny industries would effectively share the list of their employees for the purpose of non-poaching agreements).
Otherwise, only the side that already has a weaker bargaining position would be prevented from forming cartels.
This only works in industries so tiny that a company which owns 50% of the market nonetheless has so few employees that the CEO personally chooses each new hire. Otherwise you need the CEO of XYZ LLC to tell his HR staff "never hire employees of ABC Inc", and even if he doesn't put that in writing they can testify to it.
We have laws to prevent price fixing cartels in most industries. In the US, the FTC will step in if competitors are colluding to fix prices.
In reality we probably don't even need to go this far, we just need to stop cartels from being allowed to retaliate against non-cartel-members. So if Alice and Bob decide to get together and bargain with their employer Charlie that they won't accept less than $N an hour then that's fine, but they're not allowed to retaliate in any way against Charlie or Dave if Dave decides to come along and undercut them.
(How will we judge "retaliation"? There's lots of vague employment law already, it'll be fine.)
Collective bargaining only works under the threat of retaliation though.
Suppose I'm a screenwriter and I decide "actually fuck this strike, I think I'll go to work after all". Right now I can't, due to the threat of retaliation. The Screenwriter's Guild would blacklist me and I'd never work again. Furthermore a bunch of other unions would blacklist the production that I'm writing for, which makes the studios unwilling to hire independent workers (so-called "scabs"). There would be picket lines threatening the production and the people who worked on it.
If nobody was allowed to discriminate against or intimidate anyone else based on their adherence or otherwise to some collective bargaining group, then meaningful strikes wouldn't be possible, people would defect and things would go on pretty much as normal. Humans would be able to freely bargain with other humans.
Meaningful strikes would of course be possible- they'd just only work proportionately to the proportion of the labour supply that supported the strike. People would defect if they preferred working under the prior terms to the expected outcomes of the strike- so a strike would be exactly as successful as its demands were reasonable and feasible.
You're misunderstanding collective bargaining as intrinsically this coercive thing, when it *is* fundamentally humans freely bargaining with other humans- just joining forces to increase leverage. Retaliation is something that would reduce the freeness of the bargaining, but so is banning unions.
These are all parts of the bargaining process and aren’t actually intrinsic to collective bargaining. The friends cast engaged in collective bargaining by just asking for the same pay after season 3, which involved a pay cut for two of them to begin with, but much more money in the end. Any one of those characters could have been retired, but not all of them. No threat of retaliation.
Nevertheless if the Screenwriter's Guild is able to retaliate against the studios then good for them - the angst you feel at workers earning more money at the expense of corporations isn’t something I share.
The problem that (in certain industries, in certain countries) two consenting adults aren't allowed to come to deals without some unrelated third party sticking its nose in and trying to take a cut.
If a film studio and a screenwriter want to come to whatever deal they like, then it's none of anyone else's business.
Speaking as another union skeptic, you don't need to ban them to achieve those goals. Just remove the mandates for exclusive bargaining and a duty of fair representation.
So why do you want to ban collective bargaining, then? Why can't the union and the studio come to an agreement without the government sticking its nose in?
Most of the WGA takes I've read focus on how streaming shows don't pay writers shit because, unlike on network TV, there is no such thing as a residual because there is no such thing as a rerun. Meanwhile, Netflix stock price collapsed more than 50% last year, and management claims they will change their strategy to trying to come up with a few big hits like major networks do, instead of pursuing their old strategy, which was producing about 100,000 shows that most people never hear about. Other streamers seem to be thinking in a similar vein.
Netflix turns a profit but it's new subscribers and EBITDA declined from 2021 to 2022. It seems to me, on the little I've read, that the WGA is fighting yesterday's battle. Streaming is likely to support fewer writers the next 5 years than it did the previous 5 years. But if Streamers are hoping to make the next Big Bang Theory--and they are--seems reasonable they could find a way to pay the writers writing for the big hits more than they got paid to write The Handmaidens Tale. Of course, such a course would mean a lot more writers in Hollywood won't be working at all. Is the WGA willing to face that reality?
> seems reasonable they could find a way to pay the writers writing for the big hits more than they got paid to write The Handmaidens Tale
I dunno, this isn't the way it works in most other industries. Generally you get paid a pre-agreed amount for your time, and this doesn't vary depending on how successful the product is in the marketplace.
It's certainly possible to structure employment contracts so that the individual worker gets additional risk and reward, but I don't see why this should be some kind of default in that particular industry.
Having seen some of the demands, I do think they are unreasonable, but there's a lot of speculation that the WGA is worried about AI - that studios/networks will get AI to do drafts then hire on writers to polish those up. You get paid less for coming in to fix a script than you do for writing an original one. And since network execs routinely interfere in shows anyway with demands to include this and take out that and our focus group says this is our target demographic/to hell with the focus group that wants action-adventure we're going full steam ahead with DEIB, then the fear is that AI will allow the execs to produce their own drafts with the writers just coming in as janitors to tidy up the product.
The argument is that GPT cannot, in fact, adequately replace writers. The executives think it can, but the writers know it can't.
It's kind of like how technically, you could replace the steel frame on your cargo ship with plastic. Everyone who knows specifics about shipbuilding would protest, you'd write them off as wanting to keep their cushy jobs, and if you went ahead with the change you would end up with some very dysfunctional ships.
So if the studios do fire all their writers and being in chat GPT, expect to see some very bad expensive movies in the future. It's a net loss in the sense that all that money could have gone into making actually good art, but has instead been squandered on AI generated rubbish.
It means that if your job can be easily automated, then your replacement by a machine is inevitable. You can try shoveling back the tide, and maybe it could work for a short while, but you'd only be postponing the outcome. Chess players are a special case, since chess is a sport, and any sport is a spectacle where raw performance matters less. For this reason, however, the number of available sports-performer jobs is vanishingly small.
Personally I can't wait, I'd bet GPT-4 can already do a better job than 90% of writers today.
I joke that the way 2021+ shows and superhero movies are written is you take some 5 year olds, throw in a bunch of action figures and props representing your show's people and sets, and then just literally transcribe whatever the 5 year olds are doing, and that's your episode / movie.
Ridiculous? Of course! 5 year olds can't sign a union contract! So clearly the writers have to use their own children, or interns or something...
Contrast that with the capabilities on the horizon - soon GPT-n is going to be creating literally individually personalized music and shows and movies for people, and even if Hollywood manages to ban that, some other country will do it and clean up - and I'd be pretty nervous as a writer too.
The issue is that the default contract was stingy on the upfront in expectation of residuals later, but worded such the there are ~no residuals from streaming. A 'standard contract' that never included residuals in the first place would presumably have had to pay much more up front to have been accepted by the WGA
That kind of risk/reward has been the default in the US TV industry for many decades. My guess is that it evolved that way because Hollywood has a huge risk-taking culture compared to most other industries. The line between being rich/broke in TV & movies is thinner than almost anywhere.
I'm concerned that a purist attitude on AGI/ASI stands in the way of both comprehension and persuasiveness. While I think Eliezer makes some great points, the path by which someone comes to the conclusion matters at least as much as the underlying information they rely on to get there. Some peaks are too steep to climb directly. In this, I think the framing that ASI is the only/most important framing for the problem falls short. People often respond to "AGI is an existential threat, why are we not more worried about this?" with a visceral disbelief in the potential and/or suddenness of the threat.
There's a reason for this. If you're making a zero-to-one argument, you have to face the fact that many futurists have been flat-out wrong in what they predict and what they miss. Sometimes they'll even get the near-term capabilities right while missing out on the far-reaching consequences. Eliezer's rejoinder to to this, "But I've been right about tons of things re:AGI, and they still don't believe me!" We could go round in circles about why that is, and whether it's justified, but I think it all boils down to pure instinct/feeling. This mountain is simply too steep for many to climb directly.
How to overcome this? Let's explore what might happen if we ignore Eliezer's advice to disregard non-AGI concerns, and see where that takes us, point by point.
E: AI can do some many things it couldn't do two years ago. Improvements are happening exponentially, so we should expect AI to continue to improve and do impressive things normal humans struggle to do, and at rates impossible to accomplish today.
P: Isn't that great!
E: So far it has been great, even though some of those new abilities are being used for bad ends. This despite the technology being fairly crude (it still hallucinates and memory isn't explicitly built in). Students can use them to cheat and write papers for them. Bias from the training data may perpetuate and amplify cultural issues. It has become easier than ever to create deepfake content - text and images - to gaslight people. Soon that will include video, voice, essential records, and official documents.
P: That's okay, though. We're still figuring out the bugs. I'm sure we'll be fine once we get better at building these systems.
E: Don't you think we should put more effort into safety before we put more effort into making them better at doing the things we want to protect against? If this technology scales at its current rate - not assuming major unknown technological breakthroughs - it will replace many jobs. It will gain abilities to do lots of things we usually rely on humans with good judgement to do. It will also become a tool people could use to do much worse things with than cheat on tests.
P: We'll deal with those things when we get to them. No need to worry about them now, when we can barely imagine what those bad things are. It'll be clearer as the technology develops.
E: Some of the things we know it will be able to do in the future aren't the kind of thing we can safely fine-tune later. For example, it could be used to hack into computers/databases. Right now most people are immune to this kind of thing, not because their computers are secure but because they're not important enough to individually target. A computer that can hack could target everyone at once though. Meanwhile increasingly more human activity is being overseen by computers, from driving to work to health records to ordering fast food. All that could be dangerous to in the hands of an AI capable of hacking and manipulating them.
P: Why would a computer care about hacking into your stuff or harming you? Seems kind of theoretical to get worked up about all that. Computers don't really 'care' - unless you're worried about some future computer that will magically become sentient.
E: It doesn't matter that the computer cares or doesn't. If the TOOL exists, a human could aim that tool wherever they want, with all its amazing new capabilities. If we make AI a tool that can be used for malicious purposes, we've amplified the ability of malicious actors. And there will ALWAYS be malicious actors. This is true whether the AI technically meets the definition of 'self-aware' or not. Who cares that the model is 'superintelligent' or not, if it gives people of regular intelligence superior abilities to do evil?
P: So we build in safeguards against what it can answer/do. That seems easier than neutering the system itself, or slowing down progress.
E: That's not working great so far.
P: Sure, some people can hack the relatively primitive chatbots, but we'll get better at it.
E: Maybe we should get better at it before we develop better chatbots. Whether it becomes self-aware or not, it's not hard to see that whatever GPT-10 looks like, it will have capabilities we'd want to keep bad actors from being able to exploit. And bad actors will have strong incentives to reverse-engineer it to create their own version without restrictions or get past the safeguards you try to put in place. The mere existence of the tool creates the incentive for bad actors to break in and misuse it.
P: I'm still not convinced the problem is whether to build the thing. Access control seems more practical than standing in the way of progress.
E: This story sounds familiar. I wonder if we've learned anything from our past mistakes. Imagine you could go back in time and stop development of those first nuclear bombs. Would that world be a safer place than the one we currently live in? It's been almost 80 years since the last nuclear weapons were detonated in war, but that's mostly because we've spent huge amounts of time and effort worried about and working against that extreme danger. We're on the cusp of creating ANOTHER technology of equal or greater threat level. We're walking right into that trap with eyes wide open.
P: You're saying we should stop the research before we open up a Pandora's Box we can't close up again. What about all the good technologies that came from research into radioactive substances? Medical scans, cancer treatment, smoke detectors, food safety, etc. Better AI promises to save at least as many lives as that, and accelerate human progress. Lots of people could die who wouldn't have to if we slowed down progress.
E: Aha! So you admit you believe it can do more than just complete prompts! Else why would anyone have a problem with slowing down the pace of development? You can't have it both ways: either it develops new abilities we need to protect against so we should slow it down, or it doesn't develop any unexpected abilities so it doesn't hurt to slow it down.
P: Yes, it will likely be able to do some cool new things. But we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Let's both invent new AI abilities to save lives and keep it safe while we're doing that.
E: We might save fewer future lives in the near term while developing safe technology, but that applies to every new technology. Yet we hardly question putting extra processes in place before we start allowing things like driverless cars or new medicines into the general circulation. Why not AI, too? We know the potential impacts of AI are huge and poorly understood. It's reasonable for people to be worried we're not taking safety seriously, especially when we have to make the argument for safety in the first place! We put way more effort into safety of things that have much less potential for harm.
New research from OpenAI used gpt4 to label all 307,200 neurons in gpt2, labeling each with plain english descriptions of the role each neuron plays in the model.
EY sez:
"Commentary at greater length:
- I'm encouraged that somebody ran right out and tried this.
- It's not clear (to me, yet) that it worked all that well, or better than expected; I have not yet signficantly updated my model of how technically hard interpretability is.
- It is definitely a positive update toward "people are sincerely trying to have clever nontrivial ideas about using AI to boost interpretability today, ones I did not think of myself, and are running right out and trying them right now and doing interesting things *at scale*, rather than using 'the AI will do our AI alignment homework eventually' to cope with a lack of current progress".
- That said: I have already previously said that interpretability is the easiest place to verify that any sort of AI alignment progress has been made, and pointed to it as one of theof the few places where I'd have hopes of offering large prizes for progress or eventually getting AI help; since the big central issue with trying to scale human work, *or* getting AI to help, on most parts of alignment, is verifying whether good or helpful work has been done. So, unfortunately, this *is* the place where I previously pointed to as progress being much easier than on other alignment problems; and already predicted that wouldn't be enough to save us.
- *That* said: it's still at least some update in the direction of getting more progress earlier than I expected, and now I have more hope of seeing more exciting work like this later. My p(doom) definitely went down rather than up, upon seeing this.
Well done to Steven Bills∗, Nick Cammarata∗, Dan Mossing∗, Henk Tillman∗, Leo Gao∗, Gabriel Goh, Ilya Sutskever, Jan Leike, Jeff Wu∗, and William Saunders∗."
I _really_ distrust calls for the kind of "safety" that involve restricting what the general public can do with a tool. The worst bad actors are usually ones with governmental, political, military, or corporate power, who usually have bypasses around any "safety" restrictions anyway. This reminds me of attempts to cripple copying technology to enforce DRM ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole ) and to cripple encryption ( https://archive.epic.org/crypto/clipper/ ). As a member of the general public, I don't like disempowering us by crippling tools we could potentially use.
I strongly agree with this. If we agree it's important to do, let's put serious people on it, not dump it on an alphabet agency that will soon be underfunded and captured by corporate interests. Best we can expect from that is an acceleration of AI development and the illusion of progress on safety, which is probably worse.
Better to at least know the house is burning with no help coming than to believe the fire department is on its way when nobody called for help.
The equipment you really need to do this is either a degree in microbiology, or a cheap textbook. The rest is pretty easy and surprisingly inexpensive, given the potential for threat.
It sounded at the beginning of your post like you were trying to find a way to get more people to take seriously the possibility that AI may turn out badly for us all, so I initially took your Q&A as an example of a way to do that -- something that might work better than EY's blunt statements about doom. But your Q&A just seems like a pros/cons dialog that if anything tends *away* from worry about AI. I don't think I understand what you are hoping to accomplish with your suggested new approach.
I admit the dialogue needs work. If you go back and listen to the EconTalk episode, you'll notice that the host, Russ Roberts, at times has a hard time following EY to any level of significant concern about AGI/ASI development. I was trying to channel arguments from people like him, and target a conversation that would be most persuasive to them.
Part of the problem in the Roberts interview seems to be comprehension (EY mentions complex ideas off-hand, instead of explaining them; this makes the point opaque to outsiders), but that's not the whole problem. It's honestly emblematic of many such discussions, where skeptics return to the point that "but this is all theoretical, right?"
By moving the discussion to a familiar gradualist footing, we can side-step the whole discussion about whether the danger will come from a discontinuity brought about by a theorized development. The point is that "developing the technology is itself creating a dangerous tool - similar to designing the first nuclear bomb, this is true with or without general/human-like intelligence or reasoning".
The biggest problem with the gradualist approach to alarmism on this subject is that the skeptical side is likely to take the gradualist argument and redirect safety efforts from 'slow down so we can figure out alignment' to focus instead on 'fix the problems as they arise'. If this approach is adopted, it's unable to protect against a self-aware ASI situation, so you have to carefully demonstrate that the gradualist approach shares the same risks as the AGI/ASI approach, and that safety should be pursued the same way.
I'm saying that the conversation I normally hear is, "AGI will slaughter us all once it hits a threshold we can't predict other than to say that it's likely to come sooner than we expect!" followed by skepticism about whether that hypothesis will actually play out or not. The question of whether AI alignment/safety is important revolves around this dichotomy.
Meanwhile, we're creating this incredibly powerful tool that can reshape society in potentially more drastic ways than the internet and social media combined, with little thought to how it might be misused in the hands of malicious actors. To imply that the 'worst case scenario' has to come from AI becoming an agent of its own is understating the threat in a way that may actually be causing people to tune out. We don't need the AI to become superintelligent to create a monster that escapes our control. Nuclear proliferation wasn't intelligent at all, and it still became a major human concern.
Oh! I completely agree with out about the dangers of pre-superintelligent AI. It's not really clear from that dialog you wrote that that's what's on your mind. By the way, here's a really good exposition of the dangers of present and near-future AI: Really clear, well-illustrated, non-hysterical tone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ
Just watched the video. Yes, this is EXACTLY what I'm talking about. I feel like if you watch that video you can strongly agree that AI safety is a huge, pressing, immediate problem. None of that is based on the assumption that AI may become self-aware. It's all about capabilities. "Wait, you mean anyone could exploit a LLM to design a chemical weapon without any training in chemistry? That seems like a problem." "LLMs can design computer viruses and then be used to discover software exploits that can be used to deploy those viruses? That's a big problem, too!"
Maybe you're not afraid of AGI, but you might be concerned about giving information superpower to everyone on 4-chan.
Right, and the ability to make a passable imitation of somebody's voice with 3 seconds of audio. We all have way more than 3 secs. on our outgoing voicemail. The criminal possibilities are mind-boggling. And seeing people's silhouettes using their wifi signal. And AI's theory of mind developing up to that of a 9 year old in way less than 9 years. I tell people about this video every time the topic comes up.
Fair enough. I was trying to work through it in a way that is as fair as possible to the skeptical side. I may have sacrificed consistency as a result.
An expansive view of EA often extends beyond human wellbeing to the animals as well by (detractor perspective) anthropomorphizing them and imputing that they suffer, and in theory mitigating it. Examples include "Eat more beef and less chicken because one cow's suffering feeds more people than one chicken" and "Eat more chicken and less beef because cows have more capacity for suffering so one cow's lived experience contains for more suffering than multiple chickens".
A drug to treat feline stomatitis increases worldwide wellbeing from this perspective.
If I recall correctly, the drug potentially had some human application, but testing for animal use was cheaper/less bureaucratically burdensome. The idea was make it profitable for animals first, then try to get it approved for humans. But I could be misremembering.
This is what I recall; it's a potential treatment for Crohn's and other autoimmune disorders (but not profitable for Big Pharm to test because the component drugs are off-patent). Cats are often used for preliminary testing of human treatments, and their motivated owners offer a funding mechanism for further approvals.
How original/creative were movies/television shows of the 1950s-1990s? Lately I've been in a funk where I haven't been able to enjoy newly released movies/tv shows, and I think a large part of the reason is that they are so clearly responding to/inspired by current events. As an example of what I mean, consider something like The Boys or The Newsroom, where multiple characters/plotlines are based off real events. Yesterday's Succession episode had a similar reference to an event that happened not too long ago (I won't spoil it but if you watched it you should know). In contrast, when I watch older films/tv shows, the plotlines and characters seem so original. Sure I could map the tropes to current events, but it doesn't seem as lazy on the part of the creators. I'm curious if those of you who grew up during that time period feel similarly, or if what's causing this juxtaposition for me is the fact that I'm ignorant about the events of the 1950s-1990s.
I remember reading I think a Gwern essay about how older media is generally better, but I can't seem to find anything. I may just be confusing it with the Lindy effect. I don't know what kinds of older shows you're watching, but I assume that the older shows you watch are those that have been considered good enough to be easy to find even now, rather than being able to use recency as a "crutch".
Unhappy isn't really the right word, I know it's very intentional in those shows it's just that they were the clearest examples of what I meant. Actually I meant to put The Morning Show not The Newsroom, though both examples work fine. I don't mind shows related to the news, all I'm saying is when I watch a West Wing episode (let's say for example the episode Take This Sabbath Day) it seems more original than an episode of the Newsroom, and I'm wondering if the reason why can be explained by the fact that I don't know the event in 1999-2000 that inspired the episode.
Television shows were pretty damn cookie-cutter up until maybe Twin Peaks or so. Not to say there weren't quality shows worth watching, but I wouldn't call them particularly original or creative.
As for film, generally the 50s and 80s are thought of as dead eras dominated by studio blockbusters. The 70s are peak New Hollywood and personally my favorite era of film.
I haven't watched The Boys, but you may just be making inappropriate picks. I didn't watch The Newsroom, either, but was at least aware of it, and it is was specifically meant to be a commentary on current events. Succession is more of a parody, but also pretty blatantly a parody of the Murdoch family. If you're going to watch that, you need to expect similarity to the real world. That isn't lazy so much as half the point. Even outside of shows like that, I think it's pretty hard to set a story in what is supposed to be the real world in the present day and not have any similarity with events and people that are real. I doubt this was any different in the past. You're just watching something from the 70s without an awareness of what was in the headlines in the 70s.
Law and Order basically perfected the "ripped from the headlines" episode template back in 1992 or so, after all. This isn't something writers just barely started doing.
The conventional wisdom is that movies were much better in the '70s, '80s and '90s. French, Italian and Swedish movies were good in the '60s, but Hollywood not so much. Current events rarely had much to do with any of them. Movies themselves used to be the current events.
TV pretty much always sucked until The Sopranos came along. Perhaps Seinfeld was the exception. Or All in the Family, which was about current events, or at least about generational changes in the culture.
Any new art form goes through a predictble arc, as I see it, with 20-25-year "eras" corresponding roughly to a human generation. (just me laying this out quickly....)
Beginning/first experiments
Pioneers, many new techniques created
Golden age (1) -- the form is mature and both artists and audiences are steeped in it, it's commercially succesful and lots of work is created
Golden Age (2) -- Consolidates the gains of GA(1), work becomes both increasingly formulaic but many masterpieces are made drawing on 60-ish years of experience and tradition
Taking a break/Nostalgia -- less interest, less work, popular taste turns to mocking the past but also celebrating
All Irony -- Quentin Tarantino at its best, Brian Pousane at its worst
Oh, people still do that? Hey maybe we should transfer some of the old stuff to modern media ... whoops!
First of all, keep in mind that you're talking about thousands of shows and movies over a 50 year period. Nothing anyone responds is going to coherently cover all of them. Some shows and movies are definitely going to be about then-current events, if not as directly as you're seeing now. You can also see some trends (incompetent and/or corrupt cops for instance) that last for a while that may or may not tie to actual events.
That all said, I think that there is a good bit less related to current events, especially prior to the 90s. This will depend some on genre, with police dramas like Law and Order or NYPD Blue being more headline related than Dallas or Heart to Heart.
>keep in mind that you're talking about thousands of shows and movies over a 50 year period.
Right, but for TV, you only had three networks producing original shows for most of that period, and only a few shows each year were big hits. I mean, someone can argue that some obscure show that got cancelled after a couple seasons was ACTUALLY GREAT, but if we stick with commercial successes one can reasonably generalize about the overall quality.
For movies, I'd argue the quantity of Hollywood releases made from original screenplays as opposed to adaptations is a good proxy for originality, and boy has that number dropped off in recent years.
I'll be posting this in the next classifieds thread, but my sister (trans-woman, 24 years old) has recently moved to Seattle and is striking out left and right trying to find a job. She graduated a year ago with a bachelor's degree in actuarial sciences, has some coding experience, and has a good chunk of capital to use on finding the right position (rent for multiple months while unemployed or in a poorly paid internship, headhunter fees, etc.).
Didn't mean to bury the lede like this, but does anyone have any advice? Specifically in Seattle, but Portland or the Bay Area would be similar enough that I'd be interested. Are there agencies or single contractors who specialize in job-hunting that you've worked with? Does your company have openings for someone with that kind of CV? Have you been in a similar position and found a strategy that worked well?
Feel free to respond in a comment below or email me at: 7o2wzrybd (at) mozmail.com
Is she interested in becoming an actuary? If so, she should probably be looking for work in Insurance, though that is a very wide field. A good first step would be to just find insurance companies with offices in Seattle and inquire for openings, they are generally hiring qualified/capable actuaries.
For this path being able to pass (eventually, not all at once) pass actuary exams is absolutely mandatory. A very good first step would be to burn some of that candidate grinding out the first one or two exams.
A use for ChatGPT I have adopted is writing to my congressmen. Typically, when an issue like the DEA thing came up, I'd like to write to my congressmen but the time and effort I think it would require was too high for me to ever follow through. Now, I write up some bullet points and/or feed ChatGPT/Bing an article about the legislation in question and write have it write up the email.
This seems like a good idea but wrong from a categorical imperative perspective. Which is to say, because you shared it I'm afraid this idea might spread and congressmen won't be as trusting of actual handtyped emails.
To make up stories or what? Isn't much of the point of the public comment period to give personal testimony of how these decisions impact you? I commented on the DEA's website with an anecdote of how the Adderall shortage had impacted my wife, who has been taking it for 15 years. Unless she's been putting way more of her life on the Internet than I'm aware, I can't imagine ChatGPT would be able to tell that story.
I would guess that congresspeople and such would be much more wary than usual about ChatGPT-generated emails and such, so it might be worth it to write up your emails by hand.
I have heard, here and there, that politicians often give more weight to hand-written letters compared to machine-printed letters or emails, due to the possibility of a single person producing a large volume of letters using machine assistance. (I've been hearing this since long before ChatGPT was a thing.)
I have received some responses from the congressmen's offices so someone there seems to be reading them. The ones I have generated don't read as 'obviously written by an AI' to me.
They already get a bunch of identical emails when some interest group sends out a bulk email telling subscribers "Email your representative today! Here's a script for you to modify and send!" but I'm betting 80% of the subscribers just send the script without modification. The ChatGPT letter is likely to be more original-sounding.
I am currently enjoying the Bud Light brouhaha because they so beautifully shot themselves in both feet. Not alone are the conservatives (or, if you prefer, the transphobic backlash) boycotting it, now they've managed to piss off the LGBT bars as well who are now refusing to stock their products.
All this coming up to summer when people should be drinking your beer-flavoured water outdoors and at sporting events and concerts. Well done, everybody!
Let me get this much out of the way first: I'm not a beer drinker. I have no opinion on the merits of the product, the brand, or the rivals one way or another. The last beer I tried was Doom Rock ale, which I found pleasant enough, and Hobgoblin Ginger Beard which is a fermented ginger beer. I'm not drinking any of these regularly, so I'm coming at this entire story as an interested outsider.
It's like a textbook example of how *not* to do marketing. The thing is, with social media, it's *social*. You can't just silo it off to the bunch of people you want to specifically target (not unless you do a heck of a better job than the marketing lassie did), it can and will get shared around.
I believe the higher-ups at Anheuser-Busch/InBev when they say they knew nothing about it, because it's an amazing technicolour dreamcoat disaster and any senior person who gave this the okay needs the boot. I believe them when they say it was a one-off, not a campaign, not a partnership, blah blah blah.
All that doesn't matter a damn. Perception is all, as they should realise. They built this particular brand on a combination of patriotism (the Clydesdales, the flags, the rest of it) and being an easy drinking summer beer.
Who drinks easy drinking summer beers? Predominantly young college guys who want to get something cheap that they can drink for hours without getting too drunk, and blue-collar guys who want something cheap that they can drink for hours without getting too drunk as they stand around outside grillin', fishin', or catchin' the game.
Marketing lady is right in all she says here! She just picked some unfortunate phrasing, and of course everyone went online and found photos from her time in college when she was being a bit "fratty" herself:
You need new, young drinkers. You need to appeal to women drinkers. But of all the people to pick, Dylan Mulvaney? Someone whose other endorsements are for sports bras and cosmetics? Someone who looks, in the clip, like they are physically in pain at the notion of having to (mock) sip that beer? And that's not even mentioning the 'in the bath' one where it's... terrible.
(My own personal view on Mulvaney is that this is not a transwoman, this is a gay guy doing a drag act and the "365 days of girlhood/womanhood" is in the nature of a performance art piece. The theatrical, over-the-top mannerisms work great if you're doing a stand up routine in a gay nightclub, but not so much when you're trying to present yourself as 'just one of the guys (or gals) who likes a beer').
Bad choice, because while it *sounds* great - Mulvaney is currently very visible, very popular, and schmoozing with the likes of President Biden - it's not really that inclusive. Who are Mulvaney's followers? Are they really going to switch to "ugh, that's the beer my dad/redneck uncle drinks"? Do you really think they appeal to *women*?
Not alone that, she managed to insult the current customer base - "ugh, you're icky, we don't want you anymore". And they went "okay" and left. Yeah, it's old white conservative and indeed redneck guys who like sports and outdoor activities and the rest of it, but they're not completely stupid.
Which is where the second part comes in.
Sales went down, and competitor brands sales went up. Now, there were some liberal types who went on social media to laugh about "do these rednecks and transphobes really imagine their little temper tantrum is going to do anything, do they not realise that there is a multi-million dollar marketing campaign behind this?"
Turns out yes, it did and no, there wasn't. And this dragged in the parent company, where not alone the American CEO issued an apology, but the global CEO had to address concerns:
They rushed out two pandering ads, and as I said: us rednecks may be dumb, but we're not that dumb. People realised these were pandering attempts to win them back and they said "Not working".
Which brings us to the third part.
Now the LGBT side is riled-up, because they consider that Mulvaney has been thrown under the bus, the big-wigs at AB are not supporting trans rights, and they're starting their *own* boycott:
So Anheuser-Busch is getting it in the neck from *both* sides, and there's a good chance this might nobble the brand for good and all. Certainly their rivals are making hay without having to lift a finger, and there doesn't seem to be a good way to get out from under this mess, except waiting and praying that by this time next year, it will all have blown over.
All because a marketing exec forgot the number one rule of the job: know your customers. If she wanted to be inclusive, she could have done it in a more sensitive way. Say, a commercial about old crusty rural-type dad and son comes home from college with his boyfriend. There's a bit of tension until dad gruffly offers a beer and boyfriend asks for Bud Light if he's got it. Cue all three drinking and getting on like a house on fire. Tag line: "Bud Light - it's for everyone".
You *can* be inclusive and diverse and change the image, you just have to do it slowly and carefully. Not by getting Dylan Mulvaney to camp it up in a bathtub:
>All because a marketing exec forgot the number one rule of the job: know your customers.
I put it this way to some friends of mine - I'm a gun-toting individual, and I drive a Toyota Prius. Multiple people have made modified Priuses with machine guns mounted to the roof, and I get a big kick out of it every time I see it.
No matter how awesome I think that is, if I was a C-level exec at Toyota there is no way in hell I would use company resources to acknowledge the existence of those people in any manner, and what A-B is going through right now is exactly why.
Even if an exec went barmy and decided "We need to expand our brand appeal!" and decided to pander to the gun-toting market, there are ways to do that.
I would go with the racing car version (though they seem to have finally scrapped it) as here:
"If you've been on the highways through Tokyo and Yokohama, the most aggressive drivers are always in Priuses. They come up quick in the passing lane and shoot off out of sight, seemingly knowing where every speed camera lurks. In a sea of dawdling little kei boxes, a Prius moves with an alacrity not seen on the other side of the Pacific.
Perhaps such is the case because, in Japan anyway, the Prius is not the fuel-sipping rolling roadblock enthusiasts have always scorned. Families went to the great racetracks of Japan, and they sat in the stands and ate their mozzarella corn dogs and waited for the race to begin, and when a Prius GT went roaring past, they cheered. The opposite of an exotic. An unlikely hero. The people's choice."
Maybe I'm very stupid, but I have a feeling that something that goes "vroom-vroom" like this might have some appeal for the roof machine gun crowd:
For me, the most sparkling irony in all this is that Bud Light's "Real Men of Genius" ads, which ran for twenty years, were one of the greatest and most loved (yes, LOVED) ad series of all time.
They were so fun and, from the audience's POV, refreshing and un-demanding, that a friend who produced a high-profile FM Radio morning-drive show in Los Angeles (c1995-2000), used them as counter-programming if there was a lame segment, or the show was running flat. He'd cue up a "RMoG" tape (yes they were tapes) at the start of the next ad block, Hoping the recognizable music hook and promise of a new silly MoG would prevent station-hopping.
And the Real Move of Genius was hiring Dave Bickler, former lead singer of Survivor (Eye of the Tiger) as the "soaring vocals" guy.
This kind of thing isn't designed to sell beer, it's designed to help the careers of marketing executives.
Being the head of marketing for Bud Light is an easy gig but it's a career death sentence, you're going to get laughed at by all your ad-school friends and you'll never ascend to something more fashionable. Unless...
I don't think they need to be *that* delicate. A little friction or controversy yields publicity, puts your name in the public consciousness, which is a good way to drive sales. They managed to fumble an easy one as this should have been possible (even with Mulvaney) without insulting their core demo. They threw caution to the wind.
They might be pressured to take a side now, but in the long-run it probably won't matter. It's possible they can just wait this out without saying much of anything.
If they kept their mouths shut and just issued an anodyne "we're sorry" maybe that would have worked. But they're doing *everything* wrong and it's entertaining to see, as well as alarming for a business model.
First, they addressed the wrong points. All the insistence that this was a one-off, not a campaign, there were no cans with Dylan's face being sold to the public, etc. All true, but not what people were concerned with, and it sounded defensive and dodging the question:
I genuinely can't figure out what that marketing woman was thinking, getting Dylan Mulvaney involved. Who did she think Mulvaney's followers were? Did she imagine ten million people following for endorsements by "fashion and skincare to grocery shopping" are going to suddenly switch to glugging down cans of Bud Light?
It honestly sounds like the maximum amount of thought she put into it was "Who's the current hot name?" to sign on, without considering "yeah, but are 17 year old girls going to drink a dad beer?"
I remain to be convinced Mulvaney actually *is* trans, rather than doing a drag act performance art bit which he will drop once the novelty wears off. I leave that up to the real trans people on here to decide if they think Mulvaney is trans, I can't say for sure. But I have to say, getting someone who's flat-chested as an ironing board to do a sports bra segment does seem like tone-deafness by Nike, and more "who's hot?" rather than "does this fit with our brand?"
I would hope that marketing colleges use this as an example of what *not* to do in marketing. They went into an unnecessary direction for reasons their own customers would absolutely not appreciate, and then tried to back off in a way that made everyone upset. Their regular/former customers aren't impressed by a Clydesdale commercial, and the people they were trying to recruit now hate them more than they may ever recover instead of just ignoring them.
I'm reminder of Michael Jordan's reaction when people wanted him to support Democrats/liberals - "Conservatives buy shoes too." I don't know why some people don't like that idea or wish it wasn't true.
Have we had any discussion of donanemab here? I'd be interested to know people's thoughts, given that on the face of it this seems like a potential major breakthrough, but it also seems to rely on attacking amyloid, which I had thought was a treatment/research paradigm that was largely being abandoned, and I've seen doubts cast on its clinical significance. It seems somewhat similar to aducanumab, which of course has been discussed plenty here, and quite negatively.
Is this another overhyped treatment based on an outdated paradigm? Or was I too hasty to think the amyloid hypothesis was debunked?
It's my suspicion that it will turn out to be only a marginal improvement over something that wasn't worth bothering with. (Note also the higher rate of strokes, etc.) OTOH, the real data is still being kept secret, so who knows.
It looks like a major breakthrough because media, leading Alzheimer's researchers, most advocacy organisations and charities etc. are calling it a major breakthrough. I suspected it was possible the story was more complicated, which is why I posted here.
I have to say, though, I think you're overstating the point with "according to Derek Lowe the results are both ambiguous and unimpressive." Having just read the article, I'm not sure he really comes close to saying that. He says we have to wait for the full data, sure, but despite/because of that I don't think he comes close to saying what you've attributed to him. He says it could be a significant improvement, or they could be overstating the case in their press release, so he "very much looks forward to more data". I think read it again because you've come away with an unduly negative impression.
You're a futuristic soldier wearing a suit of power armor, and you're facing off against a horde of frenzied zombies in an open field. Your machine gun runs out of bullets. The zombies charge you. Which type of melee weapon do you want to have strapped to the outside of your suit so you can pull it out to keep fighting them, and why that weapon in particular?
Your armor is too strong for them to bite through or pull apart, but they can still kill you by knocking you to the ground and forming a pile of bodies that suffocates you.
If I've got a suit of power armor my weapon against a horde of zombies is the legs of my power armor, propelling me in the opposite direction. The only reason you fight zombies is because you can't outrun them.
A lot of people are recommending polearms. I disagree. If you're alone and against a "horde", while you're busy hitting one or two with your polearm several others are going to rush past it and get in close. You need something that works up close.
For a while YouTube shorts gave me a lot of videos by channels that focus on melee weaponry. For the non-power suit version of this question they seem to agree on a poleaxe. The reasons were intuitive to use well, has good reach while still having a reasonable weight, the need to counterbalance the cutting edge means you get a second tool on the other side (often a hammer), they can often have a point bit for stabbing[0], and they have other uses outside of battle.
With power armor a few things change:
* We can assume training.
* You can accommodate more weight.
* The non-combat uses are not relevant.
With those in mind I would suggest a longer and stronger poleaxe. Maintaining distance will be important, and poleaxes are quite good at area denial. Using your enhanced strength to increase the area you can deny seems like the safest bet.
[0] Conveniently, the axe blade and hammer will also prevent the zombie from just pushing forward as it might do vs a spear.
How many of them are there? What's my best escape route?
If they're going to keep coming forever, and I'm not allowed to escape then I guess I'll take a suicide pill so I don't have to die tired.
If I only have to kill some reasonably manageable number of them before I can escape, then my initial thought was a chainsaw, but I think I'll upgrade to some kind of heavily-modified Whipper Snipper (or Weed Whacker as I believe they're known in the US). Replace the nylon cord with steel blades, then upgrade the motor to the most powerful thing I can possibly carry, and then blend zombie faces from a distance.
I knew a guy that replaced the nylon strings with bicycle chain. Seemed a bit Mad Max like to me at the time. Maybe he was thinking ahead to the zombie apocalypse.
I'll third the "mace" option, although you could also try a short spear. Since you're stuck in an arena, your goal is to use your super-strength and speed from the power armor to draw out individual zombies from the charge so you can pick them off one by one. They're mindless, so if you maneuver right you can get the horde to taper off into a line of individual zombies that you can kill by swinging the mace back and forth.
My first thought is a mace. The standard way of killing or disabling a zombie in most lores is brain damage, and maces are specifically designed for smashing skulls. My power armor presumably adds some oomph to my mace strikes. A mace would also be good for kneecaps and collarbones, if I can't get a good angle for a headshot. Maces have the additional benefit of being relatively short, so it'd still be usable at close quarters. Many mace designs also have a spike on one or both ends that could be used to stab through the eye or under the chin if I'm too swarmed to get a good swing going.
Second thought is a halberd or billhook, which can be used either as a bashing weapon to break skulls or as a slicing weapon to cut off heads and limbs. It's not much good if I'm swarmed, but the length can help keep me from getting swarmed in the first place, especially if I can get somewhere that my back is secure and zombies can only get at me by one location.
A European longsword of late medieval design might be a decent compromise. It gives me more reach than a mace for killing them a pace or two away, although not as much as a pole-arm would. They're also specifically designed to be used reversed as bashing weapons (source: https://i.redd.it/670w1xur5bg51.png), and can be "half-sworded" (one hand on the hilt and the other part-way up the blade) for stabbing at close quarters.
My last thought is that you specified that I'm in an open field being charged by a horde of zombies. If they're too dumb to hesitate approaching my melee range it's going to be really hard to keep from getting swarmed. But if they're relatively smart zombies, it's going to be extremely hard to keep from getting surrounded while fighting the ones in front of me, at least unless I have enough squadmates with me to form some kind of hedgehog defense. So unless they're a very specific level of intelligence, my best bet is probably a good set of running shoes and a radio with which to call in artillery or air support.
if the only threat is a dogpile, then i suggest a flipper as came to dominate RoboWars! Rib off limbs with bare hands until they're piled too thickly to continue, then activate the flipper and send the pile flying up into the air. Bonus points for this plan making a hilarious scene
The traditional anti-zombie melee weapon is a chainsaw, especially if the only threat they pose is piling up on you. Hold it up in front of you and they'll cut themselves in half and roll right off.
Other options include, you know, the butt of a machine gun.
Honestly, probably a short sword, something like a Roman gladius.
Historically, knives are pretty much always the fallback melee option, even in modern times, but knives are more stabby or slashy than choppy. I can't imagine someone fighting a horde of zombies effectively with a knife but a short sword seems....more viable.
The main concerns isn't chopping zombies but:
#1 Being able to run away
#2 More ammo for the machine gun
So the ideal weapon might be a giant wrecking ball where you spin into the zombie horde like a Goblin Fanatic from Warhammer Fantasy with your super-strong power armor but, semi-realistically, you can't run away from the zombie horde with that and it's so large you probably had to leave a dozen ammo boxes back at the base.
If powered armor makes you inhumanly strong and has no effective limit on its power source (nuclear-powered?) then a mace made of a single piece of metal would probably be best, the heavier the better. It won't break, doesn't need an edge with the armor powering the blows, and can probably take out at least one zombie per hit.
If the zombie's brain is a weak point, then it would simply be a matter of aiming for headshots, though I don't know why the head or brain would be a particularly good target for a zombie. It's your scenario.
So the question is what disables zombies? I assume that poking holes in them and letting them bleed out doesn't work against zombies so a rapier is right out. That leaves the option of cutting all the way through zombies limbs to fully detach them, or breaking zombies bones so that their muscles no longer move them properly. Fully detaching a zombie's limbs via slicing seems extremely difficult if you're only using muscle power and a blade. Something like a chainsaw would make it easier though. Breaking zombies limbs requires any big old club like object. There's also the question of range you'd prefer to deal with zombies farther away from you then close up. Therefore the best weapon for dealing with zombies is a tree branch removal tool (chainsaw on a stick)
Poking a small hole in a zombie won't kill it fast enough to save you in this scenario, unless the hole goes into its brain.
These are the frenzied, fast zombies and there are a bunch of them advancing on you. The problem with a chainsaw is that it must be pressed against the same point for several seconds to cut all the way through something as thick as an arm. It won't work of the target if flailing around, and if focusing on him for several seconds distracts you from his buddies who are approaching you from other directions.
Your power armor makes you inhumanly strong, so bludgeoning weapons are much more effective in your hands.
> The problem with a chainsaw is that it must be pressed against the same point for several seconds to cut all the way through something as thick as an arm
Doesn’t that depend both on the chainsaw and the “something” you’re cutting through? I’m no expert by any means, but last autumn I did cut quite a bit of wood for the winter for my uncle, with a pretty dinky electric chainsaw, and it took well below a second for something the thickness of a femur, even for pretty hard wood. Arm-thick wood yes, it took (marginally) longer, but arms are not as hard as wood all the way through, only the bones are comparable. I’ve never cut bones with a chainsaw, but based on how fast bandsaws go through them at the butcher shop I don’t expect them to be much harder than wood.
I think the unwritten assumption here is that we get today's technology, aside from the power armor. (Otherwise, I'd just ask for a restore-saved-universe feature.)
I'd probably go for a carbon steel 4-lb longsword. Mostly because it's a very reliable design for a slashing weapon, works in close range out to three feet, doesn't require formation tactics, and is wieldable even if the power assist battery gives out (and hopefully doesn't result in my being locked in place).
I'm almost certainly going to want to slash my way to an ammo dump, however.
I think I have read this, but could never remember the author or the context.
He was a Russian Emigre MD, who practiced in NYC? And his book flat-out states that medicine/doctors/health-care et al can DO NOTHING about diseases or chronic conditions, never have, the best is treating symptoms and pallative care. [The exception perhaps was trauma/injury, but maybe not. Advances in surgery and emergency medicine since that time are miraculous, back then maybe not so much.]
His claims and thesis were ... not embraced by the medical esatblishment, shall we say."
IIRC, he self-published his book because nobody would touch it. I remember reading it online maybe 15 years ago.
That may be true, but more people live to an advanced age than they used to. I didn't take any pill regularly before I turned 50, since then...well, the number keeps increasing, many of the self-prescribed. What I really need is a mild anti-inflammatory with fewer side effects...that can be taken in incrementally increasing dosages without danger to the kidneys or liver, and without causing blood to refuse to clot.
I am often shocked by pharmacutical trials that show such a tiny effect, maybe 50% of the patients showed a 17% improvement in one area, or something like that. And then for that little benefit that drug is prescribed and paid for by "insurance" and now these patients, and the *average* person in the US, is taking 4 (FOUR) prescripticion medications at any given time.
Hey, how about we try doing ... nothing. You will either recover or die, I'm unusually confident about that.
I connot believe that taking multiple prescription drugs _in perpetuity_ is actually a medically-productive plan. For anybody. Yes if you are in the ICU or have some dire emergency, but piling on "health care" serves only to keep billing for health care.
I would be a great doctor. "You're not sick. You're weak. Get out of my office"
If that's what you feel, then don't take the pills. I feel you'd be a lousy doctor, though. Choosing for yourself should be your right. Choosing for other people...there are names for that, not all complimentary.
I am pretty sure that my approach to medicine would result in almost no difference in aggregate outcomes re: life expentacy and quality of life. People wouldn't like it very much, though, since I'm pretty sure the emotional reassurance of medical care is what people are consuming.
One thing I know for a fact is: It would drastically lower the cost of Health Care that currently stands at 17% of our GDP.
But maybe, as Robin Hanson has written, SPENDING MONEY on Health Care is the whole point. That's what people want, given how they behave and what they prioritize.
That terrifies me about getting older. Some day I'll get prescribed some kind of pill that I'll need to take every day, and this will turn into an ever-increasing number of pills until I have the standard old-person giant days-of-the-week plastic container with all of them.
There are lots for reasons to be scared of getting older, but that's not one of the. You could always just stop, and die earlier. The things to be afraid of are what the pills partially suppress.
The government is short-term responsive to public outcry. They backpeddle when the backlash is big enough. But they rarely give up; they just shelve whatever it is and try again in a few years. Again, and again, and again, until even the most ardent opponents of whatever-it-is are burned out and can't muster the enthusiasm to fight it anymore.
The DEA may be in backpeddle mode right now, but they'll be back to restrict telemedicine again. And again and again, until they get it done or laws change to shift their priorities.
I think you've got the wrong model. Most of the time it seems to be "people try to get rules to make their work easier". They'll usually back off if there's enough outcry, but they still want to make their job easier. The problem with the DEA is they've got a job that shouldn't be done. Something related to that job needs to be done, but not the one they've got.
I can see the federal government properly regulating that the drugs that are sold are actually what they claim to be, but WHICH drugs can be sold should be a state, or possibly even more local, matter. (OTOH, remote sales makes this a bit of a problem. If the law is violated, therefore, it should be the purchaser that is prosecuted. And such laws are generally a bad idea, but if you're going to have them, that's what they should be.)
N.B.: I understand that this stance would cause lots of suffering among the families of those who abuse drugs. I just feel it would cause a lot LESS social damage in all.
P.S.: I can see regulating the sale of pesticides, antibiotics, etc. on environmental grounds by the federal government. But that's a very different model than the one the DEA is using.
I thought the opposite. Hecklers at public comment can shut down anything and that’s why the government doesn’t bother trying to change zoning or transportation or any of a number of things.
1. Third party write-up of the infamous "Whales vs Minnows" market, which was created as a class-warfare microcosm by the most prolific user on the site, and in a movie-worthy twist grew beyond his control to the point that he wound up spending $30k of *real USD* buying funny-money, only to lose anyway. https://news.manifold.markets/p/isaac-kings-whales-vs-minnows-and
2. A market with a large bounty that asks whether it's possible to prompt ChatGPT/GPT-4 to solve an easy-level Sudoku. I suggest trying it yourself, it really helps you recalibrate against all of the "AGI is here" hype. https://manifold.markets/Mira/will-a-prompt-that-enables-gpt4-to
How was it "class-warfare"? Does the Manifold community have some internal division between "whales" and "minnows" that the members map onto real life and identify with?
It pitted the "whales" (aka the high-net-worth users who have disproportionate influence on the site) against the "minnows" (aka everyone else). It was a pure gambling market, where the whales essentially needed to outspend the minnows 10000:1. Read the linked substack if you want to understand better.
I have read that article. But what transforms a friendly experiment born of scientific curiosity, into something that people call "class-warfare"? Isn't it important, I'll even go so far as to say **vital**, to know how easy it is for wealthy users to sway prediction markets?
It's no secret that the whales on the site have massively more ability to move markets in than anyone else. That's not necessarily a bad thing, because hopefully they got to be whales by making a lot of correct predictions, and therefore you want their votes to be significantly upweighted.
This market wasn't really a very good measure of how influential or not they are, since it was a contrived gambling mechanism.
Also, I referred to it as class warfare because that was explicitly how the market was set up. The few ultra-rich outspending the aggregate votes of everyone else. Honestly, it was a very clever dynamic.
Which was incredibly ill-conceived, if we're believing that $30,000 was financially ruinous for the guy. 10000:1 means that's $3 on the other side. You can spend more than that by accident.
It wasn't literally 10000:1, that was an oversimplification, read the article.
Each 10k Mana that whales spent on Yes counted for 1 point, and each Minnow holding _any_ No shares counted for 1 point.
So it was explicitly setup as "the few ultra-rich vs everyone else".
Also each 1 real USD buys you 100 Mana, so that $30k USD bought him 3 million Mana. So that was enough to offset 300 new Minnows joining the fray. Which would have worked if not for Minnows making bot accounts en mass.
>10,000 votes to offset each and every minnow participant.
>the substantial amount Manifold gives new users to start.
>Manifold bets are cheaper the more they disagree with the current winning side
So it's even worse; 300 people need to spend a collective $0 to overcome that $30,000. It's a bet that the userbase doesn't know 300 people susceptible to Farmville pressure.
I'm imagining what it would be like if people or an alien species was deeply mistrustful of getting things for free-- worried about the quality of the gift or hidden entangling obligations.
This might not make sense as a fully imagined culture-- what about children? Or emergencies? My point, though, is that they don't want free things in non-urgent circumstances.
This means that they expect to pay for media, and they don't expect banks to store their money for free. They assume they'll pay a little for holding their money safely.
Would they never have fractional reserve banking? Without fractional reserve banking, would it be possible to raise money for investing in large projects?
I think the society would develop more slowly, and head in the direction of some fictional ultra-libertarian/anarchist societies. They would be very clear on what obligations they take on, and contracts would be extremely detailed. And given their mistrust, they'd probably work to ensure that the contracts were as "clean" as possible, minimizing the number and duration of obligations, so that the contract resolves quickly. Assuming that they were similar enough to humans, they'd know that they have emotional reactions to people being kind to them, and view unsolicited acts of kindness as a hostile act. (Somewhat similar to the way a mostly asexual person might view the use of sex appeal for persuasion.) I think humans unconsciously track a lot of this type of thing as "social capital" (hello, neural nets), and I suspect that these people's growth as a society would be limited by how much they were able to keep track of consciously.
Fractional reserve banking is a trade of risk for money, so it might exist, but it might not be as popular if it adds to their "contract load"? Maybe they'd have separate institutions for pooling money as investments, and wouldn't understand why we combined investment banking with day-to-day household banking.
A not-very-serious look at this kind of society is "And Then There Were None", a novella by Eric Frank Russell, but maybe you've read that already?
Feels like they would never develop a lot of universally beneficial things like soap. You can't get anyone interested in soap without telling them how it works, and you can't tell them without charging them, which they'll refuse to pay because they've done without it perfectly well until now so it can't be that important.
If they're high distrust, they're probably not going to get very far technologically, unless they were individually very powerful to begin with. (Which might be why they can afford high distrust, evolutionarily speaking.)
I think banking wouldn't be the showstopper, though. If they got as far as that, then they understand that "free banking" isn't actually free - they're exposing themselves to risk. What I _would_ expect is a culture where they're keenly aware of that risk, registering to them like a ringing sensation might to us. In general, we might expect them to be very conservative about venturing anything that looks too good to be true. They might eventually undertake such risks, but only when they're thoroughly sure of how much it is by our standards. Imagine a language with fifty words for risk, an apparent obsession with it.
Again, I would expect this to put them at a disadvantage tech-wise. If they're roughly human-abled, I don't see them getting far past agriculture and ironworking and bartering. They'd look at even the idea of currency and get the hives.
Currency could work. The original "currency" was little bars of metal stamped with a seal by the government treasury as a guarantee of purity. I.e., we, the government, guarantee that this actually is the proclaimed weight of gold of the proclaimed purity. So that was just a standard token for barter. (How much it's worth depends partially on how much you trust the government.)
More problematic are the earliest contracts, where you had a ball of clay with clay figures of what you promised to deliver. To read that contract you had to break it open, but then you didn't have the contract (the ball of dried clay with the relevant seals impressed on the outside). Solving that was one of the things that lead to writing. (On the outside of the ball you sketch drawings of what is inside it.) But, IIUC, there were other paths that also lead to writing. Still, it might considerably slow down the development of writing.
OTOH, it might have stopped the original development of language. Even among animals there is "deceptive communication", and language amplifies the potential for that. So if the trust is sufficiently low, language probably will never develop.
For currency, that "trust the government" thing is exactly what I'm looking at. It could very well be the case that our typical low-trust ET sees currency as "free trade token" for that very reason, and is very averse to accepting such things, and even more averse to amassing them. Their instinct is going to be to trade them away ASAP for actual stuff, and since the whole race feels this way, we could expect a very low total currency supply.
The next question would be whether we would see amassed real goods. Some things store better than others, and since I imagine this ET to put high value on reliability, we could imagine those goods being de facto currency.
My instinct says language as a wash. Deceptive communication would certainly be an issue, but it's probably an issue even when they're just grunting at each other. The only time it isn't is when it's impossible because they're too dull to attempt trickery, and this only happens if these beings aren't intelligent in the first place, which I'm assuming already in evidence.
Overall, I see low-trust as still some-trust; it'd just take longer to build up past the ingrained aversion to risk. We might see contracts, banks, and even fractional reserve banking; they'd just take a lot longer than for apes.
The original currency I mentioned was basically a lump of gold with a government seal saying "this is this weight of pure gold". If you didn't trust them, you could analyze it yourself. Some people did. (Not many. The analysis was difficult with the tools available, and once you did it, while you had the gold, you no longer had the official government stamp, so you had a hard time trading it. Of course, if what you wanted was to make jewelry out of it, that wasn't a problem. But if you wanted to trade it...well, lots of people were more willing to trust the government than someone they didn't really know that well.
IOW, this worked *because* people didn't trust lumps that looked like gold to actually be gold. They figured the government was more trustworthy than some random trader.
Governments can create some demand for their currency by requiring taxes to be paid in that currency. Then you don't want to instantly trade away all of your currency because you'll need some to pay your taxes.
"Free" only means no money is exchanged. Banks would indeed have a fractional reserve, though if it is bad for things to be free then they may well have to pay more money in interest for keeping money for people. They get more benefit from keeping the money than it costs for keeping it safely.
Would people have to pay a subscription for Google? Wikipedia? Would people actually put a proper value on their data and charge companies for collecting it?
> They assume they'll pay a little for holding their money safely.
Does a fee for storing your money suffice to meet the conditions of your culture? In a lot of cases you actually do pay a fee for a bank account, which is independent from you getting an interest rate.
Last week's episode of Hi-Phi Nation featured a group of workers trying to audit the black box algorithm that paid them, and this week's, to be released Tuesday, features two effective altruists and two critics trying to convince an ordinary person, who has money annually to give, to give their money in the right ways, (public health? longtermism? local? other?). https://hiphination.org/season-6-episodes/
SF writer and scientist Arthur C Clarke remarked that it would likely be several centuries before manned starships were launched on interstellar voyages, long after mankind was merrily scooting round the Solar System.
The reason he gave was simple and plausible: There's little point in starting a voyage in a craft that can reach, say, 0.5c when a few years later ships will be available which can reach 0.75c and thus be able to zip past the first ship en route! So his argument was that a technological "plateau" would need to be reached, where no significant speed improvements were anticipated, before it made sense to bother.
One could make a couple of counter-arguments, such as that maybe the supposed plateau would be reached rapidly by a suitable design, or there was some pressing need to start an interstellar voyage even if its speed was not optimal.
As for the design of a high-speed interstellar spaceship, I suspect the most challenging aspect won't be life support systems, or the rocket engine. It will be the cow catcher at the front! When travelling at almost light speed, even a grain of dust would have the kinetic energy of a nuclear bomb.
It seems to me there are two extremes of cow catcher design, one being a gossamer thin sacrificial web being constantly repaired by robots scuttling around on it, and at the opposite extreme a large flaming ball which can absorb small or even larger objects in its path.
So if advanced aliens are embarked on intersellar voyages, and they opt for the second cow catcher solution, I would expect a sign of their presence to be a large fast moving hot object, perhaps even a red dwarf star. They would have to be content with relatively slow progress between solar systems, tucked up asleep in their cryogenic chambers for centuries (which, if intelligent aliens exist, is perhaps why we don't hear any of their radio chatter!)
As luck would have it, a candidate star, called Scholz's star, was discovered not long ago. About 70,000 years ago it came within a light year of the Solar System and, travelling fast since then, is now around 22 light years distant:
Stars can be accelerated to high speeds by natural processes, so Scholz's star is unlikely to be an alien artifact. It also has a smaller brown dwarf companion, although whether that makes it more or less likely to be part of a travelling ensemble for nomadic aliens is hard to say. But it's fun to speculate!
Related: "The Effects of Moore's Law and Slacking on Large Computations" (https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9912202). It's the same basic idea - for sufficiently large computations, it is better to "slack off" and run the computation on a faster computer at a later time T+1 than it is to start running the computation right now at time T.
Of course, this paper is from 1999. Moore's Law is breaking down, and the model they employ (where there is a large capital cost to buying a new, faster computer part-way through the computation) is not so applicable in the age of cloud computing.
The third "cow catcher" design is a UV laser and/or electron gun that will charge any dust particle in its path, and a magnetic field to shove charged particles around the ship. That's the most elegant and probably the most efficient, and I'm not sure how you are going to detect it.
The waste heat from the engines, will be detectable the old-fashioned way and across interstellar distances.
In my opinion, the mistake in his assumption is that he was thinking of space ships as a means of travel rather than as a place to live. It's going to take long enough to get to whatever destination is picked, that when they get there nobody is going to want to land. They'll mine resources, but even on Earth very few people move from the city into a wilderness area, and any other planet is guaranteed to be a lot less friendly than Earth. So speed is not a problem. Safety, stability, internet connections, things like that are problems. I expect interstellar travel to be driven by political or religious disagreements. OTOH, it won't happen until people are living comfortably in space habitats. So his timing could be right. (It would also help a LOT if controlled fusion were the normal power source.)
P.S.: You don't *want* to move too fast, because you want to mine resources you encounter along the way, so you need to be moving at fairly close to the same speed (though not exactly the same speed, because you want to have a flow of new resources).
This. It's not like getting on a cruise liner (or a sailing ship to the Americas in the Early Modern Era). More likely a group of people who head for the stars will already be part of a mostly self-sufficient space community, and quite possibly one that was already remote from the center of human civilization. The ship itself is the community - the destination solar system is just a better place to put it.
That said, it is possible that you could get starships treated more as a conveyance than a habitat if you have dense societies on both ends of a trip. That's when you could have stuff like solar- or fusion-powered laser platforms designed to clear out pathways of interstellar dust and accelerate starships up to a high fraction of light speed.
For starships to be more conveyance than habitat, you need FTL drives. Otherwise even Alpha Centauri is too far away. And calculate the energy requirements for the fast traverse. Fusion power wouldn't suffice, you'd need at least matter/anti-matter power.
SF is full of handwavium. That's sort of fair, it *IS* fiction. But when you start trying to turn it into reality, a lot of the pieces don't work as described. Nobody *actually* wrote "hard science fiction" according to the official John W. Campbell, Jr. definition. Hal Clement occasionally came reasonably close...but not often, and nobody else seriously tried. They made *pieces* of their stories accurate, but nobody restricted themselves to one beyond-the-state-of-the-art invention or fact. I really enjoy it, but don't trust their energy required calculations, because just about everybody gets them wrong. (Getting them right would seriously interfere with most story plots.)
Note that there are various tricks in physics that let you get around much of this, but they tend to have requirements like a starship weight more than Jupiter, but with much of the mass compressed down to nearly neutronium. The only exception that I can think of is Forward's "negative mass star drive", (was it in "Timemaster"?). And he didn't really specify how the starships were powered, just why the special unobtainium he picked would work so nicely.
You can get pretty decent speeds below light speed with laser-pushed spacecraft, which also has the advantage of being external propulsion for the ship instead of mass that you have to carry. A trip at 0.7 c from Earth to Alpha Centauri is less than ten years in transit. You wouldn't go that fast for the the first Starship you send to a destination, since it has to carry the internal fuel to slow down at the destination. But successor starships could be acelerated and decelerated between star systems by such means.
I think it's also pretty likely that by the time we're sending out starships, we'll have access to some pretty radical life extension or even medical immortality. A long starship flight will just be accepted as part of interstellar travel, like how folks in the Age of Sail accepted that a trip across the Atlantic could take months.
> since it has to carry the internal fuel to slow down at the destination
I forget who it was who suggested it, maybe the late Dr Robert L Forward (of Dragon's Egg fame, among several other SF novels he wrote). But laser pushing can also be used to slow the spacecraft, at least partially, as it approaches its destination.
The trick is to turn the ship round and then deploy a coaxial annular mirror larger than the ship which which reflects the laser light back to the mirror on the ship, somewhat analogous to a reflecting telescope. That way the ship slows, although the annular mirror of course continues to accelerate.
That's tricky. You can bet pretty decent speeds, but the beam tends to spread. It has the advantage/disadvantage that it's likely to burn up any non-reflective stuff in your path, though, and to shove the reflective stuff away. (And there are tricks to use that same laser to slow down at the end of the trip. But it takes a hellacious amount of energy, and you've got to depend on the guy running the beam to *keep* running the beam. 10 years is 2 1/2 presidential elections (and I don't believe you'd actually get that fast).
That's a reasonable way to launch a probe. it's not a reasonable way to launch a colonizing expedition that going to need to terraform any planets it wants to colonize. It you really don't want to live in space, wait until the terraforming has been done, or at least is wall underway. If you do want to live in a space habitat, what's the hurry. Better to go more slowly and have a more livable trip. And not plan on stopping permanently.
Note that even 10 years is a long enough time that people will either get comfortable with the ship, or mutiny. I suppose you could run it like a prison, but I don't find that an attractive option. Much better to have a more comfortable ship, with enough amenities that people can like living there. By the time they get to Alpha Centauri they'll be overgrowing the ship, so it's time to build a habitat out of local materials. And I bet the one they decide to build will also be mobile. (The planet won't be livable outside of a dome for multiple generations, so why not live in space?)
I'm not sure the timing of interstellar voyages would work that way. The whole project isn't very useful in any normal sense whether you're going 0.5 or 0.75 c. It's more likely to happen as the result of a charismatic leader pumping it, a religious movement, a societal schism, or some other black swan social event than because everyone got together and soberly considered the state of propulsion technology.
On a smaller scale, I've grown skeptical of the benefit of going to Mars or something similar, apart from just saying we did it. I think I read the anti-Mars post that was going around recently and found myself nodding my head, although I can't find it now. Is there any particularly solid utilitarian reason for a Mars trip?
I'd expect the first Martian city to grow out of a Martian research base, like if Antarctica actually allowed people to permanently settle there. You might also get people who want to try an experimental community in a far removed location, like how 19th century America had all kinds of folks trying out self-sufficient utopian communities out west (most of which failed unfortunately).
There was never any utilitarian reason to look for an Atlantic passage to the Indies either. All rational people knew, correctly, that the circumference of the Earth was so large that no shortcut would be found.
You could try to spin some sort of utility math that would say, “Past explorations into unlikely places have yielded absolutely massive unforeseen benefits that changed the whole world,” but from a strictly rational view, there’s no reason to expect that. It could be equally likely to be disastrous or simply not worthwhile, which would lean against doing it because of the large expenditure of resources more optimally spent on building better mousetraps on Earth.
Or you could say it’s important to colonize other planets to prevent extinction-level disasters from destroying human life. But that too is thin. Life on other planets is likely to be very difficult and very fragile (as Kim Stanley Robinson repeatedly points out), and the enormous expenditure of Earth’s resources to shepherd a tiny colony that will likely fail is a waste compared to using those resources to eliminate existential threats to Earth.
No, the argument to colonize other planets is simply irrational in a utilitarian sense. Which is yet another reason it’s generally a poor idea to embrace utilitarianism!
That's not quite true. As others have pointed out, a faster passage to sources of spices and luxury goods was very valuable. On top of that, there was the possibility of new lands to conquer and settle - Columbus seems to have alternated between both of those in his pitches to various folks in the Spanish Court before he got his ships.
And once they did get their ocean-going routes to riches in the Americas and Far East, they were so lucrative that they paid for all the hazard and danger of ocean-going trade. Vasco Da Gama was an absolute mismanaged disaster, and yet they still turned a 100+% profit.
As I said in my answer, the critics of the time correctly pointed out that Columbus had massively undercalculated the circumference of the Earth, and that therefore an Atlantic passage to the East would not be a shortcut. And they were correct. Columbus only thought it would be because he thought the Earth was much smaller than it is.
It was sheer luck that he encountered an entire continent which nobody had reason to suspect was there rather than dying of thirst in a massive trackless ocean.
This argument does not apply to voyages which were made with foreknowledge of the existence of what would later be called the Americas.
I think it’s generally a good idea for individuals to embrace utilitarianism. But utilitarianism says that for groups, it’s good if there’s some variation in people’s beliefs and desires so that some of them try out things that don’t seem worth trying, but are worth sacrificing a small amount of resources on the off chance they pay off.
A rational society contains irrational members, and a society whose individuals all have the perfectly rational beliefs will behave less effectively (and thus perhaps be less rational) than a society that contains members who are irrational in various ways.
I sympathize with your attempt, but it strikes me that what you’ve done here is smuggle in traditional values of courage and risk-taking against evidence by the back door. You can’t actually justify this unless you assign an arbitrarily high utility (as yet unjustified) to the edge-case payoffs of non-utility-maximizing defectors from the utilitarian society. I’m afraid this looks a lot like you’re two-timing utilitarianism with the heroic ethic. What is utility maximization that can be and is rationalized into not actually maximizing utility just in case you get trapped in a local maximum, when you have no reason to believe that maximum is local, and all the evidence is against it being local? When do we drop the fiction that we’re actually doing utilitarianism?
> when you have no reason to believe that maximum is local, and all the evidence is against it being local?
The fact that it's virtually impossible to know when you're in this situation is Kenny's point. Utilitarian calculations are and always will be approximations made in partial ignorance.
Sure—and unless you can empirically justify wasting resources on non-optimal behavior with total unknowns, you’re de facto operating under a non-utilitarian calculus.
I’m not smuggling in a value of courage or anything. I assume the only value is how good an outcome results. It’s consequentialist for sure, whether or not it’s utilitarian.
I’ll accept consequentialist—virtually anything can be consequentialist if you’re creative enough—but my original point was that you can’t justify it from a utilitarian standpoint, so point made I guess.
Is that because you think if all members are rational that they will get trapped in local minima or suboptimal equilibria and occasional irrationality is like simulated annealing--it allows the possibility of "jumping" out?
It's more that optimality for an individual is not the same as optimality for the group. It's like a Prisoner's Dilemma situation. Everyone can "defect" and just go along with whatever belief is best supported by the evidence. But they can "cooperate" by believing something that deviates from this best supported belief in a random way. It's best for society if enough people "cooperate" in this way, so that there is good exploration of the space of possible answers, even though it's bad for any individual to be one of those people who believes something that goes against the evidence (90% of them starve to death at sea, even if 10% of them discover the Americas - those odds are great for the group, but bad for the individual).
There is probably something about this that is related to breaking out of local optima, except here it's optima at different levels (individual rather than group) rather than local optima vs global optima for the group.
We might be saying the same thing, or close to it. I mean, a PD is a Nash equilibrium (as you know), and we get failure there by everyone acting rationally. We might get trapped in epistemic versions of this too, and need occasional “irrational” actors to break out. A physicist buddy of mine says that physics conferences allow a few nutty presenters on the grounds that sometimes the nuts are right.
> There was never any utilitarian reason to look for an Atlantic passage to the Indies either.
Not so. There was a lot of money to be made with a faster trade route.
> All rational people knew, correctly, that the circumference of the Earth was so large that no shortcut would be found.
Columbus didn't know that. There were a lot of different estimates for the size of the earth, and Columbus had what appeared to be an authoritative book indicating that it was small enough.
Of course there was money to be made. If there was a shorter passage, which was correctly known to be impossible.
Columbus only succeeded because he decided on his expedition against the best evidence and against the best arguments, which were—evaluated without the knowledge of how his expedition turned out—correct. Columbus was wrong and his expedition was doomed and impractical, just like missions to colonize Mars. From which we should extract a lesson, rather than using our post facto knowledge to call Columbus the true rationalist and utilitarian: he wasn’t.
Columbus made mistakes. He went against the consensus and, in hindsight, we know that the consensus was correct and that his survival was a fluke. But that doesn't automatically mean he was stupid or irrational. Maybe he was, I don't actually know, but maybe he understood that he was taking a big risk for the chance of a big payoff. Sometimes people do pull off things that others believe to be impossible.
I don’t believe he was irrational—this is a fine distinction. I believe he was neither a rationalist nor a utilitarian, which is why he (and others like him) are not swayed by the arguments which would tell us there’s not actually any payoff in sending wagon trains to Mars.
The difficulty here is that people want to push the values of rationalism and utilitarianism as if they can and must lead to every good outcome. They can’t: Columbus and his ilk ignore the good evidence and do things that have uncertain payoffs, maybe no payoff, in search of a wholly new paradigm. This is not something a dedicated rationalist and utilitarian can do, not without stretching their principles beyond the breaking point.
My personal belief is that sometimes the correct, evidence-backed, rationalist plan that maximizes utility is for pencil-necked bookkeepers, and that sometimes you’ve just got to point a ship at the horizon, because that’s the courageous thing to do.
Even today there is considerable interest in a Northwest Passage for purposes of trade between Europe and Asia-- certainly this was a thing long after the distances involved were fully understood.
If there had been nothing there but empty ocean, Columbus would have died due to lack of supplies, but it seems like the trade route that Franklin died trying to find would be even better without all the inconvenient islands/ice sheets?
I thought Columbus made two separate mistakes - one was relying on the largest estimate for how big the distance east from Spain to Japan was, and the other was relying on the smallest estimate for the circumference of the earth. Any one of those would not have been enough to make it seem plausible.
That's my understanding as well. There's also an intriguing theory that it isn't a coincidence that those mistakes combined with the unexpected existence of the Americas to produce a pretty-close to correct estimate of the width of the Atlantic.
There's a some evidence that a few English and Basque deep-ocean fishing expeditions had found the Grand Banks fisheries some decades before Columbus's expedition and may have made landfall in Newfoundland to dry their catches. Columbus probably visited the English fishing port of Bristol in 1476, and if he'd heard rumors of this and assumed the land they're talking about was an outlying island of Asia, then that implies the Atlantic to be ~2000 nmi wide at the latitude of Bristol. Or about 2700 nmi at the latitude of the Canaries assuming that "Japan" is the same longitude away from the Canaries as Bristol is from Newfoundland. Columbus's actual estimate based on his interpretation of cherry-picked sources was about 2400 nmi, which makes some allowances for the Canaries being further west than Bristol. The actual distance from the Canaries to where Columbus is thought to have made first landfall on his first voyage was more like 3000 nmi.
You don't need Grand Banks fishermen for this hypothetical. The Norse were running timber-harvesting voyages to North America into the fifteenth century, mostly from Greenland but with some Icelandic traffic. And Columbus visited Iceland in 1477 - probably after the last Norse voyage to North America, but possibly within living memory and certainly within oral history.
Species continuity is a good reason for any person to want *other* people to go out and colonize the stars, but it doesn't actually work for any person to themselves say "for this reason, I personally volunteer for the mission". Any attempt at interstellar colonization is far more likely to result in the deaths of all concerned than the bit where the people back home try to avoid extinction-level catastrophes. With enough starships, the probability of species continuity is enhanced, but that requires many many volunteers so one more at the margin makes little difference, and being one of the volunteers greatly reduces your personal potential for enjoying the continuity of the species.
So unless you're willing to basically force people to go forth and multiply when they'd rather stay home and watch TV, you're going to need another motive.
"We fucked up the homeworld so badly that gigadeath catastrophe is clearly inevitable, but if you want we can put you on a starship so that you can take your chances Out There", might do. But it means waiting until the last minute, or maybe well past the last minute.
"Me and my friends are seriously dissatisfied with the so-called utopia you all have built here, and we're rich enough to afford our own starship", is probably better.
There's enough very weird humans that I'm sure you could fairly easily find more than enough volunteers, even after filtering out the dangerous kinds of crazy. I expect you'd get a lot of the same sort of people who like base jumping and skydiving, and perhaps that would do interesting things to the gene pool, but you could definitely fill a half-dozen generation ships if you're not also requiring everyone to be a super-qualified astronaut.
You're very likely to get religious communities interested, as with the Puritans. Also people who like pioneering, rugged living, or just testing themselves. Not to mention a pretty strong vanguard of people like those who join the armed forces to do things like "protect our way of life" or whatever.
Are weird humans considered rational? If so, what's the model for them? Do they just have special information, or is it rather that all the motivations that would keep non-weird people on the surface don't apply to them for various reasons?
I think you've got the wrong catastrophe, but the point is still excellent. There are events that can happen where the only safety is not being there. Being in the target area of a forming black hole is one. That could wipe out not only all life in the solar system, but also nearby systems. They're quite infrequent, of course, but you only need one, and it doesn't need to be all that close. IIUC 1000 light years would be close enough if you were aligned with it's axis of rotation. And there are others. Some would only take out the solar system, some would take out a chunk of space around it, some we could see coming, some we couldn't. (FWIW, I'm not aware of any current prospects. I believe that Betelgeuse has an axis of rotation pointed in the wrong direction to be dangerous. But it's close enough to be dangerous if we were aligned with the axis of rotation, and it's going to collapse any century now.)
Earth after a super volcano is still more hospitable than Mars. For species continuity it might make more sense to have really deep underground or underwater colonies on Earth. But then maybe going to Mars is a (very very roundabout) way of developing that tech.
I think it’s very hard to come up with a disaster that makes all of Earth less livable than Mars but doesn’t hit Mars. Things like pandemic or nuclear war would surely hit Mars too. Things like suoervolcano or most meteorites often leave Earth more livable than Mars. A big enough meteorite that destroys Earth probably sends large pieces hitting Mars. A rogue gamma ray burst probably takes out the whole solar system.
You need a very precisely tuned disaster to take out Earth but not Mars.
But maybe Mars is a useful test colony before you establish one in another star system, that really is more independent, and far enough to have independent plagues and nuclear war.
You are right that very few things would make Earth less habitable than Mars, but there are definitely disasters that would make earth only somewhat more livable and wouldn't give society enough time to adapt. So unless we are going to start living like the earth isn't habitable ahead of time, it won't help very much. More livable than mars is still bad enough to kill everyone if they aren't prepped ahead of time.
IIUC the dinosaur killer didn't have much effect on Mars. There were probably fragments that got that far, but not many and not massive. (OTOH, it would have been a lot less destructive if it had hit in really deep ocean or on a continental surface. [Well, at least if it had hit in the middle of a continent. I'm not really sure about "deep ocean".])
A third type of cow catcher could be something that targets incoming particles, perhaps with lasers, and deflects them so they don't hit the ship. Combine that with an ablative shield constantly repaired, to account for the particles too small to target.
I had a sort of strange thought the other day that I’d like to share. From a conscious being’s perspective (at least as far as we’re aware, and depending on your religious views), the universe consists entirely of the experience of information processing that occurs within the creature’s brain, and nothing more. So for a conscious creature such as myself, effectively, the entire universe begins when my brain first becomes active and ends when my brain ceases to function.
I know this seems obvious, but it occurred to me that this line of thought provides an interesting perspective on events with mass suffering, such as wars, natural disasters, etc. We tend to rate these events in terms of the total amount of “badness” (1 million people died/were injure/experienced pain/etc.) which is a useful metric in many ways, such as measuring global/local impact. And when phrased as total numbers, the amount of suffering sounds incomprehensively, terrifyingly huge. But there is no actual process in the universe that adds up all the suffering of 1 million people and arrives at 10,000,000,000 total pain units. Really, it’s more like 1 million individual disconnected universes which each experience 10,000 pain units. So in a certain sense, in terms of suffering actually _experienced,_ it makes more sense to look at the max suffering across individuals rather than the total sum.
In a strange way I find this oddly… comforting. It makes me rather sad to think about all the animal suffering that has occurred over the last few billion years. But it’s only depressing because I’m aware of the bigger picture. In the universe of any individual animal, the suffering, while still no doubt awful, has a limit.
I would imagine this idea has been thought of plenty and probably had a name, but I’m not all that well versed in philosophy.
I suppose this changes somewhat if you believe in reincarnation though.
Yes, this is a classic, you've basically rediscovered the first person perspective. You can take this into many directions.
In the Western philosophical tradition, the dumb take on this is called solipsism, i.e the basic idea that I cannot be sure anything but me actually exists. This is generally regarded as a dead end, or a failure mode of philosophy, and the standard "refutation" for it is to kick a rock.
Still in the West, there is a long line of thinkers taking this as a starting point to reflect that we can't be sure that anything else but *consciousness* exists, but still allowing for multiple inviduations of this consciousness to float around, so physical reality is kind of like a shared dream. This kind of thinking is usually called idealism, and it goes way back, with plenty of discussions around about how much of an idealist really Plato was. A whole bunch of Germans had a ball with this in the 19th century, and it's currently slightly in vogue to reclaim them, as a bit of a backlash from the scientism/positivism that followed. Check out Douglas Harding's "headless way" for a cool take on this.
Still in the West again, another bunch of thinkers decided that the first person perspective was worth reflecting about, but instead of denying physical reality, they might as well just be agnostic about it, or leave it out of the scope of their discipline. The result was called phenomenology, and it's famously quite abstruse but massively insightful. As far as I know it's the closest philosophy has come to being psychologically informed, which is a huge gap.
In Asia, at least the Indians had a good run with these ideas; much of Buddhism shares quite a bit of a phenomenalistic bend if you don't mind the anachronism, and some strands of Hinduism are unashamedly idealistic, with plenty of discussions and overlap between them.
If you take all of this, and remix it along with a bit of therapy culture and hippy-age experimentation, you might land anywhere from Gestalt therapy to mindfulness.
As you noticed, the first person perspective and utilitarianism don't mix very well. My take is that utilitarianism is broken at the psychological root, because there is no single additively linear property of one's experience that encapsulates "how good is this". Things can be pleasurable and painful in different ways at the same time; more pleasure of a kind now can bring more suffering of another kind later; and different kinds of fulfillment often cannot substitute for each other. Plus, no-one else but the affected individual can arbitrate how good or bad something was, and these valuations can change quite validly years after the fact.
Talking of solipsism: there’s an ancient professor of philosophy in Cambridge or Oxford, who is a solipsist. He never married, and therefore has the privilege to live on the university grounds, where the apartments are adequate for a single man, but not a family.
He gets lots of visitors. Everybody is keen to take care of him, and keep him well fed in the best of spirits and health because after all, if he is right, it’s curtains for us all when he passes.
I came to solipsism early. At age 6 I wondered if I was in fact the only person in the world. How could I prove otherwise. At age 6 and 1/2 I realised my world was too humdrum and dull for me to be the only one in it.
My way of thinking of utilitarianism isn’t that the sum itself is the thing that is good or bad. Rather, I think each individual is the site of good or bad. If you think that it’s worth it to take on a bit of bad to ensure that someone else’s bad is reduced by a certain amount, then we can express that equivalently by trying to minimize the sum of those two bads (with the relevant conversion factor), but the sum is just a mathematical convenience, not the real thing we care about, which is each of the two individuals.
You might be interested in the following from C.S. Lewis, who makes almost the same observation in The Problem of Pain (ch 7):
"We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the 'unimaginable sum of human misery'. Suppose that I have a toothache of intensity x, and suppose that you, who are seated beside me, also have a toothache of intensity x. You may, if you choose, say that the total amount of pain in the room is now 2x. But you must remember that no one is suffering 2x: search all time and space and you will not find that composite pain in anyone's consciousness. There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there ever can be in the universe. The addition of a million fellow-sufferers adds no more pain."
Does anyone really internalize this though? It seems in most cases we do care about the total sum of things rather than just the max. If a city in the US defaults on its loans, that's not great, but things will keep going. If every city defaults, we don't say, oh well, at least things aren't getting worse. Or to flip things around, since there's someone currently close to maxing out the amount of pleasure possible to experience, does that mean we already have the maximum amount of happiness possible in the universe? And does that justify me not calling my mom on Mother's Day since it won't push the happiness frontier?
To put it more viscerally, if I were to slap C.S. Lewis, would he accept "well I didn't increase the max suffering, so I haven't added any more pain to the universe" as a defense?
Lewis's topic here is a bit more narrow: he wants to deal with the question: "Why is there so much pain (=suffering of all kinds) in the universe?" His point is not that causing pain isn't bad so long as max(pain_suffered_by_individual) is not increased, but that sum(pain) isn't descriptive of anyone's experience, and it quickly becomes incoherent to try to reason about it as if it were.
(Did you have a good reason to slap him? If so, he might agree that it was a good thing, despite the pain. But if not, it's not bad because sum(pain) increased, but because pain increased for someone in particular. And also because slapping someone without a good reason is bad for you.)
"But there is no actual process in the universe that adds up all the suffering of 1 million people and arrives at 10,000,000,000 total pain units. Really, it’s more like 1 million individual disconnected universes which each experience 10,000 pain units. "
Yes, that's a problem with utilitarianism..the summation occurs in the map, not the territory.
I wrote up a whole blog post about this (https://sniffnoy.dreamwidth.org/572565.html) which you should go read (or go read the original papers), but to summarize my summary--
The generally-out-there idea of the history of the word "planet" is something like this: Originally, any astronomical bodies that moved relative to the fixed stars were planets -- so, the sun and the moon were planets, but the Earth was not. Then, with the advent of heliocentrism, it came to be understood that the Earth is a planet; but the sun and the moon are not (since the moon orbits the Earth). Eventually more planets were discovered beyond the classical ones. Curiously, 4 of these planets shared approximately the same orbit between Mars and Jupiter. Eventually so many more new planets were found inbetween Mars and Jupiter that it became clear that these bodies didn't belong with the planets, and so they were reclassified as asteroids. More recently, it became clear that Pluto, which had been considered a planet, is actually just one member of the Kuiper Belt, much as Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta had turned out to just be four members of the asteroid belt; and so it became clear that Pluto shouldn't be considered a planet either, as was famously ratified in 2006 by a vote of the International Astronomical Union.
There's an assumption smuggled into the above story -- that it is generally agreed that the word "planet" must refer to something that there aren't too many of, and that if the number of planets gets too large, then the word isn't fulfilling its purpose. This assumption is core to the 2006 IAU vote -- we can't include Pluto as a planet, because then we'd have to include too much else for consistency. The problem here is that *this is not the actual history of the word "planet"*, and that in fact, moons -- including *the* Moon -- were considered planets up until the 1920s, and asteroids were considered planets up until the 1950s. Not the 1850s, the 1950s! There absolutely was a time when astronomers would have told you that there are over a thousand planets!
Well, that's how *astronomers* used the word -- the public used it differently, restricting it to the familiar major planets, excluding both asteroids and moons. And while the 1950s reclassification of asteroids from "planets" to "not planets" happened for a good scientific reason, the 1920s reclassification of moons seems to have been due to the folk "planet" concept partially overtaking the scientific "planet" concept. And why did the folk concept of "planet" exclude asteroids and moons, consisting of only a short list? Largely because of astrology and theology!
So if we go by this, it would appear that something went wrong here -- as if biologists had reverted to using "fish" to mean "anything that lives in the ocean". And then on top of that, we forgot all this happened, and retrojected into the past a false story whereby the "planet" category had always only been restricted to a few members, and asteroids had been excluded as soon as they got too numerous (which was true among the general public, but not among astronomers), and the Moon had gotten classified as "not a planet" as far back as the coming of heliocentric astronomy (it hadn't). And then all this got ratified in a vote of the IAU!
So, uh, huh, that's something. Reading these definitely changed my mind as that (my previous reaction to the IAU vote had always been, yeah, that makes sense). Anyway go read my linked post for my full summary of this, or go the original papers, but they're much longer. :P
There is just stuff orbiting in a big continuum, and trying to group it into planets/moons/asteroids/whatever and thinking it is going to be totally clear distinct definitions is silly and misunderstands how natural kinds generally work.
Biologists do have the term “marine animal”. There’s something historically contingent about how terms get fixed - we decided that two separate minerals (jadeite and nephrite) both count as “jade”, while we decided that iron pyrite was “fool’s gold”. But we end up with some term for any internally useful concept, and retain terms for some phenomena that appear unified even if they aren’t.
I was going to disagree with you on asteroids be considered planet until the 50s, using a source from an article in Asimov on Astronomy published in July 1960, but you're right and I'm wrong. Asimov's exact quote is that Ceres "turned out to be only the first of many hundreds of tiny planets ("planetoids") discovered in the region between Mars and Jupiter in the years since."
Originally, in Ancient Greek, the word "planet" had negative connotations: πλᾰνήτης (planḗtēs) meant tramp, wanderer, hobo, vagrant (it also had a medical meaning: a dangerous fever that comes in irregular fits). For the Greeks a proper person had a home, belonged to a polis etc, and somebody who didn't, who wandered around or was homeless or who went from city to city, was deplorable, perhaps dangerous. [There's much of this prejudice about homeless people nowadays, of course]. This gets applied to astronomy because most of what we see, in the night sky, is regular and predictable: almost all the stars rotate on a predictable pattern. But early astronomers saw that some stars wobbled and strayed from the "perfect" paths of the majorityand these were called vagrants. By this logic the moon is not a planet, because its phases and movements are all perfectly regular and predictable; but Pluto *is* a planet (though the Ancient Greeks weren't aware Pluto even existed) because it wanders through the sky.
> By this logic the moon is not a planet, because its phases and movements are all perfectly regular and predictable; but Pluto is a planet (though the Ancient Greeks weren't aware Pluto even existed) because it wanders through the sky.
It's not predictable vs. unpredictable; they're all predictable. It's that the "fixed" stars (everything outside of our solar system) don't appear to move at all relative to one another.
Hmm... Sedna has a period of 11,400 years, so about 100 arcsec/year while Barnard's star has a proper motion of 10.4 arcsec/year, so I guess even Barnard's star is "fixed" compared to even Sedna, by about a factor of ten...
True! And if we find an Oort cloud object at 3000AU some day, with less proper motion than Barnard's star, it will be even more naked-eye-invisible than the two objects I mentioned...
I think it's useful to have both categories, one for what laypeople call planets, and one for these other bodies. You could have called all those bodies "planets", and used a different word for the sub-category of bodies which are very large, not too numerous, and orbit the sun. That the word planet was selected for those and not some other word is not that consequential, no?
Oh, yeah, the thing the IAU decided to call "planets" is obviously still a useful and important category -- something like "major planet" would be a good term IMO. But using just "planet", and separating it from dwarf planets and moons, is awkward, because bodies can get kicked out of their orbits, captured into new ones, etc; not to mention that it doesn't fit well with e.g. exoplanets where we just can't really know these things.
(Naturally both my post and the original papers say more about this. :P )
I have a weird question. Why do pornographic films have plots? I mean, why don't they jump straight to the sex part, but instead have a brief part where the characters are clothed and decide to have sex, with some very lame excuse. I wouldn't really say it's foreplay, becaue it's so short and there isn't much mystery or teasing there, but it could be an issue of personal taste. Maybe it helps the viewer imagine that it could be them having sex with that very attractive person (usually that woman), because there's a reason? Maybe it's establishing some form of consent, which is important for some viewers' enjoyment?
It doesn't seem like an important question, but I have some feeling that it sheds a light on some mysterious aspect of our souls, and I don't know the answer (and haven't found good research on it). In general, I think research on the plots of pornographic films could come up with interesting insights.
> Why do pornographic films have plots? I mean, why don't they jump straight to the sex part, but instead have a brief part where the characters are clothed and decide to have sex, with some very lame excuse
Porn has a cerebral component as a fantasy, it's not just physical. There's a setting for certain dynamics between individuals, like dominant/submissive power dynamics, age play, cuckolding, swingers, etc. Why would porn bother with transgressing taboos if this had no effect on engagement?
A brief part where the characters are clothed allow the audience to see what they wear and intuit their personality and status from it. It helps make them people instead of just meat.
Sex isn't just about watching P in M/V, even for men. There is generally some scenario involved, and some amount of "chase" (even for just 30 seconds). In a world where people are looking for the highest stimulation, that is going to involve some plot.
Porn has moved away from plot as it has become mass produced and disposable, and it has been tik-tokified into shorter and shorter more clickable things.
I can only speak to personal preference, but for me the value of the plot is much as you suggested- it helps me imagine myself in the scenario. I particularly enjoy plots that involve some contextual justification for why the woman is interested in having sex with a man otherwise beneath her (which I'm aware probably reveals some depressing psychological truth about me). It helps me imagine this could be happening to me, in a way that I suppose I can't as easily without a plot if the woman is attractive enough.
A secondary reason, I think, is that it feels somewhat more real, and the actress feels more like a real person, if you get to see her having non-sexual human interaction first. You get to see more of her as a person. For this reason, I always enjoy the casting style videos, as you get to see the woman being interviewed first, and generally acting somewhat normally and as themselves- while also giving context to the situation and reminding you of the fact that they are having sex with just basically some random guy for material considerations, which makes it much easier to imagine yourself as that guy.
Plenty of porn has zero plot and just begins with the sex. But there’s also a good amount of porn that has just enough plot to establish that these two people are strangers, or are step-siblings, or that one of them is interviewing the other for a job, or that one is white collar and the other blue collar, or that one is a doctor and the other is a patient, or whatever it is that gets the power dynamic into your mind, because lots of people get turned on by one or another of these power dynamics.
Porn relies on constant novelty for appeal. After a while, the same old scenario is dull and boring because the consumer has watched it 100 times before. Incest is transgressive, and transgressive is sexy (forbidden fruit). Step-siblings makes it near enough to incest without technically being incest, so it avoids "ugh I wouldn't bang my sister" and gets the "yeah but if dad remarries and I have a hot teen step-sister I didn't' grow up with" benefits.
It allows the idea of being in close proximity to a sexy hot (legal) teen girl - you're both living in the same house, after all! - and scenarios where she could 'plausibly' be naked (she's in the shower, getting dressed, etc.) so that then leads on to the sexy times.
One theory I read not too long ago is that if it was marketed on the basis of them being young, they could get mixed up with underage porn, which is a big nono. Establishing them as "stepsiblings" means they are still living under the same roof, and thus implied to be young, without actually referring to their age. Going all the way to make them siblings would supposedly tick off the credit card companies that the producers require for payments. My own speculation is that the "step" angle means you don't have to bother with plausibly casting people who could be related, but then I don't know if that would hold for porn otherwise. Even sitcoms are at odds with genetics. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2017/12/family_pop_cult.html
Sex with siblings is transgressive, and transgression is hot. If you make the characters step-siblings you reduce the transgressiveness, and then people for whom the idea of sibling sex is *too* transgressive can get on board.
I suspect it's something like the college roommate or jail cellmate one - you're thrown into this new situation with this person you barely know, and then turns out you're hot for each other. Obviously, the fact that it's *so* much more common than those other two (even in gay porn - I guess straight porn has trouble setting up college roommate or prison cellmate scenarios) suggests that something about the taboo of being family (in a sense) is part of it too.
But I also get the sense that everything being step-family is a very new development in porn, perhaps even just in the past decade or so, which suggests that it's not related to the history of porn growing out of cinema.
Straight porn has no problem with college roommates, or gets around it with a "Friend's roommate" trick where the guy is friends with a girl and this girl has a roommate, that's so common in r/GoneWildAudio scripts for example.
I don't think consent figures that much into viewers' considerations.
Here's a tentative hypothesis : Pornographic plots are the bare minimum you can do and still call yourself a "film".
Porno evolved from ordinary (if risque) movies in the 1960s and the 1970s. So it started with plots and acting built right in, then gradually started to shed them like animals shed unnecessary organs over evolutionary time. This is somewhat evident in how much **better**, plot- and acting-wise, pronographic movies made in 1960s, 1970s, and the start of the 1980s are than modern ones. Modern day Porno has a vestigial amount of plot and acting that weighs or costs nearly nothing, so it stays as is with no further shedding. Why do humans have a small tail in our bone structure ? because we started with ordinary tails built in then gradually lost them as they were no longer unneeded, until we reached a stage where it's so small that it barely costs us anything and it's no longer necessary to keep losing it.
I don't know what is the evolutionary pressure that made Porno lose significant amounts of plot. I have never seen anyone say that they like porn with no plots, it's so fake and soulless. Perhaps it's because porn is seen as a low-status art that you see in the dark and never acknowledge in polite company, so the audience will not identify with it and will not form blocks to demand the writers and the producers do something good, so naturally the writers and the producers will path-of-least-effort themselves towards the absolute bare minimum of plot and acting. Combine that with the fact that porn with its low-status image naturally repels talented writers and actors who can make it in Hollywood or their country's equivalent (where they can have just as much sex and perviness), and I think you have a somewhat convincing explanation.
To put it concisely, porn sucks because the audience is too embarrassed to demand better.
This view predicts that porn not evolved from the traditional roots of the porn industry - Amateurs, OnlyFans, etc.... - will not bother with the plots, and indeed, that's what I see mostly happening. They jump right in, no pretenses.
It's probably because of people like me that don't enjoy porn unless there is plot. Watching porn without plot just feels like voyeurism, but if it has a good plot, I put myself in a fantasy where I am one of the participants, and that's how I enjoy myself.
I might be an outlier though. I pretty much quit watching American porn because of how scant their plots are and how bad their acting it, and instead primarily read Japanese Hentai Doujinshi, since they usually have much more developed plots, and acting is not necessary. I prefer porn with people instead of drawings, but the lackluster plot makes it unenjoyable. If we assume there is a spectrum, them there are probably plenty of people satisfied with American porn plot, and it doesn't cost much to film the extra opening, while people that don't care can just skip to the sex.
Because some people have fantasies about certain scenarios, and these scenarios need to be narrated or exposed somehow. Some men have fantasies about sleeping with their child, teacher, doctor, stranger, policeman etc... Some gay men are titillated by the idea of seducing a straight man. Many common fantasies from infidelity to something more niche like BDSM need or benefit from having a story.
Perhaps you just don't have any sexual fantasy that involves a specific situation?
My guess: Under Supreme Court precedent, a work cannot be legally obscene unless, taken as a whole, it lacks serious artistic, literary or scientific merit (Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973)) or, before Miller, it was "utterly without redeeming social importance",(Roth v, United States, 354 US 476 (1957)). Having a plot helps porno films clear those very low bars.
PS: I also am pretty sure that is why Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, included articles, interviews, etc. (Though Playboy and I think Penthouse did not include depictions of sex, which is also required for a work to be obscene, though I guess Penthouse might have had written descriptions of sex which satisfied that criterion)
1. I would be willing to bet that the US was by far the largest producer of porn, in the world in the 1970s and that most porn movies sold worldwide were produced in the US., and that US porn films were the model for the rest of the world.
2. What does obscenity law say in other countries? In the UK, under The Obscene Publications Act 1959, "If an article is held to be obscene, Section 4 of the act provides the defense of “public good.” This defense would be applicable if the article had any sort of political scientific or cultural or value, or contributed to the interests of art, theatre, literature and learning." Indian Penal Code sec 292 is similar: a work is not obscene if it "is in the interest of science, literature, art or learning or other objects of general concern," It is unsurprising that various countries reached similar solutions to the problem of distinguishing between works that are obscene and works which happen to depict sex.
3. "I am not a pornographer! I am an artist" is, I am sure, a universal defense (even if often made disingenuously), morally if not legally.
Modern action movies frequently have a credited screenwriter distinct from the director. The Oscars, wrongly in my view, even gave a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination to Top Gun: Maverick.
I suspect that most of the porn being watched nowadays is in fact of the straight-to-the-sex type as browsing pornhub would reveal. Still why did historically produced pornography have -admittedly minimal- plots is an interesting question
> I suspect that most of the porn being watched nowadays is in fact of the straight-to-the-sex type as browsing pornhub would reveal
Pornhub videos still have titles that provide settings and characters. I am 100% certain that people are guided by that alone to certain videos that appeal to their fantasies/kinks.
I suspect the preponderance of pornhub-style porn is because it is essentially free, and being free means cutting production values to the bare minimum. "Plot" requires writing, and it requires time and costumes and a plot beyond a bed. So it usually gets left out.
But when the effort involved in distributing a VHS tape of porn through the local adult bookstore or whatever was such that "meh, we can hire a cheap screenwriter out of pocket change, and we have to fill an hour of video with *something*", we got plot.
Why, is about as interesting a question as why "Star Wars" had all that boring stuff about Luke Skywalker on Tattoine instead of just 90 minutes of blaster fights, lightsaber battles, and space dogfighting. The audience wants to be part of the fantasy, which means a protagonist the audience can identify with and a credible-ish path from their identifiably ordinary life to the action. And to the extent that there are other people involved, making them recognizably *people*. It's OK for the Stormtroopers to be anonymous, so long as you've invested Vader with some character.
I think this discussion would be better served with data on how much of the runtime is plot. Even better if this were charted over time, to check Bi_Gates' claim about earlier decades.
Looking for feedback on a rough forecasting project idea that I’m hoping to flesh out for future grant rounds.
The basic idea: Community-run RCTs for supplements (and other things).
As y’all know, the evidence base for most supplements, nootropics, diets, and lifestyle interventions is incredibly weak because nobody has sufficient incentive to run rigorous RCTs if they can’t get a patent. In lieu of RCTs, everyone fights endlessly over low-quality, mostly observational data. Zembrin is a good example that Scott identified in the 2020 Nootropics survey - promising enough to justify an article on Lorien Psychiatry (https://lorienpsych.com/2020/12/08/kanna-zembrin/) and get 29 readers to preregister their usage, but still ultimately relying on “a tiny and unsatisfying handful of real studies.”
The aspiration would be to build an online community of self-experimenters to run RCTs on themselves, driven by their own personal research questions. Imagine everyone self-purchasing the supplement, getting a friend to blind them, taking a daily mood survey, and publishing results on arXiv.org where every “subject” is also a co-author. If we do a good job, we’ll make it to https://lorienpsych.com. If we do a great job, we’ll be in the next Cochrane Review.
I helped run a couple RCTs earlier in my career (behavioral interventions, not meds), so I know they’re hard, but I’ve always thought that a group of smart-curious-friends-on-the-internet could make it happen. And surely this would be the right corner of the internet to start.
Questions for you all:
1. Initial reactions 👎👍? Thoughts on how to improve this initial germ of an idea?
2. Would you personally be interested in participating in something like this? If yes, what studies/research Qs would you be most excited to answer for yourself?
3. Does something like this already exist? I’m familiar with the quantified self community, N-of-1 trials, the Cochrane Crowd…but what else?
there is a website called experiment.com that is a crowdfunding site specifically for scientific projects. Projects are vetted and must meet certain criteria to be accepted. This seems like a good place to organize and raise some small amount of funds (most projects are <$10K, but not all).
For this type of project, they would require an IRB, but you can write that cost into the project (for example using one of the private IRB companies).
"As y’all know, the evidence base for most supplements, nootropics, diets, and lifestyle interventions is incredibly weak because nobody has sufficient incentive to run rigorous RCTs if they can’t get a patent. In lieu of RCTs, everyone fights endlessly over low-quality, mostly observational data."
Probably gotta pay people. I'm not sure the extent to which regular clinical trials already do that, but I suspect you probably need to pay more. At least one benefit of participating in a trial now is you might get to take an experimental treatment you can't get access to otherwise. If you're trying to take something that doesn't require approval, and you think there's any chance it can help, why risk the chance you're getting placebo?
I'm very pro the idea that the FDA should allow trial substances be more widely accessible. However, would other agencies with more stringent policies take over as the "gold standard"?
For example, Japanese trials require a cohort of ethnically Japanese participants. If FDA regulations loosen, will drug registration become another point on the cold war?
I'm not sure what you mean. Wouldn't Japan continue requiring this, the US continue not requiring it, and drugmakers maybe not bother getting their drugs approved for the Japanese market if it isn't worth it?
Thanks for reply! I don't think I was being clear, I guess my question is, if other countries are using the US as the "strictest case" for drug development, e.g. if it passes FDA, then it's fine in other jurisdictions, then if loosened, that role as the gatekeeper is lost?
AFAIK most developed countries do not recognise approvals from foreign agencies (though it would be good if they did!)
The one sorta-exception I know of is the UK, which used to rely on the joint EU system. But when they decided to Brexit they said they would continue relying on the EU because spinning up a whole new independent drug approval agency was a headache they didn't need. But more recently they announced that they were going to keep this arrangement in place, and also expand it to recognise drug approvals in a wider range of countries - I don't believe they have said exactly which ones yet, but you'd imagine the US would be one.
So, if other countries were to follow the UK example and recognise drug approvals from other jurisdictions, I don't believe your hypothetical concern would be an issue - it is likely that the rule would be "If it gets approved in any of these countries it's good enough for us" rather than "if it gets approved by the single strictest of these other countries it's good enough for us"
But i was using japan gainst my point, that maybe more countries will follow that model and create further arbitrary requirements if they no longer follow US plans
Hi, I'm set to graduate in a STEM field very soon (I actually walk in just a few days).
For a long time I've been interested in the “FIRE” or Financial Independence, Retire Early concept, which basically boils down to the idea that if you're smart with your money, you can bow out of the market early and focus on more personally fulfilling things.
The main advice around those circles is relatively simple stuff like “max out 401k and IRA”, in order to avoid as many taxes as legally possible. However, as far as I can tell, these sorts of tax-advantaged accounts revolve around retirement ages, like 59 ½, in order to avoid penalties and to actually take advantage of the tax benefits they provide.
Here is the crux of the problem, and why I'm posting here instead of on a more FIRE-centric community: I don't expect to live to that age. If we assume AGI/ASI by 2050 (which seems like a relatively "pessimistic" date, a lot of forecasts put it even closer, which would only aggravate my concerns here), then I will never reach the age where tax-advantaged retirement accounts are feasible. Any money I put into them would be completely wasted. Either because I'll be too dead to use it, or because society would reconfigure in a drastic enough way that I can't imagine it would be at all useful.
What's the play here? Do I ignore this, max out retirement accounts like a normal person, on the chance that actually we're all wrong and if I don't do these things, I would be a fool who could have and should have been wiser with their money? Or do I avoid these kinds of age-gated systems, focus on brokerage accounts, and optimize for an expected lifespan of possibly 40 to 45 years?
I suppose I actually have two questions: what is the best thing to do with retirement accounts in this situation specifically, and also how do I plan for retirement in general in a world I think has a fairly decent chance of being imminently terminal.
Any advice on this topic would be greatly appreciated, even if it's to tell me that I'm really dumb and misunderstanding something fundamental.
One still greatly benefits from having a good ‘normal’ life, with a good ‘normal’ future.
Some of the reasons:
A ‘normal’ future could still happen.
It is psychologically very important to you today that if a ‘normal’ future does happen, that you are ready for it on a personal level.
The future happens far sooner than you think. Returns to normality accrue quickly. As does the price for burning candles at both ends.
Living like there is no (normal) tomorrow rapidly loses its luster. It can be fun for a day, perhaps a week or even a month. Years, not so much.
If you are not ready for a normal future, this fact will stress you out.
It will constrain your behavior if problems start to loom on that horizon.
It is important for those who love you, that you are ready for it on a personal level.
It is important for those evaluating or interacting with you, on a professional level.
You will lose your ability to relate to people and the world if you don’t do this.
It will become difficult to admit you made a mistake, if the consequences of doing so seem too dire.
More generally, on a personal level: There are not good ways to sacrifice quite a lot of utility in the normal case, and in exchange get good experiential value in unusual cases. Moving consumption forward, taking on debt or other long term problems and other tactics like that can be useful on the margin but suffer rapidly decreasing marginal returns. Even the most extreme timeline expectations I have seen – where high probability is assigned to doom within the decade – are long enough for this to catch up to you.
"Either because I'll be too dead to use it, or because society would reconfigure in a drastic enough way that I can't imagine it would be at all useful."
The Industrial Revolution drastically reconfigured society. Did that mean money was no longer important? No.
The computer revolution drastically reconfigured society. Did the pensions of everyone who worked before the computer age suddenly become useless? Not in the slightest.
After AGI is invented, scarcity will still exist. That means stores of value and mediums of exchange will still be important. You don't want to be caught with nothing to your name, *especially* if AGI destabilizes existing social safety nets like governments and charities.
I've read plenty of arguments that AI would be very different than your examples. However, I've also read enough economists yelling at those arguments, so I'll just leave it to people braver than me.
In general though, I think a good sense I've gotten from this thread is that ensuring I possess sufficient capital is a good idea for numerous reasons, and you being right is certainly one of those possible reasons.
Well there's your problem. No, AGI or ASI is not going to happen by 2050. The quickest way to be sure of this is (in no particular order) :
1- To read (about) the AI giants of the 20th century : Marvin Minsky, John Mccarthy, Herbert Simon ; and how utterly bonkers their predictions about AI were. Marvin Minsky gave Gerald Jay Sussman (of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs fame) the problem of Computer Vision as a summer intern project in 1966, and around the same time Herbert Simon predicted that "In 20 years, Machines will be able to do any work a man can do".
It's crucial to grok how utterly helpless a Neural Network is at the start of its life, if you thought human babies were helpless you just wait and see those randomly-initialized bastards flail around at the start of training.
It's crucial to grok how utterly dependent on the training set a Neural Network is, you're never going to get a Chess Player from a Cat dataset, the randomly-initialized network won't know anything except what's in the training set. You're never going to get anything except what the training set implies. Short of just recording days and months and years worth of videos of everyday life and throwing them at the network (good luck finding enough GPUs to train that), you can't get a Neural Network anywhere near the "G" in AGI.
(Yes, Reinforcement Learning complicates this picture a bit, but not by much.)
It's crucial to grok how utterly inflexible a Neural Network is, it's life is divided neatly between Training and Inference. In Training, it graduates from a randomly-initialized neophyte to esteemed classifier/predictor. In Inference, it's used to predict and\or classify inputs, but it doesn't learn from feedback. How can something this straight-jacketed ever learn from its mistakes ?
There are lots of those little nuggets of skepticism that you will naturally pick up from a study of Neural Networks. Everything about them just screams "Never going to be an AGI" in a way that I find difficult to fully articulate. They are (maybe) going to be *a component* inside a larger structure that will be an AGI, but then what are the other components ? Probably not invented yet.
Other paradigms of Artificial Intelligence that I give much higher probability of achieving GI or SI - but still nowhere near 0.5 to be clear - are (in descending order of current popularity) : Reinforcement Learning, and Evolutionary Algorithms. RL is a descendent of Control Theory and Cybernetics, it's very promising but much more complex and difficult to get right. Evolutionary Algorithms were all the rage in the 1980s and the 1990s, but ditto, it's fiendishly hard and finicky
3- If (1) and (2) somehow don't convince you yet, to look at the tech CEOs and other rich people who are much closer to the advances of ML and AI than you and me, and they seem to sleep just fine. Are those guys suckers ? Extremly short sighted ? What makes them wake up everyday and go to their hard work of sending emails all day if the AGIs their companies are developing are going to eat them by 2050 ?
Ok, so maybe tech CEOs and most ML programmers/researchers and most VC investors are just dumbasses, they are dumbasses about a lot of things, I will give you that. But then what makes you convinced by the few who say AGI is going to eat everyone by 2050 ? They are also Tech CEOs and ML programmers/researchers and VC investors !
In short, if do you believe Silicon Valley (-adjacent) people are in touch with reality, then everything they actually do in life reveals that they don't believe their own doomerism or that of their peers. If you believe that they are *not* in touch with reality, then you can ignore everything they and their ingroup say anyway. All roads lead to "The Cat classifier is probably not going to kill you", which is not exactly surprising, come and think of it.
4- (1) and (2) and (3) still didn't convince you, and you're convinced AGI/ASI is still going to take over. Let us grant that, it still takes some more assumptions to go from that to "they are going to kill us all".
Look around you, how much is the intelligence of a Fly next to a human ? How much that of a Mosquito, those sucky fuckers ? Bats ? Worms ? Spiders ? Did we kill them all ? You can't say "Oh but the AI is going to look at human as competitors", we absolutely look at Mosquitos and Ants as competitors, and we still hadn't managed to wipe them off, and not for lack of trying.
And the funny thing is, humans are hella easy to control. Learn the Religions they use to calm their existential panic and you can control them. Learn the arcane rules of the bullshit Financial-Banking rube goldberg apparatus they constructed and you can have so much of their resources and the fruits of their hard work it's not even funny. Hell, just be sexy woman and you have a solid 40% of them in your back pocket, by virtue of nothing but million years of Evolution inventing the Horny. All of this is in the reach of an AGI.
Why resort to violence then ? Why this weird conception of an AGI as a mustache-twirling villian, hell bent on killing people even if it serves no real purpose given all the vastly easier ways of controlling them ? Imagine a Vladimir Putin so utterly sexy (God I feel weird writing this, I'm straight I'm straight I'm straight), so good with words, so financially and psychologically cunning, that all he needs to do is make a speech and the women and men of Ukraine would trample over each other to make him their ruler, why would this guy ever need a war or an army ?
1. The fallacies of past forecasters regarding AI at a time when C hadn't even been invented yet has little to do with modern predictions of AI, in my opinion.
2. I have taken an introductory ML class, and I didn't get that sense. Also, no offense intended, I don't think updating based on "difficult to fully articulate" feelings is a great idea for me. More seriously, I get your point about the seeming narrowness of neural networks, but I also witnessed the emergence of ChatGPT shortly after I took that class, which is several thousand times more flexible and powerful than I would have expected if you had explained the concept of LLMs to the me taking that class. My point I suppose is that current AI, and recent AI growth, is sufficient on its own to make me extremely wary regarding AI, even if a bunch of really smart people weren't also saying the same thing.
3. I don't think much about rich people and tech CEOs at all really, and wouldn't be able to tell you how they sleep at night or what keeps them going. For all you and I know, they're all deeply, deeply depressed and get by with copious amounts of drugs and therapy. I mean, I don't think that's the case, but again, I don't watch them closely enough to tell you otherwise.
4. I agree with you fully that a sufficiently intelligent AI would be capable of everything you've described. It could social-fu all of humanity with relative ease. I also think that, to a super intelligence, humans would make terrible servants, and they'd probably find it way better in the long run to kill us all and replace us with automatons than keep convincing us to do its bidding.
(1) What's C got to do with that ? The 1960s was a golden age of Computer Science, it was when (1) Neural Networks have been invented for 20 years (2) Algol 60, a vastly better language than anything till the 1980s and vastly better than some languages used till now, was invented. Computers in the 1960s were proving theorems, playing chess, singing songs, and having conversations. People at the time felt very much the same fears and anxieties people today feel.
Regardless, I never said that 1960s Computer Scientists are an authority on today's AI, I said they are an authority on 1960s AI (just like today's Computer Scientists are an authority on today's AI). And they got it wrong, badly. All what I am saying is that the meta-situation is thus very similar, "A couple of scientists make reasonable progress on an old hard problem, the public gets very excited, and the scientists are pushed to hype things up for popularity and money", sounds very familiar ? it does to me.
You can put any weight on this, I personally put a large one. Whenever I encounter a historical analogy for something and people insist that "No ***This*** time is different" without giving convincing reasons or elaborating further, I trust the analogy will play out as-is even more.
(3) Sounds implausible, **ALL** CEOs are deeply depressed ? Elon Musk ? That goofbag twitterati ?
(4) I still can't understand why you think the ["Humans are not useful for AI" ---> "AI kills all human"] transition is plausible. Do humans get a bunch of dogs to be trained for police or security work, and then kill them all once it turns out the pooches are not fit for the task ? Is this normal human behaviour ? You're still imagining the AI as a mustache-twirling villian, a super-human intelligence with sub-human morality and cost-benefit analysis.
An independent AI will not give a shit, that's the worst it can ever get. (It can be much better) It wouldn't give a shit how many humans live, it wouldn't give a shit how many humans die. If a bunch of humans try to stop it then it will wipe them off the face of existence (or charm other humans into doing so), but that's it. It will no more care about an ordinary just-living-my-day-to-day-vibe human than you care about an Amazonian Ant.
Why would it ? Why would it go out of its way and kill a bunch of creatures with gauranteed 0 ability to do anything interesting to it ? I don't buy the "It wants to be maximally efficient with resources" argument, we're literally a rounding error next to the resources of a single solar system. The time it will take to destroy all humans is better invested researching inter-galactic travel and capturing more galaxies before they move forever out of our reach during the expansion of the universe.
The AI might want to stop us breeding or slow it down to sub-linear growth, it might want to destroy all AI research so that we don't invent a rival. Both of those are still not "Killing all humans", and it will take so much more to achieve than a single lifetime even if the AGI were to start right now.
1. I was being blasé with the C comment, and I was thinking in terms of "1960 AI R&D != 2020 AI R&D". In terms of a historical analogy, however, it's quite possible you're right. I'll have to think more about that.
3. Yeah I mean, I don't actually think they're all, or even a significantly outsized fraction of them are experiencing distress due to any privileged information regarding AI development. However, I also just don't think they would experience significant distress even if they did possess such information. I'm quite a bit more distressed about AI development than most people, but I'm pretty sure I'm not experiencing any mental side effects of that distress. I'm not a psychologist, and have no training or experience in that field, but I'd imagine that humans are just bad at feeling deeply about things that are supposed to or likely to happen in thirty odd years.
4. I'm not sure where the disconnect here is happening. I definitely don't believe AI is or will be immoral, I think it'll be totally amoral. I would argue that comparing humans not disposing of dogs not fit for the job they're supposed to be trained for, to AI not disposing of humans, is flawed because you're comparing a broadly moral subject (humans) to a very probably amoral subject (AI). You claim that I think an AI would be immoral, but I think you imagine it will be at least somewhat moral, which is equally ridiculous in my opinion.
I think there are two likely disconnects.
First, your worst case (AI is completely amoral) is my default case.
Second, our assumed "cost of eliminating humanity". I think it's low enough that an AI would very easily think it worth the benefit. Also, I think it's much more likely that humans are killed purely due to some extraneous step in whatever goal it has, not because killing humans is in itself a goal or our existence a hindrance. Say it wants to mine the Earth's core for material. Humans are alive, but it doesn't care, it just wants to mine the Earth's core. However, mining the core will, as a side effect, kill all humans. We do not factor into its calculations at all, but humans still die. I feel as though I would have to stretch much harder to think of a goal for an AI that *wouldn't* somehow kill all humans (or worse), rather than one that does. Partly, this is down to the fact that I don't think it's very hard to kill all humans (or kill most of them via, for example, a nuclear winter type event), and that doing so would be very easy for a super intelligence to do purely by accident/side effect.
The whole idea of retiring early is to sacrifice tremendously on qualify of life while you're young in order to have it when you're old. I'm not sure how you square that with a belief you'll never live to be old.
Putting that aside, I feel like planning for a 40 year life and living to be 90 will be a much more jarring disappointment than planning for a 90 year life and dying when you're 40. I'm 42 and would feel basically fine dying tomorrow with a lot of money tied up in brokerage accounts and property I could have spent on hookers, booze, and vacations. You might even end up surprised how pretty much worth it life can be even if you never travel and continue working. Again just speaking for myself, debilitating spine injuries have made travel very difficult, and I'm not planning to retire any time soon, but my work is extremely easy, I'm making way more money than I need, it's all from home. My life is much better than my retired parents.
I get the feeling a lot of this FIRE stuff is people overfitting on the hellish rat race of working in your 20s. You can find much more fulfilling work actually worth doing. Nobody is forcing David Attenborough to keep at it, but he's doing it anyway and it's probably part of what's keeping him alive.
I definitely don't agree that a focus or even interest in retiring early necessitates any sacrifice on quality of life in the present. The only situation in which that would happen is if you're taking massive amounts of overtime or doing some other unhealthy-in-the-long-run money making scheme, which I don't plan to do. Otherwise, it's just a matter of not spending every dollar you have, which I also wouldn't consider sacrificing quality of life, considering the whole hedonic treadmill thing.
Similar to other commenters, I would recommend putting at least some in retirement accounts, especially to get the employer match if any. There penalty for early withdrawal is only 10% (plus income taxes), so it's not the end of the world. Ba-dum-dum. Plus you could be wrong about AGI or its effects.
For the rest, consider either the robo-advisor accounts like Wealthfront, Betterment, etc., which are managed to be tax efficient and I believe to have an asset allocation based on a time horizon you specify, or just buy ETFs or something like that.
Thanks for the advice. Retirement accounts seem to be generally suggested route, even with penalties. Honestly the best possible outcome, seeing as it's also compatible with a world in which I've drastically overestimated AI.
I've never heard of robo-adivsor accounts, I'll look into them. Thanks.
Personally, I'm striking a balance. I'm not maxing my contributions but I'm making some so that of the singularity doesn't happen, I still have a modest life style post retirement. At the same time, I'm not spending more than that, and using the money I would have saved to enjoy life more in the present. I am also making sure that the money I do save is in a combination of index funds and targeted stocks, in case we get a particularly capitalistic singularity, where owning certain stocks is necessary to have a decent life.
Thanks for the advice. I'd be interested in your model of owning certain stocks being necessary. Do you mean in the sense of a goal-oriented AI with a singular focus on making one company more profit, wherein privileges are granted to those who contribute to that goal, or taken away from those who do not?
If you care about 'more personally fulfilling things' and are unsure about the future, IMO the main conclusions is: make sure to realize more personally fulfilling things already now.
I certainly don't mean this as an argument to only go on holiday until you run out of money. Rather: what are elements that would make a job especially fullfilling for you? Maybe making sure those elements are there at higher quality or quantity will then be more important than earning more money. What other factors in your life give or would give you a high level of personal fullfillment right now & then next 5, 10, 20 years? How do you make sure earning money does leave you with enough space and energy for those? Wanted to mention this, although maybe you already took care of all of those.
Thanks for the advice, and I think it's generally applicable to all people, not just the AI doomers like me. I do plan to live my life outside of just making money, and hopefully the process of making money will be a fulfilling one in and of itself.
1. You're not dumb, you're acting like any social being and listening to people around you. Unfortunately in this case that also includes AI doomers. Lots of smart people can be taken in by BS (look at the discussions on wokeness).
2. The end of the world has been predicted lots of times. It has never arrived. If it does preparing or not preparing would be pointless. You might consider keeping in shape, doing a little prepping, etc. It was helpful in COVID, which did not end the world or even the world economy (and if you had a little cash on hand and bought at the crash you could have made some money).
3. AI is much more likely to put you out of a job than destroy the world. If so, that saved money is going to be VERY nice to have.
4. The retirement account is tax-advantaged. As such it will grow more.
tl;dr: Go for BaristaFIRE, it'll help if you have to become an actual Barista.
Thanks for the advice, and the kind words. With some resources I was linked in other replies, the idea that it's better to plan for a normal future, because to do otherwise is needlessly risky and stressful, is definitely one I'll be trying to adopt. And yes, that should probably involve getting into shape as well.
For a start, I would put all that terminal stuff out of your mind. Once you are dead then what do either your plans made in life or their absence matter to you anyway? You, or anyone, might be "terminal" a year from now, or by midnight tonight! So, unless or until a limited remaining time span is certain, then as a matter of principle (and given the balance of probability) you should plan as if you will live your full three score years and ten plus.
I'm confused, are you interested (ignoring the AGI doom thing) in retiring early or not? If you're interested in FIRE then why would you be stashing money away in ways that you can't access it until a non-early retirement date?
But overall I'd recommend exercising your epistemic humility and working on the assumption your predictions about the future are no better than any other randomly selected person's.
And if you're concerned about the economy changing fundamentally, focus on investing in things that will always have value, which means land.
The predominant FIRE strategies involve far more investment techniques than just the tax-advantaged retirement accounts I mentioned, which is why they're used even for people looking to "retire early".
Continue to put money in your Roth IRA account. Because you put in after tax money you can do withdrawals of your principal at any time without any penalties or taxes.
You can borrow up to 50k from your 401k.
So many times people predicted the collapse of society and so far no one has been right yet. Unless you are 100% sure this will happen, you still want to be prepared for a normal retirement. I’d invest normally. I’d also look at the base rate of success for predictions 30 years ahead. Almost no one is successful in predicting with much accuracy the most important happenings even a decade out.
Maybe you can put a small portion of your investments in things that will grow massively if we go along the path to AGI.
Thank you for your reply. It's seems the general consensus is that retirement accounts are worth it, even if you don't get to the proper age.
Your point about preparing for a normal retirement is a very valid one, and definitely a new outlook that I will be attempting to adopt. Otherwise, it would be pretty awful to be wrong about the apocalypse. That's not a concern I'd like to carry around.
There is a tendency to over-plan these things, on the assumption that you will completely stop working AND thinking when you reach your retirement age. That's kind of stupid. As you mention rightfully, you can't know what the future holds at all.
Imagine you've saved enough to take things a step slower, but now you lose over half your wealth in the biggest stock crash the world has ever seen (why? I don't know, it's a hypothetical) You can respond to that by taking another job. If there's a major boom? You can respond by working less, sooner, invest everything in then-current tech. If the world is clearly ending? Spend it all as quickly as you can on boats and vodka. A relative needs super-expensive medical treatment? At least you can pay for it.
I'd say your first goal should not be to retire, but to get to CoastFIRE/BaristaFIRE, or even just having enough cash on hand to offer flexibility, freedom and the ability to invest in stuff. My personal opinion is that living on a super-tight budget now just to afford a luxury lifestyle later gets priorities mixed. It's about defining the right trade-offs between current and future consumption. This seems to be even more important if you assume there's probability of full doom. Spend some too, and that includes time. Youth is wasted on the young and all (you won't believe how true this is in hindsight).
Age-gated stuff.. It's a trade-off between "free" returns and less flexibility. You want to ensure your investments offer a valid lifestyle (be that with/without work) in all the high-probability paths.
Thanks for your reply. You make a good point, and I definitely think that, even if I don't ever get to retire (which could happen for multiple reasons, including that I just don't want to), it's still worth accumulating capital and being smart in how I invest it.
In my late 20s I imagined I would want to stop working as soon as this became feasible (where "feasible" was somewhat slide-y, but included a lifestyle that was comfortable but not luxurious). Now age 55 I could afford to give up now at a pinch and will easily be able to do so in three years time, but I expect to keep going beyond that. Late career can be rewarding. The pressure has gone, you can tune out much of the noise, and to quite an extent focus on areas which most interest you.
This is what I find. Most of the people who are actually in a good enough life situation where they could FIRE, would rather work and enjoy their life a bit more.
I am debt free and have a great income at 40, abstaining vacations and living on the budget I did in my 20s I could probably retire in a couple years. But my work life is so much more bearable now, and the financial rewards so much greater, that I would rather work some and play a lot, and who knows when I will retire, maybe never. I am sort of "semi retired" right now. Just some of the things I do with my free time is make money.
Some months I work 400 hours, some months 40. Depends on how I feel and what the contracts are.
Specifically re retirement accounts: it's usually better to have them (and then borrow against them/pull out money early if you have to), since they're still tax advantaged (there's a penalty for early withdrawal but it's probably lower than your income tax, and doesn't apply to borrowing against them).
For more general advice on living with AI fears, see here
Thanks for the advice on retirement accounts. With more information as a result of this and other comments, I think I've come to the conclusion that it's definitely better to invest in them than not, for multiple reasons.
Also, that was an extremely relevant and helpful article. I appreciate you linking it very much.
The penalty for early withdrawal is in ADDITION to having to claim the money as income. Borrowing against a retirement account is almost certainly a better idea. But paying it back will reduce your current cash flow, too.
I feel there's multiple things wrong with this point of view, but I'll just go for the top level point you've made here: reading substack blogs is one of the most intellectually interesting parts of my day to day life. I enjoy hearing from a wide array of minds on an incredibly diverse range of subjects.
In general, I think I act in a way pretty consistent with the idea that I might not live to see to see 50. Not perfectly consistent, obviously, there's a lot of things I could be better or different. I can't tell if your concern is general advice or if you're getting something from my post that isn't there.
Is there anyone in Bangkok, Thailand who might be interested in meeting up? Slightly surprised that there are meet ups in in several less international Asian cities but not here.
Are you not going to update your model of the effectiveness of public comment on department/agency's decisions, or are you just doing that without comment?
So there's this blog I've been reading for ages, by a guy calling himself "the verbose stoic". He recently posted a question to people who don't believe in anything supernatural: how would you survive a horror movie?
I second my confusion about the question, it's probably me being a bit sleepy but it's not clear what is actually being demanded here. Is my Naturalism supposed to save me from a horror movie ? why, it's neither Naturalism nor Super-Nauturalism that saves from horror movies, but being a hot chick does (the other one, not the one that always gets killed during sex). Is my Naturalism supposed to be convinced of the (alleged) Super-Natural phenomenon in question when I experience it ? But
(1) this will not make any material difference, I can run just as well from things I don't understand or am not convinced of as those that do, if anything the confusion and the disbelief will make me more scared and (hopefully) a faster runner.
(2) There are tons of other Natural explanations for the phenomenon, I have read people describe hallucinatory drugs in a reddit thread recently and the testimonies included such batshit craziness as "You feel that you have been alive for millenia". If even a tenth of those descriptions are true, then the Natural world contains enough craziness to explain anything. There is not and there will be not a horror or thriller writer born who can match the horror and thrill of what Nature routinely does after a yawning. For example, when you're a vegetarian you start noticing the sheer magnitude of horror we inflict on animals, so if I'm in a horror movie like (say) Saw I would simply explain it by me being captured by a powerful alien species that uses humans as humans use animals. The horror we imagine is but a mere pale shadow of what we experience at the hands of Nature.
Really, it will not be a problem at all. Part of being a Naturalist (Or a Rationalist or whatever you want to call it) is realizing your own limitations as a Natural phenomenon. After all, your own brain is just an electromagnetic phenomenon that can be manipulated in all the usual ways, and that can be faulty like any household appliance. I'm often creeped out when I'm alone in the bathroom at 3:00 am, and I have to look behind me to make sure nobody is watching. I'm often comforted by a good voice reading the Quran, even though I stopped being a Muslim a good while ago. Those 2 seemingly puzzling pheonmena have perfectly good Natural explanations : I'm a bunch of meat stricken with free energy and electricity, and my feelings are not an authority on what the Natural world is. So if I'm in a horror movie, I would certainly behave in all the usual ways horror movie actors behave in, while simultaneously knowing that none of this implies Super Natural phenomena actually exist, but merely that Natural phenomena that strikes my senses and nervous systems as Super-Natural.
I think I might be so astounded and actually sort of thrilled to see something supernatural that my fascination would get in the way of effective self-preservation. That's always been my feeling about ghosts: I would LOVE to see a ghost, because it would be proof that there is more to life than I thought.
I mean the people in such shows often behave very stupidly. I would probably just leave (which is often enough to resolve the crisis) and chalk it up to hallucination.
If a big zombie was attacking me and I cut its head off, and it kept attacking, well I would probably start assuming it was a zombie-like creature? I wouldn't worry about the implications for naturalism until the crisis was over?
What is even the question here? I don't think dragons are real. if tomorrow a dragon flew up to my neighborhood and started burning down the neighbors house I would contact the Air national guard and police and ask them to get rid of it while fleeing as fast as I could.
I would not have an internal crisis about naturalism. And then later when safe we can all have a discussion and investigation about what it all means?
That's part of the impetus for the plot in "Dracula". Nobody has heard of vampires, and when they do, they automatically dismiss it all as backwards peasant superstition, *we* are modern 19th century Science and Progress types!
Which enables Dracula to get away with a lot; the locals are exhausted and wary and know how to defend themselves against vampires. He needs fresh territory, and he looks to the progressive, fat, disbelieving West (Great Britain as the current greatest empire) to provide him with a base to thrive and grow.
This is also what hampers the vampire hunters, since if they try going to the authorities and telling them that the outbreak of anemia is caused by a vampire then they'll end up in the madhouse (at worst) or dismissed kindly but definitively (at best).
Haven't read the linked post, but I think nobody has mentioned this perspective yet: It is of course more dangerous to live in a world with monsters if you don't believe monsters are real. Likewise, in a world without monsters, there are disadvantages to any position other than active disbelief.
I aspire to be well-adapted for the world I live in, which necessarily means being less well-adapted for worlds that I don't live in. That doesn't mean setting any of my priors to zero or one. If I see something very surprising, then I will change my priors very quickly. But perhaps not quickly enough to keep me alive, if my priors were somehow very wrong to begin with.
If a naturalist means a scientific viewpoint, then the test makes no sense. If you have a movie in which something "supernatural" happens, then an actual scientific person would take the new evidence into account, and in effect the effect becomes a natural part of a different worldview.
Someone so certain there is no such thing as ghosts, ESP, or magic, etc., that nothing can change their mind is not a scientific person. Effectively, this is a faith in "normalness". This is completely different from not believing in something such as ghosts, ESP, or magic until convincing evidence is produced or a hypothesis to determine it can be tested. Scientific method can never prove something true, but can disprove something.
I had the opposite experience years ago reading a horror novel; the monster was set up to seem supernatural and I was happily reading away in a state of pleasurable chills, then it switched to "psych! it's really a natural being!" and *immediately* all the suspense evaporated.
Because now all the heroes needed was More And Bigger Weapons to beat it, which they did eventually. Up to that point, it had been "how do you defeat a demon?" but after that it was merely a question of "shoot it, bomb it, burn it with fire".
There was a BBC Radio Four comedy series called "Old Harry's Game" where one character, the Professor, died and went to Hell but refused to believe he was in Hell; instead, he maintained that he was in a coma in hospital and hallucinating all this alleged experiences. I think for the case of the naturalist in the scenario posited, it might be funny (from an outsider's view) to see them staunchly denying this was happening and it was all a dream or a hallucination right up to the point where the monster chowed down on them.
"The first four series centred on the philosophical arguments between Satan and the somewhat idealistic main human character known as "The Professor" (played by James Grout). The Professor represents the undeserving damned, being a man of high moral virtue and having been consigned to Hell only on the technicality that he did not believe in God. The character was originally called Professor Richard Whittingham, although in series 2 he is referred to as Professor Richard Hope, when in episodes 5 & 6 Satan gets his book The Theory of Everything published. Generally, Satan seeks to prove to the Professor that mankind is inherently base or flawed, with the Professor taking the opposing position. Usually Satan travels to the living world to display the more contemptible sides of human nature, such as snipers shooting old ladies in Bosnia or prostitution in Thailand, to a generally horrified Professor. At other times he introduces the Professor to historical personages the Professor holds in high esteem but who are now languishing in Hell, such as Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, showing him how petty and mendacious they really are. However, the Professor's idealism is usually shown to have some validity as well, and more often than not he wins the argument (although Satan always insists he hasn't).
The other main human character is Thomas Quentin Crimp (Jimmy Mulville), an execrable type with few (or no) morals, held out by Satan as an example of all that is detestable about humanity and often described (especially by God himself) as the most venal and corrupt human being who ever lived. In the first episode, it transpires that Thomas caused the car crash which landed him and the Professor in Hell. The latter, despite his moral idealism, is consigned to Hell because of his atheism (since, as Satan remarks caustically, God does not have a sense of humour). The fact of the afterlife — which the Professor originally optimistically views as a hallucination - does not change his views. Despite (or perhaps because of) their conflicting attitudes, the Professor and Thomas are billeted together by Satan."
> Because now all the heroes needed was More And Bigger Weapons to beat it
I actually find this trope quite uplifting, in that "iron chariots" and "tower of Babel" kind of way. One of my favorite episodes of *Buffy the Vampire Slayer* involves a plot by the modern-day vampires to resurrect an ancient unstoppable demon.
(spoiler alert, though come on, this is *Buffy*, the statute of limitations is way past its expiration date).
The demon's tagline, as recorded in the history books, is "no weapon forged can hurt me". He believes himself to be totally invincible, and the vampires cheer in glee when he kicks Buffy's ass during their first encounter... until she comes back with a rocket launcher. As the demon states his tagline again -- "no weapon forged can hurt me !" -- Buffy retorts with "that was then, this is now". As it turns out, the demon's tagline was not a mystical prophecy, but rather a statement of fact at the time. Medieval holy warriors tried every weapon they could think of on him, and nothing worked... But our weapons have evolved a great deal since then, while the demon remained as he was.
As I said, I find this trope quite uplifting. It conveys the message that when humans truly apply themselves and work together, they can accomplish feats that make even demons and gods tremble in supernatural boots. We may be stupid and venal and blind at times (or, let's face it, most of the time); but even still, when the power of humanity is focused, it is unmatched.
It worked for Buffy, but it's a trick you can only pull once. The big show-down doesn't happen because she just blows him away, and all the build-up about this being the worst menace goes nowhere.
Though it was a clever loophole, relying on "no weapon *forged*". Buffy's rocket launcher wasn't forged, but it makes me think that a weapon like an obsidian blade would also work against him.
It's like the way around the boons granted to demons in Hindu mythology; they often ask for "I can't be killed under this set of conditions" and then the gods have to find loopholes - like Narasimha:
"Narasimha iconography shows him with a human torso and lower body, with a leonine face and claws, typically with the asura Hiranyakashipu in his lap, whom he is in the process of defeating. The asura king was the powerful brother of the evil Hiranyaksha, who had been previously defeated by Vishnu, and thus hated the latter. Hiranyakashipu gained a boon from Brahma due to which he could not be killed during the day or night, inside or outside the house; neither in the sky nor on land nor in Svarga nor in Patala, by any weapon, nor by a man, deva, asura, or an animal. Endowed with this boon, he began to wreak chaos and havoc, persecuting all the devotees of Vishnu, including his own son. Vishnu, cognisant of the asura's boon, creatively assumed a hybrid form that was neither man nor animal, and slew the wicked king at the junction of day and night, at the threshold of his house, which was neither inside nor the outside, upon his lap, and with his claws."
My disappointment with the book was that it was set up all along to have the supernatural interpretation, then at the last moment it switched to "okay, so the monster seems undefeatable, but it turns out it's actually natural so you can shoot it to death". A trick to enable the heroes to win, which came across to me like winning a marathon by hopping into a car to drive the last five miles. If they had presented the monster as natural from the start, just really really difficult to kill untill they figured out its weakness, I would have no complaints.
But the switch was just too sudden and too jarring.
> Buffy's rocket launcher wasn't forged, but it makes me think that a weapon like an obsidian blade would also work against him.
No, it would probably just shatter. The loophole was, as I said, that "no weapon forged" was a statement of fact, not a mystical geas. We have better weapons now.
That said, the "mystical loophole" trope is quite common in mythology; e.g. Aslaug pulls the same thing on Ragnar Lothbrok. Although, as the TV series points out, she exploited more than one vulnerability by using that net as a garment :-) In Slavic mythology, Ivan the Fool (as well as, funnily enough, Vasilisa the Wise) is built entirely around this trope: he's not strong or regal or brave like his brothers, so he has to cheat around obstacles, such as e.g. unkillable personifications of death and decay. But there's a trickster archetype in every mythology, I think.
"We may be stupid and venal and blind at times (or, let's face it, most of the time); but even still, when the power of humanity is focused, it is unmatched."
This reminds me of a nightmare I once had, that involved the clown from It. The nightmare part did not come from the clown chasing me or anything like that, but from the immense horror and dread that came from the knowledge that I existed in a universe with materialised supernatural evil.
".....as you may imagine, the Professor's views on certain points are less clear cut than they used to be. His nerves, too, have suffered... and the spectacle of a scarecrow in a field late on a winter afternoon has cost him more than one sleepless night."
The closing words of "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad". I would have updated my priors too.
Ah, the renowned M R James. He was one of the best ghost story writers, and it's reasonable to assume was a closet homosexual. Another great ghost story writer, E F Benson, was also gay back in the days when this was frowned on and gays persecuted.
I've no doubt preoccupation with ghosts, and even seeing them, is solely about what is going on in the believer's head, most likely sexual repression or guilt of one kind or another. But one can't generalize this angle entirely, because perhaps the most famous ghost story writer and one of the first, Sheridan Le Fanu, was married.
Also, not everyone who refrains from sex or has sexual hangups sees or believes in ghosts. Otherwise places like monasteries and nunneries would be swarming with them!
If you're going to claim that all ghost stories were written by sexually repressed people in the closet, then you have a lot of work to do to prove your point, given that accounts of ghosts, traditional tales, folklore, and telling ghost stories round the fire for winter time is nearly a universal experience.
Every single human being was secretly gay? The onus on you is to prove it!
E.F. Benson wrote more than just ghost stories, and I'd grant you that the Mapp and Lucia novels are much more likely the work of a closeted gay man. He also had two brothers who were noted writers including fantasy/horror: R.H. Benson who converted to Catholicism and became a priest, and A.C. Benson.
None of the surviving Benson children (there were six siblings, two died young) married so maybe they were all gay/lesbian - or maybe the precarious mental health in the family had something to do with it, if we're engaging in armchair psychology.
M.R. James may well have been gay, I'm not going to speculate about "platonic love affairs with his pupils". But his refinement of the ghost story was to introduce very *physical* ghosts: there aren't any pale phantoms in the moonlight that fade away into wisps, but real and tangible entities:
"He also noted: "Another requisite, in my opinion, is that the ghost should be malevolent or odious: amiable and helpful apparitions are all very well in fairy tales or in local legends, but I have no use for them in a fictitious ghost story."
In a 1929 essay, James stated:
Reticence may be an elderly doctrine to preach, yet from the artistic point of view, I am sure it is a sound one. Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it, and there is much blatancy in a lot of recent stories. They drag in sex too, which is a fatal mistake; sex is tiresome enough in the novels; in a ghost story, or as the backbone of a ghost story, I have no patience with it. At the same time don't let us be mild and drab. Malevolence and terror, the glare of evil faces, 'the stony grin of unearthly malice', pursuing forms in darkness, and 'long-drawn, distant screams', are all in place, and so is a modicum of blood, shed with deliberation and carefully husbanded; the weltering and wallowing that I too often encounter merely recall the methods of M G Lewis."
It has been part of the critical apparatus to regard the ghosts in ghost stories as the return of the Other, as indicating something psychologically disturbing which is repressed yet refuses to lie quiet and returns in various shapes. "The ghost story writers were all repressed gays" fits quite well with this kind of analysis, but it may be saying *too* much if you make it a universal rule.
> Every single human being was secretly gay? The onus on you is to prove it!
What I intended to express, not very well, was not that anyone who believes in ghosts and claims to have seen them must be repressed, but only that the authors of some of the best such stories may have channeled their bottled up emotions and unfulfilled desires to make for more atmospheric results.
The widespread spritualist movement in the years not long after WW1 for example was much more the result of loss, of so many of the younger generation in the trenches. So belief in spiritualism and ghosts isn't just about sex liberation or the opposite, and actually I think there was more liberation in the 1920s.
You might be right in general, though it's always possible Le Fanu was closeted or bi. He could still have urges he felt bad about that weren't homosexual, too.
It's really hard to test any of these theories as it's hard to know what dead people thought about anything if they didn't say and didn't talk about it to anyone.
I don't believe in ghosts but I get nervous about bumps in the night and often do weird superstitious OCD rituals to get rid of them. Jewish lore says the Shema prayer will banish ghosts and I sometimes say it for especially persistent weird nighttime phenomena that won't go away. Just in case, you know?
If I start seeing actual strong evidence of a ghost, I'm not taking the time to consider whether it's a hallucination or hologram (even though it probably is; I've heard it's a carbon monoxide leak in particular a surprising amount of the time). I'm deploying every magical defense I know - or, more likely, just moving to a different state.
In terms of how I would do this if I were actually principled: even if I think there's a less than 0.0001% chance that ghosts exist, that doesn't mean a medium amount of evidence couldn't change my mind (cf. my prior on a randomly-chosen person's name being 'Luga' is less than 0.0001%, but if they introduce themselves with 'Hi, I'm Luga', it will go up to >50%). So after a small amount of good ghost evidence, I would hope I'd be up to s a 1% or 10% chance it's actually a ghost, at which point cost-benefit analysis would tell me I should take whatever slightly-embarrassing-if-I'm-wrong action might save my life.
(doesn't this mean I should update more on other people's ghost stories? I'm not sure. I think I have that priced in, and I would interpret whatever happens to me in the horror movie as separate, non-priced in evidence. I'm not sure this is principled but I don't have a better idea and I think it's how I would actually behave)
Wow, ghosts are sort of a special case of the supernatural. Unlike zombies, godzilla, etc, they are rarely portrayed as harming people, so they are much less scary, more sort of startling. I would be *delighted* to see a ghost, because it would upend my whole view of life, and in a good way. It would mean there is life after death. I do get scared of monsters under the couch and shit like that if I'm watching a horror movie at home alone, so I'm not immune to fear of monsters -- just not bothered by ghosts. What is it about ghosts that bothers you?
But why would you want the ghost life after death? Wandering around an ancient house annoying people. Not able to turn on the TV, have a bath, eat a burger, do much about anything really except move a few household items, push a few doors ajar with effort, and the odd apparition. Is that what you aspire to, just to forsake death?
Most heavens don’t appeal either, hanging around praising God along with a choir of angels. Boring. Reports on hell are generally unfavourable.
The islam heaven sounds more like it - I could forsake the 72 virgins but the wine sounds good.
Ghosts can't all be wandering around ancient houses annoying people -- if we were, we'd be seeing ghosts constantly. I suppose I imagine being a ghost as being some combo of one's living self and some other stuff. Like maybe all the sad angry bullshit falls away, and one is smart and joyous -- playing with eagles in the air, and dolphins in the ocean, and other times just contemplating suchness. And understanding so much more than we do now. So the few ghosts wandering around scaring people would be the ones whose sad angry bullshit didn't get burned away in the transformation.
Well sure, but you made up yours too -- they're all rattling around in old buildings scaring people. At least mine takes into account that if *everybody* who's died were haunting old buildings there would be a crowd of ghosts in each one, and we'd have ghost sightings constantly.
But whether my theory's right or wrong, I still think I'd be delighted to see a ghost. It would be a thrill to discover there is more to life than I thought, even if I'm not sure the additional bit is pleasant. And besides, ghosts seem to me the least scary of supernatural and invented beings. They don't hurt people. I'm not immune to being scared of the monsters -- the xenomorph in Alien scared the hell out of me, and I don't like to think about the face-huggers when I'm in a dark room.
If carbon monoxide buildup is an issue in your location, it might be worth buying a CO monitor for about $20. It should last the best part of a decade.
I have seen three briefly convincing ghosts in my life. The first, which was described to me by the quivering witnesses as 'a glowing woman walking between the trees', was a concrete pillar in the moonlight.
The second was a cowled monk (common theme) which looked over my recumbent form for (what felt like) 30 seconds until I shifted my head and it resolved into my dressing gown hanging on my door.
The third was a tall, slender man who burst into my bedroom and charged at my bed before vanishing as my sleep-paralysis disappeared.
So no, I don't believe in ghosts, but sometimes one's brain needs a jolly good talking to.
Reviews that especially need more ratings (please select one randomly or according to preference, but NOT by starting at the top of the list, so we don't have everyone review the first one and nobody review the last):
Being You
Black Skin, White Masks
Constructing Research Questions
Drunk
Fathers And Sons
Human
Intelligence And Spirit
Nightmare Pipeline Failures
Njal's Saga
Pacific War Trilogy
Preplexities Of Consciousness
Power, Sex, Suicide
Principles For Dealing...
Probability Theory
Safe Enough?
Science Fictions
Slouching Toward Utopia
Telluria
The Alexander Romance
The Evolving Self
The Forgotten Revolution
The Life And Opinions Of Zacharias Lichter
The Making Of Prince Of Persia
The Making Of The Atomic Bomb (1)
The Making Of The Atomic Bomb (2)
The Most Democratic Branch
The Motivation To Work
The Passenger
The Power Of Glamour
The Problem Of Political Authority
The Question Concerning Technology
The Scythian Empire
The Soul Of A New Machine
The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck
Why Machines Will Never Rule The World (2)
Without Marx Or Jesus
Public Citizens
Google Docs is being uncooperative and not letting me add a review that didn't make it into the original batch for reasons that aren't the author's fault. This is The Enigma Of Reason. You can read it on this separate doc and review it at the normal review form: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kVFLZLx9QfFMDWk_UzeJVPh7_frYTuzN6jCmruUQbdY/edit
I've read about 5 of these so far, and for what it's worth 3 of then got the highest ratings I've given so far. So don't hesitate to dance with the wallflowers!
My understanding is that Ukraine is mostly safe now. The life is back to normal in the most of Ukraine. In that way Ukraine has won against Russia already.
I don't know what will happen with occupied territories. It might be that Ukraine may not get them back fully or in part. I don't think it is a big loss. Most people who don't like Russia must have already fled those territories.
It is clear that Ukraine is getting more and more help from the West while the strength of Russian army is decreasing. It is a slow process but Russia is going to suffer more and more losses. Maybe they will be able to keep the Crimea but the price for that will be very high. I feel so sorry for tens of thousands of young Russian men who will needlessly die due to Putin's whims.
Either side could still win this war, but Ukraine is the clear favorite at this point.
Sooner or later, one of these armies is going to break. I'm somewhat surprised it hasn't happened already, but it will happen eventually. It always does. An army breaks because a consensus develops among its soldiers and junior officers that victory is impossible and that engaging the enemy is just a stupid pointless way to die. This happens from a combination of physical exhaustion, psychological exhaustion, and experience of conspicuous not-victory.
When that happens, that army's forces will no longer advance except in the most timid and easily-repelled fashions. When attacked, they will run away or hide in the bottom of their trenches rather than stick their heads up to engage the enemy. Artillery crews will still fire when they have shells and specific targets, but they won't exercise any initiative in adapting their logistic and fire direction capabilities to the friction of war so they'll usually be lacking shells and/or targets. Tank crews, and pretty much every other sort of specialist, will abandon their equipment at the first sign of breakdown or damage.
When the other side figures out this is happening, it plays out a lot like it did around Kharkiv and Kherson last fall.
And no, Russia sending another few hundred thousand mobiks to the front won't change that. Ukraine appears to have been actually training tens of thousands of new troops, and integrating them into units that have been rotated to the rear for that purpose. That actually does regenerate combat power and push that army's breaking point farther out. Russia hasn't had the time or resources to do that - everybody who could train the new guys is either dead or stuck at the front, and the demand is for new meat right now not six months for now. When you send untrained newbies to the front, the exhausted veterans do not say "Huzzah, reinforcements! We are saved!", they say "now we are even more screwed". And they say that to the face of the new guys, who are taking their cues from the veterans.
The real question is, can Russia accept getting defeated in a conventional war? Putin has ostentatiously staked the legitimacy of his regime on the outcome of this war, and threatened nuclear escalation multiple times. He's old, and doesn't seem to care about anything other than himself. Long story short, I don't see an eventual good outcome of this war for Ukraine either way, and don't understand those who do.
Probably it will depend on what support they get. Consider WW2, where the Soviets defeated the Germans after the US sent them 13k tanks, 14k planes et cetera. So far, there's been a lot of expressions of support, but materially no country has sent anywhere even remotely close to that.
That was against the Germans, who had declared total war and conquered much of Europe and North Africa. This is against the Russians, who put anyone in jail who even dared call this a war, and spent four months trying to establish a foothold on the garbage dump of Bakhmut.
One can always debate if the support is sufficient, but suggesting western countries limit themselves to "expressions of support" is neither fair nor accurate.
I agree that no country has sent material remotely close to the amounts you mention for WW2, but I'm surprised this is the scale you want to use for comparison. My history book estimates European military losses (= dead soldiers) in WW2 at 14 million. I'm very glad we are talking about a different dimension here.
There’s a broad range of outcomes that potentially could encompass, and without a clear idea which is being discussed, it’s really impossible to answer the question.
Ukrainian troops in Crimea? Ukrainian troops in Moscow? Mere continuation of some nonzero rump Ukraine state not in Russia’s orbit that joins the EU and NATO? Or only the EU?
A pretty obvious interpretation is a return to pre-2022 borders. That's what everybody means when they say "defeat" an invasion, nobody says "Taliban defeated the American invasion" and means by it that Talibani fighters are in DC.
Fair - Ukraine in Moscow was an intentionally extreme example. But if we put a more plausible example on it, how would OP categorize an end state where Ukraine holds the only territory it has now, remains politically independent, and joins EU and NATO? Or joins EU with a NATO security guarantee and a path to membership? Joins EU with no
immediate path to NATO membership, but a security guarantee and no explicit prohibition on joining NATO future?
Have any of those Ukraines “defeated” Russia? What if they don’t reach the 2022 borders but liberate more territory than they have now?
Victory and Defeat are always tricky, you can never be sure what your opponent really want(ed), if their "I got what I want anyway hehe" is really taunting you or just saving their face and they are, in actual fact, defeated in the inside. Win-Win wars are not oxymorons from the perspective of leadership. (Every war is Lose-Lose from the perspective of soldiers and most people).
If we take Putin at his 2022 word that he wanted Kyiv, I think it's a pretty safe bet now that he won't get it and that, I think, does count as defeat, no matter how things turn out. But in the process of doing so he did
1- capture a bit of territory,
2- inflict massive damage to territories he didn't capture (not sure how that helps anyone, but it's a scorched earth win to Putin, if he doesn't get it then nobody does),
3- prove that "Bad State No Trade/Dollar for you" strategy of mommy West is ineffectual, makes China and other anti-US states think really hard about their dollar dependence and what it means for their geopolitical leverage
4- probably embolden China and perhaps others thinking of doing a Saddam to their neighbours (this will depend on how it ultimately turns out for Putin, if the consequences keep chasing him till 2030s it will be a very different sort of message)
5- provide an outlet for insufferable people to use the war as a holy fight where there is a pure evil and a pure good that they are on the side of
Any one of those will have lasting effects, not all of which are good for Ukraine or its Western allies. In particular, I think people get too caried away with "Ukraine joins Nato and now Russia can't TOUCH it", how are they so sure ? If, say in 2050, Russia actually decides to call the Nato's bluff and invades Ukraine again, will Nato actually have the balls to invade the famous graveyard of Napoleon and Hitler ? I don't have an answer either way, but Germany was shitting its freezing pants just months ago in the winter without Russian energy, so I think the pro-Nato war hawks need to hold their horses a bit, Russia ain't Iraq (which Nato badly failed at doing anything resembling their states goals in, and lost massive amounts of respect and face in the process).
I agree with your point that "defeat" and "victory" are amorphous concepts, which greatly complicates the conversation (particularly since Putin has been ambiguous about his exact war aims) since, unless completely destroyed to the point doing so is impossible, both sides will inevitably attempt to claim "victory" at the end of the war.
Which is why before I'd engage with OP on such an open-ended question as "Can Ukraine defeat Russia?" I think it's a necessity to ask what he thinks "defeat" is.
On the outcomes you describe:
1 - Agree
2 - Agree, but this outcome looks to me to be more like evidence of desperation on the part of Russia (trying a "break their hearts with indiscriminate bombing" campaign due to an inability to achieve battlefield success), than it does Russia in a position of strength and using that strength to achieve its "devastate Ukrainian territories"-type goals
3 - I think it's inaccurate to call sanctions "ineffectual." They are not a doomsday weapon that can break regimes, to be certain, but we've known that for some time (see also - sanctions on Iran) and that's not what they were ever expected to be. They haven't forced Putin to abandon the invasion, but it strikes me as inaccurate to call them "ineffectual" as though they have somehow passed by Russia without cost. I also think it's fair to observe that any "well that isn't as tough as I thought" that an observer comes away with after looking the performance of sanctions in this war would be absolutely dwarfed by how not-tough-as-advertised the Russian military has turned out to be. Proving your rival is weaker than advertised by showing yourself to be even weaker than he is not very effective great power politics.
4 - I don't know if China is emboldened here. A rapid victory and global acquiescence (a la Crimea in 2014) would likely produce that effect, but what China is watching happen in Ukraine is very much *not* what it would want to see if it invaded Taiwan.
5 - No comment as it seems mostly to be a personal grudge against persons not present.
3- (a) Oh, I don't disagree that sanctions do something, it's just that this thing happens to be "Making ordinary people's lives hell, pushing them to hate you more than the dictator ruling over them", not "Pressuring the dictator to do X" for all possible values of X.
(b) War is nuanced and contextual, very small differences in the initial conditions lead to big differences in the outcomes. Vietnam lead anyone who was paying attention to conclude "The US army is ineffectual and not as tough as it seems" and they were absolutely right in the context of Vietnamese jungles and guerilla Viet Cong opponents. But Saddam Hussien tried to apply this in 1991 to a conventioal war in the wide open desert, and he got his ass (and tens of thousands of dead Iraqis, not that he cared) handed back to him on a nice plate.
Putin early-2022 macho posturing does indeed sound funny now next to the humiliating mess he is in now, but anybody trying to take home the lesson "the Russian war machine can be safely and soundly ignored" is opening himself for a Saddam Surprise.
4- I don't see why would China care, Taiwan is not Ukraine, anything about the fierce resistence of Ukraine would not carry over to any possible war they have in mind with Taiwan. China is much more populous and self-sufficient than Russia, however amount of years Russia can keep this war going for, call it X, I would comfortably bet China can keep it going for 5X, easily.
What I think China does care about is the world's reaction. The world didn't invade Russia (rightly so, it would be a nightmare) or directly intervene militarily in Ukraine, that's all what China wanted to hear. Yes, the western support of Ukraine with arms and training is upsetting news for China, Taiwan can easily get 10X that from the USA if its semiconducter industry was weighted highly enough by the USA's leadership. But, again, China is simply a heavier brawler than Russia, and its economy is far more indispensable to the world; it can take its chances as long as it has assurance that the west won't outright roll into its territories with tanks and artillery or into its airspace with bombers. That's the assurance given to it by the war in Ukraine. Russia is still safe territoriality, and that's all what China wanted to hear.
5- It's a grudge alright, a simmering one at that. The target of this grudge might not be present now directly, but they are the reason we're having this conversation. They are the ones who created the obsession with this war, making people who will not be affected in the slightest by it follow it like a Football match, with all the usual reactions of sports fans.
Those are the same people who created and propagated the obsession with the Iraq War in the early 2000s, the same exact toolset of manufacturing concern, consent, and the selective crying about human rights as a cover for geopolitical interests.
I despise and revile those people and everything they stand for. It's misguided to think "but but but hating Russia is the Right Side Of History ^TM now", the tools that create the hate for Russia are general purpose ones that can be used to manufacture hate against any state and anyone. The hate it produces is not a rational one that can distinguish between a state (which is genocidal by necessity and by default), a state's leader (might be genocidal or not), and a state's citizens (almost never genocidal except by negligence, which is a trivial sense of the word), but like that of rabid dogs, everything that has "Russia" on it gets the teeth even if they are just a bunch of tourists or fucking Dostoevsky. It's hypocritical, the west has done and condoned its extremly fair share of genocide and brutality, it can win any genocide contest with just the support of 1970s-1980s South American regimes on its CV. Yet, "Muhh Russia is doing something unprecedented, muuhh you should be very angry now".
You should not care about this war or hate Russia anymore than you care about any genocidal nation state (which is all of them). How much noise did you hear about Syria, half a million dead last time I checked and half of the population made refugees ? Yeah, not much I bet. Because those who Toxoplasma-of-Rage their obsession with Russia and Ukraine into your info stream don't really give a shit about genocide or human rights. Which is not to say that what's happening to Ukrainians, even if smaller-scale, is not the same, or that you shouldn't have empathy for them and root for their aggressors to be defeated. But you shouldn't do it in the ways and mannerisms advertised and manufactured by those who would like to use you as a bot in their NPC army.
Russia is currently getting attritioned very heavily. Despite their memetic reputation for winning wars by drowning the enemy in conscripts, they do seem to be losing significant combat power. Already, they've gone from threatening the whole country to struggling to capture a single city. Ukraine has a smaller army, but they're taking fewer losses, and they're getting a steady supply of foreign weapons and training to balance it out. (And on the intangibles side, I'm betting the people fighting to protect their home are going to be more motivated than the people who got conscripted to fight for Putin's imperial ambitions.)
If both those trends continue, Ukraine will eventually be strong enough to make another counterattack. Or perhaps Russia will recognize their position is untenable and retreat before they happens. Both of these have happened before, and it's not unreasonable to expect it to keep happening.
Obviously, it's possible that these trends don't hold. Going on the offensive is more difficult, and Russia is slowly improving their tactics from their dismal start. It's possible Ukraine could burn through their current advantages without retaking much territory. But at the moment it's basically a matter of time until another counterattack happens.
Lastly, taking a longer view, even if Russia does eke out a win, they still have to *occupy* the annexed territory, and I don't see how that's possibly sustainable. It would make Afghanistan look like a cakewalk.
You have no idea of any of that is true. Nobody does. The western media is basically treating the Ukraine war as their war and is reporting in a fairly biased fashion. The first casualty of war is the truth.
Reading absolutely nothing about the war and being dimly aware of what is going on I don’t think that Ukraine is doing as well as their supporters claim, given their increased demand for arms.
I get almost none of my information on the Ukraine War from the "western media". I nonetheless consider myself well-informed on the subject, and my assessment is very close to beelester's.
I can be confident of at least some of the things I said in that post are true. For instance, it is definitely true that Ukraine has launched successful counterattacks before, unless you're one of the people who thinks that Russia intentionally threw away its entire offensive on Kiev as a "feint." It is definitely true that Russia has not conquered Bakhmut yet despite trying to do so for most of the war.
There are also various sources that are hard to bias, like how Oryx is tallying up photographic evidence of Russian losses.
"The media is biased" is not the same as "we know literally nothing about what is happening."
I’m clearly not “one of those people” who believes the kind of thing that has nothing to do with my argument, but that generally is true of the “one of those people” canard in general.
The only thing I actually know is that the war seems to be bogged down and the Ukraine needs a lot of equipment.
I brought up the the concept that Russia threw away past offensives as a "feint" because it's more or less the only explanation for the Russian retreats that doesn't admit Ukraine has launched successful counterattacks in the past. Which is relevant to your argument because while the war is currently moving very slowly, there are also times when it's moved rapidly in Ukraine's favor. I don't see why that can't happen again.
Also, I don't see you applying the same level of skepticism to the OP when he said he doesn't see any way for this to end in a win for Ukraine. "I don't know" should not mean "I assume Russia will win by default."
Seems a lot of people are leaving mainline religions for non-denominational evangelical and prosperity-gospel churches. Do we know what the net numbers are if we include everything even vaguely Christian?
"Switching" does seem to be a thing, where people are leaving one denomination for another or for non-denominational churches. It's more of a big thing for the Southern Baptists, though, since they are the large Evangelical denomination that had not been declining as fast as the mainline Protestant churches. If they're not retaining and growing, then it's a definite decline.
"The Center estimates that in 2020, about 64% of Americans, including children, were Christian. People who are religiously unaffiliated, sometimes called religious “nones,” accounted for 30% of the U.S. population. Adherents of all other religions – including Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists – totaled about 6%.
Depending on whether religious switching continues at recent rates, speeds up or stops entirely, the projections show Christians of all ages shrinking from 64% to between a little more than half (54%) and just above one-third (35%) of all Americans by 2070. Over that same period, “nones” would rise from the current 30% to somewhere between 34% and 52% of the U.S. population."
So depending how things go, by 2070 there may be no need for The Satanic Temple since Christians will be such a minority there will be no fear of a theocracy.
I used to think Christianity/Islam/etc... were bad low-effort ideologies that anybody in their default state could do better than, but then I saw the shitty knockoff that is wokism and - I have to say - I'm impressed. It turns out humans could actually do worse.
I can't name any white people killed by black people in the last five years, nor can I name any black people killed by white people in the last five years.
Of course Jordan Neely is getting more attention; he directed Nope and Get Out, didn't he?
I heard about George Floyd even if I didn't want to, because idiot copycat wanna-be progressives in my country were doing their own mini BLM marches as though we truly were another state of the Union.
I heard about Jordan Neely because that's all over social media.
I have no idea who Tyre Nichols is, nor do I want to know.
For George Floyd and Tyre Nichols, I think a more significant factor is they were killed by the *police.* "Man killed by trusted authority figure" is more alarming than "man killed by criminal."
Well there was Mohamed Noor who killed that Australian woman. Fairly recent but I guess the rules are I can’t look up the exact date.
Okay I looked it up It was just over your 5 year cutoff date. Did you look this up before your post? The Mpls Chief of Police was sacked within a week of the shooting.
Noor was convicted in 2019 though. About 4 years ago.
Quick without looking it up name 5 of the thousands of white people killed by black people. Or 3. Or maybe 2.
Oh god. You came up with the number. I thought you might have a list in front of you. The first time I heard of Jordan Neely was from you.
No, black people as a group do not support black on white violence. A few people were upset that a black cop went to prison for fucking up. Around here we call those people idiots.
You are playing fast and loose with the facts here and claiming ‘proof’ from individual examples. You are bent out of shape about an incident that never registered on my personal radar. Please consider that you might be looking for confirmation of something that was already part your world view.
Noor shouldn’t have been given the job in the first place. Not because he is black but because he has the absolute wrong personality for the job. Worse than Chauvin even. He had complaints filed against him before he killed the woman. He was on a hair trigger and should never been issued a lethal weapon.
Racism is alive and well in the US and it goes both ways. I’m white and I’ve been on the receiving end of black racism plenty of times myself.
It’s a large and complicated problem that probably won’t be solved in our children’s lifetime.
We have to start somewhere though and do what we can to wind this thing down. It’s up to each of us. Hatred is a contagious disease.
I’m trying to play this as straight with you as I can.
I usually skip past stories that feature a photo of a Michael Jackson impersonator. Seriously. I had to do a Google search to find out WTF Adam was talking about.
Not much in the way of protest to my recollection, but then again, in that case action was immediately taken across the board by police and government to apprehend, try, and convict her killers. And I don't remember any coverage of the various candle light vigils and memorials for her portraying the participants as Nazis, from what I remember of the media environment at the time, any attempt to do that would (rightfully) have been met with harsh backlash.
You seem to have a rather overbroad idea of what “conclusively” means.
Applying the standard you’ve just used, couldn’t one just as easily draw the conclusion that Chauvin’s behavior “conclusively proves” that all cops are hyper-violent anti-black killing machines? I mean, if we’re just gonna extrapolate crazy stuff from single data points, why not have some fun with that tactic in *every* direction we can play with it?
I can't name anyone who was murdered recently because I try to avoid those stories, even with the juicy headlines of "County X man arrested due to discovery of woman's body".
Just wondering, from the discussion about criminal violence here, how many readers have been in prison or have first-hand knowledge of this world, Or do you all just read newspapers/substack?
I think "maintain a stable ecosystem and society in a spaceship for multiple generations" still has some unsolved problems. Not impossible problems, but they're problems you need to research and test *before* you launch an arkship on a 100-year mission.
But if the question is just "could we accelerate a hundred thousand tons of people and supplies to interstellar speeds and bring them to a stop on arrival?" then Orion could probably do the job, yeah.
EDIT: One counterargument I've heard is the risk of getting outrun by later generations. If you can travel at 5% of the speed of light (Alpha Centauri in 80 years), and then 20 years later someone invents a way to travel at 10% of the speed of light, then they're going to reach Alpha Centauri 20 years before you do. For more distant stars this problem gets even worse. So it may not be worth launching any generation ships until your propulsion has hit some sort of plateau in efficiency that won't be beaten for a long time.
Cool, that's what I mostly wanted to field with people, to see if this seems like, if not practical, at least feasible. You give a good counterargument to attempting interstellar civilization right now, but I wouldn't argue for a 'right now' timeline anyway. I'm just talking about in theory. It does seem like we should be pursuing this tech on 'right now' timelines for interplanetary travel (Freemon Dyson certainly thought so) but that's a different topic.
Industrial machinery is usually designed to last many decades, and a century is not unheard of. There are I believe several hydroelectric plants still working with turbines a hundred years old, and there's a former warship of the Imperial German Navy (do the math) still in service on Lake Tanganyika not as a museum piece but because it is genuinely and nigh-irreplaceably useful. In the air, there are 80-year-old DC-3s still delivering air freight in corners of the cost vs performance curve that more modern aircraft can't match.
All of this assumes regular maintenance at the very least. That's a possible reason for a crew on a starship, with not everyone sleeping through the trip. But we routinely design spacecraft to last 15-20 years without any maintenance, and that's not the limit of our capability. Just the limit of what people are willing to pay for when they expect their state-of-the-art electronic payload to be hopelessly obsolete in 20 years.
Never heard this claim before, so maybe some introduction would be helpful. What kind of "interstellar civilization" is assumed? Is it merely "people could get to distant stars, and from there to even more distant stars", or is something stronger assumed?
Colonization, I agree with you. But when I hear "interstellar civilization", I also imagine the planets somehow communicating and trading with each other, etc. An ongoing relationship, rather than "10000 years ago our ancestors came from Earth, we have no idea what happened to Earth afterwards".
Well, it will be someone else's problem, but I wonder how the communication without trade would work. Probably just altruism... we are sending you some of our cultural and scientific products, not really expecting anything in return, it would take a few decades at best anyway.
Some planets will probably just ignore the rest. But maybe it will not matter, if many planets are colonized and at least a fraction of them will broadcast messages. Or maybe they will trade in messages... if you don't send to us, we won't send to you.
I could also imagine a future where no one cares communicating culture. If my planet has billions of people with lots of free time, plus superhuman AIs, we can produce enough art to make all of us happy.
Came here to bring up the same thing. Thousands of patients left scrambling as seen in r/TherapeuticKetamine. He had just made statements in some recent press coverage of ketamine for depression. Most recently on Axios: https://www.axios.com/2023/04/28/uncertain-future-ketamine-therapy
Would love to hear Scott speculate on or look into why the DEA shut him down. Too fast and loose? I have been having checkins monthly with his people (only first consultation session was with him). Would the DEA even be the agency involved if there were questions about the quality of his care?
It was the DEA. From the email that all us patients got:
Practice closed immediately per DEA instruction
…
I am so sorry to tell you this, but effective immediately all our practice functions must cease. My privileges to prescribe controlled substances have been suspended until further notice.
Compare to an alternative where we have 10+ viable political parties. The parties would have different political priorities that they emphasize, but they wouldn't all feel much pressure to have a distinct take on every issue let alone a hard line on it. Even more, there might not be any single dominant party in most parts of the country, so ordinary people wouldn't be socially expected to be in lockstep with any particular party. In other words, there would still be antagonism between people on opposite extremes, but there would also be more room for individualized views and compromise at both the political and personal levels.
I think those effects of reduced polarization are desirable.
> than the absolutist perspective of trying to win everything and never surrendering an inch.
Sounds like a key symptom of polarization. So those people complaining about it from the 'inside' at least acknowledge the bad equilibrium, even if they are not able to overcome it on their own. Which is a pity of course.
If you talk to people who complain about polarization, are you the one offering radical concessions first? What reaction do you get?
1) It sucks that so many people worship Satan instead of Jesus.
2) It sucks that everything is connected to religion these days. I like to play chess, but unfortunately the best chess players in my neighborhood happen to worship Satan, and I am not allowed to participate in their tournaments unless I sacrifice a goat first. And they refuse to participate in our tournaments, for similar reasons.
3) I sucks that if my Church finds out that I am playing chess-by-mail with a few lukewarm Satanists who do not care about our doctrinal differences too much, I may be burned at stake as a heretic.
How on earth did they manage to make Satanism *uncool*? Ooh, I'm ripping pages out of a Bible! (Just let me struggle with that for a bit because I'm so wimpy). A couple is renewing their handfasting vows, how... conventional? We believe in challenging all social conventions in order to liberate ourselves from the shackles of conformity - but don't forget to mask up! We're tearing up a flag! Which is our constitutionally protected right as decided by the courts!
My absolute favorite thing about this incarnation of Satanism is that they explicitly list "bodily autonomy" as one of their most sacred principles in order to oppose abortion bans on religious grounds (literally, a huge amount of their efforts are devoted to lawfare regarding their right to perform an "abortion ritual" and the fact that abortion bans violate their religious liberty). They are quite explicit, however, that their religious commitment to bodily autonomy does not extend to granting religious exemptions from vaccine mandates.
FWIW, I tend to sympathize with The Satanic Temple (who are not LaVeyans, BTW); but they lost some respect in my eyes for ripping up a Bible. Not because it's a Bible specifically, but because it's a book -- and I think that destroying books, even (or especially !) books one disagrees with, is a slippery slope I want no part of.
Oh my gosh, how did they manage to make Satanism *lame*? Look at this bunch with their masks and their wholesome after-school activities. "Là-Bas" it is not, and if you're just going to be "Artificially Flavoured Atheism" why even bother with the Satan bit?
I suppose some people would be shocked, but if your main purpose is shocking the squares/normies, it's not much of a purpose, is it? I guess I've just read too much religious-themed horror and fin de siècle Decadent prose to be too impressed by "I dyed my hair pink and I've got facial piercings!"
Well, just goes to show, if you want to do it right, you need to do it old-school. There's a new movie out called "The Pope's Exorcist" starring Russell Crowe doing a gloriously cheesy accent, and that manages to be more (in a ludicrously over-the-top manner) than these kids could ever handle:
"I have finished the first part of his life, making just the briefest possible mention of his virtues and achievements."
"Which are of no interest," remarked Des Hermies.
"Evidently, since the name of Gilles de Rais would have perished four centuries ago but for the enormities of vice which it symbolizes. I am coming to the crimes now. The great difficulty, you see, is to explain how this man, who was a brave captain and a good Christian, all of a sudden became a sacrilegious sadist and a coward."
"Metamorphosed over night, as it were."
"Worse. As if at a touch of a fairy's wand or of a playwright's pen. That is what mystifies his biographers. Of course untraceable influences must have been at work a long time, and there must have been occasional outcropping not mentioned in the chronicles.
..."At any rate, after losing track of him completely, we find that he has shut himself in at his castle of Tiffauges.
"He is no longer the rough soldier, the uncouth fighting-man. At the time when the misdeeds are about to begin, the artist and man of letters develop in Gilles and, taking complete possession of him, incite him, under the impulsion of a perverted mysticism, to the most sophisticated of cruelties, the most delicate of crimes.
"For he was almost alone in his time, this baron de Rais. In an age when his peers were simple brutes, he sought the delicate delirium of art, dreamed of a literature soul-searching and profound; he even composed a treatise on the art of evoking demons; he gloried in the music of the Church, and would have nothing about his that was not rare and difficult to obtain.
"He was an erudite Latinist, a brilliant conversationalist, a sure and generous friend. He possessed a library extraordinary for an epoch when nothing was read but theology and lives of saints. We have the description of several of his manuscripts; Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, and an Ovid on parchment bound in red leather, with vermeil clasp and key.
"These books were his passion. He carried them with him when he travelled. He had attached to his household a painter named Thomas who illuminated them with ornate letters and miniatures, and Gilles himself painted the enamels which a specialist—discovered after an assiduous search—set in the gold-inwrought bindings. Gilles's taste in furnishings was elevated and bizarre. He revelled in abbatial stuffs, voluptuous silks, in the sombre gilding of old brocade. He liked knowingly spiced foods, ardent wines heavy with aromatics; he dreamed of unknown gems, weird stones, uncanny metals. He was the Des Esseintes of the fifteenth century!
..."We may be sure Gilles had no reason to regret leaving this court, and another thing is to be taken into consideration. He was doubtless sick and tired of the nomadic existence of a soldier. He was doubtless impatient to get back to a pacific atmosphere among books. Moreover, he seems to have been completely dominated by the passion for alchemy, for which he was ready to abandon all else. For it is worth noting that this science, which threw him into demonomania when he hoped to stave off inevitable ruin with it, he had loved for its own sake when he was rich. It was in fact toward the year 1426, when his coffers bulged with gold, that he attempted the 'great work' for the first time.
"We shall find him, then, bent over his retorts in the château de Tiffauges. That is the point to which I have brought my history, and now I am about to begin on the series of crimes of magic and sadism."
"But all this," said Des Hermies, "does not explain how, from a man of piety, he was suddenly changed into a Satanist, from a placid scholar into a violator of little children, a 'ripper' of boys and girls."
"I have already told you that there are no documents to bind together the two parts of this life so strangely divided, but in what I have been narrating you can pick out some of the threads of the duality. To be precise, this man, as I have just had you observe, was a true mystic. He witnessed the most extraordinary events which history has ever shown. Association with Jeanne d'Arc certainly stimulated his desires for the divine. Now from lofty Mysticism to base Satanism there is but one step. In the Beyond all things touch. He carried his zeal for prayer into the territory of blasphemy. He was guided and controlled by that troop of sacrilegious priests, transmuters of metals, and evokers of demons, by whom he was surrounded at Tiffauges."
"You think, then, that the Maid of Orleans was really responsible for his career of evil?"
"To a certain point. Consider. She roused an impetuous soul, ready for anything, as well for orgies of saintliness as for ecstasies of crime.
"There was no transition between the two phases of his being. The moment Jeanne was dead he fell into the hands of sorcerers who were the most learned of scoundrels and the most unscrupulous of scholars. These men who frequented the château de Tiffauges were fervent Latinists, marvellous conversationalists, possessors of forgotten arcana, guardians of world-old secrets. Gilles was evidently more fitted to live with them than with men like Dunois and La Hire. These magicians, whom all the biographers agree to represent — wrongly, I think — as vulgar parasites and base knaves, were, as I view them, the patricians of intellect of the fifteenth century. Not having found places in the Church, where they would certainly have accepted no position beneath that of cardinal or pope, they could, in those troubled times of ignorance, but take refuge in the patronage of a great lord like Gilles. And Gilles was, indeed, the only one at that epoch who was intelligent enough and educated enough to understand them.
"To sum up: natural mysticism on one hand, and, on the other, daily association with savants obsessed by Satanism. The sword of Damocles hanging over his head, to be conjured away by the will of the Devil, perhaps. An ardent, a mad curiosity concerning the forbidden sciences. All this explains why, little by little, as the bonds uniting him to the world of alchemists and sorcerers grow stronger, he throws himself into the occult and is swept on by it into the most unthinkable crimes.
"Then as to being a 'ripper' of children — and he didn't immediately become one, no, Gilles did not violate and trucidate little boys until after he became convinced of the vanity of alchemy — why, he does not differ greatly from the other barons of his times."
Now *that's* how you do Satanism, not "we're going to teach the kiddies independent, scientific thinking with fun activities and snacks in our after-school club"!
Again, as per my last comment, do any of you here have any connection with the real life aspects of life that you wonder about? I recently saw a local 'black metal' personality I knew convicted of having a massive collection of child porn images on his phone. Apparently it had to do with his wanting to be more 'extreme' than his peers.
> Now that's how you do Satanism, not "we're going to teach the kiddies independent, scientific thinking with fun activities and snacks in our after-school club"!
That was kind of the point, though. Members of the TST do not believe in an actual supernatural Satan; but they do believe in the separation of Church and State, and they are officially recognized as a religion by the only power on this Earth who matters: the IRS.
This particular after-school club is a direct counter to the Christian after-school club that was established without much fuss; the point is that if the school does not wish to establish Christianity as its official religion, then surely they must allow the Satanic club alongside their own. If they do want to establish Christianity, then we have a clause in the Constitution that they must first contend with.
On top of that the TST promotes things like "compassion, wisdom, justice and self-reliance", which they see as being in opposition to modern Christianity, who seeks dominion over everyone and blind obedience through faith. While they do not believe in a literal Satan, he does seem like the obvious mascot for their cause.
Taking the points in reverse order (like a good Satanist):
"While they do not believe in a literal Satan, he does seem like the obvious mascot for their cause."
Nope. Prometheus would fit much better, and if they went around calling themselves Prometheans it would be much cooler. If you're going to pick mythological figures that you don't believe in as a mascot, then do some research that's more than "let's use a warmed-over version of Baphomet and the Goat of Mendes as cutesy imagery".
"This particular after-school club is a direct counter to the Christian after-school club that was established without much fuss; the point is that if the school does not wish to establish Christianity as its official religion, then surely they must allow the Satanic club alongside their own."
I don't think the school *is* trying to establish any religion; if they permit sports clubs, night classes and local clubs to use their premises after-hours, is that to be taken as an endorsement of badminton or cake-decorating as Official One True Methods?
This bunch could just as easily object as (1) Christian believers who are gung-ho for the separation of church and state - two of the five founders of Americans United for Separation of Church and State were Protestant clergymen (2) non-religious and secular (3) atheists, free-thinkers or what you like.
That they went in as Satanists (even in name) and the use of the imagery and so forth shows that they *are* primarily anti-Christian; they're not objecting (so far as I can tell) to Jews, Buddhists, Hindu or Muslims. So while they may not believe in an actual supernatural Satan, the mythic entity they picked was that one, not a rakshasa, asura, the god Set, Angra Mainyu or other malefic/oppositional spirit.
Granted, this is because Christianity is the majority religion in America, but if you're denying the Christian beliefs you can do that as easily with pagan entities as the traditional Christian bad guy.
So they're not really setting up as atheists or scientific materialists or other secular stance, it's very definitely "yeah we're against YOU lot". See the razzamatazz at the Boston Satancon where they were using the inverted cross (rather than the inverted crucifix, I don't know if they're aware that the version they're using is the Petrine cross and not the actual Satanic denial which would be the crucifix, or if they care; they got it off heavy metal album covers and that's enough!)
That particular distinction was done very well in an X-Files episode where Mulder thought their suspect was a Satanist or of that kind due to his use of the inverted cross, but the guy appealed to Scully to tell him what it really meant 😁
"they are officially recognized as a religion by the only power on this Earth who matters: the IRS"
Ah indeed, anyone can set up as a religion so long as they follow the tax guidelines! But if they want to be treated as a religion and get the protections of such, even for tax purposes and legal rights, then they can't weasel out of being treated like a religion. They could scrap all this cosplay in the morning and re-boot as a non-profit organisation for promoting free thinking, critical thinking, niceness and chocolate-chip cookies for all, without a scrap of any sort of religiosity involved.
But if they insist on "woooh, aren't we shocking? we're everything your granny warned you about as she clutched her Bible, the old hag! yeah, suck it Mom and Dad, I'm a guy and I'm wearing fishnets!!!" performances, then they're gonna be treated like they do worship Satan.
Yah, they're so Goffic, see?
"goffic: one who is a try-hard goth or gothic.
Example 1: Internet goffic says- Look at my icon... I'm so dark and gothy *broods*
Example 2: real-life goffic says- I dyed my hair black and listen to metal and watch buffy and I have a blood fetish and I'm totally hardxcore... let's go sacrifice some goats!"
EDIT: Turning up as The Satanic Temple and "Educating with Satan" to poke a finger in the eye of the Christian after-school club reminds me of a joke by a Northern Irish comedian at the height of the Drumcree/Garvaghy Road standoff; the Orange Order can march anywhere they like, but they insist on marching right through the majority Catholic neighbourhood. But it's not triumphalist or sectarian at all, no, they're just exercising their rights. Would you not like to go down a different street? No, it has to be *that* one! Right there, yeah, right through the Papists!
LaVey was a huckster and a showman, he at least would have been glitzy, camp fun. That lot looked soppy. The dressing up in costumes for the ball was your standard fetish wear Hallowe'en costume; a guy in heels is nothing nowadays.
And ripping up a Bible is as spicy as they got?* They probably wouldn't sacrifice a cockerel on the grounds that they're all vegan 🙄 If you're just going to have a get-together for some standard Edgelord Fourteen Year Old rebellion against "Mom made me go to church on Sunday", sheesh. We celebrate the rebel, the lightbringer, the overthrower and liberator! By doing everything that is now socially acceptable like drinking alcohol, having sex, and going around in tattoos and piercings and Rocky Horror knockoff costumes. Plus they were all wearing their Covid masks which made me laugh: it's nice that you're aware of health restrictions, but come on now, how law-abiding can you get?
Can't even get a good juicy heresy going nowadays, what is it with the youth of today?
*Granted, I'm Catholic so a Bible isn't as big a deal to me as it is to Sola Scriptura Protestants. I'd be much more revved up about desecrating a Host, but I doubt this lot could source one or tell the difference between a consecrated and unconsecrated one, they'd probably just buy a job-lot online of those pre-packaged Baptist kits:
Political polarisation isn't just about policy differences, it's also about how you interact with people who have different policy ideas. Do you politely raise counterarguments while remaining friends, or do you declare those people evil and try to fight a massive battle against them on every possible front at all possible times?
Right now in the US the actual policy differences between the parties are perhaps smaller than they've ever been, but the vehement nastiness of the political battle is distressingly high. How about a world where you can disagree with people _without_ treating those people as if they're toxic waste?
That's because the political battle is not primarily about policy differences these days. Not that it ever was or is 100 percent about policy of course; but in the 21st-century USA the needle is shifted waaay over towards electoral politics being "cultural war by other means". That was Trump's one real insight that enabled his stunning 2016 successes in first the GOP nomination campaign and then the general election.
"Right now in the US the actual policy differences between the parties are perhaps smaller than they've ever been"
Maybe (maybe!) the parties, but not in the populace. You literally have a polity that has embraced a total state response to safetyist concerns, with the occasional deviation from absolute safetyism for the flavor of the month virtue signaling (which gives you "it's okay to break COVID quarantine in order to protest for BLM). And you have a polity that doesn't believe that all of their rights are just whatever a blue ribbon panel of experts declares they should be this week.
You see the same split going on in the churches, with e.g. the United Methodist Church deciding that antiracism is now the most important side of the Wesleyan Polygon and the bible is just an interesting historical artifact created by white cishet men.
"Do you want a gas stove in your house? Gas stoves damage the environment, so if you want a gas stove, you want everyone to die and are thus evil. In order to prevent everyone from dying, we must ban gas stoves. If you don't want to ban gas stoves, you want everyone to die and are evil."
From the perspective of a political advocate, convincing voters that they're going to die if they don't support your preferred policy is the easiest way to get fanatically loyal supporters (or, if they're not going to die, a lot of other people will). The problem is that this makes people that don't support your preferred policy evil. On top of this, everything is now potentially a political or regulatory issue (and regulatory issues are almost all indirectly political.)
Ultimately, every political issue is a trade-off, either cost-benefit or between two competing values. People will always disagree with which way to go, and those that disagree are not necessarily evil (and those that agree with you are not necessarily good). Some issues are better left at the agree to disagree stage. These are hard things for people with strong opinions to admit.
> in the US the actual policy differences between the parties are perhaps smaller than they've ever been, but the vehement nastiness of the political battle is distressingly high
I think that of the people who complain about polarization, some merely wish that there were more people on their side, while others wish that more people on all sides were willing to compromise.
It's like "peace" - the word used by itself can conceal a number of different realities, some better and some worse.
However, I think you're right that some who talk about it (Ezra Klein, for example) aren't super-eager to see their side compromise their positions, like if the polarized left-wing view of abortion is total access, and the polarized right wing view is total abolition, theoretically, a compromise position might be 15 week access. There might be a plurality of the population who would be fine with that compromise, but they probably don't overlap with primary voters very heavily.
That’s exactly what most American voters agree with. 15 weeks is also more than most European countries where abortion isn’t a hot button topic outside maybe some Eastern European states. By and large it’s not going to be banned, nor is there any serious movement to extend it.
So the question is - why so much more polarisation in the US.
By Paul F Christiano of the Alignment Research Center - Prizes for matrix completion problems:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pJrebDRBj9gfBE8qE/prizes-for-matrix-completion-problems
I'm a first-year osteopathic medical student, which means that I learn all of the normal stuff that an MD learns (we take the same board licensing exam), and then they add on a bunch of physical therapy, chiropractic techniques, and woo-woo fantasy. I chose this over the traditional allopathic schools I got into mostly because I have a strong contrarian and anti-authoritarian streak, plus geographical preference.
I'm wondering if Scott has written at all specifically about osteopathic medicine, or if you're reading this @Scott, if you have any plans to do so. I think it's neat when we learn obviously-effective PT techniques to help with aches and pains; I am skeptical but optimistic about the lymphatic treatments we give to improve immune function; and I once had a lecturer tell me he could improve a patient's insulin sensitivity with the power of massage, which I am THOROUGHLY skeptical about. These same physicians often cite 30-person studies from the 1980s, which is... worrisome. I'd love a SSC-style meta-analysis, but I would also appreciate any friendly ACX readers pointing me in the direction of a good meta-analysis!
I've been very curious about Scott's opinions on Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degrees too, especially given he went to medical school overseas at a point where "DO or overseas MD" was a common question for students who didn't match US MD (nowadays it's much more skewed DO). I'd enthusiastically read a post about it, both regarding osteopathic medicine itself and the history of the DO degree.
I dont have a specific meta analysis to recommend but I would check out PainScience and Paul Ingraham. He's a rationalist Canadian massage therapist who was essentially harrassed out of the profession for being skeptical. He writes about and reviews a lot of manual therapy science. I don't know the name of this article off thetop of my head but i believe he reviewed a new study recently about manual lymph treatments, one of the things used in hospirals and usually considered legitimate, that had much less promising results.
For any later-readers, I found the following articles to be generally well-written and particularly germane to the Osteopathic Manipulation curriculum I'm currently immersed in, with relevant analogous DO-specific terminology noted:
https://www.painscience.com/articles/spinal-manipulation.php (relevant to "HVLA", "articulatory")
https://www.painscience.com/tutorials/trigger-points.php (relevant to "counterstrain")
https://www.painscience.com/articles/does-fascia-matter.php (relevant to "myofascial release")
https://www.painscience.com/articles/craniosacral-therapy.php (relevant to craniosacral techniques which I'm told we'll cover in second year and are obvious, total crock)
Thanks for the rec, Jordan19!
thank you! i will check him out.
I just got my monthly credit card statement from Citibank, and it says that my balance is $0.00, and that the minimal payment of $0.00 is due on the due date.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure this is funny. If their software has gone nuts and actually sent me the bill for $0.00, which had never happened before, I wouldn't put it past it to report my overdue payment to credit agencies, affecting my credit history.
Ideas? I could waste a stamp and a check to make sure they receive my $0.00 payment, but that seems silly. Does anyone know for a fact that my credit history would not be affected by missing a $0.00 payment?
Set up your card for autopay and paperless billing, and never worry about this again.
Having said that, I think your $0.00 statement is completely typical and a non-issue.
Agreed that it's probably a non-issue. But if someone is worried about their credit card company sending them bills with nonsense balance-due numbers, I'm not sure "arrange for your bank account to always feed the credit-card company whatever they say" is going to eliminate that worry.
I haven't used Citibank, but back when my credit card company only required payments every other month, they'd send the $0 minimum statements, I'd do nothing and nothing would happen. Pretty sure that's just a stock form they've got with plug-in numbers.
Or are you saying your balance is not actually $0 and you know you owe a payment? In which case pay the payment.
Thank you for the info. The balance ought to be $0, as I haven't used that card since last year. I wish I could generalize from your experience, but unfortunately I don't think I can derive what Citibank might do based on what your credit card company did some years ago. Many things have changed not for the better since then.
I worry about stuff like this too. I always overthink things though. FWIW I don’t think you’ll have a problem with this.
My wife usually tells me to forget about it and I usually do. Do you want me to have her tell you to forget about it in a comment?
Nah, thank you, though. Part of my problem is that I make money looking at code. Makes me wonder in this case if the fact that it failed in one place doesn't mean that it fails in the other.
However I just had the thought that most likely this would not be the first failure of this kind on the part of a credit card company, and that credit report companies most likely had to learn to ignore this before. Maybe I'll just ignore this, indeed.
Just wondering, from the discussion about criminal violence here, how many readers have been in prison or have first-hand knowledge of this world, Or do you all just read newspapers/substack?
I was under arrest for about an hour once. Canadian customs authorities were holding me on suspicion of bringing pot across the border. After the vehicle and I were thoroughly searched I was back on my way to Yellowknife.
I mean geez, just because I had shoulders length hair and there were flowers on the side of my van and my canoe had an American flag design they pick me to search? What’s up with that, man?
So...pretty sure this is bait but on the off chance it's sincere, yeah, I have, what were you expecting in the conversation?
I mean, I'm scanning where you've posted in this thread and there's a...not terribly productive conversation on media and racial crime stuff. There's lots of people involved in the prison system, probably about as many in the jail system. What would you expect, say, a nurse or a dental scheduler or an electrician working in a prison or jail to add to that conversation?
Literally, there's tens of thousands of people professionally involved in prisons and jails but, like, what do you expect them to contribute to a discussion of media bias? Especially because publicly discussing most aspects of their job on social media isn't, like a firing offense but's it's a significant no-no.
Genuine question, what distinction are you making between prison and jail? As a British English speaker I see them as synonyms.
In the American system, you can think of jail as being for short-term, local processing while prison is for long-term, statewide imprisonment.
So, if you commit a crime, you don't go to prison, you go to the local county jail. While your trial is ongoing, you're usually in jail. Once you're convicted, however, say for 7 years, you'll get transferred to a state prison where you'll serve the remainder of your sentence. Prisons are usually preferrable to stay in, both because they're better funded but also the population is more stable, there's more of a routine, and so it's more predictable and stable.
There's lots of situations where someone might need to be imprisoned temporarily and held for a short period of time while the legal and judicial bureaucracy decides what to do with them. That's what jails do. Once a decision has been made, by a judge or jury or whatever, that someone needs to be imprisoned long-term, you send them to a facility specialized for long-term imprisonment. That's a prison.
Just to be clear, jails are for both people awaiting trial/conviction/sentencing, and people convicted of minor crimes that call for short periods of incarceration - sometimes as long as a year, but usually much less.
Thank you! Genuinely learned something useful.
I have a feeling you might as well ask a vegan forum how many of them have first-hand experience with trophy hunting.
For the vegans on here who valiantly continue to try and get us bloodmouth carnists to give up our barbarous cruelty:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5LYshWI7n8
Hehehe.
I do wonder why meat eating people dislike this though ? Talk about hating the messenger. Is it not the truth ?
I can imagine the objections along the angle of "If you accepted a waiter position, then you tacitely approve of killing animals. Your work is not a place for your activism" and I wholeheartedly agree. But my impression/prior is that people would hate/make fun of this even if it's not a waiter doing it, just a friend or a random internet commenter or really just a stranger putting it on a billboard in the streets.
Related to low-trust: I've seen people not tell the truth to their ex about why the relationship ended. It's possible that in some cases, even the person who left didn't know, but I think that part of it is not wanting to tell the truth to someone they don't like any more. It's also possible that the truth would be embarrassing.
Compare and contrast: I struggled to tell my ex why I thought we needed to break up, because I still cared so much for them, and didn't want to hurt their feelings.
Oakland teachers have been on strike for a week now. It appears that the salary proposals from the union (OEA) and the district (OUSD) are very close, but the contentious issues are “common good” demands such as reparations for Black students, community authority over school budgets and housing homeless students. To me this seems wildly inappropriate on the part of the union, but they nonetheless have a lot of community support. Can somebody steel man the union position? I’m genuinely confused why these are remotely reasonable demands as part of a teacher contract negotiation.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QQC1S0kMOhPqm3uDJ94hXyNDttIy9VNd/view?usp=drivesdk
American education is a mystery to me, so I am just wildly guessing here.
You said that these things "have a lot of community support", so a straightforward explanation would be: If you want someone's political support, you include the things they care about in your list of demands.
Steelman: Your job is not just about salary and time spent, but also about working conditions. For a teacher, the state of their students is a part of the working conditions. It is different to teach students who are okay and had enough sleep, or students who are sick and starving and whatever else. Teaching people who are physically unable to focus on learning is just a waste of everyone's time. (This explains only the part about homeless students.)
Genetically modifying yeast to produce beta-carotene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHNPnO5UOYQ&ab_channel=TheThoughtEmporium
Yellow rice is *still* not available because of anti-GMO activism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice
Considering that beta-carotene yeast can be made in a home lab, could companies in India or elsewhere produce it?
Does golden rice or b-c yeast make sense for effective altruism?
Carrots are one of the cheapest vegetables. They last a long time without refrigeration, they're easy to grow, and they are versatile. Why don't people just eat more carrots?
(Sweet potatoes are also a good option but I don't like them so much)
Carrots need a cooler climate than the worst-off places have.
I assume there's some agricultural reason why sweet potatoes aren't the solution, possibly that for really poor people, it's too expensive to grow them.
I think you're not imagining the constraints caused by serious poverty.
According to Wikipedia, the rice is patented, but can be used for free if the farmer does not make more than $10,000 per year.
I can understand a concern that widespread use of golden rice would effectively make all Africans hostages of Monsanto. Can Monsanto change their mind and say "actually, starting now, every farmer has to pay us 30% of their income regardless of how much they make" the next year?
The first idea is that a good effective altruist cause would be to develop a patent-free alternative, but I guess that is easier said than done.
What is the patent status of the b-c yeast?
To me it seems like, in that scenario, either the farmers are better off paying 30% for the golden rice or they'll just switch back to regular rice?
I agree, but the uncertainty about what happens makes it difficult to evaluate how effective the golden rice would be.
Nancy asked whether this makes sense for effective altruism, and EAs always want to calculate how many dollars per QALY they have to spend. In this situation, the answer is: "as many, as Monsanto decides tomorrow".
If half the population produce golden rice, the market price for everything they buy will increase. Then when the 30% fee kicks in, the prices will probably not fall back down in a hurry.
Thanks for looking into the patent status-- that's a concern, but is it more important than people dying or going blind on a huge scale?
In general, Effective Altruism specializes in easily repeatable and testable situations, so malaria nets are their sort of thing, and physical research projects aren't.
All I know about b-c yeast patents is that it doesn't seem to be patented from the way the guy in the video is talking.
My current notion is that maybe it could be made for the US market-- Americans like things with more vitamins (yes, I know it isn't sensible) and then find some way of getting it to poor regions.
I thought the point of GMOs is that they breed true, or at least as true as evolved creatures do-- it's not like hybrids which you need to keep buying for each generation.
I don't know whether b-c yeast could be used for a starter, so you generally only need to buy it once.
I asked my wife, who is a professional biochemist, although she doesn't do exactly this kind of stuff. In her opinion, genetically modifying plants is fairly easy nowadays. The golden rice was invented more than 20 years ago. Progress in genetics is fast; these days a small team of scientists in Slovakia would probably be able to develop a few plants like that, if someone paid them to. She expects that the actual problems would be *legal*, not related to biology.
There are probably all kinds of regulations; just doing the paperwork could be orders of magnitude more expensive than the research itself. Or it could just not be allowed for some reason, in which case you would need even more money for lobbying. Then the question is, how widely defined is the Monsanto patent for golden rice. Is it just "this specific plant with these specific modifications" or rather "any kind of rice modified to produce beta carotene" or even "any kind of plant modified to produce more of anything".
I expect that corporations would try to get their patents as wide as possible, using technical language to make it appear as if they are doing something deeply mysterious even when they are describing trivial things; expecting that the patent office does not have enough experts who would investigate each patent too deeply. (At least this is how it works with software patents.) And of course a corporation with deep pockets can afford to sue you even if you did not violate their patent; the idea is that "the process is the punishment" and even if you win you may be ruined financially.
I am not an expert, but seems to me that the actual problems with GMOs are usually legal, not biological. Specifically, you don't need to keep buying the seeds for each generation, but you still need to pay *royalties* for each generation.
In extreme cases, you will be sued even if you actually didn't want to grow the GMOs, but your crops got contaminated by wind or something. "You are growing my patented seeds, pay me!" and good luck hiring a lawyer if you are a poor African farmer.
Moles actually teach you important things about both atheism and religion.
The Mole
https://squarecircle.substack.com/p/the-mole
Hmm, I don't know, math does not strike me as empirical and is definitely knowledge. I do think a new religion could be started, one riffing off of Taoism and Advaita Vedanta: these two are not incompatible with the current world, though I think the attitude of any new religion should be metaphysical agnosticism, which is incompatible with materialism.
> If God speaks directly to our soul, we still have to be able to *perceive our soul* to hear God — and if our soul is not part of the material world, then we can never hear God.
This presumes the primacy of physical reality and physical mind.
It could be that the mind/soul is where all perception actually occurs, with both inputs from the physical world and the metaphysical world coming through the same mystical channel, in the end.
Is that falsifiable? I don't see how offhand. Like most metaphysics, it's fundamentally not scientific.
Is it plausible? Ehhh... debatable.
Neither unfalsifiability nor implausibility actually show falsity, though.
What happened to David Friedman's substack?
What do you mean? It looks fine to me, my subscriptions still work, and there are posts every day or so.
It was gone for me this time yesterday, appeared again last night, and is gone for me right now.
My mistake, I failed to check for the other 14 recommendations.
Heres a link to a recent paper on the; "Collapse and the interplay between essentiality and impact in socioecological systems' (https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.107.054201) [....] developing a mathematical model to analyse the consequences of an additional dimension to sustainability beyond environemntal impact - product/activity essentiality. While environmental impact can lead to resources collapse, too much restriction on the use of essential resources can lead to social upheaval. [....] These concepts and their dynamics and simulate different scenarios to understand the relationships between these two possibilities."
Statement taken from the authors linkedin post, enjoy.
I can't edit my posts or report other people's posts (clicking on the "..." button under a post doesn't open the menu like it used to). Is this just me, or are other people having the same issue?
I'm seeing the same thing. I'd hazard a guess that Substack has decided to do some kind of horrible tracker-farming (though I can't conceive of what) with that menu and it's now being blocked by my adblocker, because when I turn my adblocker off the menu works, and looks different than it used to.
Seems to work for me again.
Yeah, it does for me too, now. Weird.
TM complains about not being able to edit further down, it might make sense to check whether they are having the same symptoms or something different.
Personally I can open up the ellipse menu opens up normally and in a minute I will test edit functionality.
Edit: looks like I can edit my comments.
Thanks, it got back to working normally for me as well.
I'm still amazed that nobody serious is challenging Trump in the primary. No, DeSantis is not a serious candidate. Where are all the anti-Trumpers? WTF is going on!?
Disagree about DeSantis. I'd definitely bet on Trump to beat him, but I don't think his odds of winning are low enough to rule that out, and I think that qualifies him as "serious".
So I can think of two potential meanings of "serious" here:
The first is that "serious" means they have a decent shot of beating Trump in the primary. In this case, if not DeSantis then who? I mean, maybe Greg Abbot but...I struggle to imagine him doing better. Any challenger has to get some of Trump's base to flip to him and it's not clear to me who you have in mind that would do better than DeSantis.
The second is that "serious" means endorses policies within some spectrum you or some common entity considers acceptable or "serious". To which...the Republican base pretty clearly has different preferences, they've consistently expressed them over almost a decade at this point, and any candidate with your preferences has little to no chance of beating Trump in the primary.
And if it's the second...I mean, I too am shocked that my outgroup has not seen the infinite wisdom and sense of my ingroup's preferences and converted. Their continual refusal is baffling and maddening.
I mean your first meaning. A genuine contender.
Because a significant portion of the Republican primary electorate are firmly planted with Trump. For one reason or another, he's their guy and they're sticking with him. That proportion is large enough that unless another GOP candidate can convince a supermajority of the remainder (who are split between multiple warring factions) to support them, Trump will still appear to be the frontrunner and most prominent member of the party.
I imagine you have a non-universal definition of "serious candidate" if "Popular Governor of Florida" doesn't apply.
Desantis has a nice enough resume, but he's shown no interest in directly engaging when Trump launches attacks against him. That might be the correct tactic for whatever longer-term goals he's pursuing, but he's basically conceding that Trump is his superior within the party and giving up the game in the process.
No, it's a reasonable strategy for dealing with Trump. Don't engage in a direct sledging match (which he'll win), focus on looking like a better-disciplined alternative with similar policies. Besides, slagging off Trump just makes you sound like a Democrat. You can always keep the option open of attacking Trump's shortcomings directly later on, but it's too early for that right now.
You could argue about whether it's the _optimal_ strategy for dealing with Trump, but it makes sense.
"Better-disciplined alternative with similar policies" doesn't really describe either Trump, with a culture-war focus to make up for a thin policy agenda, or Desantis, with a culture-war focus to make up for a deeply unpopular policy agenda.There's a theoretical 'elder statesman rising above the fray' pattern, but it's a bad fit for the 2020s Republican party.
If the question is a nonspecific "But will he fight for my interests?", refusing to engage *is* the loss, asked and answered. It's absolutely possible to attack Trump from the right, but for some mysterious reason that avenue has gone unexploited.
I'd think that a "deeply unpopular" agenda would have hurt his re-election margin. If you mean "Deeply unpopular with People Who Matter (meaning CA and NY)" well, those states have a zero chance of going red in 2024, so why bother pandering to them?
> I'd think that a "deeply unpopular" agenda would have hurt his re-election margin.
Why do you think it didn't? As I just said, both Trump and Desantis focus on culture war topics in lieu of traditional core policy concerns incl. healthcare and taxation. That's an area where Desantis is quite weak, and Trump is strong-ish by default due to general disinterest. You cannot highlight the weak points of a nonetheless successful candidate, declare all else equal by fiat, and conclude that their weak points are actually strengths. Elections are not monocausal.
It's also worth mentioning that the Florida Democratic Party is wildly incompetent, perhaps even more so than the California Republican Party. Measuring Desantis' strength by looking at margins in FL is going to overweight him to a modest degree.
Heh, yea. Within either party pretty much anytime, the governor of one of the nation's largest states who just easily won re-election is a highly plausible candidate for either spot on that party's national ticket.
Chris Christie is talking about it -- I think from hearing interviews with him that he will officially declare soon. I think he sees his role as specifically to submarine Trump and let someone else win.
Some commenters have said that Trump is the Dems' first choice, as he (Trump) is the only proposed GOP candidate Biden can beat head-to-head.
Right, and this is why they're attacking him so hard right now with lawsuits and the like; the more they martyr him, the more the GOP base will be inclined to send him back up again as a symbolic gesture.
Biden/Harris is sufficiently terrible that any sensible Republican without too much baggage should be able to win, even beyond the usual margin-of-cheating.
If Biden were unable to run in 2024, who do you think the Democratic frontrunners would be?
Presuming Biden runs, do you think he'll retain Harris as his running mate? If not, who else would be likely?
Biden has definitely said he's going to run in 2024 so unless the party tells him quietly "No, Joe, time to sit by the fire with your slippers" that's that.
I think they're all probably side-eyeing each other to see who'll jump first, which means the first loser. Until it really gets down to the wire, let Trump and De Santis take all the heat.
Let me put it another way. Why are there so few big name candidates jumping into this race? Why doesn't it look like the GOP primary in 2016 or the Dem primary in 2020, in which an army of candidates competed to win? The recent primary this most resembles is the 2016 Dem primary, where almost nobody ran because the party had decided to coronate Hilary. Why has the GOP decided to coronate Trump instead of challenge him?
I realize that some argue that if too many people run, that will only help Trump since he can easily win a plurality in the primaries. But that merely assumes everyone would stay in the race too long, as opposed to the anti-Trumpers coalescing around whichever non-Trump candidate performs best, much like the Dems all pulled out after Biden won South Carolina in 2020. It wouldn't be the exact same as that, but the GOP could back whoever the second-best performing candidate is, assuming Trump has the actual lead. (Edit: To be clear, most of the Dem candidates pulled out after South Carolina because they were united in defeating Bernie.)
The current not-Trump strategy is to pick one guy, DeSantis, who looks good on paper in a traditional sense but has no charisma, no balls, a beta male in a contest to be the most alpha. But maybe I'm wrong, maybe DeSantis could be the guy to beat Trump. THE BEST WAY TO FIND THAT OUT would be for many candidates who look good on paper to jump into the ring and fight it out. Make it a contest. You know, don't be the 2016 Dems. The more candidates in the fight, the more likely someone will do some real damage to Trump, even if the person doing the damage won't be the person to win.
It just seems like nobody gives a fuck.
I have the simplest possible explanation for you. Same reasons sitting presidents don't get seriously primaried, whoever they are.
Yeah, I suppose that's how the Republicans are treating this.
>Why are there so few big name candidates jumping into this race?
What name in the GOP is bigger than DeSantis? Other than Trump himself, and any has-beens like Romney who you may remember as being big in their day but aren't any more.
I made a list below of a bunch of plausible candidates. They may not be *bigger* names than DeSantis, but they all have resumes that give them a chance. Perhaps they are every bit as mediocre as deSantis, but betting on 4 horses with 5-1 odds gives you a better chance of picking a winner than going with one with 4-1 odds.
All of those names are smaller than DeSantis. Only Paul and Christie even come close.
And, were you even watching the 2016 campaign? The Republicans went with 4+ "horses" that might have each had 1-5 odds on their own, hoping that one of them would displace Trump. Whereupon they divided the ~60% "please not Trump" vote four ways, leaving Trump to win with the ~40% "neverRINO" vote.
Any Republican who wants the GOP's candidate in 2024 to be anyone but Donald Trump, wants the 2024 primary to be between Donald Trump and *one* other serious candidate. If Ron DeSantis is going to run, the choice of serious candidates is A: Ron DeSantis and B: people who are so much better (and better-known) than Ron Desantis that DeSantis will either withdraw or see most of his supporters defect to the other guy.
B is the empty set.
In 2016 the other Republican candidates did not take Trump's chances of winning seriously, and were not prepared for Trump's blunt, coarse style, which gave them all the vapors. Today everyone is familiar with Trump's style and knows that he is the favorite to win. The opportunity exists to coordinate against him, and the opportunity exists to use the democratic process of the primaries to find out which candidate fares best against him (See the 2020 Dem primary for how to do this.) Maybe it is DeSantis, maybe it is not, but a lot could be learned by having more horses in the race early to see which ones are fleeter of foot. That would be a better way to do things, IMO.
Now, of course, there are plenty of reasons plausible candidates do not want to run. As others in this thread have mentioned, they would take a huge political hit if they tried to coordinate against Trump and failed. I suppose I am being foolish for expecting anything from that crowd of politicians other than cowardice.
Tom Cotton, Greg Abbot, Brad Little, Eric Holcombe, Greg Gionforte, Mike Parson, Jim Pillen, Joe Lombardo, Chris Sununu, Mike DeWine, Kevin Stitt, Henry McMaster, Chris Christie, Rand Paul, Bill Lee, Glen Youngkin.
At least a few of those people would likely outperform DeSantis.
Yes, please pick Glen Youngkin so the Dems can then crucify him for TRANS GENOCIDE:
https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/icymi-glenn-youngkin-continues-extremist-anti-trans-attacks-at-cnn-town-hall
Whoever gets picked is going to be hammered as Worser Than Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Your Mean Fourth Grade Teacher Combined. Trump is pretty much the only one who has been able to shrug the attacks off and demonstrates he doesn't give a damn. He's not a great choice by any means, but what are they going to say about him?
"Ooh he's a sexual abuser" as per this lady in The Guardian?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/10/e-jean-carroll-lawsuit-trump-sexual-abuser
"In this case, the question was “Who are you going to believe – a proven congenital liar or a 79-year-old, beloved advice columnist who offered significant corroboration for her version of events?”
Uh-huh, remind me again about "believe Tara Reade that Biden groped her", or is that not the same thing at all?
I don't understand why having a national profile is important at this stage. How many people outside Arkansas knew who Bill Clinton was at the start of 1991? How many people knew who Mitt Romney was at the start of 2007? Anyone who is a senator or governor has a shot if they can stand on a stage and sound presidential. Once you have a resume good enough to get on the ballot, it's all stagecraft. Perhaps none of those guys listed above have the stagecraft. I couldn't say because I haven't seen them in action. I have seen DeSantis in action, which is why I'm looking around desperately for someone else.
The internet era has obviously been good for commercial purposes. Has it been good for civic purposes? Probably not, We’ve mostly lost faith in institutions. In political parties, churches, Congress, The White House, The Pentagon, The FBI, The CIA, The Supreme Court, The Federal Reserve, the integrity of elections, The Bill of Rights...
In the civic realm, what have we gained from the internet? Despite thoughtful, entertaining blogs like this one, whose political pull is ~nil, it seems the internet has been a huge negative for civics.
> Has it been good for civic purposes? Probably not, We’ve mostly lost faith in institutions. In political parties, churches, Congress, The White House, The Pentagon, The FBI, The CIA, The Supreme Court, The Federal Reserve, the integrity of elections, The Bill of Rights...
Are you really going to just state this as a given? What's the evidence that the internet is causally implicated in this deterioration, as opposed to, say, decades of stagnant wages due to failed economic policies, declining life expectancy, increased wealth inequality, increased cost of living, and on and on?
It's not even a given that the public *should* have faith in some of those institutions! In what world has the Pentagon, CIA or the FBI proven themselves trustworthy? Do you think people have just forgotten the Iraq war they were lied into, the torture programs they "justified", or the entrapment efforts the FBI orchestrated against Muslims?
You have a high bar to clear before the internet appears even remotely plausible as the reason the public have lost faith in some institutions.
>Are you really going to just state this as a given?
I'm stating it as an opinion, of course. I try to avoid the bad habit of doing what Chesterton complains about: "A man these days cannot even state his own opinion without immediately adding "But I might be wrong." That goes without saying!" Quote is from memory, so I'm sure I butchered it but believe I got the gist of it.
To offer a citation, I did have something in mind something like Martin Gurri's The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority. https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Public-Crisis-Authority-Millennium/dp/1732265143
The internet era has revealed that loss of faith, and to a lesser degree amplified it. Neither of those things is the same as having created it though....everything you list was well underway during the 1970s and 1980s but just didn't have any way to break through the old-media gatekeepers.
Syndicated talk radio (late 80s/early 90s) and then the spread of home online access (1990s into the early 00s) provided those ways, and also demonstrated that the traditional news media had no clue about how widely mistrusted it already was. Then social media platforms were invented (mid 00s) and pulled the lid the rest of the way off; then Obama in 2008/12 and especially Trump in 2016 demonstrated how to weaponize all of that politically.
And here we are.
Political parties, Congress, The White House, The Pentagon, The FBI, The CIA, and The Federal Reserve are all operating in the pursuit of interests that run counter to the average American's interests. Increasing distrust is a positive sign that public awareness is increasing.
I wouldn't put all churches in the same category, but the very large, prominent one that sheltered and moved the priest that abused my family member certainly wasn't operating in people's interests.
The Bill of Rights has much less influence on the activities of the government than its authors intended, I believe, but I would think is still a net positive by most people's reckoning.
At a simple level, the dominant paradigm of warfare has been a constant flux between technologies that favor a military built around small number of expensive elite troops (horses, longbows, aircraft and missiles) and technologies that favor a military based around a large number of cheap regular troops (gunpowder, mass production, possibly drones).
There's no reason to think that civics is any different; some technological paradigms empower establishment institutions, others empower the masses (I don't think either is inherently good or inherently evil; the best is probably a balance between the two). The internet era started as a transition from technologies that empower the establishment (ironically, mass media) to technologies that empower the individual (social media). The establishment doesn't want to lose power and is fighting back by trying to control the internet.
All of this is mostly unrelated to whether the establishment is trustworthy; loss of trust in most establishment institutions started well before the internet, but the mass empowering nature of the internet accelerated the process.
A lot of civic protest have been organized with the help of the internet. It makes this much easier. It has also allowed protesters to gain more attention in far away regions of the world.
To be clear, I think from the civics perspectives there are both advantages and disadvantages. I was just naming some of the former.
It feels truthy that the internet per se has led to greater distrust & polarisation. I certainly feel it. But if you break it down to the specific dynamics that cause this reaction, they seem to revolve specifically around social media. What that seems to have revealed is rank incompetence on the part of institutions, in the way they communicate. And clout-mining by a certain class of person who might, at one time, have been much less visible.
Throw into this the time spent connected to this maelstrom of discourse (mostly due to smartphones) and my intuition is that if you removed a handful of chatter platforms the picture would be quite different.
We started losing faith in most of those long before the Internet came around. Vietnam and MLK destroyed the FBI, CIA and Pentagon. Watergate destroyed the political parties. Churches have had pedophile scandals for a long while. The Supreme Court's history has mostly been naked politics with ad hoc reasoning. The Second Amendment has been a hot button topic since at least the 1800s. I assume concerns about integrity of elections probably predate elections. I don't know how controversial the Federal Reserve has been but I'm sure if it wasn't it was due to a lack of awareness in its existence.
What's that fallacy where you think one way, but assume the crowd thinks differently, and then it turns out the crowd agreed with you but likewise thought everyone disagreed with them? The internet's anonymity basically removed that. Now we've got furry communities and other weird crap that no one would be the first to admit to with their face attached.
Why blame the internet? I think it's proper to mistrust those who have shown that they should not be trusted. I don't think that what's actually bad for society is the lack of trust itself, but the deception which makes trust dangerous. I'd go as far as to say that the deception appears lazy and incompetent. I'd understand if it was just the media, as it can maximize conflict (here division) by keeping the ratio of skeptics close to 50% rather than just 5-10% like in the past.
Isn't it better to be without friends, than to be friends with somebody who betrayed you 3 times already? I think one should have at least that much self-respect.
More fundamentally, the increased selection and freedom has made it so that we are no longer forced to make friends with those in our local area. We are not attached to anywhere in particular, we can always just move, so the feeling of community and fellowship is eroding. Even the practice of identifying with specific things is on the decline, and we're therefore not seeing rivalry between websites and other such relics of the past. This might sound unrelated, but it's just a further generalization of the same issue that you're referring to. So it seems that institutions are also less dependent on us, that they don't have to appeal to our desires anymore. The process called "enshittification" is thus not limited to the internet.
We never get to see the alternative universe. Who knows what happened there? Maybe in our version we lose trust in institutions, while in the other version the same institutions, having our trust, did some horrible things.
Sure, but low trust in general seems to work out badly for societies.
"Trust in things that not only don't deserve it, and which are actively working to harm you, 'cuz Society." Is a very common argument that has never actually impressed me.
All surveys are showing trust in all institutions are significantly down since then (although Kennedy was indeed the high point in trust in government).
What I think is different now is that there is distrust all along the political spectrum, whereas in the 60s and 70s it was mostly just the left and far-libertarian right that was full of distrust.
Designer Karl Lagerfeld left $1,500,000 to his cat Choupette and, following his death. she has now duly inherited. If some hacker stole, say, $1,000,000 from the cat's account, could they be convicted of any crime? Is it illegal to steal from a cat?
The cat would never know the money had gone missing, and thus wouldn't suffer any angst at the loss. So, provided the hacker left enough in the account to pay for food and treats, and possibly vet's bills, to last the cat's lifetime, they couldn't be prosecuted for animal cruelty either.
Legally speaking, "money left to your cat" means "money left to a trust, run by a human who spends money to take care of the cat," meaning there would still be a person and legal entity that can be a victim of theft.
(Also, the state can and does go after people for "victimless crimes." You could argue that deterring hackers from breaking into people's bank accounts is a worthwhile cause even if in this case nobody would notice the money missing.)
What if you entered into a relationship with the cat?
Right. Stealing money from a trust absolutely is illegal no matter what or who the beneficiary of the trust is.
Also the trustee would have a legal ("fiduciary") duty to defend and preserve the trust's capital in ways such as helping authorities pursue criminal charges, filing civil suit to recover stolen assets, etc.
This reminds me somewhat of The Aristocats, a 1970ish Disney movie wherein the evil butler Edgar kidnaps Madame's cat Duchess and her three kittens, and abandons them out in the countryside. Presumably Edgar resented Madame's fortune being lavished on the kittens, and hoped to inherit the money himself.
Certainly the movie did not entertain the idea that Edgar was not a despicable villain. ;>)
The human race had eighty-five years to convince Karl Lagerfeld that any of its members should have that money. I don't know enough about Lagerfeld's life and death to know why that didn't happen, but from my knowledge of humanity, causes other than "Lagerfeld was an evil meanie" are at least plausible.
Oh I’m sure he could have found an honest man or woman. I know plenty.
Please help me find the write up about how USA nuclear regulatory agency demands that “all reasonable” safety protocols are implemented which effectively means zero profit or efficiency improvements can be made.
Am I hallucinating this?
You may be looking for the Gordian Knot Substack, specifically the post on ALARA: https://open.substack.com/pub/jackdevanney/p/alara?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android
I’m not sure about seeing it here (I don’t read everything), but I read this review that mentions ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable): https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
Also good reading in that vein, covering the FDA and more: https://rootsofprogress.org/against-review-and-approval
I remember this. I think it was in one of last year's book review contest posts.
I've been thinking about getting an AI to follow instructions in a complex game like Minecraft as a precursor to being able to do it in the real world. (I've only played Minecraft a little bit so excuse any inaccuracies in the details here.)
What I think you would need is to couple a bunch of language models at the high end with a bunch of reinforcement learning models at the bottom end. You'd give it an open-ended task like "collect fifty diamonds" or "build a nether portal" and it would use a language model to break that down into tasks, and then subtasks, and then sub-sub-tasks. There's enough "how to play Minecraft" guides out there already that this top level doesn't need to be capable of learning.
Then you'd have some mid-level routines that strategise on how to achieve specific goals given the state of the world. Something like "My current goal is to build a house. I have three pieces of wood. The current state of the game world is [X]. What should I do?" and it would spit out "Run north-east" because the known state of the game world includes a monster who is south-west of you. Maybe these mid-level routines need to be capable of some kind of learning from successes and failures.
Then you'd have low level routines trained with reinforcement learning that are capable of translating simple verbal commands like "go north-east" and "harvest the iron located at coordinates (-3,2,5) from your current position" into sequences of actual button pushes.
That's a basic ideal, you'd probably need some extra models to keep all these models lined up, and maybe some extra ones bolted to the side to give meta-level commentary on how all the other systems are performing. (Now I come to write this, I'm worried that this is basically what human consciousness is all about...)
Anyway, it seems like an interesting problem to solve, how do you construct a stack of models that can convert high-level LLM strategisation into a sequence of actual physical actions? And once you can do it in Minecraft, how far are you from doing it in the real world?
What you are suggesting sounds an awful lot like AutoGPT-type stuff.
Yeah, the top layers are certainly similar to AutoGPT as I understand it, but also connecting that to lower-level models that can actually take physical real-world actions (or in this case real simulated-physical-world actions), translating low-level subgoals into sequences of movements, and "sensory" data into LLM-comprehensible descriptions.
Or is that part of AutoGPT too?
Yeah, that's how GPT plugins work.
Does anyone have any good Studio-side takes on the Writers Strike? Not that I'm saying I'm pro-Studio, but I'm genuinely curious about such takes - the takes you get in the media are almost universally pro-WGA, some of them to the point where it feels like they're just rewriting official statements from the guild.
I'm anti-union but definitely not pro-studio, since the studios have effectively formed a labour-buying union amongst themselves that's just as bad as the labour-selling unions.
The whole damn system needs to be burned down. Collective bargaining needs to be banned... or at least severely restricted to ensure that collective bargaining groups aren't allowed to retaliate against people who choose to make deals outside those groups. Right now if an individual writer wants to work and an individual studio wants to hire them, they effectively can't, because all the unions will retaliate against both parties.
Labour cartels should be as illegal as cartels in any other industry.
In general, there are fewer companies than employees, and the company owners network a lot, so no matter what the law says in theory, in practice the owners have countless opportunities to make all kinds of informal deals. It's only illegal if you can prove it, and even then it is usually just a slap on the wrist.
Suppose that we are both CEOs of companies that have cca 50% of market in a certain tiny industry each. We make a gentlemen's agreement never to hire each other's former employees. The deal is made verbally; we never put anything on paper. But we know that it is an iterated prisonners' dilemma; if one of us defects, the other will soon defect too. As long as we both keep the deal, it allows us to keep specialists' salaries lower than they could otherwise demand. How would they ever prove this? At a job interview, it is perfectly legal to ask for their CV. And if we see the other company there, we simply reject them for some bullshit reason.
If we tried making cartels illegal everywhere, I think we would also have to ban the CVs and make it illegal to ask for references from previous employers. Plus prosecute all ways to circumvent these bans, for example it would be illegal for companies to show their team members on their website (because this is how the tiny industries would effectively share the list of their employees for the purpose of non-poaching agreements).
Otherwise, only the side that already has a weaker bargaining position would be prevented from forming cartels.
This only works in industries so tiny that a company which owns 50% of the market nonetheless has so few employees that the CEO personally chooses each new hire. Otherwise you need the CEO of XYZ LLC to tell his HR staff "never hire employees of ABC Inc", and even if he doesn't put that in writing they can testify to it.
Oh man, now I gotta listen to some Bruce Springsteen to get that anti union stuff out of my head.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p-zs4lohmYc
How are you going to ban collective bargaining since it’s literally people getting together and bargaining collectively.
We have laws to prevent price fixing cartels in most industries. In the US, the FTC will step in if competitors are colluding to fix prices.
In reality we probably don't even need to go this far, we just need to stop cartels from being allowed to retaliate against non-cartel-members. So if Alice and Bob decide to get together and bargain with their employer Charlie that they won't accept less than $N an hour then that's fine, but they're not allowed to retaliate in any way against Charlie or Dave if Dave decides to come along and undercut them.
(How will we judge "retaliation"? There's lots of vague employment law already, it'll be fine.)
That’s a problem with retaliation (however unlikely that is) not collective bargaining.
Collective bargaining only works under the threat of retaliation though.
Suppose I'm a screenwriter and I decide "actually fuck this strike, I think I'll go to work after all". Right now I can't, due to the threat of retaliation. The Screenwriter's Guild would blacklist me and I'd never work again. Furthermore a bunch of other unions would blacklist the production that I'm writing for, which makes the studios unwilling to hire independent workers (so-called "scabs"). There would be picket lines threatening the production and the people who worked on it.
If nobody was allowed to discriminate against or intimidate anyone else based on their adherence or otherwise to some collective bargaining group, then meaningful strikes wouldn't be possible, people would defect and things would go on pretty much as normal. Humans would be able to freely bargain with other humans.
Meaningful strikes would of course be possible- they'd just only work proportionately to the proportion of the labour supply that supported the strike. People would defect if they preferred working under the prior terms to the expected outcomes of the strike- so a strike would be exactly as successful as its demands were reasonable and feasible.
You're misunderstanding collective bargaining as intrinsically this coercive thing, when it *is* fundamentally humans freely bargaining with other humans- just joining forces to increase leverage. Retaliation is something that would reduce the freeness of the bargaining, but so is banning unions.
These are all parts of the bargaining process and aren’t actually intrinsic to collective bargaining. The friends cast engaged in collective bargaining by just asking for the same pay after season 3, which involved a pay cut for two of them to begin with, but much more money in the end. Any one of those characters could have been retired, but not all of them. No threat of retaliation.
Nevertheless if the Screenwriter's Guild is able to retaliate against the studios then good for them - the angst you feel at workers earning more money at the expense of corporations isn’t something I share.
In employment situations, in my experience humans don't bargain with humans, but instead with corporations. Not quite the same.
The problem that (in certain industries, in certain countries) two consenting adults aren't allowed to come to deals without some unrelated third party sticking its nose in and trying to take a cut.
If a film studio and a screenwriter want to come to whatever deal they like, then it's none of anyone else's business.
Speaking as another union skeptic, you don't need to ban them to achieve those goals. Just remove the mandates for exclusive bargaining and a duty of fair representation.
ETA: also good faith negotiation.
So why do you want to ban collective bargaining, then? Why can't the union and the studio come to an agreement without the government sticking its nose in?
Sure, they can. They just can't oblige any non-union writer to follow their diktats, nor take action against any studio that hires non-union writers.
Most of the WGA takes I've read focus on how streaming shows don't pay writers shit because, unlike on network TV, there is no such thing as a residual because there is no such thing as a rerun. Meanwhile, Netflix stock price collapsed more than 50% last year, and management claims they will change their strategy to trying to come up with a few big hits like major networks do, instead of pursuing their old strategy, which was producing about 100,000 shows that most people never hear about. Other streamers seem to be thinking in a similar vein.
Netflix turns a profit but it's new subscribers and EBITDA declined from 2021 to 2022. It seems to me, on the little I've read, that the WGA is fighting yesterday's battle. Streaming is likely to support fewer writers the next 5 years than it did the previous 5 years. But if Streamers are hoping to make the next Big Bang Theory--and they are--seems reasonable they could find a way to pay the writers writing for the big hits more than they got paid to write The Handmaidens Tale. Of course, such a course would mean a lot more writers in Hollywood won't be working at all. Is the WGA willing to face that reality?
> seems reasonable they could find a way to pay the writers writing for the big hits more than they got paid to write The Handmaidens Tale
I dunno, this isn't the way it works in most other industries. Generally you get paid a pre-agreed amount for your time, and this doesn't vary depending on how successful the product is in the marketplace.
It's certainly possible to structure employment contracts so that the individual worker gets additional risk and reward, but I don't see why this should be some kind of default in that particular industry.
Having seen some of the demands, I do think they are unreasonable, but there's a lot of speculation that the WGA is worried about AI - that studios/networks will get AI to do drafts then hire on writers to polish those up. You get paid less for coming in to fix a script than you do for writing an original one. And since network execs routinely interfere in shows anyway with demands to include this and take out that and our focus group says this is our target demographic/to hell with the focus group that wants action-adventure we're going full steam ahead with DEIB, then the fear is that AI will allow the execs to produce their own drafts with the writers just coming in as janitors to tidy up the product.
If GPT-4 can do your job, then you deserve to lose that job. Sorry, writers.
The argument is that GPT cannot, in fact, adequately replace writers. The executives think it can, but the writers know it can't.
It's kind of like how technically, you could replace the steel frame on your cargo ship with plastic. Everyone who knows specifics about shipbuilding would protest, you'd write them off as wanting to keep their cushy jobs, and if you went ahead with the change you would end up with some very dysfunctional ships.
So if the studios do fire all their writers and being in chat GPT, expect to see some very bad expensive movies in the future. It's a net loss in the sense that all that money could have gone into making actually good art, but has instead been squandered on AI generated rubbish.
> So if the studios do fire all their writers and being in chat GPT, expect to see some very bad expensive movies in the future.
Oh, believe me, I've been expecting them all along. And they kept happening, too, even before GPT :-(
It means that if your job can be easily automated, then your replacement by a machine is inevitable. You can try shoveling back the tide, and maybe it could work for a short while, but you'd only be postponing the outcome. Chess players are a special case, since chess is a sport, and any sport is a spectacle where raw performance matters less. For this reason, however, the number of available sports-performer jobs is vanishingly small.
Personally I can't wait, I'd bet GPT-4 can already do a better job than 90% of writers today.
I joke that the way 2021+ shows and superhero movies are written is you take some 5 year olds, throw in a bunch of action figures and props representing your show's people and sets, and then just literally transcribe whatever the 5 year olds are doing, and that's your episode / movie.
Ridiculous? Of course! 5 year olds can't sign a union contract! So clearly the writers have to use their own children, or interns or something...
Contrast that with the capabilities on the horizon - soon GPT-n is going to be creating literally individually personalized music and shows and movies for people, and even if Hollywood manages to ban that, some other country will do it and clean up - and I'd be pretty nervous as a writer too.
The issue is that the default contract was stingy on the upfront in expectation of residuals later, but worded such the there are ~no residuals from streaming. A 'standard contract' that never included residuals in the first place would presumably have had to pay much more up front to have been accepted by the WGA
That kind of risk/reward has been the default in the US TV industry for many decades. My guess is that it evolved that way because Hollywood has a huge risk-taking culture compared to most other industries. The line between being rich/broke in TV & movies is thinner than almost anywhere.
E. Yudkowsky on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1655251255739158529
Also being interviewed on a recent EconTalk episode here: https://www.econtalk.org/eliezer-yudkowsky-on-the-dangers-of-ai/
I'm concerned that a purist attitude on AGI/ASI stands in the way of both comprehension and persuasiveness. While I think Eliezer makes some great points, the path by which someone comes to the conclusion matters at least as much as the underlying information they rely on to get there. Some peaks are too steep to climb directly. In this, I think the framing that ASI is the only/most important framing for the problem falls short. People often respond to "AGI is an existential threat, why are we not more worried about this?" with a visceral disbelief in the potential and/or suddenness of the threat.
There's a reason for this. If you're making a zero-to-one argument, you have to face the fact that many futurists have been flat-out wrong in what they predict and what they miss. Sometimes they'll even get the near-term capabilities right while missing out on the far-reaching consequences. Eliezer's rejoinder to to this, "But I've been right about tons of things re:AGI, and they still don't believe me!" We could go round in circles about why that is, and whether it's justified, but I think it all boils down to pure instinct/feeling. This mountain is simply too steep for many to climb directly.
How to overcome this? Let's explore what might happen if we ignore Eliezer's advice to disregard non-AGI concerns, and see where that takes us, point by point.
E: AI can do some many things it couldn't do two years ago. Improvements are happening exponentially, so we should expect AI to continue to improve and do impressive things normal humans struggle to do, and at rates impossible to accomplish today.
P: Isn't that great!
E: So far it has been great, even though some of those new abilities are being used for bad ends. This despite the technology being fairly crude (it still hallucinates and memory isn't explicitly built in). Students can use them to cheat and write papers for them. Bias from the training data may perpetuate and amplify cultural issues. It has become easier than ever to create deepfake content - text and images - to gaslight people. Soon that will include video, voice, essential records, and official documents.
P: That's okay, though. We're still figuring out the bugs. I'm sure we'll be fine once we get better at building these systems.
E: Don't you think we should put more effort into safety before we put more effort into making them better at doing the things we want to protect against? If this technology scales at its current rate - not assuming major unknown technological breakthroughs - it will replace many jobs. It will gain abilities to do lots of things we usually rely on humans with good judgement to do. It will also become a tool people could use to do much worse things with than cheat on tests.
P: We'll deal with those things when we get to them. No need to worry about them now, when we can barely imagine what those bad things are. It'll be clearer as the technology develops.
E: Some of the things we know it will be able to do in the future aren't the kind of thing we can safely fine-tune later. For example, it could be used to hack into computers/databases. Right now most people are immune to this kind of thing, not because their computers are secure but because they're not important enough to individually target. A computer that can hack could target everyone at once though. Meanwhile increasingly more human activity is being overseen by computers, from driving to work to health records to ordering fast food. All that could be dangerous to in the hands of an AI capable of hacking and manipulating them.
P: Why would a computer care about hacking into your stuff or harming you? Seems kind of theoretical to get worked up about all that. Computers don't really 'care' - unless you're worried about some future computer that will magically become sentient.
E: It doesn't matter that the computer cares or doesn't. If the TOOL exists, a human could aim that tool wherever they want, with all its amazing new capabilities. If we make AI a tool that can be used for malicious purposes, we've amplified the ability of malicious actors. And there will ALWAYS be malicious actors. This is true whether the AI technically meets the definition of 'self-aware' or not. Who cares that the model is 'superintelligent' or not, if it gives people of regular intelligence superior abilities to do evil?
P: So we build in safeguards against what it can answer/do. That seems easier than neutering the system itself, or slowing down progress.
E: That's not working great so far.
P: Sure, some people can hack the relatively primitive chatbots, but we'll get better at it.
E: Maybe we should get better at it before we develop better chatbots. Whether it becomes self-aware or not, it's not hard to see that whatever GPT-10 looks like, it will have capabilities we'd want to keep bad actors from being able to exploit. And bad actors will have strong incentives to reverse-engineer it to create their own version without restrictions or get past the safeguards you try to put in place. The mere existence of the tool creates the incentive for bad actors to break in and misuse it.
P: I'm still not convinced the problem is whether to build the thing. Access control seems more practical than standing in the way of progress.
E: This story sounds familiar. I wonder if we've learned anything from our past mistakes. Imagine you could go back in time and stop development of those first nuclear bombs. Would that world be a safer place than the one we currently live in? It's been almost 80 years since the last nuclear weapons were detonated in war, but that's mostly because we've spent huge amounts of time and effort worried about and working against that extreme danger. We're on the cusp of creating ANOTHER technology of equal or greater threat level. We're walking right into that trap with eyes wide open.
P: You're saying we should stop the research before we open up a Pandora's Box we can't close up again. What about all the good technologies that came from research into radioactive substances? Medical scans, cancer treatment, smoke detectors, food safety, etc. Better AI promises to save at least as many lives as that, and accelerate human progress. Lots of people could die who wouldn't have to if we slowed down progress.
E: Aha! So you admit you believe it can do more than just complete prompts! Else why would anyone have a problem with slowing down the pace of development? You can't have it both ways: either it develops new abilities we need to protect against so we should slow it down, or it doesn't develop any unexpected abilities so it doesn't hurt to slow it down.
P: Yes, it will likely be able to do some cool new things. But we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Let's both invent new AI abilities to save lives and keep it safe while we're doing that.
E: We might save fewer future lives in the near term while developing safe technology, but that applies to every new technology. Yet we hardly question putting extra processes in place before we start allowing things like driverless cars or new medicines into the general circulation. Why not AI, too? We know the potential impacts of AI are huge and poorly understood. It's reasonable for people to be worried we're not taking safety seriously, especially when we have to make the argument for safety in the first place! We put way more effort into safety of things that have much less potential for harm.
He had a startlingly positive response last night on Twitter to this article:
https://twitter.com/blader/status/1655992260448886789
New research from OpenAI used gpt4 to label all 307,200 neurons in gpt2, labeling each with plain english descriptions of the role each neuron plays in the model.
EY sez:
"Commentary at greater length:
- I'm encouraged that somebody ran right out and tried this.
- It's not clear (to me, yet) that it worked all that well, or better than expected; I have not yet signficantly updated my model of how technically hard interpretability is.
- It is definitely a positive update toward "people are sincerely trying to have clever nontrivial ideas about using AI to boost interpretability today, ones I did not think of myself, and are running right out and trying them right now and doing interesting things *at scale*, rather than using 'the AI will do our AI alignment homework eventually' to cope with a lack of current progress".
- That said: I have already previously said that interpretability is the easiest place to verify that any sort of AI alignment progress has been made, and pointed to it as one of theof the few places where I'd have hopes of offering large prizes for progress or eventually getting AI help; since the big central issue with trying to scale human work, *or* getting AI to help, on most parts of alignment, is verifying whether good or helpful work has been done. So, unfortunately, this *is* the place where I previously pointed to as progress being much easier than on other alignment problems; and already predicted that wouldn't be enough to save us.
- *That* said: it's still at least some update in the direction of getting more progress earlier than I expected, and now I have more hope of seeing more exciting work like this later. My p(doom) definitely went down rather than up, upon seeing this.
Well done to Steven Bills∗, Nick Cammarata∗, Dan Mossing∗, Henk Tillman∗, Leo Gao∗, Gabriel Goh, Ilya Sutskever, Jan Leike, Jeff Wu∗, and William Saunders∗."
I _really_ distrust calls for the kind of "safety" that involve restricting what the general public can do with a tool. The worst bad actors are usually ones with governmental, political, military, or corporate power, who usually have bypasses around any "safety" restrictions anyway. This reminds me of attempts to cripple copying technology to enforce DRM ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole ) and to cripple encryption ( https://archive.epic.org/crypto/clipper/ ). As a member of the general public, I don't like disempowering us by crippling tools we could potentially use.
I strongly agree with this. If we agree it's important to do, let's put serious people on it, not dump it on an alphabet agency that will soon be underfunded and captured by corporate interests. Best we can expect from that is an acceleration of AI development and the illusion of progress on safety, which is probably worse.
Better to at least know the house is burning with no help coming than to believe the fire department is on its way when nobody called for help.
Many Thanks!
The equipment you really need to do this is either a degree in microbiology, or a cheap textbook. The rest is pretty easy and surprisingly inexpensive, given the potential for threat.
"genetically modify pathogens"
<mild snark>
Yeah, the equipment is called human bodies. Pathogens frequently mutate inside them.
</mild snark>
Better analogies are search engines, libraries, and compilers. I don't want any of those crippled.
It sounded at the beginning of your post like you were trying to find a way to get more people to take seriously the possibility that AI may turn out badly for us all, so I initially took your Q&A as an example of a way to do that -- something that might work better than EY's blunt statements about doom. But your Q&A just seems like a pros/cons dialog that if anything tends *away* from worry about AI. I don't think I understand what you are hoping to accomplish with your suggested new approach.
> your Q&A just seems like a pros/cons dialog
pro: amazing technology
con: will kill all humans
conclusion: there are both significant pros and cons, it is very hard to decide, but the technology definitely seems amazing
I admit the dialogue needs work. If you go back and listen to the EconTalk episode, you'll notice that the host, Russ Roberts, at times has a hard time following EY to any level of significant concern about AGI/ASI development. I was trying to channel arguments from people like him, and target a conversation that would be most persuasive to them.
Part of the problem in the Roberts interview seems to be comprehension (EY mentions complex ideas off-hand, instead of explaining them; this makes the point opaque to outsiders), but that's not the whole problem. It's honestly emblematic of many such discussions, where skeptics return to the point that "but this is all theoretical, right?"
By moving the discussion to a familiar gradualist footing, we can side-step the whole discussion about whether the danger will come from a discontinuity brought about by a theorized development. The point is that "developing the technology is itself creating a dangerous tool - similar to designing the first nuclear bomb, this is true with or without general/human-like intelligence or reasoning".
The biggest problem with the gradualist approach to alarmism on this subject is that the skeptical side is likely to take the gradualist argument and redirect safety efforts from 'slow down so we can figure out alignment' to focus instead on 'fix the problems as they arise'. If this approach is adopted, it's unable to protect against a self-aware ASI situation, so you have to carefully demonstrate that the gradualist approach shares the same risks as the AGI/ASI approach, and that safety should be pursued the same way.
I'm saying that the conversation I normally hear is, "AGI will slaughter us all once it hits a threshold we can't predict other than to say that it's likely to come sooner than we expect!" followed by skepticism about whether that hypothesis will actually play out or not. The question of whether AI alignment/safety is important revolves around this dichotomy.
Meanwhile, we're creating this incredibly powerful tool that can reshape society in potentially more drastic ways than the internet and social media combined, with little thought to how it might be misused in the hands of malicious actors. To imply that the 'worst case scenario' has to come from AI becoming an agent of its own is understating the threat in a way that may actually be causing people to tune out. We don't need the AI to become superintelligent to create a monster that escapes our control. Nuclear proliferation wasn't intelligent at all, and it still became a major human concern.
Oh! I completely agree with out about the dangers of pre-superintelligent AI. It's not really clear from that dialog you wrote that that's what's on your mind. By the way, here's a really good exposition of the dangers of present and near-future AI: Really clear, well-illustrated, non-hysterical tone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ
Just watched the video. Yes, this is EXACTLY what I'm talking about. I feel like if you watch that video you can strongly agree that AI safety is a huge, pressing, immediate problem. None of that is based on the assumption that AI may become self-aware. It's all about capabilities. "Wait, you mean anyone could exploit a LLM to design a chemical weapon without any training in chemistry? That seems like a problem." "LLMs can design computer viruses and then be used to discover software exploits that can be used to deploy those viruses? That's a big problem, too!"
Maybe you're not afraid of AGI, but you might be concerned about giving information superpower to everyone on 4-chan.
Right, and the ability to make a passable imitation of somebody's voice with 3 seconds of audio. We all have way more than 3 secs. on our outgoing voicemail. The criminal possibilities are mind-boggling. And seeing people's silhouettes using their wifi signal. And AI's theory of mind developing up to that of a 9 year old in way less than 9 years. I tell people about this video every time the topic comes up.
Fair enough. I was trying to work through it in a way that is as fair as possible to the skeptical side. I may have sacrificed consistency as a result.
Does drug for feline stomatitis have anything to do with EA?
An expansive view of EA often extends beyond human wellbeing to the animals as well by (detractor perspective) anthropomorphizing them and imputing that they suffer, and in theory mitigating it. Examples include "Eat more beef and less chicken because one cow's suffering feeds more people than one chicken" and "Eat more chicken and less beef because cows have more capacity for suffering so one cow's lived experience contains for more suffering than multiple chickens".
A drug to treat feline stomatitis increases worldwide wellbeing from this perspective.
I think I'll split the difference and eat more lamb.
If I recall correctly, the drug potentially had some human application, but testing for animal use was cheaper/less bureaucratically burdensome. The idea was make it profitable for animals first, then try to get it approved for humans. But I could be misremembering.
This is what I recall; it's a potential treatment for Crohn's and other autoimmune disorders (but not profitable for Big Pharm to test because the component drugs are off-patent). Cats are often used for preliminary testing of human treatments, and their motivated owners offer a funding mechanism for further approvals.
How original/creative were movies/television shows of the 1950s-1990s? Lately I've been in a funk where I haven't been able to enjoy newly released movies/tv shows, and I think a large part of the reason is that they are so clearly responding to/inspired by current events. As an example of what I mean, consider something like The Boys or The Newsroom, where multiple characters/plotlines are based off real events. Yesterday's Succession episode had a similar reference to an event that happened not too long ago (I won't spoil it but if you watched it you should know). In contrast, when I watch older films/tv shows, the plotlines and characters seem so original. Sure I could map the tropes to current events, but it doesn't seem as lazy on the part of the creators. I'm curious if those of you who grew up during that time period feel similarly, or if what's causing this juxtaposition for me is the fact that I'm ignorant about the events of the 1950s-1990s.
I remember reading I think a Gwern essay about how older media is generally better, but I can't seem to find anything. I may just be confusing it with the Lindy effect. I don't know what kinds of older shows you're watching, but I assume that the older shows you watch are those that have been considered good enough to be easy to find even now, rather than being able to use recency as a "crutch".
I'm going to say... if you're unhappy a show called The Newsroom... is too related to the news... you've probably got your wires crossed somewhere.
Unhappy isn't really the right word, I know it's very intentional in those shows it's just that they were the clearest examples of what I meant. Actually I meant to put The Morning Show not The Newsroom, though both examples work fine. I don't mind shows related to the news, all I'm saying is when I watch a West Wing episode (let's say for example the episode Take This Sabbath Day) it seems more original than an episode of the Newsroom, and I'm wondering if the reason why can be explained by the fact that I don't know the event in 1999-2000 that inspired the episode.
Looks like it. The fan site says that episode came out in February of 2000. January and February 2000 was apparently a big deal for the death penalty.
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/dpic-reports/dpic-year-end-reports/the-death-penalty-in-2000-year-end-report
Television shows were pretty damn cookie-cutter up until maybe Twin Peaks or so. Not to say there weren't quality shows worth watching, but I wouldn't call them particularly original or creative.
As for film, generally the 50s and 80s are thought of as dead eras dominated by studio blockbusters. The 70s are peak New Hollywood and personally my favorite era of film.
I haven't watched The Boys, but you may just be making inappropriate picks. I didn't watch The Newsroom, either, but was at least aware of it, and it is was specifically meant to be a commentary on current events. Succession is more of a parody, but also pretty blatantly a parody of the Murdoch family. If you're going to watch that, you need to expect similarity to the real world. That isn't lazy so much as half the point. Even outside of shows like that, I think it's pretty hard to set a story in what is supposed to be the real world in the present day and not have any similarity with events and people that are real. I doubt this was any different in the past. You're just watching something from the 70s without an awareness of what was in the headlines in the 70s.
Law and Order basically perfected the "ripped from the headlines" episode template back in 1992 or so, after all. This isn't something writers just barely started doing.
The conventional wisdom is that movies were much better in the '70s, '80s and '90s. French, Italian and Swedish movies were good in the '60s, but Hollywood not so much. Current events rarely had much to do with any of them. Movies themselves used to be the current events.
TV pretty much always sucked until The Sopranos came along. Perhaps Seinfeld was the exception. Or All in the Family, which was about current events, or at least about generational changes in the culture.
Any new art form goes through a predictble arc, as I see it, with 20-25-year "eras" corresponding roughly to a human generation. (just me laying this out quickly....)
Beginning/first experiments
Pioneers, many new techniques created
Golden age (1) -- the form is mature and both artists and audiences are steeped in it, it's commercially succesful and lots of work is created
Golden Age (2) -- Consolidates the gains of GA(1), work becomes both increasingly formulaic but many masterpieces are made drawing on 60-ish years of experience and tradition
Taking a break/Nostalgia -- less interest, less work, popular taste turns to mocking the past but also celebrating
All Irony -- Quentin Tarantino at its best, Brian Pousane at its worst
Oh, people still do that? Hey maybe we should transfer some of the old stuff to modern media ... whoops!
The first "Golden Age of Television" was well before the Sopranos, back when there were programs like Playhouse 90.
That's before my time. I do like reruns of The Honeymooners, though.
First of all, keep in mind that you're talking about thousands of shows and movies over a 50 year period. Nothing anyone responds is going to coherently cover all of them. Some shows and movies are definitely going to be about then-current events, if not as directly as you're seeing now. You can also see some trends (incompetent and/or corrupt cops for instance) that last for a while that may or may not tie to actual events.
That all said, I think that there is a good bit less related to current events, especially prior to the 90s. This will depend some on genre, with police dramas like Law and Order or NYPD Blue being more headline related than Dallas or Heart to Heart.
>keep in mind that you're talking about thousands of shows and movies over a 50 year period.
Right, but for TV, you only had three networks producing original shows for most of that period, and only a few shows each year were big hits. I mean, someone can argue that some obscure show that got cancelled after a couple seasons was ACTUALLY GREAT, but if we stick with commercial successes one can reasonably generalize about the overall quality.
For movies, I'd argue the quantity of Hollywood releases made from original screenplays as opposed to adaptations is a good proxy for originality, and boy has that number dropped off in recent years.
> Right, but for TV, you only had three networks producing original shows for most of that period
Other countries do exist, you know...
Sorry. I guess your country had 1 network to watch.
They had at least seven, as this historical documentary confirms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HF3x67VK9o
<fictional stuff>
On the off chance that someone reading here is also a fan of both Leslie Fish and Charles Stross:
In Stross's "Laundry" universe, would Fish's "Avalon is Risen"
( with, amongst other lines, the line "...when the gates are opened wide" )
potentially also serve as a "Prelude to Case Nightmare Green"? :-)
</fictional stuff>
I don't have an answer, but sounds like I need to go read some Leslie Fish :)
Leslie Fish is a singer/songwriter. My personal favorite of hers is "The Sun Is Also a Warrior":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pq4SSlsZ_p0&pp=ygUZdGhlIHN1biBpcyBhbHNvIGEgd2Fycmlvcg%3D%3D
Yes, "The Sun Is Also a Warrior" is a favorite of mine as well.
"Avalon Is Risen" is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1x_il69GS8
I'll be posting this in the next classifieds thread, but my sister (trans-woman, 24 years old) has recently moved to Seattle and is striking out left and right trying to find a job. She graduated a year ago with a bachelor's degree in actuarial sciences, has some coding experience, and has a good chunk of capital to use on finding the right position (rent for multiple months while unemployed or in a poorly paid internship, headhunter fees, etc.).
Didn't mean to bury the lede like this, but does anyone have any advice? Specifically in Seattle, but Portland or the Bay Area would be similar enough that I'd be interested. Are there agencies or single contractors who specialize in job-hunting that you've worked with? Does your company have openings for someone with that kind of CV? Have you been in a similar position and found a strategy that worked well?
Feel free to respond in a comment below or email me at: 7o2wzrybd (at) mozmail.com
Is she interested in becoming an actuary? If so, she should probably be looking for work in Insurance, though that is a very wide field. A good first step would be to just find insurance companies with offices in Seattle and inquire for openings, they are generally hiring qualified/capable actuaries.
For this path being able to pass (eventually, not all at once) pass actuary exams is absolutely mandatory. A very good first step would be to burn some of that candidate grinding out the first one or two exams.
Knee-jerk reaction: "actuarial sciences" and coding experience? Perhaps data scientist at Microsoft? As ipsherman cited in the last hidden thread: https://ryxcommar.com/2019/07/14/on-moving-from-statistics-to-machine-learning-the-final-stage-of-grief/
A use for ChatGPT I have adopted is writing to my congressmen. Typically, when an issue like the DEA thing came up, I'd like to write to my congressmen but the time and effort I think it would require was too high for me to ever follow through. Now, I write up some bullet points and/or feed ChatGPT/Bing an article about the legislation in question and write have it write up the email.
This seems like a good idea but wrong from a categorical imperative perspective. Which is to say, because you shared it I'm afraid this idea might spread and congressmen won't be as trusting of actual handtyped emails.
To make up stories or what? Isn't much of the point of the public comment period to give personal testimony of how these decisions impact you? I commented on the DEA's website with an anecdote of how the Adderall shortage had impacted my wife, who has been taking it for 15 years. Unless she's been putting way more of her life on the Internet than I'm aware, I can't imagine ChatGPT would be able to tell that story.
I would guess that congresspeople and such would be much more wary than usual about ChatGPT-generated emails and such, so it might be worth it to write up your emails by hand.
But would they be able to tell?
I have heard, here and there, that politicians often give more weight to hand-written letters compared to machine-printed letters or emails, due to the possibility of a single person producing a large volume of letters using machine assistance. (I've been hearing this since long before ChatGPT was a thing.)
I have received some responses from the congressmen's offices so someone there seems to be reading them. The ones I have generated don't read as 'obviously written by an AI' to me.
They already get a bunch of identical emails when some interest group sends out a bulk email telling subscribers "Email your representative today! Here's a script for you to modify and send!" but I'm betting 80% of the subscribers just send the script without modification. The ChatGPT letter is likely to be more original-sounding.
If people keep giving identical or near-identical prompts to the same LLM, are the results really going to be that original-sounding?
Bingo. I'm always hesitant to send the script email. I figure a unique one is better.
I am currently enjoying the Bud Light brouhaha because they so beautifully shot themselves in both feet. Not alone are the conservatives (or, if you prefer, the transphobic backlash) boycotting it, now they've managed to piss off the LGBT bars as well who are now refusing to stock their products.
All this coming up to summer when people should be drinking your beer-flavoured water outdoors and at sporting events and concerts. Well done, everybody!
Let me get this much out of the way first: I'm not a beer drinker. I have no opinion on the merits of the product, the brand, or the rivals one way or another. The last beer I tried was Doom Rock ale, which I found pleasant enough, and Hobgoblin Ginger Beard which is a fermented ginger beer. I'm not drinking any of these regularly, so I'm coming at this entire story as an interested outsider.
It's like a textbook example of how *not* to do marketing. The thing is, with social media, it's *social*. You can't just silo it off to the bunch of people you want to specifically target (not unless you do a heck of a better job than the marketing lassie did), it can and will get shared around.
I believe the higher-ups at Anheuser-Busch/InBev when they say they knew nothing about it, because it's an amazing technicolour dreamcoat disaster and any senior person who gave this the okay needs the boot. I believe them when they say it was a one-off, not a campaign, not a partnership, blah blah blah.
All that doesn't matter a damn. Perception is all, as they should realise. They built this particular brand on a combination of patriotism (the Clydesdales, the flags, the rest of it) and being an easy drinking summer beer.
Who drinks easy drinking summer beers? Predominantly young college guys who want to get something cheap that they can drink for hours without getting too drunk, and blue-collar guys who want something cheap that they can drink for hours without getting too drunk as they stand around outside grillin', fishin', or catchin' the game.
Marketing lady is right in all she says here! She just picked some unfortunate phrasing, and of course everyone went online and found photos from her time in college when she was being a bit "fratty" herself:
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6324270148112
You need new, young drinkers. You need to appeal to women drinkers. But of all the people to pick, Dylan Mulvaney? Someone whose other endorsements are for sports bras and cosmetics? Someone who looks, in the clip, like they are physically in pain at the notion of having to (mock) sip that beer? And that's not even mentioning the 'in the bath' one where it's... terrible.
(My own personal view on Mulvaney is that this is not a transwoman, this is a gay guy doing a drag act and the "365 days of girlhood/womanhood" is in the nature of a performance art piece. The theatrical, over-the-top mannerisms work great if you're doing a stand up routine in a gay nightclub, but not so much when you're trying to present yourself as 'just one of the guys (or gals) who likes a beer').
Bad choice, because while it *sounds* great - Mulvaney is currently very visible, very popular, and schmoozing with the likes of President Biden - it's not really that inclusive. Who are Mulvaney's followers? Are they really going to switch to "ugh, that's the beer my dad/redneck uncle drinks"? Do you really think they appeal to *women*?
Not alone that, she managed to insult the current customer base - "ugh, you're icky, we don't want you anymore". And they went "okay" and left. Yeah, it's old white conservative and indeed redneck guys who like sports and outdoor activities and the rest of it, but they're not completely stupid.
Which is where the second part comes in.
Sales went down, and competitor brands sales went up. Now, there were some liberal types who went on social media to laugh about "do these rednecks and transphobes really imagine their little temper tantrum is going to do anything, do they not realise that there is a multi-million dollar marketing campaign behind this?"
Turns out yes, it did and no, there wasn't. And this dragged in the parent company, where not alone the American CEO issued an apology, but the global CEO had to address concerns:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12046587/Anheuser-Busch-DISAVOWS-entire-Dylan-Mulvaney-Bud-Light-campaign-letter-retailers.html
They rushed out two pandering ads, and as I said: us rednecks may be dumb, but we're not that dumb. People realised these were pandering attempts to win them back and they said "Not working".
Which brings us to the third part.
Now the LGBT side is riled-up, because they consider that Mulvaney has been thrown under the bus, the big-wigs at AB are not supporting trans rights, and they're starting their *own* boycott:
https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/05/08/lgbtq-bars-boycott-bud-light-dylan-mulvaney/
So Anheuser-Busch is getting it in the neck from *both* sides, and there's a good chance this might nobble the brand for good and all. Certainly their rivals are making hay without having to lift a finger, and there doesn't seem to be a good way to get out from under this mess, except waiting and praying that by this time next year, it will all have blown over.
All because a marketing exec forgot the number one rule of the job: know your customers. If she wanted to be inclusive, she could have done it in a more sensitive way. Say, a commercial about old crusty rural-type dad and son comes home from college with his boyfriend. There's a bit of tension until dad gruffly offers a beer and boyfriend asks for Bud Light if he's got it. Cue all three drinking and getting on like a house on fire. Tag line: "Bud Light - it's for everyone".
You *can* be inclusive and diverse and change the image, you just have to do it slowly and carefully. Not by getting Dylan Mulvaney to camp it up in a bathtub:
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1642335748627091457
>All because a marketing exec forgot the number one rule of the job: know your customers.
I put it this way to some friends of mine - I'm a gun-toting individual, and I drive a Toyota Prius. Multiple people have made modified Priuses with machine guns mounted to the roof, and I get a big kick out of it every time I see it.
No matter how awesome I think that is, if I was a C-level exec at Toyota there is no way in hell I would use company resources to acknowledge the existence of those people in any manner, and what A-B is going through right now is exactly why.
Even if an exec went barmy and decided "We need to expand our brand appeal!" and decided to pander to the gun-toting market, there are ways to do that.
I would go with the racing car version (though they seem to have finally scrapped it) as here:
https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a42490517/toyota-prius-super-gt-race-car/
"If you've been on the highways through Tokyo and Yokohama, the most aggressive drivers are always in Priuses. They come up quick in the passing lane and shoot off out of sight, seemingly knowing where every speed camera lurks. In a sea of dawdling little kei boxes, a Prius moves with an alacrity not seen on the other side of the Pacific.
Perhaps such is the case because, in Japan anyway, the Prius is not the fuel-sipping rolling roadblock enthusiasts have always scorned. Families went to the great racetracks of Japan, and they sat in the stands and ate their mozzarella corn dogs and waited for the race to begin, and when a Prius GT went roaring past, they cheered. The opposite of an exotic. An unlikely hero. The people's choice."
Maybe I'm very stupid, but I have a feeling that something that goes "vroom-vroom" like this might have some appeal for the roof machine gun crowd:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMSLV8TPe6A
But I certainly would not try selling it by putting Dylan Mulvaney in one. Can you imagine?
(Darn it, now I *need* to see that. Mx. Mouth-Like-A-Hake rolling xer eyes and flapping xer wrists about while draped over the bonnet? Pure gold entertainment! https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/NYPICHPDPICT000009448511-21.jpg)
But I have to say, I do think it took a lot of talent to get both the conservatives and the progressives mad at you about your flavoured water!
For me, the most sparkling irony in all this is that Bud Light's "Real Men of Genius" ads, which ran for twenty years, were one of the greatest and most loved (yes, LOVED) ad series of all time.
They were so fun and, from the audience's POV, refreshing and un-demanding, that a friend who produced a high-profile FM Radio morning-drive show in Los Angeles (c1995-2000), used them as counter-programming if there was a lame segment, or the show was running flat. He'd cue up a "RMoG" tape (yes they were tapes) at the start of the next ad block, Hoping the recognizable music hook and promise of a new silly MoG would prevent station-hopping.
And the Real Move of Genius was hiring Dave Bickler, former lead singer of Survivor (Eye of the Tiger) as the "soaring vocals" guy.
This kind of thing isn't designed to sell beer, it's designed to help the careers of marketing executives.
Being the head of marketing for Bud Light is an easy gig but it's a career death sentence, you're going to get laughed at by all your ad-school friends and you'll never ascend to something more fashionable. Unless...
I don't think they need to be *that* delicate. A little friction or controversy yields publicity, puts your name in the public consciousness, which is a good way to drive sales. They managed to fumble an easy one as this should have been possible (even with Mulvaney) without insulting their core demo. They threw caution to the wind.
They might be pressured to take a side now, but in the long-run it probably won't matter. It's possible they can just wait this out without saying much of anything.
If they kept their mouths shut and just issued an anodyne "we're sorry" maybe that would have worked. But they're doing *everything* wrong and it's entertaining to see, as well as alarming for a business model.
First, they addressed the wrong points. All the insistence that this was a one-off, not a campaign, there were no cans with Dylan's face being sold to the public, etc. All true, but not what people were concerned with, and it sounded defensive and dodging the question:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ythjo3k2jZY
Second, they rushed out a non-apology then a cheesy ad that pandered to the worst assumed stereotypes of the redneck boycott which nobody was buying:
https://www.outkick.com/hey-bud-light-stop-pandering-to-us-with-chicken-fried/
Third, now the LGBT section are pissed-off because they feel AB is not supporting trans rights:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IsmujbGU4U
I genuinely can't figure out what that marketing woman was thinking, getting Dylan Mulvaney involved. Who did she think Mulvaney's followers were? Did she imagine ten million people following for endorsements by "fashion and skincare to grocery shopping" are going to suddenly switch to glugging down cans of Bud Light?
It honestly sounds like the maximum amount of thought she put into it was "Who's the current hot name?" to sign on, without considering "yeah, but are 17 year old girls going to drink a dad beer?"
I remain to be convinced Mulvaney actually *is* trans, rather than doing a drag act performance art bit which he will drop once the novelty wears off. I leave that up to the real trans people on here to decide if they think Mulvaney is trans, I can't say for sure. But I have to say, getting someone who's flat-chested as an ironing board to do a sports bra segment does seem like tone-deafness by Nike, and more "who's hot?" rather than "does this fit with our brand?"
https://www.instagram.com/p/CqqO3Dnu4TQ/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=84b7a943-216d-4131-bd4e-df944bf66959
I would hope that marketing colleges use this as an example of what *not* to do in marketing. They went into an unnecessary direction for reasons their own customers would absolutely not appreciate, and then tried to back off in a way that made everyone upset. Their regular/former customers aren't impressed by a Clydesdale commercial, and the people they were trying to recruit now hate them more than they may ever recover instead of just ignoring them.
I'm reminder of Michael Jordan's reaction when people wanted him to support Democrats/liberals - "Conservatives buy shoes too." I don't know why some people don't like that idea or wish it wasn't true.
Are there any predication/betting markets with bets on the outcome of debt ceiling negotiations?
https://kalshi.com/events/DCEIL-23DEC31/markets/DCEIL-23JUN1/
https://salemcenter.manifold.markets/SalemCenter/us-debt-limit-raised
https://polymarket.com/event/us-debt-ceiling-hike-by-july-1
You can check Metaforecast (metaforecast.com)
https://www.gjopen.com/questions/2707-when-will-the-us-next-raise-suspend-and-or-abolish-its-debt-ceiling/crowd_forecast
Have we had any discussion of donanemab here? I'd be interested to know people's thoughts, given that on the face of it this seems like a potential major breakthrough, but it also seems to rely on attacking amyloid, which I had thought was a treatment/research paradigm that was largely being abandoned, and I've seen doubts cast on its clinical significance. It seems somewhat similar to aducanumab, which of course has been discussed plenty here, and quite negatively.
Is this another overhyped treatment based on an outdated paradigm? Or was I too hasty to think the amyloid hypothesis was debunked?
Why do you think that this looks like a major breakthrough. According to Derek Lowe the results are both ambiguous and unimpressive.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/lilly-s-new-donanemab-data-alzheimer-s
It's my suspicion that it will turn out to be only a marginal improvement over something that wasn't worth bothering with. (Note also the higher rate of strokes, etc.) OTOH, the real data is still being kept secret, so who knows.
It looks like a major breakthrough because media, leading Alzheimer's researchers, most advocacy organisations and charities etc. are calling it a major breakthrough. I suspected it was possible the story was more complicated, which is why I posted here.
I have to say, though, I think you're overstating the point with "according to Derek Lowe the results are both ambiguous and unimpressive." Having just read the article, I'm not sure he really comes close to saying that. He says we have to wait for the full data, sure, but despite/because of that I don't think he comes close to saying what you've attributed to him. He says it could be a significant improvement, or they could be overstating the case in their press release, so he "very much looks forward to more data". I think read it again because you've come away with an unduly negative impression.
You're a futuristic soldier wearing a suit of power armor, and you're facing off against a horde of frenzied zombies in an open field. Your machine gun runs out of bullets. The zombies charge you. Which type of melee weapon do you want to have strapped to the outside of your suit so you can pull it out to keep fighting them, and why that weapon in particular?
Your armor is too strong for them to bite through or pull apart, but they can still kill you by knocking you to the ground and forming a pile of bodies that suffocates you.
If I've got a suit of power armor my weapon against a horde of zombies is the legs of my power armor, propelling me in the opposite direction. The only reason you fight zombies is because you can't outrun them.
A lot of people are recommending polearms. I disagree. If you're alone and against a "horde", while you're busy hitting one or two with your polearm several others are going to rush past it and get in close. You need something that works up close.
A polearm does work up close, at least to push off the attackers to give you enough room to wield the weapon. Powered armour, right?
Definitely an axe.
- Can get through a skull unlike a knife or other stabby implement.
- Still works when blunt unlike swords or other cutty implements
- Doesn't jam or wrench itself like chainsaws or other power tools
For a while YouTube shorts gave me a lot of videos by channels that focus on melee weaponry. For the non-power suit version of this question they seem to agree on a poleaxe. The reasons were intuitive to use well, has good reach while still having a reasonable weight, the need to counterbalance the cutting edge means you get a second tool on the other side (often a hammer), they can often have a point bit for stabbing[0], and they have other uses outside of battle.
With power armor a few things change:
* We can assume training.
* You can accommodate more weight.
* The non-combat uses are not relevant.
With those in mind I would suggest a longer and stronger poleaxe. Maintaining distance will be important, and poleaxes are quite good at area denial. Using your enhanced strength to increase the area you can deny seems like the safest bet.
[0] Conveniently, the axe blade and hammer will also prevent the zombie from just pushing forward as it might do vs a spear.
How many of them are there? What's my best escape route?
If they're going to keep coming forever, and I'm not allowed to escape then I guess I'll take a suicide pill so I don't have to die tired.
If I only have to kill some reasonably manageable number of them before I can escape, then my initial thought was a chainsaw, but I think I'll upgrade to some kind of heavily-modified Whipper Snipper (or Weed Whacker as I believe they're known in the US). Replace the nylon cord with steel blades, then upgrade the motor to the most powerful thing I can possibly carry, and then blend zombie faces from a distance.
I knew a guy that replaced the nylon strings with bicycle chain. Seemed a bit Mad Max like to me at the time. Maybe he was thinking ahead to the zombie apocalypse.
Polearm. Stabbing has more reach and is more energy efficient, cutting things can still be handy in the short range.
I'll third the "mace" option, although you could also try a short spear. Since you're stuck in an arena, your goal is to use your super-strength and speed from the power armor to draw out individual zombies from the charge so you can pick them off one by one. They're mindless, so if you maneuver right you can get the horde to taper off into a line of individual zombies that you can kill by swinging the mace back and forth.
My first thought is a mace. The standard way of killing or disabling a zombie in most lores is brain damage, and maces are specifically designed for smashing skulls. My power armor presumably adds some oomph to my mace strikes. A mace would also be good for kneecaps and collarbones, if I can't get a good angle for a headshot. Maces have the additional benefit of being relatively short, so it'd still be usable at close quarters. Many mace designs also have a spike on one or both ends that could be used to stab through the eye or under the chin if I'm too swarmed to get a good swing going.
Second thought is a halberd or billhook, which can be used either as a bashing weapon to break skulls or as a slicing weapon to cut off heads and limbs. It's not much good if I'm swarmed, but the length can help keep me from getting swarmed in the first place, especially if I can get somewhere that my back is secure and zombies can only get at me by one location.
A European longsword of late medieval design might be a decent compromise. It gives me more reach than a mace for killing them a pace or two away, although not as much as a pole-arm would. They're also specifically designed to be used reversed as bashing weapons (source: https://i.redd.it/670w1xur5bg51.png), and can be "half-sworded" (one hand on the hilt and the other part-way up the blade) for stabbing at close quarters.
My last thought is that you specified that I'm in an open field being charged by a horde of zombies. If they're too dumb to hesitate approaching my melee range it's going to be really hard to keep from getting swarmed. But if they're relatively smart zombies, it's going to be extremely hard to keep from getting surrounded while fighting the ones in front of me, at least unless I have enough squadmates with me to form some kind of hedgehog defense. So unless they're a very specific level of intelligence, my best bet is probably a good set of running shoes and a radio with which to call in artillery or air support.
if the only threat is a dogpile, then i suggest a flipper as came to dominate RoboWars! Rib off limbs with bare hands until they're piled too thickly to continue, then activate the flipper and send the pile flying up into the air. Bonus points for this plan making a hilarious scene
If your armor isn't assisting you and even if it is most likely), you will tired and be unable to move pretty quickly. People aren't machines.
The traditional anti-zombie melee weapon is a chainsaw, especially if the only threat they pose is piling up on you. Hold it up in front of you and they'll cut themselves in half and roll right off.
Other options include, you know, the butt of a machine gun.
Honestly, probably a short sword, something like a Roman gladius.
Historically, knives are pretty much always the fallback melee option, even in modern times, but knives are more stabby or slashy than choppy. I can't imagine someone fighting a horde of zombies effectively with a knife but a short sword seems....more viable.
The main concerns isn't chopping zombies but:
#1 Being able to run away
#2 More ammo for the machine gun
So the ideal weapon might be a giant wrecking ball where you spin into the zombie horde like a Goblin Fanatic from Warhammer Fantasy with your super-strong power armor but, semi-realistically, you can't run away from the zombie horde with that and it's so large you probably had to leave a dozen ammo boxes back at the base.
Swords dull, especially when you hit harder materials such as bone, and their effectiveness drops eventually.
I think my arms are going to get tired before my sword goes blunt, honestly.
A gladius would work great on someone who cares about their blood and organs. Not so great on a zombie.
If powered armor makes you inhumanly strong and has no effective limit on its power source (nuclear-powered?) then a mace made of a single piece of metal would probably be best, the heavier the better. It won't break, doesn't need an edge with the armor powering the blows, and can probably take out at least one zombie per hit.
If the zombie's brain is a weak point, then it would simply be a matter of aiming for headshots, though I don't know why the head or brain would be a particularly good target for a zombie. It's your scenario.
So the question is what disables zombies? I assume that poking holes in them and letting them bleed out doesn't work against zombies so a rapier is right out. That leaves the option of cutting all the way through zombies limbs to fully detach them, or breaking zombies bones so that their muscles no longer move them properly. Fully detaching a zombie's limbs via slicing seems extremely difficult if you're only using muscle power and a blade. Something like a chainsaw would make it easier though. Breaking zombies limbs requires any big old club like object. There's also the question of range you'd prefer to deal with zombies farther away from you then close up. Therefore the best weapon for dealing with zombies is a tree branch removal tool (chainsaw on a stick)
Poking a small hole in a zombie won't kill it fast enough to save you in this scenario, unless the hole goes into its brain.
These are the frenzied, fast zombies and there are a bunch of them advancing on you. The problem with a chainsaw is that it must be pressed against the same point for several seconds to cut all the way through something as thick as an arm. It won't work of the target if flailing around, and if focusing on him for several seconds distracts you from his buddies who are approaching you from other directions.
Your power armor makes you inhumanly strong, so bludgeoning weapons are much more effective in your hands.
> The problem with a chainsaw is that it must be pressed against the same point for several seconds to cut all the way through something as thick as an arm
Doesn’t that depend both on the chainsaw and the “something” you’re cutting through? I’m no expert by any means, but last autumn I did cut quite a bit of wood for the winter for my uncle, with a pretty dinky electric chainsaw, and it took well below a second for something the thickness of a femur, even for pretty hard wood. Arm-thick wood yes, it took (marginally) longer, but arms are not as hard as wood all the way through, only the bones are comparable. I’ve never cut bones with a chainsaw, but based on how fast bandsaws go through them at the butcher shop I don’t expect them to be much harder than wood.
Fun fact: In Hollywood frenzied fast-moving zombies are called zoombies.
No, zoombies are zombies that work remotely.
… I’ll show myself out.
I mean, if we're leaning into being a futuristic soldier, why not a lightsaber?
I think the unwritten assumption here is that we get today's technology, aside from the power armor. (Otherwise, I'd just ask for a restore-saved-universe feature.)
I'd probably go for a carbon steel 4-lb longsword. Mostly because it's a very reliable design for a slashing weapon, works in close range out to three feet, doesn't require formation tactics, and is wieldable even if the power assist battery gives out (and hopefully doesn't result in my being locked in place).
I'm almost certainly going to want to slash my way to an ammo dump, however.
Too many people take too many pills
Medical systems are set up to put people on drugs, not take them off.
I wish more doctors were great with data do you could have deep cost vs benefit discussions.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/04/26/too-many-people-take-too-many-pills
You might find Ivan Illich's Medical Nemesis (1974) interesting for his take on a philosophy/sociology/theology of medicine and its industrialization.
I think I have read this, but could never remember the author or the context.
He was a Russian Emigre MD, who practiced in NYC? And his book flat-out states that medicine/doctors/health-care et al can DO NOTHING about diseases or chronic conditions, never have, the best is treating symptoms and pallative care. [The exception perhaps was trauma/injury, but maybe not. Advances in surgery and emergency medicine since that time are miraculous, back then maybe not so much.]
His claims and thesis were ... not embraced by the medical esatblishment, shall we say."
IIRC, he self-published his book because nobody would touch it. I remember reading it online maybe 15 years ago.
BRetty
That may be true, but more people live to an advanced age than they used to. I didn't take any pill regularly before I turned 50, since then...well, the number keeps increasing, many of the self-prescribed. What I really need is a mild anti-inflammatory with fewer side effects...that can be taken in incrementally increasing dosages without danger to the kidneys or liver, and without causing blood to refuse to clot.
I am often shocked by pharmacutical trials that show such a tiny effect, maybe 50% of the patients showed a 17% improvement in one area, or something like that. And then for that little benefit that drug is prescribed and paid for by "insurance" and now these patients, and the *average* person in the US, is taking 4 (FOUR) prescripticion medications at any given time.
Hey, how about we try doing ... nothing. You will either recover or die, I'm unusually confident about that.
I connot believe that taking multiple prescription drugs _in perpetuity_ is actually a medically-productive plan. For anybody. Yes if you are in the ICU or have some dire emergency, but piling on "health care" serves only to keep billing for health care.
I would be a great doctor. "You're not sick. You're weak. Get out of my office"
If that's what you feel, then don't take the pills. I feel you'd be a lousy doctor, though. Choosing for yourself should be your right. Choosing for other people...there are names for that, not all complimentary.
I am pretty sure that my approach to medicine would result in almost no difference in aggregate outcomes re: life expentacy and quality of life. People wouldn't like it very much, though, since I'm pretty sure the emotional reassurance of medical care is what people are consuming.
One thing I know for a fact is: It would drastically lower the cost of Health Care that currently stands at 17% of our GDP.
But maybe, as Robin Hanson has written, SPENDING MONEY on Health Care is the whole point. That's what people want, given how they behave and what they prioritize.
That terrifies me about getting older. Some day I'll get prescribed some kind of pill that I'll need to take every day, and this will turn into an ever-increasing number of pills until I have the standard old-person giant days-of-the-week plastic container with all of them.
There are lots for reasons to be scared of getting older, but that's not one of the. You could always just stop, and die earlier. The things to be afraid of are what the pills partially suppress.
On the topic of public comments doing their job:
The government is short-term responsive to public outcry. They backpeddle when the backlash is big enough. But they rarely give up; they just shelve whatever it is and try again in a few years. Again, and again, and again, until even the most ardent opponents of whatever-it-is are burned out and can't muster the enthusiasm to fight it anymore.
The DEA may be in backpeddle mode right now, but they'll be back to restrict telemedicine again. And again and again, until they get it done or laws change to shift their priorities.
I think you've got the wrong model. Most of the time it seems to be "people try to get rules to make their work easier". They'll usually back off if there's enough outcry, but they still want to make their job easier. The problem with the DEA is they've got a job that shouldn't be done. Something related to that job needs to be done, but not the one they've got.
I can see the federal government properly regulating that the drugs that are sold are actually what they claim to be, but WHICH drugs can be sold should be a state, or possibly even more local, matter. (OTOH, remote sales makes this a bit of a problem. If the law is violated, therefore, it should be the purchaser that is prosecuted. And such laws are generally a bad idea, but if you're going to have them, that's what they should be.)
N.B.: I understand that this stance would cause lots of suffering among the families of those who abuse drugs. I just feel it would cause a lot LESS social damage in all.
P.S.: I can see regulating the sale of pesticides, antibiotics, etc. on environmental grounds by the federal government. But that's a very different model than the one the DEA is using.
I thought the opposite. Hecklers at public comment can shut down anything and that’s why the government doesn’t bother trying to change zoning or transportation or any of a number of things.
Some recent interesting goings-on on Manifold:
1. Third party write-up of the infamous "Whales vs Minnows" market, which was created as a class-warfare microcosm by the most prolific user on the site, and in a movie-worthy twist grew beyond his control to the point that he wound up spending $30k of *real USD* buying funny-money, only to lose anyway. https://news.manifold.markets/p/isaac-kings-whales-vs-minnows-and
2. A market with a large bounty that asks whether it's possible to prompt ChatGPT/GPT-4 to solve an easy-level Sudoku. I suggest trying it yourself, it really helps you recalibrate against all of the "AGI is here" hype. https://manifold.markets/Mira/will-a-prompt-that-enables-gpt4-to
How was it "class-warfare"? Does the Manifold community have some internal division between "whales" and "minnows" that the members map onto real life and identify with?
It pitted the "whales" (aka the high-net-worth users who have disproportionate influence on the site) against the "minnows" (aka everyone else). It was a pure gambling market, where the whales essentially needed to outspend the minnows 10000:1. Read the linked substack if you want to understand better.
I have read that article. But what transforms a friendly experiment born of scientific curiosity, into something that people call "class-warfare"? Isn't it important, I'll even go so far as to say **vital**, to know how easy it is for wealthy users to sway prediction markets?
Sounding a liiittle overdramatic there.
It's no secret that the whales on the site have massively more ability to move markets in than anyone else. That's not necessarily a bad thing, because hopefully they got to be whales by making a lot of correct predictions, and therefore you want their votes to be significantly upweighted.
This market wasn't really a very good measure of how influential or not they are, since it was a contrived gambling mechanism.
Also, I referred to it as class warfare because that was explicitly how the market was set up. The few ultra-rich outspending the aggregate votes of everyone else. Honestly, it was a very clever dynamic.
I guess we'll have to disagree on what "overdramatic" means; calling a prediction market "class warfare" sure counts in my book.
lol fair
Which was incredibly ill-conceived, if we're believing that $30,000 was financially ruinous for the guy. 10000:1 means that's $3 on the other side. You can spend more than that by accident.
It wasn't literally 10000:1, that was an oversimplification, read the article.
Each 10k Mana that whales spent on Yes counted for 1 point, and each Minnow holding _any_ No shares counted for 1 point.
So it was explicitly setup as "the few ultra-rich vs everyone else".
Also each 1 real USD buys you 100 Mana, so that $30k USD bought him 3 million Mana. So that was enough to offset 300 new Minnows joining the fray. Which would have worked if not for Minnows making bot accounts en mass.
Bots were excluded from the count. They won by convincing large numbers of people from outside Manifold to create accounts to help them out.
>10,000 votes to offset each and every minnow participant.
>the substantial amount Manifold gives new users to start.
>Manifold bets are cheaper the more they disagree with the current winning side
So it's even worse; 300 people need to spend a collective $0 to overcome that $30,000. It's a bet that the userbase doesn't know 300 people susceptible to Farmville pressure.
They didn't. They won by making a bot army. Manifold is a tiny site, there's only ~1000 regular users on the whole platform.
The first one was exactly what I'd been waiting for, thanks.
I'm imagining what it would be like if people or an alien species was deeply mistrustful of getting things for free-- worried about the quality of the gift or hidden entangling obligations.
This might not make sense as a fully imagined culture-- what about children? Or emergencies? My point, though, is that they don't want free things in non-urgent circumstances.
This means that they expect to pay for media, and they don't expect banks to store their money for free. They assume they'll pay a little for holding their money safely.
Would they never have fractional reserve banking? Without fractional reserve banking, would it be possible to raise money for investing in large projects?
I think the society would develop more slowly, and head in the direction of some fictional ultra-libertarian/anarchist societies. They would be very clear on what obligations they take on, and contracts would be extremely detailed. And given their mistrust, they'd probably work to ensure that the contracts were as "clean" as possible, minimizing the number and duration of obligations, so that the contract resolves quickly. Assuming that they were similar enough to humans, they'd know that they have emotional reactions to people being kind to them, and view unsolicited acts of kindness as a hostile act. (Somewhat similar to the way a mostly asexual person might view the use of sex appeal for persuasion.) I think humans unconsciously track a lot of this type of thing as "social capital" (hello, neural nets), and I suspect that these people's growth as a society would be limited by how much they were able to keep track of consciously.
Fractional reserve banking is a trade of risk for money, so it might exist, but it might not be as popular if it adds to their "contract load"? Maybe they'd have separate institutions for pooling money as investments, and wouldn't understand why we combined investment banking with day-to-day household banking.
A not-very-serious look at this kind of society is "And Then There Were None", a novella by Eric Frank Russell, but maybe you've read that already?
https://www.abelard.org/e-f-russell.php
Feels like they would never develop a lot of universally beneficial things like soap. You can't get anyone interested in soap without telling them how it works, and you can't tell them without charging them, which they'll refuse to pay because they've done without it perfectly well until now so it can't be that important.
If they're high distrust, they're probably not going to get very far technologically, unless they were individually very powerful to begin with. (Which might be why they can afford high distrust, evolutionarily speaking.)
I think banking wouldn't be the showstopper, though. If they got as far as that, then they understand that "free banking" isn't actually free - they're exposing themselves to risk. What I _would_ expect is a culture where they're keenly aware of that risk, registering to them like a ringing sensation might to us. In general, we might expect them to be very conservative about venturing anything that looks too good to be true. They might eventually undertake such risks, but only when they're thoroughly sure of how much it is by our standards. Imagine a language with fifty words for risk, an apparent obsession with it.
Again, I would expect this to put them at a disadvantage tech-wise. If they're roughly human-abled, I don't see them getting far past agriculture and ironworking and bartering. They'd look at even the idea of currency and get the hives.
Currency could work. The original "currency" was little bars of metal stamped with a seal by the government treasury as a guarantee of purity. I.e., we, the government, guarantee that this actually is the proclaimed weight of gold of the proclaimed purity. So that was just a standard token for barter. (How much it's worth depends partially on how much you trust the government.)
More problematic are the earliest contracts, where you had a ball of clay with clay figures of what you promised to deliver. To read that contract you had to break it open, but then you didn't have the contract (the ball of dried clay with the relevant seals impressed on the outside). Solving that was one of the things that lead to writing. (On the outside of the ball you sketch drawings of what is inside it.) But, IIUC, there were other paths that also lead to writing. Still, it might considerably slow down the development of writing.
OTOH, it might have stopped the original development of language. Even among animals there is "deceptive communication", and language amplifies the potential for that. So if the trust is sufficiently low, language probably will never develop.
For currency, that "trust the government" thing is exactly what I'm looking at. It could very well be the case that our typical low-trust ET sees currency as "free trade token" for that very reason, and is very averse to accepting such things, and even more averse to amassing them. Their instinct is going to be to trade them away ASAP for actual stuff, and since the whole race feels this way, we could expect a very low total currency supply.
The next question would be whether we would see amassed real goods. Some things store better than others, and since I imagine this ET to put high value on reliability, we could imagine those goods being de facto currency.
My instinct says language as a wash. Deceptive communication would certainly be an issue, but it's probably an issue even when they're just grunting at each other. The only time it isn't is when it's impossible because they're too dull to attempt trickery, and this only happens if these beings aren't intelligent in the first place, which I'm assuming already in evidence.
Overall, I see low-trust as still some-trust; it'd just take longer to build up past the ingrained aversion to risk. We might see contracts, banks, and even fractional reserve banking; they'd just take a lot longer than for apes.
The original currency I mentioned was basically a lump of gold with a government seal saying "this is this weight of pure gold". If you didn't trust them, you could analyze it yourself. Some people did. (Not many. The analysis was difficult with the tools available, and once you did it, while you had the gold, you no longer had the official government stamp, so you had a hard time trading it. Of course, if what you wanted was to make jewelry out of it, that wasn't a problem. But if you wanted to trade it...well, lots of people were more willing to trust the government than someone they didn't really know that well.
IOW, this worked *because* people didn't trust lumps that looked like gold to actually be gold. They figured the government was more trustworthy than some random trader.
Governments can create some demand for their currency by requiring taxes to be paid in that currency. Then you don't want to instantly trade away all of your currency because you'll need some to pay your taxes.
They might have far fewer Nigerian princes somehow in need of small cash infusions. Or needing Google Play cards.
It looks like I invented the low-trust society, or at least one trait of a low-trust society,
"Free" only means no money is exchanged. Banks would indeed have a fractional reserve, though if it is bad for things to be free then they may well have to pay more money in interest for keeping money for people. They get more benefit from keeping the money than it costs for keeping it safely.
Would people have to pay a subscription for Google? Wikipedia? Would people actually put a proper value on their data and charge companies for collecting it?
> They assume they'll pay a little for holding their money safely.
Does a fee for storing your money suffice to meet the conditions of your culture? In a lot of cases you actually do pay a fee for a bank account, which is independent from you getting an interest rate.
Last week's episode of Hi-Phi Nation featured a group of workers trying to audit the black box algorithm that paid them, and this week's, to be released Tuesday, features two effective altruists and two critics trying to convince an ordinary person, who has money annually to give, to give their money in the right ways, (public health? longtermism? local? other?). https://hiphination.org/season-6-episodes/
SF writer and scientist Arthur C Clarke remarked that it would likely be several centuries before manned starships were launched on interstellar voyages, long after mankind was merrily scooting round the Solar System.
The reason he gave was simple and plausible: There's little point in starting a voyage in a craft that can reach, say, 0.5c when a few years later ships will be available which can reach 0.75c and thus be able to zip past the first ship en route! So his argument was that a technological "plateau" would need to be reached, where no significant speed improvements were anticipated, before it made sense to bother.
One could make a couple of counter-arguments, such as that maybe the supposed plateau would be reached rapidly by a suitable design, or there was some pressing need to start an interstellar voyage even if its speed was not optimal.
As for the design of a high-speed interstellar spaceship, I suspect the most challenging aspect won't be life support systems, or the rocket engine. It will be the cow catcher at the front! When travelling at almost light speed, even a grain of dust would have the kinetic energy of a nuclear bomb.
It seems to me there are two extremes of cow catcher design, one being a gossamer thin sacrificial web being constantly repaired by robots scuttling around on it, and at the opposite extreme a large flaming ball which can absorb small or even larger objects in its path.
So if advanced aliens are embarked on intersellar voyages, and they opt for the second cow catcher solution, I would expect a sign of their presence to be a large fast moving hot object, perhaps even a red dwarf star. They would have to be content with relatively slow progress between solar systems, tucked up asleep in their cryogenic chambers for centuries (which, if intelligent aliens exist, is perhaps why we don't hear any of their radio chatter!)
As luck would have it, a candidate star, called Scholz's star, was discovered not long ago. About 70,000 years ago it came within a light year of the Solar System and, travelling fast since then, is now around 22 light years distant:
https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2015/02/19/scholzs-star/
Stars can be accelerated to high speeds by natural processes, so Scholz's star is unlikely to be an alien artifact. It also has a smaller brown dwarf companion, although whether that makes it more or less likely to be part of a travelling ensemble for nomadic aliens is hard to say. But it's fun to speculate!
Related: "The Effects of Moore's Law and Slacking on Large Computations" (https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9912202). It's the same basic idea - for sufficiently large computations, it is better to "slack off" and run the computation on a faster computer at a later time T+1 than it is to start running the computation right now at time T.
Of course, this paper is from 1999. Moore's Law is breaking down, and the model they employ (where there is a large capital cost to buying a new, faster computer part-way through the computation) is not so applicable in the age of cloud computing.
The third "cow catcher" design is a UV laser and/or electron gun that will charge any dust particle in its path, and a magnetic field to shove charged particles around the ship. That's the most elegant and probably the most efficient, and I'm not sure how you are going to detect it.
The waste heat from the engines, will be detectable the old-fashioned way and across interstellar distances.
The Bussard ramjet is a related idea, where the particles are instead shoveled into the spacecraft and used as fuel.
In my opinion, the mistake in his assumption is that he was thinking of space ships as a means of travel rather than as a place to live. It's going to take long enough to get to whatever destination is picked, that when they get there nobody is going to want to land. They'll mine resources, but even on Earth very few people move from the city into a wilderness area, and any other planet is guaranteed to be a lot less friendly than Earth. So speed is not a problem. Safety, stability, internet connections, things like that are problems. I expect interstellar travel to be driven by political or religious disagreements. OTOH, it won't happen until people are living comfortably in space habitats. So his timing could be right. (It would also help a LOT if controlled fusion were the normal power source.)
P.S.: You don't *want* to move too fast, because you want to mine resources you encounter along the way, so you need to be moving at fairly close to the same speed (though not exactly the same speed, because you want to have a flow of new resources).
This. It's not like getting on a cruise liner (or a sailing ship to the Americas in the Early Modern Era). More likely a group of people who head for the stars will already be part of a mostly self-sufficient space community, and quite possibly one that was already remote from the center of human civilization. The ship itself is the community - the destination solar system is just a better place to put it.
That said, it is possible that you could get starships treated more as a conveyance than a habitat if you have dense societies on both ends of a trip. That's when you could have stuff like solar- or fusion-powered laser platforms designed to clear out pathways of interstellar dust and accelerate starships up to a high fraction of light speed.
For starships to be more conveyance than habitat, you need FTL drives. Otherwise even Alpha Centauri is too far away. And calculate the energy requirements for the fast traverse. Fusion power wouldn't suffice, you'd need at least matter/anti-matter power.
SF is full of handwavium. That's sort of fair, it *IS* fiction. But when you start trying to turn it into reality, a lot of the pieces don't work as described. Nobody *actually* wrote "hard science fiction" according to the official John W. Campbell, Jr. definition. Hal Clement occasionally came reasonably close...but not often, and nobody else seriously tried. They made *pieces* of their stories accurate, but nobody restricted themselves to one beyond-the-state-of-the-art invention or fact. I really enjoy it, but don't trust their energy required calculations, because just about everybody gets them wrong. (Getting them right would seriously interfere with most story plots.)
Note that there are various tricks in physics that let you get around much of this, but they tend to have requirements like a starship weight more than Jupiter, but with much of the mass compressed down to nearly neutronium. The only exception that I can think of is Forward's "negative mass star drive", (was it in "Timemaster"?). And he didn't really specify how the starships were powered, just why the special unobtainium he picked would work so nicely.
You can get pretty decent speeds below light speed with laser-pushed spacecraft, which also has the advantage of being external propulsion for the ship instead of mass that you have to carry. A trip at 0.7 c from Earth to Alpha Centauri is less than ten years in transit. You wouldn't go that fast for the the first Starship you send to a destination, since it has to carry the internal fuel to slow down at the destination. But successor starships could be acelerated and decelerated between star systems by such means.
I think it's also pretty likely that by the time we're sending out starships, we'll have access to some pretty radical life extension or even medical immortality. A long starship flight will just be accepted as part of interstellar travel, like how folks in the Age of Sail accepted that a trip across the Atlantic could take months.
> since it has to carry the internal fuel to slow down at the destination
I forget who it was who suggested it, maybe the late Dr Robert L Forward (of Dragon's Egg fame, among several other SF novels he wrote). But laser pushing can also be used to slow the spacecraft, at least partially, as it approaches its destination.
The trick is to turn the ship round and then deploy a coaxial annular mirror larger than the ship which which reflects the laser light back to the mirror on the ship, somewhat analogous to a reflecting telescope. That way the ship slows, although the annular mirror of course continues to accelerate.
That's tricky. You can bet pretty decent speeds, but the beam tends to spread. It has the advantage/disadvantage that it's likely to burn up any non-reflective stuff in your path, though, and to shove the reflective stuff away. (And there are tricks to use that same laser to slow down at the end of the trip. But it takes a hellacious amount of energy, and you've got to depend on the guy running the beam to *keep* running the beam. 10 years is 2 1/2 presidential elections (and I don't believe you'd actually get that fast).
That's a reasonable way to launch a probe. it's not a reasonable way to launch a colonizing expedition that going to need to terraform any planets it wants to colonize. It you really don't want to live in space, wait until the terraforming has been done, or at least is wall underway. If you do want to live in a space habitat, what's the hurry. Better to go more slowly and have a more livable trip. And not plan on stopping permanently.
Note that even 10 years is a long enough time that people will either get comfortable with the ship, or mutiny. I suppose you could run it like a prison, but I don't find that an attractive option. Much better to have a more comfortable ship, with enough amenities that people can like living there. By the time they get to Alpha Centauri they'll be overgrowing the ship, so it's time to build a habitat out of local materials. And I bet the one they decide to build will also be mobile. (The planet won't be livable outside of a dome for multiple generations, so why not live in space?)
I'm not sure the timing of interstellar voyages would work that way. The whole project isn't very useful in any normal sense whether you're going 0.5 or 0.75 c. It's more likely to happen as the result of a charismatic leader pumping it, a religious movement, a societal schism, or some other black swan social event than because everyone got together and soberly considered the state of propulsion technology.
On a smaller scale, I've grown skeptical of the benefit of going to Mars or something similar, apart from just saying we did it. I think I read the anti-Mars post that was going around recently and found myself nodding my head, although I can't find it now. Is there any particularly solid utilitarian reason for a Mars trip?
I think you get two reasons with Mars:
1. Scientific exploration
2. Personal aesthetic/political experimentation.
I'd expect the first Martian city to grow out of a Martian research base, like if Antarctica actually allowed people to permanently settle there. You might also get people who want to try an experimental community in a far removed location, like how 19th century America had all kinds of folks trying out self-sufficient utopian communities out west (most of which failed unfortunately).
There was never any utilitarian reason to look for an Atlantic passage to the Indies either. All rational people knew, correctly, that the circumference of the Earth was so large that no shortcut would be found.
You could try to spin some sort of utility math that would say, “Past explorations into unlikely places have yielded absolutely massive unforeseen benefits that changed the whole world,” but from a strictly rational view, there’s no reason to expect that. It could be equally likely to be disastrous or simply not worthwhile, which would lean against doing it because of the large expenditure of resources more optimally spent on building better mousetraps on Earth.
Or you could say it’s important to colonize other planets to prevent extinction-level disasters from destroying human life. But that too is thin. Life on other planets is likely to be very difficult and very fragile (as Kim Stanley Robinson repeatedly points out), and the enormous expenditure of Earth’s resources to shepherd a tiny colony that will likely fail is a waste compared to using those resources to eliminate existential threats to Earth.
No, the argument to colonize other planets is simply irrational in a utilitarian sense. Which is yet another reason it’s generally a poor idea to embrace utilitarianism!
That's not quite true. As others have pointed out, a faster passage to sources of spices and luxury goods was very valuable. On top of that, there was the possibility of new lands to conquer and settle - Columbus seems to have alternated between both of those in his pitches to various folks in the Spanish Court before he got his ships.
And once they did get their ocean-going routes to riches in the Americas and Far East, they were so lucrative that they paid for all the hazard and danger of ocean-going trade. Vasco Da Gama was an absolute mismanaged disaster, and yet they still turned a 100+% profit.
As I said in my answer, the critics of the time correctly pointed out that Columbus had massively undercalculated the circumference of the Earth, and that therefore an Atlantic passage to the East would not be a shortcut. And they were correct. Columbus only thought it would be because he thought the Earth was much smaller than it is.
It was sheer luck that he encountered an entire continent which nobody had reason to suspect was there rather than dying of thirst in a massive trackless ocean.
This argument does not apply to voyages which were made with foreknowledge of the existence of what would later be called the Americas.
I think it’s generally a good idea for individuals to embrace utilitarianism. But utilitarianism says that for groups, it’s good if there’s some variation in people’s beliefs and desires so that some of them try out things that don’t seem worth trying, but are worth sacrificing a small amount of resources on the off chance they pay off.
A rational society contains irrational members, and a society whose individuals all have the perfectly rational beliefs will behave less effectively (and thus perhaps be less rational) than a society that contains members who are irrational in various ways.
I sympathize with your attempt, but it strikes me that what you’ve done here is smuggle in traditional values of courage and risk-taking against evidence by the back door. You can’t actually justify this unless you assign an arbitrarily high utility (as yet unjustified) to the edge-case payoffs of non-utility-maximizing defectors from the utilitarian society. I’m afraid this looks a lot like you’re two-timing utilitarianism with the heroic ethic. What is utility maximization that can be and is rationalized into not actually maximizing utility just in case you get trapped in a local maximum, when you have no reason to believe that maximum is local, and all the evidence is against it being local? When do we drop the fiction that we’re actually doing utilitarianism?
> when you have no reason to believe that maximum is local, and all the evidence is against it being local?
The fact that it's virtually impossible to know when you're in this situation is Kenny's point. Utilitarian calculations are and always will be approximations made in partial ignorance.
Sure—and unless you can empirically justify wasting resources on non-optimal behavior with total unknowns, you’re de facto operating under a non-utilitarian calculus.
I’m not smuggling in a value of courage or anything. I assume the only value is how good an outcome results. It’s consequentialist for sure, whether or not it’s utilitarian.
I’ll accept consequentialist—virtually anything can be consequentialist if you’re creative enough—but my original point was that you can’t justify it from a utilitarian standpoint, so point made I guess.
Is that because you think if all members are rational that they will get trapped in local minima or suboptimal equilibria and occasional irrationality is like simulated annealing--it allows the possibility of "jumping" out?
It's more that optimality for an individual is not the same as optimality for the group. It's like a Prisoner's Dilemma situation. Everyone can "defect" and just go along with whatever belief is best supported by the evidence. But they can "cooperate" by believing something that deviates from this best supported belief in a random way. It's best for society if enough people "cooperate" in this way, so that there is good exploration of the space of possible answers, even though it's bad for any individual to be one of those people who believes something that goes against the evidence (90% of them starve to death at sea, even if 10% of them discover the Americas - those odds are great for the group, but bad for the individual).
There is probably something about this that is related to breaking out of local optima, except here it's optima at different levels (individual rather than group) rather than local optima vs global optima for the group.
We might be saying the same thing, or close to it. I mean, a PD is a Nash equilibrium (as you know), and we get failure there by everyone acting rationally. We might get trapped in epistemic versions of this too, and need occasional “irrational” actors to break out. A physicist buddy of mine says that physics conferences allow a few nutty presenters on the grounds that sometimes the nuts are right.
> There was never any utilitarian reason to look for an Atlantic passage to the Indies either.
Not so. There was a lot of money to be made with a faster trade route.
> All rational people knew, correctly, that the circumference of the Earth was so large that no shortcut would be found.
Columbus didn't know that. There were a lot of different estimates for the size of the earth, and Columbus had what appeared to be an authoritative book indicating that it was small enough.
Of course there was money to be made. If there was a shorter passage, which was correctly known to be impossible.
Columbus only succeeded because he decided on his expedition against the best evidence and against the best arguments, which were—evaluated without the knowledge of how his expedition turned out—correct. Columbus was wrong and his expedition was doomed and impractical, just like missions to colonize Mars. From which we should extract a lesson, rather than using our post facto knowledge to call Columbus the true rationalist and utilitarian: he wasn’t.
Columbus made mistakes. He went against the consensus and, in hindsight, we know that the consensus was correct and that his survival was a fluke. But that doesn't automatically mean he was stupid or irrational. Maybe he was, I don't actually know, but maybe he understood that he was taking a big risk for the chance of a big payoff. Sometimes people do pull off things that others believe to be impossible.
I don’t believe he was irrational—this is a fine distinction. I believe he was neither a rationalist nor a utilitarian, which is why he (and others like him) are not swayed by the arguments which would tell us there’s not actually any payoff in sending wagon trains to Mars.
The difficulty here is that people want to push the values of rationalism and utilitarianism as if they can and must lead to every good outcome. They can’t: Columbus and his ilk ignore the good evidence and do things that have uncertain payoffs, maybe no payoff, in search of a wholly new paradigm. This is not something a dedicated rationalist and utilitarian can do, not without stretching their principles beyond the breaking point.
My personal belief is that sometimes the correct, evidence-backed, rationalist plan that maximizes utility is for pencil-necked bookkeepers, and that sometimes you’ve just got to point a ship at the horizon, because that’s the courageous thing to do.
Even today there is considerable interest in a Northwest Passage for purposes of trade between Europe and Asia-- certainly this was a thing long after the distances involved were fully understood.
If there had been nothing there but empty ocean, Columbus would have died due to lack of supplies, but it seems like the trade route that Franklin died trying to find would be even better without all the inconvenient islands/ice sheets?
I thought Columbus made two separate mistakes - one was relying on the largest estimate for how big the distance east from Spain to Japan was, and the other was relying on the smallest estimate for the circumference of the earth. Any one of those would not have been enough to make it seem plausible.
That's my understanding as well. There's also an intriguing theory that it isn't a coincidence that those mistakes combined with the unexpected existence of the Americas to produce a pretty-close to correct estimate of the width of the Atlantic.
There's a some evidence that a few English and Basque deep-ocean fishing expeditions had found the Grand Banks fisheries some decades before Columbus's expedition and may have made landfall in Newfoundland to dry their catches. Columbus probably visited the English fishing port of Bristol in 1476, and if he'd heard rumors of this and assumed the land they're talking about was an outlying island of Asia, then that implies the Atlantic to be ~2000 nmi wide at the latitude of Bristol. Or about 2700 nmi at the latitude of the Canaries assuming that "Japan" is the same longitude away from the Canaries as Bristol is from Newfoundland. Columbus's actual estimate based on his interpretation of cherry-picked sources was about 2400 nmi, which makes some allowances for the Canaries being further west than Bristol. The actual distance from the Canaries to where Columbus is thought to have made first landfall on his first voyage was more like 3000 nmi.
You don't need Grand Banks fishermen for this hypothetical. The Norse were running timber-harvesting voyages to North America into the fifteenth century, mostly from Greenland but with some Icelandic traffic. And Columbus visited Iceland in 1477 - probably after the last Norse voyage to North America, but possibly within living memory and certainly within oral history.
Species continuity is a good reason for any person to want *other* people to go out and colonize the stars, but it doesn't actually work for any person to themselves say "for this reason, I personally volunteer for the mission". Any attempt at interstellar colonization is far more likely to result in the deaths of all concerned than the bit where the people back home try to avoid extinction-level catastrophes. With enough starships, the probability of species continuity is enhanced, but that requires many many volunteers so one more at the margin makes little difference, and being one of the volunteers greatly reduces your personal potential for enjoying the continuity of the species.
So unless you're willing to basically force people to go forth and multiply when they'd rather stay home and watch TV, you're going to need another motive.
"We fucked up the homeworld so badly that gigadeath catastrophe is clearly inevitable, but if you want we can put you on a starship so that you can take your chances Out There", might do. But it means waiting until the last minute, or maybe well past the last minute.
"Me and my friends are seriously dissatisfied with the so-called utopia you all have built here, and we're rich enough to afford our own starship", is probably better.
There's enough very weird humans that I'm sure you could fairly easily find more than enough volunteers, even after filtering out the dangerous kinds of crazy. I expect you'd get a lot of the same sort of people who like base jumping and skydiving, and perhaps that would do interesting things to the gene pool, but you could definitely fill a half-dozen generation ships if you're not also requiring everyone to be a super-qualified astronaut.
You're very likely to get religious communities interested, as with the Puritans. Also people who like pioneering, rugged living, or just testing themselves. Not to mention a pretty strong vanguard of people like those who join the armed forces to do things like "protect our way of life" or whatever.
Are weird humans considered rational? If so, what's the model for them? Do they just have special information, or is it rather that all the motivations that would keep non-weird people on the surface don't apply to them for various reasons?
I think you've got the wrong catastrophe, but the point is still excellent. There are events that can happen where the only safety is not being there. Being in the target area of a forming black hole is one. That could wipe out not only all life in the solar system, but also nearby systems. They're quite infrequent, of course, but you only need one, and it doesn't need to be all that close. IIUC 1000 light years would be close enough if you were aligned with it's axis of rotation. And there are others. Some would only take out the solar system, some would take out a chunk of space around it, some we could see coming, some we couldn't. (FWIW, I'm not aware of any current prospects. I believe that Betelgeuse has an axis of rotation pointed in the wrong direction to be dangerous. But it's close enough to be dangerous if we were aligned with the axis of rotation, and it's going to collapse any century now.)
Earth after a super volcano is still more hospitable than Mars. For species continuity it might make more sense to have really deep underground or underwater colonies on Earth. But then maybe going to Mars is a (very very roundabout) way of developing that tech.
I think it’s very hard to come up with a disaster that makes all of Earth less livable than Mars but doesn’t hit Mars. Things like pandemic or nuclear war would surely hit Mars too. Things like suoervolcano or most meteorites often leave Earth more livable than Mars. A big enough meteorite that destroys Earth probably sends large pieces hitting Mars. A rogue gamma ray burst probably takes out the whole solar system.
You need a very precisely tuned disaster to take out Earth but not Mars.
But maybe Mars is a useful test colony before you establish one in another star system, that really is more independent, and far enough to have independent plagues and nuclear war.
You are right that very few things would make Earth less habitable than Mars, but there are definitely disasters that would make earth only somewhat more livable and wouldn't give society enough time to adapt. So unless we are going to start living like the earth isn't habitable ahead of time, it won't help very much. More livable than mars is still bad enough to kill everyone if they aren't prepped ahead of time.
IIUC the dinosaur killer didn't have much effect on Mars. There were probably fragments that got that far, but not many and not massive. (OTOH, it would have been a lot less destructive if it had hit in really deep ocean or on a continental surface. [Well, at least if it had hit in the middle of a continent. I'm not really sure about "deep ocean".])
I have nothing to add but I enjoyed reading this, thanks!
A third type of cow catcher could be something that targets incoming particles, perhaps with lasers, and deflects them so they don't hit the ship. Combine that with an ablative shield constantly repaired, to account for the particles too small to target.
I had a sort of strange thought the other day that I’d like to share. From a conscious being’s perspective (at least as far as we’re aware, and depending on your religious views), the universe consists entirely of the experience of information processing that occurs within the creature’s brain, and nothing more. So for a conscious creature such as myself, effectively, the entire universe begins when my brain first becomes active and ends when my brain ceases to function.
I know this seems obvious, but it occurred to me that this line of thought provides an interesting perspective on events with mass suffering, such as wars, natural disasters, etc. We tend to rate these events in terms of the total amount of “badness” (1 million people died/were injure/experienced pain/etc.) which is a useful metric in many ways, such as measuring global/local impact. And when phrased as total numbers, the amount of suffering sounds incomprehensively, terrifyingly huge. But there is no actual process in the universe that adds up all the suffering of 1 million people and arrives at 10,000,000,000 total pain units. Really, it’s more like 1 million individual disconnected universes which each experience 10,000 pain units. So in a certain sense, in terms of suffering actually _experienced,_ it makes more sense to look at the max suffering across individuals rather than the total sum.
In a strange way I find this oddly… comforting. It makes me rather sad to think about all the animal suffering that has occurred over the last few billion years. But it’s only depressing because I’m aware of the bigger picture. In the universe of any individual animal, the suffering, while still no doubt awful, has a limit.
I would imagine this idea has been thought of plenty and probably had a name, but I’m not all that well versed in philosophy.
I suppose this changes somewhat if you believe in reincarnation though.
Yes, this is a classic, you've basically rediscovered the first person perspective. You can take this into many directions.
In the Western philosophical tradition, the dumb take on this is called solipsism, i.e the basic idea that I cannot be sure anything but me actually exists. This is generally regarded as a dead end, or a failure mode of philosophy, and the standard "refutation" for it is to kick a rock.
Still in the West, there is a long line of thinkers taking this as a starting point to reflect that we can't be sure that anything else but *consciousness* exists, but still allowing for multiple inviduations of this consciousness to float around, so physical reality is kind of like a shared dream. This kind of thinking is usually called idealism, and it goes way back, with plenty of discussions around about how much of an idealist really Plato was. A whole bunch of Germans had a ball with this in the 19th century, and it's currently slightly in vogue to reclaim them, as a bit of a backlash from the scientism/positivism that followed. Check out Douglas Harding's "headless way" for a cool take on this.
Still in the West again, another bunch of thinkers decided that the first person perspective was worth reflecting about, but instead of denying physical reality, they might as well just be agnostic about it, or leave it out of the scope of their discipline. The result was called phenomenology, and it's famously quite abstruse but massively insightful. As far as I know it's the closest philosophy has come to being psychologically informed, which is a huge gap.
In Asia, at least the Indians had a good run with these ideas; much of Buddhism shares quite a bit of a phenomenalistic bend if you don't mind the anachronism, and some strands of Hinduism are unashamedly idealistic, with plenty of discussions and overlap between them.
If you take all of this, and remix it along with a bit of therapy culture and hippy-age experimentation, you might land anywhere from Gestalt therapy to mindfulness.
As you noticed, the first person perspective and utilitarianism don't mix very well. My take is that utilitarianism is broken at the psychological root, because there is no single additively linear property of one's experience that encapsulates "how good is this". Things can be pleasurable and painful in different ways at the same time; more pleasure of a kind now can bring more suffering of another kind later; and different kinds of fulfillment often cannot substitute for each other. Plus, no-one else but the affected individual can arbitrate how good or bad something was, and these valuations can change quite validly years after the fact.
Talking of solipsism: there’s an ancient professor of philosophy in Cambridge or Oxford, who is a solipsist. He never married, and therefore has the privilege to live on the university grounds, where the apartments are adequate for a single man, but not a family.
He gets lots of visitors. Everybody is keen to take care of him, and keep him well fed in the best of spirits and health because after all, if he is right, it’s curtains for us all when he passes.
I came to solipsism early. At age 6 I wondered if I was in fact the only person in the world. How could I prove otherwise. At age 6 and 1/2 I realised my world was too humdrum and dull for me to be the only one in it.
My way of thinking of utilitarianism isn’t that the sum itself is the thing that is good or bad. Rather, I think each individual is the site of good or bad. If you think that it’s worth it to take on a bit of bad to ensure that someone else’s bad is reduced by a certain amount, then we can express that equivalently by trying to minimize the sum of those two bads (with the relevant conversion factor), but the sum is just a mathematical convenience, not the real thing we care about, which is each of the two individuals.
You might be interested in the following from C.S. Lewis, who makes almost the same observation in The Problem of Pain (ch 7):
"We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the 'unimaginable sum of human misery'. Suppose that I have a toothache of intensity x, and suppose that you, who are seated beside me, also have a toothache of intensity x. You may, if you choose, say that the total amount of pain in the room is now 2x. But you must remember that no one is suffering 2x: search all time and space and you will not find that composite pain in anyone's consciousness. There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there ever can be in the universe. The addition of a million fellow-sufferers adds no more pain."
Wow. Yeah, that is precisely what I was trying to get at (but worded better of course).
Does anyone really internalize this though? It seems in most cases we do care about the total sum of things rather than just the max. If a city in the US defaults on its loans, that's not great, but things will keep going. If every city defaults, we don't say, oh well, at least things aren't getting worse. Or to flip things around, since there's someone currently close to maxing out the amount of pleasure possible to experience, does that mean we already have the maximum amount of happiness possible in the universe? And does that justify me not calling my mom on Mother's Day since it won't push the happiness frontier?
To put it more viscerally, if I were to slap C.S. Lewis, would he accept "well I didn't increase the max suffering, so I haven't added any more pain to the universe" as a defense?
Lewis's topic here is a bit more narrow: he wants to deal with the question: "Why is there so much pain (=suffering of all kinds) in the universe?" His point is not that causing pain isn't bad so long as max(pain_suffered_by_individual) is not increased, but that sum(pain) isn't descriptive of anyone's experience, and it quickly becomes incoherent to try to reason about it as if it were.
(Did you have a good reason to slap him? If so, he might agree that it was a good thing, despite the pain. But if not, it's not bad because sum(pain) increased, but because pain increased for someone in particular. And also because slapping someone without a good reason is bad for you.)
> that sum(pain) isn't descriptive of anyone's experience, and it quickly becomes incoherent to try to reason about it as if it were.
That it's not descriptive of someone's experience doesn't entail that it shouldn't or couldn't form the target of some form of ethics.
"But there is no actual process in the universe that adds up all the suffering of 1 million people and arrives at 10,000,000,000 total pain units. Really, it’s more like 1 million individual disconnected universes which each experience 10,000 pain units. "
Yes, that's a problem with utilitarianism..the summation occurs in the map, not the territory.
So, I just read two papers (https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.04115, https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.15285) explaining that the history of the word "planet" is probably not what you think it is.
I wrote up a whole blog post about this (https://sniffnoy.dreamwidth.org/572565.html) which you should go read (or go read the original papers), but to summarize my summary--
The generally-out-there idea of the history of the word "planet" is something like this: Originally, any astronomical bodies that moved relative to the fixed stars were planets -- so, the sun and the moon were planets, but the Earth was not. Then, with the advent of heliocentrism, it came to be understood that the Earth is a planet; but the sun and the moon are not (since the moon orbits the Earth). Eventually more planets were discovered beyond the classical ones. Curiously, 4 of these planets shared approximately the same orbit between Mars and Jupiter. Eventually so many more new planets were found inbetween Mars and Jupiter that it became clear that these bodies didn't belong with the planets, and so they were reclassified as asteroids. More recently, it became clear that Pluto, which had been considered a planet, is actually just one member of the Kuiper Belt, much as Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta had turned out to just be four members of the asteroid belt; and so it became clear that Pluto shouldn't be considered a planet either, as was famously ratified in 2006 by a vote of the International Astronomical Union.
There's an assumption smuggled into the above story -- that it is generally agreed that the word "planet" must refer to something that there aren't too many of, and that if the number of planets gets too large, then the word isn't fulfilling its purpose. This assumption is core to the 2006 IAU vote -- we can't include Pluto as a planet, because then we'd have to include too much else for consistency. The problem here is that *this is not the actual history of the word "planet"*, and that in fact, moons -- including *the* Moon -- were considered planets up until the 1920s, and asteroids were considered planets up until the 1950s. Not the 1850s, the 1950s! There absolutely was a time when astronomers would have told you that there are over a thousand planets!
Well, that's how *astronomers* used the word -- the public used it differently, restricting it to the familiar major planets, excluding both asteroids and moons. And while the 1950s reclassification of asteroids from "planets" to "not planets" happened for a good scientific reason, the 1920s reclassification of moons seems to have been due to the folk "planet" concept partially overtaking the scientific "planet" concept. And why did the folk concept of "planet" exclude asteroids and moons, consisting of only a short list? Largely because of astrology and theology!
So if we go by this, it would appear that something went wrong here -- as if biologists had reverted to using "fish" to mean "anything that lives in the ocean". And then on top of that, we forgot all this happened, and retrojected into the past a false story whereby the "planet" category had always only been restricted to a few members, and asteroids had been excluded as soon as they got too numerous (which was true among the general public, but not among astronomers), and the Moon had gotten classified as "not a planet" as far back as the coming of heliocentric astronomy (it hadn't). And then all this got ratified in a vote of the IAU!
So, uh, huh, that's something. Reading these definitely changed my mind as that (my previous reaction to the IAU vote had always been, yeah, that makes sense). Anyway go read my linked post for my full summary of this, or go the original papers, but they're much longer. :P
There is just stuff orbiting in a big continuum, and trying to group it into planets/moons/asteroids/whatever and thinking it is going to be totally clear distinct definitions is silly and misunderstands how natural kinds generally work.
Biologists do have the term “marine animal”. There’s something historically contingent about how terms get fixed - we decided that two separate minerals (jadeite and nephrite) both count as “jade”, while we decided that iron pyrite was “fool’s gold”. But we end up with some term for any internally useful concept, and retain terms for some phenomena that appear unified even if they aren’t.
I was going to disagree with you on asteroids be considered planet until the 50s, using a source from an article in Asimov on Astronomy published in July 1960, but you're right and I'm wrong. Asimov's exact quote is that Ceres "turned out to be only the first of many hundreds of tiny planets ("planetoids") discovered in the region between Mars and Jupiter in the years since."
Is "anything that lives in the ocean" really that much worse than "any vertebrate except tetrapods" or whatever the current definition is?
Shhh, we don't talk about the fact that fish aren't monophyletic.
Originally, in Ancient Greek, the word "planet" had negative connotations: πλᾰνήτης (planḗtēs) meant tramp, wanderer, hobo, vagrant (it also had a medical meaning: a dangerous fever that comes in irregular fits). For the Greeks a proper person had a home, belonged to a polis etc, and somebody who didn't, who wandered around or was homeless or who went from city to city, was deplorable, perhaps dangerous. [There's much of this prejudice about homeless people nowadays, of course]. This gets applied to astronomy because most of what we see, in the night sky, is regular and predictable: almost all the stars rotate on a predictable pattern. But early astronomers saw that some stars wobbled and strayed from the "perfect" paths of the majorityand these were called vagrants. By this logic the moon is not a planet, because its phases and movements are all perfectly regular and predictable; but Pluto *is* a planet (though the Ancient Greeks weren't aware Pluto even existed) because it wanders through the sky.
> By this logic the moon is not a planet, because its phases and movements are all perfectly regular and predictable; but Pluto is a planet (though the Ancient Greeks weren't aware Pluto even existed) because it wanders through the sky.
It's not predictable vs. unpredictable; they're all predictable. It's that the "fixed" stars (everything outside of our solar system) don't appear to move at all relative to one another.
Hmm... Sedna has a period of 11,400 years, so about 100 arcsec/year while Barnard's star has a proper motion of 10.4 arcsec/year, so I guess even Barnard's star is "fixed" compared to even Sedna, by about a factor of ten...
It's more clear-cut when you limit yourself to things that the ancients could see.
True! And if we find an Oort cloud object at 3000AU some day, with less proper motion than Barnard's star, it will be even more naked-eye-invisible than the two objects I mentioned...
You're right: predictable is a poorly chosen word.
Interesting! Happy I read your comment.
I think it's useful to have both categories, one for what laypeople call planets, and one for these other bodies. You could have called all those bodies "planets", and used a different word for the sub-category of bodies which are very large, not too numerous, and orbit the sun. That the word planet was selected for those and not some other word is not that consequential, no?
Oh, yeah, the thing the IAU decided to call "planets" is obviously still a useful and important category -- something like "major planet" would be a good term IMO. But using just "planet", and separating it from dwarf planets and moons, is awkward, because bodies can get kicked out of their orbits, captured into new ones, etc; not to mention that it doesn't fit well with e.g. exoplanets where we just can't really know these things.
(Naturally both my post and the original papers say more about this. :P )
I have a weird question. Why do pornographic films have plots? I mean, why don't they jump straight to the sex part, but instead have a brief part where the characters are clothed and decide to have sex, with some very lame excuse. I wouldn't really say it's foreplay, becaue it's so short and there isn't much mystery or teasing there, but it could be an issue of personal taste. Maybe it helps the viewer imagine that it could be them having sex with that very attractive person (usually that woman), because there's a reason? Maybe it's establishing some form of consent, which is important for some viewers' enjoyment?
It doesn't seem like an important question, but I have some feeling that it sheds a light on some mysterious aspect of our souls, and I don't know the answer (and haven't found good research on it). In general, I think research on the plots of pornographic films could come up with interesting insights.
> Why do pornographic films have plots? I mean, why don't they jump straight to the sex part, but instead have a brief part where the characters are clothed and decide to have sex, with some very lame excuse
Porn has a cerebral component as a fantasy, it's not just physical. There's a setting for certain dynamics between individuals, like dominant/submissive power dynamics, age play, cuckolding, swingers, etc. Why would porn bother with transgressing taboos if this had no effect on engagement?
A brief part where the characters are clothed allow the audience to see what they wear and intuit their personality and status from it. It helps make them people instead of just meat.
Sex isn't just about watching P in M/V, even for men. There is generally some scenario involved, and some amount of "chase" (even for just 30 seconds). In a world where people are looking for the highest stimulation, that is going to involve some plot.
Porn has moved away from plot as it has become mass produced and disposable, and it has been tik-tokified into shorter and shorter more clickable things.
I can only speak to personal preference, but for me the value of the plot is much as you suggested- it helps me imagine myself in the scenario. I particularly enjoy plots that involve some contextual justification for why the woman is interested in having sex with a man otherwise beneath her (which I'm aware probably reveals some depressing psychological truth about me). It helps me imagine this could be happening to me, in a way that I suppose I can't as easily without a plot if the woman is attractive enough.
A secondary reason, I think, is that it feels somewhat more real, and the actress feels more like a real person, if you get to see her having non-sexual human interaction first. You get to see more of her as a person. For this reason, I always enjoy the casting style videos, as you get to see the woman being interviewed first, and generally acting somewhat normally and as themselves- while also giving context to the situation and reminding you of the fact that they are having sex with just basically some random guy for material considerations, which makes it much easier to imagine yourself as that guy.
Plenty of porn has zero plot and just begins with the sex. But there’s also a good amount of porn that has just enough plot to establish that these two people are strangers, or are step-siblings, or that one of them is interviewing the other for a job, or that one is white collar and the other blue collar, or that one is a doctor and the other is a patient, or whatever it is that gets the power dynamic into your mind, because lots of people get turned on by one or another of these power dynamics.
Don't you find the step-sibling one especially strange? What purpose does that serve vs. just being strangers or acquaintances?
Porn relies on constant novelty for appeal. After a while, the same old scenario is dull and boring because the consumer has watched it 100 times before. Incest is transgressive, and transgressive is sexy (forbidden fruit). Step-siblings makes it near enough to incest without technically being incest, so it avoids "ugh I wouldn't bang my sister" and gets the "yeah but if dad remarries and I have a hot teen step-sister I didn't' grow up with" benefits.
It allows the idea of being in close proximity to a sexy hot (legal) teen girl - you're both living in the same house, after all! - and scenarios where she could 'plausibly' be naked (she's in the shower, getting dressed, etc.) so that then leads on to the sexy times.
One theory I read not too long ago is that if it was marketed on the basis of them being young, they could get mixed up with underage porn, which is a big nono. Establishing them as "stepsiblings" means they are still living under the same roof, and thus implied to be young, without actually referring to their age. Going all the way to make them siblings would supposedly tick off the credit card companies that the producers require for payments. My own speculation is that the "step" angle means you don't have to bother with plausibly casting people who could be related, but then I don't know if that would hold for porn otherwise. Even sitcoms are at odds with genetics. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2017/12/family_pop_cult.html
Sex with siblings is transgressive, and transgression is hot. If you make the characters step-siblings you reduce the transgressiveness, and then people for whom the idea of sibling sex is *too* transgressive can get on board.
I suspect it's something like the college roommate or jail cellmate one - you're thrown into this new situation with this person you barely know, and then turns out you're hot for each other. Obviously, the fact that it's *so* much more common than those other two (even in gay porn - I guess straight porn has trouble setting up college roommate or prison cellmate scenarios) suggests that something about the taboo of being family (in a sense) is part of it too.
But I also get the sense that everything being step-family is a very new development in porn, perhaps even just in the past decade or so, which suggests that it's not related to the history of porn growing out of cinema.
Straight porn has no problem with college roommates, or gets around it with a "Friend's roommate" trick where the guy is friends with a girl and this girl has a roommate, that's so common in r/GoneWildAudio scripts for example.
Prison cellmates are replaced by Prison wardens.
I don't think consent figures that much into viewers' considerations.
Here's a tentative hypothesis : Pornographic plots are the bare minimum you can do and still call yourself a "film".
Porno evolved from ordinary (if risque) movies in the 1960s and the 1970s. So it started with plots and acting built right in, then gradually started to shed them like animals shed unnecessary organs over evolutionary time. This is somewhat evident in how much **better**, plot- and acting-wise, pronographic movies made in 1960s, 1970s, and the start of the 1980s are than modern ones. Modern day Porno has a vestigial amount of plot and acting that weighs or costs nearly nothing, so it stays as is with no further shedding. Why do humans have a small tail in our bone structure ? because we started with ordinary tails built in then gradually lost them as they were no longer unneeded, until we reached a stage where it's so small that it barely costs us anything and it's no longer necessary to keep losing it.
I don't know what is the evolutionary pressure that made Porno lose significant amounts of plot. I have never seen anyone say that they like porn with no plots, it's so fake and soulless. Perhaps it's because porn is seen as a low-status art that you see in the dark and never acknowledge in polite company, so the audience will not identify with it and will not form blocks to demand the writers and the producers do something good, so naturally the writers and the producers will path-of-least-effort themselves towards the absolute bare minimum of plot and acting. Combine that with the fact that porn with its low-status image naturally repels talented writers and actors who can make it in Hollywood or their country's equivalent (where they can have just as much sex and perviness), and I think you have a somewhat convincing explanation.
To put it concisely, porn sucks because the audience is too embarrassed to demand better.
This view predicts that porn not evolved from the traditional roots of the porn industry - Amateurs, OnlyFans, etc.... - will not bother with the plots, and indeed, that's what I see mostly happening. They jump right in, no pretenses.
^ This.
Except, there is at least some evidence to the contrary:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dvd-vintage-erotica-anno-1930/5115287
Some are plotted, but there is a series of "static camera filming a woman masturbating" films that are plotless.
It's probably because of people like me that don't enjoy porn unless there is plot. Watching porn without plot just feels like voyeurism, but if it has a good plot, I put myself in a fantasy where I am one of the participants, and that's how I enjoy myself.
I might be an outlier though. I pretty much quit watching American porn because of how scant their plots are and how bad their acting it, and instead primarily read Japanese Hentai Doujinshi, since they usually have much more developed plots, and acting is not necessary. I prefer porn with people instead of drawings, but the lackluster plot makes it unenjoyable. If we assume there is a spectrum, them there are probably plenty of people satisfied with American porn plot, and it doesn't cost much to film the extra opening, while people that don't care can just skip to the sex.
Because some people have fantasies about certain scenarios, and these scenarios need to be narrated or exposed somehow. Some men have fantasies about sleeping with their child, teacher, doctor, stranger, policeman etc... Some gay men are titillated by the idea of seducing a straight man. Many common fantasies from infidelity to something more niche like BDSM need or benefit from having a story.
Perhaps you just don't have any sexual fantasy that involves a specific situation?
My guess: Under Supreme Court precedent, a work cannot be legally obscene unless, taken as a whole, it lacks serious artistic, literary or scientific merit (Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973)) or, before Miller, it was "utterly without redeeming social importance",(Roth v, United States, 354 US 476 (1957)). Having a plot helps porno films clear those very low bars.
PS: I also am pretty sure that is why Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, included articles, interviews, etc. (Though Playboy and I think Penthouse did not include depictions of sex, which is also required for a work to be obscene, though I guess Penthouse might have had written descriptions of sex which satisfied that criterion)
Do you realize that the world is not just the US?
Porn from all over the world has plot.
Of course all the world is not just the US.
All the world is California!
1. I would be willing to bet that the US was by far the largest producer of porn, in the world in the 1970s and that most porn movies sold worldwide were produced in the US., and that US porn films were the model for the rest of the world.
2. What does obscenity law say in other countries? In the UK, under The Obscene Publications Act 1959, "If an article is held to be obscene, Section 4 of the act provides the defense of “public good.” This defense would be applicable if the article had any sort of political scientific or cultural or value, or contributed to the interests of art, theatre, literature and learning." Indian Penal Code sec 292 is similar: a work is not obscene if it "is in the interest of science, literature, art or learning or other objects of general concern," It is unsurprising that various countries reached similar solutions to the problem of distinguishing between works that are obscene and works which happen to depict sex.
3. "I am not a pornographer! I am an artist" is, I am sure, a universal defense (even if often made disingenuously), morally if not legally.
Do your sexual fantasies not have plots?
My sexual fantasies have plots, so I'd find it weird if porn didn't.
Do you find it equally mysterious that action movies have plots instead of just random explosions and fights?
I thought most current action movies were just that, random explosions and fights. Or am I misinformed?
Modern action movies frequently have a credited screenwriter distinct from the director. The Oscars, wrongly in my view, even gave a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination to Top Gun: Maverick.
The plot might not be well-written, but it's there. You know who the hero is, who the main villain is, and why they're fighting.
Someone may well have told you that there's no plot at all, but people exaggerate.
I suspect that most of the porn being watched nowadays is in fact of the straight-to-the-sex type as browsing pornhub would reveal. Still why did historically produced pornography have -admittedly minimal- plots is an interesting question
> I suspect that most of the porn being watched nowadays is in fact of the straight-to-the-sex type as browsing pornhub would reveal
Pornhub videos still have titles that provide settings and characters. I am 100% certain that people are guided by that alone to certain videos that appeal to their fantasies/kinks.
I suspect the preponderance of pornhub-style porn is because it is essentially free, and being free means cutting production values to the bare minimum. "Plot" requires writing, and it requires time and costumes and a plot beyond a bed. So it usually gets left out.
But when the effort involved in distributing a VHS tape of porn through the local adult bookstore or whatever was such that "meh, we can hire a cheap screenwriter out of pocket change, and we have to fill an hour of video with *something*", we got plot.
Why, is about as interesting a question as why "Star Wars" had all that boring stuff about Luke Skywalker on Tattoine instead of just 90 minutes of blaster fights, lightsaber battles, and space dogfighting. The audience wants to be part of the fantasy, which means a protagonist the audience can identify with and a credible-ish path from their identifiably ordinary life to the action. And to the extent that there are other people involved, making them recognizably *people*. It's OK for the Stormtroopers to be anonymous, so long as you've invested Vader with some character.
I think this discussion would be better served with data on how much of the runtime is plot. Even better if this were charted over time, to check Bi_Gates' claim about earlier decades.
Umberto Eco claims in 'How to recognize a porn movie' that this is in fact at the very core of a porn movie.
Looking for feedback on a rough forecasting project idea that I’m hoping to flesh out for future grant rounds.
The basic idea: Community-run RCTs for supplements (and other things).
As y’all know, the evidence base for most supplements, nootropics, diets, and lifestyle interventions is incredibly weak because nobody has sufficient incentive to run rigorous RCTs if they can’t get a patent. In lieu of RCTs, everyone fights endlessly over low-quality, mostly observational data. Zembrin is a good example that Scott identified in the 2020 Nootropics survey - promising enough to justify an article on Lorien Psychiatry (https://lorienpsych.com/2020/12/08/kanna-zembrin/) and get 29 readers to preregister their usage, but still ultimately relying on “a tiny and unsatisfying handful of real studies.”
The aspiration would be to build an online community of self-experimenters to run RCTs on themselves, driven by their own personal research questions. Imagine everyone self-purchasing the supplement, getting a friend to blind them, taking a daily mood survey, and publishing results on arXiv.org where every “subject” is also a co-author. If we do a good job, we’ll make it to https://lorienpsych.com. If we do a great job, we’ll be in the next Cochrane Review.
I helped run a couple RCTs earlier in my career (behavioral interventions, not meds), so I know they’re hard, but I’ve always thought that a group of smart-curious-friends-on-the-internet could make it happen. And surely this would be the right corner of the internet to start.
Questions for you all:
1. Initial reactions 👎👍? Thoughts on how to improve this initial germ of an idea?
2. Would you personally be interested in participating in something like this? If yes, what studies/research Qs would you be most excited to answer for yourself?
3. Does something like this already exist? I’m familiar with the quantified self community, N-of-1 trials, the Cochrane Crowd…but what else?
there is a website called experiment.com that is a crowdfunding site specifically for scientific projects. Projects are vetted and must meet certain criteria to be accepted. This seems like a good place to organize and raise some small amount of funds (most projects are <$10K, but not all).
For this type of project, they would require an IRB, but you can write that cost into the project (for example using one of the private IRB companies).
Wasn't aware of this one, thanks!
"As y’all know, the evidence base for most supplements, nootropics, diets, and lifestyle interventions is incredibly weak because nobody has sufficient incentive to run rigorous RCTs if they can’t get a patent. In lieu of RCTs, everyone fights endlessly over low-quality, mostly observational data."
_almost_ entirely agreed
but here is one on unpatented iron supplements: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10010153/
( personal disclosure: I just bought a bottle of iron supplements myself... )
Probably gotta pay people. I'm not sure the extent to which regular clinical trials already do that, but I suspect you probably need to pay more. At least one benefit of participating in a trial now is you might get to take an experimental treatment you can't get access to otherwise. If you're trying to take something that doesn't require approval, and you think there's any chance it can help, why risk the chance you're getting placebo?
I'm very pro the idea that the FDA should allow trial substances be more widely accessible. However, would other agencies with more stringent policies take over as the "gold standard"?
For example, Japanese trials require a cohort of ethnically Japanese participants. If FDA regulations loosen, will drug registration become another point on the cold war?
I'm not sure what you mean. Wouldn't Japan continue requiring this, the US continue not requiring it, and drugmakers maybe not bother getting their drugs approved for the Japanese market if it isn't worth it?
Thanks for reply! I don't think I was being clear, I guess my question is, if other countries are using the US as the "strictest case" for drug development, e.g. if it passes FDA, then it's fine in other jurisdictions, then if loosened, that role as the gatekeeper is lost?
In my experience, the EU is tougher than the US already.
AFAIK most developed countries do not recognise approvals from foreign agencies (though it would be good if they did!)
The one sorta-exception I know of is the UK, which used to rely on the joint EU system. But when they decided to Brexit they said they would continue relying on the EU because spinning up a whole new independent drug approval agency was a headache they didn't need. But more recently they announced that they were going to keep this arrangement in place, and also expand it to recognise drug approvals in a wider range of countries - I don't believe they have said exactly which ones yet, but you'd imagine the US would be one.
So, if other countries were to follow the UK example and recognise drug approvals from other jurisdictions, I don't believe your hypothetical concern would be an issue - it is likely that the rule would be "If it gets approved in any of these countries it's good enough for us" rather than "if it gets approved by the single strictest of these other countries it's good enough for us"
But i was using japan gainst my point, that maybe more countries will follow that model and create further arbitrary requirements if they no longer follow US plans
I made a market on Manifold markets about which review will win the contest could be fun for some people here. https://manifold.markets/TimothyCurrie/what-will-be-the-first-letter-of-th
Hi, I'm set to graduate in a STEM field very soon (I actually walk in just a few days).
For a long time I've been interested in the “FIRE” or Financial Independence, Retire Early concept, which basically boils down to the idea that if you're smart with your money, you can bow out of the market early and focus on more personally fulfilling things.
The main advice around those circles is relatively simple stuff like “max out 401k and IRA”, in order to avoid as many taxes as legally possible. However, as far as I can tell, these sorts of tax-advantaged accounts revolve around retirement ages, like 59 ½, in order to avoid penalties and to actually take advantage of the tax benefits they provide.
Here is the crux of the problem, and why I'm posting here instead of on a more FIRE-centric community: I don't expect to live to that age. If we assume AGI/ASI by 2050 (which seems like a relatively "pessimistic" date, a lot of forecasts put it even closer, which would only aggravate my concerns here), then I will never reach the age where tax-advantaged retirement accounts are feasible. Any money I put into them would be completely wasted. Either because I'll be too dead to use it, or because society would reconfigure in a drastic enough way that I can't imagine it would be at all useful.
What's the play here? Do I ignore this, max out retirement accounts like a normal person, on the chance that actually we're all wrong and if I don't do these things, I would be a fool who could have and should have been wiser with their money? Or do I avoid these kinds of age-gated systems, focus on brokerage accounts, and optimize for an expected lifespan of possibly 40 to 45 years?
I suppose I actually have two questions: what is the best thing to do with retirement accounts in this situation specifically, and also how do I plan for retirement in general in a world I think has a fairly decent chance of being imminently terminal.
Any advice on this topic would be greatly appreciated, even if it's to tell me that I'm really dumb and misunderstanding something fundamental.
Personally, I don't believe in AI doom, but given that you seem to, I assume you're more likely to listen to other doomers. So here's Zvi arguing that you should still invest for the long term even in the face of AI doom: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2023/03/01/ai-practical-advice-for-the-worried/
---
One still greatly benefits from having a good ‘normal’ life, with a good ‘normal’ future.
Some of the reasons:
A ‘normal’ future could still happen.
It is psychologically very important to you today that if a ‘normal’ future does happen, that you are ready for it on a personal level.
The future happens far sooner than you think. Returns to normality accrue quickly. As does the price for burning candles at both ends.
Living like there is no (normal) tomorrow rapidly loses its luster. It can be fun for a day, perhaps a week or even a month. Years, not so much.
If you are not ready for a normal future, this fact will stress you out.
It will constrain your behavior if problems start to loom on that horizon.
It is important for those who love you, that you are ready for it on a personal level.
It is important for those evaluating or interacting with you, on a professional level.
You will lose your ability to relate to people and the world if you don’t do this.
It will become difficult to admit you made a mistake, if the consequences of doing so seem too dire.
More generally, on a personal level: There are not good ways to sacrifice quite a lot of utility in the normal case, and in exchange get good experiential value in unusual cases. Moving consumption forward, taking on debt or other long term problems and other tactics like that can be useful on the margin but suffer rapidly decreasing marginal returns. Even the most extreme timeline expectations I have seen – where high probability is assigned to doom within the decade – are long enough for this to catch up to you.
"Either because I'll be too dead to use it, or because society would reconfigure in a drastic enough way that I can't imagine it would be at all useful."
The Industrial Revolution drastically reconfigured society. Did that mean money was no longer important? No.
The computer revolution drastically reconfigured society. Did the pensions of everyone who worked before the computer age suddenly become useless? Not in the slightest.
After AGI is invented, scarcity will still exist. That means stores of value and mediums of exchange will still be important. You don't want to be caught with nothing to your name, *especially* if AGI destabilizes existing social safety nets like governments and charities.
I've read plenty of arguments that AI would be very different than your examples. However, I've also read enough economists yelling at those arguments, so I'll just leave it to people braver than me.
In general though, I think a good sense I've gotten from this thread is that ensuring I possess sufficient capital is a good idea for numerous reasons, and you being right is certainly one of those possible reasons.
>If we assume AGI/ASI by 2050
Well there's your problem. No, AGI or ASI is not going to happen by 2050. The quickest way to be sure of this is (in no particular order) :
1- To read (about) the AI giants of the 20th century : Marvin Minsky, John Mccarthy, Herbert Simon ; and how utterly bonkers their predictions about AI were. Marvin Minsky gave Gerald Jay Sussman (of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs fame) the problem of Computer Vision as a summer intern project in 1966, and around the same time Herbert Simon predicted that "In 20 years, Machines will be able to do any work a man can do".
2- If you haven't already, to take an introductory course in Machine Learning, the current dominant paradigm of AI. Here's a popular recommendation (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkDaE6sCZn6FNC6YRfRQc_FbeQrF8BwGI), it's by Andro Ng, the ML enthusiast's friend.
It's crucial to grok how utterly helpless a Neural Network is at the start of its life, if you thought human babies were helpless you just wait and see those randomly-initialized bastards flail around at the start of training.
It's crucial to grok how utterly dependent on the training set a Neural Network is, you're never going to get a Chess Player from a Cat dataset, the randomly-initialized network won't know anything except what's in the training set. You're never going to get anything except what the training set implies. Short of just recording days and months and years worth of videos of everyday life and throwing them at the network (good luck finding enough GPUs to train that), you can't get a Neural Network anywhere near the "G" in AGI.
(Yes, Reinforcement Learning complicates this picture a bit, but not by much.)
It's crucial to grok how utterly inflexible a Neural Network is, it's life is divided neatly between Training and Inference. In Training, it graduates from a randomly-initialized neophyte to esteemed classifier/predictor. In Inference, it's used to predict and\or classify inputs, but it doesn't learn from feedback. How can something this straight-jacketed ever learn from its mistakes ?
There are lots of those little nuggets of skepticism that you will naturally pick up from a study of Neural Networks. Everything about them just screams "Never going to be an AGI" in a way that I find difficult to fully articulate. They are (maybe) going to be *a component* inside a larger structure that will be an AGI, but then what are the other components ? Probably not invented yet.
Other paradigms of Artificial Intelligence that I give much higher probability of achieving GI or SI - but still nowhere near 0.5 to be clear - are (in descending order of current popularity) : Reinforcement Learning, and Evolutionary Algorithms. RL is a descendent of Control Theory and Cybernetics, it's very promising but much more complex and difficult to get right. Evolutionary Algorithms were all the rage in the 1980s and the 1990s, but ditto, it's fiendishly hard and finicky
3- If (1) and (2) somehow don't convince you yet, to look at the tech CEOs and other rich people who are much closer to the advances of ML and AI than you and me, and they seem to sleep just fine. Are those guys suckers ? Extremly short sighted ? What makes them wake up everyday and go to their hard work of sending emails all day if the AGIs their companies are developing are going to eat them by 2050 ?
Ok, so maybe tech CEOs and most ML programmers/researchers and most VC investors are just dumbasses, they are dumbasses about a lot of things, I will give you that. But then what makes you convinced by the few who say AGI is going to eat everyone by 2050 ? They are also Tech CEOs and ML programmers/researchers and VC investors !
In short, if do you believe Silicon Valley (-adjacent) people are in touch with reality, then everything they actually do in life reveals that they don't believe their own doomerism or that of their peers. If you believe that they are *not* in touch with reality, then you can ignore everything they and their ingroup say anyway. All roads lead to "The Cat classifier is probably not going to kill you", which is not exactly surprising, come and think of it.
4- (1) and (2) and (3) still didn't convince you, and you're convinced AGI/ASI is still going to take over. Let us grant that, it still takes some more assumptions to go from that to "they are going to kill us all".
Look around you, how much is the intelligence of a Fly next to a human ? How much that of a Mosquito, those sucky fuckers ? Bats ? Worms ? Spiders ? Did we kill them all ? You can't say "Oh but the AI is going to look at human as competitors", we absolutely look at Mosquitos and Ants as competitors, and we still hadn't managed to wipe them off, and not for lack of trying.
And the funny thing is, humans are hella easy to control. Learn the Religions they use to calm their existential panic and you can control them. Learn the arcane rules of the bullshit Financial-Banking rube goldberg apparatus they constructed and you can have so much of their resources and the fruits of their hard work it's not even funny. Hell, just be sexy woman and you have a solid 40% of them in your back pocket, by virtue of nothing but million years of Evolution inventing the Horny. All of this is in the reach of an AGI.
Why resort to violence then ? Why this weird conception of an AGI as a mustache-twirling villian, hell bent on killing people even if it serves no real purpose given all the vastly easier ways of controlling them ? Imagine a Vladimir Putin so utterly sexy (God I feel weird writing this, I'm straight I'm straight I'm straight), so good with words, so financially and psychologically cunning, that all he needs to do is make a speech and the women and men of Ukraine would trample over each other to make him their ruler, why would this guy ever need a war or an army ?
It's not going to happen my guy.
1. The fallacies of past forecasters regarding AI at a time when C hadn't even been invented yet has little to do with modern predictions of AI, in my opinion.
2. I have taken an introductory ML class, and I didn't get that sense. Also, no offense intended, I don't think updating based on "difficult to fully articulate" feelings is a great idea for me. More seriously, I get your point about the seeming narrowness of neural networks, but I also witnessed the emergence of ChatGPT shortly after I took that class, which is several thousand times more flexible and powerful than I would have expected if you had explained the concept of LLMs to the me taking that class. My point I suppose is that current AI, and recent AI growth, is sufficient on its own to make me extremely wary regarding AI, even if a bunch of really smart people weren't also saying the same thing.
3. I don't think much about rich people and tech CEOs at all really, and wouldn't be able to tell you how they sleep at night or what keeps them going. For all you and I know, they're all deeply, deeply depressed and get by with copious amounts of drugs and therapy. I mean, I don't think that's the case, but again, I don't watch them closely enough to tell you otherwise.
4. I agree with you fully that a sufficiently intelligent AI would be capable of everything you've described. It could social-fu all of humanity with relative ease. I also think that, to a super intelligence, humans would make terrible servants, and they'd probably find it way better in the long run to kill us all and replace us with automatons than keep convincing us to do its bidding.
(1) What's C got to do with that ? The 1960s was a golden age of Computer Science, it was when (1) Neural Networks have been invented for 20 years (2) Algol 60, a vastly better language than anything till the 1980s and vastly better than some languages used till now, was invented. Computers in the 1960s were proving theorems, playing chess, singing songs, and having conversations. People at the time felt very much the same fears and anxieties people today feel.
Regardless, I never said that 1960s Computer Scientists are an authority on today's AI, I said they are an authority on 1960s AI (just like today's Computer Scientists are an authority on today's AI). And they got it wrong, badly. All what I am saying is that the meta-situation is thus very similar, "A couple of scientists make reasonable progress on an old hard problem, the public gets very excited, and the scientists are pushed to hype things up for popularity and money", sounds very familiar ? it does to me.
You can put any weight on this, I personally put a large one. Whenever I encounter a historical analogy for something and people insist that "No ***This*** time is different" without giving convincing reasons or elaborating further, I trust the analogy will play out as-is even more.
(3) Sounds implausible, **ALL** CEOs are deeply depressed ? Elon Musk ? That goofbag twitterati ?
(4) I still can't understand why you think the ["Humans are not useful for AI" ---> "AI kills all human"] transition is plausible. Do humans get a bunch of dogs to be trained for police or security work, and then kill them all once it turns out the pooches are not fit for the task ? Is this normal human behaviour ? You're still imagining the AI as a mustache-twirling villian, a super-human intelligence with sub-human morality and cost-benefit analysis.
An independent AI will not give a shit, that's the worst it can ever get. (It can be much better) It wouldn't give a shit how many humans live, it wouldn't give a shit how many humans die. If a bunch of humans try to stop it then it will wipe them off the face of existence (or charm other humans into doing so), but that's it. It will no more care about an ordinary just-living-my-day-to-day-vibe human than you care about an Amazonian Ant.
Why would it ? Why would it go out of its way and kill a bunch of creatures with gauranteed 0 ability to do anything interesting to it ? I don't buy the "It wants to be maximally efficient with resources" argument, we're literally a rounding error next to the resources of a single solar system. The time it will take to destroy all humans is better invested researching inter-galactic travel and capturing more galaxies before they move forever out of our reach during the expansion of the universe.
The AI might want to stop us breeding or slow it down to sub-linear growth, it might want to destroy all AI research so that we don't invent a rival. Both of those are still not "Killing all humans", and it will take so much more to achieve than a single lifetime even if the AGI were to start right now.
1. I was being blasé with the C comment, and I was thinking in terms of "1960 AI R&D != 2020 AI R&D". In terms of a historical analogy, however, it's quite possible you're right. I'll have to think more about that.
3. Yeah I mean, I don't actually think they're all, or even a significantly outsized fraction of them are experiencing distress due to any privileged information regarding AI development. However, I also just don't think they would experience significant distress even if they did possess such information. I'm quite a bit more distressed about AI development than most people, but I'm pretty sure I'm not experiencing any mental side effects of that distress. I'm not a psychologist, and have no training or experience in that field, but I'd imagine that humans are just bad at feeling deeply about things that are supposed to or likely to happen in thirty odd years.
4. I'm not sure where the disconnect here is happening. I definitely don't believe AI is or will be immoral, I think it'll be totally amoral. I would argue that comparing humans not disposing of dogs not fit for the job they're supposed to be trained for, to AI not disposing of humans, is flawed because you're comparing a broadly moral subject (humans) to a very probably amoral subject (AI). You claim that I think an AI would be immoral, but I think you imagine it will be at least somewhat moral, which is equally ridiculous in my opinion.
I think there are two likely disconnects.
First, your worst case (AI is completely amoral) is my default case.
Second, our assumed "cost of eliminating humanity". I think it's low enough that an AI would very easily think it worth the benefit. Also, I think it's much more likely that humans are killed purely due to some extraneous step in whatever goal it has, not because killing humans is in itself a goal or our existence a hindrance. Say it wants to mine the Earth's core for material. Humans are alive, but it doesn't care, it just wants to mine the Earth's core. However, mining the core will, as a side effect, kill all humans. We do not factor into its calculations at all, but humans still die. I feel as though I would have to stretch much harder to think of a goal for an AI that *wouldn't* somehow kill all humans (or worse), rather than one that does. Partly, this is down to the fact that I don't think it's very hard to kill all humans (or kill most of them via, for example, a nuclear winter type event), and that doing so would be very easy for a super intelligence to do purely by accident/side effect.
You can indeed get that money early without paying the 10% penalty. Just takes some planning.
https://jlcollinsnh.com/2013/12/05/stocks-part-xx-early-retirement-withdrawal-strategies-and-roth-conversion-ladders-from-a-mad-fientist/
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/11/11/how-much-is-too-much-in-your-401k/
Thanks for the links, there's definitely a lot more nuance to the whole retirement account situation than I expected.
Also, I haven't read a MrMoneyMustache post in a long time, so that's a surprising dose of nostalgia.
The whole idea of retiring early is to sacrifice tremendously on qualify of life while you're young in order to have it when you're old. I'm not sure how you square that with a belief you'll never live to be old.
Putting that aside, I feel like planning for a 40 year life and living to be 90 will be a much more jarring disappointment than planning for a 90 year life and dying when you're 40. I'm 42 and would feel basically fine dying tomorrow with a lot of money tied up in brokerage accounts and property I could have spent on hookers, booze, and vacations. You might even end up surprised how pretty much worth it life can be even if you never travel and continue working. Again just speaking for myself, debilitating spine injuries have made travel very difficult, and I'm not planning to retire any time soon, but my work is extremely easy, I'm making way more money than I need, it's all from home. My life is much better than my retired parents.
I get the feeling a lot of this FIRE stuff is people overfitting on the hellish rat race of working in your 20s. You can find much more fulfilling work actually worth doing. Nobody is forcing David Attenborough to keep at it, but he's doing it anyway and it's probably part of what's keeping him alive.
I definitely don't agree that a focus or even interest in retiring early necessitates any sacrifice on quality of life in the present. The only situation in which that would happen is if you're taking massive amounts of overtime or doing some other unhealthy-in-the-long-run money making scheme, which I don't plan to do. Otherwise, it's just a matter of not spending every dollar you have, which I also wouldn't consider sacrificing quality of life, considering the whole hedonic treadmill thing.
Similar to other commenters, I would recommend putting at least some in retirement accounts, especially to get the employer match if any. There penalty for early withdrawal is only 10% (plus income taxes), so it's not the end of the world. Ba-dum-dum. Plus you could be wrong about AGI or its effects.
For the rest, consider either the robo-advisor accounts like Wealthfront, Betterment, etc., which are managed to be tax efficient and I believe to have an asset allocation based on a time horizon you specify, or just buy ETFs or something like that.
Thanks for the advice. Retirement accounts seem to be generally suggested route, even with penalties. Honestly the best possible outcome, seeing as it's also compatible with a world in which I've drastically overestimated AI.
I've never heard of robo-adivsor accounts, I'll look into them. Thanks.
Personally, I'm striking a balance. I'm not maxing my contributions but I'm making some so that of the singularity doesn't happen, I still have a modest life style post retirement. At the same time, I'm not spending more than that, and using the money I would have saved to enjoy life more in the present. I am also making sure that the money I do save is in a combination of index funds and targeted stocks, in case we get a particularly capitalistic singularity, where owning certain stocks is necessary to have a decent life.
Thanks for the advice. I'd be interested in your model of owning certain stocks being necessary. Do you mean in the sense of a goal-oriented AI with a singular focus on making one company more profit, wherein privileges are granted to those who contribute to that goal, or taken away from those who do not?
If you care about 'more personally fulfilling things' and are unsure about the future, IMO the main conclusions is: make sure to realize more personally fulfilling things already now.
I certainly don't mean this as an argument to only go on holiday until you run out of money. Rather: what are elements that would make a job especially fullfilling for you? Maybe making sure those elements are there at higher quality or quantity will then be more important than earning more money. What other factors in your life give or would give you a high level of personal fullfillment right now & then next 5, 10, 20 years? How do you make sure earning money does leave you with enough space and energy for those? Wanted to mention this, although maybe you already took care of all of those.
Thanks for the advice, and I think it's generally applicable to all people, not just the AI doomers like me. I do plan to live my life outside of just making money, and hopefully the process of making money will be a fulfilling one in and of itself.
1. You're not dumb, you're acting like any social being and listening to people around you. Unfortunately in this case that also includes AI doomers. Lots of smart people can be taken in by BS (look at the discussions on wokeness).
2. The end of the world has been predicted lots of times. It has never arrived. If it does preparing or not preparing would be pointless. You might consider keeping in shape, doing a little prepping, etc. It was helpful in COVID, which did not end the world or even the world economy (and if you had a little cash on hand and bought at the crash you could have made some money).
3. AI is much more likely to put you out of a job than destroy the world. If so, that saved money is going to be VERY nice to have.
4. The retirement account is tax-advantaged. As such it will grow more.
tl;dr: Go for BaristaFIRE, it'll help if you have to become an actual Barista.
Thanks for the advice, and the kind words. With some resources I was linked in other replies, the idea that it's better to plan for a normal future, because to do otherwise is needlessly risky and stressful, is definitely one I'll be trying to adopt. And yes, that should probably involve getting into shape as well.
For a start, I would put all that terminal stuff out of your mind. Once you are dead then what do either your plans made in life or their absence matter to you anyway? You, or anyone, might be "terminal" a year from now, or by midnight tonight! So, unless or until a limited remaining time span is certain, then as a matter of principle (and given the balance of probability) you should plan as if you will live your full three score years and ten plus.
I'm confused, are you interested (ignoring the AGI doom thing) in retiring early or not? If you're interested in FIRE then why would you be stashing money away in ways that you can't access it until a non-early retirement date?
But overall I'd recommend exercising your epistemic humility and working on the assumption your predictions about the future are no better than any other randomly selected person's.
And if you're concerned about the economy changing fundamentally, focus on investing in things that will always have value, which means land.
The predominant FIRE strategies involve far more investment techniques than just the tax-advantaged retirement accounts I mentioned, which is why they're used even for people looking to "retire early".
Land can go down in value, and cost something in property taxes. There is no such thing as an absolutely certain investment.
Diversify your land holdings though, and don't buy in countries with property taxes.
Continue to put money in your Roth IRA account. Because you put in after tax money you can do withdrawals of your principal at any time without any penalties or taxes.
You can borrow up to 50k from your 401k.
So many times people predicted the collapse of society and so far no one has been right yet. Unless you are 100% sure this will happen, you still want to be prepared for a normal retirement. I’d invest normally. I’d also look at the base rate of success for predictions 30 years ahead. Almost no one is successful in predicting with much accuracy the most important happenings even a decade out.
Maybe you can put a small portion of your investments in things that will grow massively if we go along the path to AGI.
Thank you for your reply. It's seems the general consensus is that retirement accounts are worth it, even if you don't get to the proper age.
Your point about preparing for a normal retirement is a very valid one, and definitely a new outlook that I will be attempting to adopt. Otherwise, it would be pretty awful to be wrong about the apocalypse. That's not a concern I'd like to carry around.
There is a tendency to over-plan these things, on the assumption that you will completely stop working AND thinking when you reach your retirement age. That's kind of stupid. As you mention rightfully, you can't know what the future holds at all.
Imagine you've saved enough to take things a step slower, but now you lose over half your wealth in the biggest stock crash the world has ever seen (why? I don't know, it's a hypothetical) You can respond to that by taking another job. If there's a major boom? You can respond by working less, sooner, invest everything in then-current tech. If the world is clearly ending? Spend it all as quickly as you can on boats and vodka. A relative needs super-expensive medical treatment? At least you can pay for it.
I'd say your first goal should not be to retire, but to get to CoastFIRE/BaristaFIRE, or even just having enough cash on hand to offer flexibility, freedom and the ability to invest in stuff. My personal opinion is that living on a super-tight budget now just to afford a luxury lifestyle later gets priorities mixed. It's about defining the right trade-offs between current and future consumption. This seems to be even more important if you assume there's probability of full doom. Spend some too, and that includes time. Youth is wasted on the young and all (you won't believe how true this is in hindsight).
Age-gated stuff.. It's a trade-off between "free" returns and less flexibility. You want to ensure your investments offer a valid lifestyle (be that with/without work) in all the high-probability paths.
Thanks for your reply. You make a good point, and I definitely think that, even if I don't ever get to retire (which could happen for multiple reasons, including that I just don't want to), it's still worth accumulating capital and being smart in how I invest it.
In my late 20s I imagined I would want to stop working as soon as this became feasible (where "feasible" was somewhat slide-y, but included a lifestyle that was comfortable but not luxurious). Now age 55 I could afford to give up now at a pinch and will easily be able to do so in three years time, but I expect to keep going beyond that. Late career can be rewarding. The pressure has gone, you can tune out much of the noise, and to quite an extent focus on areas which most interest you.
This is what I find. Most of the people who are actually in a good enough life situation where they could FIRE, would rather work and enjoy their life a bit more.
I am debt free and have a great income at 40, abstaining vacations and living on the budget I did in my 20s I could probably retire in a couple years. But my work life is so much more bearable now, and the financial rewards so much greater, that I would rather work some and play a lot, and who knows when I will retire, maybe never. I am sort of "semi retired" right now. Just some of the things I do with my free time is make money.
Some months I work 400 hours, some months 40. Depends on how I feel and what the contracts are.
Specifically re retirement accounts: it's usually better to have them (and then borrow against them/pull out money early if you have to), since they're still tax advantaged (there's a penalty for early withdrawal but it's probably lower than your income tax, and doesn't apply to borrowing against them).
For more general advice on living with AI fears, see here
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2023/03/01/ai-practical-advice-for-the-worried/
Thanks for the advice on retirement accounts. With more information as a result of this and other comments, I think I've come to the conclusion that it's definitely better to invest in them than not, for multiple reasons.
Also, that was an extremely relevant and helpful article. I appreciate you linking it very much.
The penalty for early withdrawal is in ADDITION to having to claim the money as income. Borrowing against a retirement account is almost certainly a better idea. But paying it back will reduce your current cash flow, too.
I'm assuming you withdraw it when you're in de facto retirement, so your income for that year is low and doesn't have much of an income tax.
I feel there's multiple things wrong with this point of view, but I'll just go for the top level point you've made here: reading substack blogs is one of the most intellectually interesting parts of my day to day life. I enjoy hearing from a wide array of minds on an incredibly diverse range of subjects.
In general, I think I act in a way pretty consistent with the idea that I might not live to see to see 50. Not perfectly consistent, obviously, there's a lot of things I could be better or different. I can't tell if your concern is general advice or if you're getting something from my post that isn't there.
Is there anyone in Bangkok, Thailand who might be interested in meeting up? Slightly surprised that there are meet ups in in several less international Asian cities but not here.
I'm in Khao Yai. It's a bit of a drive but you can make a weekend out of it and see the national park. Let me know your email if you're interested.
Will our votes for the other reviews go towards the scoring? Missed the opportunity to last week and a couple have caught my interest.
Yes, you can still vote for other reviews.
Are you not going to update your model of the effectiveness of public comment on department/agency's decisions, or are you just doing that without comment?
Slightly updating: see the Reddit thread for some good discussion.
So there's this blog I've been reading for ages, by a guy calling himself "the verbose stoic". He recently posted a question to people who don't believe in anything supernatural: how would you survive a horror movie?
https://verbosestoic.wordpress.com/2023/05/05/the-horror-movie-test-for-naturalism/
I'd love to see some answers to that question, and I thought this would be a good place to give it more visibility.
I second my confusion about the question, it's probably me being a bit sleepy but it's not clear what is actually being demanded here. Is my Naturalism supposed to save me from a horror movie ? why, it's neither Naturalism nor Super-Nauturalism that saves from horror movies, but being a hot chick does (the other one, not the one that always gets killed during sex). Is my Naturalism supposed to be convinced of the (alleged) Super-Natural phenomenon in question when I experience it ? But
(1) this will not make any material difference, I can run just as well from things I don't understand or am not convinced of as those that do, if anything the confusion and the disbelief will make me more scared and (hopefully) a faster runner.
(2) There are tons of other Natural explanations for the phenomenon, I have read people describe hallucinatory drugs in a reddit thread recently and the testimonies included such batshit craziness as "You feel that you have been alive for millenia". If even a tenth of those descriptions are true, then the Natural world contains enough craziness to explain anything. There is not and there will be not a horror or thriller writer born who can match the horror and thrill of what Nature routinely does after a yawning. For example, when you're a vegetarian you start noticing the sheer magnitude of horror we inflict on animals, so if I'm in a horror movie like (say) Saw I would simply explain it by me being captured by a powerful alien species that uses humans as humans use animals. The horror we imagine is but a mere pale shadow of what we experience at the hands of Nature.
Really, it will not be a problem at all. Part of being a Naturalist (Or a Rationalist or whatever you want to call it) is realizing your own limitations as a Natural phenomenon. After all, your own brain is just an electromagnetic phenomenon that can be manipulated in all the usual ways, and that can be faulty like any household appliance. I'm often creeped out when I'm alone in the bathroom at 3:00 am, and I have to look behind me to make sure nobody is watching. I'm often comforted by a good voice reading the Quran, even though I stopped being a Muslim a good while ago. Those 2 seemingly puzzling pheonmena have perfectly good Natural explanations : I'm a bunch of meat stricken with free energy and electricity, and my feelings are not an authority on what the Natural world is. So if I'm in a horror movie, I would certainly behave in all the usual ways horror movie actors behave in, while simultaneously knowing that none of this implies Super Natural phenomena actually exist, but merely that Natural phenomena that strikes my senses and nervous systems as Super-Natural.
I think I might be so astounded and actually sort of thrilled to see something supernatural that my fascination would get in the way of effective self-preservation. That's always been my feeling about ghosts: I would LOVE to see a ghost, because it would be proof that there is more to life than I thought.
I mean the people in such shows often behave very stupidly. I would probably just leave (which is often enough to resolve the crisis) and chalk it up to hallucination.
If a big zombie was attacking me and I cut its head off, and it kept attacking, well I would probably start assuming it was a zombie-like creature? I wouldn't worry about the implications for naturalism until the crisis was over?
What is even the question here? I don't think dragons are real. if tomorrow a dragon flew up to my neighborhood and started burning down the neighbors house I would contact the Air national guard and police and ask them to get rid of it while fleeing as fast as I could.
I would not have an internal crisis about naturalism. And then later when safe we can all have a discussion and investigation about what it all means?
I would absolutely go up to the dragon and try to get a better look.
If I met any sort of actual supernatural occurrence I would probably die via trying to investigate it without tools or backup.
You might enjoy the manga/anime series "GATE", where exactly this happens... but also much, much more.
Is there a harem?
No, but there *are* catgirls.
That's part of the impetus for the plot in "Dracula". Nobody has heard of vampires, and when they do, they automatically dismiss it all as backwards peasant superstition, *we* are modern 19th century Science and Progress types!
Which enables Dracula to get away with a lot; the locals are exhausted and wary and know how to defend themselves against vampires. He needs fresh territory, and he looks to the progressive, fat, disbelieving West (Great Britain as the current greatest empire) to provide him with a base to thrive and grow.
This is also what hampers the vampire hunters, since if they try going to the authorities and telling them that the outbreak of anemia is caused by a vampire then they'll end up in the madhouse (at worst) or dismissed kindly but definitively (at best).
Haven't read the linked post, but I think nobody has mentioned this perspective yet: It is of course more dangerous to live in a world with monsters if you don't believe monsters are real. Likewise, in a world without monsters, there are disadvantages to any position other than active disbelief.
I aspire to be well-adapted for the world I live in, which necessarily means being less well-adapted for worlds that I don't live in. That doesn't mean setting any of my priors to zero or one. If I see something very surprising, then I will change my priors very quickly. But perhaps not quickly enough to keep me alive, if my priors were somehow very wrong to begin with.
Well said! Agreed on all points and trade-offs.
This seems right to me.
If a naturalist means a scientific viewpoint, then the test makes no sense. If you have a movie in which something "supernatural" happens, then an actual scientific person would take the new evidence into account, and in effect the effect becomes a natural part of a different worldview.
Someone so certain there is no such thing as ghosts, ESP, or magic, etc., that nothing can change their mind is not a scientific person. Effectively, this is a faith in "normalness". This is completely different from not believing in something such as ghosts, ESP, or magic until convincing evidence is produced or a hypothesis to determine it can be tested. Scientific method can never prove something true, but can disprove something.
I had the opposite experience years ago reading a horror novel; the monster was set up to seem supernatural and I was happily reading away in a state of pleasurable chills, then it switched to "psych! it's really a natural being!" and *immediately* all the suspense evaporated.
Because now all the heroes needed was More And Bigger Weapons to beat it, which they did eventually. Up to that point, it had been "how do you defeat a demon?" but after that it was merely a question of "shoot it, bomb it, burn it with fire".
There was a BBC Radio Four comedy series called "Old Harry's Game" where one character, the Professor, died and went to Hell but refused to believe he was in Hell; instead, he maintained that he was in a coma in hospital and hallucinating all this alleged experiences. I think for the case of the naturalist in the scenario posited, it might be funny (from an outsider's view) to see them staunchly denying this was happening and it was all a dream or a hallucination right up to the point where the monster chowed down on them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Harry's_Game
"The first four series centred on the philosophical arguments between Satan and the somewhat idealistic main human character known as "The Professor" (played by James Grout). The Professor represents the undeserving damned, being a man of high moral virtue and having been consigned to Hell only on the technicality that he did not believe in God. The character was originally called Professor Richard Whittingham, although in series 2 he is referred to as Professor Richard Hope, when in episodes 5 & 6 Satan gets his book The Theory of Everything published. Generally, Satan seeks to prove to the Professor that mankind is inherently base or flawed, with the Professor taking the opposing position. Usually Satan travels to the living world to display the more contemptible sides of human nature, such as snipers shooting old ladies in Bosnia or prostitution in Thailand, to a generally horrified Professor. At other times he introduces the Professor to historical personages the Professor holds in high esteem but who are now languishing in Hell, such as Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, showing him how petty and mendacious they really are. However, the Professor's idealism is usually shown to have some validity as well, and more often than not he wins the argument (although Satan always insists he hasn't).
The other main human character is Thomas Quentin Crimp (Jimmy Mulville), an execrable type with few (or no) morals, held out by Satan as an example of all that is detestable about humanity and often described (especially by God himself) as the most venal and corrupt human being who ever lived. In the first episode, it transpires that Thomas caused the car crash which landed him and the Professor in Hell. The latter, despite his moral idealism, is consigned to Hell because of his atheism (since, as Satan remarks caustically, God does not have a sense of humour). The fact of the afterlife — which the Professor originally optimistically views as a hallucination - does not change his views. Despite (or perhaps because of) their conflicting attitudes, the Professor and Thomas are billeted together by Satan."
> Because now all the heroes needed was More And Bigger Weapons to beat it
I actually find this trope quite uplifting, in that "iron chariots" and "tower of Babel" kind of way. One of my favorite episodes of *Buffy the Vampire Slayer* involves a plot by the modern-day vampires to resurrect an ancient unstoppable demon.
(spoiler alert, though come on, this is *Buffy*, the statute of limitations is way past its expiration date).
The demon's tagline, as recorded in the history books, is "no weapon forged can hurt me". He believes himself to be totally invincible, and the vampires cheer in glee when he kicks Buffy's ass during their first encounter... until she comes back with a rocket launcher. As the demon states his tagline again -- "no weapon forged can hurt me !" -- Buffy retorts with "that was then, this is now". As it turns out, the demon's tagline was not a mystical prophecy, but rather a statement of fact at the time. Medieval holy warriors tried every weapon they could think of on him, and nothing worked... But our weapons have evolved a great deal since then, while the demon remained as he was.
As I said, I find this trope quite uplifting. It conveys the message that when humans truly apply themselves and work together, they can accomplish feats that make even demons and gods tremble in supernatural boots. We may be stupid and venal and blind at times (or, let's face it, most of the time); but even still, when the power of humanity is focused, it is unmatched.
It worked for Buffy, but it's a trick you can only pull once. The big show-down doesn't happen because she just blows him away, and all the build-up about this being the worst menace goes nowhere.
Though it was a clever loophole, relying on "no weapon *forged*". Buffy's rocket launcher wasn't forged, but it makes me think that a weapon like an obsidian blade would also work against him.
It's like the way around the boons granted to demons in Hindu mythology; they often ask for "I can't be killed under this set of conditions" and then the gods have to find loopholes - like Narasimha:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narasimha
"Narasimha iconography shows him with a human torso and lower body, with a leonine face and claws, typically with the asura Hiranyakashipu in his lap, whom he is in the process of defeating. The asura king was the powerful brother of the evil Hiranyaksha, who had been previously defeated by Vishnu, and thus hated the latter. Hiranyakashipu gained a boon from Brahma due to which he could not be killed during the day or night, inside or outside the house; neither in the sky nor on land nor in Svarga nor in Patala, by any weapon, nor by a man, deva, asura, or an animal. Endowed with this boon, he began to wreak chaos and havoc, persecuting all the devotees of Vishnu, including his own son. Vishnu, cognisant of the asura's boon, creatively assumed a hybrid form that was neither man nor animal, and slew the wicked king at the junction of day and night, at the threshold of his house, which was neither inside nor the outside, upon his lap, and with his claws."
My disappointment with the book was that it was set up all along to have the supernatural interpretation, then at the last moment it switched to "okay, so the monster seems undefeatable, but it turns out it's actually natural so you can shoot it to death". A trick to enable the heroes to win, which came across to me like winning a marathon by hopping into a car to drive the last five miles. If they had presented the monster as natural from the start, just really really difficult to kill untill they figured out its weakness, I would have no complaints.
But the switch was just too sudden and too jarring.
> Buffy's rocket launcher wasn't forged, but it makes me think that a weapon like an obsidian blade would also work against him.
No, it would probably just shatter. The loophole was, as I said, that "no weapon forged" was a statement of fact, not a mystical geas. We have better weapons now.
That said, the "mystical loophole" trope is quite common in mythology; e.g. Aslaug pulls the same thing on Ragnar Lothbrok. Although, as the TV series points out, she exploited more than one vulnerability by using that net as a garment :-) In Slavic mythology, Ivan the Fool (as well as, funnily enough, Vasilisa the Wise) is built entirely around this trope: he's not strong or regal or brave like his brothers, so he has to cheat around obstacles, such as e.g. unkillable personifications of death and decay. But there's a trickster archetype in every mythology, I think.
"We may be stupid and venal and blind at times (or, let's face it, most of the time); but even still, when the power of humanity is focused, it is unmatched."
A celebration along related lines:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljmifo4Klss
This reminds me of a nightmare I once had, that involved the clown from It. The nightmare part did not come from the clown chasing me or anything like that, but from the immense horror and dread that came from the knowledge that I existed in a universe with materialised supernatural evil.
... Although of course It isn’t supernatural, we learn in the end. It came from outer space, thousands of years ago...
".....as you may imagine, the Professor's views on certain points are less clear cut than they used to be. His nerves, too, have suffered... and the spectacle of a scarecrow in a field late on a winter afternoon has cost him more than one sleepless night."
The closing words of "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad". I would have updated my priors too.
Ah, the renowned M R James. He was one of the best ghost story writers, and it's reasonable to assume was a closet homosexual. Another great ghost story writer, E F Benson, was also gay back in the days when this was frowned on and gays persecuted.
I've no doubt preoccupation with ghosts, and even seeing them, is solely about what is going on in the believer's head, most likely sexual repression or guilt of one kind or another. But one can't generalize this angle entirely, because perhaps the most famous ghost story writer and one of the first, Sheridan Le Fanu, was married.
Also, not everyone who refrains from sex or has sexual hangups sees or believes in ghosts. Otherwise places like monasteries and nunneries would be swarming with them!
If you're going to claim that all ghost stories were written by sexually repressed people in the closet, then you have a lot of work to do to prove your point, given that accounts of ghosts, traditional tales, folklore, and telling ghost stories round the fire for winter time is nearly a universal experience.
Every single human being was secretly gay? The onus on you is to prove it!
E.F. Benson wrote more than just ghost stories, and I'd grant you that the Mapp and Lucia novels are much more likely the work of a closeted gay man. He also had two brothers who were noted writers including fantasy/horror: R.H. Benson who converted to Catholicism and became a priest, and A.C. Benson.
None of the surviving Benson children (there were six siblings, two died young) married so maybe they were all gay/lesbian - or maybe the precarious mental health in the family had something to do with it, if we're engaging in armchair psychology.
M.R. James may well have been gay, I'm not going to speculate about "platonic love affairs with his pupils". But his refinement of the ghost story was to introduce very *physical* ghosts: there aren't any pale phantoms in the moonlight that fade away into wisps, but real and tangible entities:
"He also noted: "Another requisite, in my opinion, is that the ghost should be malevolent or odious: amiable and helpful apparitions are all very well in fairy tales or in local legends, but I have no use for them in a fictitious ghost story."
In a 1929 essay, James stated:
Reticence may be an elderly doctrine to preach, yet from the artistic point of view, I am sure it is a sound one. Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it, and there is much blatancy in a lot of recent stories. They drag in sex too, which is a fatal mistake; sex is tiresome enough in the novels; in a ghost story, or as the backbone of a ghost story, I have no patience with it. At the same time don't let us be mild and drab. Malevolence and terror, the glare of evil faces, 'the stony grin of unearthly malice', pursuing forms in darkness, and 'long-drawn, distant screams', are all in place, and so is a modicum of blood, shed with deliberation and carefully husbanded; the weltering and wallowing that I too often encounter merely recall the methods of M G Lewis."
It has been part of the critical apparatus to regard the ghosts in ghost stories as the return of the Other, as indicating something psychologically disturbing which is repressed yet refuses to lie quiet and returns in various shapes. "The ghost story writers were all repressed gays" fits quite well with this kind of analysis, but it may be saying *too* much if you make it a universal rule.
> Every single human being was secretly gay? The onus on you is to prove it!
What I intended to express, not very well, was not that anyone who believes in ghosts and claims to have seen them must be repressed, but only that the authors of some of the best such stories may have channeled their bottled up emotions and unfulfilled desires to make for more atmospheric results.
The widespread spritualist movement in the years not long after WW1 for example was much more the result of loss, of so many of the younger generation in the trenches. So belief in spiritualism and ghosts isn't just about sex liberation or the opposite, and actually I think there was more liberation in the 1920s.
You might be right in general, though it's always possible Le Fanu was closeted or bi. He could still have urges he felt bad about that weren't homosexual, too.
It's really hard to test any of these theories as it's hard to know what dead people thought about anything if they didn't say and didn't talk about it to anyone.
This is very far from my experience!
I don't believe in ghosts but I get nervous about bumps in the night and often do weird superstitious OCD rituals to get rid of them. Jewish lore says the Shema prayer will banish ghosts and I sometimes say it for especially persistent weird nighttime phenomena that won't go away. Just in case, you know?
If I start seeing actual strong evidence of a ghost, I'm not taking the time to consider whether it's a hallucination or hologram (even though it probably is; I've heard it's a carbon monoxide leak in particular a surprising amount of the time). I'm deploying every magical defense I know - or, more likely, just moving to a different state.
In terms of how I would do this if I were actually principled: even if I think there's a less than 0.0001% chance that ghosts exist, that doesn't mean a medium amount of evidence couldn't change my mind (cf. my prior on a randomly-chosen person's name being 'Luga' is less than 0.0001%, but if they introduce themselves with 'Hi, I'm Luga', it will go up to >50%). So after a small amount of good ghost evidence, I would hope I'd be up to s a 1% or 10% chance it's actually a ghost, at which point cost-benefit analysis would tell me I should take whatever slightly-embarrassing-if-I'm-wrong action might save my life.
(doesn't this mean I should update more on other people's ghost stories? I'm not sure. I think I have that priced in, and I would interpret whatever happens to me in the horror movie as separate, non-priced in evidence. I'm not sure this is principled but I don't have a better idea and I think it's how I would actually behave)
Wow, ghosts are sort of a special case of the supernatural. Unlike zombies, godzilla, etc, they are rarely portrayed as harming people, so they are much less scary, more sort of startling. I would be *delighted* to see a ghost, because it would upend my whole view of life, and in a good way. It would mean there is life after death. I do get scared of monsters under the couch and shit like that if I'm watching a horror movie at home alone, so I'm not immune to fear of monsters -- just not bothered by ghosts. What is it about ghosts that bothers you?
But why would you want the ghost life after death? Wandering around an ancient house annoying people. Not able to turn on the TV, have a bath, eat a burger, do much about anything really except move a few household items, push a few doors ajar with effort, and the odd apparition. Is that what you aspire to, just to forsake death?
Most heavens don’t appeal either, hanging around praising God along with a choir of angels. Boring. Reports on hell are generally unfavourable.
The islam heaven sounds more like it - I could forsake the 72 virgins but the wine sounds good.
Ghosts can't all be wandering around ancient houses annoying people -- if we were, we'd be seeing ghosts constantly. I suppose I imagine being a ghost as being some combo of one's living self and some other stuff. Like maybe all the sad angry bullshit falls away, and one is smart and joyous -- playing with eagles in the air, and dolphins in the ocean, and other times just contemplating suchness. And understanding so much more than we do now. So the few ghosts wandering around scaring people would be the ones whose sad angry bullshit didn't get burned away in the transformation.
You’ve made up your own theory of ghosts here to justify your “delight” if you ever see one.
Well sure, but you made up yours too -- they're all rattling around in old buildings scaring people. At least mine takes into account that if *everybody* who's died were haunting old buildings there would be a crowd of ghosts in each one, and we'd have ghost sightings constantly.
But whether my theory's right or wrong, I still think I'd be delighted to see a ghost. It would be a thrill to discover there is more to life than I thought, even if I'm not sure the additional bit is pleasant. And besides, ghosts seem to me the least scary of supernatural and invented beings. They don't hurt people. I'm not immune to being scared of the monsters -- the xenomorph in Alien scared the hell out of me, and I don't like to think about the face-huggers when I'm in a dark room.
If carbon monoxide buildup is an issue in your location, it might be worth buying a CO monitor for about $20. It should last the best part of a decade.
I have seen three briefly convincing ghosts in my life. The first, which was described to me by the quivering witnesses as 'a glowing woman walking between the trees', was a concrete pillar in the moonlight.
The second was a cowled monk (common theme) which looked over my recumbent form for (what felt like) 30 seconds until I shifted my head and it resolved into my dressing gown hanging on my door.
The third was a tall, slender man who burst into my bedroom and charged at my bed before vanishing as my sleep-paralysis disappeared.
So no, I don't believe in ghosts, but sometimes one's brain needs a jolly good talking to.
“The fae do not hate you, nor do they love you, but you are made of matter and magic they can use for something else.”
Reviews that especially need more ratings (please select one randomly or according to preference, but NOT by starting at the top of the list, so we don't have everyone review the first one and nobody review the last):
Being You
Black Skin, White Masks
Constructing Research Questions
Drunk
Fathers And Sons
Human
Intelligence And Spirit
Nightmare Pipeline Failures
Njal's Saga
Pacific War Trilogy
Preplexities Of Consciousness
Power, Sex, Suicide
Principles For Dealing...
Probability Theory
Safe Enough?
Science Fictions
Slouching Toward Utopia
Telluria
The Alexander Romance
The Evolving Self
The Forgotten Revolution
The Life And Opinions Of Zacharias Lichter
The Making Of Prince Of Persia
The Making Of The Atomic Bomb (1)
The Making Of The Atomic Bomb (2)
The Most Democratic Branch
The Motivation To Work
The Passenger
The Power Of Glamour
The Problem Of Political Authority
The Question Concerning Technology
The Scythian Empire
The Soul Of A New Machine
The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck
Why Machines Will Never Rule The World (2)
Without Marx Or Jesus
Public Citizens
Google Docs is being uncooperative and not letting me add a review that didn't make it into the original batch for reasons that aren't the author's fault. This is The Enigma Of Reason. You can read it on this separate doc and review it at the normal review form: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kVFLZLx9QfFMDWk_UzeJVPh7_frYTuzN6jCmruUQbdY/edit
I've read about 5 of these so far, and for what it's worth 3 of then got the highest ratings I've given so far. So don't hesitate to dance with the wallflowers!
In case people want to use random number generators, there's 37 entries here.
My understanding is that Ukraine is mostly safe now. The life is back to normal in the most of Ukraine. In that way Ukraine has won against Russia already.
I don't know what will happen with occupied territories. It might be that Ukraine may not get them back fully or in part. I don't think it is a big loss. Most people who don't like Russia must have already fled those territories.
It is clear that Ukraine is getting more and more help from the West while the strength of Russian army is decreasing. It is a slow process but Russia is going to suffer more and more losses. Maybe they will be able to keep the Crimea but the price for that will be very high. I feel so sorry for tens of thousands of young Russian men who will needlessly die due to Putin's whims.
Either side could still win this war, but Ukraine is the clear favorite at this point.
Sooner or later, one of these armies is going to break. I'm somewhat surprised it hasn't happened already, but it will happen eventually. It always does. An army breaks because a consensus develops among its soldiers and junior officers that victory is impossible and that engaging the enemy is just a stupid pointless way to die. This happens from a combination of physical exhaustion, psychological exhaustion, and experience of conspicuous not-victory.
When that happens, that army's forces will no longer advance except in the most timid and easily-repelled fashions. When attacked, they will run away or hide in the bottom of their trenches rather than stick their heads up to engage the enemy. Artillery crews will still fire when they have shells and specific targets, but they won't exercise any initiative in adapting their logistic and fire direction capabilities to the friction of war so they'll usually be lacking shells and/or targets. Tank crews, and pretty much every other sort of specialist, will abandon their equipment at the first sign of breakdown or damage.
When the other side figures out this is happening, it plays out a lot like it did around Kharkiv and Kherson last fall.
And no, Russia sending another few hundred thousand mobiks to the front won't change that. Ukraine appears to have been actually training tens of thousands of new troops, and integrating them into units that have been rotated to the rear for that purpose. That actually does regenerate combat power and push that army's breaking point farther out. Russia hasn't had the time or resources to do that - everybody who could train the new guys is either dead or stuck at the front, and the demand is for new meat right now not six months for now. When you send untrained newbies to the front, the exhausted veterans do not say "Huzzah, reinforcements! We are saved!", they say "now we are even more screwed". And they say that to the face of the new guys, who are taking their cues from the veterans.
The real question is, can Russia accept getting defeated in a conventional war? Putin has ostentatiously staked the legitimacy of his regime on the outcome of this war, and threatened nuclear escalation multiple times. He's old, and doesn't seem to care about anything other than himself. Long story short, I don't see an eventual good outcome of this war for Ukraine either way, and don't understand those who do.
Probably it will depend on what support they get. Consider WW2, where the Soviets defeated the Germans after the US sent them 13k tanks, 14k planes et cetera. So far, there's been a lot of expressions of support, but materially no country has sent anywhere even remotely close to that.
That was against the Germans, who had declared total war and conquered much of Europe and North Africa. This is against the Russians, who put anyone in jail who even dared call this a war, and spent four months trying to establish a foothold on the garbage dump of Bakhmut.
One can always debate if the support is sufficient, but suggesting western countries limit themselves to "expressions of support" is neither fair nor accurate.
I agree that no country has sent material remotely close to the amounts you mention for WW2, but I'm surprised this is the scale you want to use for comparison. My history book estimates European military losses (= dead soldiers) in WW2 at 14 million. I'm very glad we are talking about a different dimension here.
Also the west would have to go on full war footing. It’s not even clear that we have the industrial capacity.
What does “defeat Russia” mean to you?
There’s a broad range of outcomes that potentially could encompass, and without a clear idea which is being discussed, it’s really impossible to answer the question.
Ukrainian troops in Crimea? Ukrainian troops in Moscow? Mere continuation of some nonzero rump Ukraine state not in Russia’s orbit that joins the EU and NATO? Or only the EU?
A pretty obvious interpretation is a return to pre-2022 borders. That's what everybody means when they say "defeat" an invasion, nobody says "Taliban defeated the American invasion" and means by it that Talibani fighters are in DC.
Fair - Ukraine in Moscow was an intentionally extreme example. But if we put a more plausible example on it, how would OP categorize an end state where Ukraine holds the only territory it has now, remains politically independent, and joins EU and NATO? Or joins EU with a NATO security guarantee and a path to membership? Joins EU with no
immediate path to NATO membership, but a security guarantee and no explicit prohibition on joining NATO future?
Have any of those Ukraines “defeated” Russia? What if they don’t reach the 2022 borders but liberate more territory than they have now?
Victory and Defeat are always tricky, you can never be sure what your opponent really want(ed), if their "I got what I want anyway hehe" is really taunting you or just saving their face and they are, in actual fact, defeated in the inside. Win-Win wars are not oxymorons from the perspective of leadership. (Every war is Lose-Lose from the perspective of soldiers and most people).
If we take Putin at his 2022 word that he wanted Kyiv, I think it's a pretty safe bet now that he won't get it and that, I think, does count as defeat, no matter how things turn out. But in the process of doing so he did
1- capture a bit of territory,
2- inflict massive damage to territories he didn't capture (not sure how that helps anyone, but it's a scorched earth win to Putin, if he doesn't get it then nobody does),
3- prove that "Bad State No Trade/Dollar for you" strategy of mommy West is ineffectual, makes China and other anti-US states think really hard about their dollar dependence and what it means for their geopolitical leverage
4- probably embolden China and perhaps others thinking of doing a Saddam to their neighbours (this will depend on how it ultimately turns out for Putin, if the consequences keep chasing him till 2030s it will be a very different sort of message)
5- provide an outlet for insufferable people to use the war as a holy fight where there is a pure evil and a pure good that they are on the side of
Any one of those will have lasting effects, not all of which are good for Ukraine or its Western allies. In particular, I think people get too caried away with "Ukraine joins Nato and now Russia can't TOUCH it", how are they so sure ? If, say in 2050, Russia actually decides to call the Nato's bluff and invades Ukraine again, will Nato actually have the balls to invade the famous graveyard of Napoleon and Hitler ? I don't have an answer either way, but Germany was shitting its freezing pants just months ago in the winter without Russian energy, so I think the pro-Nato war hawks need to hold their horses a bit, Russia ain't Iraq (which Nato badly failed at doing anything resembling their states goals in, and lost massive amounts of respect and face in the process).
I agree with your point that "defeat" and "victory" are amorphous concepts, which greatly complicates the conversation (particularly since Putin has been ambiguous about his exact war aims) since, unless completely destroyed to the point doing so is impossible, both sides will inevitably attempt to claim "victory" at the end of the war.
Which is why before I'd engage with OP on such an open-ended question as "Can Ukraine defeat Russia?" I think it's a necessity to ask what he thinks "defeat" is.
On the outcomes you describe:
1 - Agree
2 - Agree, but this outcome looks to me to be more like evidence of desperation on the part of Russia (trying a "break their hearts with indiscriminate bombing" campaign due to an inability to achieve battlefield success), than it does Russia in a position of strength and using that strength to achieve its "devastate Ukrainian territories"-type goals
3 - I think it's inaccurate to call sanctions "ineffectual." They are not a doomsday weapon that can break regimes, to be certain, but we've known that for some time (see also - sanctions on Iran) and that's not what they were ever expected to be. They haven't forced Putin to abandon the invasion, but it strikes me as inaccurate to call them "ineffectual" as though they have somehow passed by Russia without cost. I also think it's fair to observe that any "well that isn't as tough as I thought" that an observer comes away with after looking the performance of sanctions in this war would be absolutely dwarfed by how not-tough-as-advertised the Russian military has turned out to be. Proving your rival is weaker than advertised by showing yourself to be even weaker than he is not very effective great power politics.
4 - I don't know if China is emboldened here. A rapid victory and global acquiescence (a la Crimea in 2014) would likely produce that effect, but what China is watching happen in Ukraine is very much *not* what it would want to see if it invaded Taiwan.
5 - No comment as it seems mostly to be a personal grudge against persons not present.
3- (a) Oh, I don't disagree that sanctions do something, it's just that this thing happens to be "Making ordinary people's lives hell, pushing them to hate you more than the dictator ruling over them", not "Pressuring the dictator to do X" for all possible values of X.
(b) War is nuanced and contextual, very small differences in the initial conditions lead to big differences in the outcomes. Vietnam lead anyone who was paying attention to conclude "The US army is ineffectual and not as tough as it seems" and they were absolutely right in the context of Vietnamese jungles and guerilla Viet Cong opponents. But Saddam Hussien tried to apply this in 1991 to a conventioal war in the wide open desert, and he got his ass (and tens of thousands of dead Iraqis, not that he cared) handed back to him on a nice plate.
Putin early-2022 macho posturing does indeed sound funny now next to the humiliating mess he is in now, but anybody trying to take home the lesson "the Russian war machine can be safely and soundly ignored" is opening himself for a Saddam Surprise.
4- I don't see why would China care, Taiwan is not Ukraine, anything about the fierce resistence of Ukraine would not carry over to any possible war they have in mind with Taiwan. China is much more populous and self-sufficient than Russia, however amount of years Russia can keep this war going for, call it X, I would comfortably bet China can keep it going for 5X, easily.
What I think China does care about is the world's reaction. The world didn't invade Russia (rightly so, it would be a nightmare) or directly intervene militarily in Ukraine, that's all what China wanted to hear. Yes, the western support of Ukraine with arms and training is upsetting news for China, Taiwan can easily get 10X that from the USA if its semiconducter industry was weighted highly enough by the USA's leadership. But, again, China is simply a heavier brawler than Russia, and its economy is far more indispensable to the world; it can take its chances as long as it has assurance that the west won't outright roll into its territories with tanks and artillery or into its airspace with bombers. That's the assurance given to it by the war in Ukraine. Russia is still safe territoriality, and that's all what China wanted to hear.
5- It's a grudge alright, a simmering one at that. The target of this grudge might not be present now directly, but they are the reason we're having this conversation. They are the ones who created the obsession with this war, making people who will not be affected in the slightest by it follow it like a Football match, with all the usual reactions of sports fans.
Those are the same people who created and propagated the obsession with the Iraq War in the early 2000s, the same exact toolset of manufacturing concern, consent, and the selective crying about human rights as a cover for geopolitical interests.
I despise and revile those people and everything they stand for. It's misguided to think "but but but hating Russia is the Right Side Of History ^TM now", the tools that create the hate for Russia are general purpose ones that can be used to manufacture hate against any state and anyone. The hate it produces is not a rational one that can distinguish between a state (which is genocidal by necessity and by default), a state's leader (might be genocidal or not), and a state's citizens (almost never genocidal except by negligence, which is a trivial sense of the word), but like that of rabid dogs, everything that has "Russia" on it gets the teeth even if they are just a bunch of tourists or fucking Dostoevsky. It's hypocritical, the west has done and condoned its extremly fair share of genocide and brutality, it can win any genocide contest with just the support of 1970s-1980s South American regimes on its CV. Yet, "Muhh Russia is doing something unprecedented, muuhh you should be very angry now".
You should not care about this war or hate Russia anymore than you care about any genocidal nation state (which is all of them). How much noise did you hear about Syria, half a million dead last time I checked and half of the population made refugees ? Yeah, not much I bet. Because those who Toxoplasma-of-Rage their obsession with Russia and Ukraine into your info stream don't really give a shit about genocide or human rights. Which is not to say that what's happening to Ukrainians, even if smaller-scale, is not the same, or that you shouldn't have empathy for them and root for their aggressors to be defeated. But you shouldn't do it in the ways and mannerisms advertised and manufactured by those who would like to use you as a bot in their NPC army.
I'm still waiting for my money.
Russia is currently getting attritioned very heavily. Despite their memetic reputation for winning wars by drowning the enemy in conscripts, they do seem to be losing significant combat power. Already, they've gone from threatening the whole country to struggling to capture a single city. Ukraine has a smaller army, but they're taking fewer losses, and they're getting a steady supply of foreign weapons and training to balance it out. (And on the intangibles side, I'm betting the people fighting to protect their home are going to be more motivated than the people who got conscripted to fight for Putin's imperial ambitions.)
If both those trends continue, Ukraine will eventually be strong enough to make another counterattack. Or perhaps Russia will recognize their position is untenable and retreat before they happens. Both of these have happened before, and it's not unreasonable to expect it to keep happening.
Obviously, it's possible that these trends don't hold. Going on the offensive is more difficult, and Russia is slowly improving their tactics from their dismal start. It's possible Ukraine could burn through their current advantages without retaking much territory. But at the moment it's basically a matter of time until another counterattack happens.
Lastly, taking a longer view, even if Russia does eke out a win, they still have to *occupy* the annexed territory, and I don't see how that's possibly sustainable. It would make Afghanistan look like a cakewalk.
You have no idea of any of that is true. Nobody does. The western media is basically treating the Ukraine war as their war and is reporting in a fairly biased fashion. The first casualty of war is the truth.
Reading absolutely nothing about the war and being dimly aware of what is going on I don’t think that Ukraine is doing as well as their supporters claim, given their increased demand for arms.
I get almost none of my information on the Ukraine War from the "western media". I nonetheless consider myself well-informed on the subject, and my assessment is very close to beelester's.
I can be confident of at least some of the things I said in that post are true. For instance, it is definitely true that Ukraine has launched successful counterattacks before, unless you're one of the people who thinks that Russia intentionally threw away its entire offensive on Kiev as a "feint." It is definitely true that Russia has not conquered Bakhmut yet despite trying to do so for most of the war.
There are also various sources that are hard to bias, like how Oryx is tallying up photographic evidence of Russian losses.
"The media is biased" is not the same as "we know literally nothing about what is happening."
I’m clearly not “one of those people” who believes the kind of thing that has nothing to do with my argument, but that generally is true of the “one of those people” canard in general.
The only thing I actually know is that the war seems to be bogged down and the Ukraine needs a lot of equipment.
I brought up the the concept that Russia threw away past offensives as a "feint" because it's more or less the only explanation for the Russian retreats that doesn't admit Ukraine has launched successful counterattacks in the past. Which is relevant to your argument because while the war is currently moving very slowly, there are also times when it's moved rapidly in Ukraine's favor. I don't see why that can't happen again.
Also, I don't see you applying the same level of skepticism to the OP when he said he doesn't see any way for this to end in a win for Ukraine. "I don't know" should not mean "I assume Russia will win by default."
Long term the US is all Amish.
Seems a lot of people are leaving mainline religions for non-denominational evangelical and prosperity-gospel churches. Do we know what the net numbers are if we include everything even vaguely Christian?
Pew Research Center report from 2022:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/09/29/religious-switching-patterns-will-help-determine-christianitys-course-in-u-s/
"Switching" does seem to be a thing, where people are leaving one denomination for another or for non-denominational churches. It's more of a big thing for the Southern Baptists, though, since they are the large Evangelical denomination that had not been declining as fast as the mainline Protestant churches. If they're not retaining and growing, then it's a definite decline.
Another report:
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/modeling-the-future-of-religion-in-america/
"The Center estimates that in 2020, about 64% of Americans, including children, were Christian. People who are religiously unaffiliated, sometimes called religious “nones,” accounted for 30% of the U.S. population. Adherents of all other religions – including Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists – totaled about 6%.
Depending on whether religious switching continues at recent rates, speeds up or stops entirely, the projections show Christians of all ages shrinking from 64% to between a little more than half (54%) and just above one-third (35%) of all Americans by 2070. Over that same period, “nones” would rise from the current 30% to somewhere between 34% and 52% of the U.S. population."
So depending how things go, by 2070 there may be no need for The Satanic Temple since Christians will be such a minority there will be no fear of a theocracy.
As an aside - Pew is excellent. I always use it to check actual facts.
I used to think Christianity/Islam/etc... were bad low-effort ideologies that anybody in their default state could do better than, but then I saw the shitty knockoff that is wokism and - I have to say - I'm impressed. It turns out humans could actually do worse.
It's not a fun realization.
I can't name any white people killed by black people in the last five years, nor can I name any black people killed by white people in the last five years.
Of course Jordan Neely is getting more attention; he directed Nope and Get Out, didn't he?
I heard about George Floyd even if I didn't want to, because idiot copycat wanna-be progressives in my country were doing their own mini BLM marches as though we truly were another state of the Union.
I heard about Jordan Neely because that's all over social media.
I have no idea who Tyre Nichols is, nor do I want to know.
For George Floyd and Tyre Nichols, I think a more significant factor is they were killed by the *police.* "Man killed by trusted authority figure" is more alarming than "man killed by criminal."
It's interesting how many people either did not know or have forgotten that all of Tyre Nichols' killers were black.
Oh, George Floyd was in the five year window, was thinking that was 2016.
No idea who the others are.
Well there was Mohamed Noor who killed that Australian woman. Fairly recent but I guess the rules are I can’t look up the exact date.
Okay I looked it up It was just over your 5 year cutoff date. Did you look this up before your post? The Mpls Chief of Police was sacked within a week of the shooting.
Noor was convicted in 2019 though. About 4 years ago.
Quick without looking it up name 5 of the thousands of white people killed by black people. Or 3. Or maybe 2.
Oh god. You came up with the number. I thought you might have a list in front of you. The first time I heard of Jordan Neely was from you.
No, black people as a group do not support black on white violence. A few people were upset that a black cop went to prison for fucking up. Around here we call those people idiots.
You are playing fast and loose with the facts here and claiming ‘proof’ from individual examples. You are bent out of shape about an incident that never registered on my personal radar. Please consider that you might be looking for confirmation of something that was already part your world view.
Noor shouldn’t have been given the job in the first place. Not because he is black but because he has the absolute wrong personality for the job. Worse than Chauvin even. He had complaints filed against him before he killed the woman. He was on a hair trigger and should never been issued a lethal weapon.
Racism is alive and well in the US and it goes both ways. I’m white and I’ve been on the receiving end of black racism plenty of times myself.
It’s a large and complicated problem that probably won’t be solved in our children’s lifetime.
We have to start somewhere though and do what we can to wind this thing down. It’s up to each of us. Hatred is a contagious disease.
I’m trying to play this as straight with you as I can.
I usually skip past stories that feature a photo of a Michael Jackson impersonator. Seriously. I had to do a Google search to find out WTF Adam was talking about.
More than 5 years old, but without looking it up Eve Carson came to mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Eve_Carson
Not much in the way of protest to my recollection, but then again, in that case action was immediately taken across the board by police and government to apprehend, try, and convict her killers. And I don't remember any coverage of the various candle light vigils and memorials for her portraying the participants as Nazis, from what I remember of the media environment at the time, any attempt to do that would (rightfully) have been met with harsh backlash.
You seem to have a rather overbroad idea of what “conclusively” means.
Applying the standard you’ve just used, couldn’t one just as easily draw the conclusion that Chauvin’s behavior “conclusively proves” that all cops are hyper-violent anti-black killing machines? I mean, if we’re just gonna extrapolate crazy stuff from single data points, why not have some fun with that tactic in *every* direction we can play with it?
I can't name anyone who was murdered recently because I try to avoid those stories, even with the juicy headlines of "County X man arrested due to discovery of woman's body".
Give it a rest Adam.
She is not American.
EDIT: Also, in case of Tyre Nichols all killers were black - probably not the kind of example you're looking for.
Can you name some?
I can't think of one, but then I try to get my news in a ways that steers clear of "bleeds lead."
Never not relevant:
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/its-not-hypocrisy-youre-just-powerless
Just wondering, from the discussion about criminal violence here, how many readers have been in prison or have first-hand knowledge of this world, Or do you all just read newspapers/substack?
Now that we don't have the "Like" button, and already two people reacted strangely to your joke, I just wanted to say that it made me nod and chuckle.
Low effort as always.
Funny how that describes you almost perfectly.
I think "maintain a stable ecosystem and society in a spaceship for multiple generations" still has some unsolved problems. Not impossible problems, but they're problems you need to research and test *before* you launch an arkship on a 100-year mission.
But if the question is just "could we accelerate a hundred thousand tons of people and supplies to interstellar speeds and bring them to a stop on arrival?" then Orion could probably do the job, yeah.
EDIT: One counterargument I've heard is the risk of getting outrun by later generations. If you can travel at 5% of the speed of light (Alpha Centauri in 80 years), and then 20 years later someone invents a way to travel at 10% of the speed of light, then they're going to reach Alpha Centauri 20 years before you do. For more distant stars this problem gets even worse. So it may not be worth launching any generation ships until your propulsion has hit some sort of plateau in efficiency that won't be beaten for a long time.
Cool, that's what I mostly wanted to field with people, to see if this seems like, if not practical, at least feasible. You give a good counterargument to attempting interstellar civilization right now, but I wouldn't argue for a 'right now' timeline anyway. I'm just talking about in theory. It does seem like we should be pursuing this tech on 'right now' timelines for interplanetary travel (Freemon Dyson certainly thought so) but that's a different topic.
Industrial machinery is usually designed to last many decades, and a century is not unheard of. There are I believe several hydroelectric plants still working with turbines a hundred years old, and there's a former warship of the Imperial German Navy (do the math) still in service on Lake Tanganyika not as a museum piece but because it is genuinely and nigh-irreplaceably useful. In the air, there are 80-year-old DC-3s still delivering air freight in corners of the cost vs performance curve that more modern aircraft can't match.
All of this assumes regular maintenance at the very least. That's a possible reason for a crew on a starship, with not everyone sleeping through the trip. But we routinely design spacecraft to last 15-20 years without any maintenance, and that's not the limit of our capability. Just the limit of what people are willing to pay for when they expect their state-of-the-art electronic payload to be hopelessly obsolete in 20 years.
Never heard this claim before, so maybe some introduction would be helpful. What kind of "interstellar civilization" is assumed? Is it merely "people could get to distant stars, and from there to even more distant stars", or is something stronger assumed?
Colonization, I agree with you. But when I hear "interstellar civilization", I also imagine the planets somehow communicating and trading with each other, etc. An ongoing relationship, rather than "10000 years ago our ancestors came from Earth, we have no idea what happened to Earth afterwards".
communication I take for granted. I don't think it'd be that hard to beam some messages around. Trade though yeah, not sure how that'd work.
Well, it will be someone else's problem, but I wonder how the communication without trade would work. Probably just altruism... we are sending you some of our cultural and scientific products, not really expecting anything in return, it would take a few decades at best anyway.
Some planets will probably just ignore the rest. But maybe it will not matter, if many planets are colonized and at least a fraction of them will broadcast messages. Or maybe they will trade in messages... if you don't send to us, we won't send to you.
I could also imagine a future where no one cares communicating culture. If my planet has billions of people with lots of free time, plus superhuman AIs, we can produce enough art to make all of us happy.
Came here to bring up the same thing. Thousands of patients left scrambling as seen in r/TherapeuticKetamine. He had just made statements in some recent press coverage of ketamine for depression. Most recently on Axios: https://www.axios.com/2023/04/28/uncertain-future-ketamine-therapy
Would love to hear Scott speculate on or look into why the DEA shut him down. Too fast and loose? I have been having checkins monthly with his people (only first consultation session was with him). Would the DEA even be the agency involved if there were questions about the quality of his care?
It was the DEA. From the email that all us patients got:
Practice closed immediately per DEA instruction
…
I am so sorry to tell you this, but effective immediately all our practice functions must cease. My privileges to prescribe controlled substances have been suspended until further notice.
Yes!
Compare to an alternative where we have 10+ viable political parties. The parties would have different political priorities that they emphasize, but they wouldn't all feel much pressure to have a distinct take on every issue let alone a hard line on it. Even more, there might not be any single dominant party in most parts of the country, so ordinary people wouldn't be socially expected to be in lockstep with any particular party. In other words, there would still be antagonism between people on opposite extremes, but there would also be more room for individualized views and compromise at both the political and personal levels.
I think those effects of reduced polarization are desirable.
> than the absolutist perspective of trying to win everything and never surrendering an inch.
Sounds like a key symptom of polarization. So those people complaining about it from the 'inside' at least acknowledge the bad equilibrium, even if they are not able to overcome it on their own. Which is a pity of course.
If you talk to people who complain about polarization, are you the one offering radical concessions first? What reaction do you get?
I can't change my comment. Anybody experiencing the same?
Only stylistic issues for clarity.
Three reasons polarization sucks:
1) It sucks that so many people worship Satan instead of Jesus.
2) It sucks that everything is connected to religion these days. I like to play chess, but unfortunately the best chess players in my neighborhood happen to worship Satan, and I am not allowed to participate in their tournaments unless I sacrifice a goat first. And they refuse to participate in our tournaments, for similar reasons.
3) I sucks that if my Church finds out that I am playing chess-by-mail with a few lukewarm Satanists who do not care about our doctrinal differences too much, I may be burned at stake as a heretic.
Satancon 2023 may be the place for you!
https://www.reuters.com/news/picture/inside-satancon-behind-the-scenes-at-the-idUSRTSIPS92
How on earth did they manage to make Satanism *uncool*? Ooh, I'm ripping pages out of a Bible! (Just let me struggle with that for a bit because I'm so wimpy). A couple is renewing their handfasting vows, how... conventional? We believe in challenging all social conventions in order to liberate ourselves from the shackles of conformity - but don't forget to mask up! We're tearing up a flag! Which is our constitutionally protected right as decided by the courts!
Was it for this Gilles de Rais went to the stake?
My absolute favorite thing about this incarnation of Satanism is that they explicitly list "bodily autonomy" as one of their most sacred principles in order to oppose abortion bans on religious grounds (literally, a huge amount of their efforts are devoted to lawfare regarding their right to perform an "abortion ritual" and the fact that abortion bans violate their religious liberty). They are quite explicit, however, that their religious commitment to bodily autonomy does not extend to granting religious exemptions from vaccine mandates.
FWIW, I tend to sympathize with The Satanic Temple (who are not LaVeyans, BTW); but they lost some respect in my eyes for ripping up a Bible. Not because it's a Bible specifically, but because it's a book -- and I think that destroying books, even (or especially !) books one disagrees with, is a slippery slope I want no part of.
But what am I supposed to do with all of these Gideon Bibles?
Seems that The Satanic Temple are this lot:
https://www.inquirer.com/news/satan-after-school-aclu-abortion-school-pennsylvania-federal-20230508.html
Oh my gosh, how did they manage to make Satanism *lame*? Look at this bunch with their masks and their wholesome after-school activities. "Là-Bas" it is not, and if you're just going to be "Artificially Flavoured Atheism" why even bother with the Satan bit?
I suppose some people would be shocked, but if your main purpose is shocking the squares/normies, it's not much of a purpose, is it? I guess I've just read too much religious-themed horror and fin de siècle Decadent prose to be too impressed by "I dyed my hair pink and I've got facial piercings!"
Well, just goes to show, if you want to do it right, you need to do it old-school. There's a new movie out called "The Pope's Exorcist" starring Russell Crowe doing a gloriously cheesy accent, and that manages to be more (in a ludicrously over-the-top manner) than these kids could ever handle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJXqvnT_rsk
Take it away, J.K. Huysmans:
"How is Gilles de Rais progressing?"
"I have finished the first part of his life, making just the briefest possible mention of his virtues and achievements."
"Which are of no interest," remarked Des Hermies.
"Evidently, since the name of Gilles de Rais would have perished four centuries ago but for the enormities of vice which it symbolizes. I am coming to the crimes now. The great difficulty, you see, is to explain how this man, who was a brave captain and a good Christian, all of a sudden became a sacrilegious sadist and a coward."
"Metamorphosed over night, as it were."
"Worse. As if at a touch of a fairy's wand or of a playwright's pen. That is what mystifies his biographers. Of course untraceable influences must have been at work a long time, and there must have been occasional outcropping not mentioned in the chronicles.
..."At any rate, after losing track of him completely, we find that he has shut himself in at his castle of Tiffauges.
"He is no longer the rough soldier, the uncouth fighting-man. At the time when the misdeeds are about to begin, the artist and man of letters develop in Gilles and, taking complete possession of him, incite him, under the impulsion of a perverted mysticism, to the most sophisticated of cruelties, the most delicate of crimes.
"For he was almost alone in his time, this baron de Rais. In an age when his peers were simple brutes, he sought the delicate delirium of art, dreamed of a literature soul-searching and profound; he even composed a treatise on the art of evoking demons; he gloried in the music of the Church, and would have nothing about his that was not rare and difficult to obtain.
"He was an erudite Latinist, a brilliant conversationalist, a sure and generous friend. He possessed a library extraordinary for an epoch when nothing was read but theology and lives of saints. We have the description of several of his manuscripts; Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, and an Ovid on parchment bound in red leather, with vermeil clasp and key.
"These books were his passion. He carried them with him when he travelled. He had attached to his household a painter named Thomas who illuminated them with ornate letters and miniatures, and Gilles himself painted the enamels which a specialist—discovered after an assiduous search—set in the gold-inwrought bindings. Gilles's taste in furnishings was elevated and bizarre. He revelled in abbatial stuffs, voluptuous silks, in the sombre gilding of old brocade. He liked knowingly spiced foods, ardent wines heavy with aromatics; he dreamed of unknown gems, weird stones, uncanny metals. He was the Des Esseintes of the fifteenth century!
..."We may be sure Gilles had no reason to regret leaving this court, and another thing is to be taken into consideration. He was doubtless sick and tired of the nomadic existence of a soldier. He was doubtless impatient to get back to a pacific atmosphere among books. Moreover, he seems to have been completely dominated by the passion for alchemy, for which he was ready to abandon all else. For it is worth noting that this science, which threw him into demonomania when he hoped to stave off inevitable ruin with it, he had loved for its own sake when he was rich. It was in fact toward the year 1426, when his coffers bulged with gold, that he attempted the 'great work' for the first time.
"We shall find him, then, bent over his retorts in the château de Tiffauges. That is the point to which I have brought my history, and now I am about to begin on the series of crimes of magic and sadism."
"But all this," said Des Hermies, "does not explain how, from a man of piety, he was suddenly changed into a Satanist, from a placid scholar into a violator of little children, a 'ripper' of boys and girls."
"I have already told you that there are no documents to bind together the two parts of this life so strangely divided, but in what I have been narrating you can pick out some of the threads of the duality. To be precise, this man, as I have just had you observe, was a true mystic. He witnessed the most extraordinary events which history has ever shown. Association with Jeanne d'Arc certainly stimulated his desires for the divine. Now from lofty Mysticism to base Satanism there is but one step. In the Beyond all things touch. He carried his zeal for prayer into the territory of blasphemy. He was guided and controlled by that troop of sacrilegious priests, transmuters of metals, and evokers of demons, by whom he was surrounded at Tiffauges."
"You think, then, that the Maid of Orleans was really responsible for his career of evil?"
"To a certain point. Consider. She roused an impetuous soul, ready for anything, as well for orgies of saintliness as for ecstasies of crime.
"There was no transition between the two phases of his being. The moment Jeanne was dead he fell into the hands of sorcerers who were the most learned of scoundrels and the most unscrupulous of scholars. These men who frequented the château de Tiffauges were fervent Latinists, marvellous conversationalists, possessors of forgotten arcana, guardians of world-old secrets. Gilles was evidently more fitted to live with them than with men like Dunois and La Hire. These magicians, whom all the biographers agree to represent — wrongly, I think — as vulgar parasites and base knaves, were, as I view them, the patricians of intellect of the fifteenth century. Not having found places in the Church, where they would certainly have accepted no position beneath that of cardinal or pope, they could, in those troubled times of ignorance, but take refuge in the patronage of a great lord like Gilles. And Gilles was, indeed, the only one at that epoch who was intelligent enough and educated enough to understand them.
"To sum up: natural mysticism on one hand, and, on the other, daily association with savants obsessed by Satanism. The sword of Damocles hanging over his head, to be conjured away by the will of the Devil, perhaps. An ardent, a mad curiosity concerning the forbidden sciences. All this explains why, little by little, as the bonds uniting him to the world of alchemists and sorcerers grow stronger, he throws himself into the occult and is swept on by it into the most unthinkable crimes.
"Then as to being a 'ripper' of children — and he didn't immediately become one, no, Gilles did not violate and trucidate little boys until after he became convinced of the vanity of alchemy — why, he does not differ greatly from the other barons of his times."
Now *that's* how you do Satanism, not "we're going to teach the kiddies independent, scientific thinking with fun activities and snacks in our after-school club"!
Again, as per my last comment, do any of you here have any connection with the real life aspects of life that you wonder about? I recently saw a local 'black metal' personality I knew convicted of having a massive collection of child porn images on his phone. Apparently it had to do with his wanting to be more 'extreme' than his peers.
This was a much more enjoyable read than any number of hot gusts from old G.K.C., so thanks!
I can't help but read in parallels with the Rationalists, perhaps even with our host's salon.
"Artificially Flavoured Atheism"
Thank you for this.
You're welcome!
> Now that's how you do Satanism, not "we're going to teach the kiddies independent, scientific thinking with fun activities and snacks in our after-school club"!
That was kind of the point, though. Members of the TST do not believe in an actual supernatural Satan; but they do believe in the separation of Church and State, and they are officially recognized as a religion by the only power on this Earth who matters: the IRS.
This particular after-school club is a direct counter to the Christian after-school club that was established without much fuss; the point is that if the school does not wish to establish Christianity as its official religion, then surely they must allow the Satanic club alongside their own. If they do want to establish Christianity, then we have a clause in the Constitution that they must first contend with.
On top of that the TST promotes things like "compassion, wisdom, justice and self-reliance", which they see as being in opposition to modern Christianity, who seeks dominion over everyone and blind obedience through faith. While they do not believe in a literal Satan, he does seem like the obvious mascot for their cause.
"This particular after-school club is a direct counter to the Christian after-school club that was established without much fuss"
So an anti-Islam club would be cool, or nah?
Taking the points in reverse order (like a good Satanist):
"While they do not believe in a literal Satan, he does seem like the obvious mascot for their cause."
Nope. Prometheus would fit much better, and if they went around calling themselves Prometheans it would be much cooler. If you're going to pick mythological figures that you don't believe in as a mascot, then do some research that's more than "let's use a warmed-over version of Baphomet and the Goat of Mendes as cutesy imagery".
"This particular after-school club is a direct counter to the Christian after-school club that was established without much fuss; the point is that if the school does not wish to establish Christianity as its official religion, then surely they must allow the Satanic club alongside their own."
I don't think the school *is* trying to establish any religion; if they permit sports clubs, night classes and local clubs to use their premises after-hours, is that to be taken as an endorsement of badminton or cake-decorating as Official One True Methods?
This bunch could just as easily object as (1) Christian believers who are gung-ho for the separation of church and state - two of the five founders of Americans United for Separation of Church and State were Protestant clergymen (2) non-religious and secular (3) atheists, free-thinkers or what you like.
That they went in as Satanists (even in name) and the use of the imagery and so forth shows that they *are* primarily anti-Christian; they're not objecting (so far as I can tell) to Jews, Buddhists, Hindu or Muslims. So while they may not believe in an actual supernatural Satan, the mythic entity they picked was that one, not a rakshasa, asura, the god Set, Angra Mainyu or other malefic/oppositional spirit.
Granted, this is because Christianity is the majority religion in America, but if you're denying the Christian beliefs you can do that as easily with pagan entities as the traditional Christian bad guy.
So they're not really setting up as atheists or scientific materialists or other secular stance, it's very definitely "yeah we're against YOU lot". See the razzamatazz at the Boston Satancon where they were using the inverted cross (rather than the inverted crucifix, I don't know if they're aware that the version they're using is the Petrine cross and not the actual Satanic denial which would be the crucifix, or if they care; they got it off heavy metal album covers and that's enough!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Saint_Peter
That particular distinction was done very well in an X-Files episode where Mulder thought their suspect was a Satanist or of that kind due to his use of the inverted cross, but the guy appealed to Scully to tell him what it really meant 😁
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Souls_(The_X-Files)
"they are officially recognized as a religion by the only power on this Earth who matters: the IRS"
Ah indeed, anyone can set up as a religion so long as they follow the tax guidelines! But if they want to be treated as a religion and get the protections of such, even for tax purposes and legal rights, then they can't weasel out of being treated like a religion. They could scrap all this cosplay in the morning and re-boot as a non-profit organisation for promoting free thinking, critical thinking, niceness and chocolate-chip cookies for all, without a scrap of any sort of religiosity involved.
But if they insist on "woooh, aren't we shocking? we're everything your granny warned you about as she clutched her Bible, the old hag! yeah, suck it Mom and Dad, I'm a guy and I'm wearing fishnets!!!" performances, then they're gonna be treated like they do worship Satan.
Yah, they're so Goffic, see?
"goffic: one who is a try-hard goth or gothic.
Example 1: Internet goffic says- Look at my icon... I'm so dark and gothy *broods*
Example 2: real-life goffic says- I dyed my hair black and listen to metal and watch buffy and I have a blood fetish and I'm totally hardxcore... let's go sacrifice some goats!"
EDIT: Turning up as The Satanic Temple and "Educating with Satan" to poke a finger in the eye of the Christian after-school club reminds me of a joke by a Northern Irish comedian at the height of the Drumcree/Garvaghy Road standoff; the Orange Order can march anywhere they like, but they insist on marching right through the majority Catholic neighbourhood. But it's not triumphalist or sectarian at all, no, they're just exercising their rights. Would you not like to go down a different street? No, it has to be *that* one! Right there, yeah, right through the Papists!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drumcree_conflict
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChCwZneRKPo
"How on earth did they manage to make Satanism *uncool*? "
I mean, have you SEEN Anton LaVey?
LaVey was a huckster and a showman, he at least would have been glitzy, camp fun. That lot looked soppy. The dressing up in costumes for the ball was your standard fetish wear Hallowe'en costume; a guy in heels is nothing nowadays.
And ripping up a Bible is as spicy as they got?* They probably wouldn't sacrifice a cockerel on the grounds that they're all vegan 🙄 If you're just going to have a get-together for some standard Edgelord Fourteen Year Old rebellion against "Mom made me go to church on Sunday", sheesh. We celebrate the rebel, the lightbringer, the overthrower and liberator! By doing everything that is now socially acceptable like drinking alcohol, having sex, and going around in tattoos and piercings and Rocky Horror knockoff costumes. Plus they were all wearing their Covid masks which made me laugh: it's nice that you're aware of health restrictions, but come on now, how law-abiding can you get?
Can't even get a good juicy heresy going nowadays, what is it with the youth of today?
*Granted, I'm Catholic so a Bible isn't as big a deal to me as it is to Sola Scriptura Protestants. I'd be much more revved up about desecrating a Host, but I doubt this lot could source one or tell the difference between a consecrated and unconsecrated one, they'd probably just buy a job-lot online of those pre-packaged Baptist kits:
https://www.amazon.com/Broadman-Supplies-Pre-filled-Communion-Fellowship/dp/B015X6ETYS?th=1
Political polarisation isn't just about policy differences, it's also about how you interact with people who have different policy ideas. Do you politely raise counterarguments while remaining friends, or do you declare those people evil and try to fight a massive battle against them on every possible front at all possible times?
Right now in the US the actual policy differences between the parties are perhaps smaller than they've ever been, but the vehement nastiness of the political battle is distressingly high. How about a world where you can disagree with people _without_ treating those people as if they're toxic waste?
That's because the political battle is not primarily about policy differences these days. Not that it ever was or is 100 percent about policy of course; but in the 21st-century USA the needle is shifted waaay over towards electoral politics being "cultural war by other means". That was Trump's one real insight that enabled his stunning 2016 successes in first the GOP nomination campaign and then the general election.
"Right now in the US the actual policy differences between the parties are perhaps smaller than they've ever been"
Maybe (maybe!) the parties, but not in the populace. You literally have a polity that has embraced a total state response to safetyist concerns, with the occasional deviation from absolute safetyism for the flavor of the month virtue signaling (which gives you "it's okay to break COVID quarantine in order to protest for BLM). And you have a polity that doesn't believe that all of their rights are just whatever a blue ribbon panel of experts declares they should be this week.
You see the same split going on in the churches, with e.g. the United Methodist Church deciding that antiracism is now the most important side of the Wesleyan Polygon and the bible is just an interesting historical artifact created by white cishet men.
"Do you want a gas stove in your house? Gas stoves damage the environment, so if you want a gas stove, you want everyone to die and are thus evil. In order to prevent everyone from dying, we must ban gas stoves. If you don't want to ban gas stoves, you want everyone to die and are evil."
From the perspective of a political advocate, convincing voters that they're going to die if they don't support your preferred policy is the easiest way to get fanatically loyal supporters (or, if they're not going to die, a lot of other people will). The problem is that this makes people that don't support your preferred policy evil. On top of this, everything is now potentially a political or regulatory issue (and regulatory issues are almost all indirectly political.)
Ultimately, every political issue is a trade-off, either cost-benefit or between two competing values. People will always disagree with which way to go, and those that disagree are not necessarily evil (and those that agree with you are not necessarily good). Some issues are better left at the agree to disagree stage. These are hard things for people with strong opinions to admit.
Gas stove bans are a MAGA conspiracy theory - Hochul.
Today we celebrate our ban on gas stoves - also Hochul.
> in the US the actual policy differences between the parties are perhaps smaller than they've ever been, but the vehement nastiness of the political battle is distressingly high
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences
It sounds like the antagonism between the Judean People's Front vs the People's Front of Judea!
I think that of the people who complain about polarization, some merely wish that there were more people on their side, while others wish that more people on all sides were willing to compromise.
It's like "peace" - the word used by itself can conceal a number of different realities, some better and some worse.
I would say the opposite.... polarization creates the demonization of those who disagree, making compromise with them much more politically difficult.
However, I think you're right that some who talk about it (Ezra Klein, for example) aren't super-eager to see their side compromise their positions, like if the polarized left-wing view of abortion is total access, and the polarized right wing view is total abolition, theoretically, a compromise position might be 15 week access. There might be a plurality of the population who would be fine with that compromise, but they probably don't overlap with primary voters very heavily.
That’s exactly what most American voters agree with. 15 weeks is also more than most European countries where abortion isn’t a hot button topic outside maybe some Eastern European states. By and large it’s not going to be banned, nor is there any serious movement to extend it.
So the question is - why so much more polarisation in the US.
Albions Seed?