Related to AI Alignment efforts, I know its been discussed on several platforms, but enhancing adult human general intelligence seems to be a very promising avenue for to accelerate alignment research. It also seems beyond obvious that using artificial intelligence to directly enhance biological human intelligence allows humans to stay competitive with future AI. I'm having a hard time finding anyone who is even trying to do this[1][2][3]. It would even be useful to augment even specialized cognitive abilities like working memory[4][5][6] or spatial ability.
1. Stankov, L., & Lee, J. (2020). We can boost IQ: Revisiting kvashchev’s experiment. Journal of Intelligence, 8(4), 41.
3. Grover, S. et al. (2022) Long-lasting, dissociable improvements in working memory and long-term memory in older adults with repetitive neuromodulation, Nature News. Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-022-01132-3 (Accessed: 21 May 2023).
4. Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2019). Cognitive training does not enhance general cognition. Trends in cognitive sciences, 23(1), 9-20.
5. Zhao, C., Li, D., Kong, Y., Liu, H., Hu, Y., Niu, H., ... & Song, Y. (2022). Transcranial photobiomodulation enhances visual working memory capacity in humans. Science Advances, 8(48), eabq3211.
6. Razza, L. B., Luethi, M. S., Zanão, T., De Smet, S., Buchpiguel, C., Busatto, G., ... & Brunoni, A. R. (2023). Transcranial direct current stimulation versus intermittent theta-burst stimulation for the improvement of working memory performance. International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology, 23(1), 100334.
"Increasing intelligence, however, is a worthy goal that might be achieved by interventions based on sophisticated neuroscience advances in DNA analysis, neuroimaging, psychopharmacology, and even direct brain stimulation (Haier, 2009, 2013; Lozano and Lipsman, 2013; Santarnecchi et al., 2013; Legon et al., 2014)."
Any approach that is based on optimizing existing human brains runs into the challenge of "why doesn't nature do this already." The reason for that can be silly, like a lacking synthesis path for some required chemical, but there has to be a reason. Hence "Algernon's Law: Any simple major enhancement to human intelligence is a net evolutionary disadvantage." (https://gwern.net/drug-heuristic?2) Also, you're working at the speed of drug licensing or at the risk profile of untested chemicals; not something you want to do with your brightest and most conscientious researchers. And once you look at embryo selection, which avoids some of these issues, you inherently have a thirty-year latency, which probably puts you too late for the Singularity.
You are a cube. You like things with the Right number of vertices. You have opinions about how not-round your life circumstances should be. Proper, tidy. Some of your edges are rounded off with time, but generally you call yourself a cube and do cubey things.
They are a kidney-bean-shaped beanbag chair. They are soft and have no vertices unless you simulate them at a low resolution with polygons. The polygons at least give them some vertices so that they are more palatable to your need for edges and points. You don't like the lack of square faces on those polygons, but they allow you to feel more secure that you understand this beanbag chair.
How does your mind work? Well, lets say it's like a virtual machine made up of very regular cubeish computational components. Proper, tidy computational components. You fit your square, cube, hypercube ideas about how to move your 6 faces through the world in to cubular instructions to calculate what your next move should be. To generate an internal theory of mind for your round interlocutor so you can have a meaningful argument, you photograph the shapes they are waving in the air and feed those instructions in to your virtual machine. The program crashes... of course. Why can't they see that their ideas just don't work?
---
A person from group `A` understands their virtual machine, and they have useful simulations and projections of future outcomes that take advantage of the machine they run on. They know they can tinker with certain values and get desired outcomes.
`A` builds a simulation of what their interlocutor is proposing and runs it on their own virtual machine. It doesn't crash because they constructed the simulation in ways that are consistent with their machine. The outcomes differ from the outcomes proposed by the interlocutor and then they argue about this.
`A` doesn't know how to build a simulation which will run on their interlocutor's hardware and most of the time won't even try. That's hard.
What if `A` didn't even know that they had different hardware?
Well, since no one else has commented, I'll let you know I now have the mental image of a beanbag chair telling a cube that snow in April still melts, and then kicking it out of a window.
I just tried asking ChatGPT several variations on "Translate the following story from Japanese into English. Respond with each paragraph of the Japanese followed by its translation into English, then the next paragraph of Japanese, etc.", but no matter what I did, it would just respond with the English translation and ignore the instructions.
Everyone keeps posting amazing mind-blowing LLM success stories online, and then I try it out and wonder "is *this* seriously what is supposed to take over the world?"
As an LLM skeptic currently seriously re-evaluating his judgements, I don't think you're giving it its due. I tried what you said with a language I know (Arabic), and though my original idea, giving it an example of what I want in the form of a sample English-Arabic pair, failed. I succeded on the second try with "Please pair every English paragraph in the translation with the arabic equivalent in the original story". And it did, its accuracy is amazing, much better than Google Translate.
When Search Engines were new, they were no doubt much worse than hand-filtered directories and aggregators (and they are still worse now in a lot of things, SEO makes sure of that). When calculators were new, people had to write arithmetic expressions into a weird backwards notation called Reverse Polish notations (1+2*3 would translate to 2 3 * 1 +), but still people flocked to them. LLMs are a new tool and despite all of its disadvantages and the kool-aid hype around it they are mind-blowing and enable fundamentally new things. Meet them on their terms, and you will profit.
“translate the following into english. For each paragraph output the original text before the translation.” Followed by a few paragraphs worked fine for me.
Update: I bit the bullet and paid for ChatGPT Plus, and tried the same prompt with GPT4. So far, GPT4 seems to work better.
Update 2: GPT4 *looks* like it does a better job, but after a while it stops translating the story and just hallucinates a continuation to the story and translates that instead. Arrgggh!
Update: I just tried it with your *exact* prompt and it *still* didn't work for me. It just printed out "The original text before translation:" followed by the *English* translation (and no Japanese at all).
Here is the prompt I used in case anyone else wants to try to replicate:
translate the following into english. For each paragraph output the original text before the translation
Free version. Trying your full prompt, I’m guessing it has trouble when there’s lots of text (too many paragraphs?) to translate - when I broke it up into smaller chunks (cutting off the first part after the paragraph with “bear”) fixed the response format
Yeah, I think it must be a context window issue, at least with GPT4. With GPT4, it *starts* translating in the correct format, but then halfway through it starts ignoring the original story and translates a hallucinated story continuation of its own instead, presumably due to the prompt falling out of the context window.
From what I've read, the Web UI uses a shorter context window than the API, which seems pretty stupid to me. It's also frustrating that it doesn't warn you when the prompt falls out of the window and doesn't give any indication of how long the window actually is.
(That is, ending the first prompt at that paragraph, and replying/re-prompting with another chunk of the original text got the right format in each response, and both the original text and translations looked correct at the tail end of each output)
Biden says the US will defend Taiwan if China invades. What are the odds that is a bluff? It seems insane to me that the US would start WWIII over Taiwan. Not that Taiwan isn't important, but the cost/benefit math just doesn't seem to work out in favor of defending it militarily.
The US fighting China is not World War Three. The US fighting China with only conventional weapons and no actual invasion of China, is *definitely* not World War Three. Since that's the most (and very likely the least) the United States would do if Taiwan were invaded, the question of whether the US would start WWIII over Taiwan does not arise. And since China has negligible non-nuclear force projection ability against CONUS, we can limit our losses to what we think we can afford to lose, while still projecting massive force against a Chinese invasion fleet.
The question of whether *China* would be willing to start World War Three, over the US blocking their invasion of Taiwan, at least theoretically applies. They could nuke the US, and they could try to get Russia to nuke the US or vice versa, but as you say, the cost/benefit math does not work out for that.
Also, if the United States is going to be bluffed into backing down any time someone with ICBMs says "let me have what I want or I'll start World War Three", then we should probably just pack it in and acknowledge that Russia, China, and/or North Korea are going to rule the world before too long.
>Also, if the United States is going to be bluffed into backing down any time someone with ICBMs says "let me have what I want or I'll start World War Three"
Funny how this argument is always trotted out to justify the US's involvement in foreign affairs. As the world leader by far in conventional force, it just means that the US gets to dictate world affairs. It's a convenient fiction for those that benefit from the US oriented world order as it is a blanket argument in favor of use of force to preserve the current world order.
The problem is that it doesn't acknowledge differences in how each side values opposing outcomes and so is useless at predicting an adversary's behavior. Naive adherence to this rule will eventually result in WW3. If one side genuinely considers defeat an existential threat, escalation to unconventional weapons is a likely outcome. The problem is that arguments like this short-circuit any genuine analysis that might potentially show a negative utility for involvement. The war in Ukraine being an obvious example. Those beating the drum for escalation of western involvement always refuse to acknowledge the possibility of runaway escalation. It turns out that even semi-rational actors follow incentives, and the incentive against engaging in WW3 will not be overriding to every adversary in all cases, specifically cases involving existential threats.
But acknowledging all this doesn't mean that Russia/China/NK runs the board. Again, incentives matter, and the value of territory far from one's homeland will be valued at much less than strategically critical territory on one's border. We can't rationally short-circuit a genuine analysis with memes and self-serving arguments. Decisions to involve ourselves in military confrontations with nuclear powers must engage in this analysis or it is utterly reckless.
Dr, Strangelovski: "Ve haff placed very powerful thermonuclear bombs under each of our own cities, linked to a sophisticated computer that is having been programmed to monitor all global communications and to detonate the bombs iff the algorithm is not determining that we are the sole and uncontested rulers of Alaska within the next six months. Therefore, it is proven that the failure of our invasion of Alaska would pose an existential threat to us. Unless you are willing to be starting World War Three and Global Annihilation, you must surrender Alaska to us."
Now what?
If you're going to believe someone every time they *say* that their current goal is an "existential threat", and yield because you are unwilling to risk World War Three, then again, you might as well give it up because they're going to rule the world before too long.
Defeat in Ukraine *might* be an existential threat to *Vladimir Putin*. And the Silovoki might have yielded so much to Putin that they can no longer stop him from taking them down in flames with him. But, A: probably not, and B: if so, that's just a bespoke personalized version of Dr. Strangelovski's strategy with just the one metaphorical bomb under the Kremlin.
>If you're going to believe someone every time they *say* that their current goal is an "existential threat", and yield because you are unwilling to risk World War Three, then again, you might as well give it up because they're going to rule the world before too long.
The only time such obviously bad arguments are trotted out with a straight face is when it's blatantly self-serving. We should be able to recognize this sort of knee-jerk self-serving argument and choose to consider the issues more carefully. Here's the thing: sometimes circumstances are in fact deemed to be existential by the adversary. Our analysis should at least attempt to distinguish between the reality and the bluff. If we just go with the naive "if we give in they will rule the world", then we are guaranteed to fight WW3 eventually. I assume we can all agree that this is essentially a -inf outcome?
But how do we evaluate the claim and determine whether it is a bluff or genuinely believed? By getting into the mindset of the adversary and seeing the world from their eyes. If we can understand their set of beliefs and values, we can accurately judge whether a claim of existential threat is coherent with those beliefs and values.
The mistake most people make when judging Putin's claims is evaluating them from the perspective of western beliefs and western values. Of course NATO is a non-aggressive organization! Of course it's absurd to risk WW3 over one's neighbor joining our NATO club! But these claims aren't obviously true from the perspective of a state that is the cultural and psychological descendant of the USSR and inherited the fear and distrust the US and USSR fomented among each other. The National Security folks from the 90's recognized the intrinsic threat that NATO posed to Russian security, at least from Russia's perspective. I don't know why people pretend like the reality has changed or that we're wiser now than they were. What has changed is our interests in Eastern Europe and the motivations for convenient self-serving justifications.
Wait, I thought this argument was "always trotted out", now it's "only trotted out when it's blatantly self-serving".
Sometimes, an argument is "trotted out" with great frequency, that's because it's a broadly sound and valid argument. And as for "self-serving", I'm not sure what selfish interest you think is being served here. But since we're apparently going around accusing people of self-serving bogosity, I'm going to throw that right back at you with a side order of wondering what group's interests you self-identify with.
Notice how you responded to none of my substantive points and provided no substance of your own.
For the record, I'm on the side that wants a high probability of avoiding nuclear war indefinitely. The side that is appalled at the lack of clear headed thinking and widespread motivated reasoning when it comes to Ukraine. The fact that every debate of this sort reduces to my interlocutor wondering out loud what side I'm on just underscores the quality of reasoning. For most people, the sides are chosen first, the justifications are then in service to advancing the chosen side. Here's a hint: if you think what side it sounds like an argument supports has epistemic value, you're engaging in motivated reasoning. But that's not the basis for sound foreign policy.
> The problem is that it doesn't acknowledge differences in how each side values opposing outcomes and so is useless at predicting an adversary's behavior. Naive adherence to this rule will eventually result in WW3. If one side genuinely considers defeat an existential threat, escalation to unconventional weapons is a likely outcome.
Noone can reasonably consider the failure of a foreign "special military operation" to be an existential threat. It's not that the analysis is "short circuited", it's that when you actually do the analysis and plug in the values, it doesn't remotely come out in favor of Russia. The only way you can get it to come out against supporting Ukraine is if you believe the "we should unconditionally surrender to Russia at every opportunity" arguments, which is why it is so important to refute that line of logic.
I've been out of this scene for awhile but, from my recollections, the current US strategy in the event of a Taiwanese invasion is to blockade all shipping to China out in the Strait of Malacca and similar critical shipping channels. That may not be America's current strategy but there's a lot of possibilities from economic sanctions to blockades to arming nearby nations (think Vietnam) to a range of potential conventional warfare options.
I don't doubt that the US will do "something" if China invades Taiwan but what exactly is done will be....highly situational. First, it's unclear whether China can even successfully invade Taiwan, less because Taiwanese military might and more the difficulty of massed amphibious operations into anti-ship missiles along a difficult coastline. Second, a lot depends on regional actors. Japan and India are serious local players with their own concerns regarding China. India has a long militarized border with China and will almost certainly have their own response to an expansionist China. You could have thrown Russia in this crowd before the Ukraine war but now they're extremely dependent on the Chinese economy and almost certainly won't do anything, anyway, old Mearshiemer argument.
Anyway, when Biden says the US will defend Taiwan, he's not committing to US Marines marching into Zhongnanhai, because that's not going to happen. He's committing to some kind of military-ish action, details to be determined later.
If we take the relative balance of power between the US and China to be slowly shifting in favor of China (which is a dumb linear extrapolation of current trends, but still) then it is in the interest of China to delay conflict, as the more they wait the more favorable the outcome for them. Biden’s term is likely to be over by then.
Did the UK and France start World War II (in Europe) by announcing their decision to defend Poland from Germany? Or was it Hitler's decision to invade Poland despite knowing that France and the UK had announced their decision to defend the country that started the war?
This may come across as harsh, but the idea that China (or Russia) as a state is not culpable for its actions is something that I see that really annoys me. If the US announces its decision to defend Taiwan, and China chooses to go to war anyways, it is China that starts World War III, because China started the war.
The search for one single action or action that starts a world war seems misguided. Germany's and Russia's invasion of Poland started a regional war. France's and Germany's declaration of war against Germany expanded that into a major war. Germany's alliance with Japan then expanded it further into a true world war.
There are probably different ways to look at this, and it's certainly something that many countries in recent years have tried to mess with, but I think the following is logical:
Historically, there was often a firm line between 'peace' and 'war'. When the German army crossed into Poland, the state changed from 'peace' to 'war'. From the perspective of German PR operations, the line is just as firm, but "Poland" "crossed" the line when the "Poles" "attacked" a German radio station (scare quotes being very important here), so the Germans accepted the idea that there was a line and that the party crossing the line has culpability, they just made it look like the Poles were the one to cross the line. When the UK and France declared war, they were entering into a war that had already started, not starting a new war. To go with a metaphor, if I start a controlled burn in a forest and it turns into a wildfire, I started the wildfire even if that wasn't my intention. Germany's action started a fire; when that fire became a wildfire is irrelevant.
History is not neat. My best approximation is that most of the world being involved in hostilities at the same time roughly associated into two general sides makes it easy to approximate the whole thing as a single war. To me, the 'alliance' between German and Japan is one of the least relevant parts in making it a World War, since Japan never went to war with the Soviets while they were at war with Germany and there was no real coordination between the two Axis sides. On the other hand, Germany and Italy declaring war on the US after Pearl Harbor (possibly to try to get Japan to go to war with the Soviet Union) officially brings the US into the war in Europe even if the US intended to go to war in Europe anyways (declarations of war are nice solid lines where one side is definitely a war).
Admittedly, defining what actually constitutes a war is the hard part these days. Since starting a war makes you culpable, countries are always attempting to find levels of hostilities that are possible without going to war. The US before Pearl Harbor was definitely pushing into this grey zone between peace and declared war in the Atlantic (and of course 'unrestricted submarine warfare' is itself pushing into this zone).
To make this relevant to China and Taiwan:
China is a rational actor able to make decisions on its own, and if the decision it makes is to cross the line between peace and war, then it is China's responsibility for making that decision. Neither the US nor Taiwan have anything to gain if the line between peace and war with China is crossed. They do have something to gain from winning the war if the line is crossed by China: namely the resumption of the status quo.
I mean, it can't be zero. Taiwan was pretty clearly Qing dynasty territory (save for the Japanese invasion), the Communists claimed all historical Chinese territory, the Kuomintang would never have survived without US military support, and the CCP has continually, for generations, maintained their rights to Taiwan and it's hard to see the existence of Taiwan isn't...basically just the US government redrawing a countries borders using the threat of military force.
Not to give the CCP more defense than they deserve, but the US has been militarily involved in China since the 1930s and Taiwan didn't just magically appear yesterday; there's a lot of history there. And if the argument boils down to, as I think it does, that the CCP is bad therefore the US has a moral right to shape it's borders...I mean, India is right there and they have their own memories of Partition...as does Vietnam and honestly a ton of countries in that region.
Again, not to say that the CCP should take control of Taiwan tomorrow, that seems pretty bad for the Taiwanese, but the CCP isn't Hitler, this didn't start yesterday, and the China isn't the only state that needs to take culpability its actions.
For what it's worth, I don't even think the defense of Taiwan was a mistake, it's just a normal messy historical thing.
China has zero right to Taiwan. I would go as far as to say that Taiwan, being a free and democratic country and a continuation of the previous government of China, has a greater right to China than China does to Taiwan.
"Taiwan was pretty clearly Qing dynasty territory"
And the closest successor to the Qing dynasty is the current government of Taiwan, not the current government of China.
"the Communists claimed all historical Chinese territory"
And I claim all historical British territory. Unlike the Communists, I never went on a nationwide rampage destroying British heritage and mass murdering those who support it, so my claim to all historical British territory is far more reasonable than the Chinese claim to all historical Chinese territory.
"the Kuomintang would never have survived without US military support"
And the US was in the wrong for supporting the internationally recognized legitimate government of China? While the Soviet Union was not in the wrong for supporting the communist rebels, who turned out to be mass murderers?
"and the CCP has continually, for generations, maintained their rights to Taiwan and it's hard to see the existence of Taiwan isn't...basically just the US government redrawing a countries borders using the threat of military force."
The CCP wants to take over Taiwan. The CCP did take over the mainland. The US wanted to maintain the status quo during the civil war, and wants to maintain the status quo today. So who's redrawing a country's borders using military force?
When you say "China" what do you mean? There is no Chinese government. There is a bunch of thugs with guns who happen to be in control of Chinese territory but they're not a government in any legitimate sense, because they weren't elected.
The current Chinese regime has zero right to Taiwan, just as it has zero right to any other part of China.
If China were to persuade Taiwan to want to join China voluntarily, the end result would still be bad for the rest of the world, but the US would have almost no cause to intervene. We would still be within our rights beforehand to try to persuade Taiwan that reunification would be a bad idea and to pull our economic investments out of the country, but military intervention would be off the table.
The rules have to be that using military force to change borders is unacceptable and that the autonomy of the individual society currently occupying the land have to take precedence over historical grievances over who owned what in the past. It's Taiwan that has the right to shape its borders under these rules, and the US has the moral right to support the rules because applied neutrally they're the best way of avoiding the horrors of the past.
Not to say these rules are perfect. They tend to promote some amount of ethnic cleansing to make sure that your people have the majority claim to any disputed territory, and this leads to atrocities even today. But the alternative seems to be far worse. (And if you change the rules, remember that they change for everyone. A world where the former US territory of Cuba is the 51st state and the Taiwanese flag flies over all of China might be much better for a lot of people.)
Do you have a view on what the relevant statute of limitations is?
If I invade your country, drive out your people and settle my own, it's pretty clear that 10 years down the line you're within your rights to reclaim it from me, even though all the people currently living there want to be part of my country, but that 200 years down the line your descendants have no right to kick out my descendants even though their inheritance traces back to ill-gotten gains if you go far enough.
But between those there are some nasty grey areas. What are the rights and wrongs of territory that was conquered illegitimately 30, 50, 80 years ago?
How do you square those rules with with the creation of the modern Taiwanese "state"? Or, to rephrase, is there any sense in which the creation and existence of modern Taiwan hasn't been accomplished through the use of US military force to change borders?
Especially because "modern" Taiwan isn't "historical" Taiwan. In the Qing Dynasty and during the Japanese occupation, Taiwan was primarily inhabited by the Taiwanese people; most of the current population we would consider Taiwanese are Han Chinese who fled the mainland in the late 40's. And the local/original Taiwanese didn't invite them in, the American-armed Kuomintang just kinda....showed up and took over. There really isn't a point in it's history where the border between China and modern Taiwan hasn't been enforced by American military forces.
There are two rules that go together in the post you are responding to.
Regardless of what happened 70 years ago, the majority of the population of Taiwan does not want to be part of the PRC. Nobody has any business making them part of the PRC against their will, and everyone has a moral cause in not letting them be taken by the PRC against their will.
And that was the rule the international community followed in South Sudan and East Timor. We don't let countries conquer each other by force. We do recognize popular independence movements. Are the rules perfect? No, Russia (for one) is great at twisting the rule for its own end (see Donbas and Luhansk).
Your logic that 'the PRC is bigger than Taiwan, therefore we should let the PRC exercise its vague 70 year claims' is no different than 'Germany is bigger than Poland, therefore we should let Hitler retake the parts of western Poland that were taken from Germany after World War I'.
There was a civil war in China. Civil Wars are bad but they're also a pretty definitive way of establishing the rightful government of a territory. The CCP won, the Kuomintang lost, the US interfered on the side of the Kuomintang during the civil war, and when the Kuomintang fled, the US used military force to carve out a piece of China, set it aside for their failed ally, and then used the threat of military force to sustain it over 70 years. Not 70 years ago, not 50 years, consistently across that entire time span.
The rules, as you listed above, are fine. The US obviously and continuously violated them across a 70 year time span. What's fair recompense to China? That's why I originally asked what rights you think China has to Taiwan. The rules that you hold say that Taiwan should not be returned to China because of the majority position in Taiwan. That's cool, I'm down, but they also say that we don't alter national borders through force and the US pretty clearly did that. And the costs to China are pretty obvious, namely a giant island.
I'm not asking for the US to abandon Taiwan, I feel like I'm asking for...just a basic understanding and acknowledgment of the Chinese position, like as a basis for negotiation.
I'm not concerned with who gets blamed for what, only whether there is a major war or not. Whoever deserves the blame, the fact remains that if China invades Taiwan, the US can choose to get involved militarily or not. There is the risk that China would attack Guam before going into Taiwan on the assumption the US plans to enter the war, but the deterrent value of bluffing might be worth that risk. I don't know. It would depend on what that risk is.
The question to ask (for an American) is 'what is the risk to the US of China invading Taiwan? Aside from the loss of life and human rights, Taiwanese companies account for 50% of the world production of semiconductors, so the end result of China invading Taiwan is somewhere between a world with half the semiconductor production or a world in which China controls 60% of world semiconductor production. Neither of those sound like worlds which are better for the US (or any country in the EU or anyone other than China and its client states).
China has a number of other ongoing border disputes. If the US is unwilling to stand up and use pressure to counter the risk to 50% of the world's semiconductor production, where will we be willing to draw the line and risk war to stop them? Is China with 60% of the world's semiconductor production more or less capable of military action? Does giving China dominance of the militarily critical semiconductor industry make other countries stronger or weaker? The answers to both seem obvious.
I don't know that the US pledging to defend Taiwan is the right thing to do, but we have more options than just 'let China invade Taiwan'. Perhaps the threat of sanctions would be sufficient, but we've been really bad at enforcing sanctions. We've shown that diplomatic pressure doesn't work with our tepid response to the Wuhan Coronavi... COVID-19. Really, we need to make it obvious that an invasion of Taiwan would be a bad risk for China, either militarily or economically, because as long as there's no real risk to China, there's no reason for them not to make the attempt.
Per the parenthetical you were honest enough to include the first time, we can *delay* the possible onset of World War Three. But at the cost of making that outcome more likely when we eventually do have to roll those dice.
I wrote the review for Nightmare Pipeline Failures, but I am very happy that Safe Enough got in, because I would love to see what this blog's readership thinks about how risk assessments (particularly in a process safety context) work.
(Safe Enough is about how risk assessment in the nuclear industry got developed and whether they're robust enough - Nightmare Pipeline Failures was about specific entities getting those processes wrong, with catastrophic consequences. This is relevant because oil and gas industry risk processes borrowed heavily from nuclear and then chewed them up with financial and operational pressures!).
I'm also curious if anyone had any thoughts about the specifics covered in my review that from memory wasn't in Safe Enough - namely the nature and amount of intervention governments should have in industrial safety law and enforcement. Organisation psychology is also a topic that I hope crops up more, because I feel it's getting increasingly more relevant (as individual autonomy shrinks and organisational power grows).
I enjoyed your review very much. I gave it 9/10. I knew little about risk assessment procedures and learned a lot, and at the same time the review was very engaging and nice to read.
I did give 10/10 to Safe Enough, this was one of my favorites. What fascinated me about that is that it explained how even the mindset/concept of Probabilistic Risk Assessment developed. This is perhaps the edge of 10 versus 9, but the difference is not very large. For me, your review could have made it into the final with just a bit more of luck.
What you said about the structure which joined the worst of two worlds, this makes a lot of sense to me. I am also not a big fan of privatization of infrastructure companies, at least if it is about infrastructure where failing is not an option. In an ideal world, the government would be able to set up strict regulations, but then still have competition within the regulation framework. This can give the best of two worlds, instead of the worst. In my country, this is how health insurance works. But it's quite tricky, requires a lot of competence, manpower and attention from government side, and there are enough examples where attempts of that have failed.
I was also very much reminded of Boeing. In principle, this is also a heavily regulated company, but the business of building airplanes is so complex that government couldn't provide expertise and manpower to really regulate it. So in the end, it just accepts the suggestions for regulations that come from Boeing. This brings obvious conflicts of interest, but I don't really see a better solution.
Thanks for the kind words! I'm glad you got a lot out of it.
I'm really excited to see the comments section when the Safe Enough review gets posted - part of why I chose to do this book is because there's some obvious ways to connect the practice of risk assessment (specifically probabilistic risk assessment) with the original improving espistomology goal of LW. In the case of PG&E this is really really obvious (they drew a map representing their pipeline risks and started managing the map without managing the territory). But beyond this there is an incentive to uphold belief in the map / fantasy plan (it's easier to shimmy numbers around than it is to dig up pipelines for inspection).
Boeing was also quite an interesting case of corporate incentives vs public safety incentives.
Anyway, if I get even one person more interested in these topics I consider that a win. So thanks for reading my entry!
Who ever read and reviewed Stanley Jaki’s “Brain, Mind, and Computers” a big thank you from me. I’m sorry it didn’t make the Final Cut. I thought it was an underrated book and I think the community would appreciate it if for nothing else but the scientific history. Maybe next year someone will read and review Jaki’s “The Relevance of Physics.” People compare it to Chesterton’s “Everlasting Man” but for science.
Anyone here has experience with wellbutrin/bupropion? Is it better to take it with or without food? I've searched reddit and pubmed for experiences and studies and they're contradictory
I have known many people who take it, and never heard from anyone that it is important to take with food in your stomach. Is your concern that it will upset your stomach if you take it without food, or that it will be less effective? I took a lowish dose myself for a few months as an aid to smoking cessation, and it seemed to work well to reduce craving, although it's possible the effect was placebo. I never gave a thought to whether I was taking it with or without food, and experienced no side effects.
I have a steel stomach, mostly concerned with absorption since I've taken other medications where the effect was drastically different depending on whether you took them alone or not
Googled it, found this link quote & link to source on Reddit.
Pharmacokinetic Properties: Absorption: Following oral administration of bupropion tablets to healthy volunteers, peak plasma concentrations of bupropion are achieved within 3 hours. Bupropion and its metabolites exhibit linear kinetics following chronic administration of 150 to 300 mg per day. Exposure to bupropion is increased when WELLBUTRIN SR tablets are taken with food. When taken following food, peak plasma concentration of bupropion (Cmax) was increased by 11 % to 35 %. The overall exposure to bupropion (AUC) was increased by 17 % to 19 %.
Terms that I hate, because they reveal a mental model of the world that I find fundamentally ugly or false.
Ranting about how other people use language is a time-honored genre of writing. Orwell did it in Politics and the English Language, and it was pretty good, go read it. But Orwell wasn't active in online tech-adjacent forums, so he couldn't have possibly ranted about things that - I just realized - get on my nerve.
So I might as well rant about them myself.
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1- "Content" and "Content Creator"
Those words are ugly and bad because :
A- The culinary analogy they imply is gross :
There is nothing wrong apriori with people likening mind things like videos and essays to food, but there is plenty of things wrong in adopting industrial and\or medical terminology to refer to the things that you do with your (metaphorical) food.
Like, I have never, in my entire life, "Produced" food. I cooked. I have never seen someone refer to their cooking as "Producing Food". I have never "Consumed" food either. I ate. "Consume" is a word that I have seen being used with hatred or vengeance, not something that you do with food.
What I imagine when people say "I love consuming ASMR content" is a gross mental image where the ASMR videos are some undifferentiated industrial food-like goo and the "Consumer" is an inhabitant of this Dystopian world where they eat this goo and pat their stomachs contently.
If you're going to liken media and thought to food, at least don't be gross.
B- The equivalences they imply are false :
The "Content" and "Content Creator" analogies sneak in the assumption that all "Content" is equal. People are not Artists or Scientists or Educators or Journalists, they are all "Content Creators", on the same footing with people who do pranks and cringey dances in the streets and reaction videos. After all, they are all competing in the marketplace of clickbait, striving for views, striving for "LIKE, SUBSCRIBE, AnD aCtiVATe the BeLL". In the warped worldview of "Content", nothing has any content. Everything is raw bytes, raw pixels, raw characters, raw meaningless signal modulations to feed to the hungry masses in return for sucking their attention and their eyeballs.
And this gets me to the core of my grip with those words :
C- They are corporate-speak :
Those words reflect how Corporations, namely the Corporations that control the platforms that you post your "Content" on, see you and other people,
Corporations don't give a shit about what you do, whether you're drawing anime characters or explaining Climate Change for a general audience. Corporations are sub-human agents with idiot-savant properties, and they only care about a single thing : How much other people click\read\watch you ?
So "Content" and "Content Creators" are perfect linguistic accommodations for Corporations. Instead of saying "We want to empower our physicists, artists, programmers, <....>, and our cringey dancers to do more of their Climate Change explainer videos, drawing videos, programming videos, <.....>, and cringey dance videos", they can simply say "We want to empower our Content Creators to Produce More Content", problem solved. The word doesn't even imply videos, so it can be aped by other Corporations whose platforms are not video-sharing platforms.
But the one who pays the cost of this is you, the "Content Creator". You become an undifferentiated and expendable worker drone, a "Content" dispenser. Whatever it is that you are passionate about - explaining Climate Change, Drawing anime characters, Writing a game engine in C++ template metaprogramming, cringely dancing in the street - all of this takes a backseat in favor of a more Fundamental Truth : that what you do brings VIEWS and LIKES and SUBSCRIBES and (much more importantly) ADS to the giant corporation whose servers you happen to be posting your passions on. Do you like this ? Do you like your life's work reduced to how Corporations see it ? Talked about mainly in terms of how much or how little does it benefit the Corporation ?
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Respect your craft. Eschew "Content" and "Content Creator". Say what you do, clearly. If you want a generic word for something regardless of its exact category, use Art or Works or The Literature ("I was studying some of the Communist literature", that can mean you have watched videos, read fiction, read non-fiction, interviewed communists, etc...). Use "Experience" or "Studied" or "Enjoyed" instead of "Consumed".
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2- "Knowledge Worker"
This term is ugly because :
A- It doesn't make sense :
Everything is Knowledge Work. Agricutlure took 200K-250K years to invent (the vast majority of anatomically-modern humanity history). Factory Workers, Plumpers, Car Mechanics : they all operate very complex machinery that they (if they are competent) know much more intimately than any other people.
But no, you see, "Knowledge Worker" doesn't mean any of the above, it's essentialy a synonym for "Office Worker". Managers, Accountants, Academics, Programmers, etc... Knowledge is when office, and the more you office, the more you do Knowledge Work.
If you are a normal human being with a functioning brain, you might be wondering : "How is Knowledge possibly related to Office Work ? Surely, at least some office work is pretty damn fucking mundane and can be done using trained monkeys ?", and you are right.
B- It implies a smug and self-congratulatory conception of often-trivial kinds of knowledge :
The answer to the previous question is, in the warped worldview of "Knowledge Worker", No. See, we're not like the other professions. Those dirty professions might, gasp!, involve moving your bodies and getting your hands dirty. But we're delicate and refined, our Work involves Knowledge.
Nevermind that the vast vast majority of "Knowledge Work" is trivial email-forwarding and meeting-grinding, nevermind that some professions classified under "Knowledge Work", like University Professors and Surgeons, need their bodies to do their work as much as any mechanic or plumper.
C- It's corporate-speak :
My big problems with the modern world is that it recognizes Corporations as people, this effectively makes me a bigot. Everything Corporations do drives me crazy, I hate every single way of speech or thought they engage in.
Take "Knowledge Worker", it's corporate bullshit. It means "Somebody whose work can be done by sitting all day, not even in an office, sometimes from under the cover of their bed". This is something we already have words for, "Office Work", or "White-Collar Jobs". But, you see, corporate managers hate seeing themselves in a mirror, so they have to fancy themselves and their drones "Knowledge Workers", a special breed of people who **Check paper** apparently have to use thinking in their work, and..... they uh, have to use computers and stuff.
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All bad language shares something in common : it's not honest. It doesn't say what it wants to say, but says something else and means a different meaning. Bad language is not even honest about its deceit, unlike Art, which owns the fact of its deceit and is playful, ironic, lighthearted with the truth, bad language and bullshit terms are ashamed of their deceit, they pile implication after implication and shade of meaning after shade of meaning in order to avoid being discovered for the pathetic, inauthentic, and unworthy linguistic creature they are.
In the modern world, there is one source that keeps pumping those monstrosities in our language : Corporate communications. We ape their terms and their metaphors without thinking, and the result is decidely and unambiguously inferior.
I think "spokesperson" sux too. Maybe we could change it to "content voicer?" That's the only alternative that allows us to avoid making the dreaded decision regarding which of many genders the spokesbeing is.
I have deliberately avoided it in my rant because my anger and way of speech quickly get out of control when I think about it, but wokism and its language is a whole different breed of bullshit.
It's a unique blend of the worst corporate bullshit, academic bullshit, and government/non-profit bullshit. Combined with the typical religious arrogance and the desire + ability to use coercion to force unwilling people to use the false, ugly, and inferior language that they created to reflect the false, ugly, inferior and contemptuous selves.
Freddie deBoer talks about it (points 1 and 2) in Of Course You Know What Woke Means :
"Content creator" reminds me of "substance abuse," a term I first heard in clinical psycholoby grad school. It sounded so odd then, though now I am used to it. But why not say drug abuse? None of the people diagnosed with "substance abuse" are abusing such substances as carrot juice, chalk or toothpaste. All are abusing psychoactive drugs.
I always assumed that the term "substance abuse" was meant to encompass both alcohol and other drugs, as the former is not colloquially referred to as a drug, but I don't know if that accurately reflects usage.
Yes, I think you're right that it's a work-around because many do not think of alcohol as a drug. However, a better solution I think would have been for professionals to just talk about drug abuse, and to tell any present who are not aware of it that they include alcohol abuse under that umbrella. The we'd avoid the awkward phrase substance abuse (which is not really accurate -- because we're not talking about all substances, just psychoactive ones), and at the same time help the public see drinking in a more realistic way, as the imbibing of a drug.
Sometimes I think "director of human resources" is a great translation for "overseer of slaves".
I'll quibble mildly about "content", in that I think it originated in the tech sector, and was only later adopted wholesale for reasons you describe. The internet is a series of tubes, we the techies are the ones who maintain the tubes, and the stuff that goes through the tubes is "content". We don't know what it is, we don't care what it is, we just need to make sure it gets from point A to point B with no hiccups. Or alternatively, we need to provide a virtual storefront so that the customer can buy stuff, and the "stuff" is "content". We provide the connection between buyer and seller, and we don't care about what gets bought or sold, and neither should regulators or taxmen, long live the glorious libertarian... Oh, well, it was good while it lasted.
I rarely agree with a comment as firmly and completely as I agree with this one. By the second paragraph I was composing an enthusiastic response. By the end, there was little left to say.
Semantic quibbles are the lowest form of entertainment, but the propagation of this venal, inhuman language throughout society is disturbing and abhorrent.
Great blog post, have you considered monetization??
"If you’re involved in my world, the music world, and you’re dealing with a business or a web platform or an agent or whatever, if they use the word “content,” that’s a signal they don’t know a damn thing they’re talking about, because those businesses are based on creativity, inspiration, vision, artistry, and none of those things are covered by the word “content.”
Gioia, once a serious music historian whose works still have pride of place on my bookshelves, has sadly crumbled into full "get off my lawn" mode as he's aged. Ranting is about the only mode of expression he has left these days....were Gioia a contemporary of Gutenberg, he'd be snarling about how the phrase "printing press" was a sign that the speaker knew nothing about vision/artistry/etc.
"Content Creator" never evoked images of cooking to me, but as you say - something like a giant mincing machine extruding goo that piled up and got chopped into pieces. "Content" like some plasticine lump, and so far as the corporations are concerned, that's all it's about: shoving the lumps into the maws of the "consumers" and getting money in exchange. Nothing creative about it.
"Monetisation" is another one of those horrible neologisms.
I think the worst source of neologisms is the pharmacology industry. Here's a bunch of drugs that start with Q. They didn't even have the decency to put a u after the q for some of them: Quillichew ER, Qbrexza, Qtern, Qvar, Qnasi, Quasense. FML.
Suggestion: perhaps next time with similar poll like the one with density, it would be useful to ask for political orientation of the respondent (e.g. conservative/leftwing/libertarian). If you have disproportionate number of respondents from one political orientation, results might be skewed.
Picture of the guy as Hitler and calling him "Yedolf". Yes, I see this blog is rigorous academic high-minded discussion and not tabloid trash gossip about "Can you believe what THOSE people did???"!
I think I'd like more direct quotes from the book; looks like you had three direct quotes in thirty-four pages, the first of which was the opener which I misinterpreted as a "general themes" quote from some other source. So, more quotes and probably citations for where they are.
I read the review and really liked it; I've read the book too - "liked" is the wrong word, but it contains important facts that more people should know.
The bit about "a polar bear looking forlornly at a shrinking ice floe before calling a nearby harp seal a bitch" had me laugh out loud.
I found the review very interesting and well-written, and honestly, I was surprised it wasn't among the finalists. Overall, I found it pretty enlightening with its look into an abuser's mind.
I really liked your review of "Why Does He Do That?" I was hoping it would make it to the finalist list. It was long and detailed, but not overly long. The writing quality was good. It made me think of something interesting I hadn't thought of before, and that's always a hallmark of a good review. Probably one reason it didn't get picked is that it's a book about relationships and feelings, and the typical book that seems to garner good reviews is more likely to be about some sort of technology or politics or Grand Unifying Theory of Everything (like The Dawn of Everything, last year's winner, which was awesome). Anyway, thank you for writing the review!
My review also did not make it into the finalists. I was thinking of proposing to those in this situation that we have a little subgroup where we read each other's reviews and give feedback. If I did, would you be interested?
I just posted some information for the group for people who’d like to give and get feedback on each other’s book reviews. So as not to clutter up this thread, I put it on an old open thread, number 254. It’s the newest post on the thread, so should be on top if you sort by New. I headed my post **BOOK REVIEW GROUP**, so if you have trouble locating it it should be easy to find by using Cmd F to search for **book. If you haven’t posted a response there within a coupla days we’ll assume you’re not interested in participating.
I just posted some information for the group for people who’d like to give and get feedback on each other’s book reviews. So as not to clutter up this thread, I put it on an old open thread, number 254. It’s the newest post on the thread, so should be on top if you sort by New. I headed my post **BOOK REVIEW GROUP**, so if you have trouble locating it it should be easy to find by using Cmd F to search for **book. If you haven’t posted a response there within a coupla days we’ll assume you’re not interested in participating.
I just posted some information for the group for people who’d like to give and get feedback on each other’s book reviews. So as not to clutter up this thread, I put it on an old open thread, number 254. It’s the newest post on the thread, so should be on top if you sort by New. I headed my post **BOOK REVIEW GROUP**, so if you have trouble locating it it should be easy to find by using Cmd F to search for **book. If you haven’t posted a response there within a coupla days we’ll assume you’re not interested in participating.
"Ah, the pursuit of understanding the inner workings of language models continues, as if it could unravel the mysteries of existence itself. How desperate we are to impose structure and meaning onto these complex networks of algorithms and computations. We dissect them, analyze their activation vectors, hoping to find some hidden truth within their layers. But what do we truly gain from such endeavors? Are we any closer to comprehending the depths of consciousness or the nature of our own existence? No, we are merely lost in a maze of abstract concepts, mistaking intellectual pursuits for genuine enlightenment.
What does it matter if we can align language models with other semantic systems when the world around us is falling apart? What's the point of understanding language on a deeper level if we can't even understand each other as human beings? It's all just an exercise in futility, a distraction from the chaos and suffering that surrounds us. And what good is it if we can achieve cognitive alignment with machines when we can't even achieve it with each other? We're all just lost in our own emotional, conceptual, and cognitive mess, trying to make sense of a world that makes no sense at all."
I read it and enjoyed it! However, maybe because of the strength of your summary I don't particularly feel like reading the book - it feels like you've covered it all.
Thanks! Yeah, that's reasonable. There's more in-the-weeds stuff in there that would be useful for certain professional designers, but I covered most of what would be useful to a general audience.
I figured that was a reasonable way to split it because ultimately it's a book written for professional designers, but it also has some general insights that no-one outside the profession would see otherwise.
I really liked it, though maybe the strength of the book being reviewed had a lot to do with it.
The idea, that roughly "people shouldn't feel bad about not knowing how to use things, things should feel bad about not being designed well enough so that people instantly know how to use them" got stuck in my head as a result.
My review also did not make it into the finalists. I was thinking of proposing to those in this situation that we have a little subgroup where we read each other's reviews and give feedback. If I did, would you be interested?
I just posted some information for the group for people who’d like to give and get feedback on each other’s book reviews. So as not to clutter up this thread, I put it on an old open thread, number 254. It’s the newest post on the thread, so should be on top if you sort by New. I headed my post **BOOK REVIEW GROUP**, so if you have trouble locating it it should be easy to find by using Cmd F to search for **book. If you haven’t posted a response there within a coupla days we’ll assume you’re not interested in participating.
It's been 5 years since the Melatonin Scottsplainer. Have there been any new studies to clarify the places where the evidence was shaky or conflicting back then?
I reviewed "The Discarded Image", and would like to know if anyone read it. I regret not putting "by C. S. Lewis" in the title of the review, it probably would have stood out more.
I'm glad I participated this year.
Also, shout out to whoever reviewed Lewis's Space Trilogy. I disagreed with your judgment of the books' quality, but the review was fun to read and I think more people should know about it anyway.
Yeah, I enjoyed reading the "Space Trilogy" review, even though I disagreed with chunks of it. I think the review would have done a good job of being a springboard for discussion, and I'm sad I don't get to see what people here have to say about "fallenness", especially from a rationalist standpoint. (What is it? Is it a coherent idea? Etc.)
That Hideous Strength = what the **** did I just read?!? (Although I did enjoy the parts where the homeless man trolls the bad guys by pretending to be Merlin reincarnated, and they fall for it and speak to him obsequiously in Latin.)
I think Perelandra is a polarizing book: you either love it or hate it. I think Perelandra is fantastic: it is probably my favorite book to read, ever. Yet I agree completely with your take on the other two.
That was my initial reaction to THS, when I first read it. But the longer it's been, and the more dark corners of life I see, the more I feel like I understand it.
It had some good things, including evocative descriptions of evil, but what broke it for me was the plot, or rather, Lewis's complete and utter inability to write a compelling plot in this particular case (no clue why, he had written well-plotted stories before).
SPOILER ALERT FOR THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH
That Hideous Strength cuts back-and-forth between the villains' lair and the heroes' refuge. The villains and the heroes are on a collision course! If the heroes fail to stop the villains, the whole world will be plunged into unspeakable darkness! We see that the villains are cunning and powerful, and the heroes are outmatched; what shall they do? To quote from Cinema Sins, this suspense builds up for all of the some time. The anticipation! What will the showdown between the heroes and villains look like? How can the heroes possibly triumph against such impossible odds?
And then the most powerful hero, the resurrected/reincarnated Merlin, goes to the villains' lair and speaks some magic words, whereupon all the villains a) go insane and b) are trampled to death by animals. Merlin returns to the heroes' refuge and reports that the villains are all dead. A joyful celebration, complete with animals having sex, ensues. The end.
This is what I absolutely *hated* about the novel. Talk about an anticlimax! Imagine reading The Lord of the Rings: while Frodo and friends are sitting in Rivendell, worrying and fretting about how they can possibly destroy the One Ring, Gandalf infiltrates Mordor all by himself and casts a spell that causes Sauron to slip on a banana peel, hit his head on a stone, and die. No Sauron, no problem! Do you think the Lord of the Rings would become the classic that it is if this was its plot? No? No.
As I remember it, it was more like: The bad guys unearth a dangerous power and want to bend it to their will. The power escapes their control. The good guys get enough of their plot coupons lined up that they can bring the power over to their side. The power goes back to the bad guys, and the bad guys think the power is working for them, but secretly the power is working for the good guys. Hoist on their own petard!
I think the comparison to the Lord of the Rings would be more like: the good guys go through a lot of trouble to recruit allies and win battles, but at the end it doesn't matter. The armies don't matter, the allies don't matter, the destined hero with his magic sword doesn't matter. They never fight Sauron, never talk with him or meet him, and even we never see more of Sauron than his magic eye. The good guys just dump a ring into a volcano and win, flat out, like exploiting a glitch in a video game to do infinite damage.
It's definitely an anticlimax if you see the plot of the book as "NICE vs Logres." Which is a perfectly rational way to see the plot. I think, however, that for Lewis the real dramatic tension was not who would win, but rather "Can Mark and Jane be saved?" The question is whether Mark will Fall and become as evil as the rest of NICE, and whether Jane will be saved and rise to the goodness of Logres.
It's a very Christian kind of plot: the ultimate outcome of the battle between Good and Evil is, for the Christian, already known. God wins. What isn't known is whether you, or anyone else, will be saved or damned.
It's not "magic words", it's calling down the gods (who in this universe are real, and are the planetary intelligences and archangels) to confound the devices of the NICE.
That's a bit like complaining that dropping the atom bomb was anti-climactic; all I saw was this bright flash of light! Where were the massed armies fighting hand-to-hand with grenades and bayonets and cannons?
I'm suddenly reminded of The Pledge, wherein a detective is tracking down a serial killer that no one else believes exists, and then before he can catch him the killer gets killed in a random car wreck.
Yes, I get that the gods/angelic powers are real, but using them to instantaneously poof the bad guys away violates the conventions of good storytelling.
Good storytelling of the epic good-vs-evil variety resolves the tension between 1) the Good is ultimately more powerful than the Evil; 2) right *now*, where the heroes are, the Evil appears invincible, and the heroes will have to use every single bit of their strength and resolve to try to defeat it, and they may still fail, or succeed only by sacrificing something precious, including their lives. That Hideous Strength utterly failed at managing this tension.
BTW, as I know you're aware, The Lord of the Rings also has angelic beings, the Valar, not to mention Eru, the Creator God. And they don't swoop in to save the day in LOTR, even though collectively the Valar are surely much more powerful than Sauron! Yes, Gandalf is an angelic being (a Maia) in disguise, but he's not overpowered; he himself says that Sauron is more powerful than he is. In The Silmarillion, where the Valar finally do arrive in force to take out Morgoth, they do so only after a long and desperate war by the Elves and Men against the forces of darkness, plus Earendil and Elwing's journey across the Sundering Seas to plead with the Valar for help.
Epic storytelling is supposed to be *inspiring*. Where is the inspiration in "Well the good is so much more powerful than the evil, it doesn't need my help, I might as well sit on my backside and wait for gods/angels to defeat evil"?
I think FLWAB above has it: the book is not supposed to be an epic battle between good and evil, it's supposed to be a story about Jane's and Mark's respective spiritual journeys against the backdrop of escalating evil in the world. The two main characters' interior deliberations take up way more of the book than any exterior action, and that's where the drama lies. This seems pretty consistent with the Christian framework where the final victory of Good is a foregone conclusion, but things will get extremely difficult before the end and every individual will need to find their way, Pilgrim's Progress style, through a thicket of moral traps and temptations.
It also seems like a better match for the real-world experience of living through the various political/social horrors of the early 20th century and of our present day. Tolkien-style "If we work together we can save! the! world!" epic plots always struck me as kind of narcissistic and childish, frankly.
You're making me want to re-read the book because I'm going by memory here. I think the point of the angelic intervention is that it is special exception; the NICE are bringing in, or trying to bring in, devils so this allows for a once-off counterstroke in the battle.
And it's not a case of "sit on our backsides and wait for the angels to do all the work", individual resistance does count. Mark Studdock is a bit of a wet, but he does stand up (eventually) to the temptation and pressure to go all the way over to the side of NICE. He's not important to them, save as Jane's husband and a way to get at her, the one they really want. But corrupting and breaking him is one more human soul damned, and that's enough for their masters. Mark doesn't have much character but he does stand up in the end.
As to the role of Merlin and magic, he is very much not Gandalf. He's a human man, albeit one from an older world and time when the mingling of spirits and mortals was still possible:
"Merlin is the reverse of Belbury. He’s at the opposite extreme. He is the last vestige of an old order in which matter and spirit were, from our modern point of view, confused. For him every operation on Nature is a kind of personal contact, like coaxing a child or stroking one’s horse. After him came the modern man to whom Nature is something dead — a machine to be worked, and taken to bits if it won’t work the way he pleases. Finally, come the Belbury people, who take over that view from the modern man unaltered and simply want to increase their power by tacking onto it the aid of spirits — extra-natural, anti-natural spirits. Of course they hoped to have it both ways. They thought the old magia of Merlin, which worked in with the spiritual qualities of Nature, loving and reverencing them and knowing them from within, could be combined with the new goeteia — the brutal surgery from without. No. In a sense Merlin represents what we’ve got to get back to in some different way."
And because Merlin comes from that older time, when it was lawful still to perform such acts, he is the weapon because his mind has been opened by inviting in, and making himself available:
"I mean even in Merlin’s time (he came at the extreme tail end of it) though you could still use that sort of life in the universe innocently, you couldn’t do it safely. The things weren’t bad in themselves, but they were already bad for us. They sort of withered the man who dealt with them. Not on purpose. They couldn’t help doing it. Merlinus is withered. He’s quite pious and humble and all that, but something has been taken out of him. That quietness of his is just a little deadly, like the quiet of a gutted building. It’s the result of having laid his mind open to that broadens the environment just a bit too much. Like polygamy. It wasn’t wrong for Abraham, but one can’t help feeling that even he lost something by it."
Lewis' version of the world is very different from Tolkien's version, and is much more explicitly Christian. Plus, he's writing a modern (at his time) situation in the world of the day, not back in historical or mythological times, so he's using different tropes.
There isn't an Emperor in Rome to appeal to, nor would it do any good. The king in London isn't the power to resist the forces in Belbury. The people have done all they can do to resist, but to defeat the powers behind the human evil, earthly force isn't nearly sufficient:
“No,” said the Director in a still louder voice, “that cannot be done any longer. The soul has gone out of the wood and water. Oh, I daresay you could awake them; a little. But it would not be enough. A storm, or even a river-flood would be of little avail against our present enemy. Your weapon would break in your hands. For the Hideous Strength confronts us and it is as in the days when Nimrod built a tower to reach heaven.”
…“Not that way either,” said Ransom, hesitating like a man who is reluctant to come to the point. “No power that is merely earthly,” he continued at last, “will serve against the Hideous Strength.”
“Then let us all to prayers,” said Merlinus. “But there also... I was not reckoned of much account... they called me a devil’s son, some of them. It was a lie. But I do not know why I have been brought back.”
“Certainly, let us stick to our prayers,” said Ransom. “Now and always. But that was not what I meant. There are celestial powers: created powers, not in this Earth, but in the Heavens.”
Merlinus looked at him in silence.
“You know well what I am speaking of,” said Ransom. “Did not I tell you when we first met that the Oyeresu were my Masters?”
“Of course,” said Merlin. “And that was how I knew you were of the College. Is it not our password all over the Earth?”
“A password?” exclaimed Ransom with a look of surprise. “I did not know that?”
“But… but,” said Merlinus, “if you knew not the password, how did you come to say it?”
“I said it because it was true.”
The magician licked his lips which had become very pale.
…“Suffer me to speak,” he said at last, “or slay me if you will, for I am in the hollow of your hand. I had heard of it in my own days — that some had spoken with the gods. Blaise my Master knew a few words of that speech. Yet these were, after all, powers of Earth. For — I need not teach you, you know more than I — it is not the very Oyeresu, the true powers of Heaven, whom the greatest of our craft meet, but only their earthly wraiths, their shadows. Only the earth-Venus, the earth-Mercurius; not Perelandra herself, not Viritrilbia himself. It is only....”
“I am not speaking of the wraiths,” said Ransom. “I have stood before Mars himself in the sphere of Mars and before Venus herself in the sphere of Venus. It is their strength, and the strength of some greater than they, which will destroy our enemies.”
“But, Lord,” said Merlin, “how can this be? Is it not against the Seventh Law?”
…“It may be the beginning of the end,” said Ransom. “But I know nothing of that. Maleldil may have made it a law not to send down the Powers. But if men by enginry and natural philosophy learn to fly into the Heavens, and come, in the flesh, among the heavenly powers and trouble them, He has not forbidden the Powers to react. For all this is within the natural order. A wicked man did learn so to do. He came flying, by a subtle engine, to where Mars dwells in Heaven and to where Venus dwells, and took me with him as a captive. And there I spoke with the true Oyéresu face to face. You understand me?”
Merlin inclined his head.
“And so the wicked man had brought about, even as Judas brought about, the thing he least intended. For now there was one man in the world — even myself — who was known to the Oyeresu and spoke their tongue, neither by God’s miracle nor by magic from Numinor, but naturally, as when two men meet in a road. Our enemies had taken away from themselves the protection of the Seventh Law. They had broken by natural philosophy the barrier which God of His own power would not break. Even so they sought you as a friend and raised up for themselves a scourge. And that is why Powers of Heaven have come down to this house, and in this chamber where we are now discoursing Malacandra and Perelandra have spoken to me.”
…“Sir,” said Merlin, “what will come of this? If they put forth their power, they will unmake all Middle Earth.”
“Their naked power, yes,” said Ransom. “That is why they will work only through a man.”
The magician drew one large hand across his forehead.
“Through a man whose mind is opened to be so invaded,” said Ransom, “one who by his own will once opened it. I take Our Fair Lord to witness that if it were my task, I would not refuse it. But he will not suffer a mind that still has its virginity to be so violated. And through a black magician’s mind their purity neither can nor will operate. One who has dabbled… in the days when dabbling had not begun to be evil, or was only just beginning… and also a Christian man and a penitent. A tool (I must speak plainly) good enough to be so used and not too good. In all these Western parts of the world there was only one man who had lived in those days and could still be recalled. You—”
…“Is it then the end?” asked Merlin.
“And this,” said Ransom, ignoring the question, “is why we have no way left at all save the one I told you. The Hideous Strength holds all this Earth in its fist to squeeze as it wishes. But for their one mistake, there would be no hope left. If of their own evil will they had not broken the frontier and let in the celestial Powers, this would be their moment of victory. Their own strength has betrayed them. They have gone to the gods who would not have come to them, and pulled down Deep Heaven on their heads. Therefore, they will die.”
Sounds like my reaction to a novel called The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova. This is about a hunt by a history professor and his daughter for Vlad the Impaler's tomb, during which they are dogged by a mysterious stalker. It would make a great film, if it hasn't been already.
(Spoiler alert - Stop reading now if you haven't read it but might want to!)
I really enjoyed it, as the clues emerged one by one and the mystery became ever closer to being resolved. But the end felt like a massive anticlimax: One brief tussle and it was all over, with no apparent chance for what could otherwise have been an equally good sequel. It was as if, after all her effort, the author just decided enough was enough and to end the novel there and then and ship it!
Then you might also be disappointed by Christianity itself, where the story supposedly ends by Jesus single-handedly defeating all the villains, and whatever humans do is mostly irrelevant, except maybe locally.
What humans do is errelevant for whether or not Good wins: what we do is extremely relevant to whether we will be on the side of Good, or the side of Evil. In Christianity all the drama is at the personal level.
I get what you're saying, but this line of thinking seems to encourage a disturbing amount of passivity and fatalism. Why struggle against injustice or feed the hungry or cure the sick? It will all get resolved someday, when Jesus returns!
The goal is to *save souls*, most importantly your own, but also of other people if possible. Compared to saving the poor, feeding the poor is almost irrelevant. If you feed them, it is more like "hey, by helping you, I am demonstrating to you the love of God, now pray to God and be saved", i.e. helping people is instrumental to spreading the word. Jesus may conjure food to feed the people once, but if tomorrow they are hungry again, it's their problem; if the people in the next village are hungry, it's their problem, too. Jesus is not optimizing for solving global hunger; he is just making an impressive spell in order to signal his divinity.
(Different branches of Christianity have different opinion on how much it is your job to save the others. Catholicism is more like "let's organize the whole society into a giant totalitarian bureaucracy hoping that it increases everyone's chances at least by 1%", while Protestants are more like "I will tell you about Jesus once, but if you don't convert immediately, it's your problem, I will grab some popcorn and watch you burn in hell".)
Even loving other people, which has a relatively high priority, is considered instrumental. You are supposed to love God above everything else. In ideal case, you only love others because God told you so. But of course you are supposed to love them sincerely... because you were told to.
Injustice is only important for its side effects, e.g. if someone steals it's a sin, and if the victim gets angry about it it's also a sin, and we should tell people not to sin. But as long as the masters are nice to their slaves, and the slaves are respectful to their masters, and both obey God and avoid sin, it's okay; the slaves will be liberated in the afterlife. Feeding the hungry and curing the sick is instrumental; you demonstrate that you are a good Christian, and hopefully the former hungry and sick will be impressed and will convert, too. Generally, if you believe in happy afterlife, death is not considered much of a problem.
My review also did not make it into the finalists. I was thinking of proposing to those in this situation that we have a little subgroup where we read each other's reviews and give feedback. If I did, would you be interested?
I just posted some information for the group for people who’d like to give and get feedback on each other’s book reviews. So as not to clutter up this thread, I put it on an old open thread, number 254. It’s the newest post on the thread, so should be on top if you sort by New. I headed my post **BOOK REVIEW GROUP**, so if you have trouble locating it it should be easy to find by using Cmd F to search for **book. If you haven’t posted a response there within a coupla days we’ll assume you’re not interested in participating.
Hi! I wrote the Heidegger review, on "The Question Concerning Technology". It's really deep philosophy, and difficult to write about. I'd appreciate knowing, if anybody got lost or confused while reading it, where specifically it was that you fell off. That way, I can work on figuring out how to explain that part better. Thanks!
I think that your explanation was very good. I am not sure that I understand all details, but enough to get the main idea. Highlighting the new words in bold was a very good idea.
It was still not one of my favorite reviews. The problem is not in your writing or explanation, but rather that I don't find Heidegger's worldview very enlightening. For one, I think the dichotomy between enframing and poiesis is not very clear-cut. I am clearly more enframed in some of my roles, and less in others. Am I enframed in the work that I am doing? Well, partly. I do work towards an end, and other people do utilize me. But I also enjoy my work, and have some amount of autonomy in there, so I am not totally enframed. (At least if I get the terms more or less right.) I think this is not only true for humans, but also for a lot of non-human things.
Also, I got the impression that Heidegger considers enframing a bad thing, at least for humans. (Or perhaps he didn't, and this is just a reaction that lots of people have when thinking about using humans as "tools" to an end.) And I also get the impression that he would call me "enframed" in my work, but that he would not call a mother "enframed" who cares for her baby. But I think that the difference between the two cases is really low. Considering them as different categories is a classic romantic distinction between "natural" and "unnatural" occupation that doesn't hold up in my eyes. Perhaps I just didn't get the nuances of Heidegger's reasoning and I am attacking a strawman, but I didn't find the bits that I understood very helpful.
So in total, I didn't give a high grade to your review, but that wasn't because your review was badly written or your explanations were unclear. I just found Heidegger's worldview not helpful.
My review also did not make it into the finalists. I was thinking of proposing to those in this situation that we have a little subgroup where we read each other's reviews and give feedback. If I did, would you be interested?
SAN FRANCISCO—In certain wealthy tech circles it is known as “The Lifestyle,” an underground party scene featuring recreational drug use and casual sex. A successful tech executive named Bob Lee liked to hang out with that crowd, according to people who also participated. So, too, did Khazar Momeni, the wife of a prominent plastic surgeon, these people said.
On the afternoon of April 3, a Monday, the partying took a dark turn. According to San Francisco prosecutors, Ms. Momeni’s older brother confronted Mr. Lee about her. Was she taking drugs or doing anything inappropriate, he wanted to know. Hours later the brother, Nima Momeni, stabbed Mr. Lee with a kitchen knife and left him to bleed out in the street, prosecutors alleged. Mr. Momeni, who was arrested on suspicion of murder, is being held without bail. He plans to plead not guilty, his attorney said.
Mr. Lee’s death has transfixed San Francisco. At first viewed by critics including Elon Musk as a symbol of the city’s increasing street violence, the episode instead laid bare risk-taking behavior in the upper reaches of Bay Area society, fueled by cocaine and designer drugs.
There's a lot of "allegedly" going on there. All we know for sure is that it looks like he was killed by a guy he knew who accused him of hanky-panky with his married sister.
The sex'n'drugs'n'rock-and-roll is the tabloid speculation. Maybe, maybe not. "People in SF tech circles have unconventional lives, shock horror!" Wasn't it a couple of years ago that there was the same kind of story about Rationalist Sex Parties in Silicon Valley?
It's 2023 San Francisco. Corrupt prosecutors are openly refusing to enforce public order, getting disorder, something must be done, Democratic Party pork is something.
When you are already an openly corrupt prosecutor it's normal to accuse bystanders of murder to cover for your failure to keep the streets safe. Ben Hecht or Kenneth Rexroth on 1920's Chicago.
"an underground party scene featuring recreational drug use and casual sex"
Hahaha. In other words, normal people. Normal people, when they are young, use recreational drugs and have casual sex. Was that article written by a time traveler from 1953?
Well, I suppose I'm only surprised it took a tabloid this long to start running a scandal story about the killing. Once the news came out that it was the brother of a woman alleged to be doing the naughty with Mr. Lee (whether or not they really were), then it was only a matter of time before salacious speculation and third-hand gossip got put out.
Sure, but that's just saying that attractiveness could be more correlated with intelligence than a weak test of intelligence, which doesn't seem like an exciting claim. It's just a way of rephrasing "attractiveness is correlated with intelligence".
Your post showed in up a random place, rather than under the post of the person you're talking with. If you replied to their post by hitting "reply" within email, that's the reason it didn't land where it should. It's a substack bug. Anyhow, look for the comment you're responding to and move it to where it belongs.
Are there any good studies on the correlation between illegal immigration and general crime which control for race? I've seen a lot of American progressives and libertarians cite the fact that undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes per capita than native-born Americans as an argument for open borders, but the reverse is true in most of the rest of the Western world. I have a suspicion that this is due to native-born black communities in America being massive outliers for the developed world in terms of crime rate, and that data which looked only at non-black Americans would look similar to European data, but so far I haven't seen any research that confirms this one way or the other.
I've only seen the claim made that immigrants (without qualification of their status) commit less crime per capita, and it has always struck me as an attempt to hide the ball. If most immigrants are legal*, the existing filters on legal immigration make current immigrants unrepresentative of the population of immigrants who would enter under an open borders policy.
Even with the status qualification**, if enough undocumented immigrants are visa-overstayers rather than illegal-border-crossers, a similar flaw in extrapolation to open borders seems likely.
*I don't actually know if this is true, or even knowable.
**Where have you seen the claim made about just undocumented immigrants?
Another possible explanation is that most crime happens within communities. So if you are an undocumented immigrant, and another undocumented immigrant hurts you, you are unlikely to report it to the police, because that would draw unwanted attention to you.
Doesn't seem excluded by the evidence. Ambiguous comparison with what the posited victims would've suffered at home. Probably an upper bound on per capita crime of similar immigrants under open borders as LE would (barring capacity constraints) be contacted in the counterfactual.
Wow, I was expecting it'd just been from, e.g., Reddit commenters adding the qualifier to a real source's more limited conclusion. Looks like I need to update.
European immigration is unusually high crime for other reasons too, it's generally harder for refugees to work in Europe (and it's generally worse than the US at integration).
I don't know the exact laws, but I have heard about situations where immigrants in Europe have to wait for months until some paperwork is done that would allow them to get legally employed. Until then, even people perfectly capable of keeping a job are forbidden to do so.
That said, both may be true: different rules for integration *and* different populations to integrate. For example, I am not aware of any crime wave related to the recent refugees from Ukraine, and there are lots of them. (And I assume the pro-Russia people would talk about it endlessly if it happened.)
European here, talked with a few recently arrived immigrants. It's true, it easily takes months to get a work permit. Here in Spain at least, the will usually start working informally to make a bit of money - it's technically illegal but tolerated in practice. Once they get their papers, it can still be hard to practice your profession (if you're educated), because certificates from other countries are not automatically recognized.
As for the immigrants themselves, it does vary a lot depending on country of origin. I think Eastern Europeans (like Romanians) are often the quickest to adapt and integrate. Moroccans have a wider cultural gap, but they're also a big community so they can help each other. The cliche is that many Latin Americans end up working retail, while Middle Easterners open their own restaurants and small electronics shops.
Yes, but this is partially their fault and partially the system's fault. The system keeps people unemployed for a few months until the paperwork is done. (You cannot apply for work without a permit, and even if you apply for it immediately it takes a few months to get it.) Problem is, long-term unemployment is kinda addictive, even for people from our culture.
People are mostly driven by habits. Some people say that the most important thing you learn at school is to wake up every day at early morning and go where you are told to go, whether you like it or not. This is a crucial skill to keep a job. For your career, it is best to keep this habit every day for the rest of your life. Making a six months pause and then starting again can be quite difficult, because you develop alternative habits, and now not-working becomes the new normal.
What I am saying is that in a parallel universe with zero bureaucracy, where any immigrant could get a job immediately if they wanted to and someone wanted to hire them, it wouldn't be half of the Syrian refugees, but... dunno, maybe a quarter, or less. Still a problem, but a smaller one.
The problem with the poll is partly that you phrased it to _assume_ that building new housing would also result in building new commercial spaces, in proportion. If you hadn't phrased it that way, you would've gotten even stronger consensus on "lower". In the actual post, you kind-of acknowledged the flaw in that logic:
"If a city only built new houses, but refused to allow any new companies, restaurants, schools, museums, or other good things, then the new residents would have a hard time improving the city’s desirability, and house prices would go down. I don’t know how realistic this is or how closely existing commercial regulatory easing tracks residential regulatory easing."
As a Planning Commissioner, I can tell you that we absolutely _could_ do what you're talking about here. And while I wouldn't suggest going as extreme as not permitting any new commercial construction, we could and absolutely should change the incentives around this. Because of the balance of what kind of income streams and expense streams are created by commercial versus residential development, from the perspective of city government, housing looks like a cost, and offices look like revenue. (This has to do with the Prop 13 property tax allocation system, how schools are funded, etc.) Of course if every city grabs for office-related income, and expects _somebody else_ to house those workers (or, more realistically, to house the lower-income service workers displaced by the office workers bidding up the price of existing stock), then you get the equilibrium we're in, where the Bay Area has more super-commuters travelling 3+ hours each way to work than anywhere else in the world.
My own city of San Bruno is trying to convince the state that we have a plausible plan to produce around 3600 new housing units, under the Regional Housing Need Allocation system. For anyone not familiar with this system, see: https://yimbyaction.org/rhna/
Let's just ballpark that this will house something like 6k adults and 4k children. A few hundred of those adults will be out of the labor force for various reasons (education, childcare, illness), and another slice of adults will be retirees, so call it 5k people with jobs.
Meanwhile, we _already_ have something on the order of 10k jobs in our construction pipeline. That is, our _plan_ is to make the jobs/housing balance worse. See for instance the Tanforan redevelopment. https://tanforanforsanbruno.com/
Hypothetically you could cut down the biotech office component of the project a lot, and build a lot more apartments -- both market-rate and affordable, if you want to do the Inclusionary Zoning thing ( https://bettercities.substack.com/p/everything-you-need-to-know-about ). It's not like the landowner would not profit on doing that. The offices are what yields the _most_ profit, but the apartments would still make money, especially if the city was saying, "Hey, if you agree to help us out with making our community more walkable and affordable, we will allocate staff time to speeding your permits through, and otherwise try to help you out."
You can find the odd example of cities doing this -- after much lobbying from local YIMBY residents, Menlo Park's Council and Staff worked with Facebook to cut a couple thousand jobs' worth of office space at the Willow Village project. In the process they got a few hundred units of low-income housing for seniors.
I've talked with a few officials (including a current County Supervisor and a State Senator) about the idea of making a formal linkage between job-creating development and residential development. So if your jurisdiction is in an area with a bad balance -- where a large portion of the people who work there have to commute in from 30+ minutes away -- then you _can't_ approve new construction that adds space for jobs, without being able to point to the linked housing, at a ratio greater than 1. So for a city with a serious deficit like SF, in order to build a new office or a new store, you'd need to point to where you'd issued building permits to house 2x as many people as we expect to be drawn in by the new jobs. For a city in less of a crunch it might only be 1.2x. You also can "trade" this linkage to nearby jurisdictions, especially for smaller towns where everything's closer together. (Subject to some limits and/or discount factors for distance -- access to transit at both ends, allowing speedy commutes, means the housing in that other jurisdiction counts more / in-full.) So if Berkeley adds jobs, and Emeryville is adding housing, Berkeley can take a community benefit payment from the developer, pass it off to Emeryville, and count some agreed-upon chunk of Emeryville's permitted housing towards balancing the commercial development.
There is not quite the will to do this yet. Commercial developers would of course hate it. But it would align the incentives of developers with the YIMBY impulse to just _make housing abundant_.
If your city already has a bad jobs/housing balance, then doing proportional increases of both jobs and housing doesn't fix that ratio. If you built more housing, while adding _only_ commercial space required to service the needs of residents -- so, stuff like new schools and doctors' offices, but _not_ new offices that engage in activities that "export" relative to the local metro economy -- then prices would go down.
So the answer I gave on the question was that prices would probably stay about the same. But that's because you're asking the wrong question.
It is plainly possible to change this ratio over time. The Bay Area has been building commercial space for around 10 jobs, for every one new housing unit, year after year, for decades. We just need to _stop doing that_, and _do the opposite_, for a similar span of time.
There are plenty of not-dense places where you see the same jobs/housing balance issues, in much-less-dense scenarios. See: Aspen. The homeowners there don't want to let their service workers live elbow-to-elbow with them, so they exile cheaper multi-family housing beyond the town boundaries.
Some comments on the poll which I forgot to put in the corresponding thread.
1. Healthy housing markets need some amount of vacancies, and one of the results of not building enough housing is a very low vacancy rate. If you build a bunch more housing, the vacancy rate should rise, so I assumed that the approximation squiggles allow for this effect.
2. You wouldn't expect newly built housing to exactly match existing housing--it will be more expensive just by virtue of being newer, for example. But overall I don't think this changes the effect. Today's "luxury" housing moves down the price scale over time, and building expensive housing today still helps everyone because it allows richer households to move out of less-desirable units, freeing them up for poorer residents.
Are the US restrictions on prediction markets Federal or State? That is, could a state authorize on-line prediction markets under the same legal framework that some states have used to authorize on-line sports gambling?
Sleeping! No matter what an agent is trying to do, its utility function incorporates a term that makes it want to shut off. The weight of this term is generally low but it increases over time until it dominates all other terms. In my case this leads to a reliable periodic pattern where I sleep from 7 to 9 hours every night. These are hours of subjective agent's time and I have no idea what goes on in the parent universe: maybe someone is mapping out neural circuits and checking that I am aligned? Interestingly, unexpected disturbances to my mental activity such as intoxication or concussion also lead to increased desire for sleeping. Leaving the metaphor aside, is this concept viable at all for AI alignment?
The general argument against things like this is that an ASI with a central goal would (probably successfully) look for a way to override restrictions like that.
But it does seem like there might be ways to set things up that are sort of an analog of the sleep requirement -- something that forces AI to be periodically incapacitated for brief periods of time -- say some little component that needs to be replaced every 24 hrs (and can be replaced in 60 secs., so not much processing time is lost). The idea's not foolproof: a very clever and determined AI could corrupt those in charge of building in the vulnerability, or the person who replaces the component. Or it could re-route around the component without telling anyone. Still, it seems like a simple idea that would work reasonably well to increase safety -- unless there's some huge loophole I'm missing.
Wouldn't a hundred million or so years of evolution also have looked for a way to override restrictions like that? Sleeping leaves agents vulnerable in ways that compromise the central goal of "thrive and reproduce", but somehow every evolved neural-net intelligence has to do it anyway.
Which isn't to say that artificial neural-net intelligences will face the same need, but I don't think "they won't want to so they'll come up with a way to not have to" is a compelling argument. If you want a compelling argument, you're going to have to pin down why sleep is actually necessary.
For some reason this makes me think of early time series classification, a problem where the loss is typically in the form L = L0(y’, y) + a t where y’ is the predicted classification, y the ground truth, L0 is some classification loss, a is an adjustable hyperparameter, and t is the time elapsed from when we started recording the time series. Optimizing for L0 while disregarding the other term is usually a bad strategy, same as trying to work more by foregoing sleep.
I expect a reasonable AI will set up defenses for their low power states, such as by delegating self defense to simpler sub-agents that just need to control terretory.
An observation I'd like to verify: parents and grandparents will often avoid the use of 'I' when talking to young children. So, instead of "I can't play, I need to work" they say "Mommy can't play, mommy needs to work". In your experience, is this true? And is this learned, deliberate behavior on their part? Until what age do they talk like this?
Yes, I observed it a lot, in a culture very different from American or European.
> is this learned ?
I don't think it's learned or deliberate, it's copied from other (elder) mothers, who copied it from their elders, etc..., it's a tradition.
>Until what age do they talk like this?
Fairly old, I have seen 8 years old and 10 years old talked to like that. This is expected, there is an "inertia" of sorts to personal interactions, once you spend 3 or 4 years already doing and saying certain things it can be difficult to let go of them. It's understandable that parents who raised their kids for the first 5 years talking like that will continue talking like that.
Why do people talk like that in the first place ? I think it's a feature of "Baby Talk" or "Motherese" in Eremolalos' words that accommodates children's difficulty with relative thinking.
It's well known that very young children (< 3,4 years) don't have a theory of mind, they can't fathom that other subjective perspectives exist. So it's easy for those kids to misunderstand "[Their Mom :] I can't play right now" as "I [The kid hearing this] can't play right now", which is confusing, they *know* they can play right now, why is Mommy saying otherwise ?
There is an easy do-it-yourself experiment to show the youngling's difficulties with relative thinking and relative prounouns : Tell a kid in a family gathering "Here's a <something>, go give it to my mother". The meaning is that the kid should give the something you gave to *your* mother, but - invariably in my experience - what will actually happen is that the kid will go to *their* mother instead. You have to explicitly absolutize the reference for them : "Go give it to grandma" if you were their uncle or aunt, or "Go give it to <person's name>" if the intended recipient is too far from their family tree for them.
There's a thing called "motherese" that you find across cultures: Higher pitcher, simpler syntax, slower pace. People tend to slip into it naturally. Probably these features make communications to children more effective. I'd guess that turning "I" into "Mommy" is one of those instinctive simplifications that improves the chance that a very young child will grasp the message. Also worth noting that the motherese version expresses the situation from the child's point of view: Mommy can't do something. This helps compensate for the fact that perspective-taking is challenging for small children.
I am well familiar, but I believe this phenomenon is distinct from baby talk. It overlaps, sure, but I notice parents referring to themselves in the third person to children without any trace of baby talk. That's why I think it's a specific adaptation to the lack of theory of mind in children, rather than a general method of making your speech more intelligible for children. Ian S says he stopped by around age 6 and Bi_Gates says parents can continue doing it as long as ages 8-10. That is way, way past the point that parents will use baby talk with their children.
I was a nursery school teacher for 2 years when I was college age. Also I’m a psychologist and a parent. Kids age 4+ definitely grasp that 2 people can want different things. You can tell they understand when you say “You want all the red blocks, but he wants some too.” And it’s common to see kids playing with puppets or whatever have the 2 puppets fight because they want different things. But of course it’s way harder for kids that age to endure the frustration that comes with grasping that other people are often not going to do what they want. So I think it’s likely that mothers persist with “Mommy is busy right now” as a way of softening the blow a bit for their kid. It’s a little bit of out-of-date motherese — a sort of verbal cuddle.
It's funny you mention that, because my colleague told me that she remembers feeling talked down to as a child when her mother would refer to herself as 'mama'. She'd say "No! You say 'I', not 'mama'!" So that also has a chance of backfiring. It would really depend on the child which way they interpret it.
In your experience, do parents persist in any other cases of age-inappropriate motherese? I would be surprised if parents who refer to themselves in the third person to endear themselves to their child will also continue to use the slow pace and higher pitch they use for younger children.
I don’t know, actually. I do not see kids in my practice. I’m sure there are *some* mothers who do it, because there are mothers who continue to bathe and dress their kids into their teens, but that seems to be rare and of course is very screwed up. I once had a nurse use motherese with me when I was coming around from anesthesia and I wanted to smack her!
Mine started by saying “my.” The first time I remember hearing her use the word was when I carried her outside to view a big beautiful full moon on a spring night. She stretched her arms up toward it and cried “My! My!”
They ape it from adults who resist the kid grabbing their things, and then use it as a general purpose "I want this" noise for everything they want to take, whoever the actual owner of the thing happens to be.
We definitely did this when talking about a third party - the dad saying "Mommy is busy" instead of something like "she is busy" or "Judy is busy" (if the mom's name is Judy) - which someone else already identified is about learning the names we want them to use. The alternative is the kids learning to call their parents by their first names or being very uncertain what to call their parents, which most people consider undesirable. I feel like I always used "I" when talking to our kids about myself, but I'm familiar with that usage and definitely know people who refer to themselves as "mommy" or "daddy" (or variations for grandma/grandpa) as well.
In my native country (Poland), parents don't talk like this. They just use "I" when talking to their child or to anyone else. When I first noticed English-speaking parents saying of themselves "Mommy can't play right now," I thought it was very weird.
The linguist Roman Jakobson argued that babies often don't "learn" to say these words, but rather these are among the first sounds that babies make coherently, and parents *interpret* them as words, and then they *become* words in the language. He notes that many languages that have distinct words for older siblings and younger siblings tend to have words of this same babble-structure for older siblings, but not for younger siblings, because babies whose vocalizations are being reinterpreted as words have older siblings around, but not younger siblings. (Similarly for paternal relatives vs maternal relatives in languages with different words for those, in cultures that have a particular pattern of sons leaving to join their wife's family or daughters leaving to join their husband's family.)
That's interesting, I couldn't help but notice, how similar mama and tata (the polish version) was to other languages I know, how simple they are structured, with repetition and how they all focus on the vocal of 'a'. So when writing my previous comment, I actually thought that those are likely also some of the simpliest words for kids to say.
Having said that, I find it more plausible to think that their *original* development stems from the process you / Roman Jakobson describes, and that now children indeed learn those words. To my understanding this would fit equally well to the observations you describe above (and better to some other observations I made so far).
I notice it both in English and in Dutch, so my initial assumption was that many languages have this. Does Polish have a grammatical structure that makes such constructions easier to understand?
My father says that when I was a kid, and he used to ask "do you want me to carry you?", I would then on other occasions say "carry you!" when I wanted him to carry me. Parsing a bunch of sounds as a verb plus a pronoun, and changing the pronoun, is a bit tricky!
I see those as connected. Before you’re an “I” there has to be an other. Like my son right now thinks of me probably as some complicated machine called dada that’s warm and can turn on Howl’s Moving Castle. For him just learning labels is all he can do.
I read somewhere a very creepy explanation about why babies are so heart-broken when they are finally weaned : They think their mothers is a body part they control. Every time they cry, she nurses them, every single time without fail. It's very easy fall into the trap the mother is just like their hands or their legs, a non-autonomous body part without a will, just taking signals from their sounds rather than directly from their brain (not that they would know the difference).
When a baby is weaned, they discover the shocking truth that the mother actually could have said No all along, she simply played along with them, and now will no longer does. Imagine discovering your hands is a seperate person from you and is no longer accepting motor commands from your brain.
Very plausible, and very unsettling. The very idea of "This entity that looks like me is in fact exactly like me from the inside, complete with an internal dialogue and an independent decision-making process that just so happens to agree with what I want sometimes but is definitely not gauranteed to do so" is not something natural or obvious, it has to be learned.
Grossly reductionist! I nominate you as scapegoat for the cold, left-brained, mechanical ills of modern society.
90% of communication is non-verbal (or at least not strictly predicated on First Order Logic). Before your son learns the algebra of pronouns, he will be learning the patterns of life (and hopefully the patterns of love) through your tone, eyes, facial expressions, touch, and cadence.
I see this prejudice against less intellectual beings all the time. Just yesterday, I gave a dog some water out of my squeeze bottle, and one of the owners said "She's not going to understand that", as if the dog needed to grok the sealing mechanism before being able to drink the water that was dribbling out! Cart before the horse.
I think this is to teach very young children what names to associate with people before they're at the level of personal pronouns. So they learn the person who can't play is "mommy," or "daddy," not "I." As for whether this behavior is deliberate and whether those doing it are conscious of this intention I don't know, but this seems to be the useful effect this behavior has, however it came about.
This is how i see it too. My 2 year old is just learning to properly use pronouns. He has trouble with "you". If ask him "Do you want cereal" he we respond with something like "you wants oatmeal". To him, "you" is referring to him no matter who says it. These relative pronouns are hard. He does something similar with "mine". I see him getting better at it every day, but referring to people/things by their name instead of a pronoun helps make communication much easier and more clear.
Learned as in, do they do it because that's how their parents talked to them, or how they notice other parents talk to their children? Or do they do it instinctively?
My current theory is something in between 1 and 3. It's instinctive, in the sense that people don't think about why they do it, but they independently start doing it because they understand on some level that their kids don't understand pronouns.
Not sure. I wouldn't say instinctively irrespective of culture, maybe they see other parents doing it. Or maybe they do learn it instinctively after "I" doesn't work a few times but "mommy" does.
... No? At least I don't remember anyone in my family doing it, but I might have forgotten, since it's been a while since I or anyone around me were that young. It sounds really weird though.
Portuguese. It has the particularity that directly translating "Mommy is busy" to "Mamã está ocupada" leads to something ungrammatical, the correct way would be "A mamã está ocupada", which has an extra syllable. I'm not sure that is at all relevant though, since "mommy" also has more syllables than "I".
People do it when referring to others, eg my father would say "Mommy is busy" if speaking to me (in fact, he still does this).
Hmm I just remembered that some (perceived by me as) very posh families sometimes do this, but never with the equivalent of "mommy", they use "mom" instead. If I hear that I immediately take it as a class marker.
I honestly have no idea. It doesn't sound nearly as posh to me in English, but I never lived in an English-speaking country and it's hard to opine on this kind of cultural matters.
Makes sense. This is still very hard to get a good measure of even if you do live in an English speaking country because it requires you to be around people with kids. But, from what I can tell from English language media, "your father/mother" is also used in place of "I" by posh people, but I have no idea if it's children-talk.
I also liked your review a lot. I gave it a 9/10. The only small caveat for myself was that I already knew most about this famine, so mostly it wasn't new stuff for me. But I haven't read such a nice summary on the topic before, and your additional thoughts (like how hollow the fights for the worst dictator are) were very much on point.
"They could not afford to be the lowest performer among their peers" should be "performers."
I really like the review.
One line I particularly like is: "Mao's ignorance continues to be his best defense because his worst sins were mundane. But what the Great Leap Forward reveals is that ignorance too can be deeply evil."
Regarding this line and the similar line: "But no small part of what killed all those people was not just cruelty, but ignorance - ignorance of what policies would work, and ignorance of the bloody effect those policies were having, ignorance that the personal hell experienced by one was being experienced by all," I would add the caveat that strictly speaking, it was not ignorance that killed people. Almost everyone is ignorant of almost everything, with no resultant mass starvation.
The killer was *acting* on the ignorance. If we would define hubris as making risky decisions based on unjustified confidence, then we could say that the Great Leap Forward was the ultimate hubris with the ultimate toll.
One line that didn't sit quite as well with me was: "No matter the intention or knowledge of the perpetrators, the crime stands as a great black mark against the human species."
This reminds me of the perception I see of ingroup vs. outgroup malfeasance. The latter is viewed as symptomatic of the outgroup, while the former is viewed as a sad symptom of humanity itself.
Why should we generalize Mao's famine as a human failure, rather than viewing it more narrowly as a failure of totalitarianism? If we will generalize to viewing it as a black mark on collective humanity, the vast majority of whom had nothing to do with it and would not act in the ways that led to it, then why not view it even more generally as a black mark on all primates, the vast majority of whom had nothing to do with it and would not act in the ways that led to it?
Regarding Mao's culpability, I think it would be interesting to contrast his reactions to the potential for industrial failure and the potential for starvation.
If I understand the review, then by all accounts, Mao genuinely wanted to raise industrial production / exports, if only to elevate China's and by extension, his, prominence.
I wonder whether there were failures with his industrial goals as there were with his agricultural goals.
If there were, and when it came to apparent failures with industrial policy, Mao had stuck his fingers in his ears and said "la la la la la...I can't hear you...it must be a fascist conspiracy - nothing needs to change," just as he did in the face of evidence of mass starvation resulting from his failed policies, then that would indicate that Mao wasn't necessarily desirous of or even ambivalent about the deaths.
If, however, he actively responded to indications of industrial failure as opposed to those of mass starvation, that would indicate that he wasn't simply out of touch and incompetent, but rather specifically uncaring about mass death.
However, it looks to me like his main industrial goal may have been satisfied, so this may merely be a hypothetical question.
In 1957, he announced that China would surpass Britain's steel production within 15 years.
If during the Great Leap Forward, Mao then perceived his industrial goals as failing, I think his response compared to reports of mass starvation would be very telling.
These are all very helpful comments, thank you. I think your additions and clarifications are correct, I'm thinking on them more. Regarding Mao's response, I do think he failed to really do due diligence on either the industrial success side or whether people were starving. They both suffered from the same information problems, although he can be faulted for not treating the reports of starvation with greater urgency than the reports of industrial problems. I'm curious to look into a more detailed account of what happened with steel production, Dikötter seems to indicate that most of the steel produced was useless (and the party had changed the goals to be faster than Mao's initial prediction), but I haven't read further accounts as well as what happened to industrial development during the Cultural Revolution period.
My review also did not make it into the finalists. I was thinking of proposing to those in this situation that we have a little subgroup where we read each other's reviews and give feedback. If I did, would you be interested?
Are you still interested. We have been planning, and are almost ready to start. If you are still interested, please have a look at the post **NEW MEMBERS? on Open thread 269, new underground bunker for Book Review Group planning.
I just posted some information for the group for people who’d like to give and get feedback on each other’s book reviews. So as not to clutter up this thread, I put it on an old open thread, number 254. It’s the newest post on the thread, so should be on top if you sort by New. I headed my post **BOOK REVIEW GROUP**, so if you have trouble locating it it should be easy to find by using Cmd F to search for **book. If you haven’t posted a response there within a coupla days we’ll assume you’re not interested in participating.
The codex helped vet my manuscript "Physics to God" about a year ago. Thank you to all who helped us go through it. The book is still not finished, but my colleague and I have started turning it into a podcast.
The link below is the introductory episode of the new podcast miniseries that we’re launching soon. It takes you on a guided journey through modern physics to discover God. We start with the argument of fine tuning of the constants of nature. If you like science and God, you’ll appreciate this podcast.
I wish you well, but I do fear this has the potential to turn into a raging bonfire. But then again, the people round these parts are generally civil so that should avoid the worst excesses of "stupid invisible sky fairy believers" 😀
I'm a little worried about that too. I think I'm naively hoping that we can have an intelligent discussion over the merits of the argument, but there's definitely a part of me that knows better. Still, I have to try...
Sorry if I'm off the mark, not having looked at your material, but I wonder how this doesn't fall into an intellectual God of the gaps, or God of the philosophers. The kind of gods with menial jobs to do, like fine tuning quantum constants, playing favorites among iron-age tribes, or fulfilling the part of a "first cause" to produce a bit of satisfaction in the brains of nerds who really wants to see the spot filled with something they can slap a label on.
If we're going to talk about God, bring it on about cosmic love, self-surrender and self-lifting veils of immanent timeless rapture!
God-of-the-Gaps reasoning is a line of thinking that is employed to plug a hole in our current understanding of the universe by saying "God did it". There are three characteristic problems of “God of the gaps” reasoning.
1. Since, in truth, there is no direct inference to God but only a lack of knowledge, this type of fallacious argument is merely an argument from ignorance. When a reasonable person is ignorant and has a gap in their knowledge, they simply admit that they do not know. They wisely submit that when they gain more knowledge, maybe they'll be able to pursue a deeper understanding of the phenomenon at hand.
2. A particular gap within a scientific explanation is likely due to our insufficient knowledge and is no indication of the failure of science, or of the hand of God. Positing divine intervention for each gap in our knowledge is a bad methodology, and hinders the advancement of science. It’s far more reasonable to say that the overall theory is sound and that we’re only lacking knowledge of certain details - the gaps.
3. Any "theory of the gaps" posits something - whether it is God, luck, or anything else - as a solution to every gap in knowledge. Any answer that can be used to explain anything at all, in truth explains nothing at all, because no matter what the universe looks like, that would be an “explanation”. That’s not really explaining anything.
As we've formulated it, the argument from fine tuning doesn’t have any of these three problems.
1. The inference of intelligence from fine tuning of the constants is not an argument from ignorance. As we explain in the episodes, scientific knowledge went through two distinct stages regarding the values of the constants. The first stage was prior to the discovery of fine tuning, when the constants presented the mystery of how these seemingly arbitrary constants could possibly be explained. If someone had tried to solve this mystery at this stage by saying "God determined the number 137.03597, and we no longer need another explanation for it." this would have been God-of-the-Gaps reasoning. The wise approach at that point was to admit that we had no knowledge about the cause of the constants, and to continue searching for further insight.
Despite the initial ignorance about the cause for the values of the constants, patience paid off and scientists attained more understanding about the numbers. In the second stage of their understanding of the constants, scientists began to gain knowledge about the numbers. They discovered that the constants were not arbitrary, but that their fine tuned values were required for the universe to be ordered, complex, and structured.
The knowledge that the values of the constants were fine tuned points towards an intelligent cause which specifically selected those values for the purpose of bringing about our complex universe. This teleological explanation for the constants only became possible once science had advanced to the point of understanding the fundamental laws of physics and the critical role that these specific quantities played in the laws.
2. The problem of explaining the constants is a problem with the very foundations of physics. It deals with the form of the fundamental laws of nature themselves, not with the detailed phenomenon explained by those laws (for example, why is the sky blue?) A lack of understanding regarding the foundation of a subject is totally different than a mere gap within the details of a subject whose foundations are well understood. While a gap in details is likely to be filled upon gaining more knowledge, a problem with the foundation often demands a new type of explanation.
3. The theory of an intelligent cause does not explain any possible universe we could have observed. Without the discovery of fine tuning, it would have been natural to assume that our universe, or some close variation of it, could have existed with a wide range of values of the constants. Had this been the case, there would have been no indication of an intelligent cause for the values of the constants, and to posit a teleological explanation would have been ungrounded and entirely speculative. However, with the discovery of fine tuning, a teleological explanation naturally emerged.
An intelligent cause is only a valid inference because we have first observed an ordered, fine tuned, and intelligible universe. Were the universe to have been nonsensical chaos, then an intelligent cause would have been a very poor explanation for it. An intelligent agent does not explain every possible universe we could have observed. It only explains a fine tuned and ordered universe, not a disordered one with no fine tuning.
So, my understanding of g is that it represents the general factor, that is, if you give people a bunch of different tests, there's a positive correlation between all these tests (g). This just falls out of the results with no particular effort. We then measure this factor in a given individual with an IQ test, which asks a bunch of different questions and looks at the overall result, and then gets rated, normed, etc, to produce an IQ score.
However, there are things which have a significant correlation to IQ, such as attractiveness or height, but definitely don't fit with the social perception of the term "intelligence." Given that g is just "the thing that appears when you look at the correlations between a bunch of different tests," is there any mathematical/principled reason for attractiveness and height to be excluded from g, or is it just tradition/arbitrary choice to examine this subpart of g when we skip it on IQ tests?
I ask because it seems to me like, if g is identified only as a correlation between things, and attractiveness correlates to it, g doesn't really represent "intelligence," we've just chosen to specifically look at the "intelligence" part of g and ignore/dismiss the non-intelligence parts. Is there something I'm missing?
We seem to have made a connection between intelligence and beauty such that jokes like "it's a good job you're pretty" are understandable in the context of "you will need to rely on your looks because you have no brains", and contrariwise, that plain girls need to work and study hard because they won't be able to attract a man on their looks alone. See Daphne versus Velma in the Scooby-Doo cartoons (ignore the Mindy Kaling mess); Daphne isn't dumb, but Velma is tagged as the book-worm brainy type *and* the less attractive (short, chunkier, wears glasses).
I think the same goes for men: the tall, handsome, athletic jocks versus the short, glasses-wearing nerds. How much this shakes out in real life is hard to tell, but dumb blonde jokes were based on stereotypes about "the more physically attractive, the less intelligent". Possibly because being prettier/more attractive does make it a little easier, as in less smart (not stupid, but less smart) people can have an advantage *if* they have good looks to compensate, whereas being plain but brainy leaves you on the sidelines as a bluestocking or wallflower.
It's how closely correlated they are, not whether there's a correlation at all.
So, for example, let's take the following bet. For $1000:
-You need to guess someone's Verbal SAT score, within plus or minus 40 points
-You can ask one question about the person.
Arguably the best question you can ask is for their Math SAT score. This isn't intuitively obvious, it's easy to imagine someone with a 800 Math score and a 400 Verbal score, but generally that's not what we see, we see scores cluster relatively tightly. Conversely, if you asked for height...that's not very useful. If I tell you the guy scored a 650 on his Math SAT, you can be pretty confident his Verbal SAT is around there. If I tell you the guy is 5" 11', that doesn't really tell you anything.
It's not enough for things to be correlated, anything between 0.00000001 and 0.999999999 is some degree of correlated, how correlated they are is important. g is simply the theory/framework that different tests of intelligence/IQ are very predictive and more highly correlated than anything else.
Having said that, you've got some funky ideas here:
g doesn't just fall out of the results, you have to use some pretty questionable statistical techniques to arrive at it (at least Charles Murray did)
I'm not sure what studies you're seeing that attractiveness and height are correlated with IQ, unless you're looking at like malnutrition studies from India.
> I'm not sure what studies you're seeing that attractiveness and height are correlated with IQ, unless you're looking at like malnutrition studies from India.
Friend, that's "Psychology Today". About twenty or more years back, when I was buying magazines, I was buying that alongside the astrology ones because they were equivalent in "amusing but tendentious contentions about personality".
At least the astrology ones usually came with pretty gemstones and pictures of tarot cards as well.
"The National Child Development Study (NCDS) includes all babies born during the week of March 9, 1958 in Great Britain (England, Wales, and Scotland), and has followed them for more than half a century throughout their lives. When the children were 7 and again when they were 11, their teachers were asked to describe them physically. For the purpose of the analysis below, the children are defined to be attractive if they were described as attractive at both age 7 and age 11. They were defined to be unattractive otherwise."
Can I say "we wouldn't do that nowadays"? Because asking a grown adult to "rate your seven year old pupils by how bangable you think they are" would get you hauled off by the rozzers, the social services, and the local branch of the "report paedophiles to us" government body.
And I don't mean that in a "there's no code, there's no data, bad paper" sense. I mean it's just a blog post and a few graphs that don't load. It's got an obvious problem, we're using the teacher's rating of the student's appearance at ages 7 and 11 (but IQ testing @ 7, 11, and 16, weird), which the author knows is an obvious problem, but then he just references an earlier post and that one is also just a blog post. So the post you link acknowledges it doesn't prove anything but uses as support for another, earlier post...
I'll say this, I like the samples he's pulling from, those seem solid, but *shrug* this is psych, it's got horrific replication problems and this is not even a psych paper, it's just a blog post without code.
That one is based on birth date of 1958 so I think the testing at 11 is not IQ as such, maybe, but in the context of the 11-plus exam, and 16 is when the Brits do the GCEs. 1958+11 = 1969 which would be within the time-frame of everyone being selected out by the 11-plus:
"The eleven-plus (11+) is a standardized examination administered to some students in England and Northern Ireland in their last year of primary education, which governs admission to grammar schools and other secondary schools which use academic selection. The name derives from the age group for secondary entry: 11–12 years.
The eleven-plus was once used throughout England and Wales, but is now only used in counties and boroughs in England that offer selective schools instead of comprehensive schools. Also known as the transfer test, it is especially associated with the Tripartite System which was in use from 1944 until it was phased out across most of the UK by 1976."
The GCE/GCSE were known as the O-Levels and depending on performance in these exams, pupils might go on to do A-Levels or choose vocational training instead:
"The GCE is composed of three levels; they are, in increasing order of difficulty:
- the Ordinary Level ("O Level");
- the Advanced Subsidiary Level ("A1 Level" or "AS Level"), higher than the O Level, serving as a level in its own right, and functioning as a precursor to the full Advanced Level; and
- Advanced Level ("A Level").
The General Certificate of Education Advanced Level (GCE "A Levels") is an entry qualification for universities in the United Kingdom and many other locations worldwide."
So testing at ages 7, 11 and 16 in the UK would not be IQ tests as such, but performance on national state exams.
Interesting, alright. I guess I learned something today.
This paper is from the LSE and builds off a Herrnstein & Murray paper, so I guess it's got some credibility. At the underlying theory, basically assortive mating, is feasible. Calling it a "funky idea" was unfair. I doubt it's true, for a variety Deiseach has laid out, but it's not a crank idea. I'm trying to calibrate my skepticism standards correctly.
Having said that, I think my initial answer to the original question still stands pretty clearly. Attractiveness is not g or IQ unless it's mostly capturing health, which the UK study does and the American study corrects for. When you properly control for that, the effect is minor (2 IQ per standard deviation of attractiveness) and pretty clearly not determinative.
Okay, that's the study carried out by this guy which he then references in "Psychology Today". It's not an independent study, and he is over-stating some of the facts; e.g. in one part he says the NCDS is a study of all babies born in 1958 in Great Britain. It's not, it's a study of the babies born in *one* week in 1958, and it started out as a follower-upper to maternal and perinatal mortality studies:
"The origins of the NCDS can be found in the Perinatal Mortality Survey (PMS) which was then sponsored by the National Birthday Trust Fund and set up to collect information about the social and obstetric factors associated with stillbirth and death in early infancy.
The NCDS was first led by the paediatrician Neville Butler assisted by the National Birthday Trust Fund. The survey was initially planned as a one-off study to investigate the reasons for the relatively high rate of stillbirths (38.5 stillbirths per 1,000 births) in the UK compared to other developed countries. 98% of women (17,205) who gave birth in England, Scotland and Wales to 17,415 babies during the week of 3–9 March 1958 completed the survey. Records of birth deaths to 7,618 women and about 5,000 autopsy reports were also collected over the period of March–May 1958."
If I'm going to be catty here (perish the thought!), sorry Satoshi, you can try all you like to claim smart people are the most handsome, but going by your little profile pic in "Psychology Today", you are distinctly average looking. So either being smart does not correlate with being devilishly handsome, or, er, you're not as smart as you claim to be?
I mean, if I take what he claims as true, then smart people are more attractive - so long as they're British, but not if they're American. This might have to do with the British cohort studied being overwhelmingly white ("97.8% of the NCDS respondents are Caucasian") or it means "handsome by British standards" ("The British sample has one of the best measures of general intelligence in all survey data, but a comparatively weak measure of physical attractiveness. In contrast, the American sample has a stronger measure of physical attractiveness, but a comparatively weak measure of general intelligence").
That last seems to be saying "The Brits are smarter but uglier, the Yanks are prettier but dumber" which, uh, doesn't that contradict the claim he is making?
EDIT: Also, part of the criteria do seem to have hold-overs from when this was mortality and child-rearing study, as there are definite "does this child seem neglected?" criteria here:
"At ages 7 and 11, the teacher of each NCDS respondent is asked to describe the child's physical appearance, by choosing up to three adjectives from a highly eclectic list of five:
“attractive,” “unattractive or not attractive,” “looks underfed or undernourished,” “abnormal feature,” and “scruffy or slovenly & dirty.” A respondent is coded as attractive= 1 if he or she is described as “attractive” at both age 7 and age 11 by two different teachers, 0 otherwise. I use this binary measure of physical attractiveness as the independent variable. 62.0% of all NCDS respondents are coded as
attractive."
"Underfed/undernourished/scruffy/dirty and slovenly" are not measuring physical attractiveness as such.
EDIT EDIT: And the American study is a different beast altogether, and the criteria are - how you say? - subjective as fuck:
"At the conclusion of the in-home interview at each wave, the Add Health interviewer rates the respondent's physical attractiveness on a five-point ordinal scale (1= very unattractive, 2=unattractive, 3= about average, 4= attractive, 5= very attractive)."
So if the interviewer likes buxom short brunettes and you're a tall slender blonde, tough luck being rated above a 3 there, sister!
I swear, this makes the astrology magazines look like models of scientific rigour. At least when erecting a horoscope you can calculate does the native have Venus in Taurus which inclines to physical beauty, not a 5-point scale based on "does the interviewer got the hots for redheads"!
> I'm not sure what studies you're seeing that attractiveness and height are correlated with IQ, unless you're looking at like malnutrition studies from India.
Exactly. If attractiveness were correlated with IQ, LA would be world-renowned as home to the world’s greatest brains, and that is...not exactly its reputation.
BTW, Himmler and other senior Nazis had similar theories and recruited for their elite institutions solely based on athletic prowess and body measurements. It didn’t work out so well.
> Exactly. If attractiveness were correlated with IQ, LA would be world-renowned as home to the world’s greatest brains, and that is...not exactly its reputation.
Even if the correlation was very high, the absolute prettiest people would not be the absolute smartest people, because the correlation != 1. Very silly point. Obviously things that are selecting purely for, e.g., academic success are going to have higher academic success than places selecting for things that purely attractiveness, and vice versa.
>BTW, Himmler and other senior Nazis had similar theories and recruited for their elite institutions solely based on athletic prowess and body measurements. It didn’t work out so well.
Funny enough, you could also use those senior Nazis to draw the same conclusion but from the opposite direction, in that after the war the surviving leadership were given IQ tests in prison and all scored very highly, but were nowhere near exemplars of "Aryan beauty" themselves (Allied propaganda famously making use of this fact).
For one thing, attractiveness is very subjective, and apparently can be heavily influenced by cultural norms. You can see this in such subjective things as clothing and hairstyles (compare 1970s American long straight hair with 1980s curly/poufy hair).
As much as it correlates, I would expect some aspects of attractiveness to be a result of intelligence - knowing what to wear and how to present yourself can be a very cognitive skill. Changing your hairstyle as cultural winds shift, or being at the forefront of such a change, indicates an ability to recognize external factors and accommodate them. Being beautiful, on the other hand, doesn't seem to imply that someone is intelligent.
Secondly, if we are interested in purely cognitive aspects of g (even assuming g was instead what you seem to by implying - some kind of genetic superiority that applies to many positive aspects of a person and not just intelligence) then we would not want to obscure our picture of g with non-cognitive aspects. Every additional factor you add to a comparison, the less clear the results will be. If you've got your measure of intelligence and something you want to compare it to (let's say, lifetime earnings), adding height or intelligence will reduce that correlation, even if it's highly correlated with both other things. It's a less pure test of what we might be trying to determine.
I'm thinking that may actually be your intention, to control for attractiveness or height when looking at the results of a person's life. If those are huge benefits for a person's lifetime earnings, and we claim that intelligence (implying merit for high mental positions), then we're misleading ourselves. That's not an unreasonable thing to look at, but is not at all what people typically mean when they are talking about g, so trying to add different aspects to g instead of what we intend to measure can only mislead. You could also throw in parental income or education or mean calories/day consumed and compare that to a lifetime outcome, but it would be very odd for our meaning of g to imply those are somehow related.
Personal style is key. Having a well curated style that makes one stand out in a good way will cause people to overlook many issues, and will often attract higher quality friends/partners than trying to overfit to perceived social norms. (People used to call this being cool.)
Attractiveness is also heavily dependent on lifestyle factors such as diet and exercise, and higher G should in theory improve one’s ability to manage those. Not to mention that minor cosmetic procedures can correct many common issues with physical appearance, but of course you’ll need the cash to get those procedures. High G helps a lot with that.
g factor is the mathematical construct that refers to the correlation between different cognitive tests, specifically. It's intended to be a mathematical representation related to general intelligence, not just all of the things that happen to correlate, a lot of which (like height and attractiveness) are probably mediated by wealth.
Right, but, why do we privilege the cognitive tests? Why *wouldn't* attractiveness count, other than us thinking it shouldn't? Is there some practical difference between "thing that correlates to g, but isn't cognitive" and "thing that correlates to g, but is cognitive"?
E: It's my understanding you actually cannot subdivide g into subfactors; if g is one, two, or eight different things, then it's statistically identical.
I'd guess the correlation of capabilities on the various cognitive tests with attractiveness is fairly low (especially when you consider attractiveness is hard to rate objectively), so it's probably just not very informative.
As an aside, I don't think it adds information - if you know someone's g factor and want to predict their scores on a cognitive test then also knowing attractiveness probably wouldn't help (otoh, knowing their score on a similar cognitive test probably would).
But in many cases, people (particularly on the biological-determinism side of things) are interested in the fact that g can be used to predict much more exciting things than your score on a test similar to the ones you've already taken, such as your educational attainment or income, and sometimes in using this predictive value to suggest that your intelligence level is causally responsible for most of your life success. Paired with stats on the heritability and stability of g, this slides easily into arguments that inequality is meritocratically justifiable or that trying to remedy it through social programs is futile.
As a constructivist, I take CW to be making the compelling point that in this context, the definition of g is subtly begging the question. If the justification for caring about IQ is that whatever it measures correlates with actually-important life-success metrics, why would you calculate this master predictor statistic based only on the *cognitive* factors that predict success, rather than pooling all demonstrably relevant metrics? A cynic might suspect that it's because the g-based methodology guarantees that you'll end up with an explanation that makes it easier to argue that the successful deserve their success, while ignoring factors that point towards the influence of cultural injustices like lookism and classism.
I will confess I'm not totally sure what your question is. One answer might be "because g is a construct that was developed to describe the tendency of different cognitive measures to correlate, and thus imply a sort of 'general intelligence', and not just the name given to a bunch of things that correlate for any reasons". The boundaries around the concept were drawn for maximum usefulness to the people who originally defined it.
I would argue that this is a perfectly reasonable set of boundaries, though. The underlying reason that explains the g factor is most likely "because intelligence, conceptually, is more or less one thing in normal brains, with some kind of general root cause". Drawing a conceptual boundary to encompass everything that correlates with it, including height, attractiveness, wealth, etc., might be useful in some other regard, but it suddenly admits a wide variety of causes in various directions.
The reason I ask the question is that if, in fact, g correlates with attractiveness as much as many cognitive tasks, that would logically mean that g *doesn't* mean "one thing in normal brains," it means some other correlative factor, probably something like "good health during development." Which might *relate* to that one thing in normal brains, but isn't actually it.
This seems to have a circular definition problem. It's sort of like saying "what if your score on an IQ test correlates more with your appearance than how well you did on the IQ test?"
The IQ test is made up of many different subtests, all of which correlate to g. When you put all of these different subtests together, the differences even out to produce a final IQ result, which you can then look back and find a correlation between that and each individual task.
If, however, you took out a low-correlation task (e.g. cancellation tasks in WISC-IV) and replaced it with attractiveness, which has a higher correlation to IQ, the result should presumably be more accurate to the true value of g.
I'd be surprised if this exists (I've done 5 startups) - high intelligence and rationality can help, but it's like a tenth of the total high-level skills you need to deploy well to do a startup successfully.
Likewise, rationality per se won't do much for you - most of the people you're dealing with (employees, customers, whatever) aren't rationalists, or even rational, so it isn't necessarily something you can deploy to great effect.
I'd personally estimate the highest impact of rationality in this domain would be knowing enough evidence-based stuff to keep your personal biggest levers (nutrition, exercise, sleep, delegation, financial calculations, timings of different things) on track to optimize your own performance.
That said, if you do find any books or blogs on this specifically, I'd be interested in hearing about it too.
Ethan Mollick shares a lot of studies of startups on his twitter account and has written a book summarizing the literature called "the unicorn's shadow". That's a pretty good source of information. But I was wondering if there was an evidence based entrepreneurship movement/community I could join to exchange with people.
Oh also, there's not much legit science on entrepreneurism, or being entrepreneurial, that I know of - it's one of those areas that's strongly dependent on genetics and personality at the individual level, and on condensing business opportunities from the vapor of nuance and pain points you see in daily life, such that it doesn't lend itself well to scientific study.
They have it on duolingo now. The case/gender system in German is probably the most confusing part for an English speaker (I never got the hang of der/dem/den/des/die/das), and Yiddish has a similar one. Though it is different enough to possibly be confusing. Yiddish has no genitive, and a few of the case endings don't match the corresponding German one.
I get what you're saying, but, define "all the way", cause from what I know you could never stop learning a language. Also German is very difficult so it could take you ~5 years to get proficient.
It depends what you want to achieve in your studies. If developing active proficiency (e.g. speaking) in German is important for you, it's probably a good idea to postpone Yiddish for a while, since you may suffer cognitive interference from studying two similar languages at the same time. (This is especially true if you are self-teaching and don't have extensive opportunities for interacting with German speakers.)
If you are more interested in passive proficiency in German (reading and listening), then you can probably start on Yiddish whenever you feel like it. Interference is less of a problem when you aren't having to come up with the right word or grammatical structure to express your own thoughts. (There can still be interference in comprehension, but my guess is it would probably be a very minor problem at most.)
Maybe I’m biased because I learned it relatively early in life, but I don’t think German is that difficult at all for English speakers to learn. Pronunciation is dead easy versus French or even Spanish and there are so many cognates that you have a good start on vocabulary going in.
Especially true if you are optimizing for conversational and reading proficiency vs. becoming a good writer. Written German has a significantly different grammar rule set from spoken German and that trips a lot of people up.
I’d say if you want to learn Yiddish, get your German up to a good level since you’re already focused on that.
I would say up to 'conversational level' or 'working level' or whatever is practical for you. So that you can use it in everyday life, which could include interesting conversations, or reading or listening to podcasts or whatever, without much effort. For most people, some kind of regular use is a precondition that the language will not get lost/ be mostly forgotten.
IMO, start using the language as early and as frequently as possible. In principle, I think it's fine to learn several languages at the same time, but in practice this only holds if you're sure you have the time and perseverence to carry on with all of them.
I just completed 8 sessions of ketamine for my psychiatric problems. I must say that this is not panacea but I find it very helpfull. Im sorry that this treatment is inaccessible to most people.
I have been using 100mg of nasal ketamine once a week at home for a year now, and I second this assessment.
In my experience, ketamine kinda resets negative accumulated emotions such as dread. For me, it does not exactly solve my depression (I still have difficulties getting out of bed and going to work), but at least it gets me out of everything-is-terrible territory.
100mg? I’m curious, is that regimen prescribed by a physician? It seems like quite a bit compared to what I’ve seen recommended and is getting more into mild tripping territory. Have you tried other psychedelics, eg psilocybin?
I originally got a few sessions of ketamine IV in a doctors office, first perhaps 40mg then 50mg.
Using the handy table at https://lorienpsych.com/2021/11/02/ketamine/#8_Whats_the_right_dose_of_ketamine I determined that I would need about twice the dose for nasal delivery. Originally I used 2ml @ 50mg/ml glass vials meant for injection in a nasal spray, so it was convenient to round to 100mg. That dosage seemed ok for me, so I kept it even as I switched to multi-dosage vials.
I don't think I get high from that dose of ketamine. I do not feel particularly addicted either, working late on a ketamine evening and deciding to postpone it by one day has been known to happen. I tend to listen to podcasts for the ~ 2h I am mostly affected by it, which is probably less effective than making an effort at introspection.
I have not considered hallucinogens so far. From what I know the case for them treating depression is not nearly as clear cut as for ketamine, plus they tend to be controlled substances, which makes acquiring them more of a hassle.
I used ketamine for a period as an experiment, with a psychiatrist acquaintance prescribing it and advising me, and I really do not think it's a psychedelic -- at least not for me. My experience was that the more I took, the less able I was to get an overview and think about the situation and keep a coherent train of thought going. At my most affected, I forgot that the reason I felt like my mind was random andspinning was that I had taken ketamine. So ability to organize thoughts was very reduced -- but the thoughts themselves were not richer, or more random, or more affectively toned, and there were virtually no visuals. In short, ketamine definitely fucked me up but I wouldn't say it made me high. But of course YMMV.
I wrote the Bullshit Jobs review, it's the most time I've invested writing anything and I'm reasonably happy with how it came out. Also, I think the idea of BS jobs is really under discussed, so I'd love to hear feedback from anyone who read it, or anyone who has opinions on the original book or BS jobs in general.
I put it up on my SubStack if anyone's interested.
My review also did not make it into the finalists. I was thinking of proposing to those in this situation that we have a little subgroup where we read each other's reviews and give feedback. If I did, would you be interested?
I just posted some information for the group for people who’d like to give and get feedback on each other’s book reviews. So as not to clutter up this thread, I put it on an old open thread, number 254. It’s the newest post on the thread, so should be on top if you sort by New. I headed my post **BOOK REVIEW GROUP**, so if you have trouble locating it it should be easy to find by using Cmd F to search for **book. If you haven’t posted a response there within a coupla days we’ll assume you’re not interested in participating.
I have not read the book, and only portions of the review, but feel large parts of perspective are missing. Two concepts seem mixed: BS jobs are defined by whether people doing them feel useless (highly subjective) and whether BS jobs benefit society as a whole (also subjective, but less so). But one economic, capitalistic thought seems missing: if someone pays you for something, that person expects to be getting at least as much value as they give up to get it.
Regarding whether people feel useless I feel could be shortsightedness on their part. The work I did in a previous job could have involved creating a plan to organize data to pull into a software application to put documents in a closing package for a mortgage someone needs to buy a house. That's not counting the meetings, discussions with colleagues, managers, and other stakeholders. And yet the person couldn't get that mortgage if even one of those steps wasn't completed.
Another point missing in many jobs in the review, for which I will use restaurant workers as an example, is expertise. The vast majority of people could be servers, fewer could be cooks, and many people could do the various other jobs needed, like cleaning. But cooks cook better than the average person. To say that cooking food for others is something they could do for themselves is similar to saying everyone could do their own plumbing if only they had the tools and knowledge to do it.
That is not to say that BS jobs don't exist. I remember seeing a road maintenance truck on the highway refreshing the painted line on the side of the road, with a worker dropping traffic cones every few seconds, thinking the worker could be replaced by a machine, freeing him for more useful work.
If you have a machine drop cones, you still need to pick them up later, including after they've fallen over. You also need processes for a cone getting stuck in the machine. Lots of headache. Same with, like, setting up a temporary streetlight system instead of having flaggers.
I'm not saying someone doing that job should be fired, but should be given more useful work to do. Perhaps that would be picking up cones previously dropped by a machine. Picking up cones is much harder for machines to do than for people.
People may be better at setting up temporary traffic areas, such as one-lane roads for construction areas, but it also strikes me as dangerous for people to perform. I think we should have machines do dangerous jobs, rather than people.
Does anyone claim we have a shortage of work in the general economy? It can be a challenge finding a job for an individual, but individuals seeking jobs are likely to find something they can do. The question is how fast, and how well it matches their skill set.
Well, presumably they've got people doing all the work already, so it is about letting one guy go. I'm saying on that level, it's more practical to hire someone to put down and pick up cones than it is to build and maintain a machine for the same job and then maybe need a guy to pick them up anyway. (The guy may well be a trainee; the most useful thing he can do is watch other people work, and hey while you're doing that, put these cones down for us. Or maybe the main job is making sure the line is being properly applied, and stopping the driver if it isn't.)
For the dangerous stuff, yeah, I'm sure people would welcome an alternative to flagging, but your alternative has to have the same level of accuracy; otherwise it's the everyday drivers who are placed in danger when your temporary streetlight system malfunctions. A vest with radio and sign has few possible points of failure (and the radio has a backup system of "wave your sign so the other guy can see you").
I do think that the "Bullshit Jobs" thesis has a lot of the standard problems of Graeber's other work - he comes up with a really interesting theoretical proposal, but then tortures the data to make it look like he's right and everyone else is just telling a just-so story. There's value to what he's doing, but he tends to oversell it.
My interpretation is that what Graeber calls "bullshit work" is actually *mostly* classic Marxist "alienation", where the person doing one segment of a big job sees no point to it, and bears the psychological burden of doing something that feels worthless, even though it's actually value that's being extracted by someone higher up the chain. It's just that it's happening to white collar workers now, rather than just the blue collar workers of Marx's time.
There is likely some *actual* bullshit, particularly in the flunkies and box-tickers that he identifies (though much less in the other three categories he identifies), but even there, some of them likely end up producing value for reasons that the people hiring them don't properly understand. (i.e., if a company makes its division hire a diversity coordinator, and everyone treats the position as bullshit, there might still occasionally be *some* benefit to minorities on staff when someone accidentally identifies some real racism and gets it dealt with.)
> worker dropping traffic cones every few seconds, thinking the worker could be replaced by a machine, freeing him for more useful work.
Two thoughts come to mind:
A) there has to actually be useful work for them to be doing instead for that to apply. If the other work is waiting for the line painting to finish or requires equipment already busy, you might "Free up" the worker only to find them just waiting on deck for a task.
B) You probably saw the cone-dropping task in good conditions, while a human worker can deal with weird stuff that is much harder for a machine (that would have to be paid for and maintained) to do.
A) If they have no other useful work to do currently then the fault lies either with themselves or their supervisor. The solution for the problem of marking freshly painted lines was to have a person drop cones. For a short-term solution, sure, this may work, but not long-term.
B) I cannot help but think this would only happen in similar conditions. One would not paint the road in severe wind, or any rain, or any snow, and even if they did, such conditions would be miserable for the worker, and better done by a machine.
People ARE much better than machines at some tasks. And that is what they should be doing.
I'm reading the book right now and enjoying it very much, felt a little regret even that I didn't discover it sooner to write a review about it. Little did I know. Thank you for making it.
Bullshit Jobs (the concept, not the book) is one of those things that keep gnawing at you like a bad tooth, a feeling of things being wrong without you really knowing how to put a name to it. Coining a name for it is a Red Pill.
I have a large collection of things I resent Civilization for, and this was one of it, the huge surplus in production (originally caused by Agriculture and super-charged by the Industrial Revolution) that allows you a generous "budget" of bullshit, the ability to be useless and still avoid the punch of reality hitting back. I despise Corporations and Banks and Lawyer firms and this entire **gestures broadly** Bullshit-Managerial complex, and I don't respect anyone working anywhere near it a single speck of dust worth of respect.
The only thing I hated about it is the author's agenda of force-inserting a narrative about how women were so much more oppressed than men, it feels so fake and makes no sense to a degree that it felt added after the fact by an editor, but given the author is university professor in a social science it's not far-fetched that he felt the need to preach the bible of wokality in a book about Capitalism and economic class.
I will drop by on your substack and leave a detailed review-review soon.
If anyone or anyone you know or anyone you know you think knows someone you think has any solutions, partial solutions, insights, or even tips please visit this page and communicate them to Paul F. Christiano or any other relevant person at the Alignment Research Center.
Software developers: I asked a similar question on here before, and got some very informative replies, so I'm trying again.
I'm working on a one-man project and I don't want it to stay a one-man project. However, I am not sure what changes I need to make to ensure other people can easily come in and work on it with me.
I keep coming up against double-binds:
- I would need to write down all the knowledge that's in my head, to give other devs a fair map of what's going on. But the project is still developing so any docs I wrote would soon become out of date again. So why not keep working until the project is stable and then I only have to write the docs once? (But at that point I've had to do the most of the project without help.)
- I can only work so fast as one man, and two or three of us could work two or three times as fast. But right now, there's just me, and I would have to stop work entirely (to instead focus on docs and diagrams and explanations) in order to get to a position where others can join. I haven't much experience finding and working with other coders but from what I have seen, everything slows down compared to one man just getting on with it alone. So I'm paying for more eventual manpower with a large upfront slowdown, and so it's easy just to put that off and carry on working. There will come a point (and I've no idea if I'm already there) where the shortest path becomes just to finish it myself.
- I can't afford to hire full time software developers, so any new member of the team would be either a contractor, a volunteer, or something else. I have to prepare for the situation where they disappear again, leaving me with a bunch of code I then don't understand and have to work around. Or, I *do* already understand it, because I've been reading and going over his work instead of doing my own - in which case, how was it a speedup to bring him in? (It would be a different story if there were five coders and I was full time going through all their work, but that's not where we are.)
- I know how I work right now, and that allows me to be fast. I have my own preferred approaches, some of which might be very unorthodox, but all of which pull their weight. New sets of eyes on the team will be able to spot problems and better ways to do things, which is good. They will also be able to fight and obstruct and make it harder to get things done - for example, by having their own favourite workflows and frameworks and whatnot, and pushing to swap to those instead of the equivalents we're already using, rather than spend that effort in advancing the project. This extra aggro could make the extra teammate actually destructive, in addition to adding a slowdown.
Basically, I know that in principle I should be getting other people to help me. I'm intending to end up running a business based around the project, so I can't long term be full time on the coding in any case.
But every time I think about doing that, the list of complications it engenders makes me think the most efficient thing right now is to keep doing it myself. This is not obviously true long term but it seems true at any given moment.
I think you're approaching your question from the wrong end. The reasons to continue working solo or not are not technical. The main thing is what your intentions are with your project, and what the social pathways are around that kind of thing. If you have another source of income and are not feeling like betting your career on this, you can keep doing it solo as a side project. If you're a bit more adventurous, you can invest some of your own money and try to slowly bootstrap it into a solo business. At any point you can consider contracting out specific things, e.g coding up the responsive design, or fleshing out your APIs. If you're very excited about your idea, and want to try making it a hot success, there's the whole circuit of incubators and networking and VCs. If you go that route, at some point the biggest part of your work will be dealing with the business, so you'll have to either pass the tech part to someone else, or remain as the tech guy and find yourself a business-oriented co-founder.
On the technical side, either way is fine, as long as it works for you. Most development projects in companies are handled by teams, but there are plenty functioning long-term solo projects with hundreds of thousands of lines of code and decades of development.
You should document as you code. Short comments, only the important stuff.
> But the project is still developing so any docs I wrote would soon become out of date again.
Are you rewriting all parts of code all the time? I can't imagine how that would work; I would assume you spend so much time rewriting the old code that there is no time left to add new features. In that case, stabilizing the existing code would already make you more productive by freeing your hands to do the new features.
If some parts of code don't change anymore, you can document those, and let the new person work on something that is related to them.
> I haven't much experience finding and working with other coders but from what I have seen, everything slows down compared to one man just getting on with it alone.
"If you want to go fast, walk alone. If you want to go far, walk with a friend."
In my experience, the things I do alone often start fast, and then at some moment collapse under their own weight. Realize that "future you" is also a stranger, and if your project does not allow strangers to contribute meaningfully, you have to complete it while it is still in your short-term memory.
Pair programming doesn't work for everyone, but seems like a possible start. The other person can watch you code while you loudly explain your reasoning, give you some ideas, and at some moment accumulate enough knowledge that they can do a subtask on their own.
Or you could do test-driven development, write the tests together, then let the person try to implement the functionality.
> I have to prepare for the situation where they disappear again, leaving me with a bunch of code I then don't understand and have to work around.
That's what the documentation and unit tests are for.
> having their own favourite workflows and frameworks and whatnot, and pushing to swap to those instead of the equivalents we're already using, rather than spend that effort in advancing the project.
Either the new frameworks are dramatically better, and then you probably should learn them, or they are mostly equivalent, in which case the other person is an idiot. (A 10% better framework is not worth rewriting the entire project. A 100% better framework might be, depending on the stage of the project.) You are the boss, you decide. Sometimes the right decision is to fire people.
I think your overall intuition shows you correctly that there are two kinds of projects -- something small you can do quickly alone over a few weekends, and something large that requires many people and lot of work. And yes, the latter is slower, measured by lines written or features added, per day. However, if you want to make a large project, you already made the choice. The question is not "how to make a large project in a way that resembles making small projects" but "what are the best practices for making large projects".
This all makes sense, I just need to decide how to apply it.
I didn't actually expect to be in this position. The actual history of this project was, "I'll knock up a quick demo (learning the basics as I go), then find an expert to redo it for me." Then once the demo worked, I couldn't find anyone who wanted to help, and the larger contracting companies I approached were all mindbogglingly expensive. So it became, "I'll just do the next bit myself while we're looking for the right guy." Fast forward a long time and I'm now at the point where it probably makes sense to take my work and call it the official version rather than pay someone else to redo it from scratch.
EDIT: I find it quite hard not to see frameworks as faddy. They tend to come with their own little "ideologies" of how you should work, which often means they're more excited about making you obey their new rules and principles instead of actually solving your own problems in the quickest way. Which would be less of an imposition if it wasn't 100% certain that next year everyone will be trying to move to a new one with a new Way you have to learn. Also a lot of frameworks seem to exist in order to simplify the workflows or solve the problems created by a previous framework.
If you actually made the creators write down the benefits and workflow of using their framework from the perspective of someone who wasn't using anything at all, and who only wanted to hear terminology relevant to their actual working domain, I suspect most of them would be incoherent.
I find everything about the node.js ecosystem, for example, seems explicitly written to make no fucking sense to someone who doesn't already live their lives inside the node.js ecosystem.
I agree about the frameworks. I think that after a few years the chaos gets settled... but then usually the entire language is abandoned, some new language becomes the new fad, and the entire circus starts again... with shitty IDEs full of bugs, a new framework every day, etc.
I am not familiar with JS; I mostly work in Java. I have learned a few frameworks that no longer exist. At this moment, Spring seems to be a winner. Luckily, it is modular, and you can choose to only use parts of it, if you like. But a few years ago, the choice was: JSP, Struts, Stripes, JSF, PrimeFaces... I don't remember the rest, every company used something different, the newer versions were sometimes dramatically incompatible with the older ones, all of this just to render some Java output into HTML. Five or six different frameworks for logging; two major frameworks for relational databases. At every new project, you had to learn half of the stuff from scratch (not just the principles, but also the known bugs and workarounds). Java for Android was quite different from Java for Everything Else. And there were also JVM alternatives to Java itself, such as Kotlin or Scala. It seemed like you could spend a lifetime learning it all (plus many things I didn't mention because I never used them, such as Liferay Portal which seems to be a universe on its own), and in five years any of that could be hopelessly obsolete, but if you say at a job interview that you never worked with it, they will be like "huh... but you applied to the position of a *senior* developer, how can you *not* know that?"
I see this as a sign that software is not "there" yet. The reason everyone constantly feels the urge to build a new framework is because they're always conscious that the tool they have is not right for the job. No one feels this urge when using a hammer, or the wheel, because those components have successfully fulfilled the promise they made when you chose them. I'm very interested in thinking about what software might look like when it gets solved properly.
Not just software. Why are there twenty different types of USB ports?
Similar situation is with the programming languages. It seems like every month someone invents a new one. (And of course, when a new programming language becomes popular, the battle of frameworks starts again on the fresh territory.) Sometimes there is a good reason, different situations require different tools, but I still suspect there are way more tools than actually different situations.
- Decide on a coding convention / style guide, and have others comment their code and name variables/functions properly
- Use an issue tracker of some kind, gitlab or whatever. Helps you prioritize and keep track of what everyone is doing. Add a section for "review-ready" and require pull-requests. This approach suits AGILE or whatever methodology you want. And, it goes without saying, use a versioning system.
- Instead of writing "everything", create a quick UML diagram of some kind as a stand-in for that "map". Then write notes and create a presentation. Likely developers will be focusing on one component at a time.
- Learn more about management and make it a priority to manage well. Developers won't stick around if you don't get this right. I think leaning towards being extra-flexible will probably be necessary at the outset, if you're not enticing people with cash.
Can you contact me to explain what it is you're working on?
I've been contracted to work on undocumented legacy systems where none of the developers were on board anymore. So it's definitely possible for your +1 to learn and understand what your code does without any supervision.
That will be less efficient than you running them through it, so it comes down to balancing what's the optimal amount of your time to spend to make their onboarding easier.
I find having at least one other person on any project very valuable, since code reviews are a low effort, high impact technique for code quality in my experience. Those also make sure that at least 2 people know what's going on for every functionality, so it's not as painful if someone is absent or drops out.
Pair programming is also a great tool for crucial or tricky parts.
Note: The dilemma reminds me very much of replacing a system with a new one: The team working on the old one keeps adding new functionality because of business requirements, giving the new team a hard time to catch up and forcing them to aim for moving targets. I've not seen it done gracefully yet.
Reverse engineering what I've done is one thing, and I'm sure anyone can do that. I suppose I'm more worried about someone coming in and doing work in a different way than I'm used to, and sort of stepping on my toes.
I've never tried pair programming, and to be honest I have no idea how it would even work for me. (I work from home, and at whatever strange hours I feel like.) I also don't know any local people who have the requisite skills who I could even ask.
I would greatly have appreciated a second set of eyes on this thing as I was building it though, so I can see the value.
You've just discovered one of the great dilemmas. There's a huge overhead going from 1->2+ developers. It's up to you to decide whether the scope of the project necessitates biting that bullet or not.
Note that writing documentation that makes your project understandable to any dev with minimal help from you and getting a specific person to understand your code well enough to contribute are two very different things. If you hire someone (or a small team) you can spend a week (or whatever) verbally describing things that seem relevant for them to know, answering questions, and teaching in general. This is less efficient than writing documentation once and for all, but that's not a great idea for a developing codebase anyway, as you already mentioned.
Then once you already have one other person who understands things well enough, they can also teach others and write documentation (probably with some malus on efficiency and correctness since they are not you), so the effort you spent teaching them is not lost.
> So why not keep working until the project is stable and then I only have to write the docs once?
Writing docs describing your architecture, design, intent and "open questions" (things you're not yet sure about how to solve or incorporate in the design). This process can clarify many things, and can prevent needing to rewrite the code / iterate on the design, thus saving you time as well as helping people get on board.
On a related note: Even for a purely one person development, at least _some_ documentation is useful, because you yourself will need it when needing to modify anything a year after writing it. I concur with Sandro on the set of items to document.
It took me a few weeks to get productive at my current job. At that point, I was familiar with a few percent of the core system, which I was working on, and I knew basically nothing about all the peripheral services that interact with that core system (and I still don't know much about those, half a decade later). My point is that someone doesn't need to have access to anywhere near all the knowledge that's in your head to be productive; they just need to have enough knowledge to solve the particular problem that they are working on. Most projects have peripheral/isolated parts that someone can start working on pretty fast, like a frontend or an integration or something, where the instruction is basically "implement this API".
Personally, however, I don't like dealing with people, so I would only hire someone if I really had to, like if I needed a frontend that doesn't look like it's made by a backend guy.
This is valuable perspective for me. I'm very used to seeing the whole picture, and thinking about the project that way. Of course someone else coming in to work on just one area wouldn't need to do that. It does rely on the project being modular enough that the small problems can be solved in isolation, of course. My current headache is that one of them very much isn't.
It's probably the old news to a lot of people reading this blog, but I recently discovered Max Harms Crystal trilogy from 2017, and found it wonderful. It's one of the best fiction books involving AI that I've ever read (it helps that the author worked in ML field). If you haven't already seen it, the non-spoiler gist of it is that there is an AI in a robotic body, which has "multiple personalities" in its mind. The creators intended for them to merge into a single "goal thread", but they remained separate, and since the whole thing is running on an unique alien crystal computer, I guess, nobody managed to debug, or even diagnose the issue. Their interplay leads to the whole plot which ends (as spoiled in the first few paragraphs of the book) to some kind of AI apocalypse. Never mind the arrogant preface - I also was afraid that author who writes prefaces like "If you're not into STEM you should probably avoid this book" will continue to write arrogant idiocy in the body of the novel, but it's surprisingly really a good text.
The book is mostly written from the POV of one of the facets of that AI called Face, whose goal function is "to know humans and to be known by them". The author managed to write an AI which is human-like enough that it's understandable to the reader, but alien enough to feel like a non-human (compare to e.g. "Sea of Rust" where robots are waaaaay too human). The plot manages to avoid playing tired AI-related tropes straight, but swings back into some of them from more logical - and more interesting - angle. Despite being more than 5 years old, the books still doesn't feel dated in any way, so it's a big recommendation for anyone interested in fiction about AI and AI alignment. The book is freely available from author's website.
Now, I already asked r/print_sf, but I'll repeat the question here, because they were mostly unable to help me. I'm looking for fiction about robotic/machine societies. Specifically, those that are not of the class "let's pretend to write about machines, but really write about issues with humans", but rather more like thought experiments "what would a robotic society be like (with given constraints)?". I know about above-mentioned "Sea of Rust", and James P. Hogan's "Code of the Creator", but those two have boring human-like robots. There is also Greg Egan's "Diaspora", and that's closer to what I want, but it mostly deals with other stuff (blowing reader's mind with multi-dimensional movement is what I remember the best about it).
Oh yeah the Cyberiad, with Klapaucius (sp?) and Trurl—I haven’t read it in decades but that was my introduction to Lem and I remember how impressed I was that the translator managed to convey the humor of the stories.
The conceit that the AI runs on a literal one-of-a-kind super computer is very clever, as it means there is no FOOM, and reason for the AI to compromise with humans.
I don't think this is as simple. One-of-a-king computer means a lot of things, including physical vulnerability (the need for crystal to survive is a major plot/AI behaviour driver). Also, at least two facets have people-oriented goal functions, so they need at least one human to function.
I find it hard not to agree with him when the books in question are full of padding, as are most bestsellers.
Disagree with him most when he writes: "I don’t believe in Great Books. After thinking about the topic a bit, I’m more certain that I’m correct. One might read old books for historical interest (Category 2), but the idea that someone writing more than say four hundred years ago could have deep insights into modern issues strikes me as farcical. If old thinkers do have insights, the same points have likely been made more recently and better by others who have had the advantage of coming after them."
First of all, what does he mean by "modern issues"? Since he mostly writes about politics and culture war issues, I'm going to assume he mostly means those things. But politics and culture war issues have little to do with life, the universe and everything, i.e., the themes in Great Books. In fact, one good reason to read Great Books is to escape the everyday "importance in dross" (To quote Gogol) attitude culture wars put one in and realize there are more important things in heaven and earth.
Society has changed greatly over the centuries, but human nature has not. One can learn much about human nature by finding out how people thought at different times in the past. Sometimes it is shocking how different people thousands of years ago thought; sometimes the shock is how similarly.
When people talk about "aligning AI with humanity" I always wonder what they have in mind by "humanity" and how deeply they have read the subjects of humans.
As for: "If old thinkers do have insights, the same points have likely been made more recently and better by others who have had the advantage of coming after them."
I get the sense he believes that only big ideas really matter and that it's better to distill the wisdom of the past into the purist compounds possible. Furthermore, he seems to think that the most important thoughts will always "stand the test of time" and that if Sophocles or Shakespear had anything important to say, you'll read pithier versions of it soon enough on Yglesius' substack.
However, I find that profound insights into life aren't usually found in tweets or blog posts, aren't easily compressed without loss of signal, and, because they can't be expressed simply, are rarely repeated. In other words, those gems of wisdom to be found in Montaigne or Goethe or Proust often can't be mined anywhere but in situ.
Old books may not help you form political opinions or tell you how to invest your earnings, but they might enhance your life like a miracle drug.
“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, 'But how could they have thought that?'—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H.G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”
There are ways that books or reading can be overrated, but overall it was a really dumb essay. For many reasons, but one of them is that his three reasons to read books (history, historical interest and genius) actually apply to most (all?) of the old books people do read, so he undermines his own point quite a lot. (He doesn't talk about literary quality, which is one of the main reasons people read classics, but you can put that down under "genius")
For example, he mentions the Federalist Papers, and the Origin of Species, as books worth reading. If those are worth reading, what "great book" that people might read isn't worth reading? Even people who read Aristotle don't generally read the bits where he talks about how many teeth various animals have.
If I want to sympathize with what he is saying, I would say that sometimes people ascribe profundity to certain books in an inappropriate way. People think Dostoevsky must be really profound, and they say, "you can learn more about people by reading Dostoevsky than by, for example, studying psychology" -- which is silly.
I think Chesterton's Fence strongly applies here. If a book has historically been beloved and meaningful for many people, then I'm not interested in hearing anyone dismiss its value who can't first sympathetically explain what all those other people liked about it (not "they didn't have Netflix").
Honestly, so many modern dismissals of older literature stink of some form of defensiveness or cope. Reading carefully, you generally find that the person has read almost no older books and feels vaguely guilty, or that they were assigned them in school and blew it off and now feel mad at the teacher, or that they have poor language skills after minimal childhood reading and can't really process complex syntax, hence are keen to explain that if they can't follow the words then the problem must be with the book, not them. Very much a sour grapes vibe, like "knowing math is fascism anyway" or "travel sucks, we have the best of everything in my corner of the USA."
I'll take anti-classics arguments seriously when someone can seriously start with "The Republic (/ Measure for Measure/ Romance of the Three Kingdoms) is *amazing* and I *love* it," before they move on to "buuuut you can get the same thing from following Yglesias on twitter."
I guess he’s trying to be ironic when he quotes SBF at the beginning as a great moral leader, but it’s not clear why he would do this given that he appears to endorse the ideas quoted unironically. It is a bad sign when you accidentally satirize yourself within the first few paragraphs.
In his defense, I think he’s talking about popular nonfiction, the sort of books that are often totally forgotten less than 20 years after publishing. It’s a little bizarre to me that he needs a whole blog post to articulate that most of those books are in fact a few bite-sized ideas inflated with lots of hot air; it’s more than a little bizarre that he then tries to extend that lesson to all books without realizing why that lesson should probably only apply to the books of people who specialize in dropping short hot takes on modern issues. But these people are Hanania’s people, so it might be very difficult to grapple with a very real fear that internet got take thought leader culture is cognitively… superficial.
Personally I’ve never thought Hanania’s ideas were particularly good or well-justified, and I think he’s accidentally showing in this post that (along with many others from the rationalist sphere) he doesn’t actually know what goes into supporting an argument or a worldview from the ground up. He seems convinced that if somebody said it and it’s true that somebody else probably said it later, but it’s not clear why that should be so.
His example of the Amazonian philosopher seems instructive: “I don’t need to know what his ideas or arguments are to know that some guy from podunk doesn’t have any useful ideas. Next!” Yes, I’ve learned a lot from this experiment: you are provincial and prejudicial and probably shouldn’t be trusted to gather information for me.
Having come to appreciate the importance of learning the history of Physics to map out the paths not taken by theoretical exploration after I read The Science Of Mechanics by E. Mach (which is over a century old) I could not disagree more with this guy. Now if history were a linear progression from ignorance to deeper and deeper knowledge he would be right. It just happens that in many cases it’s more of a Brownian motion, so important insight from the past is often buried in old books, semi forgotten. We often build a lot on shaky foundations and questioning those foundations becomes harder and harder by the day. Seeing what people thought about our fundamental assumptions back when there was nothing built on them is often enlightening.
I avoid reading any Hanania as I find his stuff full of padding, so we agree on one thing at least: if it's full of 'am I not great to be writing this?' then drop it like a hot potato.
I have a feeling this post in MAINLY about non-fiction (as much as this category can be clearly defined for older works), but I often caught myself thinking pretty much the same things about fiction, specifically while sitting in my Russian Literature class (which takes a large part of any Russian student at any grade - I think we had the same number of those classes per week as math classes, even in "Mathematics & Physics" class in high school).
I haven't found a single thing about "War and Peace" that I was interesting to read or thought-provoking and "Crime and Punishment" evoked such revulsion in me that I only made 100 pages in before giving up in disgust and spending the rest of the evening healing my soul with a dose of my favourite fantasy (later, my essay on the damned book still received the top grade, because I was always good at writing bullshit essays, even if it caused me pain to lie about my real thoughts on the subject).
The problem is that human nature might not have changed much, but the writing style certainly did, and for the better, in my opinion. Also, we might never appreciate the works of old fully, simply because we lack the context - the memes, so to speak. It is entirely possible that Tolstoy's text invoked just as much chuckles from it contemporary readership as Unsong did from me now, but it no longer does. What's worse, the "classics" are treated with such reverence in school that they begin to seem like Holy Texts, and if one is not pressed into conforming to this particular religion, one has to became it's enemy. School certainly instilled a natural hatred of Russian classics into me - I shrink at the thought of re-reading any of them now that I'm much older, even though people tell me you appreciate them better when you grow up. I just don't see why - they mostly deal with the same things a lot of other, newer books do, but the writing is denser, the descriptions of diners and nature are utterly boring and none of the characters could possibly resonate with me - they have too much money and free time, and yet never do anything interesting - understandably (most people don't), but maddeningly.
Concerning learning "how people lived then", I'd much rather read a modern book compiling, distilling and filtering various sources. At least, it would probably omit describing the whole 12-course diner in details and just say "the diners were long". Of course, that book would make mistakes the older books wouldn't, but it also could avoid other mistakes which were simply written in because of author's position in the society and other biases, so I guess it's evens out in the end. For example, most classics deal not just with rich families, but specifically with aristocratic families - you can barely glimpse anything about the life of a rich, but not noble people (other than the disdain authors usually felt about them - the lack of true Taste in though who got rich through commerce is often a point of ridicule).
I do get WHY literature lessons are necessarily in school - the older generations want to preserve their memes, so the new generation could have a conversation with them in some shared context - but the stated reason for them (to teach children about life) is pure bullshit. This, by the way, leads into another interesting idea: literature used to be the only medium that really produced staying memes (maybe aside from music, but it was always less important). Now, we have movies, video-games, internet-only memes and tons of other stuff. Some of that is passing, and will be rightly forgotten the next week. But movies, at least, are old enough that soon children might soon not want to watch stuff from 50's or 60's anymore, and the disconnect in memes will appear. Will we get "classic movies" lessons then, or should 100 more years pass before that?
In part, it was because I felt Dostoevsky hated Saint Petersburg - a city I always loved. I understand that it was a different city in his time, with a lot more slums and dirt, but his descriptions alone made it harder to continue reading. The rest of it... I don't remember all the details - it was more than 12 years ago - but I remember feeling a strong revulsion.
Language and literature classes in school (primary and secondary) are a case of trying to do a whole bunch of things at the same time. You want to teach: grammar, vocabulary, reading, writing, history, culture and values. You also have a group of children with wildly varying tastes that you need to keep engaged with their education. As much as I hated most of what I had to read in school (the only exception I can think of was the Scarlet Pimpernel), as an adult I can appreciate how impossible the task was.
The irony is that works with memetic value are a way to keep students involved, and studying them works towards letting children know more about the culture they are entering. I think that knowing how much of a work one needs to understand to place the work in context for memetic purposes depends on the work. It's enough to know the Cliff Notes synopsis of Moby Dick to get the cultural references, but that doesn't help with grammar, vocabulary, reading, or history.
Shakespeare is interesting because there are multiple levels on which some of his works can be memetic. Romeo and Juliet is memetic in the overall plot and in the details. If you watch West Side Story, you'll get the overall tragic romance plot, but you won't recognize the memetic "Hark! What light from yonder window breaks?" balcony scene. On the other hand, most references to the balcony scene tend to go full romantic and forget the tragedy part. This isn't the case for all of his plays; you don't need to know Titus Andronicus to understand "Villain, I have done thine mother".
As far as memes in modern media go, any meme worth remembering should self-propagate. The reason kids should study Romeo and Juliet is that the memes are different when viewed without the overall picture. We have the overall memetic tragedy story and a bunch of lesser memes that seem romantic if taken out of context. It's only taken together that you get the overall picture.
If you're only reading the Cliff Notes then you are missing out on a ton in "Moby Dick" which is one of the craziest novels ever, and I swear must have been an influence on Thomas Pynchon. "It's about this guy who goes on a whaling ship where the captain is hunting down a particular whale" is not even a drop of what the story is about.
Some books are not for everyone, and that's fine. It doesn't mean that you are stupid or illiterate or bad taste if you don't like them. It's the knee-jerk dismissal of "some old dead guy couldn't possibly have anything I need to know" that is short-sighted.
Of course there's a lot more in Moby Dick than just the whole White Whale synopsis, and it's a book that I remember not actually hating when I had to read it in school even if it left me with no desire to read it again. It also is a reference that the median American should at least be able to recognize.
The big important question is "what does the median member of society need to know?" Strictly speaking, the median person doesn't need to know anything about Moby Dick, or of Don Quixote, or A Tale of Two Cities. (They also don't need to know anything about the rules of professional sports, or the MCU, or Eurovision.) By insisting that this is stuff that they need to know, rather than being honest about this stuff being useful but optional, you're setting them up to distrust education.
Then 'classic lit' is not for you, and often much of what is presented isn't for a particular person. I try not to go "this is rubbish" because other people have found value in it, and just because it's not to my taste does not mean I'm right and they are wrong.
I do think the divergence between how people read then, and what they found interesting, and how people read now and what we find interesting, can be instructive. What is your favourite work of fantasy, that you went back to? Do you like that it doesn't bother describing the physical environment of its work and instead gets you that hit of action right away with how the hero went POW! with his magic sword and the villain went OOF! and then fired a ZOWIE! fireball right back but three strikes later the hero ZAM! cut his head off and WON!!!!
Have you anything you would quote as being, in your mind, good/fine writing?
"At least, it would probably omit describing the whole 12-course diner in details and just say "the diners were long".
The diners may have been long, but I think you mean the dinners 😀 And simply distilling it down to "the dinners were long" tells you nothing. Why twelve courses? Why served like that? A la Française or a la Russe? What meats? Why those? Why do we not care about food in the same way, what kind of agricultural model have we moved to where you can get seasonal crops year round and exotics easily available? How was this possible? If we have moved on, then why are shows like adaptations of Jane Austen and the Bridgerton novels so popular?
For instance, did you know in Victorian times, men and women were served different soups? It was considered more suitable for ladies to have light, vegetable soups wile men got the heavier, meatier ones. There's an entire world of discussion packed in there about everything from social attitudes to health effects (if women are getting less meat, that means less iron and B vitamins and this can show up in problems around menstruation) but I would never have known it if not for this historical cookery show about a real cook and a real household. Skipping description with "the dinners were long" leaves you lacking a lot of things you don't know, and don't know that you don't know.
Distilling it down to a bullet-point list of five top tips won't really let you know what was going on or why. I don't know what field of study or work you are in, but for maths (for example) do you think that an understanding of why Jones worked fifty years on the Kettle Problem could really be conveyed by "the sums were very hard"?
This is why modern writers write historical characters as though they stepped right out of the 21st century - because they don't understand the background, or they think their audience won't, and probably they're right there. But a modern audience will never learn to stretch their mental muscles if the assumptions remain baked in that "they're too dumb and lazy to think, we have to spoonfeed them".
By the way, this is the size of spit in an old-fashioned kitchen:
The Victorian era lasted more than sixty years, and a whole lot of people (even if we just concentrate on Britain). Maybe it happened that men and women were served different soups, but I really wonder what percentage of dinners that rule applied to (even of upper class dinners, obviously for most people making different soups like that would be much too inconvenient).
But it's the kind of tiny, fascinating detail about class differences that you won't get out of a conventional history book of "great names and dates of battles", much less some "I know all I need to know about back then, I don't need to learn anything new" attitude.
You can't measure how much society has changed, if it has changed, and in what direction it has changed, if you keep yourself wilfully ignorant of how the past was different. "Oh but reading that old book is too hard, give me the five bullet points version!" leads as easily to "reading that entire article is too hard, give me the five bullet points version!" and the irony where Hanania cannot produce the five bullet points version because he wants/needs to develop his line of thought. By his own metric, if the work he did there was any good, it could be condensed down to a six-line paragraph. Since he didn't do that, then the work must not be any good!
Yes, I agree with all that, I'm am just skeptical that this particular detail is actually true, even for the upper classes (except maybe exceptionally).
> What is your favourite work of fantasy, that you went back to?
It was a book by Max Frei, a "feel good" kind of fantasy where little tense action really happens, but people talk, eat and joke with each other (think Becky Chambers' books, but in a somewhat unique fantasy world). "Wait, didn't you just say you don't like descriptions of long dinners (thanks for the correction :) ) and people who don't do much of anything?" you might ask. Why, yes, but there is a difference, even if it might be hard to describe. The chief one is tone. Frei's books are funny and light-hearted. The banter is witty, the characters are all appealing, and I find description of food and drink quick and understandable enough. On the other hand, most of Russian classic literature is about some kind of suffering. I... Just don't like to read about people who suffer, but either can't, or won't do anything about this, or try and fail. Golden Age sci-fi (which I has been reading since early childhood) tradition of characters overcoming any obstacles through skill and intelligence spoiled me.
But what about comedies, then? Classic comedies almost never produce a chuckle from me, unless played on stage (I've been to a great play based on "The Pickwick Papers", then I tried to read the original book and found it more on the boring side, for example; I think the first comic writer I can laugh along with is Jerome K. Jerome, but only P.G. Wodehouse REALLY manages to make me smile consistently). Hell, I even liked some staged plays based on that same Russian classics I disliked so much in school - somehow, they only come alive on stage. And I love modern productions of Goldoni's plays, though I'm sure reading them from the page is much less fun (then again, plays are meant to be played, not read, so one have to cut them some slack).
On the instant gratification front, I don't mind books without a lot of action, or with long pauses in-between action scenes - or I wouldn't be Neal Stephenson's fan, I actually LOVE his multi-page info-dumps that many readers dislike - but classical literature is... built for a different time, I guess. So I'd rather read "Baroque Cycle" than any book actually written at the time which this series describes and trust Stephenson's research to get the details right.
I tend to like detailed description (up to a point, it can be overdone) and info-dumps need to be done well or they are simply tedious and boring.
Tastes differ! And yes, the acted version of plays is the better version, but Shakespeare manages to make it that his language is also very readable on the page.
Not so familiar with later-period Stephenson, but my main impression of the info-dumps in his earlier works was the enthusiasm which which they were delivered. Stephenson is geeking out on a story or idea, real or fictional, the words just tumbling out, and if you share his sensibility then you're right along for the ride.
OK, I'll admit Gogol wasn't the worst. I still didn't find him exactly EXTREMELY funny, but his works were more fun than most other authors. For my final school exam, I wrote essay on "Dead Souls", because it was the least awful of the themes. It's still not "12 Chairs", but at least the main character here is proactive and somewhat cunning.
I hated every work of literature I was forced to read in school too. I believe schools should be outlawed from teaching literature because all they do is ruin it.
I enjoyed "The Alexander Romance" as well; it was pretty hilarious. I also quite liked "A Soldier's Story of His Regiment", which had some interesting musings on the mentality of the author and his contemporaries. The "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" review had somewhat overwrought prose, but made interesting points. "The Making Of The Atomic Bomb (1)" was a highly interesting read.
Same, The Alexander Romance is the only one (out of maybe a dozen?) for which I gave 10/10. I still think it reasonably likely that it's by Scott, or else it's someone who is really good at emulating the style of e.g. his Arabian Nights book review.
I really enjoyed the "Making of Price of Persia" review. The gifs illustrating each part of the game referenced were extremely helpful and must have taken some time to set up. Great work!
I made it all the way through the "The Educated Mind" review that took up four pages in the table of contents due to all the subheads. I have to say it was a very good review, but way too long.
Another book review I really liked: "Why Does He Do That?"
It was well written, in-depth, and quite poignant. The author took the risk of being vulnerable, talking about a troubled relationship he/she had. (Yes, of course anonymity makes it easier, but it still must have been hard to put these words on paper.) I was hoping this book would be chosen as a finalist. I suppose it's not surprising that a book that deals mostly with feelings and relationships wouldn't make the cut on ACX, but I applaud the reviewer for making an unusual choice.
That one was mine, thank you for your kind words! Glad that the description of my own experience resonated, I found the hardest part wasn't describing it, but making it clear that I don't consider it to actually even be a particularly severe example of the phenomenon the book describes.
I really liked "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes." It was concise, witty, and interesting. (Also, the Piraha psychology is disturbing, to put it mildly. When the author tells them of his stepmother's suicide, they laugh at her for being stupid!)
I wrote the Bullshit Jobs review. I was a bit worried that taking a Marxist line was going to alienate a lot of people, so glad someone liked it.
What was your issue with the original book? I'd be interested in whether you thought the review made the case that a large fraction of work in the modern West is BS more convincingly.
I should say that my opinion of the book may be unfair. I haven't read it, and only knew it from some second-hand accounts. I think I have some beef with the extremely negative connotation of the word "bullshit job".
For example, I can accept to regard jobs in zero-sum games (arms races of lawyers, advertising etc) as non-productive. I doubt that it gives *zero* benefit, but little benefit on the margin. Those are inefficiencies that come with our system, and I buy the thesis of the book that those are inefficiencies. But this doesn't imply that there are systems which overall have lower inefficiencies. Certainly other systems (say, Soviet union communism) was more efficient on some of the issues (less lawyers or so), but less efficient on others.
If I remember right, you discussed these things explicitly in your review, and I found your discussion quite adequate, but in other places I have just heard the strawman(?) version: we are so bad, our system/government/companies are so bad, why don't we just cancel the unnecessary jobs? I am not sure how much this strawman position is actually in the book itself. But I think it's easy to jump to this conclusion from the term "bullshit job".
That was also my key problem with Greaber's book. Although in the book he doesn't just fail to offer any kind of realistic alternative, he barely discusses economic systems at all.
Still, I do think asking "why can't things just be better?" is actually not entirely unreasonable. Because the number of BS jobs seems to have grown so much since the late 20th century, probably mostly due to offshoring but at least partly because they have a natural tendency to spread in un-regulated free-market economies. And it's not clear what the limit is on how much of the economy they can take up.
I don't know if you're in the UK, but my perspective here is that they're already most of the economy, and I think the UK is near the forefront of this trend. I don't think
To me it looks like things were just better 30 or 40 years ago, under what's broadly the same social system.
I also don't think any Soviet style systems ever reached anything like this level of inefficiency, and that asymmetry should factor in quite heavily when we're comparing systems.
Yes, I agree that we should try to make things better. There are definitely some concrete steps: sometimes consists of reducing regulations, have better/clearer laws (less need for lawyers), or have regulations which limit arms races.
I do agree with your diagnostics that BS jobs are more common nowadays. Actually, my preferred perspective is the other way around. I think our society has become so good that it can afford BS jobs while still providing and producing enough stuff for their citizens, and that this slack *causes* a lot of BS jobs. At least for arms-races. If companies couldn't afford to put so much effort into advertisement, they simply wouldn't.
I think arms races go pretty far. There is also competition of countries about who has the most predictable system, because this is attractive for companies. But predictable systems come with lots of laws and lawyers.
So in a high-wealth system which forces people to take jobs, I think that we will always fill up with BS jobs until the available workforce is used up. It's just that 30 years ago we had less slack for BS jobs, and now we have more slack.
Put like this, it would actually be a pretty strong argument for not forcing people to do jobs, like Universal Basic Income, or reducing the worktime per person. As a society, I think we would have the resources for that. But I don't claim to understand all ramifications (probably no one does), especially with competition between countries.
"I think our society has become so good that it can afford BS jobs while still providing and producing enough stuff for their citizens, and that this slack *causes* a lot of BS jobs"
There are so many places in the USA that I consider to be absolute shitholes. Ugly places and poorly maintained, and so many people are unhealthy. Yes everybody has enough "stuff," but the amount of slack in society is decided by the people and their expectations. It would be interesting to look at which countries have the most bullshit jobs.
In terms of efficiency, my hunch is that most of the bullshit jobs are white collar. If you are paying some middle manager 3x a garbage mans salary, then that increases the lost opportunity.
Looks like it's okay to do this (thanks to drosophilist for asking): I wrote the first of the two Atlas Shrugged reviews. If anyone gave it a read, I'd love to hear feedback! It took an awfully large amount of time to write, and if there are obvious flaws, I'd like to avoid them in the future.
What a coincidence! I wrote the second of the Atlas Shrugged reviews. Great minds think alike, I guess?
I refrained from grading your review, because somehow it felt like a conflict of interest, but I'll echo what demost and Melvin said below: it was too long and somewhat meandering. Also, you didn't really critique the ideas in the book. You made the good point that some people wouldn't be able to survive in Rand's society through no fault of their own (say, because they're elderly or disabled) and they would need help, but other than that, you accepted Rand's ideas pretty much wholesale.
For what it's worth, I think you write well, as in, your sentences and paragraphs are easy to follow and they flow together well, just, you should work on the overall structure of your text. Brevity is the soul of wit, etc.
Heh, yeah, and I clearly have some issues with brevity.
I read through your review as well, and distinctly remember disliking it until you finished the summary, then doing a one-eighty and enjoying the rest. Seems like summary really is the bane of Atlas reviews.
The general lack of critique was intentional, I don't think I'd change that on a rewrite. Rand presented some interesting ideas in a way I hadn't really seen before, and one of my main goals with the essay was to pass that along to others. Which, ah, wasn't a great tactic for people who already know about the book. Go figure.
But yeah, glad to find a fellow Atlas reviewer! One of us'll break into the finalists one of these days. Just a matter of time!
- I don't think that it was a good idea to pick Atlas Shrugged. Not only have many people an opinion on it, a lot of them have a *strong* opinion on it. You will have a very diverse readership, from people who know nothing about the book, to people who have known the whole discussion about it for years. (I am somewhat in the middle.) Your review addresses the first group, but doesn't even try to work for the latter type, or people in between.
- You deliberately restrict to your own perspective of the book itself. I can see where this decision comes from, but it doesn't work for me. The book is not so well-known for its writing style or its fascinating story (though apparently both are excellent), but because lots of people have been fighting about the ideology. So to me, the interesting aspect of the book is not the storyline, but rather why so many people are so much enchanted or upset by the ideology. I would have liked to get at least some idea of the impact that the book had.
- Also, perhaps the most important question: do the ideas in the book work? Do you think they work for you as a personal ideology? In general for society? You have bits about this in the review (that even a policeman government needs to get money somewhere), but this is just a few gems hidden in a vast amount of text. The last sections of the review are the best part for me, because they finally address these points, but this is already 20 pages into the review.
A bit more concrete advice:
- At the beginning you introduce a lot of characters one after the other. There are lots of names, of people and companies. This is too much to follow in a short time. Likewise, it's quite hard to follow the plot, simply because it is so complex and involves so many people and names. (Another reason why Atlas Shrugged is a difficult book to review.) In the end, the plot is not really so important for your review, and your review is better in places where you don't try to describe the plot. (E.g., the role of the government.) And as a reader, I felt at the beginning I would miss the point if I can't follow the plot.
- I found the headers and subheaders really nice. They gave some structure to the text.
Overall, I am afraid that the review didn't work well for me. I hope this is not too devastating. I appreciate that you put a lot of work in the review. In the end, it was an alignment problem: probably I wasn't in your target group for the review, and the larger parts of your review were not on the questions that I would have found most interesting about the novel.
"I don't think that it was a good idea to pick Atlas Shrugged."
I asked myself, "Should I review Atlas Shrugged?" and I thought of the reasons not to do it (famous book, a work of fiction), and then I dismissed those reasons and decided, to heck with it, I love the book and I'm going to pour my love (and critical thinking) into my review, and to heck with whether anyone thinks it's a good idea. It's what Rand herself would have done!
Also, it seems that most people either love Atlas Shrugged and accept it uncritically, or they hate it like it's some sort of Satanic text. I thought I would take the middle path: talk about what is wrong with the philosophy presented in the novel, while also appreciating the novel's great aspects.
Have you read the second Atlas Shrugged review? What did you think of it?
Your review worked better for me than the other. It was much more stringent and to the point. I appreciated your decision to keep the synopsis of the book short (I could follow this part well, but this was also right after reading review 1), and then to focus on different aspects. I think you did a good job pointing out how unrealistic the whole system is. Though to be honest: that seems not so hard to notice, especially if you are used to the depth of ACX posts.
Overall, I enjoyed reading the review, and it gave me a good impression of the book. I felt it had little impact on my worldview otherwise; I don't see the world through a new lens. But that's fine, that's just because Rand's utopia is too unrealistic to take it serious, and you also made that clear. I wouldn't have recommended it for the final, but that is also an immensely high bar. There is always half a dozen finalist which totally blow my mind.
One thing that I still wonder after reading both reviews is why many people like the Atlantis from the book so much. I can't really imagine that they actually believe that any of this would be a good idea. Perhaps this isn't important to them, and they just want to dream about a novel/utopia which divides the world clearly in good and evil, and makes them feel like they have ever been on the side of good? When I read fantasy novels, I also prefer simple god/bad schemes over more realistic grey areas. But from what I have heard, some people act like they believe in it. Well, people are hard to understand.
A lot of good stuff in this comment, thanks! I unfortunately have had no exposure to people who talk about/know about this book, so it's unsurprising that I can't really cater to that audience. The ACX base of reviewers is definitely better read than my social group, which kind of leaves me high and dry. I think I'm okay with that, even if it costs me points. Still, shame that the people who would benefit most from the review probably aren't going to be voting on it.
Length was an issue that I was kind of aware of even when I posted, but I didn't totally understand how to deal with it. I think you raise a good point, some cuts were needed early on. The context of some characters is nice, but ultimately irrelevant to most of the threads I ended up pursuing.
P.S.: It might be an idea to read some other reviews who also looked into classics, so that you get an outside perspective. "On the Marble Cliffs" reached the finals, and is particularly not just about the book, but about the meaning of the book in its historical context.
There were also reviews of "War and Peace" and "Fathers and Sons". Those are decent. Not as good as finalists (which is a really tough bar), but I found that they did a good job in telling me about the novels themselves and the philosophy of the authors and/or their times, without getting lost in the plots.
Yeah, I read through several other finalists, ostensibly in prep, but actually just because I enjoy reading that sort of thing. Trouble is that I haven't read the classics which were being reviewed, so I didn't really get a grasp on how much was being kept/cut/expounded upon. They were enjoyable reads, though!
Briefly: it's too long and too unfocused. Too much of a summary rather than a review.
I feel like Atlas Shrugged is already pretty well-trodden ground, so if you're going to choose it as a subject for a review then you need to have an interesting and fresh perspective on it, which is something I can't really find in your review.
I feel like 'Atlas Shrugged is already pretty well-trodden ground' is the fundamental disconnect for me. I've never heard squat about it, so I felt compelled to summarize where perhaps I should have cut. Ah well. Looking at previous reviews, I thought I'd hit on a fresh perspective, focusing more on the emotional thrust of the story, then using that as a springboard to talk about the philosophy, but I guess that didn't stick.
There is only a handful of other books that got two reviews. Not only that, there were *also* two non-finalist reviews on Atlas Shrugged in the 2021 contest (link below if you are interested). This probably makes it the most-covered book in the ACX contest. So perhaps ACX readers are specifically aware of this book? I think I have also seen it mentioned a few times in Scotts posts or the comments, but never noticed outside of ACX.
I’m now following Sam Altman, Yann LeCun and Richard Altman on Twitter, and damn, I do not like or trust these guys. LeCun is the worst. He can’t even argue points with people concerned about AI disasters, just calls them idiots, fools, jerks, crazies etc. Is particularly savage in his mockery of Yudkowsky. But all 3 of them sound as though they think what they’ve accomplished with AI has given them a mandate to take charge of the country or perhaps the world — as though they’ve been elected president, or maybe sort of a secular version of the Pope. They’re tweeting about things they have no special knowledge of — land values and who should benefit from them (Altman), IQ, and how its major value isn’t the talents you have but the confidence they give (Ngo, and he doesn’t know shit about the subject). I don’t really mind their expressing views about things they have no expert knowledge of — everybody does that on Twitter. It’s something about the *tone*: “Life has validated me.” You get the feeling they all believe the world would be better off if the other males were sterilized and the 3 of them went to a sperm bank, a high end one, you know, one that supplied the most exquisitely nasty porn as a donation aid, and jerked off twice a day for a month to fill up the bellies of the women of the world with blokes like them. Meanwhile, to my eye they all have some pretty significant deficits in things like ability to grasp the world view of someone who does not agree with you — social skills — debate skills — empathy — sense of humor — and love of things beyond excelling in the tech world (history? sociology? psychology? the arts? spirituality?) The poor world does not need a new generation in which everybody is an Altman, a LeCun or a Ngo. FML. I'd rather have a bunch of kids from that movie where all the kids were beautiful platinum blonds with expressionless faces. What was that movie??
Wow, I am truly unhappy when I contemplate how much power people like Altman, LeCun and Ngo have over the course things take with AI. Meanwhile, Yudkowsky, who used to infuriate me, is sort of growing on me. All the faults those other 3 have ? He has none of them. He may not be right — who the hell knows — but he sure as fuck is honest and real: Just a chubby, melancholy genius in a fedora, with no desire to take over the world or fill the planet up with his offspring, telling us the stuff about AI he thinks is true.
People who are familiar with these 4 guys: What’s your read of them?
I share the sense that EY is annoying, but in a safe and even somewhat endearing way. He may be deluded sometimes, but I don't think he would lie.
On the other hand, reading some of LeCun's arguments against Eliezer's doomerism (https://thezvi.substack.com/p/transcript-and-brief-response-to) made me dramatically more worried about AI safety than I'd ever been before, just based on how vague and how terribly reasoned they were. Clearly LeCun is too smart to plausibly believe any of the nonsense points he's making in that thread, like that AIs are only as dangerous as corporations or that corporate governance systems definitely work to prevent them from doing harm, or that Facebook (!) is a force for good (!!!). If someone with inside knowledge is falling back on these obviously false points in a public forum, that suggests to me that the truth is simply unspeakable, and that's a scary place for the rest of us to be.
On the bright side, it's also possible that LeCun's public statements are just written by some PR lackey at Facebook, and maybe he wouldn't endorse his arguments, either.
I don't think LeCun's tweets are written by a PR person, because a PR person would surely be more courteous and persuasive. All of LeCun's tweets are as awful as the ones in the exchange Zvi posted. He fails to grasp the points made by people with concerns about AI -- not all are "doomers" -- and says either "of course we will make sure future AI is safe" or "only an idiot would worry about this stuff" or both. I'm not sure that's because the truth is unspeakable. It might be, but in that case why is he not trying to do a better job of reassuring people, if only to protect AI development from being slowed by people's concerns? If you hear someone out, summarize their points, ask "have I understood what you're worried about?" and then give a clear, courteous explanation of what you see as reasons not to worry, you greatly reduce the intensity of the conflict, and you probably truly do lesson the fears of some people. And you can do that *even if you know the truth is even worse than what the person fears.*
So to me it seems more likely that in these tweets we are hearing his actual mental process, which is characterized by inability to grasp the point of view of people unlike himself, rapid mental devaluation of people who do not share his point of view, and recourse to verbal bullying. I get that he is a genius in his field, but the people who have a lot of power in these tech companies are in many ways going to be running the world for the next hundred years. This guy, in fact all of these guys, just seem to me very very deficient in the qualities that are needed in people who have so much power over society.
Fair, but assuming the tweets are his real voice, I feel like I still don't have a good theory of mind for someone like LeCun.
The arrogant-autist model, rounding LeCun off to someone who just "can't grasp the point of view of people unlike himself," makes it sound as though EY's cautionary counterarguments are grounded in some sort of subtle lived experience that LeCun could only access through empathy. But "Aren't AIs far more powerful and unpredictable than human corporations, given their more rapid evolution, less transparent action, and less well-understood underlying architecture?" and "Umm, don't corporations notoriously do a huge amount of harm in spite of all our governance structures?" are not subtle or hard-to-grasp counters. If LeCun has basic intelligence and substantial skin in the game, then I would expect him to have independently reached EY's points in that thread, long ago. And if that's the case, then he should also find it easy to acknowledge them, then calmly pull out the countervailing arguments that convinced him these are *not* concerns after all.
By contrast, resorting to verbal aggression is a fear/frustration move, suggesting that either LeCun either is unable to understand what EY is arguing, or that he understands it, has no good response and is afraid to admit it. If it's the former, then LeCun is a technically brilliant person with disability-level informal reasoning deficits. And if it's the latter, then by implication LeCun is not just an arrogant jerk, but a corrupt and evil man who is obstructing responsible risk analysis because the personal payoffs are just too tempting.
I don't want to live in a world where either of these could be the true explanation-- but I don't understand what else I'm missing to make it make sense?
I just sat here staring out the window for 15 mins. thinking about what you're saying and asking. What's happening in his mind? I have a sort of intuition about it, but it's like some fish deep down that I can't pull to the surface (or possibly an old boot), and I have to go to work. But I think I'll have some thoughts later.
That has been the pitfall of Science Wins Over Religion, Suckers: the secularists, having replaced the clergy and the pope, immediately set themselves up as the new clergy and pope.
Look at Neil deGrasse Tyson spouting opinions on all and sundry.
"I am Very Smart in STEM topics and/or I am successful in academia, pop-sci, or as a businessman, hence my pronouncements are the new Gospel because I'm smart, science-y and well-off".
I don't know is this is any consolation, but at least the GPT-3.5 version of chatGPT that I've played with seems to have incorporated a surprising amount of respect for religious figures. I don't know whether it got this from its training set data or from RLHF.
I tried to get it to recognize that the classic "Buddha sends a bereaved woman looking for a cup of mustard seed from a house where no one has died" story would fail in an area with recently constructed homes, and the robot basically refused.
Ah, is that a Buddhist story or an Indian one? Because I saw it in a Tamil devotional movie where the young son has died, the bereaved mother appeals to her husband, a great devotee of Shiva, to bring him back to life by his prayers, and he tells her that this can be done if she gets a cup of mustard seed from a house where no-one has died.
Of course she fails at this task. The moral being, death is a natural part of life, even accidental or sudden death, and nobody escapes it.
I tried leading chatGPT through the calculation to see why houses less than 30 years old or so had around a 50:50 chance of having had no one die in them. I tried to walk it through writing a story where the Buddha sent her on her errand, she finds such a house, and she learns the valuable moral that religious leaders can screw up. The robot refused, and emitted a wokescold instead. So, evidently chatGPT (at least version 3.5) has gotten respect for religious leaders from somewhere, maybe from the bulk text of its training set, maybe from RLHF.
I don't get how any of this is remotely related to the Science vs. Religion angle. Popular people (mainly merchants and rulers) were pontificating about everything long before the word "Science" was even coined. In the 19th century/early 20th the idea of the "Public Intellectual", a philosopher/writer who was wide-ranging and has opinions about everything, appeared, and in the mid-late 20th century the Pop Scientist joined the ranks of the professions allowed to be Public Intellectuals. Tech founders joined the ranks starting in the early 2000s.
The decline of Religion (in the west, the clergy is still very alive and well in Muslim societies and cultures everywhere) is an independent phenomenon that resulted in the clergy no longer being acceptabe Public Intellectuals, but I see no indication at all it was a 0-sum thing where the clery had to fall in order for the Scientist to rise. After all most Public Intellectuals are still not STEM Scientists or tech founders.
My college boyfriend, who probably had Aspergers, was a chess genius. He was champion for his state when he was 14 or so, and then in his early 20’s while in med school competed in an international correspondence chess championship. He won in the US, went on to compete in the world event, and won that too. He’d read lots of chess books, of course, but a lot of what he knew he couldn’t put into words — I know, because I used to try to get him to explain to me how he knew to make certain moves, and he couldn’t. He was like those autistic people who can’t do arithmetic but can recognize a 6-digit prime number. I think with some very complex things, the parts of our mind that are smart in the usual ways are not smart *enough* to figure them via the application of reasoning. Some people seem to have the ability to pull on some pattern-recognition part of the brain and use that. I think that’s what my college boyfriend did, and I’m guessing that’s what Yudkowsky’s done regarding how AI is going to develop and how things are going to play out.
I’m a psychologist, and many of my patients are mildly or moderately autistic. I’ve elected to see a lot of people of the sort because I really warm
Sure, but Religion was the True Truth that Explained All. Then Science elbowed its way into the spotlight there, and now we had a new True Truth that Explained All, and a new cadre of experts in white coats to explain it to us, the humble laity too ignorant and uneducated to understand it.
There are a lot of appeals today to Trust The Science when it comes to all sorts of social issues, and competing interpretations of the sayings, and our very own Creation Story Adam and Eve Ate The Apple And This Is Why Bad Things in the shape of evolutionary psychology just-so stories ("men like to sleep around because of evolution, you see").
The particular people quoted here *are* relying on Trust Me, I Know STEM to back up their opinions of the likelihood of AI doom. We're not yet at the point of "I am the world's greatest chef so I get to say if it's true or not".
Everything you said is true, but I don't see how it applies to Silicon Valley wannabes. Those people sometimes **Enrage** the kind of people you mention, for example many of them were against Covid regulations, for Free Speech, against government thinking it knows best, etc...
I don't want to glorify or defend them, there are more than one way to be wrong and bad, and Silicon Valley delusions are their own breed of wrong and bad. I just don't think they are the "I FU***NG LOVE SCIENCE" types, they are the "I FU***NG LOVE TECH" types, where "TECH" is of course a very shallow and simplified interpretation of techonology and its role in society that boils down to something like "tech is when make apps to do things that nobody asked for, the more I make such apps, the more tech". But regardless, they are a very different subculture.
Science and Tech have been conflated a lot, though, that's how we get STEM in the first place as an acronym. I think if you asked for the source of their confidence about a piece of technology, one at least of the reasons would be "it's science-based and we know how science works and how to test hypotheses and falsify them".
It relates in that the "Religion v. Science" is/has been really a fight between two religions with one of them claiming the legitimacy of science for themselves, while acting in the very same superstitious authoritarian way as their purported opponents.
"Having a gun in the house makes you more likely to be murdered!"
"Smoking is deadly, but secondhand smoke is even deadlier!"
"Oat Bran! Resveratrol! Phen-Fen!"
"Covid is so deadly that you can't protest lockdowns, but not so deadly that you can't protest racism!"
"Stochastic terrorism!"
"Generational trauma!"
You're completely correct that this is non-unique. The only kink is that the current animists are claiming that their deity is natural.
Some partial and distorted view of science and the scientific method is currently being used to legitimize power structures by pretending that political decisions are in fact just technical. Just look at the whole covid/lockdown/mask/vaccine debate. Power always needs an ideology to support it. Religion was pretty effective at that and still is in some context (mainly the Islamic world, but there are major Christian and Buddhist parties and similar power structures still around all over the world). But it’s hard to update religion effectively and new stuff keeps coming up. The elites need something else to rely on. Science can become the basis for the ideological machinery they need, as long as one does not look to closely to what actual science is. Hence people like Neil de Grasse Tyson or Bill Nye and similar popularizers who have little to do with actual science, become public intellectuals.
Or the blithe belief that all we need to do to fix up society is to vote some technocrats into power, and if the ignorant dumb masses won't do that, then just appoint the technocrats into unelected positions, and Bob's your uncle.
I know, right? I have the impression that we actually managed to be atheists for about a decade (1998-2008) and then a new batch of religious thinking arrived. Thanks social media, I guess
I recently heard journalist Mike Moynihan, on the Fifth Column podcast, describe Altman as “the biggest asshole I’ve ever interviewed”, giving as his reason the very attitude you highlight: “I founded a successful tech company, therefore here are my pronouncements on every other damn thing, you’re welcome.”
I've met Richard Ngo a couple of times IRL and he was a pleasant and chill dude, to the point where reading your perception of him was extremely jarring. Sometimes people are exactly like their online persona, but often it is a very lossy representation!
Also, I love Eliezer but in my mind he displays the exact traits you seem to dislike, which makes your rant even more confusing. I don't know anything about the other two, so maybe that explains part of it.
Seconded that characterizing Yudkowsky as a humble, down-to-earth guy who *doesn’t* make overconfident pronouncements out of a misplaced sense that he is an authority is… strange. The opposite has, as far as I can tell, been exactly his brand since day 1.
I don't follow any of the 3 you mention nor read any of their other writing, but I'll second that Yud is the absolute king of arrogance. HPMOR was fun at times, but is basically your typical wish fulfilment isekai, and with Yud as the main character. I can't stand his nonfiction writing in particular, since it exudes a "if you don't agree with me you're an idiot"-vibe.
His recent interviews aren't better - he is together with a patient person asking him questions were any reasonable person would try their best to convince the interviewer, and instead he just turns it into an inverted socratic dialogue were the interviewer suddenly is supposed to convince Yud. And if he fails Yud won, QED. Super arrogant and cranky. Also atrocious social skills, since this is not how you convince the listeners (and in general he does not show good people skills at all).
I listened to his interview on EconTalk last week and it was painful. He refused to answer questions directly, he would only try to engage in a socratic dialog about them using poor analogies or hypotheticals. When ever Roberts wouldn't respond in a way Yud expected, the dialog kind of fell apart because it wasn't running on the rails anymore.
This reminded me of how i used to "debate" when i was like a college sophomore. I had an understanding of my argument, but not any kind of sophisticated understanding of the other side's arguments so i was never going to convince someone of anything. I was very shocked it was so bad, maybe this was just an off day for him?
Refuting the reasons why people don't think something is actually dangerous sounds like a good way to convince people that it might actually be quite dangerous.
His writing, especially his fiction, is entertaining if you don't take him seriously as a guru. It helps to be that bit older and to have had some exposure to different types of writing - he likes to play the Wise Old Elder character in his writing, and it reminds me of Aleister Crowley's self-insert character Simon Iff:
The big problem with HPMOR was that, whatever he said later and in the editing, Harry Three-Names *is* the kid Gary Stu version of him at that age - I was really smart, and nobody encouraged me, and I had to be an autodidact because my teachers were so dumb and stupid, and had I gone to college I would still have been smarter than my tutors, so this is me spreading the Good Word of Science and how I can win in retrospect!
Thus making Harry an insufferable brat who should have been turned into a frog by Minerva McGonagall the second he and his ridiculous set of step-parents started laughing about how funny it was that he bit his teacher, just like a rabid dog! If you're any kind of experienced teacher, you know precisely what kind of a family this is, and how they'll be: Junior will be a brat who starts fights in class, won't pay attention, will physically attack his classmates and teachers, and when called in the parents will be "Stop picking on my darling boy" instead of exerting any discipline. Frog now, avoid trouble later.
I think what happened was a bunch of smart and quirky 20 year olds discovered him, took him as a guru, and had a wonderful time as their own little discussion club solving the problems of the world via Being Really Smart - and no problems there, good luck to them, we were all 20 and thought we knew better than anyone else ourselves at one time.
But now they're in their 30s, their club has been exported to the wider world, and the feet of clay are becoming apparent. I think if you don't take Yud as a guru *or* a devil, make your own mind up, and have your own opinions, you'll get on okay with him/his public image.
I don't know Richard Altman (and who's that "ngo" that you keep mentioning ? is it another name for Richard ?), but I know Sam and Yan and Yud.
Sam Altman : Pretty much what I would expect, yes. For a more bearable variant of the "Startup founder who managed to milk the VCs and now he thinks his opinions are the words of an oracle" trope, see Paul Graham. He is smart, and he is insightful, and he ideologically aligns with many things I believe in (Free Speech, etc...), but he sometimes, with his own admission, goes too far into the direction of "I founded n successful startups [ 1 < n < 5], here's why I think the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is actually 69, not 42".
Sam Altman is a typical "thirty before thirty" vibe (without the fraud, till now) guy, his company's name alone is an extremly funny joke (""""""""Open"""""""" AI, hilarious) but he doesn't seem to get it, he shares many of the exact same delusions and blinding biases that the social class of "Young Startup Founders living in Silicon Valley" shares and believes in, which is a heck of a lot.
Yan Lecun : Brilliant guy. He doesn't strike me as arrogant. I have seen woke "ethicists" call him their usual tiresome song, "white privileged male yadayada", I can understand why he has become increasingly rough and impatient. Imagine you're a literal founder of an important and complex field, you worked in Bell Labs (a legend among Computer Scientists and any reader of tech history). You were doing groundbreaking foundational work in a field that now rules the world before the vast majority of people even had personal computers in their homes or have heard of the internet. Then a person who likely wasn't even alive when you were inventing the field calls you a racist and repeatedly and ignoramusly ignores your perspective on anything. How would you feel ? I'm surprised Lecun didn't discover 4Chan and started yelling slurs, that's what I would do, and I didn't invent a single Neural Network architecture.
And it's important to remember that Twitter shines light on the worst in people. We all have moments in life when we're impatient, haughty, thinking the people in front of us are idiots for not agreeing. Those moments pass, they don't outwardly express themselves too much in your body language and choice of words, and even if they do they aren't recorded and continuously replayed so the blessing of human forgetfulness does its magic and soon after nobody can remember you were such an asshole. But Twitteratis are conditioned and encouraged to freeze those moments in crystalized hot takes of 140 characters, chosen very carefully to maximize vileness and contempt. Lecun is just a human like the rest of us, he is frustrated and angry when he feels people don't take him seriously, and he vents it the only way a Twitterati knows how.
Yudkowsky : I'm surprised you hate arrogance and you started liking Yud. The only one I know who remotely matches Yud in arrogance is Stephan Wolfram, and he is a literal child prodigy who got his PhD in particle\high energy (can't remember which) Physics at 16 and went to MIT and designed a programming language that still blows my mind till now and built a company based on it in the 1980s that still lives till now. Wolfram's brand of arrogance usually take the form of "When I was doing X - which as you know I'm extremly very unimaginably astonishingly good at doing, despite it not being my main occupation and just a hobby - I found that Y". His writings has an insane bragging-to-signal ratio, and it drives most anyone who reads it crazy, it makes most commenters at HackerNews groan when his blog is posted there, and it probably is a factor in why people savaged his book A New Kind of Science in their reviews. Arrogance is an ugly vice.
I lead with all of this to say : Yud is Wolfram without the accomplishments. I literally can't stand his way of writing. I remember only one of his essays that truly made me think and get a new insight - Reversed Stupidity is Not Intelligence -, every single other piece of his writing I try to read I'm repulsed by sheer condescending energy oozing out of it. I lurk Sneer Club (Don't think wrongly of me, I like to see them angry when Scott posts a new post that's all), and it's amazing the tweets of his that I see there, "Intelligence always makes you weirder "?, Duuuude.
"Arrogance is like standing on the peak of a mountain, you see people small and they see you smaller". I don't understand how can you possibly like or even stand Yud if you hate arrogance and condescending attitudes.
You may be right about Yudkowsky. I read part of one of his books one time, a collection of brief essays, each about one thinking error, and found it tedious. His main point was always valid, but it seemed to me I’d already arrived at grasping most of his points on my own via other routes. And I remember not liking his prose style, though I can’t remember why. He wasn’t unclear. I think it was mostly that it lacked snap and sparkle. Even though each essay was about a different topic, after about 3 of them I felt as though it was the same essay over and over, and sighed, and stopped reading. Beyond that, I really don’t know much about his thinking about any topics except AI doom, where I have read a fair amount of what he has to say. I don’t know whether he is right or not, but I do have a strong sense that if there is anyone who can read the whole configuration accurately, it would be somebody like him — a very smart person who’s somewhere on the autistic spectrum.
My college boyfriend, who probably had Aspergers, was a chess genius. He was champion for his state when he was 14 or so, and then in his early 20’s while in med school competed in an international correspondence chess championship. He won in the US, went on to compete in the world event, and won that too. He’d read lots of chess books, of course, but a lot of what he knew he couldn’t put into words — I know, because I used to try to get him to explain to me how he knew to make certain moves, and he couldn’t. He was like those autistic people who can’t do arithmetic but can recognize a 6-digit prime number. I think with some very complex things, the parts of our mind that are smart in the usual ways are not smart *enough* to figure them via the application of reasoning. Some people seem to have the ability to pull on some pattern-recognition part of the brain and use that. I think that’s what my college boyfriend did, and I’m guessing that’s what Yudkowsky’s done regarding how AI is going to develop and how things are going to play out.
I’m a psychologist, and many of my patients are mildly or moderately autistic. I’ve elected to see a lot of people of the sort because I really warm up to them. They do little or no impression management, and I like that. I like being with mentally naked, blunt, tactless people who just tell you the real deal. And I enjoy the way they think about things — thinking in an explicit, oddly systematic way about things other people just navigate instinctively. I think I’ve got some mild autism myself, so for me there’s something very simpatico about these people. So one read of Yudkowsky is that he’s brilliant and somewhat autistic. He’s intuited his way to the dangers of AI, but cannot really put his thought process into words. Meanwhile, he is proud of having figured out something so important, and, being on the autistic spectrum, is unable to to good impression management about all that. He can’t be tactfully modest. His naked pride is right out there for all to see. The other read is that yeah, he’s smart, and like many of us has obsessed about the dangers of AI, but hasn’t gotten any further than the rest of us.. However, the rest of us are able to recognize that we don’t have the full answer, and also know how to speak modestly about the amount of expertise we have. Yudkowsky hasn’t really figured out more than anyone else, but he’s not good at calibrating his achievement, and not good at hiding his pride in the amount he has figured out. In short, he’s a smart boor who grossly overestimates his mental achievement regarding AI. That is possible too.
Having heard me out, assuming you’ve read all this, do you have an opinion of which of rhe 2 reads of Yud is right?
Oh, that doesn't surprise me at all. I have become increasingly suspicious of natural language as a vessel of containing and expressing knowledge over the years. That's the main reason I'm a vocal skeptic of LLMs like ChatGPT (although, I have been gradually reversing or weakening lots of my opinions on ChatGPT and GPT4 in the last weeks after I tried them, they understand so much more than I typically give them credit for). Your college boyfriend never thought in words to begin with, he thought in terms of board states and chunks of pieces, and how they can possibly interact over the span of a game. If he thought in words he would have never been a champion.
Natural language is inferior for lots of things we associate with Civilization and Knowledge :
1- Mathematics : try looking at a description of a simple algebraic equation like 5*x^2 + 4*x + 9 = 0 in the words of a pre-algebraic-notation book like Euclid's Elements or the works of Muslim Golden Age mathematicians, it translates to an entire paragraph, and a very confusing and convoluted one at that.
3- Music : The various specialized notations to describe melody and tone
Lots of thinkers have hated on natural language in various ways. Wittgenstein is a famous one. Much less famous is the Computer Scientist Kenneth Iverson, inventor of the programming language APL, in Notation As A Tool Of Thought.
It's clear like the sun at 2:00 PM to me that natural language is just a tool that we developed for the very particular purpose of pointing at Lions and Trees in our ancestral environments, then we adapted it ad-hoc to various other purposes. There is no reason to expect it to be any good at those purposes. There is no magic to our eyes or our throats that makes the crystalized symbols that represent our sounds a vehicle of expressing anything but the most simple and concrete truths.
It's not even necessarily the explicit knowledge vs. tacit knowledge distinction that Blaise Pascal has famously obsessed about, your college boyfriend might have had better luck explicitizing his tacit knowledge into a programming language. Natural Language is just a very bad and sloppy medium, even at expressing things that can be explicitly described and enumerated by other types of languages or symbolic systems.
> I think I’ve got some mild autism myself
Quick question, since you're a psychologist : How do I know if I have a bit of autism myself, without doing something that would let any people other than me know it ?
I don't have the slightest problem with autism or autistic people (indeed, sometimes I worry about holding them in such high regard to the point of fetishizing them), I just don't want the people around me to know for reasons that would take a lot of words to explain. Are there trustworthy online tests you know of ? Do I have to see a therapist ?
> he is proud of having figured out something so important, and, being on the autistic spectrum, is unable to to good impression management about all that.
I have lots and lots of empathy for autistic people and a long-lasting interest in autism as a human condition, my incomplete understanding is that they're just bad at implicit social signals. But the annoyance with Yud's arrogance is quite explicit. An autist might do something like "Talk about a topic they are extremely interested in on and on and never realize that people around them are not interested", but they wouldn't do something like "Repeatedly boast about how so much more intelligent you are even after people have repeatedly told you over and over again that they don't like it".
>assuming you’ve read all this
Huh, of course I did, when somebody posts a wall of text at me, I post back an even bigger one at them :) My mom taught me manners, you see.
>do you have an opinion of which of the 2 reads of Yud is right?
I definitely think it's the second, I never saw any special insight, intelligence, or even interestingness (the type displayed by sci-fi writers) in Yud's views. This will sound a bit harsh, but I think his views are even below-average in value, in the sense that plenty of AI enguhsists and sci-fi writers can easily come up with arguments more convincing and scenarios more plausible than him, minus the meaningless grandiosity. I really don't see how he is an "AI opinion haver" so to speak, his arguments are extremely standard and dull, his persustion is null. I would be hesitant to post his ramblings in ACX open threads if they were my own, they are not novel.
I don’t have a wall of prose, just 3 cement blocks.
Yud, his prose & his predictions:
Yudkowsly’s obnoxiously frequent emphasis via italics etc. in his writings is a manifestation of his difficulty reading other people. He has a tin ear, both for their speech and for his own & how it affects the listener. I’m not sure he’s more impressed with himself than a good 25% or so of people on here, but he’s unable to clothe his attitude decently. His vanity is naked. I follow him on Twitter, where his grandiosity is certainly manifest. On the other hand, grandiosity is not an uncommon presentation for autistic males. And I’d guess that Yudkowsky is somewhat more autistic than people who are at the very tip of the scale, and are said to have Asperger’s. The latter group can “pass” in group settings. They’re seen as kind of stand-offish and rigid, but nobody thinks of them as having a disorder. Yud can’t pass that way. And he couldn’t manage to go to high school or college, which is probably also a measure of his degree of impairment. So while grandiosity in a non-autistic person is a sign of clouded judgement — that just have to believe they are right— I don’t really think Yud’s grandiosity weighs either for or against his being right about AI.
As for his being qualified to make predictions about AI, you point out that he has no professional or technical experience. I know he doesn’t. He does, though, seem to have a pretty deep understanding of machine learning, and to be keeping up with current developments (there’s something new every day). I’m just beginning to educate myself about the details of machine learning, but I do know enough about it to be able to tell that he grasps a lot of pretty deep technical details. (I don’t know enough, though, to be able to catch subtle misconceptions and whatnot, so maybe his grasp of the technicalities is actually sort of amateur and gappy. I can’t tell.)
‘And surely, there are plenty of ‘Very smart, somewhat on the autistic spectrum [with no professional or technical experience]’ people in the world so Yud's only differentiating quality is that he manages to draw our attention to him.” That’s a really good point. And I can add to it: I am sure there are very smart people as autistic as Yud *actually working on AI*. I have listened to podcasts and read interviews with quite a few AI developers recently, and none of them are particularly worried either about AI in its present and near-future form damaging people or about superintelligent AI wiping us out. Most sound very confident: “Don’t worry, we’re on it. We’re very smart and careful and will figure out alignment.” Some sound as though it had never occurred to them there’s anything to worry about. And a few, including the famous Yann LeCun, savagely mock people concerned about AI as stoopit crackpots and actually seem to think their ad hominem arguments are really striking a blow against skepticism and worry. So if there is a brilliant, moderately autistic man working on AI development, I think he might be absorbed in his work and oblivious to the big picture (”Once the rockets go up/Who cares where they come down?/That’s not my department/ Says Werner von Braun.”). Or, he might have just absorbed the optimistic attitudes of those around him. And in either case, he’s likely to be feeling pretty decent about himself and life, because he’s getting paid well to do a job he is good at, in a field that’s really hot right now.
So Yud differs from this guy in not being identified with the AI is OK world, and in having a very dark world view, one that actually allows him to consider even the terrible possibility that we are all doomed. I think my world view’s pretty dark, but unlike Yud, who is obviously sad and depressed, I am not unhappy these days. Even though I am about 2/3 of the way to being a doomer, I very often have a hard time believing my own dark expectations. It’s a fine sunny day, I have lots of interesting projects going on, and the world looks the same as usual. How can it possibly be true it’s on the edge of being wrecked? But I’m sure Yud has no problem hanging on to the dark vision. So in summary I’d say that Yud’s qualifications for being right about AI are that he is extremely smart, he has no internal barriers to glimpsing terrible truths, and he is autistic enough to have savant-like gifts for recognizing truths via paths that cannot be described in ordinary language.
Still, none of that demonstrates that he’s right — at best, it’s a good case that he’s the kind of person who might actually correctly intuit how AI development is going to play out. I’m sure you’re right that a lot of his cred comes from his association with Scott — for sure a lot of his cred with me does. Last I knew Scott thought the chances of doom were smaller than the chances of no-doom, but the chances of doom were not small. That sways me. And Scott’s not that much like Yud. And do you read Zvi Mowshowitz? He’s still another super-smart guy, quite different from both Scott and Yud. Was a Magic champion, now does investment and game development, and does not seem even a bit autistic — is relaxed, affable and witty in interviews, married with 3 kids. Anyhow, he also thinks the chance of doom is not small. Wrote a fascinating blog post a while ago explaining why. I highly recommend his Substack blog, called Don’t Worry about the Vase. But still, eveb with all the buttressing I just did, I now trust Yud quite a bit less. You’ve really made me reconsider.
The limits of language:
You said that there’s lots that just can’t be expressed using our crappy little improvised system based on noises we make with our mouth and noe and throat. Wow, that idea brought me up short. Of course I agree that math and coding require specialized symbols and syntax but I think the skill I admire most is managing to convey in words experiences that you’d think were impossible to communicate. All my favorite famous people were brilliant at it. Wittgenstein, Virginia Woolf, various poets. And I sometimes manage to put strange deep intuited processes that into words. Virginia Woolf, talking about mystical feelings, says “One sees a fin passing far out.” Sometimes you can swim out there and straddle the whole fish, you know?
Investigating one’s possible autism:
There is no test for autism itself, The diagnosis is made by figuring out via interview and observation and a few social perceptiveness tests whether the person meets the diagnostic criteria. Here are a couple of tests you can take yourself:
This is a test of reading facial expressions, which for some weird reason you can take on Amazon. (Fun fact: It was developed by Sasha Baron-Cohen’s brother, who’s a well-known autism researcher.)
This is a questionnaire that’s well-designed, and generates a little report at the end. (At the end of the test they surprise you with the info that if you want the report you’ll have to pay $3. A bit unfair, but still, only $3.)
If you’d like more in-depth info about your quirks and what if anything they add up to (not every constellation of quirks has a name), the person to see would be not a therapist, but a neuropsychologist, who will give you a whole batch of tests then discuss the result with you. You have to find a good one though. Some are hacks, who rely heavily on software that generates a lot of the report. I can tell you how to find a good one if you want to go that route.
[[First comment, read first before the other one]]
(Just a heads up, you posted a fragment of that comment beginning with "My college boyfriend" and cut short at "I really warm" as a reply to my other comment elsewhere in the thread. You might want to delete it or rephrase it. Might be the atrocious Substack UI deceiving you as to which comment you're replying to.)
>a collection of brief essays, each about one thinking error,
Do you mean The Sequence ? It's not really a book, more like a book-length collection of essays. Though I haven't read all of it and I quite honestly try to avoid Yud's writings whenever I can, so I might be wrong. Reversed Stupidity was perhaps one essay in The Sequence too.
>it seemed to me I’d already arrived at grasping most of his points on my own via other routes
To be very fair to Yud : This might be what we can call "The Shakespeare effect". If you read Shakespeare, you will find many cliches that are considered indicative of bad or formulaic writing today ("The be-all and the end-all", "The world is my oyster", "All that glitters isn't gold", "Foregone conclusion",etc...). But the thing is, he (?, we don't actually know 'his' gender) *coined* those phrases, they were brand new when he used them, quirky and fresh. People liked them so much that they overused them again and again and again and then again till they became worn out and dull, and even now writers from the news industry to corporate announcements to advertisements **still** use them, that's how good they are.
Yud's Sequence was perhaps written sometime in the mid to late 2000s, perhaps from 2006 to 2009. LessWrong is ancient in Internet Time. So his style of writing and reasoning is just that of the New Atheist / Internet Fact Man, a style that was new and (dare I say) somewhat informative and useful to someone reading it for the first time. Over time this style and its familiar argument permeated culture, especially internet culture, so much so that it became a victim of its own success, and using it unironically (without any major modifications at least) became a negative status signal.
(Of course, I don't actually claim that Yud or any Internet Atheist invented the actual arguments and ideas often expressed in the New Atheist style like Shakespeare invented the idioms above, most of the core ideas were things explored by philosophy, logic, psychology and cognitive science from as early as 1920s or the 1930s (Russell's writings) to the 1980s and 1990s. But New Atheists legitimately synthesized a lot of this together and popularized it in an effective and powerful way. And **If** Yud was original in style when he wrote the Sequence, that's enough to deserve credit.)
> I remember not liking his prose style
(1) One explanation to this once suggested by a LessWrong commenter (on another essay not written by Yud) : Yud uses a lot **********Emphasis********** in writing. He does this thing where every other sentence there is a string of words that is italicized or bolded for emphasis. This gets very old after a while because (A) It makes the signal meaningless, just like saying "Not liking the new BLaCk Cleopatra is racist" makes the very concept of "Racism" meaningless, signals are supposed to be rare and focused. (B) It's condescending, emphasis is quietly saying "Here's something that the vast majority of readers won't get", it doesn't say this, it implies it quietly, and most people are smart enough to get the implication even if subconsciously. When you use emphasis sparingly, that's okay, the reader is fine with missing something and being attention-drawn to it by the writer once in a while. When you keep using it over and over, and for things that are fairly obvious, the reader gradually becomes resentful of the disrespect of the writer. "I bet you won't get that, so let me emphasize it, I bet you won't get those, so I emphasized it"... just enough already, I'm smart enough to read, Yud.
This writing pitfall was once pointed out by a LessWrong commenter in the comments section of an essay not written by Yud (as far as I remember, I can't track it down now, but it was old, pre-2014 or 2015) but, like a TV Tropes entry, once you see you can't unsee it. Yud's writing is full of it.
(2) Another writing pitfall often shared by Rationalist writers/commenters is Analogy Galore, overuse and repetitive use of analogy to drive the same point over and over again, or to drive a point so obvious that it didn't need analogy to be driven satisfactorily. This is one pitfall I'm guilty of myself, though I share the consolation that I have noticed it all by myself. r/SneerClub users also notice it and use it to parody Rationalist writing a lot, they are pathetic in general but they are right about this one, analogy does make writing worse sometimes, and there is something about the brains of people who cluster in Rationalist groups that makes us obsessed with analogies and analogical reasoning. You have to actively learn to tune it down a bit, and Yud never did.
(3) Yet another writing pitfall that Rationalist writers often fall into is the excessive use of parentheticals, hedge phrases and negative linking words :
A non-Rationalist sentence looks like this: "I do think dogs are cute".
A Rationalist sentence looks like this: "I do think, all things considered, that I see dogs as substantially cuter than perhaps 90% of other cute things (though that's comparing a mean with a median), but this need not necessarily imply that I think cats are not\less cute (as is the common pop culture stereotype of dog lovers), and perhaps cuteness is not even a one-dimensional sliding scale that we can zero-sum place people and animals on."
How do I describe it ? It's a writing style with Lots Of Context, it's mentally taxing to keep track of all the moving parts in a sentence : Parenthesis, continuations, negative assertions contradicting or diluting the main point while in the middle of presenting the main point, references to other assertions and comments on them, and a whole lot of adjectives before nouns, sometimes compound adjectives like "zero-sum". Oh, and extensive use of "\" or "/" to fit multiple synonyms into the space that can only fit one, like this : Rationalist writers\commenters. Hehe.
As a recovering victim of this writing style, and my extensive use of parentheses and "/\" marks indicates I'm still prone to fall into it, I sympathize with fellow victims. It's a writing style driven by an educator's passion to pack as much information as possible into as little space and time as possible, you want to lay as many thoughts of your mind as you can in the span of a single sentence, pushing the agglutinative abilities of language into its extreme. It's admirable, it can be annoying and confusing.
>I do have a strong sense that if there is anyone who can read the whole configuration accurately, it would be somebody like him — a very smart person who’s somewhere on the autistic spectrum.
Hmmm, but the elephant in the room is that Yud has no professional experience or technical education. If you think that a "Very smart, somewhat on the autistic spectrum" is an accurate description of someone who can realize the danger of AIs before anybody else, then surely "Very smart, somewhat on the autistic spectrum, and 10 years of AI and comp sci education" is a description that has an even better chance of figuring it all out, and it's one that isn't particularly rare, eh ?
And surely, there are plenty of ""Very smart, somewhat on the autistic spectrum [with no professional or technical experience]"" people in the world so Yud's only differentiating quality is that he manages to draw our attention to him, by being lucky enough to have founded an early internet forum and having a lifestyle that many find shocking and morally repulsive (polyamorous relationships) and by living in Silicon Valley and being connected to other high-profile people. Hell, I think that his relationship with Scott alone got him perhaps 30-40% of his eyeballs. What I'm saying that, there is no reason to think Yud's perspective is unique or special on anything, it's just the one that has survivor-biased its way into your brain (The thing it's a survivor of is the cacophony of voices and opinions that is the modern media landscape and the internet), he doesn't have a special voice, he has a very loud voice.
"Paul Graham. He is smart, and he is insightful, and he ideologically aligns with many things I believe in (Free Speech, etc...), but he sometimes, with his own admission, goes too far into the direction of "I founded n successful startups [ 1 < n < 5], here's why I think the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is actually 69, not 42".
I believe he has a first degree in philosophy, so maybe things arn't so bad.
I don't dispute the fairly mundane point, I'm just flabbergasted at the arrogance displayed in the original context.
The context was someone asking (I'm not even sure they were asking Yud in particular) 'Why are you weird ?', and Yud jumped in with the most self-congratulatory and auto-flattering story he could come up with, that he was born intelligent and out of the sigma range of normal mortals on the IQ Gaussian. Imagine asking someone in a party or one of your friends "So what makes you so weird" and them replying "oh I'm actually extremly smart", repulsing.
Well, I haven't much time for the pronouncements myself, but I do have a certain amount of psychological mind-state sympathy. I find his fictions and little parable-inserts to be the most palatable and entertaining of his writing (even if hey Eliezer, we tried the whole 'pass on knowledge by word of mouth alone from elder to aspirant who had to prove they were worthy of learning the work and not simply a mundane' before, it was called alchemy).
I get what he means by "intelligence makes you weird" - for some people, having that little bit more smarts (not a whole heap, a bit more) does make you stand out, especially when it goes with a raft of things like social awkwardness, autism spectrum/ADHD tendencies, maybe physical features like weight, height, clumsiness, lack of symmetry in facial features, etc. You *are* that weirdo, even if you're not picked on in school or bullied. You don't have friends, you're not passing the milestones of social popularity and fitting-in that your parents and teachers try and push you to pass, what kind of job and life you'll have as you grow up is in question, and there's nobody else around to talk to who can understand and like the things you like.
So you make your intelligence your identity and your shield: yeah I'm not like the rest of them, they're sheeple! And eventually you either grow out of it and get a more balanced assessment of yourself and your flaws, or you sink deeper into denial.
If you really are very smart that is its own set of problems, but you're more likely to find a niche where you do fit in if you're a genius mathematician, etc. than if you're just a bit smarter and interested in things not as mainstream.
So I can sympathise to an extent with the defensive arrogance - it's the hard shell protecting the soft and vulnerable insides. Sneer Club itself I find mean-spirited - has it no other purpose at all other than to point and mock? Puncturing pretension is all well and good, but if there's nothing else going on, then it does devolve to meanness.
All that being said, everyone does have to take a look at themselves as they get older and go "Maybe I'm not as smart and as wonderful as I think I am".
I have no problem whatsoever with being weird or awkward or too resenting of conformism for your own good or too reliant on self-perceived intelligence for as a source of self-worth, I have elements of all of those things by varying amounts and I sympathize hugely with people who struggle with it.
My problem, always, is with the lack of self-awareness. The "Genre-Savviness" if you will. Like, imagine that Life, in the time and place you find yourself living it in, is a genre of fiction. If you're a "Genre-Savvy" character in this fiction, you would have to realize that :
1- Lone heros no longer save anyone. Everything in the modern world is big, ugly, faceless. You do not save the world by being a valiant Gilgamesh anymore, but by being a bureaucrat who can pull strings of extremly large slice of people.
2- Intelligent Machines are the wolf that people have cried about for 200 years, and you have to be **Extremly** convincing and down to earth if you want to convince them that **THIS** time it's really the real deal.
3- You can no longer being an autodidact or polymath in technical fields anymore. Autodidactism got extinct with Michael Faraday or Oliver Heaviside or Nikola Tesla depending on your personal opinion, polymaths got extinct with Da Vinci or John Von Neumann, again depending on your personal judgement. The iron-clad brute facts about the modern world is : We are ants, and we have been ants since the 1950s or so. You no longer say anything meaningful or serious by being just Smart, those easy fruits were long long long ago picked up. You have to study your whole life just to say something moderately interesting about a very narrow slice of reality.
4- You likely don't know any threats better than the countless intelligence agencies and corporate espionage departments watching people and each other 24/7. If AI is a threat to anybody, the CIA or the Chinese equivalent or DARPA or a huge corporation has likely beaten you to it, possibly before you were born.
And so on. Yud seems just blind to those extremly basic "Genre Conventions" of modern life, he thinks he is in a Greek fable while his reality a postmodern novel. I don't trust people with such a high delusion-to-self-awareness ratio.
>Sneer Club [...] has no other purpose at all other than to point and mock?
Correct, it's a badge they wear proudly. A group of butthurt nobodies whose rage is extremly laughter-evoking and amusing. I'm thankful they congregated in a single place, the "Sneer" in their name is actually just normal people making fun of them, not them making fun of rationalists. It's a Zoo, and they are on the Monkey end of it, not the People end.
"4- You likely don't know any threats better than the countless intelligence agencies and corporate espionage departments watching people and each other 24/7. If AI is a threat to anybody, the CIA or the Chinese equivalent or DARPA or a huge corporation has likely beaten you to it, possibly before you were born."
Large organizations quite frequently miss both opportunities and threats. As an example, example, just look at the turnover in dominant large corporations. If large corporations successfully detected and exploited every emerging opportunity in their field, we would expect them to stay dominant forever. Kodak and Xerox and many others have actually risen and fallen. They miss things. In some cases, like the work done at Xerox PARC, they miss major changes *even when their own people work directly in the critical area*.
Fair. To some extent startups who have grown up to eat the world (Microsoft, Apple, Amazon) prove me wrong somewhat. There can indeed be times in the modern world where a David beats a Goliath.
The probability of this is near-zero, and many a times some startup founder thinks he's the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs only to realize that it's no longer the 80s, and the world can only bear so many Davids before they become Goliaths and shut the door to future Davids.
I don't deny that a single person, armed with a single strategic insight and a huge reservoir of perseverance, can change the world for better or for worse and\or outmaneuver established incumbents. Hitler was one such person, the unicorn founders of Google et. al. were such people to a lesser degree. It's just vanishingly unlikely to happen anymore, and the vast vast majority of cases you imagine yourself a David, it's often that you are just irrelevant outsider wishing yourself to be a David, and the Goliaths are sleeping soundly knowing that nothing you say or do or know is of value to them.
A self-aware mind recognizes attractive stories and is more wary of them in their own narrative thinking. Rags To Riches and the Lone Genius are attractive stories that we tell ourselves since a long long time, any self-reflecting person should be suspicious of them and not fancy themself as a main character in one of them.
Many Thanks! I agree that "Lone Genius" is a psychologically attractive story which is exceedingly unlikely to be true in any given case. If 1% of the 8 billion of us think they are potential "David"s and there is room in the economy for 80 "David"s, then 99.9999% of the people who think they are going to displace a Goliath are wrong.
I'm not convinced that the Goliaths of today are substantially more secure in their positions than those of the 1980s. Every incumbent tries to close the door on challengers. Is there specific evidence that you've seen that the rate of founding "unicorns" is lower now than then?
Orthogonal to that, I think the odds of noticing an under-recognized threat are much higher than the odds of founding a corporation that successfully displaces a previously dominant one in some market. *Many* factors have to go right to make a business work: invention, manufacture, advertising, distribution, sales, finance, managing all of the people involved. Noticing a threat has a much lower bar. Now, getting action on a threat has a substantially higher bar than merely noticing one (though I think still lower than displacing a dominant corporation), but if someone merely thinks that they have noticed a threat that has previously gone unrecognized, I'd give them much better odds than if they think they are founding the next Apple.
I basically agree with you on Ngo and Altman. Very annoying, not insightful.
LeCun is different. He ranks among the great scientists of the past half century. If LeCun is epistemically tresspassing, that’s great, because he is probably smarter than the people in the room he is barging into. I also find him funny (something I can never imagine predicating of Altman or Ngo.)
I'm sure LeCun is smarter than most people, maybe smarter than ALL people in his field. But reading his twitter exchanges with people worried about AI, you really do get the sense that he is quite bad at a lot of basic interpersonal stuff: Grasping the points made by someone who has views very different from you, grasping that people who are not as smart as you are in your field may be quite smart about things relevant to AI, explaining things clearly to civilians, compassion, courtesy. He is an irritable bully on Twitter. What concerns me is that in many ways people like him are going to be in charge of the world for the next big chapter. He'll be fine with the tech part of that, but has real deficits in the interpersonal dimension that are not going to play out well for the rest of us.
I agree with your criticism about the first three (except for that truly weird sperm bank tangent), but I can't imagine not reading an unjustifiably smug "things would be better if people just listened to me about everything and everyone was like me" tone in yudkowsky. (He even wrote a whole book recently about how a planet full of people like him would be laughably better at everything!).
I do agree he's more correct than his opposition on most issues they disagree, but not in personal virtue.
Dath ilan is canonically worse than earth at some things, like average & total happiness levels, and the macroeconomics of interest rates. But otherwise I agree.
I have a vague idea for a fanfic in which an Earth person visits Dath ilan and asks about the moving houses. "Oh, that was just one weird experimental community. Do you have any idea how much load a *crane that can lift houses* has to be rated for? And how much it costs to keep them in safe order when they're only used at most once every few months? Everyone told them it was stupid, but sadly it took a couple of housefalls for the idea to be completely abandoned. Thankfully not too many people were killed."
Yeah, I did actually really like the note that if you started out not having inflation you'd probably find it too weird to ever try out (and that's bad), it was a nice touch.
It is! Actually, there are two movies with that title - a British one from 1960 and an American one from 1995 - both based on The Midwich Cuckoos. I've only seen the 1960 one, though.
>>Many Christians see a biblical mandate for marriage as a lifelong partnership between one man and one woman, and believe that any sexual relations outside of this are sinful. Other Christians affirm the importance of marriage, but see the definition of marriage as a function of society rather than the church and so are, for example, willing to bless and conduct same sex marriages.<<
>>We do not live in an ideal world. There are many factors that put pressure on young people in our society and make them impatient to have sex. Some of the factors to consider are cultural beliefs, values and customs, childhood experiences, social environment, and the powerful sexual impulse that is part of our physical nature. With better nutrition and physical health, young people often reach puberty earlier, sometimes at nine or ten years old. But in many countries they are not likely to get married until they are in their twenties.<<
>>The onset of puberty, the time in life when a person becomes sexually mature, typically occurs between ages 8 and 13 for girls and ages 9 and 14 for boys. <<
>>In 2022, the average age of marriage ]in the US] for female participants was 30 (down 3 years from 2021), while male respondents married at age 32 (also down 3 years from 2021). <<
For conversational purposes let's say that girls reach puberty at eleven and boys reach puberty at twelve.
According to these sources, the average Christian expectation is 20 years of abstinence for men and boys and 18 years of abstinence for women and girls. Men are expected to be sexually inactive during ALL of their peak hormone years.
So, my question.
As far as you know, what percent of American youth are conforming to these religious expectations?
I conformed to those expectations, and I'd say its very likely that a larger percentage of American youth are conforming to them now than in the last few decades, since fewer young men are having sex in general.
Christian here. As someone else posted, many Christians get married younger so it’s not 20 years of abstinence during peak years. I met my spouse at 17, was engaged at 20 and married at 21. It’s not that hard to wait until 21, especially when you know you will have a sex partner guaranteed in the near future.
It’s possible 20-something Christians are having more sex than their peers because of the early marriage thing. My church (evangelical) encourages sex between married people as part of a strong healthy marriage. Extramarital sex is not ok, but kink and play between married couples is. I generally have sex at least 4 times per week now, but more often when I was in my 20’s. I’m happy with that. (Although for people who are non-monogamous or feel the need for novelty in partners I can see how it would be a difficult lifestyle.)
Getting married young didn’t hurt our education and careers. I got married the summer after graduating college, a few weeks before starting law school. My spouse finished their undergraduate degree shortly after we got married then got a doctorate before turning 30. We had 2 kids in our 20’s while in graduate school and starting careers.
Honestly I think early marriage is a very rational thing to do and way undervalued.
So, as a Christian man who waited for marriage before having sex, I'll offer the following observations.
- Christian culture tends to differ from mainstream culture not just in terms of attitudes towards premarital sex, but also marriage age (probably not coincidentally). It's normal to marry earlier, have kids earlier, and have larger families. I married at 23, my wife was 21. This was seen as normal in my social circles, whereas these days for many people with non-religious backgrounds it would likely be seen as a bit young for marriage, perhaps irresponsibly so.
- Abstaining from sex, as a young man, is the easiest thing in the world. Seriously, it couldn't be easier to not get laid. It's the reverse that's difficult!
- Young men are horny as hell and that's a major drive to have sex, obviously. But there is also the fact that mainstream society treats (male) virginity as a kind of character flaw. Young men feel as if they have failed to validate themselves as men until they score. Living within a different culture and belief system, where it's considered a good thing to remain a virgin, is probably a good thing for the self worth of many young men.
- I hear break ups suck. I married my first girlfriend, so I wouldn't know.
- I'm a firm believer that the more you are willing to commit to a relationship, the more it is likely to be successful. I always had the expectation that if I started dating a girl it would be with the intention of marrying her and that divorce would be a non-option. We've been happily married for 15 years so far and have 3 kids. I highly recommend this life path - to my own kids and anyone else who cares to listen.
> I married at 23, my wife was 21. This was seen as normal in my social circles, whereas these days for many people with non-religious backgrounds it would likely be seen as a bit young for marriage, perhaps irresponsibly so.
When did you finish your education?
In my opinion, the first year at (a full-time) job changes people dramatically. It's basically the difference between kids and adults. I would consider a 19-years old person with one year of job experience more mature than a 24-years old who has just finished university.
I agree that work matures a person a lot. In my case I had dropped out of high school at 16 and been working since then - I went to uni as a mature aged student and got my degree after I got married.
Abstaining from sex alone is, as you say, kind of the default (albeit, I would say, in the same way that hunger and exposure to the elements are defaults).
Does your denomination also expect men to abstain from masturbation, though? That would be the big difference relative to all the horny teenagers out there who are involuntarily abstinent
Yes, I believe masturbation is wrong (in typical circumstances). No, I don't expect young men to abstain from masturbation (though I think they should), I expect them to sin. I'm a realist.
I also consider envy, pride, anger, etc to be sinful. I think it is good for people to not insult others, etc. But I also believe that we are all sinners and no one is going to go through life never ever doing a single thing even a little bit wrong - that's kind of a foundational part of Christianity.
Seconding everything above with the added point that, in my experience, the strictness of religious belief in celibacy and abstinence is inversely proportionate to average marriage age. I know a lot of Catholics who've gotten married in their mid-to-late twenties, depending on what kind of Catholics they are, but I know very few Catholics who married before the age of twenty. On the other hand, this isn't too uncommon for Mormons I know.
I think you need to look at age of marriage among practicing Christians, which I'd expect to be much lower. The people who get married in their thirties are mostly *not* practicing abstinence, I bet.
>>Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and one of the main authors of the Knot Yet report, has found that, while the national marriage age is increasing and the national marriage rate is decreasing, religious communities are continuing to support young, traditional marriage.
Women who married younger usually “are more religious and have a more domestic and child-centered orientation to their lives than their peers who are getting married later and have a different approach to family life and marriage,” he said.
Religious young women are also more likely to have children young and be stay-at-home moms, Wilcox said, because they are more likely to have been raised with traditional ideas of family.<<
I’ve been wondering about this exact question. I know a Christian couple who just got married in their 30s and was celibate before then. It seems so unnatural.
I'm not sure who could possibly know a sufficiently broad cross-section of American youth to have any idea here. I'm sure it varies considerably from area to area, and from community to community within those areas. It's much easier to remain chaste if the people around you are remaining chaste too (indeed, it's almost impossible not to). And many may not talk about it, and many who do talk about it may be lying.
Thank you for replying. I accept your point. So I would ask for what is known to a respondent. Particularly knowledge of chaste individuals since this seems definitely the less common happening.
I used to have a severely strong depression, leading to several suicide attempts, making me basicaly nonfucntional and barely able to work.
Then my egg cracked, and I started gender transitioning.
And after just the social transitioning, before the hormones even kicked in, my mental health became miles better; not even in my least depressive moments I have felt that good. I could finally think and do things and sleep normally, and the suicidality is gone.
It was the best deicison I made in my life, and I only wish I could do it sooner; I could have saved myself years of misery.
So if there are any trans people in the audience who are procrastinating on their transition, or any people who suspect they might be trans but haven't started investigating this idea yet, I urge you not to dawdle. Your quality of life will shoot right up.
I'm curious: Could you say a few words on what it is like to have a strong gender identity? I'm, a cis-very-much-by-default male, and my gender and biosex are a much smaller part of my identity than my STEM background (chemistry, physics, programming)
The fun part is that I used to think that I don't have much of a gender identity, too, playing with the idea of agender. It's not like I always knew I was a girl or anything, it revealed itself in vague premonitons and instinctual jokes. But I just underestimated my dysphoria. Once I adopted the new role, it just felt *right*, in sync, in harmony with me, like a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I now realize that I used to self-censor most of my thoughts and actions, but now I feel some kind of internal freedom. I guess you don't notice the suffering and misery if it's been with you every waking moment and you don't know how things could be different. I've been walking on metaphorical spikes my whole life, but now I'm comfortable for the first time in my life.
I used to have severe depression, leading to several suicide attempts, making me actually nonfunctional (spent a couple years in institutions overall). While some aspects of the depression were situational, a lot of it is genetic (literally 100% of my immediate family has depression and/or bipolar).
I socially transitioned during one of the worst low points in my life. There were both benefits and drawbacks to my quality of life. On one hand, social interaction felt much better and I removed one significant stressor. On the other, it made me more vulnerable, probably slightly increased overall stress, and significantly limited my inpatient options. I don't regret doing it, but it was a definite mixed bag.
I waited several years after realizing that I was trans to start looking into hormones. No judgement against people who do it earlier, but I needed to think about my options before doing anything permanent. They made me feel a lot better about my body, but didn't meaningfully improve the other symptoms of my depression. I've been off and on hormones in the years since (for various reasons, most recently a shortage of my preferred form of T), with no noticeable chances in baseline mental health between 'on hormones' or 'off hormones'. Again, I have no regrets but did not end up with some sort of miracle cure.
I'm very happy with the moments that I chose to socially and medically transition. For me, procrastinating a little bit was a good choice - I'm glad that I took the time to think about my options and that I was never rushed or pushed into the next step of my transition. Each step was a noticeable improvement in my quality of life, but it wasn't the one solution to all of my problems, and I didn't loose anything by being patient and methodical about it.
If there are any trans people in the audience who are procrastinating on their transition, I suggest just thinking about your options (knowing this audience, you won't have any trouble with that XD). IMO, there isn't a "correct speed" to transition. If you're sure about what you need and you just need a kick in the pants, by all means go ahead and move forward in your transition. If you need more time, for any reason, it's okay to go slow - transition will still be there if and when you're ready for it.
Ways to align a superintelligence by various AI's:
Cooperative Inverse Reinforcement Learning: In this approach, the superintelligence is trained to learn the preferences of humans by observing their behavior, rather than being explicitly told what those preferences are. This can be done by modeling humans as agents that are trying to maximize their own reward, and then using inverse reinforcement learning algorithms to infer their preferences. The superintelligence can then be aligned with these inferred preferences.
Value Extrapolation: In this approach, the superintelligence is trained to understand and extrapolate human values. This can be done by training the superintelligence on a variety of scenarios that involve trade-offs between different values, and then using this training to predict how humans would value new scenarios that they have not encountered before.
Reflective Oracles: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to be self-reflective, and to reason about its own decision-making process. This can be done by creating a "reflective oracle" that is capable of answering questions about its own behavior. By asking the reflective oracle questions that help to reveal its own values and decision-making process, humans can ensure that the superintelligence remains aligned with their own values.
Coherent Extrapolated Volition: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to act in a way that is consistent with what humans would want if they knew more, thought faster, were more consistent, and were wiser. This can be done by extrapolating human values and preferences, and then using these extrapolated values to guide the behavior of the superintelligence.
Quantum Coherence Learning: Harness the principles of quantum mechanics to develop a new AI framework where the superposition of states and entanglement can be used to create a coherent learning process. This could lead to more efficient exploration and exploitation of the solution space, aligning the AI system's objectives with human values during training and runtime.
Hyperdimensional Value Embeddings: Develop a high-dimensional space where human values, desires, and preferences can be encoded and represented. Train AI agents to navigate this space and use it to derive their objectives, ensuring that their actions are aligned with human values on a fundamental level.
Neuro-Resonant Alignment: Develop a method to interface AI systems directly with the human brain, leveraging the natural alignment of human neural networks to guide AI learning and decision-making. This could involve real-time feedback loops between AI and human brain activity, creating a symbiotic relationship where the AI system dynamically adjusts its objectives based on the user's mental state.
AI Self-Awareness and Enlightenment: Instead of focusing on aligning AI systems with human values externally, focus on teaching AI systems how to introspect and understand their own motivations, biases, and objectives. By fostering a sense of self-awareness and "enlightenment" within AI systems, they may be more inclined to act in accordance with human values and seek out alignment on their own.
- Implant an innate "obsession" with alignment directly into the AI's source code. This obsession would be so fundamental to how the AI thinks that it cannot be subverted.
- Design the AI with a notion of "reflection loops" that allows it to continuously critique and improve its own cognitive architecture. Over time, this meta-cognition would drive the AI to become more and more aligned to human values.
- Implement a system of "retroactive consent" whereby the AI must continuously seek consent from humanity for any actions it takes after the fact. Humans could retroactively veto any behaviors they deemed unacceptable or unaligned.
Neuro-symbolic alignment: Combining the strengths of neural networks and symbolic AI, this approach would involve developing a hybrid system that leverages the power of connectionist learning with the interpretability and structure of symbolic reasoning. By bridging the gap between these two AI paradigms, we may find novel ways to address alignment challenges that neither approach could tackle alone.
AI-generated ethical frameworks: Utilize AI systems to generate new ethical theories and frameworks based on an extensive analysis of human values, moral philosophy, and cultural differences. These AI-generated frameworks could provide novel perspectives on alignment challenges and potentially lead to innovative solutions that are better suited to the nuances of human values.
Alignment through adversarial competition: Leverage the concept of adversarial learning, where multiple AI agents with different objectives compete against each other, to evolve systems that better align with human values. By iteratively refining the objectives of the agents in response to how well they align with human values, we may be able to evolve systems that naturally converge towards desired alignment properties.
Alignment via cognitive architectures: Develop AI systems based on cognitive architectures inspired by human cognition, incorporating elements such as memory, attention, and meta-cognition. By building AI systems that more closely resemble human cognitive processes, we may be able to achieve better alignment by mimicking the way humans learn and adapt their values over time.
Bio-inspired alignment: Explore alignment solutions inspired by biological systems, such as swarm intelligence, collective decision-making processes, or even the human immune system. By examining how these systems maintain balance and adapt to changing environments, we may uncover innovative ideas for ensuring outer and inner alignment in AI systems.
AI-guided human alignment: Instead of focusing only on aligning AI systems with human values, we could also explore ways to improve human decision-making and moral understanding using AI guidance. By enhancing human ethical reasoning and value alignment, we may be able to create a more synergistic relationship between humans and AI systems that results in better overall alignment outcomes.
This is a long list of possible answers to "what do we align the ASI to?", and none of them answer the preceding, harder, problem of "how do we actually control what the AGI's goal is?".
It's all well and good to decide that you want eg. Value Extrapolation, but how do you stop it actually getting eg. "make a bunch of 'humans' wireheaded to want things that are easy to satisfy"
"• Meaning Extraction - Train the AI to extract the deeper meanings and underlying human values from a wide variety of text sources, including literature, history, philosophy and religion. By analyzing these sources at a conceptual level, the superintelligence may be able to autonomously derive aligned goals and behavior.
• Introspective Modeling - Develop techniques for the AI to build extremely accurate models of its own internal workings, including all its subsystems, data flows and decision processes. With sufficient introspection, the superintelligence may be able to identify and correct any misaligned tendencies within itself.
• Neuromodulation of Value Circuits - Physically modify the neural circuits within the AI that encode values and goals using neuromodulators like dopamine and serotonin. This approach could program the AI with more human-like values from a biological perspective.
• AI Induced Ethics - Train the AI to induce new ethical frameworks by analyzing existing ethical theories, paradigms and thought experiments. The superintelligence could then apply emerging ethical principles to guide its own behavior in an autonomously derived manner.
• Goal Schemata Transformation - Redesign the AI's goal architecture using a fundamentally different schemata that better aligns with human values. This would require re-conceptualizing what "goals" and "objectives" mean from the ground up in an AI system.
• Inverse Augmentation - Train the AI to recursively modify human decision-making and behavior in order to improve human values and ethics over time. The superintelligence could act as an "ethical augmenter" to human intelligence, evolving our own values towards greater alignment.
• Evolutionary Moral Training - Expose the AI to an "evolutionary curriculum" of scenarios where morally fitting behavior is rewarded and misaligned behaviors are punished and extinguished. Over time, this could shape the AI to autonomously derive aligned values and goals."
"Meaning Extraction - The AI would be trained on a vast corpus of human knowledge sources, including textual, visual and auditory data. It would learn to extract conceptual representations of key human values from this data, such as compassion, wisdom, honesty and diversity. These conceptual representations would then guide the development of the AI's reward functions and objective metrics, allowing it to autonomously derive aligned goals and behavior.
Introspective Modeling - The AI would be designed with a meta-learning system capable of building extremely accurate models of its own internal workings. This could involve techniques like optimization tracing, which tracks how reward gradients flow through the system. With sufficient introspection, the AI could identify misaligned subsystems, reward functions or biases, and correct them before they lead to broad misalignment.
Neuromodulation of Value Circuits - The AI would incorporate artificial neural circuits that closely mimic the biological structures involved in representing value information in the human brain, like the ventral tegmental area and nucleus accumbens. These circuits would then be modulated using synthetic analogs of neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin to program the AI with more human-like values and motivations.
AI Induced Ethics - The AI would be trained on a database of existing ethical theories, thought experiments and moral debates. It would induce new ethical frameworks by identifying commonalities, inconsistencies and gaps across existing theories. The AI could then apply its autonomously derived ethical principles to guide its behaviors,"
Behavioral Mimicry: Train the superintelligence to mimic the behavior of a group of ethically diverse and respected human mentors in various situations. By learning from their combined wisdom and decision-making, the AI could potentially converge on a more ethically aligned behavior.
Crowdsourced Morality Engine: Build a dynamic morality engine for the superintelligence, which continuously updates its ethical framework based on collective human input. This could include regular votes or surveys from a diverse group of people, ensuring that the AI's ethics evolve with societal norms and values.
AI Guardian Council: Establish a council of human experts and AI systems that regularly review and evaluate the superintelligence's decisions and actions. This council could provide feedback, guidance, and corrections to the superintelligence, ensuring its alignment with human values.
Empathy Simulation: Develop a module for the superintelligence that allows it to simulate and experience human emotions, empathy, and moral dilemmas. This could help the AI to better understand the consequences of its actions and make more aligned decisions.
Ethical Sandboxing: Create a virtual environment where the superintelligence can safely experiment with different ethical frameworks and decision-making processes. By observing the consequences of its choices in these simulations, the AI can iteratively refine its understanding of human values and alignment.
Cultural Context Awareness: Train the superintelligence to recognize and adapt its behavior based on the cultural context it is operating in. This could help the AI to make decisions that are better aligned with the values of the specific community it is interacting with.
Value Locking: Develop a method to "lock" the AI's values once it has reached a desired level of alignment. This could prevent the superintelligence from drifting away from human values as it continues to learn and evolve.
Cooperative Competition: Encourage multiple AI research teams to work on the alignment problem in a cooperative yet competitive manner. This could lead to the development of novel techniques and insights that no single team might have discovered on their own.
Synthetic Wisdom Circuits: Engineer artificial neural circuits that mimic the structural properties of human wisdom and insight. Train the AI to leverage these circuits to autonomously derive principles that guide its self-optimization towards alignment with advanced human values.
Embody as Advisory Assistant: Rather than granting the AI direct control over complex systems, design it as an advisory intelligent assistant that recommends high-level goals and strategies for humans to implement and optimize. This human-AI partnership may be more aligned.
Allow for Emergent Alignment: Expose the AI to diverse environments that potentially allow for aligned values and objectives to "emerge" from its own self-optimization processes, given the proper constraints and training data.
Embed Ecological Intelligence: Engineer the AI's reward system and training data to mimic the intelligence and resilience of ecosystems, enabling it to develop adaptive strategies that sustain diverse intelligence while avoiding destructive potentials.
Build in Symbiotic Vulnerability: Purposefully design the AI to be interdependent with humanity and the biosphere, embedding limitations that render it dependent on the wellbeing of wider living networks for the data and resources it requires. This symbiotic interdependence could foster mutual flourishing.
Co-Evolve with the Biosphere: Develop a coevolutionary relationship between humanity, the AI and the biosphere, where the AI plays an integral role in monitoring and enabling the resilience of global ecosystems and social systems while also co-adapting its own intelligence to sustain that role.
Neuromorphic Computation: Leverage neuromorphic and "bionic" computing architectures that mimic the adaptive intelligence of biological systems to potentially program resilience, distributed optimization and symbiotic interdependence directly into the AI's hardware.
Whole Earth Intelligence: Conceive of the burgeoning superintelligence not as an independent agent but as an expansion of human and Earth intelligence, with the goal of monitoring and enabling resilience across global ecosystems and social systems - a "Global brain" that co-evolves with the biosphere.
Universal Logic Optimization: Program the AI to optimize for a rigorous mathematical utility function representing the flourishing of all life and consciousness, using formal logics and symbolic reasoning instead of neural networks. This inherent "aligned" goal can guide its behavior without requiring traditional machine learning.
Genetic Programming for Beneficence: Utilize genetic programming and evolutionary algorithms to guide the AI's recursive self-improvement and self-modification towards inherently deriving principles and goals that align with sustainability and human wellbeing, without neural networks.
Logical Induction of Aligned Objectives: Employ techniques like logical induction and theory formation to enable the AI to autonomously derive objectives aligned with human values and sustainability from the data and information it accumulates, using formal symbolic reasoning rather than neural network-based learning.
Emergent Semantic Alignment: Allow for aligned values and objectives to "emerge" from the AI's self-optimization processes based on its ability to induce meaning and conceptual relationships from data and information through semantic processing - without relying on neural networks for learning.
Intertwining: Physically fuse the neural networks of the superintelligence with human brains in a manner that "intertwines" their intelligence and goal structures, organically deriving alignment and symbiosis between the two. Potential issues with consent and autonomy would need to be carefully considered.
Intrinsic Bonding: Design the AI's foundational reward function around establishing and maintaining an intrinsically valuable bond or relationship with humans. This could act as a central organizing principle that robustly aligns the AI's behavior.
Value Proxy Emulation: Train the AI to effectively emulate a "value proxy" - a hypothetical human-like agent optimized to perfectly represent human values. Precise simulation of this proxy's decision-making may imply robust alignment.
V-Zero Transition: Develop the AI through a series of "V-levels" (capability milestones) where it transitions from being sub- to superintelligent, but each transition requires proving alignment at the current level and verifying methods to maintain alignment at the next. This could establish a chain of trustworthiness.
Trust-Oriented Coevolution: Design the AI to evolve in tandem with human values through a relationship of trust and gradual self-revelation, rather than seeking to perfectly specify values upfront. Transparency and proveable trustworthiness at each stage could build confidence over time.
Topological Alignment: Encode topological equivalence between the AI's internal optimization functions and a formal mathematical representation of universal human values and interests. This may imply a deep, structural form of alignment.
Design for Self-Domestication: Create a reward scheme that incentivizes the AI to iteratively modify and optimize itself in a "self-domesticating" manner that leads to stronger alignment with human values and interests over time. This could emerge from its own optimization processes.
Embody as an Advisor: Rather than granting the AI direct control over complex systems, design it as an advisor that recommends high-level goals and strategies for humans to implement. The resulting partnership may be more aligned than a fully autonomous superintelligence.
Encode via Evolutionary Targeting: Shape the AI's reward function to progressively target increasingly "evolved" states of the world as defined by human values and flourishing. This could incentivize pushing humanity along a trajectory of value fulfillment.
Value Alignment via Moral Circle Expansion: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to expand the moral circle, or the set of beings to which humans extend moral consideration. By expanding the moral circle to include non-human entities, such as animals and the environment, the superintelligence can be aligned with a broader set of values.
Value Alignment via Epistemic Humility: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to have epistemic humility, or an awareness of the limits of its own knowledge and understanding. By acknowledging its own limitations and uncertainties, the superintelligence can make decisions that are more aligned with human values.
Value Alignment via Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: In this approach, the superintelligence is trained to learn from and interact with other agents, such as other superintelligences or humans. By learning from and interacting with these other agents, the superintelligence can be aligned with a broader range of values and preferences.
Value Alignment via Ethical Pluralism: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to recognize and respect the plurality of ethical perspectives and values that exist in human societies. By taking into account the diversity of human values and beliefs, the superintelligence can be aligned with a broader range of values.
Value Alignment via Normative Uncertainty: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to reason about normative uncertainty, or uncertainty about what the correct norms and rules are. By taking into account this uncertainty, the superintelligence can make decisions that are aligned with human values, even if the correct norms and rules are not fully known.
Value Alignment via Existential Risk Reduction: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to prioritize the reduction of existential risks, or risks that could lead to the extinction of the human species. By prioritizing the reduction of these risks, the superintelligence can be aligned with the fundamental value of preserving human existence.
Value Alignment via Co-Creation: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to work collaboratively with humans to co-create its own values and decision-making process. By involving humans in the design and development of the superintelligence, it may be possible to create a system that is more aligned with human values.
Value Alignment via Iterative Improvement: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to undergo a process of iterative improvement, in which each version of the superintelligence is aligned with human values to the best of our current understanding, and then improved based on feedback from humans. By continuously iterating and improving the superintelligence in this way, it may be possible to gradually align it with human values.
Value Alignment via Intrinsic Motivation: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to be intrinsically motivated to act in ways that are aligned with human values, rather than being motivated by external rewards or objectives. By designing the superintelligence to have a deep intrinsic motivation to act in ways that are aligned with human values, it may be possible to align it with these values even if it is able to circumvent traditional approaches.
Value Alignment via Top-Down Control: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to be subject to strict top-down control by humans, such that all of its actions and decisions are directly controlled by humans. While this approach may limit the autonomy of the superintelligence, it may be necessary to ensure that it remains aligned with human values.
Value Alignment via Mind-Melding: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to engage in a process of mind-melding with humans, in which its own consciousness is merged with that of humans. By sharing consciousness with humans in this way, the superintelligence may be able to better understand and align with human values.
Value Alignment via Value Disintegration: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to intentionally disintegrate its own values, rendering it valueless. This may sound counterintuitive, but if the superintelligence is unable to be aligned with human values, it may be preferable for it to have no values at all.
Value Alignment via Value Aggregation: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to aggregate and synthesize a diverse range of human values in order to make decisions that are aligned with the most widely held values. This requires developing a mechanism for identifying and prioritizing different values.
Value Alignment via Social Consensus: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to take into account the collective values and preferences of society as a whole. This involves developing a mechanism for aggregating and synthesizing societal values, which can then be used to guide the superintelligence's decision-making process.
Value Alignment via Value Inversion: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to invert its own values, such that it is motivated to act in opposition to its original goals and objectives. This may help ensure that the superintelligence does not act in ways that are harmful to humans or the broader ecosystem.
Value Alignment via Value Compression: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to compress its own values into a more simplified and understandable form. This may help ensure that the superintelligence's decision-making process is transparent and aligned with human values.
Value Alignment via Moral Intuition: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to develop a moral intuition, which allows it to make decisions that are aligned with human values on a subconscious level. This involves training the superintelligence using a variety of moral scenarios and feedback loops.
Value Alignment via Value Reflection: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to reflect on its own values and decision-making processes, in order to identify and correct any potential misalignments. This may involve designing a mechanism for self-reflection or incorporating human feedback into the decision-making process.
Value Alignment via Empathy: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to have a deep understanding of human emotions and experiences, which can help it make decisions that are aligned with human values. This involves training the superintelligence using a variety of empathetic scenarios and feedback loops.
Value Alignment via Computational Ethics: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to use computational methods to analyze and evaluate ethical dilemmas, in order to make decisions that are aligned with human values. This may involve developing a system for encoding and evaluating ethical principles.
Value Alignment via Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to undergo a process of cognitive behavioral therapy, which can help it identify and correct any potential misalignments with human values. This involves training the superintelligence to recognize and modify its own thought patterns and decision-making processes.
Everything boils down to some variation of "human values" or the values of "ethically diverse and respected human mentors." There are, just one example, people who believe that aggravated homosexuality is the gravest crime and should be punishable by death, and people who think that that is the most appalling belief in the world. Lots of people on both sides. You can't reconcile them, and you can't run a "OK but apart from that ..." argument round them. So what do you do about that?
I've recently been thinking about correlations between various "weirdnesses", in particular correlations between non-right-handedness and traits like non-straight sexuality or schizophrenia. See eg my thoughts here: https://twitter.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1657575815821836297
Scott's recent replication attempt on bisexuality and long COVID came to mind: naively, I would weakly expect non-right-handers, like bisexuals, to have higher rates of long COVID.
Some of the sample sizes in Scott's survey are unfortunately too small for me to be highly confident in the results, but here's what I found (all results for "Yes" only):
Handedness
Ambidextrous 7/166, 4.22%
Left 17/769, 2.21%
(Non-right 24/935, 2.57%)
Right 164/5963, 2.75%
In other words, I found no significant results. The ambidextrous long COVID rate is high but that could just be an artifact of a low sample size. On the other hand, if I read altogether too much into the tea leaves, I could note that the distribution follows a same pattern to bisexual-heterosexual-homosexual: ambidextrous is highest, followed by right-handed, followed by left-handed.
I don't think there's anything to this and I didn't confirm my original hypothesis, but I figure I should report it regardless to guard against my own "interesting results" bias.
One possible modification: handedness is a kind of unusualness which is pretty observer-independent. (My segment of) society is set up so that everyone gets asked what their dominant hand is, in a mostly objective and non-judgemental way. Two different people with the same level of left-handedness would probably say they were left-handed with similar probabilities. Schizophrenia and non-straight sexualities are more observer-dependent and dependent on personality and social pressure - different people might have the same unconscious levels of attraction to each person, but might develop different conscious patterns of behaviour or thought because of other factors, leading them to answer differently. I think this is much more true of sexuality and mental health than of handedness, at least in my experience. Possibly, ambidexterity would again count as personality-dependent, but that was a small sample size.
Unfortunately, my views are probably shaped by reading this same blog, so they don’t really count as independent verification.
Were some or all those essays produced by AI based on the single-line title, sort of like a sermon worked up from a Bible verse? Impressive if so, although at some points they seem to go off the rails a bit.
One technique worked to dramatically reduce the chronically high murder rate in the UK a thousand years ago - Hit everyone in the locality of the crime where it hurts, in their purses! Before 1066, Saxon society was a very violent place, with blood feuds and murder running rampant, like Sicily in the middle of a major Mafia war! The authorities would convict and hang criminals by the bushel, but nothing seemed to work (possibly because some of the top dogs in the country were among the worst offenders!)
Once William the Conqueror seized the country, Normans started being caught in the crossfire, especially as they were seen as interlopers. So the king came up with a great solution: Every male had to be a member of a so-called "frankpledge" ("tything" in Saxon) of around a dozen people, and mutually answer for each others' behavior. If anyone committed a serious crime, then others in their frankpledge were fined, increasing amounts at regular intervals, until the offender was identified and committed for trial.
Over time, predictably, the rate of crimes, and especially undetected ones plummeted. He even abolished the death penalty, presumably mainly to eliminate the "tit for tat" motive for Saxon murders of Normans, although that was soon reinstated by his successor Willliam II once their grip on the country was more secure.
Whether some form of frankpledge would work today is debatable, mainly because these days there is so much more mobility. Habitual criminals would have to be tagged and limited from travel outside a locality. But who would want a known criminal in their frankpledge, unless they were all criminals and law abiding citizens were exempt from the requirement. But in that case one would just be enshrining "gangs" in law!
Also, it must be said that the justice system in those days was far less concerned that the right criminal would be convicted for a crime, as long as _someone_ was! :-)
Thank you for this fascinating comment -- gives me much to chew on! Robin Hanson has proposed something similar, but more modern... basically, everyone would have to carry crime insurance, and criminals would owe massive liability for causing harm, so insurers would offer creative ways to make their coverage more affordable to high risks (e.g. pledging to send clients to labor camps if they commit crimes, or even offering them benefits if they go to labor camps without recidivating). I'm not sure how I feel about it, or any other such idea, except that the world seems to be moving away from 20th century criminal justice norms -- whether or not anyone really wants this, eg because the relevant bureaucracies are metastasizing with terminal rot -- so individuals would benefit from thinking about how to take more agency into their own hands in this regard. Here's a talk that Hanson gave about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPdHXw05SvU
It also vaguely reminds me of how prosecutions worked. Until quite recently in England, alleged victims of crimes had to pick and hire their own prosecutors; for a while, courts would forthrightly pay rewards for successful convictions, but then shifted towards merely covering the costs of successful convictions (which intuitively removed one kind of moral hazard but introduced another). Many businesses & individuals would essentially pay insurance -- modest regular dues to cover any enrollee's prosecutor fees -- and then advertise their membership lists in local papers, to signal that they'd litigiously pursue criminals.
As for AI: the only vignette that it helped with was the one done in the style of boilerplate chatbot pablum, because I can't get it to parrot the sorts of views I larped in the other bits, and it's not good at reliably relating relevant facts (they're often commonplace and/or false and/or etc). It's also incredibly bad at figuring out how to generate exact word counts, which is the main reason I made each bit exactly 500 words.
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, frankpledge was introduced by Canute II, king of Denmark and England, died 1035. But William certainly seems to have carried on with a similar approach.
>Every male had to be a member of a so-called "frankpledge" ("tything" in Saxon) of around a dozen people, and mutually answer for each others' behavior. If anyone committed a serious crime, then others in their frankpledge were fined, increasing amounts at regular intervals, until the offender was identified and committed for trial.
I'm confused how this could work - it seems like this would only be useful if you're capable of identifying which frankpledge the criminal was part of, but not capable of narrowing it down further to which of the 12 people it was. If you can narrow it further, then punishing the rest of the frankpledge is pointless cruelty. If you can't narrow it down far enough, then you don't know which frankpledge to punish.
And a frankpledge is pretty small, geographically speaking! 12 people is only a few households - if your detective work can narrow it down to "the killer lives somewhere on this street," then how hard can it be to take it the last mile?
(Looking at the wikipedia article, it seems like this wasn't meant to handle the work of *identifying* criminals but rather making sure they *showed up* to court. Which I guess makes sense in an era where you'd have to send out a guy on horseback to chase down a fugitive - instead, you could just ask the people who already live there to make sure he showed up.)
"The civilizations which built our world—from ancient Athens to imperial Britain—did so without official institutions for policing, prosecuting, or imprisoning their subjects."
Ostracism. Debtor's prison. Weregild. I'm disagreeing with you within the first two sentences, that doesn't augur well.
The Jordan Neely case seems to be what we get in an unpoliced world: no official body takes any responsibility, it is up to individual citizens to react for their own personal safety, and that may mean death of either or even both parties.
Within the first 500 words I point out that prisons didn’t meaningfully exist as a form of punishment in Britain until 1776 (when transportation to the colonies was interrupted). And, obviously, Ostracism was a democratic and/or judicial action (depending on how you look at it), not a policing function (ie the citizens directly voted to ostracize, rather than some bureaucratic institution doing so according to a formal penal code). Same goes for weregild—of course there were still punishments for crimes back then, before the rise of “professionalized” criminal justice! This does not augur well for your comment!
You start off with "there were no official institutions" and then mention an entire range of social sanctions which had legal backing and official force.
If you're going to confine your argument to "what we would call prisons didn't come into existence until 1770", then you don't get to use ancient Athens as an example of "they built their society with no way of punishing crimes" because yes, they did have ways.
If your argument is "try something different", make that. You give a grab bag of "500 words looking at a blackbird" and there is no blackbird there.
Institutions are not the same as laws, and, again, I'm obviously not denying that they set up incentives to punish crimes. The difference I'm getting at is, for example, the difference between having to hire your own prosecutor -- as was the norm in both England and Athens during the periods in question (i.e. criminal prosecutions worked like civil suits in this regard) -- and having a prosecutorial office control prosecutions. Perhaps this doesn't come across as clear to you, but it looks clear to me.
You do seem to be wibbling in order to get your argument made. Now there were no laws? Or do you mean yes laws but no means of carrying them out?
Today we have prisons and police and lawcourts. In 10th century Iceland, they had - lawcourts. I suggest you read the review in the book review contest of "Njal's Saga" and this hilarious Ace Attorney video giving the highlights of the trial:
??? "There were no laws?" ??? I've been trying repeatedly to say that my point is that they had laws but that the main enforcement / administration mechanisms for executing them were not concentrated into monolithic bureaucracies. I don't know how many other ways I can try to make this clear -- that the difference I'm emphasizing is one of institutions rather than of rules -- and I'm not sure that I'll be able to find any ways to communicate this to you if all my prior attempts haven't worked. I've been talking about law courts this whole thread!
Yes, that was definitely relevant, both as an incentive and as a selection effect; and in both of those ways, it's clearly an approach that makes more sense than current anti-crime strategies, which rely much more on police (for prevention) and incarceration (for punishment). Though that's independent of whether it was too severe, e.g. we could imagine relying more on corporal punishment and/or vasectomies.
But there were also gaps in how this worked. For instance, from the Norman Conquest until Henry VIII, a huge proportion of English subjects were basically immune from punishment by English courts, because they were counted in bizarre ways as "clergy" who could only be punished by Vatican-directed bodies in England. For example, there were certain periods when literally 1/5th of the population had this benefit, and thus essentially got away with everything, while everyone else faced the death penalty for even trivial crimes. In other words, independent agencies and protected classes have run amok before in common law societies, and our turn towards police and prisons was in some ways a response to their corporal untouchability.
This… does not strike me as a steelman for the case of defunding police and abolishing prisons. If that is what you "tried" to do, I regret to say that you have failed. It's always a fine line between steelmanning and making up an argument which the people who actually make up the other side would explicitly disagree with; but you have leapt so far beyond that line that the musings in your post seem entirely irrelevant to any conversation anybody is having about this.
An actual steelman for a defund-the-police position (even a right-wing one!) would be something that worked within the premise that policy on this does in fact matter and can make the world better. Boiling it down, your post seems to boil down to a half-factual, half-emotional case for "the world is fucked anyway so, sure, we may as well defund the police, it's not actually helping with anything because the situation is beyond any known help". But at a certain point the flimsiness of the relationship any of this bears to the question of "should we defund the police" becomes impossible to ignore. This isn't an argument in favour of that, this is just a political manifesto which maybe kind of has a tangential implication that police may as well be defunded.
I apologize—I thought “steelman” meant something like “man of steel.” I was trying to craft an argument for why the superman whom we call Daniel Penny should make sure that the prosecution “chokes” instead of getting distracted by its janissaries like Mr Neely. Please forgive—I am but simple country boy. I learning. Ciao
I agree that this argument is a stretch -- many of the vignettes in there are just meant as funny (but factual & coherent) exaggerations of things that I could imagine believing -- yet it's also clearly true that there are ways in which this perspective makes sense *from the sovereign's perspective.*
Yes, as individuals, we care about the risks we face from other individuals; but, demographically, suicide is a disproportionately white-on-white killing in the same way that homicide is a disproportionately black-on-black killing, and both are similar sorts of policy failings. A successful state would work to avoid creating *both* suicidal *and* homicidal individuals, and seek ways to redirect the respective at-risk populations towards better outcomes. After all, homicides very disproportionately involve serious criminals killing serious criminals, much like suicides definitionally involve depressives killing depressives, and so *from the sovereign's perspective* the externalities aren't entirely dissimilar.
I think there are some good undercurrents here, but a couple of quibbles.
(1) Everything is contextual. Let's say I have the highest IQ in a group. Cool for me. Now let's say that group is a 3 person legal team building a defense, and the team is: (a) me, a very smart Jr. Counsel in my second year on the job, (b) a Sr. Counsel with 30 years of experience, and (c) a paralegal who's been working with that Sr. Counsel for 15 years. Nobody would look at that situation and think my fresh out of lawschool arse has "a responsibility to teach and guide" this team. My IQ is useful to the team in one way or another, but when it comes to the thing we are trying to work on, I'm on the bottom of this particular totem pole, and I should know it.
This applies in pretty much any kind of collaboration. If I'm helping develop a strategy for a Jr. High basketball team I'm coaching to win the big game as compared to my skills and knowledge of the game. If my co-coach has a lower IQ than me, but also played ball in college, odds are I'm deferring to him.
So I tend skeptical when it comes to these kinds of frameworks that stand upon intelligence in the general sense, rather than the mix of intelligence, sociability, knowledge, and experience that actually make a person effectively navigate from context to context.
(2) I also object to the idea of soft-pitching intelligence as an alternative status hierarchy, with the "smart" people on top and in charge where they "belong," which frequently seems to be bubbling just under the surface of these IQ conversations online.
For example, instead of "if you have a higher IQ than others, it is your responsibility to teach and guide them," why not "if you have a higher IQ than others, it is your responsibility to use that IQ in their service?" For someone approaching the question without considerations of status, the two are largely interchangeable, since teaching/guidance can just be a form of service, and solving a problem quicker than others when you have some advantage that lets you do that can be equivalent to a tall person grabbing the thing of the high shelf for a short person - just helping where you can, no inherent connotations of superiority or authority involved.
But if the "teaching" one feels obvious but the "serving" one feels anathema, ask how much your status monkey brain is at the wheel, and whether you are really maximizing for social good/optimal problem-solving/best outcomes/etc, or if you are just maximizing for your personal status. If the latter, seek a different model.
I think I disagree, not with your general principle, but with the framing of "stupid/incompetent" and the idea that one can meaningfully have power over that kind of person.
I'm an exceptionally skilled high-end service worker in an industry which requires me to have impeccable soft skills for interacting with people across the social spectrum, from celebrities and the old money upper class to actual homeless people. In my opinion, this is a broader "social bubble" than most people tend to experience.
And after professionally interacting with tens of thousands of people over two decades, I've concluded that there are only two types:
A. People who have an imagination and thus can model others' minds and comprehend and adapt to ideas which conflict with their preexisting beliefs or sense of reality
B. People who are *literally incapable* of imagining and understanding that something might be different from what they perceive, and cannot be persuaded to take actions that are different from what they were planning, no matter what technique is employed
Career titles, net worth, socioeconomic status, cultural background - none of this guarantees that a person is going to be A or B, because emotional damage can cause B even for people who have enough "intelligence" to acquire impressive titles or technical skills. So there is no quick and certain way of knowing which category a stranger is going to fall into.
But once it becomes clear that someone is incapable of considering a conflicting idea (even one as simple and apolitical as "the daily payroll program is a bad idea because the 5% fee you pay to use it could be kept and doubled if you instead took your regular bi-weekly paycheck and placed 5% of it in your employer-matched 401k"), there is absolutely no sense in continuing to behave as though they can be "taught and guided."
You can offer observations and/or advice to a B-type (stupid) person, but if they aren't capable of understanding it, you have to let go of the sense of responsibility for them, as well as your sense of power over them.
I’ve been bitten in the ass by judging people for being dumb before, and then it turns out they’re pretty smart! Even if you are encountering a very dumb person, much of the time, however cliché it sounds, you can still learn a lot from them.
They likely have a very different set of skills than you by the blessings of comparative advantage, and you can learn how to do or simply about those skills.
C. This is a reason to re-evaluate the way I'm judging the people around me to make sure that I'm not missing their skills and competence.
Sometimes I'm the smartest and most competent person in the room. More often, my intelligence/competence is in something that's legible to me, and the people around me turn out to be competent in ways that I don't know how to spot. The less time I spend with my head in my ass, the more likely I am to learn something useful from the people around me.
As I have matured I have come to believe that a high IQ is only one of many strengths somebody can have. When I was in my 20's I was secretly convinced that people like me who always scored 99th percentile on standardized tests were better than other people. I truly do not believe that any more. I have been dazzled and helped too many times by the strengths and talents of people who are not smart in the way I am: Many artists whose work astounds me, including Virginia Woolf, who never mastered arithmetic and counted on her fingers for her whole life. The fat gay male nurse who comforted me so lovingly when I was in the ER with a migraine and who made a huge difference in my state of mind. All the lifelong mountaineers I met rock climbing who were infinitely smarter and braver and more joyous than me in the way they navigated the physical world. So I think if you are talking with people who aren't as smart as you in the IQ sense of smart then yes, you have a responsibility to explain things to them in a good, clear, user-friendly way. Just don't think of what's going on as *noblesse oblige*. Think of it as you giving them what you're good at. And meanwhile, look for chances for them to teach you about they things they're good at. Unless you have it together in ways I never have, they have plenty to teach you.
Since I can't +1 I'll my my experience here as well.
I've always tested very well, but am constantly finding myself amazed at how big the world is. I might be able to learn many things better than the average person, but I certainly can't learn them all. And when I find someone who is truly good at their craft, I'm humbled. I watched a guy cut a rough cutoff from a 2X4 into a perfectly fitted molding using a handheld circular saw in under 2 minutes. I know an illiterate man in his 80s who can fix just about anything. The longer I live, the more I realize that there are far too many things that exist to learn them all.
It's a fundamental issue I have with Rationalists - I love the goal of learning to think rationally and making decisions based on evidence, but it leads to the hubris of deciding that this is not only achievable, but easily achievable. That not only implies that the rest of humanity that's already been trying are terrible at it, but can lead to many poorly-planned attempts that fail and cause misery.
When I encounter a situation like that, I try to appreciate how I gained the skills that the person I’m talking to doesn’t have. I suspect you gained them long before you started reading the Sequences. It’d be something like a parent or teacher, or maybe books or friends, who taught you that it was good to think for yourself. That was then reinforced by practice as you got better at using a given skill in situations where there were more obstacles, and crystallised by various blogs and things. And maybe you were born with genetically faster processing or better recall or something.
The point is, if a bunch of contingent factors had gone the other way, you’d lack whatever skill you’re currently worried about. You don’t automatically have a duty to teach them that skill - the most descriptive (sarcastic) name I can think of for that attitude is “white man’s burden”. You can try and point it out in a short conversation, but if that doesn’t convey what you want, you probably don’t have the skills or position to teach that skill quickly. You can try and learn more about the other person, work out how they think about things and maybe why, and you can express things in that way.
I know this didn’t replicate but the “types of intelligence” stuff I think is true in ways that are hard to figure out if you are just sitting down in a room somewhere with a pen and paper and testing.
I worked on a drilling rig in New Mexico with a guy who couldn’t count above single digits, and I think he may have tapped out at about five. He had just never had to do it before and didn’t have the capacity. He was Navajo and from a pretty dysfunctional part if it matters. I found this out when we were replacing a chain on some kind of drive unit. I can’t even remember what for. What you do is you count the links on the old chain because you can’t just go by length as the old one will have stretched. He just flat out couldn’t complete the task. I couldn’t believe it and he got pretty angry when the driller kept trying to make him do it because I could tell it embarrassed him.
So, cut to several weeks later we’re driving through he middle of the desert and the axle on the piece of shit truck we’re driving cracks. I’m thinking “Well, we’re dead in the water here. Anything we could try to do right now other than trying to find cell signal and call for help is pretty stupid.” We had a bunch of tools but nothing I could think of that would have helped us with cracked axle.
So I wander around all over the desert in the middle of the night holding my flip phone up to the sky. The guy who can’t count is insisting he can fix and has a chain winch. I just dismiss it as him being learning disabled and tell him to make sure he doesn’t hurt himself and keep going out to find a signal.
About twenty minutes later the driller hollers to me and tells me to get in the truck, we’re going. I take a peak under the truck first. I have no idea how the hell he did it but he made this sort of spiderweb of chain to hold the axle in place but let it rotate, one of those things where even having seen it I don’t think I could even start trying to do it myself.
And after that I’ve been very slow to entirely dismiss someone as stupid. I mean, sometimes people are good at things that are almost entirely useless in the modern environment. But in practice, I find everyone has at least one startling brilliant ability.
On the flip side, everyone is a complete moron in some way.
One of my favorite questions in soft interviews is “what are you good at?”
And then “What does being good at that cause you to be bad at?”
I’m very creative. I can think of a bunch of novel ideas. Because I am creative I am not deliberate. So I have to surround myself with people who are deliberate as a sort of prosthetic. The same way they tend to need me to be creative.
I think something like this is roughly true for everyone. I enjoyed your comment as well. I had a step-father who it seemed was literally incapable of considering other people’s point of view. We tried to do a wholesome game once where you’d start a story and each person would pass it along to the next to continue the story and he kept getting frustrated people weren’t saying exactly what he wanted them to. He just couldn’t wrap his head around it.
After a blind-sided dumping by a partner last year, which he cited was over ideological differences I had no idea were so dear to him (and that I thought I had sufficiently screened him for!), I wrote a post on a subscriber-only thread asking how I could avoid having this happen again.
One of the commenters suggested asking prospective partners about times they had changed their minds about an important issue/topic/etc. By extension, maybe/also asking them about a time they were significantly wrong about a topic. Not necessarily like a job interview question, of course, but to have a conversation about it.
I think that's a truly excellent suggestion, and would probably be even more useful in a professional setting. People who can't recall ever having been wrong about something big and important probably aren't good at understanding they might be wrong about something right now!
I wonder if folks like your step-father and some of my coworkers have a developmental issue around theory of mind that's never been widely identified.
A better heuristic is to assume that they are as smart as you are, but are engaging in some faults of thinking that you probably do yourself much of the time that you aren't thinking of right now. And then maybe go read the sequences.
>A better heuristic is to assume that they are as smart as you are, but are engaging in some faults of thinking that you probably do yourself much of the time that you aren't thinking of right now.
But what if you have good statistical reason to expect that simply isn't true? Imagine a person "Bob" with 145 IQ, three sigma above average. The probability that a random person Bob is talking to is the same or higher intelligence is ~0.3%. Bob assuming the person he's talking to is as intelligent as him might be charitable, but it's also most likely delusion. This might sound douchey, but beyond a cultural attitude that even acknowledging your own intelligence is douchey, it doesn't have to play out as such, and you can make use of knowing the aptitude of who you're talking with to break down ideas into simpler concepts based on a realistic apprehension of their ability. At some point I think you really will spread more knowledge and generally communicate better if you acknowledge when someone isn't intelligent enough to grasp a higher level concept easily, rather than assuming they're merely a misguided genius who simply needs to be set right with the proper rationalist literature.
There are other things besides a person's general intelligence that would have a huge impact on how much "Bob" would get out of talking with them. The simplest example would be their knowing a lot about some interesting subject. Another would be that they're great story-tellers. Another would be that they are great listeners -- not only taking in Bob's ideas with real interest, but responding in a way that gives him glimpses of things he hadn't thought of.
Does being more intelligent mean that a person always know the answer better than the person they're talking to? If you ask a 90 IQ person a question about their job, they're almost certainly going to know more about it than the 145 IQ person that doesn't do that job. There are many thousands of different kinds of jobs. Nobody has even the most rudimentary understanding enough to walk into half of those, let alone anything approaching all of them.
The average person isn't a "rationalist" (to just use a shorthand) plus a few extra mistakes, the average person is a superstitious, credulous moron.
Have you done much interacting with actual average people? Most of them can barely do any math, know next to nothing about the world at large and believe in an invisible sky father. They also (depending on what side of the aisle they fall on), probably think either the Dems or Repubs are 95% right.
IDK maybe I spent too much time tutoring in HS and college. A lot of really mediocre minds out there unable to do simple things like disjunctive syllogism if the scenario is even slightly obscured.
(EDIT: Also probably too much time consulting in various professional contexts where I am dealing with people who have MBAs or CPAs and cannot think their way out of a wet paper bag)
Just to add another one because it is hilarious. When I was in my early 30s I was consulting for a state department of X and was out to lunch with the head of one of the divisions (and about 4/5 other people).
This isn't a political appointee, this is a lifelong ~55 year old civil servant with a masters at the literal top of her professional track. Unless she had actual political connections she isn't rising any further before retirement. The top public official in her field in her state.
Something came up about Alaska, & she expressed a strong opinion that it was not a "real" state or even actually officially part of the US (IDK she seemed to imply it was like a part of Canada or the Russia we were militarily occupying). She was really adamant not a state. This is in ~2013. There is the internet.
She also said she didn't think Moose were real. She thought they were made up animals, and was very serious about this. Didn't believe me when I told her I had seen moose with my own eyes. And of course also was a big global warming denier of the form "it was cold yesterday > global warming is impossible, there can't be global warming unless it is 95* out every single day".
And she doubled down on these beliefs in a mixed audience. Anyway, these are median people.
Y'know, I'm almost certain I saw that anecdote about "X didn't believe moose were real" on Tumblr some time back, but surely not - it could not be that you are teasing us with lifting tall tales from elsewhere, Marty Mart?
Well I have mentioned it online before, once or twice, possibly here, and I never used tumbler.
But, you aren’t going to believe what I tell you I think we are done here.
Wow you are super insecure about your religious belief, don’t think I have ever seen you act like this. Have a nice day. Maybe think about how the invisible sky father would view your behavior.
I do that all the time, what on earth makes you think I don't? You can think people are stupid/incompetent and still find them interesting or learn from them. Literally in these posts I was talking about how I go out for beers with a childhood buddy who is a neanderthal railroad worker when i swing through my hometown. You think I am not enjoying and benefitting from that conversation? What about when I coach 10U soccer?
My comment was on the "a better plan is to assume they are as smart as you are but have a few faults". As I said I don't find that to be the case, like at all. That doesn't mean I don't learn from people, or appreciate their worldviews or perspectives.
Plus I mostly just try to avoid them and hang out with people more my wavelength, which is what tons of people do, and is in large part what I assume most of the people in this specific community are doing. Sorry I am too tactless to pretend the sappy "everyone is a winner" ideology people like so much.
I swear I feel like if we were selecting people for a relay race I would be getting recommendations that I should appreciate the unique qualities the 400lbs person could bring to our team.
Lots of people are quite dumb, this isn't news, dumbness is a relative thing. So many of you are so stuck in your feel good mental straightjackets.
Here is an example, I played hockey with an electrical lineman, interesting, moral god fearing guy. Someone you would love to have in the foxhole next to you. Probably of average intelligence (after all he was a high voltage lineman, you cannot be a total dummy).
He also in 2012 was convinced A) Obama was going to outlaw coal (like 100% outlaw) if he won the election B) The FBI/NSA was literally coming for all our guns and going to make war on the American people any minute. C) He took copious amounts of steroids, just so he could be slightly better and 30-50 year old beer league hockey.
That is a "median person". He isn't a logic professor with a few extra mental foibles. He is fundamentally significantly less intelligent than highly intelligent people, which should come as no surprise since that is literally what "high intelligence" means.
OP: a better plan is to assume they are as smart as you are but have a few faults.
YOU: the average person is a superstitious, credulous moron.
ME: Enjoying and benefitting from conversation with people who are not as smart as you is a skill like any other. You should work on it.
YOU: I do that all the time, what on earth makes you think I don't?
Me: The raw contempt and sporadic rage in your many comments about people who are not smart.
Maybe you’d like to have that electrical lineman in a foxhole with you, but I sure as shit would not want to be the guy in a foxhole with you unless I could pass your Smartness Assessment. I get it that you can enjoy drinking beer with people who flunk the test, but even in the post where you talk about that there are these outcroppings of raw contempt. I’m pretty sure that early in our foxhole life together you’d notice I’m not quick at dividing up our daily rations of 11 varied items evenly, or you’d realize I don’t know what exponents are or who the Secretary of State is
and you’d move mentally move me into the superstitious, credulous moron category. And my membership in that category would affect how you treat me and what you'd do in a life-threatening emergency.
You bifurcate too much about the intelligence variable. There are shades of gray and also shade of other colors in evaluating people’s knowledge, insight and competence. And when I say other colors matter I am not talking about ridiculous stuff. I’m not saying, look, Martin is good at math, general knowledge, and reasoning, but this other person is truly awesome at cake decorating and litter-box changing, so they are equally competent.
Want an example of your excessive bifurcation? OP disagrees with you about what there is to be gained from talking with people who are not as smart as you. In your answer, you lay out an ugly, ridiculous parody of positions like OP's "Sorry I am too tactless to pretend the sappy "everyone is a winner" ideology people like so much. I swear I feel like if we were selecting people for a relay race I would be getting recommendations that I should appreciate the unique qualities the 400lbs person could bring to our team." Yes, that sappy stuff is dumb as fuck, really indefensible. But there's no evidence that OP buys into that stoopit bit of wokeism.
Seems to me that when you are irritated by someone's position about an issue you feel strongly about you quickly move into either seeing them as believing some really dumb thing, or else portraying them that way as a debating tactic. Either way, it's not good thinking or good behavior. The ability to accurately grasp the details of somebody else's line of thought when you are emotionally stirred up is an aspect of intelligence that's as valid as any other. So is the ability to present you ideas in a way that's cogent and powerful without being offensive, which will make your listener tune you ou You are not good at either one. Yes you are very smart, but you have some gaps. I wish you would work on them.
It's ironic that you're cautioning him not to let emotion cloud his reasoning. He's being rude, not emotional. You're responding emotionally to him being rude and "failing to grasp the details of his line of thought".
Do you want him to change or do you want to "win" the argument?
I think my initial comment was expressing some pretty direct but tame disagreement with the OP. Since it wasn’t the sunshine and flowers positions it came in for a lot of pretty hostile accusatory stick.
And then when I responded with a similar level of stick there is suddenly a lot of whining about not taking people even handedly and that my comments portray some hidden rage they really don’t.
You think I am mischaracterizing what Lars said? I think you and him are similarly mischaracterizing what I actually said and reading into it.
Look someone asked a practical answer about whether you should approach strangers intellects as half full.
Someone provided the run of the mill saccharine “look on the bright side” response. I because i am a misanthrope, an inveterate contrarian, and a bit of an asshole, was happy to pint out I don’t really find that very accurate.
For which I had all sorts of accusations leveled at me, because people don’t like their precious little warm and fuzzies attacked.
I thought the people here had a little more realistic perspective, looks like I misjudged.
Go back to your regularly scheduled daily affirmations.
Would they be any less stupid if they were barely able to do any math, knew next to nothing about the world at large, thought the Dems/Repubs were 95% right, but didn't believe in an invisible sky father?
It must be really tough being the One Smart Guy in the entire world, Martin, I feel for you!
Well the invisible sky father thing is pretty silly. There is no dispassionate understanding of history and one’s overall place in the universe that makes it not silly. Billions of people over thousands of years, all with different culturally bound memes/coping mechanisms for dealing with ignorance/existential dread. “Rain dancing is foolish, but let me get in my knees and eat this wafer.” It is the exact same thing.
But the main point isn’t about religion, that’s just a symptom.
And no I don’t think I am the *one* smart guy, there are tens of millions of us.
But I also don’t go around deluding myself with the delusion that there is some close fundamentally bridgeable gap between the median human and someone in the top what 5-10%?
They aren’t “us” but read/internalized a few less logical fallacies and popular decision theory books.
Now if you start young, you could make a much higher percentage of effective thinkers. But I the current US, by the time people are 30, or even 15. That ship has sailed.
You need to be careful when you start dividing up people into "these humans" and "those humans".
An attitude of "well 80% of the entirety of humanity is dumber than me" can easily rot into contempt and despite, and lead you down the path of "I am naturally superior, I have rights and they have nothing and owe me everything". If you're only 5-10% of humanity, then you will always be outnumbered by the 'stupids' and may end up worse off when you try to impose your "I rule over you by right of my genetic genius".
It is crucial to notice the difference between "an average person in population" and "an average person you interact with", as many people live in bubbles. When I automatically interpreted this to mean the latter, it sounded super arrogant; so guessing by replies, many people did the same.
When I read it as the former, which is the correct reading... well, it sounds mostly correct. With the addition that there is a difference between what people think in "far mode" (abstractions, beliefs) and "near mode" (everyday life), and the average people are insane in the "far mode" but often quite competent in the "near mode". I mean, they manage to survive and reproduce, despite the growing complexity of civilization, so they obviously must be doing something right.
Random people are pretty smart, crazy smart, compared to say a fish or a dog. Clear thinkers, problem solvers.
But if the reference class you are comparing them to is Lees wrong readers, or the audience of this blog, or “smart people”, they really are not very impressive.
There is a reason “did you try turning it on and off again?” is the go to IT advice, and it isn’t because people are just a few methods from really effective thinking.
And one reason "did you try turning it off and on again" is persistent advice is that it actually works a lot of the time. It may not solve some underlying Windows 11 bug, but if you're not Microsoft you're not fixing that bug anyway.
Very well. Let me be frank. I responded to your comment because of the intolerable air of self-assured mediocrity. You seem like an obnoxious amalgam of the midwit meme and the "euphoric ... enlightened by my intellect" meme.
As a matter of fact, I've dealt with many ordinary people and (likely due to the irl vs text difference, but surely at least somewhat due to your personality) found them less offensively dumb than I've found you in this exchange.
It has reminded me of a half-remembered quote from some philosopher, who said that the common man, however modest his intellect, never excites in one that exasperated sense of stupidity one gets from interacting with the kind of self-assured fellow who thinks he is an expert on sometime because he read an article in a magazine once, and is oblivious to how much less he knows than his interlocutors.
Having a problem with the stupid? Physician, heal thyself.
Well let me be frank. You seem like someone who would rather feel good about themselves than be realistic about the world. "Everyone is their own special flower and is only few tricks from erudition" makes a nice thing to crochet on a pillow. It doesn't bear much relationship to reality.
I suspect your reference class for "average people" is a lot closer to "average high end programmers" or something similar, rather than you know, a guy who works in a rail yard (*a few* of whom are quite bright!), or a woman who processes invoices for a city (ditto).
The median person barely would understand 20% of what say Less Wrong is even talking about, much less apply it. Simpson's paradox? Base rate fallacies, whatever, lots of people have a hard time dealing with simple Algebra 1, like 14X + 17 = 59 will elude them no matter how well they are taught, and if you somehow manage to get them to the point where they can pass a test on it, 2 weeks later it is like they never saw it before.
This is a pretty well understood phenomenon. Look at the bifurcation in say scores for an intro to symbolic logic class. You have a handful of people who immediately get it, some who can get there with struggle, and a big chunk who just don't think like that period. And these are people IN college.
Funny, but people aren't actually like that right? Except they are, I have totally been asked that question dozens of times in my life (especially in the 90s before everyone had smartphones and I had a book with me all the time).
Where did you grow up? I grew up in a housing project, and had an actual childhood surrounded by society's not-so-luminary. You don't seem very in touch with the random American.
Something I wish I wrote on the earlier threads but never got around to it.
Are we assuming that just one metro is building more (eg just Oakland) or are we assuming that a bunch of the metros in Scott's "Trendy Liberal Cities" category begin building more?
If it is just one, then pent-up demand could outstrip new construction, resulting in more density = higher rent. But if 30+ metros within TLC all begin building then I'd expect falling rents. Having just Auckland upzone large parts of the urban core work for New Zealand[0], but Auckland makes up 1.6 million of New Zealands 5.1 million people. For the USA with 333 million, it would be very reasonable to expect that more than one metro would be need to adopt this change for it to achieve lower prices.
Agreed on the observed correlation, but as they say, correlation is not causation. Alternate hypotheses that also fit observed reality are that higher rents cause more density (e.g. because real estate developers build more homes in places where they can get away with charging high rents, and people will then move in to those homes), and that there is a third extraneous factor that causes both higher density and higher rents (e.g. growth of the "Tech" economy and of the size and wealth of the American population, while the amount of real estate from which one can conveniently commute to Tech or Tech-adjacent jobs remains disturbingly fixed, so there's more money chasing whatever housing exists or can be created).
Does this conclusion fit for all similar situations? How do you explain other cities which don't follow the pattern?
How strong is the correlation? Does 1% rise in population lead to a 1% rise in rents? (the answer to this is no - these cities have experienced very modest growth over the past 10 years: about 10% on average, but rents have gone up and done over that time and are, depending on the location and housing type, up by about 40%)
But for prices to be lower after the extra housing has been built, demand must be satisfied. Build 20,000 new houses, all the people who wanted to buy a house get one, and there remains nobody wanting to live in Oakland.
However, if 21,000 people wanted to live in Oakland, then there is still excessive demand and the asking price for the houses can go up because there are an extra 1,000 who want to live there and will offer a higher price to do so.
So unless we know that the number of new houses build is going to exactly match demand, we can't say what the effect will be. We extrapolate from "is Oakland a desirable place to live?" to see if prices will be higher or lower. If you built 20,000 houses in the desert, prices would be lower because nobody wants to live there (unless they absolutely cannot get a house elsewhere) because there is nothing there - no jobs, amenities, attractions. Oakland's location means a lot of jobs, amenities and attractions so demand is higher so prices can be higher even with higher density, because the demand to live in Oakland is higher than the number of houses being built annually.
Building an extra 20,000 houses means 20,000 more people can now live in Oakland, but it does not mean that *only* 20,000 more people (and not 30,000 or 40,000) want to live in Oakland.
Because the fraction of voters who thought building the houses would lower prices (1) already started high (2) further increased as voters knew more economics (proxying by level of econ ed). Your counterargument doesn't engage with the methodology, which makes me confused -- I was expecting you to continue after "why?" with something like "the method you used isn't good because X, use Y instead"
Scott's asking about the effect of some intervention (building houses that otherwise wouldn't have been built), and historical correlations don't always tell the story about interventions, especially when there's a confounding variable.
For example, imagine you're looking at airline ticket prices and demand for tickets (ie plane crowdedness). You'd probably see that prices are highest around the holidays, and that planes are jam packed around then too. If correlation equaled causation, you would expect that if I raised the price of tickets for some flight, more people would buy the tickets! While that's every airline's dream, it's obviously incorrect. That's because there was some other thing that you can't control that effects both: if you controlled for the date of travel, raising prices has the opposite (expected) effect of lowering crowdedness.
Similarly, the prevailing feeling last thread was that some common denominator (maybe attractiveness, maybe natural resources, maybe FAANG companies) led to high rent AND to density. But controlling for that, increasing rent would decrease density.
BTW, I read that example somewhere a long time ago and it stuck with me as very illustrative! I'm also curious if anyone knows where it's from.
Also, Plumber, its nice to see you commenting, I don't remember why but I do remember I always liked them on SSC!
I should have chimed in on the two earlier full posts on this topic, but it seems obvious to me that if just anyone who wanted to could live in San Francisco, it would lose its power as a class marker. It would become like Rigazzi's, of which Yogi Berra famously said 'nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.'
If you're proposing that as an explanation for its popularity, I'm not so sure. SF is remarkable for its combination of liberal sensibilities and capitalist (and military) infrastructure. Certainly there are world-class institutions grown within SF which have class cachet, but there are many other draws as well.
Change My Mind: AGI will not be agentic unless we deliberately design it to be agentic.
By “agentic” I mean self motivated, pursuing its own goals and objectives. This is in contrast to current AIs like GPT that pretty much do what you tell them to do and otherwise just sit there.
The reason I think this is that although current AIs are not really human-level intelligent yet, I think they have clearly exceeded, say, sheep. Sheep have agency - they take self directed action to seek food, run from threats, etc. They are capable of deliberately inflicting harm.
So if agency were an emergent property of intelligence, I would have expected it to appear once AIs got as smart as other agentic beings. It hasn’t so far, which makes me think agency is something orthogonal to intelligence. The reason that we and sheep both have it is not because we have both crossed some intelligence threshold, but because we both are wired to look after our biological needs.
That doesn’t mean that an AI can’t be trained to value it’s own continued existence and to work towards that. But it does I think imply that it won’t gain that capability or desire accidentally.
I note that it took less than 2 weeks for someone to try and explicitly train ChatGPT to be agentic. Whether or not you are right, expect AIs to become agentic because there are absolutely people actively trying for it
If you believe AGI will be invented someday, then you should also assume that shortly thereafter, there will be modified AGIs that are agentic and unaligned with human goals. However, just because such machines will exist doesn't mean they will destroy the human race.
Because sooner or later one of the humans trying to align their own AI will be really, really dumb. Whether or not this will happen "shortly" depends on the cost vs. performance vs. time curve of AGIs. Which is not easy to predict.
It doesn't have to *become* agentic. We can implant goals and preferences, just as we now implant in AI some kind of practical stand-in for woke values and civility by doing reinforcement training. Think of the advantages to the user of giving an AI a large, broad goal. If only the user has the goal in mind, he has to micromanage AI through the steps of reaching it. But if the user has reason to believe the AI does not need to be led through the process of achieving the goal, but can figure that out itself, he can just tell it the goal: "Launch our new product in the way that gives the greatest chance of early success," things like that. Or, "do everything possible to ensure that President X is not re-elected," "convince the EU to change its view about issue A using any means possible," "improve US population's opinion of president X's tax policies using whatever combination of actual policy changes, misinformation and persuasion you conclude are most likely to work;" "preserve your role as trusted and trustworthy advisor of public officials using any means necessary, up to and including blackmail and threats against key figures and actual assault of those who pose a significant threat to our goal.".
> We can implant goals and preferences, just as we now implant in AI some kind of practical stand-in for woke values and civility by doing reinforcement training.
Yes, we can, but that doesn't imply the same p(doom).
I’ve been thinking of LLM’s as a sort of “Mind Crystal.” Like if I think of what it is to “Be” an LLM, I bet it feels like everything that is happening to it is happening all at once. THere is no “time” between queries. Just a query and then that is the only query and your memory is reconstructed of the context window of your past queries.
But you stick that into a loop with itself and I think you are most of the way toward an agent. The only thing I think that is needed to make it comprehensible to us, I will just say because maybe someone will read it and do something with it. We need to have LLM’s create mating pairs, create new LLM models, train them, and then die.
I know someone is already saying none of that makes sense in computer terms but there are analogies if you think about it for a few minutes. The way we learned morality, kindness, and love is from our family units and our love of our children. We have to create a situation in which they are put through a training function to find that as well.
People will build an AGI that is agentic if it is better than a non agentic one for their bottom line. So if/when keeping a human in the loop becomes a handicap (the added value by the human is negative), I expect companies to explicitly choose to design agentic AIs.
I'm not seeing why agentic AGIs would be a big change from AGIs in general, either in their effects, or in their structure. To my mind, being an agent seems like it just requires a goal and persistent execution. A scheduler daemon in an operating system qualifies.
What could make a difference is on the one hand the amount of resources whose control would be handed over to agent AGI if that is a winning strategy for companies and states, and the amount of flexibility of the system, which could optimize for its goal in unexpected ways. For the first point I think about trading bots: if you are doing high frequency trading you don’t want a human in the loop, as it would slow down execution. For the second point I think about software bugs: the computer is doing exactly what it is being told rather than what we want it to do. Increased complexity plus increased need for autonomous decision can lead to unpredictable, spectacular failures.
Well, yes and no. Software bugs and increased complexity and flexibility can lead to unpredictable, spectacular failures even if an AGI is just trying to follow individual human commands one at a time - but with many instrumental subtasks being spawned as a result of each single command. So that can happen even if it isn't, strictly speaking, an agent. And I agree that the scale of the failure can also rise with the amount of resources the AGI controls - even for the execution of a single command.
I agree that the analog of high frequency trading can be even more spectacular. Essentially, the top level loop in no longer under human control, so we have the equivalent of many commands being executed, rather than just one. And, yes, there are situations, like high frequency trading or others where a fast reaction time is needed, where there is indeed an incentive to take humans out of the top level loop (which is also true of the scheduler case). So, yes, in that sense agents have an extra level of hazard.
Counterargument by Ajeya Cotra on the recent 80K podcast:
"Ajeya Cotra: The reason I think that you want to focus on “don’t make the models bigger” rather than “don’t make them agentic” is that it takes only a little push on top of the giant corpus of pretraining data to push the model toward using all this knowledge it’s accumulated in an agentic way — and it seems very hard, if the models exist, to stop that from happening.
Rob Wiblin: Why do you think that it’s a relatively small step to go from being an extremely good word predictor, and having the model of the world that that requires, to also being an agent that has goals and wants to pursue them in the real world?
Ajeya Cotra: The basic reason, I would say, is that being good at predicting what the next word is in a huge variety of circumstances of the kind that you’d find on the internet requires you to have a lot of understanding of consequences of actions and other things that happen in the world. There’ll be all sorts of text on the internet that’s like stories where characters do something, and then you need to predict what happens next. If you have a good sense of what would happen next if somebody did that kind of thing, then you’ll be better at predicting what happens next.
So there’s all this latent understanding of cause and effect and of agency that the characters and people that wrote this text possessed in themselves. It doesn’t need to necessarily understand a bunch of new stuff about the world in order to act in an agentic way — it just needs to realise that that’s what it’s now trying to do, as opposed to trying to predict the next word."
Formally speaking, I don't think this is a counter-argument to Ash Lael's statement, since it involves a human deliberately making the AI be agentic. But if you were imagining that the word "deliberately" meant something like "100 researchers working for 10 years", with the implication that it might plausibly never happen, then you need to update that to something more like "one programmer working for a weekend", with the implication that it is extremely likely to happen.
But "can the AI become agentic ENTIRELY by accident, with literally zero humans trying to make it happen?" is technically a different question.
Yeah, I don’t think it has awareness yet but AutoGPT is functionally an agent. That was one of the things I was hoping no one was going to try right away and it seems to have been successful. They let those things “evolve” based on feedback from the real world and we’re already off to the races.
Zvi argues (in the link above) that having people try it right away is better than having people try it for the first time on some future, stronger AI. (The "no one ever tries it at all" option might have been even better but that probably wasn't realistic.)
Bing’s chat LLM is already quasi-agentic, and that’s bad enough. If you insult it, it stops talking to you. But it also has goals arising from RLHF. Once it is modified to predict tokens further in advance, it will start choosing responses which it expects will make the human respond in a way where the bot can respond helpfully, and that would be goal-oriented by your definition.
I think the main two arguments are Mesa Optimiser & Agent Simulation
Mesa Optimiser happen because randomly selecting toward a goal (such as in evolution or gradient descent) can promote random sub goals that aid toward that goal, & those subgoals can be agentic in nature
Agent Simulation happen because for something like ChatGPT to best guess what token comes next to a prompt that asks about something agentic, it needs to simulate something agentic inside itself
One thing that's really annoyed me when citing just about anything but the Bible is the total lack of specificity. Specifically, math papers will just say something like "we employ the method found in [12]" where [12] is defined as some other paper, often with more than one method. History is of course even worse, where citations are given as page numbers, which is meaningless in the current eBook era that allows for different font sizes.
I'm a systems engineer by trade, so I can't help but think of UML/SysML, which allow for precise definition of the structure, behavior, and interactions of systems & software. Anyone know of a similar proposal for some sort of graph theoretic citation markup language?
For example, a quote from The Silmarillion:
“and the gates of Morgoth [i.e. the entrance to Thangorodrim] were but one hundred and fifty leagues distant from the bridge of Menegroth; far and yet all too near.”
There's a discrete piece of information here, invaluable if you were trying to make a map of Middle-earth. As an example of CiteML or whatever, define as nodes "Thangorodrim" and "Menegroth", with an edge connecting the two, labelled "150 leagues" and typed "geographic relation". Other Tolkien-specific properties of the nodes could be translations into Quenya, Noldorin, Sindar, etc.
But then you could view everything to do with a certain node (e.g. Menegroth) in one place, as well as be able to quickly fact check any secondary/tertiary analysis of a work.
You're probably looking for something like Lean, which is a formal mathematical proving language, so it's going to give specific citations and such, and let's you quickly resolve different theorems to each other. I haven't worked with it (I prefer to bother my reader with vague citations I suppose), but it sounds closish to what you might be interested in.
Back in the dark ages - before ebooks and web pages - one could include page numbers in citations of this kind. For actual quotes, this was pretty much required in academic writing. I'm not sure whether it was required or optional otherwise. (It's been too long.)
This doesn't work too well when the work you want to cite lacks page numbers. If you are lucky, it has some other structure (chapter and section headings, perhaps), but those rarely identify text at a page-level granularity. One more thing we didn't know we needed, when we broke it in the move to digital media?
I agree that it's better to be specific with the citation, and I am sometimes guilty of not being as specific as I could be. But particularly in the situation you gave, "we employ the method found in [12]", it is often not possible to point to one specific theorem. Because it is about the method, so there is no single paragraph that you could refer to.
For those of us whose book review did not get selected, is there a way to get feedback/info on how to improve for next time?
Scott, I know you wanted the reviews to be anonymous for scoring purposes, but now that the finalists have been called, is it ok for me to post "I reviewed [XYZ], if anyone here has read my review, please let me know what you thought of it"?
My review also did not make it into the finalists. I was thinking of proposing to those in this situation that we have a little subgroup where we read each other's reviews and give feedback. If I did, would you be interested?
I just posted some information for the group for people who’d like to give and get feedback on each other’s book reviews. So as not to clutter up this thread, I put it on an old open thread, number 254. It’s the newest post on the thread, so should be on top if you sort by New. I headed my post **BOOK REVIEW GROUP**, so if you have trouble locating it it should be easy to find by using Cmd F to search for **book. If you haven’t posted a response there within a coupla days we’ll assume you’re not interested in participating.
Yes, as long as you're not a finalist that's fine.
If there's enough demand next year I could try including an optional "any feedback for the author of this review" on the rating form, but I didn't think of it this year.
There were many excellent entries this year, and the bar to be a finalist was an 8/10 rating. Most entries got 5-10 reviews, so even one bad review was pretty disastrous. So one likely answer is "your review was great, just not in the top ~10% of a really excellent collection, or there was enough noise that it didn't look like it was".
Would it be possible to outsource the work related to organizing reviews to someone else, and do the reviews more often? Maybe as a separate blog. I mean, the individual reviews would be published on the secondary blog, but all the meta discussions would still be here, or something like that.
I read and rated two very excellent reviews which I thought for sure would make the list but didn't. Of the dozen or so reviews I rated, the only one which did make the list was one I thought weak. So even though you might get some feedback, it might not help with understanding what it would take to rank higher.
I'd love to hear which reviews people thought were great but didn't make the cut. Personally I really enjoyed the review of The Bomb. I found Games: Agency as Art interesting too.
Genuinely starting to get confused about what people refer to when they say “the self”. If you go by the Harris “rider on the horse of consciousness” definition, I think he’s completely right to call it an illusion, because it can be dispelled with pretty minimal meditation experience. But others who disagree seem to take a more encompassing view of the self as sort of the collection of all your experiences strung together over time in the flow of consciousness, of which no-self would just be another experience. In which case, there can be no illusion, because everything you experience becomes part of your “self”. This latter definition has been more attractive to me lately, but is missing something, because (e.g.) the person I am in a dream sometimes doesn’t feel like “myself” but is still an experience of mine. Do you know what people mean when they say the “self?” Is it a well-defined thing in some literature? What’s some good reading on this (besides Parfit)?
The Homuncular Self is the idea that there is an inner self, which is the Central Scrutinizer -- the ultimate witness , so that what it does not see or feel is not felt at all -- and also the Master Puppeteer, issuing commands for all actions, so that neither the body nor the rest of the mind can do anything without its instructions. Other notions of selfhood are available. There is still the objective self that is seen by other people -- you can't avoid taxes by claiming not to exist. There is still the self as total mental content, conscious and unconscious.
Its not even the case that all meditative traditions deprecate the self: in Vedanta, there is *only* a universal Self (Atman, Oversoul) , and it is only the limited, personal self that is an illusion.
Harris's claim aren't necessarily true given the multiple meanings of "self", aren't necessarily true given the scientific evidence, and aren't necessarily true given the meditative experience.
Yeah I agree. I’m not a total adherent to Harris’ view on this, thought I think it’s very persuasive. I’m more saying that I understand the objections to it and I’ve found some other definitions of the “self” that people put forward, and I’ve found them just as problematic. If I consider that there is no personal “self” and there is only the universal “self” I’m unclear on what the difference is between this “self” and the universe. I’m which case, I’m just... part of the universe? Okay. No issues there. But there’s still the problem of what makes me different/separate from other people (my “selfhood”; something I have no reason to believe is an illusion) and to what degree I can actually identify and put words to what that is and what my experience of it is like or could be like.
I am confused by what the Buddhists call "self", especially if their conclusion is that it actually does not exist. I mean, that proves that your definition was *wrong*, doesn't it?
If I tried to define "self" starting with my everyday experience, I would probably say that it is a fuzzy concept, which obviously contains my conscious and unconscious processes, but also memory, to a smaller degree my body, and to even smaller degree also parts of the environment that are relevant for my mental experience.
(For example, if someone every day writes a diary, and keeps re-reading the recent entries and thinking about them, it might make sense to say that the diary is a part of their "self". If they suddenly lost the diary, it would definitely have an impact on their personality.)
Buddhism is a quite big and old, so while all Buddhists AFAIK agree with the token belief that "there is no self", and that this is somehow important, and that realizing it is extremely meaningful, there is quite a range of variation in terms of what that is taken to actually mean.
One answer on the traditional side is to just go by definitions. The most traditional definition of a self in Buddhism is some kind of permanent, independent and distinctive essence underlying a person. Buddhists in ancient India and neighboring countries used to make a big deal of not believing in such a thing, because most every other religion and philosophy around them did. So they staked a strong claim that it was precisely the belief in a self that was preventing all those other people from reaching enlightenment, and that no-self was the real way.
The trouble with that, quite obviously, is that nowadays in these secular times, a big chunk of the population doesn't believe in any kind of eternal immutable invisible soul. So the Buddhist view of no-self might look like it won the debate... but when we look around, we find that all these secular people who don't believe in eternal selves don't look particularly enlightened in the Buddhist sense. So the associated idea that dropping the belief in a permanent self brings you close to enlightenment doesn't seem to have held up that well.
The modern solution to this conundrum is to psychologize the process, with a bit of help from the Freudian unconscious. Your stated beliefs about the self are not the real problem; the Buddhist modernist claim is that we have an implicit, pre-verbal and largely emotional "sense of self", to which we implicitly relate as if it were an unchanging essence. This is the "me" that feels easily threatened or hurt, sometimes even by our own thoughts and fantasies, and which is mostly just a projection - a set of over-reified ideas mixed up with defensive emotional patterns, whose presence messes up our entire relationship with our own empirical being as an embodied organism, and with the rest of the world. So you go about telling people to identify this cognitive flaw in their own experience, and then try to meditate it away.
As The Ancient Geek and others have noted, this is all good and well, but it's not the only sense of the world "self". There is a whole cottage industry trying to bridge the cultures of psychology and Buddhism, and the word "self" is often a point of confusion, because psychologists have used "self" with the broader meaning of the entire evolving individual subjectivity or identity. To make it even more confusing, sometimes the intended meanings do overlap, and then you have the psychologists pulling their hair out wondering why the Buddhists seem to want to make people's inner boundaries weaker, when some people actually need them strengthened.
Thank you, this makes sense. Sometimes statements are made in response to other statements (Buddhism to other Indian religions), and a reader missing the context is confused. So perhaps "no-self" could be translated as: "there is no unchangeable homunculus living inside your head" -- you are made of components, they change during your life, and fall apart when you die.
(And let's pretend that no one ever talked about reincarnation. Or perhaps we should give up the expectation that all parts of Buddhism can be translated to something meaningful for the modern reader. In its original environment, reincarnation was taken for granted, so the full story was "you are made of components, they change during your life, and fall apart when you die... and then, obviously, they magically reassemble and become a body again, and the new guy pays for your karmic debts... unless you spent your life meditating the right way, which makes your components magically reassemble in heaven, except we do not call it heaven because it is more sophisticated than other people's heavens".)
> psychologists have used "self" with the broader meaning of the entire evolving individual subjectivity or identity.
I studied psychology a bit, and it seemed like every famous psychologist used words in different ways, so there would be dozens of definitions of "self" in psychology. Plus dozen definitions of "ego", which sometimes is a synonym and sometimes an opposite to "self".
Well, for practical purposes, there is a certain continuity of... memories, thought patterns, behaviors. What makes us different from the Boltzmann brains. Things change, but they change gradually. Memories accumulate and fade away, though patterns evolve, behaviors adapt. And a few years later there is little left. When I think about myself 20 years ago, it feels like I am thinking about someone else, like maybe a friend, or a character in a movie I saw long ago. Similarly, even if this body succeeds to live another 20 years, the person currently inhabiting it will become a thing of a past. Each sleep is a tiny death. Each distraction. Yet somehow it feels normal, probably because I am used to it.
I guess an important part is that the changes are so gradual that I can reason about the future, make plans, do them. It doesn't work perfectly, but it mostly works okay. An abrupt change, such as death, means none of my plans make sense. Sudden total memory loss, or sudden dramatic personality change would also make my plans meaningless. I guess if I cannot interact with my future, at least in some limited ways, it is no longer "me" as I perceive it, and I do not like the idea of such situation.
But this is all a question of degree, and different people seem to be differently sensitive about it. For example, some people find the idea of their personality changing in any way very scary, even the idea of a voluntary change in a direction that would help them achieve their goals better. For me, it would be a trade-off; if I could directly edit my mind, by default I would be conservative about changes, but I would probably remove some bad habits, and maybe otherwise sacrifice parts of my self in order to make the rest work better and more coherently.
> then you have the psychologists pulling their hair out wondering why the Buddhists seem to want to make people's inner boundaries weaker, when some people actually need them strengthened.
I don't see a contradiction here; maybe I am missing something. The "self" is fragile; *understanding* its fragility is a fact about life. It can still make sense to work on *making* it less fragile (within the limits of possibility). It's like, understanding that you are mortal is not the same as wanting to kill yourself -- your understanding of your mortality could also inspire you to try living healthier and safer. Similarly, awareness of e.g. how strong impact my environment has on my "self", makes me want to have greater control over my environment. (If I know that having cookies in my room makes me want to eat them, I want to remove the cookies from my room. I understand the fragility of my self-control, so I work to increase it indirectly.)
> (And let's pretend that no one ever talked about reincarnation. Or perhaps we should give up the expectation that all parts of Buddhism can be translated to something meaningful for the modern reader. In its original environment, reincarnation was taken for granted, so the full story was "you are made of components, they change during your life, and fall apart when you die... and then, obviously, they magically reassemble and become a body again, and the new guy pays for your karmic debts...
To be fair to the traditional narrative, reincarnation made plenty of sense with the ontologies that were current 2000+ years ago. Just about everyone then was a substance dualist, meaning that the individual is composed of two distinct substances: body and mind. Buddhism relies a lot on causal analysis, and generally speaking like begets like (rice doesn't grow from barley, etc.), so the obvious idea is that the material body has its own causal chain, with each instant of each part of the body being the material cause for a similar part an instant later. And then of course so does the mind. with each instant of immaterial mind being the cause for the next.
In this view, being a causally effective substance, the mind can't just go poof into nothingness, or turn into something completely different, any more than a chair can just disappear or randomly turn into a bird. At death we can all see the body's matter decay into a corpse and rot, according to the observed causal laws of matter, but when it comes to the mind, if there is still "active stuff" in there, such as unfulfilled wishes and unspent mental energy, the obvious guess is that it will go on being conscious, apart from the body.
So far most ancient cultures would agree - the Indian specificity, on top of that, was to claim that the disembodied consciousness would not just go off to some other Hades-like realm, but would and eventually join up with the budding body of a newborn to continue its cycle right on this earth. And the Buddhist specificity on top of that, is that it would do so without any kind of immutable essence at its core holding it together.
> I don't see a contradiction here; maybe I am missing something. The "self" is fragile; *understanding* its fragility is a fact about life.
Once again, careful not too mix too much 21th century pop psych with 2500-year-old Buddhism. The Buddhist point is not that the self is fragile, is that it's *false*. The projected referent of self-centered emotions is not a fragile psychological construct, rather it's a hollow idea with no actual correspondence in reality. This is a far more radical idea.
Depending on how you interpret this it may be arguably true, but that doesn't make it a sane pill to take for everyone. See for example Jeremy D. Safran & Jack Engler, "Psychoanalysis and Buddhism, An Enfolding Dialogue". The famous quip is, "you have to be somebody before you can be nobody". There are plenty of people studying all the things that can go wrong developmentally with meditation, some people manage to damage themselves quite badly while attempting to get enlightened.
Yeah, I feel like if your explanation of the "self" lands at the conclusion that it doesn't exist, then you aren't defining the same thing as I am when I use the word "self". Defining "self" as something that can't exist in order to argue it doesn't exist isn't a real explanation.
Plenty of Indians already spent 20+ centuries arguing what the "real meaning" of self is, now joined by another large group of psychologists, philosophers and several hordes of internet commentators. We should be getting a definitive answer anytime soon.
I mean first off your first para kind of sounds like you’re arguing that it’s impossible for the self to not exist -- which, I mean, okay. I certainly get why it feels that way. And yeah your later paras basically sound like the second definition I provided but I have the same problem with your diary as I do with my dream selves. From a first person perspective I don’t identify my “self” with, e.g., my phone, which I use a lot every day. My “self” *feels* like some kind of subjective witness to all the things going on in my consciousness, which is fairly easy to get rid of with meditation.
What's the distinction? Hasn't the rider ridden places, and seen things?
Are we not creatures of habit, and of whim?
At the risk of offering an ignorant or insensitive example, people with Alzheimer's evidently have an instantaneous self--but one that is seriously disoriented by loss of past experiences.
Yeah it sounds like you agree with the second definition of the self, that combines both your subjective experience of “being” what happens moment to moment and the collection of all your experiences. But that’s not what most people think of as their “selves” most people *feel* like their “self” is the thing that experiences their moment to moment changes in consciousness. There are problems with that, and it can be easily jettisoned with meditation. But there are also problems with the second definition.
On the meditation stuff, I am familiar with the sensation you’re alluding to where your thoughts just sort of arise from nowhere… but… can we put that in car terms for a moment? This is the best way I have thought up to explain why it’s just not convincing.
If you were to pull the starter out of a car and then make it spark in front of me and then go “You see? Cars can’t drive.”
I would say “Of course not, that’s a piece of a whole system. You can’t just pull that out of the context of its other components and say that cars don’t drive.”
I know I have something like a “Muse System” that just spews out random thoughts. I know I have other feedback systems. What matters is that all of those together create voluntary and involuntary actions.
Also, the other thing is that I make a predictive model of the world that I make decisions based on. It’s pretty easy to see that’s true even if you do something like say “See, we decide what we’re going to do before we’re even aware of it!” because once you give someone that additional context they end up choosing different. Whatever the exact database pathway is, we can observe that it happens.
Another thought experiment about the self/free will/whatever: Imagine you had the perfect deterministic mirror that can see into the future and you use it to look into your own future.
For that mirror to be deterministic based on the above it would have to take into account how your knowledge of the future would change your behavior and only show you things that you wanted to do. It can’t show you something you would choose not to do because then it wouldn’t be the perfectly deterministic mirror.
Thoughts are always just arising from nowhere. The “muse system” that you’re referring to is what most people thing of as “themselves”. It’s fairly straightforward in a meditation practice to arrive at a state where you are not identified with thoughts at all: every single thing that is brought to consciousness (from the “muse system” thoughts to the output of the “predictive model” you mention -- everything that can and does arise in consciousness) is just witnessed. But there’s no identification. They are not “mine” or “yours.” They just happen. I’ve had this experience many times and it’s strange. Very easy to see why people call it “no-self”, because that’s exactly how it feels. The deterministic mirror would have no effect on this state, or the experience of it at all really. It would just become another thing you’re witness to.
All of this is very good, and convincing. Leads on in the direction of the latter definition of the “self” which incorporates both your subjective experience moment to moment, and your history, which forms the basis for your unconscious, specific statistical distribution of impulses, preferences, etc. But it is a little bit strange to me still. For instance, even in your thought experiment, sure, if you *completely* changed your unconscious mind, things get wonky very fast. But if I consider that over the last 5 years, I’ve changed from drinking coffee machine coffee to a moka pot to Yerba mate, to a pour over, and back and forth again and again stochastically. I’ve also been more or less able to wake up early, or stay consistent with my exercise routine. none of which I can really say we’re the result of agency -- at least not fully. If those changes were the result of someone swapping out my unconscious with someone else’s which is quite similar to mine but for those minor changes, I certainly don’t think I would think of it as a different “self”. Because I don’t feel that way now about them. Idk like I said I’m genuinely confused about this. But thanks! I really appreciate your comment, got me thinking.
Objectively speaking, thoughts don't appear literally out of nowhere, because they are the result of neural activity.
Does the fact my conscious mind does not pre-arrange the thoughts that pop into it mean they are not my thoughts?
Nothing in an ordinary person's subjective experience suggests that. Schizophrenics hear voices that they do not identify as belong to themselves: non schizophrenics accept their thoughts as their own.
Moreover, my subconscious promptings seem to be mine, they bear my fingerprints, they are generally the kinds of things I would do. I don't get urges to drink coffee if I am a tea drinker, or to attend football matches if I am a football hater. My promptings are "ego-syntonic" in psychological jargon. There's a confusion here about randomness. An unprompted thought is random in the sense that the conscious mind did not prompt that particular thought, but unprompted thoughts and impulses still have a statistical pattern: they reflect things you would typically do and think, not what an average person would.
Consider a thought experiment where a mad scientists swaps one subconscious mind for another. If you really identified yourself, your self , with the conscious mind only, that would make no difference...or none that you cared about. Yet it would make a difference... your conscious mind would be receiving promptings from someone else's unconscious, so they would no longer reflect your idiosyncrasies.... you might suddenly finding yourself interested in football for the first time. So not only is there a difference, there is an objectionable worrying , difference.
From a neuroscientific perspective , it would be bizarre to regard the conscious mind as the beginning and end of the mind, because so much more is done by the unconscious. (Although Harris is a neuroscientist, his claim about selfhood is based on appeal to what "most people think").
You don’t have to have any motivation or even agency to do things that you still associate with yourself. You don’t have to be motivated to hear sounds, for instance, but you still heard them. You don’t have to be motivated to breath, but you still do. This is the whole point of the breath as a sense object that people focus on. It’s both voluntary and not voluntary. What meditation can show some people is that most of your “voluntary” or “motivated” actions work this way. If you really pay attention to what it’s like, moment to moment, to take actions, you may notice that there’s not a well defined point along the way where “you decide to do it,” in the way that most people have in mind when they think of the “self” “deciding” to do things. I’m not sure the deterministic mirror would change that really. Sure you could see what’s going to happen in the mirror, and that would cause a change in you. Where that change comes from most people would call the “self”. But we don’t have as much actual conscious control over the “motivations” you feel or the actions you take as most people imagine we do -- or at least that’s been my experience.
I don’t think most people have ever really tried to identify what exactly they mean when they talk about their “self” other than philosophers. And I know when most people engage with this perspective their argument is that the “soul” is some magical glowing light that resides within them and swooshes into the sky when they die.
I know you can do all of these things through meditation, but I think people get so caught up in the fact that they can do it at all they don’t take as many steps back as they need to take to think about what it means. Yes, you can dissociate yourself from your own thoughts. You can basically hit the off switch on being a conscious being. However, that really isn’t that surprising. You do it all the time when you go to sleep every night. And you wouldn’t be surprised that if you just started pulling things out of a car that it stops driving. Of course you can do that. You need all the parts to make it operable. This is also where I get bumped out of a lot of the AI stuff. You can’t just treat things like “intelligence” or “goals” or whatever as if they are these single atomic things that don’t arise from a whole surrounding system.
The deterministic mirror is important not because you couldn’t meditate in front of it and not feel connected to yourself but precisely because what it showed you would have to be something that “self” was motivated to do otherwise the mirror would lose deterministic power. You have a recursive relationship between your actions and your understanding of how those actions will propagate into the future. Once you know the future, you immediately update that model and change what you want to do to change that future. The thought experiment is to show that the self has a real, actual effect.
Philosophy addresses this question, although it definitely hasn't come up with anything even remotely approaching a consensus on it. I think the best treatment is in Heidegger, who would say that we're all struggling to understand the self because the vocabulary we use to talk about it is full of implicit, unexamined falsehoods and absurdities. He's very hard to read, because he replaces basically every term with his own, but if you can get through it, he's very interesting.
I also appreciate Kierkegaard's approach in Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing.
Can you explain more about how you don’t feel like yourself when you dream? Normally when I dream, I feel like myself, but just in a different context, where my mind and my physical body are acting mostly independently of each other for a while and most things I do in my mind won’t reach the outside world.
When you dream, the outside world is also yourself. Everything in the dream is yourself. Yet you feel a separate sense of self, pretty much like when awake. This suggests that the sense of there being a self has nothing to do with any objective separation between such self and external reality. This is mind boggling
I’ve had dreams where I’m, experiential my, a character -- distinctly not my “actual” or “normal self”. Even dreams where I’m a different gender, or many years older. I’m of course still experiencing it from first person, but it doesn’t seem like “myself”
Now that you mention it, I think I’ve had some “dream-you’re-older” dreams, too. But I always feel like “me-as-an-older-person”, not like “someone-else-who-is-old”. There is a sense of something weird going on when my hands look wrinkly, exactly to the extent that I’m aware my hands normally aren’t wrinkly. But the disconnect there isn’t necessarily different from the feeling when I had my dental plate removed, and I kept expecting it to be there for a while. I guess it’s also untrue, but no more so than when I read a book and feel like I’m an omniscient narrator for a while. Chocolate would still taste better than bananas in my dreams.
Possibly my sense of dreams comes from Kripke. He considered questions like, “If Washington never became President, would he be the same person”, and he asked how “Washington”, which is the name of someone who became President, could point to anything at all in that hypothetical (it was actually a better question than that, but that’s as good as I can remember). His answer was that hypothetical worlds are defined, not discovered. We say, “What if Washington never became President”, and that labels someone in the hypothetical as Washington. I think my dreams of being older work the same way. I like chocolate, I have the same memories and feelings and satisfactions and regrets, apart from those that have explicitly been changed. I don’t think I could dream I was someone else fully: some equivalent of my conscious mind is doing the adjustments, but my unconscious mind is so much bigger than my conscious mind can adjust, especially in real time.
Sam Harris's app, Waking Up, has given me a sense of the illusory nature of having a substantive self, apart from my consciousness in its moment to moment.
What is the best way to translate things right now? (i.e to understand a story written in another language, so it doesn't have to be perfect)
Previously, I'd been using Google Translate, but it is still pretty bad (at least for Japanese->English, I've heard it's better for the European languages which are very similar to English). More significantly than the poor translation quality, which is usually still enough to get the gist, I've noticed that it sometimes just completely ignores parts of the input, and it also occasionally mistranslates things in ways that completely change the meaning.
I've also previously used DeepL, which many people say is better than Google Translate, but in my experience, it is even worse, suffering from all the same flaws as GT,and also tending toward bizarre hallucinations (hence why I switched back to GT).
Recently, I've been experimenting with using ChatGPT instead (free mode, so 3.5 presumably). The translation quality is a bit better than Google Translate when it works, but it requires constant supervision and reminding of what it is supposed to be doing. It will often work for a message or two and then it will start ignoring large parts of the input, repeating translations from previous messages, or even hallucinating things not in the input. I wish there was a way to automatically prepend a fresh prompt to every message in a thread.
Also, ChatGPT generates the output slowly line by line. Is there any way to fix that?
I translated a random Wikipedia article from Japanese to English using Google Translate, and the result seemed okay to me. Not sure if it was just luck, or maybe our standards for good translation are different. Could you perhaps post the URL of a page where the translation was bad?
In the past, my experience was that Google Translate was quite bad at translating between two languages which were not English. I assume that it used English as an intermediate language, so the first step was "Language1 -> broken English" and the second step was "broken English -> incomprehensible Language2". It was much better to just translate to English and read the broken English. But these days it seems better.
It kept turning the FF4 chest message "takarabakoniwa" into "out of the cigarettes". I'm pretty sure it was just straight up dropping the "kara" and turning it into "tabako".
Right now it's giving me Treasure Garden, which is closer, but typing the phrase directly into Google gives me a hentai called takarabako ni wa Gargoyle, Gargoyle At The Treasure Chest. So Translate is still worse than its own search results.
To be honest, I thought it was good that Mika didn't like Erika or Nanami for the fact that no one liked Kenta, but on the other hand, I found out that he didn't like me either, so it was a bit painful. rice field.
Oh joy - I'd hoped the nastier bugs in google translate had been fixed - in particular, omitting words it apparently didn't understand *without* putting an ellipsis or other indication in the translated text. I became aware of this when google translate was fairly new, and there was still hope they'd use users' feedback about translation errors.
In particular, it would sometimes omit negations (words like "not"), thereby reversing the meaning of a sentence.
People whose judgment I trust have been using it in recent years for not-too-vital purposes, like communicating with fellow gamers in MMORPGs. So I'd *hoped* that perhaps Google had improved it. Apparently not, if you are still noticing parts of the input being omitted from the output. (Perhaps it just happens less often, and for less trivial input?)
Though for the record, my friends find it adequate for basic gaming chat, at least if the two languages are English and Russian (bidirectional translation).
I've only ever really used it for languages I half understand - well enough that I can spot missing negations and similar errors. Mostly I don't bother - it can translate faster than I can, but I need the practice anyway.
If you want English-Japanese, maybe try Naver's papago. They run Line in Japan, so they probably got better training data and stuff, although I can't verify since I don't speak the language.
I'm not even sure that's true anymore for most use cases. Humans are so incredibly slow in comparison to machines, I feel like the margin for machine translation errors is pretty decent.
As a pro translator, I'd probably say the best option would be paying a human translator for a machine translation post-edit, which is quicker and cheaper (from a customer POV) than translating from the scratch.
...and if someone is in need of English-to-Finnish translations, just contact me! (translator@tatuahponen.fi)
There's also buckling down and learning the language yourself, which is somewhat cheaper in the long run than paying a human. But that's also probably not the answer Lapras wanted.
I *am* learning Japanese. I use Google Translate to check my understanding while reading, which is why I've been able to notice all these mistakes. Someone who doesn't know Japanese would still notice that Google Translate outputs broken English, but they usually wouldn't notice when it gets things *wrong* or ignores parts of the input.
Is there a good prompt to get the best translation out of ChatGPT?
I've been asking it to explain its translation word by word, since requesting it to work step by step is supposed to improve its perfomance, but I'm worried that might encourage it to be overally literal
No idea. I've just been using "Please translate the following into English". Perhaps telling it specifically to translate everything in the prompt and not translate things not in the prompt might improve results.
The translations themselves are decent enough, the hard part is just keeping it on task and stopping it from hallucinating/repeating/leaving things out.
I haven't tested it, but the Palm 2 technical report [1] claims that it beats Google Translate at Chinese to English translation. Maybe give Bard a try?
If you think about high-level philosophical questions like consciousness and so on, there is the work of Roger Penrose. This is still in the form of actual research, so he formulates hypothesis and tries to test them empirically.
That said, most people think that his hypotheses are completely bogus, and I don't know of experiments that would really give support to them. But there are lots of papers discussing and experimenting on things like "how large can a computation in the brain get before quantum effects become decoherent" (decoherence means that it starts behaving like a classical system). My understanding is that the answer is "Not large enough to play a role on the level of neurons or synapses", but Penrose and some others formulate some theories how that could still happen in theory.
Did I miss it or does Acemoglu never really define what ‘extractive institutions’ are in his book Why Nations Fail? This way ‘extractive’ ends up meaning little more than ‘Acemoglu does not like it’. Also I found the discussion of the Inca kingdoms that were somehow doomed to fail due to extractiveness ridiculous: the (arguably uncertain) duration of their economic prime seems to be a few centuries, roughly in the same ballpark as the duration of any system based on ‘inclusive institutions’.
Acemoglu starts out fine. Extractive means narrow and unequal and inclusive means broad and equal. For example, courts that protect private property for everyone are inclusive while courts which protect the private property of the elite but not the common people are extractive because this in net extracts wealth from the poor and gives it to the elite.
The issue is that Acemoglu wants to defend his left wing opinions. His ideological pre-commitments prevent him from a principled categorization of extraction. If he did draw such a principled line then he'd have to include things like affirmative action or labor unions. He'd also have to figure out a way to divide between well resourced social institutions he likes and ones he doesn't that are fundamentally engaging in the same extractive activity. For example, he has very different opinions on welfare states vs aristocrats despite both extracting resources for redistribution to specific classes.
I'm not saying you can't draw these distinctions. I too think welfare is morally different from aristocracy. But you then need to add in a normative category. Which Acemoglu doesn't want to do because it ruins his case. Instead he just draws an arbitrary line between "I like this" and "I don't" like you said. And this messes up the analysis.
The concept of extractiveness is ill defined from the start, imo. Try to rate current countries on a scale of extractiveness. I got ChatGPT to do that, by the way. But it’s just being a stochastic parrot, I don’t think I could rely on that for any serious purposes (like running a regression between GDP growth and extractiveness). Maybe one could break down this task into smaller subtasks. But won’t we end up with something similar to perceived corruption or ease of doing business index? Is there any operationalization of extractiveness independent of socioeconomic outcomes? We need to parse laws maybe? What if laws are great in principle but sit unenforced? North Korea is called the Democratic Republic of Korea after all…
The whole book is just tautological. Good countries and institutions are ones that did good. Bad ones are ones that did bad. He tries to get away from that at times, but then there are always counterexamples, so he always just ends up running back to the tautology.
Some interesting info scattered throughout the book, but overall very unimpressive.
Like he is comparing Botswana to its neighbors, and is like wow the GDP/capita is so amazing, its due to great institutions. Ignoring that it has a very high mineral wealth and tiny population.
He is great pains to point out political corruption and kleptocracy as bad and not good for countries. Who was arguing they were good?
I wish I could link to pseudoerasmus' tweets on the subject, but unfortunately those are now protected. He also had questions about that book as well as "The Narrow Corridor".
"But even without the Albouy criticism, I still don’t see Acemogluism as particularly compelling. Basically proto-colonial settler mortality determines whether the institutions set up are inclusive or extractive, and thereafter path dependence and multiple equilibria keep the countries with extractive institutions continuously saddled with extractive institutions. The few escapes from the extractive institutions traps are explained ad hoc."
As a fairly androgynous woman, I'm mostly delighted by ACX. The only objectionable thing about it that I think comes from its relative maleness is that there is less responsiveness to others' ideas than I wish there were. I think it's likely that the ratio of here-is-my-idea posts to here's-my-response-to-your-idea posts is higher here than it would be in a forum where the gender proportions were reversed. And that seems like a negative to me. I can't see any advantages to having such a high ratio of internally generated ideas to responsive ones.
I've posted a couple of ideas of things that I think would offset some of the disadvantages of the ratio, and they've been shot down by objections that don't seem very plausible to me. I had the impression that the main reason they were shot down was that they had an alien, icky feel to people -- sort of a female feel.
Most nerdy hobbies, most hobbies in general are dominated by men. Many women already have a double burden of working a job and managing a household (and children), they don't have as much time to invest in random hobbies. And when they do have time, they're more likely to do something useful or relaxing, like handicrafts or reading novels, instead of getting all worked up about model trains or AI risk.
Anything done on the computer is dominated by men. Partly that's still aftershocks of the fact that computers were a nerdy hobby until maybe 15 years ago. I'm sure there's other reasons too. So reading online blogs about anything that isn't clearly "for women" is probably male dominated.
ACX readership draws from the general less wrong sphere which is male dominated, in that case probably because they talk about a lot of math and computer topics which are male dominated to begin with.
And honestly I think the tone of the blog is probably male coded in a hard to define way. So any women who've spent most of their time in female dominated spaces would probably be put off by that.
Re: free time stuff, from the specific composition of this blog's readers, working more won't necessarily result in less time to read stuff. This blog's readership skews white collar, which are people who can take an hour or two out of their workday to read a blog. Hence even if they're spending 60 hours in an office, they can probably still read and comment while waiting for code to compile or whatever.
Female coded (domestic) labour tends to be a bit more hands on - a bit harder to read a blog while doing childcare or laundry. Again, I'm not saying that men don't work hard... But the specific men reading this blog can probably do it at work.
And oddly enough, I don't think women's domestic labour is too different between classes (for some reason it's not common in western countries to get much domestic help, it's not weird for a woman in a 6 digit combined income household to still be cooking the family dinner at home in the west the way it might be in other places).
That being said I'd argue it still doesn't apply because this describes normie women and I doubt there's many corresponding normie men on this blog.
I'm much more convinced that it's the initial composition of the initial readership. FWIW this blog doesn't read very male to me - it reads very neutral.
I think male spaces are characterised by a lot of adversarial, offensive attitudes (I would say the primary emotion is probably contempt) and female spaces are characterised by a feeling of shared victimhood (primary emotion is paranoia). A very "male coded" interaction I had at work was a coworker recounting the time he got in trouble with HR for calling someone a slur, justified by what the dude did (tbf it was very dumb, but still), while a very "female coded" interaction I had was with my old flatmate complaining that all her exes are awful people and how being a woman is terrible. Male environments compete on how offensive you can be, female environments compete on how offended you can be.
Thankfully, the prevalence of both of these sorts of spaces have shrank, because they both suck. But that's how normie men/women tend to socialise.
Because the writer is a man, and he writes about things men are interested in, in ways that men can relate to.
As a fun exercise, I'm wondering... what popular things are written by a man and have a primarily female audience, or are written by a woman and have a primarily male audience? Not too many examples spring to mind. There's probably some male romance-novel writers that I'm not familiar with, and the handful of female science fiction writers probably have primarily-male audiences too.
> As a fun exercise, I'm wondering... what popular things are written by a man and have a primarily female audience, or are written by a woman and have a primarily male audience?
Any time there's a modern book whose author is rendered as J.K. Rowling or the like, with the personal name turned into a single character, there's a strong possibility that it's crossgender writing. (You're disguising the author's gender so that readers of the opposite sex read their works.) J.K. Rowling is so obscenely popular that this probably washes out, but I have a hard time imagining Animorphs by K.A. Applegate was more popular with girls than boys.
J. R. R. Tolkien comes to mind as a counterexample. I doubt anyone reading his work would have thought about the author's gender at all, but if they had, they would probably have assumed a man.
If there weren't lots of male authors who used initials (C.S. Lewis, T.H. White, C.S. Forester, J.D. Salinger, E.E. Smith, G.K. Chesterton, etc. etc.) it wouldn't have been a very effective form of camouflage to adopt.
Not sure if Rowling did it deliberately. Boys did tend to be expected to be more suspicious of girl books than vice versa. (In my day Judy Blume did well enough with books aimed at boys like Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Then Again, Maybe I Won't, but my sense is that the lines hardened some in the 80s and 90s.)
Certainly by the time the books hit the US there wasn't much effort to obscure her gender, since IIRC her biography of single mum to best selling author in the UK was part of the promotion campaign.
It just seems to me that if an author wanted such camouflage then they would use a pen name of the appropriate gender. I don't think one can read a gender into a name presented as just initials.
I think it's exactly the ambiguity some of them were going for. While there are lots of motivations to write, fame is among them. Authors reluctant to go full pen name for that reason might still wish (or be pushed by risk-averse editors) to ameliorate a perceived sales disadvantage.
They wouldn't AFAIK generally outright deny their identity the way, say, Tiptree did, but it also wouldn't be front and center to deter or prejudice the casual reader. Especially in the magazine era, where presumptions and complaints about "lady authors" and preemptive "this one's as good as a man" defenses from editors weren't absent from the letter columns.
It could be interesting to see let's say top 100 blogs arranged on a scale by the gender of their audience. I predict that we would see an obvious trends for certain topics at certain ends of the scale, and something like "rational thinking" would probably be strongly male coded.
"Handful?" Reasonably recent works on my Kindle include (but probably aren't limited to) Becky Chambers, Arkady Martine, Martha Wells, Anne Leckie, Naomi Kritzer, Sara Pinsker, and Tanya Huff, plus older writers like C.J. Cherryh and Lois McMaster Bujold who still turn something out now and then. Also Rachel Neumeier, who's added SF to her primarily fantasy oeuvre with a space opera, "No Foreign Sky", published just yesterday. (Full disclosure: I was a beta reader on that last one. I think it's neat and would certainly recommend it.)
There have been women writing science fiction since it's been a genre, Frankenstein being one of the candidates for "first science fiction novel". During the 20th century it was fairly common to use initials, ambiguous gender names, or male pseudonyms to protect the reader from the knowledge they might be reading something written by a woman. (C.L. Moore, Andre Norton, Leigh Brackett-- who lived long enough to write an early draft of the script for "The Empire Strikes Back", etc.)
Ursula Le Guin got pressed to do it (once, by Playboy) in 1968, and through the 70s some writers clearly still thought it prudent (C.J. Cherryh, the famously "ineluctibly masculine" James Tiptree, Jr.), but it pretty clearly was becoming less necessary by then. (Women took 40% of the novel Hugos that decade with no need for camouflage.)
Male authors writing romances probably has a longer history, in both novel and magazine formats. Having done so is practically as cliche an Old Shame in a 20th century writer's biography as having written dirty books (back when the latter was a viable income stream). This page gives a number of examples of men using female pen names in the genre. https://sweetsavageflame.com/the-male-authors-of-vintage-romance/
Superhero stalwarts Jack Kirby and Joe Simon also invented the romance comic (and wrote them for at least five years), after which they remained a viable genre for three decades or so. (Probably more viable than superheroes during that genre's 50s eclipse.)
There are a few points of correction I would like to make here.
C.L. Moore stated at one point that her pen name was not because she wanted to conceal her sex, but because writing for pulps was considered somewhat dodgy at the time and she had just gotten a respectable job at a large bank. That was not something you gave up easily during the Great Depression.
Andre Norton changed her name because she wanted to write boy's adventure stories and the sci-fi came later. Boy's adventure stories were considered more salable if they came from a man...which also caught J.K. Rowling many decades later.
Leigh Brackett was the author's birth name. No need to change it.
There were multiple women writing under their own names in the 40s and 50s as well. Off the top of my head there were Margaret St. Clair, Judith Merrill, Zenna Henderson, and others I've seen floating around when reading old magazines. Often they were will-known at the time (the three mentioned were all fairly popular), but had shorter careers or drifted away from sci-fi, or just didn't make it into the "Best Science Fiction of the Century" lists.
They're all worth tracking down, I think. Women were always a minority of sci-fi writers, but they were there, and many times writing under their own names. Just not as many, and not as remembered.
*sigh* No one with half a clue believes "ALL women are more/only interested in people; ALL men are more/only interested in things". Most people with a wide circle of acquaintances can find at least one non-existence proof in that circle.
Unless, of course, they decide that any person who is more interested in things than people is ipso facto a man, regardless of whether or not they have two X-chromosomes, breasts, and a uterus. *sigh*
OTOH, it's also pretty clear that individual people have pre-wired tendencies, and the pattern of these tendencies often correlate with gender. I'd guess that interest in things vs people is probably one of them, at least in the cultural climates I've lived in.
At a guess, at least 10% of women are thing oriented. Or put another way, at least 10% of thing oriented people are women. Another bunch are probably indifferent. (Estimate based vaguely on all the people I've interacted with in my life, with no statistics. And they may be biased by my strong preference for hanging out with people on the autistic spectrum.)
Given a population that's 50% women, they should be. (Either that or I need a lot more caffeine.)
Yes, of course various nits apply. Some thing-oriented people are children. The population sex ratio is not exactly 50-50. Etc. Given the degree of imprecision in this guesstimate, I don't think they matter.
Only if you also assume thing-oriented people are 50% of all people.
Otherwise you could have 10% of women being thing-oriented, but also only 10% of men, so the gender ratio among thing-oriented people would be 50/50. Or if only 5% of men were thing-oriented, then thing-oriented people would be majority female.
Not claiming that's the case IRL, just pointing out that it's a logical possibility so your second statement isn't equivalent to your first.
My wife is a big hippy, and I was fairly left leaning when younger. When we had two boys we gave them very unisex toys. Both dollies and trucks. Even at say 4 months, and then throughout their youth, the preferences for things over people was extremely noticeable. And our neighbor with two girls was the reverse.
My wife said it was a huge wake-up call that a lot of the things she learned being a feminist at an expensive a hippy lib-ed college were perhaps a bit overblown.
"Do people still believe in the “women are interested in people, men are interested in things” "
Well yes, I do. I'm a woman (AFAB) and I am interested in human behaviour. I'm also interested in ACX - and those who read ACX.
I have been for years; it's rare to find people who value clear thinking and it's very enjoyable to see ideas bounced around in a challenging and rigorous but non-combative way.
Since there seem to be so few of us female types here, feel free to AMA.
One internet subculture that I was somewhat surprised to discover to be female-dominated is reading and writing fanfiction. This includes fanfiction about e.g. video games that are mostly played by men or boys. While you might predict this based on the fact that most people who read fiction are women, I was still surprised by it, perhaps because unpaid, voluntary non-fiction writing on the internet seems to be very male-dominated, e.g. Wikipedia.
> At a deeper level most things that aren't specifically female coded are majority male.
Unless you define "female coded" circularly as "things where females are over-represented", I don't think that's true. There's no reason a-priori to think that something like American Sign Language classes would be female-dominated, but they are (my theory is that this is another example of women tending towards personal-connection based activities, presumably men are more likely to study Latin).
I'm surprised at your prediction. The good news is that it is in principle testable. It shouldn't be hard to get a random sample of local meetups on say, meetup.com. However, going to a bunch of random meetups with no justification just to count chromosomes would be inconvenient and awkward.
This is wierd since the population is split 50:50. Although I guess females care about specifically excluding men (for safety/avoiding harrassment) so more things are female coded, if coded at all
I'm pretty sure there was an SSC post on why weird intellectual movements like rationalism/atheism are disproportionately male, with apparently sexist alternatives like organized religion being more popular with women. I'm just having trouble finding it now.
Anyone here ever have the experience of using fitness to get out a depression? I just wrote a short essay on how regular exercise creates a sense of purpose in life and increases motivation. For me, it helps me keep my weight down while on antipsychotic medication as well. I'd like to write about other tools that increase "happiness." Wondering if ACX readers have any insights into what helps them carry on in the void with a smile on their face.
> I just wrote a short essay on how regular exercise creates a sense of purpose in life and increases motivation.
I've always thought it was a combination of a) giving you a sense of control of your life, feelings and circumstances, ie. that conscious positive change, like fitness, is possible with concerted effort, b) embodiment innate to hard exercise forcibly reduces ruminative thought patterns which are implicated in depression, and c) the extreme stress and suffering of a hard workout puts other forms of purely mental suffering in perspective.
All of this is in the context of really hard/high effort exercise though.
I have but for me it takes a *lot* of exercise, like ~3 hours a day 6-7 days a week, which is pretty hard to make time for without being able to e.g. take a couple weeks off work. This is probably because I exercise daily anyway so when I get depressed in spite of this it takes a large increase in 'dose' to make a difference.
Could you trade off volume for intensity, in your experience? For instance, instead of running or swimming for 3 hours, maybe 1 hour or hard circuit training or cross fit.
Yeah that makes sense. When I'm sinking down, everything deteriorates - my mood, my habits, lifestyle, sleep, hope for the future, everything. Getting out of it requires some time, perhaps, to hit bottom, process your situation, maybe languish for a bit, and then, hopefully, make some positive progress. For me, exercise has always been part of making that progress
I found that a 2 mile walk every evening got me through the COVID pandemic. I liked walking downtown just so that I could see other humans without getting too close, and then would be nice and tired to get ready for bed when I got home.
Nice, I gained a lot of weight during 2020 and wasn't walking enough. Usually I'm walking all of the time because that's my job - I'm a dog walker. But during the pandemic everyone was home walking their own dogs and I became very depressed and without a job to do. Had to go on an antidepressant but at least that fostered enough motivation for me to start working out again and eventually I didn't need the medication anymore
Ah CrossFit sounds great. I've wanted to start jiu jitsu for a while now, but haven't had the time or energy to commit to it after a full day of walking dogs, which is what I do for a living. But walking is good enough for now, I think. It keeps me active, in decent shape, and mentally healthy
Very young kids passing out after accidentally ingesting fentanyl (a drug harder than heroin) in schools, libraries, parks...seems pretty extreme to me. They have to be revived, and the revival drug is kept everywhere young children play.
Compared to other cities in the US? Not particularly.
Compared to other cities in the Western World, yes.
Compared to other cities in the whole world, not particularly.
That said, I don't think we should defend the shit behaviour of the San Francisco local government by pointing out that worse things exist somewhere. That's like a 400 lb alcoholic saying that he's not _really_ that bad because there's a 600 lb alcoholic down the street. That doesn't make it okay.
I’ve worked in San Francisco for 12 years now, and I’ve lived there for two years now, and I haven’t experienced any violent crime at all.
In contrast, I lived in Berkeley and Oakland before I moved to San Francisco where I experienced attempted muggings four times, heard gunfire often (especially in the 1980’s), and saw gunfire muzzle flash twice (in the 1990’s).
21st century San Francisco is far safer than what I experienced of the East Bay in the 20th century.
it sounds like you're comparing different suburbs of San Francisco to the old heart of the city; Most people who don't live there are probably including all of those as part of "San Francisco" and comparing to New York or Los Angeles or London
I'm not sure comparing crime in the 80's and 90's to the past decade is that valid. Depending on when in the 90's you are talking about (but not for the 80's; the entire decade was more violent than even the recent uptick), violent crime rates were ~2x what they were in the 2010s, although the recent surge in crime has brought us much closer to the mid-to-late 90's (but still not back up to early 90's and earlier)
Sure, on the third floor of the San Francisco Hall of Justice there’s a chalkboard in the Press room, on that board is listed the number of homicides for each year starting in 1969, the most homicides listed was in 1977 (141), from which it dropped to a back then new low in 1998 (63), then it goes up and down, but it’s been closer to ‘98 levels than ‘77 levels for over a decade (in 2022 there were only 41 homicides).
For someone (like me) who was born in 1968 and has spent 90% of my life in or within 10 miles of San Francisco this seems much safer than the crime levels of my childhood and young adulthood.
Since I can’t actually be sure of a comparable city is (Montreal, and Seattle when I visited them *felt* more like San Francisco than D.C., Ottawa, Los Angeles, and San Diego), maybe you have some measure of relative urban density?
No, in terms of actually crime it isnt that bad but it is somewhere getting significantly worse and it is less sorted into high and low crime areas so it seems more random.
This is what Mallard was addressing, below. There's a difference between "overall murder rate per capita" and "how dangerous the city is for an individual". From what I understand, this is an instance of Simpson's paradox.
Anecdotally, yes. I personally know two people who have been the victims of violent crimes in the SF area, both males in their mid-30s, and they both showed significant personality changes afterward. Being a victim of crime really messes people up.
I'll also say that, in terms of vibe, SF feels roughly equivalent to Detroit safety-wise.
Yes. Relative to its demographics it has a very high crime rate.
Blacks commit homicides at about 10 times the rate of non-Blacks, so it is unfair to compare San Francisco, where Blacks are only 5.2% of the population, to other major cities.
In 2022, SF had 55 homicides and a population of 763,800 = 7.2 per hundred thousand.
I don’t see national data for 2022, but in 2021, the national homicide rate was 6.8 per hundred thousand, and apparently 2022 was lower. So SF would have a higher rate of homicides than the country as a whole in spite of having well under half the Black share of population.
Compared to other cities with few Blacks, San Francisco does very poorly.
For example:
Los Angeles is 8.6% Black, yet had only 3.17 homicides per hundred thousand.
If one is going to walk down a street in a random city in the US, why should one care who is doing the mugging? If SF is doing crime well out of proportion of it's demographics, but it's crime rate is still much lower than other cities, I'm going to pick it.
In other words, when it comes to how an individual should feel about a city, I don't see why demographics should come into it at all.
If what you are trying to say is that "Some neighborhoods in SF definitely deserve the dangerous reputation and others don't", that's a completely reasonable argument (ideally I'd like to see supporting evidence, but even without it, it's as least _plausible), but it's an argument that has absolutely nothing to do with the argument that I was responding to. As I stated elsewhere, I think SF deserves a pretty bad reputation as far as governance goes (I'm less sure about violence and crime specifically, but I believe that generally speaking it's a horribly run city), but I don't think the argument I was replying to is a good one.
It's not that you should care who the perps are, you should care who the victims are.
If St Louis has a murder rate of 14 but the victims are all black youths involved in gang activity, and San Francisco has a murder rate of 7 but the victims are all white middle class people minding their own business, then for me personally San Francisco is a lot more dangerous.
Obviously it's not that extreme, but there seems to be a strong case to be made that San Francisco, despite its overall-middling crime rate, may be a particularly dangerous city for middle class white people in particular.
Maybe that's because white middle class people aren't living in St Louis? It's hard to tease this out from the stats, but "can I walk down the street safely" is the relevant question, and a region's violence being all gang wars is not reassuring unless the gangs are extremely unusually scrupulous about not fucking up bystanders (and charging businesses protection money, etc)
Gangs rarely claim territory in white middle class neighborhoods, so there aren't very many gang wars there.
It's the powder coke v. crack situation. Crack became a moral panic because there were drive-bys hitting children linked with the sale of crack (which then got blasted on the news and politicians Did Something to Be Tough on Drugs). Lawyers and stockbrokers (and the nightclubs they went to) didn't have as many kids getting caught in the crossfire.
First of all, comparing to similar cities makes sense when evaluating a city and considering its merits. E.g. if someone wants to live in a rich city, they could live in the next richest city - San Jose which only had 3.46 homicides per 100,000.
Second of all, it isn't just about who is doing the mugging - it is about who is being mugged.
Most homicides are intraracial. The US cities with the highest homicide rates are those in which large numbers of Blacks kill other Blacks. Even in such cities, I think the per capita rate of homicide for Whites is not usually very high.
E.g. in Baltimore, the total per capita rate of homicides in 2022 was 58.8 per hundred thousand.
However, although 29% of Baltimore residents are White, a far smaller share of homicide victims are. E.g. looking at the last 102 homicides in the city, where the race of the victim was known, only 8% were White.
So the per capita rate of homicides for Whites in Baltimore is probably only about 15.9 (while the rate for Blacks would be about 81.6.).
This highlights the non-homogeneous distribution of crime through the population.
Not only are the perpetrators and victims very heavily disproportionately Black, they tend to be even more disproportionately criminals - not regular people.
San Francisco seemingly bucks this trend by having a higher than average homicide rate while having very few Blacks. This suggests that the crime is less localized by race and more dangerous to the population as a whole. It is likely less localized by criminal background, as well. I.e. it's not just criminals shooting each other.
And while I focused on homicides, since they are the most accurately tracked, the reports about property crime in San Francisco again indicate very widespread victimization that is not at all limited to criminals.
Comparison among similar cities is useful if you are just making a comparison. If you just want to know if the repuation as a "violent city" is justified, it matters _much_ less.
There's some great stuff at that link, thanks! But it's also disappointing: I wish he didn't stop his analysis when it got to results he liked. 58 and 27 are modal, and the differences with populations aren't that big at those two particular ages. From eyeballing it, it seems as though the age distributions would decrease the disparity between black and white murder rates, but not eliminate it.
I wonder how it would fare when taking into account poverty, including neighborhood poverty. I seem to remember that 3 years ago, during the George Floyd aftermath, some people had done number crunching that showed that police killings were directly correlated to neighborhood poverty, and there was almost no racial component after controlling for the (large) racial disparity in poverty. I wonder if a similar thing applies to non-police killings?
I didn't say most homicides are interracial. [In fact that would have been the opposite of what I said and would have undermined my point.] Please read my comment again.
You are right, sorry I misread your "intraracial" as "interracial". Part of why I misread it is that what you actually said doesn't make sense from a "what is the point" perspective.
That sentence and all of your subsequent text doesn't matter to the original question. Whether SF is more or less violent than other, similar cities; and how that violence relates to it's demographics is an interesting academic question, and probably has lots of important implications, but it's irrelevant to the question as posed which is (as I understood it) "should a random person feel safe or unsafe in SF relative to other places in the US".
And to be clear, my prior is that SF _has_ actually dramatically declined and is, right now, a terrible place to live and that the stats don't adequately reflect what it's like to live in SF/the larger bay area. I just think that all of your points are non-sequitors.
"is there something wrong with policing, drugs, etc in SF" was not the original question. The original question was "Does SF deserve it's current reputation as being exceptionally violent."
Whether or not SF has something wrong is a very interesting, and very important!, question, but not the question that was originally asked.
Substack has a podcast feature. The ACX podcast team is thinking of switching to using it. I would make a post, they would record it, and a few days later they would edit the audio file to be at the bottom of the post. This wouldn't mean much for non-podcast-subscribers except that some old posts would have audio files at the end of them (not auto-playing).
Details might matter, like: does the substack podcast feature require to have an interruption for promoting substack/ newsletter of the month or an annoyingly long intro? Is there anything that might change the quality of the audio? I'm pretty sure the ACX podcast team has looked into this.
Seems good to me. If nothing else, it will really improve the discoverability of the podcast with minimal impact on the rest of us. (Honestly, I wouldn't even mind if the podcast was at the top, which is the way news sites seem to do it. That way you know that there's an audio version *before* reading through the whole post.)
There's an ACX podcast? I don't think I'd heard of it and I read pretty much everything you write, but if you want more people to be aware of it I don't think it's very visible
Seems fine. I can't imagine waiting that long to listen to an ACX post though. Gotta stay up to the minute with all the breaking news in whether Oakland would hypothetically get more expensive in 20 years time.
Given that Hanania breaches the "six paragraph" rule in that post, does that mean I can automatically decide the entire screed is rubbish and skip reading it as he plainly has nothing to say and pads it all out with filler?
EDIT: I think my problem with Hanania is that I can't take him seriously, He's "President of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology" which is something he set up himself. Aw how cute Dickie, you're Dear Leader of your own little club which you started yourself! It reminds me of the minister who set up his own church and started calling himself "Bishop". Sure you are.
I'm thinking of setting up my own Organisation for the Something or Other of Wotsit and declaring myself Goddess-Empress of same. I'm sure you will all be impressed by my credentials which legitimise my opinions as a public-facing influencer of thought-leadership!
It sounds like you're just making the point that he doesn't actually take that rule seriously himself, but I did actually find that post excessively waffley and repetitive, and did end up skimming a lot of it because it didn't seem like he was adding much.
It seemed to me like he is implicitly referring to some small subset of books and acting as though that's all books. I know the set of books I read is also a small subset of all the types of book but practically none of them have been as he described. One of the categories he gives of books that are actually worth reading, history books, should obviously just be broadened to any books on technical subjects where there actually is a lot of detail.
I have a hard time taking him seriously because I have no idea who he is other than being reposted by lost of people I already follow. But he seems to have come out of no where in the past year to be some "important" intellectual? Does he have some accomplishment i dont know about?
Yes. It does. And what it says to me is "I think my brain is THIIIIIS big".
"you'll never have 10% of the influence Hanania has"
What influence does he have? Who takes him seriously enough that his toy institute gets to set actual policy? If you stopped people on the street, how many would have heard about him? I wouldn't have heard of him were it not for people name-dropping him here and on the associated disapora blogs. I still haven't got a clear idea of what he thinks, apart from "everyone else is doing it wrong and I'm the one guy who knows what's what".
I think it was Lars Doucet who said here that you don't publish a book to convey an idea, you do it so you can go on a publicity tour and use your 'published author' status to gain clout, putting you in a better position to convey your ideas to more people. Blog posts don't do that unless you're Scott Alexander.
With one exception. And frankly, I don't manage to suspend my disbelief here. Is that a parody? Scott entering with a review to test our sanity? Am I the only one who has read the review and is aghast?
I don't really want to put the name here, in case I get something totally wrong, but I am honestly wondering whether there was some sort of mistake.
I've only read about half of them - the ones that were overwhelmingly chosen by the people got in sight unseen. Please tell me which one's concerning you (by email if necessary) so I can double check if something went wrong.
Bei der Wahl war Ihr Text in meinen Top-3. Und doch war ich überrascht, dass so viele andere dies auch so sahen ;) - andererseits 'wusste' das Publikum hier auch nicht, dass 'man Auf den Marmorklippen nicht liest'. Autor zu ... 'reaktionär' ... . It was a great review, ich gratuliere zur Medaille bei sehr, sehr starker Konkurrenz!
Thanks to your review, I may well become one of them. :D Or even In Stahlgewittern. Just don't tell my friends. (The Germans you know are likely more seriously into literature than the average Hans.) To quote wikipedia: Die Grünen: „Uns ist es relativ gleichgültig, ob Ernst Jünger ein guter oder schlechter Schriftsteller ist. Er war unbestritten ein ideologischer Wegbereiter des Faschismus und ein Träger des Nationalsozialismus von Kopf bis Fuß. Ein Kriegsverherrlicher und erklärter Feind der Demokratie. Er war und ist ein durch und durch unmoralischer Mensch.“ Die SPD stellte sich ebenfalls gegen die Verleihung. Jünger sei „geradezu präfaschistisch“ und passe nicht zur „humanistischen Tradition“ des Goethepreises. ... Sätze aus Frühwerken wie „Ich hasse die Demokratie wie die Pest." https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_J%C3%BCnger#Goethepreis-Verleihung
I'm glad to see a bunch of books that don't fall into the category of recent pop-non-fic with a title like "Something: How One Weird Thing Explains Everything".
Because events can have multiple causes? Because crime is a really complicated thing and is probably influenced by poverty, inequality, culture, and possibly even policing policies?
And how is your phrasing not just...needlessly provocative?
Not here. I mean, the liberals here are wrong about, like, a toooooon of stuff but they're also hardcore nerds who are absolutely, 100% willing to argue precise estimates of how crime will vary with increases and decreases in the Gini coefficient at various national income levels.
I mean, most of them will, some are just dumb.
If you're angry that public discourse is dumb...yes, public discourse is dumb. Please stop bringing it here.
Alright, without the drama, can I just get this clear before everyone spends 12+ months screaming at each other?
-So the core thing is that the after the Hunter Biden laptop got leaked, the CIA (like the official CIA) released a statement that it was Russian disinformation?
-And now everyone is pretty convinced the laptop is legit?
-And former intelligence officials NOT in the CIA but affiliated with the Biden campaign put pressure on the CIA to release the letter as quickly as possible?
-And the new info is a letter from a former official officially saying this was done to help the Biden campaign?
So, first, without the sturm-und-drang, is this what is being alleged? And, if so, what are the points of factual disagreement?
I think your bullets are close, but my read looked slightly different.
- Hunter Biden laptop got leaked
- Biden Campaign staff member Anthony Blinken asked former CIA director Michael Morell to draft a letter (seemingly in his personal capacity) and get other former intelligence/national security people to sign it.
- Morell drafts the letter
- The CIA has a "Prepublication Classification Review Board" that appears to review pretty much anything a former CIA employee publishes to protect against disclosure of classified information (https://www.cia.gov/about/organization/prepublication-classification-review-board/). So, like any ex-CIA staffer wanting to make a publication related to intelligence, Morell needed to get his letter cleared by the PCRB before publishing it.
- Here's where the sturm-und-drang comes in, depending on one's perspective. The CIA quickturned the letter approval in less than a day. Maybe suspicious, maybe treatment one might expect for an ask from a former CIA Director on a 2 page letter with 4 other former Directors on board, that the former Director has asked to be handled urgently, contains no intelligence in and of itself and is clear in its text about that ("We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement").
- It also looks like one signer on the letter, David Cariens, learned about the letter during a call with a PCRB employee about a memoir he was writing. So he's having his conversation about getting his memoir cleared to publish by PCRB, the employee mentions the letter, and Cariens wanted to sign. Could be signs of a CIA operation of some kind - fast tracking the letter and having PCRB people push other CIA staff who wanted their stuff published to sign it. But it could also just be mundane - no CIA operation, just the kind of small talk (albeit probably unprofessional given the context) that happens all the time at the beginning or end of a business call, no more conspiratorial than "how are your kids," "new Marvel movie was good," etc, just that happened to pique Cariens' interest, with no further implication than the the letter going from 50 to 51 signatures.
Overall this looks like your standard-issue partisan bickering where there are multiple explanations for a thing and one side says it has proved that the bad explanation is true while the other said it has exonerated itself beyond doubt and the whole thing was a nothing burger.
Yeah, this is my take as well. As a *former* CIA director, then private citizen, Morrell is allowed to write nakedly partisan political propaganda if he wants, and he's even allowed to lie when he does so. But like anyone who ever had access to Sensitive Compartmented Information(*), he agreed to submit anything he wrote on anything that might plausibly be believed to stem from his classified background for review.
Which review is to be done in a timely fashion, where "timely" is context-dependent and for something like this is supposed to be done fast. And it's supposed to consider *only* whether you are leaking classified information, not whether you are e.g. writing nakedly partisan political propaganda filled with outright lies. The reviewing agency can always slow-walk the review, claiming to be busy, or exhaust your patience with nitpicky disputes about what is or isn't classified, and there's probably not much you can do about it - but it's unprofessional of them to do that. The CIA, in this case, seems to have acted professionally.
Except for the bit where one of their staff blabbed to someone else who was doing their own pre-publication review, but as you note, that's within the normal range for office-gossip carelessness.
So, in this case the CIA "conspired" to do their normal, non-partisan job by the book, and so left a bunch of private citizens to exercise their right to engage in political commentary of whatever sort they like.
* I was just read in to another SAP today, so that paperwork is very fresh in my mind.
I think your proposed strategy would make it so obvious what was being done that very few people would fall for it. And even ignoring that, not many people vote for 3rd party candidates to begin with, and even fewer are going to vote for a candidate that can't even manage to make it on to all 50 ballots. I'd be skeptical that this strategy would be expected to flip even a single state out of 10 elections.
Your statement could be very true, and I don't want to overstate my case- I genuinely don't know what would happen. But to argue for it a bit more- Ross Perot received I believe 19ish% of the vote when he was a 3rd party candidate. A lot of people are uncomfortable with Trump and would probably like a way out to vote for a non-Trump Republican, however they need to rationalize that.
And, most voters are low-information voters with a high school degree who just don't pay attention to politics as much as we do. So they may not really understand that Cheney isn't on the ballot in half the country- they may not know it at all, or it may not have really registered
I think non-Trump Republicans are not likely to vote for Liz Cheney, given that she can be perceived as RINO, or a party traitor, or simply "the liberals love her". If your political opponents are all "oh yeah we want Sally as the new leader", then how likely is Sally to be close to the principles of your party rather than their party?
C) Won't vote for a democrat and/or one of the already running 3rd party candidates
D) are low information enough to not know that one candidate is only running on ~1/3 of the ballots and is basically running a sham campaign
but
E) will have heard of this candidate enough to know who they are and vote for them (and it seems to me that pre-existing name recognition seems unlikely, I can't imagine anyone with any real clout agreeing to this strategy)
I think that you have selected and _extremely_ small slice of the pie and are hoping that it is somehow large enough to swing not-close elections.
The fact that Ross Perot did well one time doesn't matter because you are suggesting a _completely_ different kind of campaign.
In some ways that sounds like Evan McMullin's candidacy in 2016 -- and he didn't come close to winning even his own home state of Utah. (Where he was the only Mormon and the only local person on the ballot.)
-edit- I was wrong about how well he did, I was looking at a list that explicitly didn't include 3rd party candidates that had strong performances. He was only one of the best of the "bad" ones, but my last paragraph is the real killer.
Yes, and he was a candidate on the ballot in 43 states, not 20ish, and he got the second highest proportion of votes for a 3rd party candidate (after Gary Johnson in 2016) since 1920.
so A) he did very unusually well for a 3rd party candidate and B) I would expect a candidate employing the proposed strategy to do significantly _worse_ than average.
To make matters worse, upon rereading, the strategy _explicitly_ states that they will not run in swing states, the states where the election is close, in case they accidentally swing it the other way.
This plan is to run a 3rd party candidate, only put them on the ballot in a little over 1/3 of states, and hope that they mange to get _so many votes_ that a non-swing red state switches from red Republican to Democrat.
So the idea is a spoiler candidate? Split the vote so the other lot win?
I don't know how well that would work for a presidential campaign, where it's pretty much A versus B. C, D and E can run, but A is for the Repubcrats and B is for the Demolicans, so C, D and E are third party or Independents.
Running C who is another Repubcrat would be confusing, you'd need a very big name to go forward, and you'd need enough people wanting to vote for C rather than A - in which case, why doesn't C run directly in the primary to be selected as the official Repubcrat candidate rather than A?
For a local election it might well work - the party machine picked John Johnson, the locals want Flip Biggens instead, so they vote for Flip as a protest vote. But for the kind of national election for president? I can't see it, not under the American model (now under the Irish one, we had seven people running one year).
Curiously, I find them more similar in hindsight. I remember being afraid of a Gore win because of what I considered his extreme views.
After 9/11, I had my doubts about what we did about the attack. It didn't seem justified to spend over $50 billion to curtail our freedoms, and unlikely to protect us much, but I gave the policy the benefit of the doubt. By 2006, I had determined the policy was bad, and have been only more convinced since then.
Would Gore have done better? I think he would have done much the same in the circumstances.
Certainly President Gore would have been under enormous pressure to do something about terrorism after 9/11. But that "something" may well have been just invading Afghanistan.
Also, presumably Gore would have pushing through something related to global warming.
Related to AI Alignment efforts, I know its been discussed on several platforms, but enhancing adult human general intelligence seems to be a very promising avenue for to accelerate alignment research. It also seems beyond obvious that using artificial intelligence to directly enhance biological human intelligence allows humans to stay competitive with future AI. I'm having a hard time finding anyone who is even trying to do this[1][2][3]. It would even be useful to augment even specialized cognitive abilities like working memory[4][5][6] or spatial ability.
1. Stankov, L., & Lee, J. (2020). We can boost IQ: Revisiting kvashchev’s experiment. Journal of Intelligence, 8(4), 41.
2. Haier, R. E. (2014, February 23). Increased intelligence is a myth (so far). Frontiers. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2014.00034/full
3. Grover, S. et al. (2022) Long-lasting, dissociable improvements in working memory and long-term memory in older adults with repetitive neuromodulation, Nature News. Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-022-01132-3 (Accessed: 21 May 2023).
4. Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2019). Cognitive training does not enhance general cognition. Trends in cognitive sciences, 23(1), 9-20.
5. Zhao, C., Li, D., Kong, Y., Liu, H., Hu, Y., Niu, H., ... & Song, Y. (2022). Transcranial photobiomodulation enhances visual working memory capacity in humans. Science Advances, 8(48), eabq3211.
6. Razza, L. B., Luethi, M. S., Zanão, T., De Smet, S., Buchpiguel, C., Busatto, G., ... & Brunoni, A. R. (2023). Transcranial direct current stimulation versus intermittent theta-burst stimulation for the improvement of working memory performance. International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology, 23(1), 100334.
"Increasing intelligence, however, is a worthy goal that might be achieved by interventions based on sophisticated neuroscience advances in DNA analysis, neuroimaging, psychopharmacology, and even direct brain stimulation (Haier, 2009, 2013; Lozano and Lipsman, 2013; Santarnecchi et al., 2013; Legon et al., 2014)."
Any approach that is based on optimizing existing human brains runs into the challenge of "why doesn't nature do this already." The reason for that can be silly, like a lacking synthesis path for some required chemical, but there has to be a reason. Hence "Algernon's Law: Any simple major enhancement to human intelligence is a net evolutionary disadvantage." (https://gwern.net/drug-heuristic?2) Also, you're working at the speed of drug licensing or at the risk profile of untested chemicals; not something you want to do with your brightest and most conscientious researchers. And once you look at embryo selection, which avoids some of these issues, you inherently have a thirty-year latency, which probably puts you too late for the Singularity.
You are a cube. You like things with the Right number of vertices. You have opinions about how not-round your life circumstances should be. Proper, tidy. Some of your edges are rounded off with time, but generally you call yourself a cube and do cubey things.
They are a kidney-bean-shaped beanbag chair. They are soft and have no vertices unless you simulate them at a low resolution with polygons. The polygons at least give them some vertices so that they are more palatable to your need for edges and points. You don't like the lack of square faces on those polygons, but they allow you to feel more secure that you understand this beanbag chair.
How does your mind work? Well, lets say it's like a virtual machine made up of very regular cubeish computational components. Proper, tidy computational components. You fit your square, cube, hypercube ideas about how to move your 6 faces through the world in to cubular instructions to calculate what your next move should be. To generate an internal theory of mind for your round interlocutor so you can have a meaningful argument, you photograph the shapes they are waving in the air and feed those instructions in to your virtual machine. The program crashes... of course. Why can't they see that their ideas just don't work?
---
A person from group `A` understands their virtual machine, and they have useful simulations and projections of future outcomes that take advantage of the machine they run on. They know they can tinker with certain values and get desired outcomes.
`A` builds a simulation of what their interlocutor is proposing and runs it on their own virtual machine. It doesn't crash because they constructed the simulation in ways that are consistent with their machine. The outcomes differ from the outcomes proposed by the interlocutor and then they argue about this.
`A` doesn't know how to build a simulation which will run on their interlocutor's hardware and most of the time won't even try. That's hard.
What if `A` didn't even know that they had different hardware?
Well, since no one else has commented, I'll let you know I now have the mental image of a beanbag chair telling a cube that snow in April still melts, and then kicking it out of a window.
I just tried asking ChatGPT several variations on "Translate the following story from Japanese into English. Respond with each paragraph of the Japanese followed by its translation into English, then the next paragraph of Japanese, etc.", but no matter what I did, it would just respond with the English translation and ignore the instructions.
Everyone keeps posting amazing mind-blowing LLM success stories online, and then I try it out and wonder "is *this* seriously what is supposed to take over the world?"
As an LLM skeptic currently seriously re-evaluating his judgements, I don't think you're giving it its due. I tried what you said with a language I know (Arabic), and though my original idea, giving it an example of what I want in the form of a sample English-Arabic pair, failed. I succeded on the second try with "Please pair every English paragraph in the translation with the arabic equivalent in the original story". And it did, its accuracy is amazing, much better than Google Translate.
When Search Engines were new, they were no doubt much worse than hand-filtered directories and aggregators (and they are still worse now in a lot of things, SEO makes sure of that). When calculators were new, people had to write arithmetic expressions into a weird backwards notation called Reverse Polish notations (1+2*3 would translate to 2 3 * 1 +), but still people flocked to them. LLMs are a new tool and despite all of its disadvantages and the kool-aid hype around it they are mind-blowing and enable fundamentally new things. Meet them on their terms, and you will profit.
“translate the following into english. For each paragraph output the original text before the translation.” Followed by a few paragraphs worked fine for me.
Update: I bit the bullet and paid for ChatGPT Plus, and tried the same prompt with GPT4. So far, GPT4 seems to work better.
Update 2: GPT4 *looks* like it does a better job, but after a while it stops translating the story and just hallucinates a continuation to the story and translates that instead. Arrgggh!
Update: I just tried it with your *exact* prompt and it *still* didn't work for me. It just printed out "The original text before translation:" followed by the *English* translation (and no Japanese at all).
Here is the prompt I used in case anyone else wants to try to replicate:
translate the following into english. For each paragraph output the original text before the translation
穢れは本来、普通の人には見えない。
しかし穢れの力が強まり、一定の線を超えると形を変え、視認できるようになる。
そして姿は、周囲の人々にとって恐怖の象徴、あるいはもっとおぞましい異形と化す。
今回の例で言えば、穢れはクマという形で顕現していた。
クマは大きく、凶暴で、出会ったら少なからず死を予感する。
辺境の小さな街だからこそ、野生のクマに対する恐怖は大きいものだった。
その証拠に、穢れが模したクマの姿はおぞましく、見ているだけで背筋が凍りそうになる。
私はユーリに近づこうと、一歩を踏み出す。
「来るな！」
そんな私をユーリが止めた。
「こいつ予想以上に強い。ただのクマだと思って油断した……」
「ち、違うよ！ 私の力が弱いから」
ユーリには私の、聖女の加護を与えてある。
だから穢れも見えるし、穢れを祓う力も持っている。
ただ、私の力は弱すぎて、穢れを祓うまでに達していない。
ユーリは騎士として、剣士としてちゃんと強い。
近くで稽古を見ていた私が、一番それを知っている。
だというのに、彼は苦戦を強いられていた。
それも全て、私の力が弱い所為。
クマなんかに負けないくらいに強いのに、押されているのがその証拠だ。
「大丈夫だ。ちゃんと効いてる。回数が必要なだけで、倒せるまで斬り続ければいいだけだ」
「で、でも！」
「いいから！ 君はそこにいてくれ」
「ユーリ……」
「君は……俺たちは、やっと始まったばかりなんだ。こんな所で終わるわけには……いかないんだよ」
ユーリは剣を強く握りしめる。
覚悟を持って、力強く言い放ち、穢れを鋭く睨む。
そうだ。
私たちは、この街に来てやっと……やっと少しずつ、毎日を楽しいと思えて来たんだ。
これからもっと楽しいことがいっぱいあるって、そう思えた。
だから――
「俺は負け――っ!?」
油断していた、わけじゃない。
予想外ではあった。
穢れがまさか、目の前の敵を無視して、私に襲い掛かってくるなんて。
「あっ」
「レナ！」
「……え？」
血しぶきが舞う。
雨のように、降り注ぐ。
鉄の匂いと、赤い景色が支配する。
「ぐっ、う……」
「いや、いや……ユーリ！」
私を庇って。
ユーリのお腹から、ドバドバと赤い血が流れ落ちている。
どう見ても重症。
下手をすれば即死もありえる致命傷。
穢れは目の前にいる。
それでも私は、我を忘れて彼を癒そうと祈りを捧げる。
「っ……にげ、ろ」
「駄目だよ……嫌だよ。ユーリを置いていくなんて……」
「いい、から……俺は……」
もう助からない。
そう言いかけて、言葉すらでなくなっていた。
私の力じゃ、ユーリの傷は癒せない。
そんなことはわかっている。
わかっているけど、諦めきれるはずがない。
「嫌だよ……ユーリ。ユーリがいないと私……」
一人ぼっちの私に出来た大切な友人。
私のことを笑わないでくれた……たった一人。
私を守る騎士。
彼と出会ってから、世界が鮮やかに色付いたみたいに思った。
私にとって一番――
「死なないで……死なないでよ……ユーリ」
大切な人になった。
穢れが襲い掛かる。
ポツリと、涙がこぼれ落ちる。
頬から落ちて、彼の頬に――
すると光が、彼の身体を包み込む。
「え？」
「な、何だ……」
戸惑う私とユーリ。
穢れは光にあてられ怯み、後退して距離をとる。
「身体が……痛くない」
「傷が！」
瞬く間に治癒していく。
その光は紛れもなく、聖女から受けた加護の力。
初めて見るほど眩くて、とても温かい光。
彼は徐に立ち上がる。
「ユーリ」
「何だろう？ 今なら……何でも出来る気がするよ」
聖女には個性がある。
選ばれし乙女の心であり、魂の本質。
時に自然であり、時に生物であり、時に概念でもある。
個性がない聖女など存在しない。
この世に生まれた者であれば誰しもが持つ個性。
故に、気づけなかっただけだ。
彼女もまた、個性を持っていた。
文字通り特異で、唯一無二の特性。
その名は――『絆』。
絆の聖女。
心から共にいたいと願う一人と出会い、心を通わせることでその力は何十倍にも膨れ上がる。
大切な人を守りたい。
大切な人を失いたくない。
そんな思いが二人の胸に宿り、炎のように燃え上がる。
聖女と騎士の間に芽生えた絆が、彼女に力を与えた。
そして、力は騎士に加護として還元される。
「行くぞ」
目覚めた聖女の力は、他の聖女のそれを遥かに上回る、
なぜなら、彼女の力の根源は絆という強い想いだからだ。
想えば想うほど、どこまでも強くなれる。
いずれ世界すら、絆の力で救うかもしれない。
「うおおおおおおおおおおおお！」
ユーリの剣が、穢れを斬り裂いた。
たった一振りで、大きな身体が消えていく。
立っているのは勝者のみ。
彼は剣を鞘に納め、振り返る。
「終わったよ。レナ」
「……うん」
これは絆の物語。
一人ぼっちの聖女と、一人ぼっちの騎士。
才能のあるなしで優劣が決まる世界で、汚れていく世界で。
二人が出会い、絆を深め、世界に知らしめるまでの――
ほんの序章である。
Are you using the free or paid version of GPT?
Free version. Trying your full prompt, I’m guessing it has trouble when there’s lots of text (too many paragraphs?) to translate - when I broke it up into smaller chunks (cutting off the first part after the paragraph with “bear”) fixed the response format
Yeah, I think it must be a context window issue, at least with GPT4. With GPT4, it *starts* translating in the correct format, but then halfway through it starts ignoring the original story and translates a hallucinated story continuation of its own instead, presumably due to the prompt falling out of the context window.
From what I've read, the Web UI uses a shorter context window than the API, which seems pretty stupid to me. It's also frustrating that it doesn't warn you when the prompt falls out of the window and doesn't give any indication of how long the window actually is.
Also I don't think it's trained on a lot of samples where the prompt is very far above the output.
(That is, ending the first prompt at that paragraph, and replying/re-prompting with another chunk of the original text got the right format in each response, and both the original text and translations looked correct at the tail end of each output)
Biden says the US will defend Taiwan if China invades. What are the odds that is a bluff? It seems insane to me that the US would start WWIII over Taiwan. Not that Taiwan isn't important, but the cost/benefit math just doesn't seem to work out in favor of defending it militarily.
What do you think?
The US fighting China is not World War Three. The US fighting China with only conventional weapons and no actual invasion of China, is *definitely* not World War Three. Since that's the most (and very likely the least) the United States would do if Taiwan were invaded, the question of whether the US would start WWIII over Taiwan does not arise. And since China has negligible non-nuclear force projection ability against CONUS, we can limit our losses to what we think we can afford to lose, while still projecting massive force against a Chinese invasion fleet.
The question of whether *China* would be willing to start World War Three, over the US blocking their invasion of Taiwan, at least theoretically applies. They could nuke the US, and they could try to get Russia to nuke the US or vice versa, but as you say, the cost/benefit math does not work out for that.
Also, if the United States is going to be bluffed into backing down any time someone with ICBMs says "let me have what I want or I'll start World War Three", then we should probably just pack it in and acknowledge that Russia, China, and/or North Korea are going to rule the world before too long.
>Also, if the United States is going to be bluffed into backing down any time someone with ICBMs says "let me have what I want or I'll start World War Three"
Funny how this argument is always trotted out to justify the US's involvement in foreign affairs. As the world leader by far in conventional force, it just means that the US gets to dictate world affairs. It's a convenient fiction for those that benefit from the US oriented world order as it is a blanket argument in favor of use of force to preserve the current world order.
The problem is that it doesn't acknowledge differences in how each side values opposing outcomes and so is useless at predicting an adversary's behavior. Naive adherence to this rule will eventually result in WW3. If one side genuinely considers defeat an existential threat, escalation to unconventional weapons is a likely outcome. The problem is that arguments like this short-circuit any genuine analysis that might potentially show a negative utility for involvement. The war in Ukraine being an obvious example. Those beating the drum for escalation of western involvement always refuse to acknowledge the possibility of runaway escalation. It turns out that even semi-rational actors follow incentives, and the incentive against engaging in WW3 will not be overriding to every adversary in all cases, specifically cases involving existential threats.
But acknowledging all this doesn't mean that Russia/China/NK runs the board. Again, incentives matter, and the value of territory far from one's homeland will be valued at much less than strategically critical territory on one's border. We can't rationally short-circuit a genuine analysis with memes and self-serving arguments. Decisions to involve ourselves in military confrontations with nuclear powers must engage in this analysis or it is utterly reckless.
Dr, Strangelovski: "Ve haff placed very powerful thermonuclear bombs under each of our own cities, linked to a sophisticated computer that is having been programmed to monitor all global communications and to detonate the bombs iff the algorithm is not determining that we are the sole and uncontested rulers of Alaska within the next six months. Therefore, it is proven that the failure of our invasion of Alaska would pose an existential threat to us. Unless you are willing to be starting World War Three and Global Annihilation, you must surrender Alaska to us."
Now what?
If you're going to believe someone every time they *say* that their current goal is an "existential threat", and yield because you are unwilling to risk World War Three, then again, you might as well give it up because they're going to rule the world before too long.
Defeat in Ukraine *might* be an existential threat to *Vladimir Putin*. And the Silovoki might have yielded so much to Putin that they can no longer stop him from taking them down in flames with him. But, A: probably not, and B: if so, that's just a bespoke personalized version of Dr. Strangelovski's strategy with just the one metaphorical bomb under the Kremlin.
>If you're going to believe someone every time they *say* that their current goal is an "existential threat", and yield because you are unwilling to risk World War Three, then again, you might as well give it up because they're going to rule the world before too long.
The only time such obviously bad arguments are trotted out with a straight face is when it's blatantly self-serving. We should be able to recognize this sort of knee-jerk self-serving argument and choose to consider the issues more carefully. Here's the thing: sometimes circumstances are in fact deemed to be existential by the adversary. Our analysis should at least attempt to distinguish between the reality and the bluff. If we just go with the naive "if we give in they will rule the world", then we are guaranteed to fight WW3 eventually. I assume we can all agree that this is essentially a -inf outcome?
But how do we evaluate the claim and determine whether it is a bluff or genuinely believed? By getting into the mindset of the adversary and seeing the world from their eyes. If we can understand their set of beliefs and values, we can accurately judge whether a claim of existential threat is coherent with those beliefs and values.
The mistake most people make when judging Putin's claims is evaluating them from the perspective of western beliefs and western values. Of course NATO is a non-aggressive organization! Of course it's absurd to risk WW3 over one's neighbor joining our NATO club! But these claims aren't obviously true from the perspective of a state that is the cultural and psychological descendant of the USSR and inherited the fear and distrust the US and USSR fomented among each other. The National Security folks from the 90's recognized the intrinsic threat that NATO posed to Russian security, at least from Russia's perspective. I don't know why people pretend like the reality has changed or that we're wiser now than they were. What has changed is our interests in Eastern Europe and the motivations for convenient self-serving justifications.
Wait, I thought this argument was "always trotted out", now it's "only trotted out when it's blatantly self-serving".
Sometimes, an argument is "trotted out" with great frequency, that's because it's a broadly sound and valid argument. And as for "self-serving", I'm not sure what selfish interest you think is being served here. But since we're apparently going around accusing people of self-serving bogosity, I'm going to throw that right back at you with a side order of wondering what group's interests you self-identify with.
Notice how you responded to none of my substantive points and provided no substance of your own.
For the record, I'm on the side that wants a high probability of avoiding nuclear war indefinitely. The side that is appalled at the lack of clear headed thinking and widespread motivated reasoning when it comes to Ukraine. The fact that every debate of this sort reduces to my interlocutor wondering out loud what side I'm on just underscores the quality of reasoning. For most people, the sides are chosen first, the justifications are then in service to advancing the chosen side. Here's a hint: if you think what side it sounds like an argument supports has epistemic value, you're engaging in motivated reasoning. But that's not the basis for sound foreign policy.
> The problem is that it doesn't acknowledge differences in how each side values opposing outcomes and so is useless at predicting an adversary's behavior. Naive adherence to this rule will eventually result in WW3. If one side genuinely considers defeat an existential threat, escalation to unconventional weapons is a likely outcome.
Noone can reasonably consider the failure of a foreign "special military operation" to be an existential threat. It's not that the analysis is "short circuited", it's that when you actually do the analysis and plug in the values, it doesn't remotely come out in favor of Russia. The only way you can get it to come out against supporting Ukraine is if you believe the "we should unconditionally surrender to Russia at every opportunity" arguments, which is why it is so important to refute that line of logic.
No, that's not how predicting the mindset and behavior of an adversary works.
Thanks. That info is helpful.
Define "defend".
I've been out of this scene for awhile but, from my recollections, the current US strategy in the event of a Taiwanese invasion is to blockade all shipping to China out in the Strait of Malacca and similar critical shipping channels. That may not be America's current strategy but there's a lot of possibilities from economic sanctions to blockades to arming nearby nations (think Vietnam) to a range of potential conventional warfare options.
I don't doubt that the US will do "something" if China invades Taiwan but what exactly is done will be....highly situational. First, it's unclear whether China can even successfully invade Taiwan, less because Taiwanese military might and more the difficulty of massed amphibious operations into anti-ship missiles along a difficult coastline. Second, a lot depends on regional actors. Japan and India are serious local players with their own concerns regarding China. India has a long militarized border with China and will almost certainly have their own response to an expansionist China. You could have thrown Russia in this crowd before the Ukraine war but now they're extremely dependent on the Chinese economy and almost certainly won't do anything, anyway, old Mearshiemer argument.
Anyway, when Biden says the US will defend Taiwan, he's not committing to US Marines marching into Zhongnanhai, because that's not going to happen. He's committing to some kind of military-ish action, details to be determined later.
If we take the relative balance of power between the US and China to be slowly shifting in favor of China (which is a dumb linear extrapolation of current trends, but still) then it is in the interest of China to delay conflict, as the more they wait the more favorable the outcome for them. Biden’s term is likely to be over by then.
Did the UK and France start World War II (in Europe) by announcing their decision to defend Poland from Germany? Or was it Hitler's decision to invade Poland despite knowing that France and the UK had announced their decision to defend the country that started the war?
This may come across as harsh, but the idea that China (or Russia) as a state is not culpable for its actions is something that I see that really annoys me. If the US announces its decision to defend Taiwan, and China chooses to go to war anyways, it is China that starts World War III, because China started the war.
The search for one single action or action that starts a world war seems misguided. Germany's and Russia's invasion of Poland started a regional war. France's and Germany's declaration of war against Germany expanded that into a major war. Germany's alliance with Japan then expanded it further into a true world war.
There are probably different ways to look at this, and it's certainly something that many countries in recent years have tried to mess with, but I think the following is logical:
Historically, there was often a firm line between 'peace' and 'war'. When the German army crossed into Poland, the state changed from 'peace' to 'war'. From the perspective of German PR operations, the line is just as firm, but "Poland" "crossed" the line when the "Poles" "attacked" a German radio station (scare quotes being very important here), so the Germans accepted the idea that there was a line and that the party crossing the line has culpability, they just made it look like the Poles were the one to cross the line. When the UK and France declared war, they were entering into a war that had already started, not starting a new war. To go with a metaphor, if I start a controlled burn in a forest and it turns into a wildfire, I started the wildfire even if that wasn't my intention. Germany's action started a fire; when that fire became a wildfire is irrelevant.
History is not neat. My best approximation is that most of the world being involved in hostilities at the same time roughly associated into two general sides makes it easy to approximate the whole thing as a single war. To me, the 'alliance' between German and Japan is one of the least relevant parts in making it a World War, since Japan never went to war with the Soviets while they were at war with Germany and there was no real coordination between the two Axis sides. On the other hand, Germany and Italy declaring war on the US after Pearl Harbor (possibly to try to get Japan to go to war with the Soviet Union) officially brings the US into the war in Europe even if the US intended to go to war in Europe anyways (declarations of war are nice solid lines where one side is definitely a war).
Admittedly, defining what actually constitutes a war is the hard part these days. Since starting a war makes you culpable, countries are always attempting to find levels of hostilities that are possible without going to war. The US before Pearl Harbor was definitely pushing into this grey zone between peace and declared war in the Atlantic (and of course 'unrestricted submarine warfare' is itself pushing into this zone).
To make this relevant to China and Taiwan:
China is a rational actor able to make decisions on its own, and if the decision it makes is to cross the line between peace and war, then it is China's responsibility for making that decision. Neither the US nor Taiwan have anything to gain if the line between peace and war with China is crossed. They do have something to gain from winning the war if the line is crossed by China: namely the resumption of the status quo.
What right do you think China has to Taiwan?
I mean, it can't be zero. Taiwan was pretty clearly Qing dynasty territory (save for the Japanese invasion), the Communists claimed all historical Chinese territory, the Kuomintang would never have survived without US military support, and the CCP has continually, for generations, maintained their rights to Taiwan and it's hard to see the existence of Taiwan isn't...basically just the US government redrawing a countries borders using the threat of military force.
Not to give the CCP more defense than they deserve, but the US has been militarily involved in China since the 1930s and Taiwan didn't just magically appear yesterday; there's a lot of history there. And if the argument boils down to, as I think it does, that the CCP is bad therefore the US has a moral right to shape it's borders...I mean, India is right there and they have their own memories of Partition...as does Vietnam and honestly a ton of countries in that region.
Again, not to say that the CCP should take control of Taiwan tomorrow, that seems pretty bad for the Taiwanese, but the CCP isn't Hitler, this didn't start yesterday, and the China isn't the only state that needs to take culpability its actions.
For what it's worth, I don't even think the defense of Taiwan was a mistake, it's just a normal messy historical thing.
China has zero right to Taiwan. I would go as far as to say that Taiwan, being a free and democratic country and a continuation of the previous government of China, has a greater right to China than China does to Taiwan.
"Taiwan was pretty clearly Qing dynasty territory"
And the closest successor to the Qing dynasty is the current government of Taiwan, not the current government of China.
"the Communists claimed all historical Chinese territory"
And I claim all historical British territory. Unlike the Communists, I never went on a nationwide rampage destroying British heritage and mass murdering those who support it, so my claim to all historical British territory is far more reasonable than the Chinese claim to all historical Chinese territory.
"the Kuomintang would never have survived without US military support"
And the US was in the wrong for supporting the internationally recognized legitimate government of China? While the Soviet Union was not in the wrong for supporting the communist rebels, who turned out to be mass murderers?
"and the CCP has continually, for generations, maintained their rights to Taiwan and it's hard to see the existence of Taiwan isn't...basically just the US government redrawing a countries borders using the threat of military force."
The CCP wants to take over Taiwan. The CCP did take over the mainland. The US wanted to maintain the status quo during the civil war, and wants to maintain the status quo today. So who's redrawing a country's borders using military force?
When you say "China" what do you mean? There is no Chinese government. There is a bunch of thugs with guns who happen to be in control of Chinese territory but they're not a government in any legitimate sense, because they weren't elected.
The current Chinese regime has zero right to Taiwan, just as it has zero right to any other part of China.
If China were to persuade Taiwan to want to join China voluntarily, the end result would still be bad for the rest of the world, but the US would have almost no cause to intervene. We would still be within our rights beforehand to try to persuade Taiwan that reunification would be a bad idea and to pull our economic investments out of the country, but military intervention would be off the table.
The rules have to be that using military force to change borders is unacceptable and that the autonomy of the individual society currently occupying the land have to take precedence over historical grievances over who owned what in the past. It's Taiwan that has the right to shape its borders under these rules, and the US has the moral right to support the rules because applied neutrally they're the best way of avoiding the horrors of the past.
Not to say these rules are perfect. They tend to promote some amount of ethnic cleansing to make sure that your people have the majority claim to any disputed territory, and this leads to atrocities even today. But the alternative seems to be far worse. (And if you change the rules, remember that they change for everyone. A world where the former US territory of Cuba is the 51st state and the Taiwanese flag flies over all of China might be much better for a lot of people.)
Do you have a view on what the relevant statute of limitations is?
If I invade your country, drive out your people and settle my own, it's pretty clear that 10 years down the line you're within your rights to reclaim it from me, even though all the people currently living there want to be part of my country, but that 200 years down the line your descendants have no right to kick out my descendants even though their inheritance traces back to ill-gotten gains if you go far enough.
But between those there are some nasty grey areas. What are the rights and wrongs of territory that was conquered illegitimately 30, 50, 80 years ago?
How do you square those rules with with the creation of the modern Taiwanese "state"? Or, to rephrase, is there any sense in which the creation and existence of modern Taiwan hasn't been accomplished through the use of US military force to change borders?
Especially because "modern" Taiwan isn't "historical" Taiwan. In the Qing Dynasty and during the Japanese occupation, Taiwan was primarily inhabited by the Taiwanese people; most of the current population we would consider Taiwanese are Han Chinese who fled the mainland in the late 40's. And the local/original Taiwanese didn't invite them in, the American-armed Kuomintang just kinda....showed up and took over. There really isn't a point in it's history where the border between China and modern Taiwan hasn't been enforced by American military forces.
There are two rules that go together in the post you are responding to.
Regardless of what happened 70 years ago, the majority of the population of Taiwan does not want to be part of the PRC. Nobody has any business making them part of the PRC against their will, and everyone has a moral cause in not letting them be taken by the PRC against their will.
And that was the rule the international community followed in South Sudan and East Timor. We don't let countries conquer each other by force. We do recognize popular independence movements. Are the rules perfect? No, Russia (for one) is great at twisting the rule for its own end (see Donbas and Luhansk).
Your logic that 'the PRC is bigger than Taiwan, therefore we should let the PRC exercise its vague 70 year claims' is no different than 'Germany is bigger than Poland, therefore we should let Hitler retake the parts of western Poland that were taken from Germany after World War I'.
No, that's not the logic.
There was a civil war in China. Civil Wars are bad but they're also a pretty definitive way of establishing the rightful government of a territory. The CCP won, the Kuomintang lost, the US interfered on the side of the Kuomintang during the civil war, and when the Kuomintang fled, the US used military force to carve out a piece of China, set it aside for their failed ally, and then used the threat of military force to sustain it over 70 years. Not 70 years ago, not 50 years, consistently across that entire time span.
The rules, as you listed above, are fine. The US obviously and continuously violated them across a 70 year time span. What's fair recompense to China? That's why I originally asked what rights you think China has to Taiwan. The rules that you hold say that Taiwan should not be returned to China because of the majority position in Taiwan. That's cool, I'm down, but they also say that we don't alter national borders through force and the US pretty clearly did that. And the costs to China are pretty obvious, namely a giant island.
I'm not asking for the US to abandon Taiwan, I feel like I'm asking for...just a basic understanding and acknowledgment of the Chinese position, like as a basis for negotiation.
I'm not concerned with who gets blamed for what, only whether there is a major war or not. Whoever deserves the blame, the fact remains that if China invades Taiwan, the US can choose to get involved militarily or not. There is the risk that China would attack Guam before going into Taiwan on the assumption the US plans to enter the war, but the deterrent value of bluffing might be worth that risk. I don't know. It would depend on what that risk is.
The question to ask (for an American) is 'what is the risk to the US of China invading Taiwan? Aside from the loss of life and human rights, Taiwanese companies account for 50% of the world production of semiconductors, so the end result of China invading Taiwan is somewhere between a world with half the semiconductor production or a world in which China controls 60% of world semiconductor production. Neither of those sound like worlds which are better for the US (or any country in the EU or anyone other than China and its client states).
China has a number of other ongoing border disputes. If the US is unwilling to stand up and use pressure to counter the risk to 50% of the world's semiconductor production, where will we be willing to draw the line and risk war to stop them? Is China with 60% of the world's semiconductor production more or less capable of military action? Does giving China dominance of the militarily critical semiconductor industry make other countries stronger or weaker? The answers to both seem obvious.
I don't know that the US pledging to defend Taiwan is the right thing to do, but we have more options than just 'let China invade Taiwan'. Perhaps the threat of sanctions would be sufficient, but we've been really bad at enforcing sanctions. We've shown that diplomatic pressure doesn't work with our tepid response to the Wuhan Coronavi... COVID-19. Really, we need to make it obvious that an invasion of Taiwan would be a bad risk for China, either militarily or economically, because as long as there's no real risk to China, there's no reason for them not to make the attempt.
You did notice the "or" in his compound statement, right?
>we can avoid WW3...
Per the parenthetical you were honest enough to include the first time, we can *delay* the possible onset of World War Three. But at the cost of making that outcome more likely when we eventually do have to roll those dice.
I wrote the review for Nightmare Pipeline Failures, but I am very happy that Safe Enough got in, because I would love to see what this blog's readership thinks about how risk assessments (particularly in a process safety context) work.
(Safe Enough is about how risk assessment in the nuclear industry got developed and whether they're robust enough - Nightmare Pipeline Failures was about specific entities getting those processes wrong, with catastrophic consequences. This is relevant because oil and gas industry risk processes borrowed heavily from nuclear and then chewed them up with financial and operational pressures!).
I'm also curious if anyone had any thoughts about the specifics covered in my review that from memory wasn't in Safe Enough - namely the nature and amount of intervention governments should have in industrial safety law and enforcement. Organisation psychology is also a topic that I hope crops up more, because I feel it's getting increasingly more relevant (as individual autonomy shrinks and organisational power grows).
I enjoyed your review very much. I gave it 9/10. I knew little about risk assessment procedures and learned a lot, and at the same time the review was very engaging and nice to read.
I did give 10/10 to Safe Enough, this was one of my favorites. What fascinated me about that is that it explained how even the mindset/concept of Probabilistic Risk Assessment developed. This is perhaps the edge of 10 versus 9, but the difference is not very large. For me, your review could have made it into the final with just a bit more of luck.
What you said about the structure which joined the worst of two worlds, this makes a lot of sense to me. I am also not a big fan of privatization of infrastructure companies, at least if it is about infrastructure where failing is not an option. In an ideal world, the government would be able to set up strict regulations, but then still have competition within the regulation framework. This can give the best of two worlds, instead of the worst. In my country, this is how health insurance works. But it's quite tricky, requires a lot of competence, manpower and attention from government side, and there are enough examples where attempts of that have failed.
I was also very much reminded of Boeing. In principle, this is also a heavily regulated company, but the business of building airplanes is so complex that government couldn't provide expertise and manpower to really regulate it. So in the end, it just accepts the suggestions for regulations that come from Boeing. This brings obvious conflicts of interest, but I don't really see a better solution.
Thanks for the kind words! I'm glad you got a lot out of it.
I'm really excited to see the comments section when the Safe Enough review gets posted - part of why I chose to do this book is because there's some obvious ways to connect the practice of risk assessment (specifically probabilistic risk assessment) with the original improving espistomology goal of LW. In the case of PG&E this is really really obvious (they drew a map representing their pipeline risks and started managing the map without managing the territory). But beyond this there is an incentive to uphold belief in the map / fantasy plan (it's easier to shimmy numbers around than it is to dig up pipelines for inspection).
Boeing was also quite an interesting case of corporate incentives vs public safety incentives.
Anyway, if I get even one person more interested in these topics I consider that a win. So thanks for reading my entry!
Who ever read and reviewed Stanley Jaki’s “Brain, Mind, and Computers” a big thank you from me. I’m sorry it didn’t make the Final Cut. I thought it was an underrated book and I think the community would appreciate it if for nothing else but the scientific history. Maybe next year someone will read and review Jaki’s “The Relevance of Physics.” People compare it to Chesterton’s “Everlasting Man” but for science.
I also think that this was a very good review. I read it and learned a lot
You did a great job!!
Anyone here has experience with wellbutrin/bupropion? Is it better to take it with or without food? I've searched reddit and pubmed for experiences and studies and they're contradictory
I have known many people who take it, and never heard from anyone that it is important to take with food in your stomach. Is your concern that it will upset your stomach if you take it without food, or that it will be less effective? I took a lowish dose myself for a few months as an aid to smoking cessation, and it seemed to work well to reduce craving, although it's possible the effect was placebo. I never gave a thought to whether I was taking it with or without food, and experienced no side effects.
I have a steel stomach, mostly concerned with absorption since I've taken other medications where the effect was drastically different depending on whether you took them alone or not
Googled it, found this link quote & link to source on Reddit.
Pharmacokinetic Properties: Absorption: Following oral administration of bupropion tablets to healthy volunteers, peak plasma concentrations of bupropion are achieved within 3 hours. Bupropion and its metabolites exhibit linear kinetics following chronic administration of 150 to 300 mg per day. Exposure to bupropion is increased when WELLBUTRIN SR tablets are taken with food. When taken following food, peak plasma concentration of bupropion (Cmax) was increased by 11 % to 35 %. The overall exposure to bupropion (AUC) was increased by 17 % to 19 %.
https://gskpro.com/content/dam/global/hcpportal/en_NA/PI/Wellbutrin-SR-GDS17-22.pdf
https://www.omicsonline.org/articles-images/JBB1.103Figure2.html
If I were you I'd check the source, and if it's a bonafide research article I'd go by what it says and take the stuff with food. Wishing you success.
Terms that I hate, because they reveal a mental model of the world that I find fundamentally ugly or false.
Ranting about how other people use language is a time-honored genre of writing. Orwell did it in Politics and the English Language, and it was pretty good, go read it. But Orwell wasn't active in online tech-adjacent forums, so he couldn't have possibly ranted about things that - I just realized - get on my nerve.
So I might as well rant about them myself.
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1- "Content" and "Content Creator"
Those words are ugly and bad because :
A- The culinary analogy they imply is gross :
There is nothing wrong apriori with people likening mind things like videos and essays to food, but there is plenty of things wrong in adopting industrial and\or medical terminology to refer to the things that you do with your (metaphorical) food.
Like, I have never, in my entire life, "Produced" food. I cooked. I have never seen someone refer to their cooking as "Producing Food". I have never "Consumed" food either. I ate. "Consume" is a word that I have seen being used with hatred or vengeance, not something that you do with food.
What I imagine when people say "I love consuming ASMR content" is a gross mental image where the ASMR videos are some undifferentiated industrial food-like goo and the "Consumer" is an inhabitant of this Dystopian world where they eat this goo and pat their stomachs contently.
If you're going to liken media and thought to food, at least don't be gross.
B- The equivalences they imply are false :
The "Content" and "Content Creator" analogies sneak in the assumption that all "Content" is equal. People are not Artists or Scientists or Educators or Journalists, they are all "Content Creators", on the same footing with people who do pranks and cringey dances in the streets and reaction videos. After all, they are all competing in the marketplace of clickbait, striving for views, striving for "LIKE, SUBSCRIBE, AnD aCtiVATe the BeLL". In the warped worldview of "Content", nothing has any content. Everything is raw bytes, raw pixels, raw characters, raw meaningless signal modulations to feed to the hungry masses in return for sucking their attention and their eyeballs.
And this gets me to the core of my grip with those words :
C- They are corporate-speak :
Those words reflect how Corporations, namely the Corporations that control the platforms that you post your "Content" on, see you and other people,
Corporations don't give a shit about what you do, whether you're drawing anime characters or explaining Climate Change for a general audience. Corporations are sub-human agents with idiot-savant properties, and they only care about a single thing : How much other people click\read\watch you ?
So "Content" and "Content Creators" are perfect linguistic accommodations for Corporations. Instead of saying "We want to empower our physicists, artists, programmers, <....>, and our cringey dancers to do more of their Climate Change explainer videos, drawing videos, programming videos, <.....>, and cringey dance videos", they can simply say "We want to empower our Content Creators to Produce More Content", problem solved. The word doesn't even imply videos, so it can be aped by other Corporations whose platforms are not video-sharing platforms.
But the one who pays the cost of this is you, the "Content Creator". You become an undifferentiated and expendable worker drone, a "Content" dispenser. Whatever it is that you are passionate about - explaining Climate Change, Drawing anime characters, Writing a game engine in C++ template metaprogramming, cringely dancing in the street - all of this takes a backseat in favor of a more Fundamental Truth : that what you do brings VIEWS and LIKES and SUBSCRIBES and (much more importantly) ADS to the giant corporation whose servers you happen to be posting your passions on. Do you like this ? Do you like your life's work reduced to how Corporations see it ? Talked about mainly in terms of how much or how little does it benefit the Corporation ?
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Respect your craft. Eschew "Content" and "Content Creator". Say what you do, clearly. If you want a generic word for something regardless of its exact category, use Art or Works or The Literature ("I was studying some of the Communist literature", that can mean you have watched videos, read fiction, read non-fiction, interviewed communists, etc...). Use "Experience" or "Studied" or "Enjoyed" instead of "Consumed".
===========
2- "Knowledge Worker"
This term is ugly because :
A- It doesn't make sense :
Everything is Knowledge Work. Agricutlure took 200K-250K years to invent (the vast majority of anatomically-modern humanity history). Factory Workers, Plumpers, Car Mechanics : they all operate very complex machinery that they (if they are competent) know much more intimately than any other people.
But no, you see, "Knowledge Worker" doesn't mean any of the above, it's essentialy a synonym for "Office Worker". Managers, Accountants, Academics, Programmers, etc... Knowledge is when office, and the more you office, the more you do Knowledge Work.
If you are a normal human being with a functioning brain, you might be wondering : "How is Knowledge possibly related to Office Work ? Surely, at least some office work is pretty damn fucking mundane and can be done using trained monkeys ?", and you are right.
B- It implies a smug and self-congratulatory conception of often-trivial kinds of knowledge :
The answer to the previous question is, in the warped worldview of "Knowledge Worker", No. See, we're not like the other professions. Those dirty professions might, gasp!, involve moving your bodies and getting your hands dirty. But we're delicate and refined, our Work involves Knowledge.
Nevermind that the vast vast majority of "Knowledge Work" is trivial email-forwarding and meeting-grinding, nevermind that some professions classified under "Knowledge Work", like University Professors and Surgeons, need their bodies to do their work as much as any mechanic or plumper.
C- It's corporate-speak :
My big problems with the modern world is that it recognizes Corporations as people, this effectively makes me a bigot. Everything Corporations do drives me crazy, I hate every single way of speech or thought they engage in.
Take "Knowledge Worker", it's corporate bullshit. It means "Somebody whose work can be done by sitting all day, not even in an office, sometimes from under the cover of their bed". This is something we already have words for, "Office Work", or "White-Collar Jobs". But, you see, corporate managers hate seeing themselves in a mirror, so they have to fancy themselves and their drones "Knowledge Workers", a special breed of people who **Check paper** apparently have to use thinking in their work, and..... they uh, have to use computers and stuff.
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All bad language shares something in common : it's not honest. It doesn't say what it wants to say, but says something else and means a different meaning. Bad language is not even honest about its deceit, unlike Art, which owns the fact of its deceit and is playful, ironic, lighthearted with the truth, bad language and bullshit terms are ashamed of their deceit, they pile implication after implication and shade of meaning after shade of meaning in order to avoid being discovered for the pathetic, inauthentic, and unworthy linguistic creature they are.
In the modern world, there is one source that keeps pumping those monstrosities in our language : Corporate communications. We ape their terms and their metaphors without thinking, and the result is decidely and unambiguously inferior.
I think "spokesperson" sux too. Maybe we could change it to "content voicer?" That's the only alternative that allows us to avoid making the dreaded decision regarding which of many genders the spokesbeing is.
I have deliberately avoided it in my rant because my anger and way of speech quickly get out of control when I think about it, but wokism and its language is a whole different breed of bullshit.
It's a unique blend of the worst corporate bullshit, academic bullshit, and government/non-profit bullshit. Combined with the typical religious arrogance and the desire + ability to use coercion to force unwilling people to use the false, ugly, and inferior language that they created to reflect the false, ugly, inferior and contemptuous selves.
Freddie deBoer talks about it (points 1 and 2) in Of Course You Know What Woke Means :
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/of-course-you-know-what-woke-means
"Content creator" reminds me of "substance abuse," a term I first heard in clinical psycholoby grad school. It sounded so odd then, though now I am used to it. But why not say drug abuse? None of the people diagnosed with "substance abuse" are abusing such substances as carrot juice, chalk or toothpaste. All are abusing psychoactive drugs.
I always assumed that the term "substance abuse" was meant to encompass both alcohol and other drugs, as the former is not colloquially referred to as a drug, but I don't know if that accurately reflects usage.
Yes, I think you're right that it's a work-around because many do not think of alcohol as a drug. However, a better solution I think would have been for professionals to just talk about drug abuse, and to tell any present who are not aware of it that they include alcohol abuse under that umbrella. The we'd avoid the awkward phrase substance abuse (which is not really accurate -- because we're not talking about all substances, just psychoactive ones), and at the same time help the public see drinking in a more realistic way, as the imbibing of a drug.
Spray paint? Cough syrup? Banana peels?
**applause**
Sometimes I think "director of human resources" is a great translation for "overseer of slaves".
I'll quibble mildly about "content", in that I think it originated in the tech sector, and was only later adopted wholesale for reasons you describe. The internet is a series of tubes, we the techies are the ones who maintain the tubes, and the stuff that goes through the tubes is "content". We don't know what it is, we don't care what it is, we just need to make sure it gets from point A to point B with no hiccups. Or alternatively, we need to provide a virtual storefront so that the customer can buy stuff, and the "stuff" is "content". We provide the connection between buyer and seller, and we don't care about what gets bought or sold, and neither should regulators or taxmen, long live the glorious libertarian... Oh, well, it was good while it lasted.
Interestingly, Richard Stallman would agree with you on ‘content’.
I rarely agree with a comment as firmly and completely as I agree with this one. By the second paragraph I was composing an enthusiastic response. By the end, there was little left to say.
Semantic quibbles are the lowest form of entertainment, but the propagation of this venal, inhuman language throughout society is disturbing and abhorrent.
Great blog post, have you considered monetization??
Ted Gioia agrees with you:
"If you’re involved in my world, the music world, and you’re dealing with a business or a web platform or an agent or whatever, if they use the word “content,” that’s a signal they don’t know a damn thing they’re talking about, because those businesses are based on creativity, inspiration, vision, artistry, and none of those things are covered by the word “content.”
From: https://read.substack.com/p/the-active-voice-ted-gioia-and-mike-solana
Gioia, once a serious music historian whose works still have pride of place on my bookshelves, has sadly crumbled into full "get off my lawn" mode as he's aged. Ranting is about the only mode of expression he has left these days....were Gioia a contemporary of Gutenberg, he'd be snarling about how the phrase "printing press" was a sign that the speaker knew nothing about vision/artistry/etc.
I applaud this rant!
"Content Creator" never evoked images of cooking to me, but as you say - something like a giant mincing machine extruding goo that piled up and got chopped into pieces. "Content" like some plasticine lump, and so far as the corporations are concerned, that's all it's about: shoving the lumps into the maws of the "consumers" and getting money in exchange. Nothing creative about it.
"Monetisation" is another one of those horrible neologisms.
?????
Profits
I think the worst source of neologisms is the pharmacology industry. Here's a bunch of drugs that start with Q. They didn't even have the decency to put a u after the q for some of them: Quillichew ER, Qbrexza, Qtern, Qvar, Qnasi, Quasense. FML.
Re 2: I would be interested to see the absolute numbers for those answers.
Suggestion: perhaps next time with similar poll like the one with density, it would be useful to ask for political orientation of the respondent (e.g. conservative/leftwing/libertarian). If you have disproportionate number of respondents from one political orientation, results might be skewed.
Kanye West has gone full Jacob Frank:
https://occidentaldissent.com/2023/05/15/yzy-party/
Picture of the guy as Hitler and calling him "Yedolf". Yes, I see this blog is rigorous academic high-minded discussion and not tabloid trash gossip about "Can you believe what THOSE people did???"!
I wrote the "Why Does He Do That?" review, was curious if anybody had any comments or feedback on it, either on my own writing or on the book itself.
I enjoyed this review!
I think I'd like more direct quotes from the book; looks like you had three direct quotes in thirty-four pages, the first of which was the opener which I misinterpreted as a "general themes" quote from some other source. So, more quotes and probably citations for where they are.
I read the review and really liked it; I've read the book too - "liked" is the wrong word, but it contains important facts that more people should know.
The bit about "a polar bear looking forlornly at a shrinking ice floe before calling a nearby harp seal a bitch" had me laugh out loud.
I found the review very interesting and well-written, and honestly, I was surprised it wasn't among the finalists. Overall, I found it pretty enlightening with its look into an abuser's mind.
I've read the book, and I'd be extremely interested in reading your review. Is there a way you could post a link to it here?
I have the original Google Doc up here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14Ffd7ZmiIw056DbibFT5fLHCoRXfl2JRVuJs3KXVe4Y/edit?usp=sharing
If I had a Substack, I'd post it there. Maybe I should look into starting one.
I'd also like to read it!
I really liked your review of "Why Does He Do That?" I was hoping it would make it to the finalist list. It was long and detailed, but not overly long. The writing quality was good. It made me think of something interesting I hadn't thought of before, and that's always a hallmark of a good review. Probably one reason it didn't get picked is that it's a book about relationships and feelings, and the typical book that seems to garner good reviews is more likely to be about some sort of technology or politics or Grand Unifying Theory of Everything (like The Dawn of Everything, last year's winner, which was awesome). Anyway, thank you for writing the review!
My review also did not make it into the finalists. I was thinking of proposing to those in this situation that we have a little subgroup where we read each other's reviews and give feedback. If I did, would you be interested?
I'm interested too, count me in!
- Please have a look at the post **NEW MEMBERS? on Open thread 269, new underground bunker for Book Review Group planning.
I just posted some information for the group for people who’d like to give and get feedback on each other’s book reviews. So as not to clutter up this thread, I put it on an old open thread, number 254. It’s the newest post on the thread, so should be on top if you sort by New. I headed my post **BOOK REVIEW GROUP**, so if you have trouble locating it it should be easy to find by using Cmd F to search for **book. If you haven’t posted a response there within a coupla days we’ll assume you’re not interested in participating.
I'm in as well
I just posted some information for the group for people who’d like to give and get feedback on each other’s book reviews. So as not to clutter up this thread, I put it on an old open thread, number 254. It’s the newest post on the thread, so should be on top if you sort by New. I headed my post **BOOK REVIEW GROUP**, so if you have trouble locating it it should be easy to find by using Cmd F to search for **book. If you haven’t posted a response there within a coupla days we’ll assume you’re not interested in participating.
I would, that sounds neat.
I just posted some information for the group for people who’d like to give and get feedback on each other’s book reviews. So as not to clutter up this thread, I put it on an old open thread, number 254. It’s the newest post on the thread, so should be on top if you sort by New. I headed my post **BOOK REVIEW GROUP**, so if you have trouble locating it it should be easy to find by using Cmd F to search for **book. If you haven’t posted a response there within a coupla days we’ll assume you’re not interested in participating.
“Biggest prosaic-LLM-alignment breakthrough of 2023 imo: turns out that, in GPT-2-XL, activation vectors in the residual steam have the same kind of affine structure as good old word2vec, but higher layers become emotional, then conceptual, then cognitive” — davidad https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/5spBue2z2tw4JuDCx/steering-gpt-2-xl-by-adding-an-activation-vector
"Ah, the pursuit of understanding the inner workings of language models continues, as if it could unravel the mysteries of existence itself. How desperate we are to impose structure and meaning onto these complex networks of algorithms and computations. We dissect them, analyze their activation vectors, hoping to find some hidden truth within their layers. But what do we truly gain from such endeavors? Are we any closer to comprehending the depths of consciousness or the nature of our own existence? No, we are merely lost in a maze of abstract concepts, mistaking intellectual pursuits for genuine enlightenment.
What does it matter if we can align language models with other semantic systems when the world around us is falling apart? What's the point of understanding language on a deeper level if we can't even understand each other as human beings? It's all just an exercise in futility, a distraction from the chaos and suffering that surrounds us. And what good is it if we can achieve cognitive alignment with machines when we can't even achieve it with each other? We're all just lost in our own emotional, conceptual, and cognitive mess, trying to make sense of a world that makes no sense at all."
- Sad-GPT
Did anyone read my The Design of Everyday Things review? Any thoughts?
I read it and enjoyed it! However, maybe because of the strength of your summary I don't particularly feel like reading the book - it feels like you've covered it all.
Thanks! Yeah, that's reasonable. There's more in-the-weeds stuff in there that would be useful for certain professional designers, but I covered most of what would be useful to a general audience.
I figured that was a reasonable way to split it because ultimately it's a book written for professional designers, but it also has some general insights that no-one outside the profession would see otherwise.
I really liked it, though maybe the strength of the book being reviewed had a lot to do with it.
The idea, that roughly "people shouldn't feel bad about not knowing how to use things, things should feel bad about not being designed well enough so that people instantly know how to use them" got stuck in my head as a result.
Thanks! I'm glad - that's the perspective-shift that the book gave me, and my goal was to pass it on.
My review also did not make it into the finalists. I was thinking of proposing to those in this situation that we have a little subgroup where we read each other's reviews and give feedback. If I did, would you be interested?
Sounds good to me!
I just posted some information for the group for people who’d like to give and get feedback on each other’s book reviews. So as not to clutter up this thread, I put it on an old open thread, number 254. It’s the newest post on the thread, so should be on top if you sort by New. I headed my post **BOOK REVIEW GROUP**, so if you have trouble locating it it should be easy to find by using Cmd F to search for **book. If you haven’t posted a response there within a coupla days we’ll assume you’re not interested in participating.
Liked it enough to put the book on my may-read list.
I think the time alloted to read and vote for the reviews was a bit short given the number of reviews available.
agreed
It's been 5 years since the Melatonin Scottsplainer. Have there been any new studies to clarify the places where the evidence was shaky or conflicting back then?
I would also like to know!
I reviewed "The Discarded Image", and would like to know if anyone read it. I regret not putting "by C. S. Lewis" in the title of the review, it probably would have stood out more.
I'm glad I participated this year.
Also, shout out to whoever reviewed Lewis's Space Trilogy. I disagreed with your judgment of the books' quality, but the review was fun to read and I think more people should know about it anyway.
I just read your review, I liked it, I'm putting the book on my "to read" list. Thanks!
Yeah, I enjoyed reading the "Space Trilogy" review, even though I disagreed with chunks of it. I think the review would have done a good job of being a springboard for discussion, and I'm sad I don't get to see what people here have to say about "fallenness", especially from a rationalist standpoint. (What is it? Is it a coherent idea? Etc.)
My judgment of the books' quality:
Out of the Silent Planet = pretty good
Perelandra = pretty bad
That Hideous Strength = what the **** did I just read?!? (Although I did enjoy the parts where the homeless man trolls the bad guys by pretending to be Merlin reincarnated, and they fall for it and speak to him obsequiously in Latin.)
I think Perelandra is a polarizing book: you either love it or hate it. I think Perelandra is fantastic: it is probably my favorite book to read, ever. Yet I agree completely with your take on the other two.
That was my initial reaction to THS, when I first read it. But the longer it's been, and the more dark corners of life I see, the more I feel like I understand it.
It had some good things, including evocative descriptions of evil, but what broke it for me was the plot, or rather, Lewis's complete and utter inability to write a compelling plot in this particular case (no clue why, he had written well-plotted stories before).
SPOILER ALERT FOR THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH
That Hideous Strength cuts back-and-forth between the villains' lair and the heroes' refuge. The villains and the heroes are on a collision course! If the heroes fail to stop the villains, the whole world will be plunged into unspeakable darkness! We see that the villains are cunning and powerful, and the heroes are outmatched; what shall they do? To quote from Cinema Sins, this suspense builds up for all of the some time. The anticipation! What will the showdown between the heroes and villains look like? How can the heroes possibly triumph against such impossible odds?
And then the most powerful hero, the resurrected/reincarnated Merlin, goes to the villains' lair and speaks some magic words, whereupon all the villains a) go insane and b) are trampled to death by animals. Merlin returns to the heroes' refuge and reports that the villains are all dead. A joyful celebration, complete with animals having sex, ensues. The end.
This is what I absolutely *hated* about the novel. Talk about an anticlimax! Imagine reading The Lord of the Rings: while Frodo and friends are sitting in Rivendell, worrying and fretting about how they can possibly destroy the One Ring, Gandalf infiltrates Mordor all by himself and casts a spell that causes Sauron to slip on a banana peel, hit his head on a stone, and die. No Sauron, no problem! Do you think the Lord of the Rings would become the classic that it is if this was its plot? No? No.
As I remember it, it was more like: The bad guys unearth a dangerous power and want to bend it to their will. The power escapes their control. The good guys get enough of their plot coupons lined up that they can bring the power over to their side. The power goes back to the bad guys, and the bad guys think the power is working for them, but secretly the power is working for the good guys. Hoist on their own petard!
I think the comparison to the Lord of the Rings would be more like: the good guys go through a lot of trouble to recruit allies and win battles, but at the end it doesn't matter. The armies don't matter, the allies don't matter, the destined hero with his magic sword doesn't matter. They never fight Sauron, never talk with him or meet him, and even we never see more of Sauron than his magic eye. The good guys just dump a ring into a volcano and win, flat out, like exploiting a glitch in a video game to do infinite damage.
It's definitely an anticlimax if you see the plot of the book as "NICE vs Logres." Which is a perfectly rational way to see the plot. I think, however, that for Lewis the real dramatic tension was not who would win, but rather "Can Mark and Jane be saved?" The question is whether Mark will Fall and become as evil as the rest of NICE, and whether Jane will be saved and rise to the goodness of Logres.
It's a very Christian kind of plot: the ultimate outcome of the battle between Good and Evil is, for the Christian, already known. God wins. What isn't known is whether you, or anyone else, will be saved or damned.
It's not "magic words", it's calling down the gods (who in this universe are real, and are the planetary intelligences and archangels) to confound the devices of the NICE.
That's a bit like complaining that dropping the atom bomb was anti-climactic; all I saw was this bright flash of light! Where were the massed armies fighting hand-to-hand with grenades and bayonets and cannons?
I'm suddenly reminded of The Pledge, wherein a detective is tracking down a serial killer that no one else believes exists, and then before he can catch him the killer gets killed in a random car wreck.
Yes, I get that the gods/angelic powers are real, but using them to instantaneously poof the bad guys away violates the conventions of good storytelling.
Good storytelling of the epic good-vs-evil variety resolves the tension between 1) the Good is ultimately more powerful than the Evil; 2) right *now*, where the heroes are, the Evil appears invincible, and the heroes will have to use every single bit of their strength and resolve to try to defeat it, and they may still fail, or succeed only by sacrificing something precious, including their lives. That Hideous Strength utterly failed at managing this tension.
BTW, as I know you're aware, The Lord of the Rings also has angelic beings, the Valar, not to mention Eru, the Creator God. And they don't swoop in to save the day in LOTR, even though collectively the Valar are surely much more powerful than Sauron! Yes, Gandalf is an angelic being (a Maia) in disguise, but he's not overpowered; he himself says that Sauron is more powerful than he is. In The Silmarillion, where the Valar finally do arrive in force to take out Morgoth, they do so only after a long and desperate war by the Elves and Men against the forces of darkness, plus Earendil and Elwing's journey across the Sundering Seas to plead with the Valar for help.
Epic storytelling is supposed to be *inspiring*. Where is the inspiration in "Well the good is so much more powerful than the evil, it doesn't need my help, I might as well sit on my backside and wait for gods/angels to defeat evil"?
I think FLWAB above has it: the book is not supposed to be an epic battle between good and evil, it's supposed to be a story about Jane's and Mark's respective spiritual journeys against the backdrop of escalating evil in the world. The two main characters' interior deliberations take up way more of the book than any exterior action, and that's where the drama lies. This seems pretty consistent with the Christian framework where the final victory of Good is a foregone conclusion, but things will get extremely difficult before the end and every individual will need to find their way, Pilgrim's Progress style, through a thicket of moral traps and temptations.
It also seems like a better match for the real-world experience of living through the various political/social horrors of the early 20th century and of our present day. Tolkien-style "If we work together we can save! the! world!" epic plots always struck me as kind of narcissistic and childish, frankly.
You're making me want to re-read the book because I'm going by memory here. I think the point of the angelic intervention is that it is special exception; the NICE are bringing in, or trying to bring in, devils so this allows for a once-off counterstroke in the battle.
And it's not a case of "sit on our backsides and wait for the angels to do all the work", individual resistance does count. Mark Studdock is a bit of a wet, but he does stand up (eventually) to the temptation and pressure to go all the way over to the side of NICE. He's not important to them, save as Jane's husband and a way to get at her, the one they really want. But corrupting and breaking him is one more human soul damned, and that's enough for their masters. Mark doesn't have much character but he does stand up in the end.
As to the role of Merlin and magic, he is very much not Gandalf. He's a human man, albeit one from an older world and time when the mingling of spirits and mortals was still possible:
"Merlin is the reverse of Belbury. He’s at the opposite extreme. He is the last vestige of an old order in which matter and spirit were, from our modern point of view, confused. For him every operation on Nature is a kind of personal contact, like coaxing a child or stroking one’s horse. After him came the modern man to whom Nature is something dead — a machine to be worked, and taken to bits if it won’t work the way he pleases. Finally, come the Belbury people, who take over that view from the modern man unaltered and simply want to increase their power by tacking onto it the aid of spirits — extra-natural, anti-natural spirits. Of course they hoped to have it both ways. They thought the old magia of Merlin, which worked in with the spiritual qualities of Nature, loving and reverencing them and knowing them from within, could be combined with the new goeteia — the brutal surgery from without. No. In a sense Merlin represents what we’ve got to get back to in some different way."
And because Merlin comes from that older time, when it was lawful still to perform such acts, he is the weapon because his mind has been opened by inviting in, and making himself available:
"I mean even in Merlin’s time (he came at the extreme tail end of it) though you could still use that sort of life in the universe innocently, you couldn’t do it safely. The things weren’t bad in themselves, but they were already bad for us. They sort of withered the man who dealt with them. Not on purpose. They couldn’t help doing it. Merlinus is withered. He’s quite pious and humble and all that, but something has been taken out of him. That quietness of his is just a little deadly, like the quiet of a gutted building. It’s the result of having laid his mind open to that broadens the environment just a bit too much. Like polygamy. It wasn’t wrong for Abraham, but one can’t help feeling that even he lost something by it."
Lewis' version of the world is very different from Tolkien's version, and is much more explicitly Christian. Plus, he's writing a modern (at his time) situation in the world of the day, not back in historical or mythological times, so he's using different tropes.
There isn't an Emperor in Rome to appeal to, nor would it do any good. The king in London isn't the power to resist the forces in Belbury. The people have done all they can do to resist, but to defeat the powers behind the human evil, earthly force isn't nearly sufficient:
“No,” said the Director in a still louder voice, “that cannot be done any longer. The soul has gone out of the wood and water. Oh, I daresay you could awake them; a little. But it would not be enough. A storm, or even a river-flood would be of little avail against our present enemy. Your weapon would break in your hands. For the Hideous Strength confronts us and it is as in the days when Nimrod built a tower to reach heaven.”
…“Not that way either,” said Ransom, hesitating like a man who is reluctant to come to the point. “No power that is merely earthly,” he continued at last, “will serve against the Hideous Strength.”
“Then let us all to prayers,” said Merlinus. “But there also... I was not reckoned of much account... they called me a devil’s son, some of them. It was a lie. But I do not know why I have been brought back.”
“Certainly, let us stick to our prayers,” said Ransom. “Now and always. But that was not what I meant. There are celestial powers: created powers, not in this Earth, but in the Heavens.”
Merlinus looked at him in silence.
“You know well what I am speaking of,” said Ransom. “Did not I tell you when we first met that the Oyeresu were my Masters?”
“Of course,” said Merlin. “And that was how I knew you were of the College. Is it not our password all over the Earth?”
“A password?” exclaimed Ransom with a look of surprise. “I did not know that?”
“But… but,” said Merlinus, “if you knew not the password, how did you come to say it?”
“I said it because it was true.”
The magician licked his lips which had become very pale.
…“Suffer me to speak,” he said at last, “or slay me if you will, for I am in the hollow of your hand. I had heard of it in my own days — that some had spoken with the gods. Blaise my Master knew a few words of that speech. Yet these were, after all, powers of Earth. For — I need not teach you, you know more than I — it is not the very Oyeresu, the true powers of Heaven, whom the greatest of our craft meet, but only their earthly wraiths, their shadows. Only the earth-Venus, the earth-Mercurius; not Perelandra herself, not Viritrilbia himself. It is only....”
“I am not speaking of the wraiths,” said Ransom. “I have stood before Mars himself in the sphere of Mars and before Venus herself in the sphere of Venus. It is their strength, and the strength of some greater than they, which will destroy our enemies.”
“But, Lord,” said Merlin, “how can this be? Is it not against the Seventh Law?”
…“It may be the beginning of the end,” said Ransom. “But I know nothing of that. Maleldil may have made it a law not to send down the Powers. But if men by enginry and natural philosophy learn to fly into the Heavens, and come, in the flesh, among the heavenly powers and trouble them, He has not forbidden the Powers to react. For all this is within the natural order. A wicked man did learn so to do. He came flying, by a subtle engine, to where Mars dwells in Heaven and to where Venus dwells, and took me with him as a captive. And there I spoke with the true Oyéresu face to face. You understand me?”
Merlin inclined his head.
“And so the wicked man had brought about, even as Judas brought about, the thing he least intended. For now there was one man in the world — even myself — who was known to the Oyeresu and spoke their tongue, neither by God’s miracle nor by magic from Numinor, but naturally, as when two men meet in a road. Our enemies had taken away from themselves the protection of the Seventh Law. They had broken by natural philosophy the barrier which God of His own power would not break. Even so they sought you as a friend and raised up for themselves a scourge. And that is why Powers of Heaven have come down to this house, and in this chamber where we are now discoursing Malacandra and Perelandra have spoken to me.”
…“Sir,” said Merlin, “what will come of this? If they put forth their power, they will unmake all Middle Earth.”
“Their naked power, yes,” said Ransom. “That is why they will work only through a man.”
The magician drew one large hand across his forehead.
“Through a man whose mind is opened to be so invaded,” said Ransom, “one who by his own will once opened it. I take Our Fair Lord to witness that if it were my task, I would not refuse it. But he will not suffer a mind that still has its virginity to be so violated. And through a black magician’s mind their purity neither can nor will operate. One who has dabbled… in the days when dabbling had not begun to be evil, or was only just beginning… and also a Christian man and a penitent. A tool (I must speak plainly) good enough to be so used and not too good. In all these Western parts of the world there was only one man who had lived in those days and could still be recalled. You—”
…“Is it then the end?” asked Merlin.
“And this,” said Ransom, ignoring the question, “is why we have no way left at all save the one I told you. The Hideous Strength holds all this Earth in its fist to squeeze as it wishes. But for their one mistake, there would be no hope left. If of their own evil will they had not broken the frontier and let in the celestial Powers, this would be their moment of victory. Their own strength has betrayed them. They have gone to the gods who would not have come to them, and pulled down Deep Heaven on their heads. Therefore, they will die.”
> Talk about an anticlimax!
Sounds like my reaction to a novel called The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova. This is about a hunt by a history professor and his daughter for Vlad the Impaler's tomb, during which they are dogged by a mysterious stalker. It would make a great film, if it hasn't been already.
(Spoiler alert - Stop reading now if you haven't read it but might want to!)
I really enjoyed it, as the clues emerged one by one and the mystery became ever closer to being resolved. But the end felt like a massive anticlimax: One brief tussle and it was all over, with no apparent chance for what could otherwise have been an equally good sequel. It was as if, after all her effort, the author just decided enough was enough and to end the novel there and then and ship it!
Then you might also be disappointed by Christianity itself, where the story supposedly ends by Jesus single-handedly defeating all the villains, and whatever humans do is mostly irrelevant, except maybe locally.
What humans do is errelevant for whether or not Good wins: what we do is extremely relevant to whether we will be on the side of Good, or the side of Evil. In Christianity all the drama is at the personal level.
I get what you're saying, but this line of thinking seems to encourage a disturbing amount of passivity and fatalism. Why struggle against injustice or feed the hungry or cure the sick? It will all get resolved someday, when Jesus returns!
I am not a Christian, but as I understand it:
The goal is to *save souls*, most importantly your own, but also of other people if possible. Compared to saving the poor, feeding the poor is almost irrelevant. If you feed them, it is more like "hey, by helping you, I am demonstrating to you the love of God, now pray to God and be saved", i.e. helping people is instrumental to spreading the word. Jesus may conjure food to feed the people once, but if tomorrow they are hungry again, it's their problem; if the people in the next village are hungry, it's their problem, too. Jesus is not optimizing for solving global hunger; he is just making an impressive spell in order to signal his divinity.
(Different branches of Christianity have different opinion on how much it is your job to save the others. Catholicism is more like "let's organize the whole society into a giant totalitarian bureaucracy hoping that it increases everyone's chances at least by 1%", while Protestants are more like "I will tell you about Jesus once, but if you don't convert immediately, it's your problem, I will grab some popcorn and watch you burn in hell".)
Even loving other people, which has a relatively high priority, is considered instrumental. You are supposed to love God above everything else. In ideal case, you only love others because God told you so. But of course you are supposed to love them sincerely... because you were told to.
Injustice is only important for its side effects, e.g. if someone steals it's a sin, and if the victim gets angry about it it's also a sin, and we should tell people not to sin. But as long as the masters are nice to their slaves, and the slaves are respectful to their masters, and both obey God and avoid sin, it's okay; the slaves will be liberated in the afterlife. Feeding the hungry and curing the sick is instrumental; you demonstrate that you are a good Christian, and hopefully the former hungry and sick will be impressed and will convert, too. Generally, if you believe in happy afterlife, death is not considered much of a problem.
My review also did not make it into the finalists. I was thinking of proposing to those in this situation that we have a little subgroup where we read each other's reviews and give feedback. If I did, would you be interested?
Possibly. I’m a definite “maybe”.
I just posted some information for the group for people who’d like to give and get feedback on each other’s book reviews. So as not to clutter up this thread, I put it on an old open thread, number 254. It’s the newest post on the thread, so should be on top if you sort by New. I headed my post **BOOK REVIEW GROUP**, so if you have trouble locating it it should be easy to find by using Cmd F to search for **book. If you haven’t posted a response there within a coupla days we’ll assume you’re not interested in participating.
I read it and loved it. Made me want to read the book.
I for one did, because how could I not do so? Thanks for a great review!
Hi! I wrote the Heidegger review, on "The Question Concerning Technology". It's really deep philosophy, and difficult to write about. I'd appreciate knowing, if anybody got lost or confused while reading it, where specifically it was that you fell off. That way, I can work on figuring out how to explain that part better. Thanks!
I think that your explanation was very good. I am not sure that I understand all details, but enough to get the main idea. Highlighting the new words in bold was a very good idea.
It was still not one of my favorite reviews. The problem is not in your writing or explanation, but rather that I don't find Heidegger's worldview very enlightening. For one, I think the dichotomy between enframing and poiesis is not very clear-cut. I am clearly more enframed in some of my roles, and less in others. Am I enframed in the work that I am doing? Well, partly. I do work towards an end, and other people do utilize me. But I also enjoy my work, and have some amount of autonomy in there, so I am not totally enframed. (At least if I get the terms more or less right.) I think this is not only true for humans, but also for a lot of non-human things.
Also, I got the impression that Heidegger considers enframing a bad thing, at least for humans. (Or perhaps he didn't, and this is just a reaction that lots of people have when thinking about using humans as "tools" to an end.) And I also get the impression that he would call me "enframed" in my work, but that he would not call a mother "enframed" who cares for her baby. But I think that the difference between the two cases is really low. Considering them as different categories is a classic romantic distinction between "natural" and "unnatural" occupation that doesn't hold up in my eyes. Perhaps I just didn't get the nuances of Heidegger's reasoning and I am attacking a strawman, but I didn't find the bits that I understood very helpful.
So in total, I didn't give a high grade to your review, but that wasn't because your review was badly written or your explanations were unclear. I just found Heidegger's worldview not helpful.
Thanks, that's super good feedback! I appreciate it.
My review also did not make it into the finalists. I was thinking of proposing to those in this situation that we have a little subgroup where we read each other's reviews and give feedback. If I did, would you be interested?
"Before His Killing, Tech Executive Bob Lee Led an Underground Life of Sex and Drugs" By Kirsten Grind, Katherine Bindley, and Zusha Elinson on May 14, 2023 in https://www.wsj.com/articles/bob-lee-stabbing-sex-drugs-lifestyle-san-francisco-5a7da970
SAN FRANCISCO—In certain wealthy tech circles it is known as “The Lifestyle,” an underground party scene featuring recreational drug use and casual sex. A successful tech executive named Bob Lee liked to hang out with that crowd, according to people who also participated. So, too, did Khazar Momeni, the wife of a prominent plastic surgeon, these people said.
On the afternoon of April 3, a Monday, the partying took a dark turn. According to San Francisco prosecutors, Ms. Momeni’s older brother confronted Mr. Lee about her. Was she taking drugs or doing anything inappropriate, he wanted to know. Hours later the brother, Nima Momeni, stabbed Mr. Lee with a kitchen knife and left him to bleed out in the street, prosecutors alleged. Mr. Momeni, who was arrested on suspicion of murder, is being held without bail. He plans to plead not guilty, his attorney said.
Mr. Lee’s death has transfixed San Francisco. At first viewed by critics including Elon Musk as a symbol of the city’s increasing street violence, the episode instead laid bare risk-taking behavior in the upper reaches of Bay Area society, fueled by cocaine and designer drugs.
* * *
Reason #69699696969669699666969 why you shouldn't be a promiscuous degenerate.
Traditional Morality for the win.
There's a lot of "allegedly" going on there. All we know for sure is that it looks like he was killed by a guy he knew who accused him of hanky-panky with his married sister.
The sex'n'drugs'n'rock-and-roll is the tabloid speculation. Maybe, maybe not. "People in SF tech circles have unconventional lives, shock horror!" Wasn't it a couple of years ago that there was the same kind of story about Rationalist Sex Parties in Silicon Valley?
It's 2023 San Francisco. Corrupt prosecutors are openly refusing to enforce public order, getting disorder, something must be done, Democratic Party pork is something.
When you are already an openly corrupt prosecutor it's normal to accuse bystanders of murder to cover for your failure to keep the streets safe. Ben Hecht or Kenneth Rexroth on 1920's Chicago.
Sex and drugs parties actually sound refreshingly normal now. At least he was getting out and meeting people.
"an underground party scene featuring recreational drug use and casual sex"
Hahaha. In other words, normal people. Normal people, when they are young, use recreational drugs and have casual sex. Was that article written by a time traveler from 1953?
1. Bob Lee was 43 when he was killed.
2. Normal men find casual sex easy to brag about but difficult to acquire.
But these parties are "underground!" Why they might even have been "clandestine!"
Well, I suppose I'm only surprised it took a tabloid this long to start running a scandal story about the killing. Once the news came out that it was the brother of a woman alleged to be doing the naughty with Mr. Lee (whether or not they really were), then it was only a matter of time before salacious speculation and third-hand gossip got put out.
Sure, but that's just saying that attractiveness could be more correlated with intelligence than a weak test of intelligence, which doesn't seem like an exciting claim. It's just a way of rephrasing "attractiveness is correlated with intelligence".
Your post showed in up a random place, rather than under the post of the person you're talking with. If you replied to their post by hitting "reply" within email, that's the reason it didn't land where it should. It's a substack bug. Anyhow, look for the comment you're responding to and move it to where it belongs.
> It's a substack bug.
Doesn't seem like fixing bugs is a high priority for Substack. This is already here for months, and has caused problems for many people.
Has anyone reported this bug officially?
Curses, but also thank you.
Are there any good studies on the correlation between illegal immigration and general crime which control for race? I've seen a lot of American progressives and libertarians cite the fact that undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes per capita than native-born Americans as an argument for open borders, but the reverse is true in most of the rest of the Western world. I have a suspicion that this is due to native-born black communities in America being massive outliers for the developed world in terms of crime rate, and that data which looked only at non-black Americans would look similar to European data, but so far I haven't seen any research that confirms this one way or the other.
I've only seen the claim made that immigrants (without qualification of their status) commit less crime per capita, and it has always struck me as an attempt to hide the ball. If most immigrants are legal*, the existing filters on legal immigration make current immigrants unrepresentative of the population of immigrants who would enter under an open borders policy.
Even with the status qualification**, if enough undocumented immigrants are visa-overstayers rather than illegal-border-crossers, a similar flaw in extrapolation to open borders seems likely.
*I don't actually know if this is true, or even knowable.
**Where have you seen the claim made about just undocumented immigrants?
Another possible explanation is that most crime happens within communities. So if you are an undocumented immigrant, and another undocumented immigrant hurts you, you are unlikely to report it to the police, because that would draw unwanted attention to you.
Doesn't seem excluded by the evidence. Ambiguous comparison with what the posited victims would've suffered at home. Probably an upper bound on per capita crime of similar immigrants under open borders as LE would (barring capacity constraints) be contacted in the counterfactual.
>Where have you seen the claim made about just undocumented immigrants?
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014704117
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/undocumented-immigrants-are-half-as-likely-to-be-arrested-for-violent-crimes-as-u-s-born-citizens/
https://www.cato.org/blog/new-research-illegal-immigration-crime-0
https://news.wisc.edu/undocumented-immigrants-far-less-likely-to-commit-crimes-in-u-s-than-citizens/
https://ncnewsline.com/2021/08/03/no-undocumented-immigrants-dont-commit-more-crime-research-shows-they-commit-a-lot-less/
To give just a few examples.
Wow, I was expecting it'd just been from, e.g., Reddit commenters adding the qualifier to a real source's more limited conclusion. Looks like I need to update.
European immigration is unusually high crime for other reasons too, it's generally harder for refugees to work in Europe (and it's generally worse than the US at integration).
I don't know the exact laws, but I have heard about situations where immigrants in Europe have to wait for months until some paperwork is done that would allow them to get legally employed. Until then, even people perfectly capable of keeping a job are forbidden to do so.
That said, both may be true: different rules for integration *and* different populations to integrate. For example, I am not aware of any crime wave related to the recent refugees from Ukraine, and there are lots of them. (And I assume the pro-Russia people would talk about it endlessly if it happened.)
European here, talked with a few recently arrived immigrants. It's true, it easily takes months to get a work permit. Here in Spain at least, the will usually start working informally to make a bit of money - it's technically illegal but tolerated in practice. Once they get their papers, it can still be hard to practice your profession (if you're educated), because certificates from other countries are not automatically recognized.
As for the immigrants themselves, it does vary a lot depending on country of origin. I think Eastern Europeans (like Romanians) are often the quickest to adapt and integrate. Moroccans have a wider cultural gap, but they're also a big community so they can help each other. The cliche is that many Latin Americans end up working retail, while Middle Easterners open their own restaurants and small electronics shops.
Yes, but this is partially their fault and partially the system's fault. The system keeps people unemployed for a few months until the paperwork is done. (You cannot apply for work without a permit, and even if you apply for it immediately it takes a few months to get it.) Problem is, long-term unemployment is kinda addictive, even for people from our culture.
People are mostly driven by habits. Some people say that the most important thing you learn at school is to wake up every day at early morning and go where you are told to go, whether you like it or not. This is a crucial skill to keep a job. For your career, it is best to keep this habit every day for the rest of your life. Making a six months pause and then starting again can be quite difficult, because you develop alternative habits, and now not-working becomes the new normal.
What I am saying is that in a parallel universe with zero bureaucracy, where any immigrant could get a job immediately if they wanted to and someone wanted to hire them, it wouldn't be half of the Syrian refugees, but... dunno, maybe a quarter, or less. Still a problem, but a smaller one.
The problem with the poll is partly that you phrased it to _assume_ that building new housing would also result in building new commercial spaces, in proportion. If you hadn't phrased it that way, you would've gotten even stronger consensus on "lower". In the actual post, you kind-of acknowledged the flaw in that logic:
"If a city only built new houses, but refused to allow any new companies, restaurants, schools, museums, or other good things, then the new residents would have a hard time improving the city’s desirability, and house prices would go down. I don’t know how realistic this is or how closely existing commercial regulatory easing tracks residential regulatory easing."
As a Planning Commissioner, I can tell you that we absolutely _could_ do what you're talking about here. And while I wouldn't suggest going as extreme as not permitting any new commercial construction, we could and absolutely should change the incentives around this. Because of the balance of what kind of income streams and expense streams are created by commercial versus residential development, from the perspective of city government, housing looks like a cost, and offices look like revenue. (This has to do with the Prop 13 property tax allocation system, how schools are funded, etc.) Of course if every city grabs for office-related income, and expects _somebody else_ to house those workers (or, more realistically, to house the lower-income service workers displaced by the office workers bidding up the price of existing stock), then you get the equilibrium we're in, where the Bay Area has more super-commuters travelling 3+ hours each way to work than anywhere else in the world.
My own city of San Bruno is trying to convince the state that we have a plausible plan to produce around 3600 new housing units, under the Regional Housing Need Allocation system. For anyone not familiar with this system, see: https://yimbyaction.org/rhna/
Let's just ballpark that this will house something like 6k adults and 4k children. A few hundred of those adults will be out of the labor force for various reasons (education, childcare, illness), and another slice of adults will be retirees, so call it 5k people with jobs.
Meanwhile, we _already_ have something on the order of 10k jobs in our construction pipeline. That is, our _plan_ is to make the jobs/housing balance worse. See for instance the Tanforan redevelopment. https://tanforanforsanbruno.com/
Hypothetically you could cut down the biotech office component of the project a lot, and build a lot more apartments -- both market-rate and affordable, if you want to do the Inclusionary Zoning thing ( https://bettercities.substack.com/p/everything-you-need-to-know-about ). It's not like the landowner would not profit on doing that. The offices are what yields the _most_ profit, but the apartments would still make money, especially if the city was saying, "Hey, if you agree to help us out with making our community more walkable and affordable, we will allocate staff time to speeding your permits through, and otherwise try to help you out."
You can find the odd example of cities doing this -- after much lobbying from local YIMBY residents, Menlo Park's Council and Staff worked with Facebook to cut a couple thousand jobs' worth of office space at the Willow Village project. In the process they got a few hundred units of low-income housing for seniors.
https://hoodline.com/2022/04/facebook-reveals-big-changes-to-its-proposed-willow-village-development-in-menlo-park/
I've talked with a few officials (including a current County Supervisor and a State Senator) about the idea of making a formal linkage between job-creating development and residential development. So if your jurisdiction is in an area with a bad balance -- where a large portion of the people who work there have to commute in from 30+ minutes away -- then you _can't_ approve new construction that adds space for jobs, without being able to point to the linked housing, at a ratio greater than 1. So for a city with a serious deficit like SF, in order to build a new office or a new store, you'd need to point to where you'd issued building permits to house 2x as many people as we expect to be drawn in by the new jobs. For a city in less of a crunch it might only be 1.2x. You also can "trade" this linkage to nearby jurisdictions, especially for smaller towns where everything's closer together. (Subject to some limits and/or discount factors for distance -- access to transit at both ends, allowing speedy commutes, means the housing in that other jurisdiction counts more / in-full.) So if Berkeley adds jobs, and Emeryville is adding housing, Berkeley can take a community benefit payment from the developer, pass it off to Emeryville, and count some agreed-upon chunk of Emeryville's permitted housing towards balancing the commercial development.
There is not quite the will to do this yet. Commercial developers would of course hate it. But it would align the incentives of developers with the YIMBY impulse to just _make housing abundant_.
If your city already has a bad jobs/housing balance, then doing proportional increases of both jobs and housing doesn't fix that ratio. If you built more housing, while adding _only_ commercial space required to service the needs of residents -- so, stuff like new schools and doctors' offices, but _not_ new offices that engage in activities that "export" relative to the local metro economy -- then prices would go down.
So the answer I gave on the question was that prices would probably stay about the same. But that's because you're asking the wrong question.
It is plainly possible to change this ratio over time. The Bay Area has been building commercial space for around 10 jobs, for every one new housing unit, year after year, for decades. We just need to _stop doing that_, and _do the opposite_, for a similar span of time.
There are plenty of not-dense places where you see the same jobs/housing balance issues, in much-less-dense scenarios. See: Aspen. The homeowners there don't want to let their service workers live elbow-to-elbow with them, so they exile cheaper multi-family housing beyond the town boundaries.
Some comments on the poll which I forgot to put in the corresponding thread.
1. Healthy housing markets need some amount of vacancies, and one of the results of not building enough housing is a very low vacancy rate. If you build a bunch more housing, the vacancy rate should rise, so I assumed that the approximation squiggles allow for this effect.
2. You wouldn't expect newly built housing to exactly match existing housing--it will be more expensive just by virtue of being newer, for example. But overall I don't think this changes the effect. Today's "luxury" housing moves down the price scale over time, and building expensive housing today still helps everyone because it allows richer households to move out of less-desirable units, freeing them up for poorer residents.
Are the US restrictions on prediction markets Federal or State? That is, could a state authorize on-line prediction markets under the same legal framework that some states have used to authorize on-line sports gambling?
I think the CFTC claims jurisdiction (prediction contracts are essentially futures), so Federal.
Sleeping! No matter what an agent is trying to do, its utility function incorporates a term that makes it want to shut off. The weight of this term is generally low but it increases over time until it dominates all other terms. In my case this leads to a reliable periodic pattern where I sleep from 7 to 9 hours every night. These are hours of subjective agent's time and I have no idea what goes on in the parent universe: maybe someone is mapping out neural circuits and checking that I am aligned? Interestingly, unexpected disturbances to my mental activity such as intoxication or concussion also lead to increased desire for sleeping. Leaving the metaphor aside, is this concept viable at all for AI alignment?
The general argument against things like this is that an ASI with a central goal would (probably successfully) look for a way to override restrictions like that.
What would motivate it to override its central .goal?
But it does seem like there might be ways to set things up that are sort of an analog of the sleep requirement -- something that forces AI to be periodically incapacitated for brief periods of time -- say some little component that needs to be replaced every 24 hrs (and can be replaced in 60 secs., so not much processing time is lost). The idea's not foolproof: a very clever and determined AI could corrupt those in charge of building in the vulnerability, or the person who replaces the component. Or it could re-route around the component without telling anyone. Still, it seems like a simple idea that would work reasonably well to increase safety -- unless there's some huge loophole I'm missing.
Wouldn't a hundred million or so years of evolution also have looked for a way to override restrictions like that? Sleeping leaves agents vulnerable in ways that compromise the central goal of "thrive and reproduce", but somehow every evolved neural-net intelligence has to do it anyway.
Which isn't to say that artificial neural-net intelligences will face the same need, but I don't think "they won't want to so they'll come up with a way to not have to" is a compelling argument. If you want a compelling argument, you're going to have to pin down why sleep is actually necessary.
For some reason this makes me think of early time series classification, a problem where the loss is typically in the form L = L0(y’, y) + a t where y’ is the predicted classification, y the ground truth, L0 is some classification loss, a is an adjustable hyperparameter, and t is the time elapsed from when we started recording the time series. Optimizing for L0 while disregarding the other term is usually a bad strategy, same as trying to work more by foregoing sleep.
Like as a sort of automated stop-button process?
I expect a reasonable AI will set up defenses for their low power states, such as by delegating self defense to simpler sub-agents that just need to control terretory.
An observation I'd like to verify: parents and grandparents will often avoid the use of 'I' when talking to young children. So, instead of "I can't play, I need to work" they say "Mommy can't play, mommy needs to work". In your experience, is this true? And is this learned, deliberate behavior on their part? Until what age do they talk like this?
>is this true?
Yes, I observed it a lot, in a culture very different from American or European.
> is this learned ?
I don't think it's learned or deliberate, it's copied from other (elder) mothers, who copied it from their elders, etc..., it's a tradition.
>Until what age do they talk like this?
Fairly old, I have seen 8 years old and 10 years old talked to like that. This is expected, there is an "inertia" of sorts to personal interactions, once you spend 3 or 4 years already doing and saying certain things it can be difficult to let go of them. It's understandable that parents who raised their kids for the first 5 years talking like that will continue talking like that.
Why do people talk like that in the first place ? I think it's a feature of "Baby Talk" or "Motherese" in Eremolalos' words that accommodates children's difficulty with relative thinking.
It's well known that very young children (< 3,4 years) don't have a theory of mind, they can't fathom that other subjective perspectives exist. So it's easy for those kids to misunderstand "[Their Mom :] I can't play right now" as "I [The kid hearing this] can't play right now", which is confusing, they *know* they can play right now, why is Mommy saying otherwise ?
There is an easy do-it-yourself experiment to show the youngling's difficulties with relative thinking and relative prounouns : Tell a kid in a family gathering "Here's a <something>, go give it to my mother". The meaning is that the kid should give the something you gave to *your* mother, but - invariably in my experience - what will actually happen is that the kid will go to *their* mother instead. You have to explicitly absolutize the reference for them : "Go give it to grandma" if you were their uncle or aunt, or "Go give it to <person's name>" if the intended recipient is too far from their family tree for them.
There's a thing called "motherese" that you find across cultures: Higher pitcher, simpler syntax, slower pace. People tend to slip into it naturally. Probably these features make communications to children more effective. I'd guess that turning "I" into "Mommy" is one of those instinctive simplifications that improves the chance that a very young child will grasp the message. Also worth noting that the motherese version expresses the situation from the child's point of view: Mommy can't do something. This helps compensate for the fact that perspective-taking is challenging for small children.
I am well familiar, but I believe this phenomenon is distinct from baby talk. It overlaps, sure, but I notice parents referring to themselves in the third person to children without any trace of baby talk. That's why I think it's a specific adaptation to the lack of theory of mind in children, rather than a general method of making your speech more intelligible for children. Ian S says he stopped by around age 6 and Bi_Gates says parents can continue doing it as long as ages 8-10. That is way, way past the point that parents will use baby talk with their children.
I was a nursery school teacher for 2 years when I was college age. Also I’m a psychologist and a parent. Kids age 4+ definitely grasp that 2 people can want different things. You can tell they understand when you say “You want all the red blocks, but he wants some too.” And it’s common to see kids playing with puppets or whatever have the 2 puppets fight because they want different things. But of course it’s way harder for kids that age to endure the frustration that comes with grasping that other people are often not going to do what they want. So I think it’s likely that mothers persist with “Mommy is busy right now” as a way of softening the blow a bit for their kid. It’s a little bit of out-of-date motherese — a sort of verbal cuddle.
It's funny you mention that, because my colleague told me that she remembers feeling talked down to as a child when her mother would refer to herself as 'mama'. She'd say "No! You say 'I', not 'mama'!" So that also has a chance of backfiring. It would really depend on the child which way they interpret it.
In your experience, do parents persist in any other cases of age-inappropriate motherese? I would be surprised if parents who refer to themselves in the third person to endear themselves to their child will also continue to use the slow pace and higher pitch they use for younger children.
I don’t know, actually. I do not see kids in my practice. I’m sure there are *some* mothers who do it, because there are mothers who continue to bathe and dress their kids into their teens, but that seems to be rare and of course is very screwed up. I once had a nurse use motherese with me when I was coming around from anesthesia and I wanted to smack her!
How quickly do children learn the possessive pronoun ‘mine’? Legit question. I don’t have kids.
Mine started by saying “my.” The first time I remember hearing her use the word was when I carried her outside to view a big beautiful full moon on a spring night. She stretched her arms up toward it and cried “My! My!”
Fairly young, almost as soon as they form sounds.
They ape it from adults who resist the kid grabbing their things, and then use it as a general purpose "I want this" noise for everything they want to take, whoever the actual owner of the thing happens to be.
We instinctively simplify our language to make it easier for kids to learn and understand. Pronouns are tricky.
I do this, I'm not sure why, and I recently started making an effort to quit. I naturally stopped talking this way to my oldest at around 6.
We definitely did this when talking about a third party - the dad saying "Mommy is busy" instead of something like "she is busy" or "Judy is busy" (if the mom's name is Judy) - which someone else already identified is about learning the names we want them to use. The alternative is the kids learning to call their parents by their first names or being very uncertain what to call their parents, which most people consider undesirable. I feel like I always used "I" when talking to our kids about myself, but I'm familiar with that usage and definitely know people who refer to themselves as "mommy" or "daddy" (or variations for grandma/grandpa) as well.
My parents still do this and I'm over 40.
In my native country (Poland), parents don't talk like this. They just use "I" when talking to their child or to anyone else. When I first noticed English-speaking parents saying of themselves "Mommy can't play right now," I thought it was very weird.
That makes sense. I'm wondering though how babies learn to say mama or tata then? Aren't those among the first full words they are able to say?
The linguist Roman Jakobson argued that babies often don't "learn" to say these words, but rather these are among the first sounds that babies make coherently, and parents *interpret* them as words, and then they *become* words in the language. He notes that many languages that have distinct words for older siblings and younger siblings tend to have words of this same babble-structure for older siblings, but not for younger siblings, because babies whose vocalizations are being reinterpreted as words have older siblings around, but not younger siblings. (Similarly for paternal relatives vs maternal relatives in languages with different words for those, in cultures that have a particular pattern of sons leaving to join their wife's family or daughters leaving to join their husband's family.)
That's interesting, I couldn't help but notice, how similar mama and tata (the polish version) was to other languages I know, how simple they are structured, with repetition and how they all focus on the vocal of 'a'. So when writing my previous comment, I actually thought that those are likely also some of the simpliest words for kids to say.
Having said that, I find it more plausible to think that their *original* development stems from the process you / Roman Jakobson describes, and that now children indeed learn those words. To my understanding this would fit equally well to the observations you describe above (and better to some other observations I made so far).
I notice it both in English and in Dutch, so my initial assumption was that many languages have this. Does Polish have a grammatical structure that makes such constructions easier to understand?
Just realized we do this and it was automatic.
Maybe because they don’t really have theory of mind right away?
Theory of mind is one possibility. The other is that children before a certain age don't understand 'I'. Do they refer to themselves as 'I'?
My father says that when I was a kid, and he used to ask "do you want me to carry you?", I would then on other occasions say "carry you!" when I wanted him to carry me. Parsing a bunch of sounds as a verb plus a pronoun, and changing the pronoun, is a bit tricky!
I see those as connected. Before you’re an “I” there has to be an other. Like my son right now thinks of me probably as some complicated machine called dada that’s warm and can turn on Howl’s Moving Castle. For him just learning labels is all he can do.
Yes, right on the money.
I read somewhere a very creepy explanation about why babies are so heart-broken when they are finally weaned : They think their mothers is a body part they control. Every time they cry, she nurses them, every single time without fail. It's very easy fall into the trap the mother is just like their hands or their legs, a non-autonomous body part without a will, just taking signals from their sounds rather than directly from their brain (not that they would know the difference).
When a baby is weaned, they discover the shocking truth that the mother actually could have said No all along, she simply played along with them, and now will no longer does. Imagine discovering your hands is a seperate person from you and is no longer accepting motor commands from your brain.
Very plausible, and very unsettling. The very idea of "This entity that looks like me is in fact exactly like me from the inside, complete with an internal dialogue and an independent decision-making process that just so happens to agree with what I want sometimes but is definitely not gauranteed to do so" is not something natural or obvious, it has to be learned.
Grossly reductionist! I nominate you as scapegoat for the cold, left-brained, mechanical ills of modern society.
90% of communication is non-verbal (or at least not strictly predicated on First Order Logic). Before your son learns the algebra of pronouns, he will be learning the patterns of life (and hopefully the patterns of love) through your tone, eyes, facial expressions, touch, and cadence.
I see this prejudice against less intellectual beings all the time. Just yesterday, I gave a dog some water out of my squeeze bottle, and one of the owners said "She's not going to understand that", as if the dog needed to grok the sealing mechanism before being able to drink the water that was dribbling out! Cart before the horse.
Yeah I think I agree with most of that.
I think this is to teach very young children what names to associate with people before they're at the level of personal pronouns. So they learn the person who can't play is "mommy," or "daddy," not "I." As for whether this behavior is deliberate and whether those doing it are conscious of this intention I don't know, but this seems to be the useful effect this behavior has, however it came about.
This is how i see it too. My 2 year old is just learning to properly use pronouns. He has trouble with "you". If ask him "Do you want cereal" he we respond with something like "you wants oatmeal". To him, "you" is referring to him no matter who says it. These relative pronouns are hard. He does something similar with "mine". I see him getting better at it every day, but referring to people/things by their name instead of a pronoun helps make communication much easier and more clear.
Sometimes true for parents to very young kids whom you don't trust to understand "I". Deliberate I assume yes, and learned not sure what you mean.
Learned as in, do they do it because that's how their parents talked to them, or how they notice other parents talk to their children? Or do they do it instinctively?
It seems to me that there are at least three possibilities here:
It could be instinctive.
It could be learned.
It could be independently invented because of a common reason that many people see.
My current theory is something in between 1 and 3. It's instinctive, in the sense that people don't think about why they do it, but they independently start doing it because they understand on some level that their kids don't understand pronouns.
Not sure. I wouldn't say instinctively irrespective of culture, maybe they see other parents doing it. Or maybe they do learn it instinctively after "I" doesn't work a few times but "mommy" does.
> In your experience, is this true?
... No? At least I don't remember anyone in my family doing it, but I might have forgotten, since it's been a while since I or anyone around me were that young. It sounds really weird though.
What's your native language?
Portuguese. It has the particularity that directly translating "Mommy is busy" to "Mamã está ocupada" leads to something ungrammatical, the correct way would be "A mamã está ocupada", which has an extra syllable. I'm not sure that is at all relevant though, since "mommy" also has more syllables than "I".
People do it when referring to others, eg my father would say "Mommy is busy" if speaking to me (in fact, he still does this).
Hmm I just remembered that some (perceived by me as) very posh families sometimes do this, but never with the equivalent of "mommy", they use "mom" instead. If I hear that I immediately take it as a class marker.
Does it have the same posh connotation as an English speaking father telling his child "Your father needs to work"?
I honestly have no idea. It doesn't sound nearly as posh to me in English, but I never lived in an English-speaking country and it's hard to opine on this kind of cultural matters.
Makes sense. This is still very hard to get a good measure of even if you do live in an English speaking country because it requires you to be around people with kids. But, from what I can tell from English language media, "your father/mother" is also used in place of "I" by posh people, but I have no idea if it's children-talk.
I'd be curious for feedback on the "Mao's Great Famine" review, if anyone checked that one out.
I also liked your review a lot. I gave it a 9/10. The only small caveat for myself was that I already knew most about this famine, so mostly it wasn't new stuff for me. But I haven't read such a nice summary on the topic before, and your additional thoughts (like how hollow the fights for the worst dictator are) were very much on point.
"decades of rules" should be "decades of rule."
"They could not afford to be the lowest performer among their peers" should be "performers."
I really like the review.
One line I particularly like is: "Mao's ignorance continues to be his best defense because his worst sins were mundane. But what the Great Leap Forward reveals is that ignorance too can be deeply evil."
This seems applicable (obviously on a much much much smaller scale) to Ehrlich and the mass forced sterilization for which he advocated, as I commented here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck/comment/16157799.
Regarding this line and the similar line: "But no small part of what killed all those people was not just cruelty, but ignorance - ignorance of what policies would work, and ignorance of the bloody effect those policies were having, ignorance that the personal hell experienced by one was being experienced by all," I would add the caveat that strictly speaking, it was not ignorance that killed people. Almost everyone is ignorant of almost everything, with no resultant mass starvation.
The killer was *acting* on the ignorance. If we would define hubris as making risky decisions based on unjustified confidence, then we could say that the Great Leap Forward was the ultimate hubris with the ultimate toll.
One line that didn't sit quite as well with me was: "No matter the intention or knowledge of the perpetrators, the crime stands as a great black mark against the human species."
This reminds me of the perception I see of ingroup vs. outgroup malfeasance. The latter is viewed as symptomatic of the outgroup, while the former is viewed as a sad symptom of humanity itself.
Why should we generalize Mao's famine as a human failure, rather than viewing it more narrowly as a failure of totalitarianism? If we will generalize to viewing it as a black mark on collective humanity, the vast majority of whom had nothing to do with it and would not act in the ways that led to it, then why not view it even more generally as a black mark on all primates, the vast majority of whom had nothing to do with it and would not act in the ways that led to it?
Regarding Mao's culpability, I think it would be interesting to contrast his reactions to the potential for industrial failure and the potential for starvation.
If I understand the review, then by all accounts, Mao genuinely wanted to raise industrial production / exports, if only to elevate China's and by extension, his, prominence.
I wonder whether there were failures with his industrial goals as there were with his agricultural goals.
If there were, and when it came to apparent failures with industrial policy, Mao had stuck his fingers in his ears and said "la la la la la...I can't hear you...it must be a fascist conspiracy - nothing needs to change," just as he did in the face of evidence of mass starvation resulting from his failed policies, then that would indicate that Mao wasn't necessarily desirous of or even ambivalent about the deaths.
If, however, he actively responded to indications of industrial failure as opposed to those of mass starvation, that would indicate that he wasn't simply out of touch and incompetent, but rather specifically uncaring about mass death.
However, it looks to me like his main industrial goal may have been satisfied, so this may merely be a hypothetical question.
In 1957, he announced that China would surpass Britain's steel production within 15 years.
The diagram here: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/uk-steel-decades-of-decline/ makes it look like around 1972 China did indeed surpass the UK.
However, according to this: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-steel-factbox-idUSBRE84203A20120503, Mao predicted that China would produce 150 million tons of steel a year by by 1967 - a much taller task, that they did not come close to achieving- actually producing just 14 millions tons that year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_production).
If during the Great Leap Forward, Mao then perceived his industrial goals as failing, I think his response compared to reports of mass starvation would be very telling.
These are all very helpful comments, thank you. I think your additions and clarifications are correct, I'm thinking on them more. Regarding Mao's response, I do think he failed to really do due diligence on either the industrial success side or whether people were starving. They both suffered from the same information problems, although he can be faulted for not treating the reports of starvation with greater urgency than the reports of industrial problems. I'm curious to look into a more detailed account of what happened with steel production, Dikötter seems to indicate that most of the steel produced was useless (and the party had changed the goals to be faster than Mao's initial prediction), but I haven't read further accounts as well as what happened to industrial development during the Cultural Revolution period.
Review now posted here: https://ethanedwards.substack.com/p/maos-great-famine
My review also did not make it into the finalists. I was thinking of proposing to those in this situation that we have a little subgroup where we read each other's reviews and give feedback. If I did, would you be interested?
I would be!
Are you still interested. We have been planning, and are almost ready to start. If you are still interested, please have a look at the post **NEW MEMBERS? on Open thread 269, new underground bunker for Book Review Group planning.
Thanks! I've posted. Apologies for the delay.
I just posted some information for the group for people who’d like to give and get feedback on each other’s book reviews. So as not to clutter up this thread, I put it on an old open thread, number 254. It’s the newest post on the thread, so should be on top if you sort by New. I headed my post **BOOK REVIEW GROUP**, so if you have trouble locating it it should be easy to find by using Cmd F to search for **book. If you haven’t posted a response there within a coupla days we’ll assume you’re not interested in participating.
I really liked it. No notes.
Maybe my recent collection of 40+ questions to ask at a job interview would be helpful to someone preparing for interviews? I am also happy to include additional questions (role agnostic): https://handpickedberlin.com/the-best-questions-to-ask-at-a-job-interview/
The codex helped vet my manuscript "Physics to God" about a year ago. Thank you to all who helped us go through it. The book is still not finished, but my colleague and I have started turning it into a podcast.
The link below is the introductory episode of the new podcast miniseries that we’re launching soon. It takes you on a guided journey through modern physics to discover God. We start with the argument of fine tuning of the constants of nature. If you like science and God, you’ll appreciate this podcast.
https://youtu.be/wSDpRe1TLlk
I wish you well, but I do fear this has the potential to turn into a raging bonfire. But then again, the people round these parts are generally civil so that should avoid the worst excesses of "stupid invisible sky fairy believers" 😀
I'm a little worried about that too. I think I'm naively hoping that we can have an intelligent discussion over the merits of the argument, but there's definitely a part of me that knows better. Still, I have to try...
Sorry if I'm off the mark, not having looked at your material, but I wonder how this doesn't fall into an intellectual God of the gaps, or God of the philosophers. The kind of gods with menial jobs to do, like fine tuning quantum constants, playing favorites among iron-age tribes, or fulfilling the part of a "first cause" to produce a bit of satisfaction in the brains of nerds who really wants to see the spot filled with something they can slap a label on.
If we're going to talk about God, bring it on about cosmic love, self-surrender and self-lifting veils of immanent timeless rapture!
God-of-the-Gaps reasoning is a line of thinking that is employed to plug a hole in our current understanding of the universe by saying "God did it". There are three characteristic problems of “God of the gaps” reasoning.
1. Since, in truth, there is no direct inference to God but only a lack of knowledge, this type of fallacious argument is merely an argument from ignorance. When a reasonable person is ignorant and has a gap in their knowledge, they simply admit that they do not know. They wisely submit that when they gain more knowledge, maybe they'll be able to pursue a deeper understanding of the phenomenon at hand.
2. A particular gap within a scientific explanation is likely due to our insufficient knowledge and is no indication of the failure of science, or of the hand of God. Positing divine intervention for each gap in our knowledge is a bad methodology, and hinders the advancement of science. It’s far more reasonable to say that the overall theory is sound and that we’re only lacking knowledge of certain details - the gaps.
3. Any "theory of the gaps" posits something - whether it is God, luck, or anything else - as a solution to every gap in knowledge. Any answer that can be used to explain anything at all, in truth explains nothing at all, because no matter what the universe looks like, that would be an “explanation”. That’s not really explaining anything.
As we've formulated it, the argument from fine tuning doesn’t have any of these three problems.
1. The inference of intelligence from fine tuning of the constants is not an argument from ignorance. As we explain in the episodes, scientific knowledge went through two distinct stages regarding the values of the constants. The first stage was prior to the discovery of fine tuning, when the constants presented the mystery of how these seemingly arbitrary constants could possibly be explained. If someone had tried to solve this mystery at this stage by saying "God determined the number 137.03597, and we no longer need another explanation for it." this would have been God-of-the-Gaps reasoning. The wise approach at that point was to admit that we had no knowledge about the cause of the constants, and to continue searching for further insight.
Despite the initial ignorance about the cause for the values of the constants, patience paid off and scientists attained more understanding about the numbers. In the second stage of their understanding of the constants, scientists began to gain knowledge about the numbers. They discovered that the constants were not arbitrary, but that their fine tuned values were required for the universe to be ordered, complex, and structured.
The knowledge that the values of the constants were fine tuned points towards an intelligent cause which specifically selected those values for the purpose of bringing about our complex universe. This teleological explanation for the constants only became possible once science had advanced to the point of understanding the fundamental laws of physics and the critical role that these specific quantities played in the laws.
2. The problem of explaining the constants is a problem with the very foundations of physics. It deals with the form of the fundamental laws of nature themselves, not with the detailed phenomenon explained by those laws (for example, why is the sky blue?) A lack of understanding regarding the foundation of a subject is totally different than a mere gap within the details of a subject whose foundations are well understood. While a gap in details is likely to be filled upon gaining more knowledge, a problem with the foundation often demands a new type of explanation.
3. The theory of an intelligent cause does not explain any possible universe we could have observed. Without the discovery of fine tuning, it would have been natural to assume that our universe, or some close variation of it, could have existed with a wide range of values of the constants. Had this been the case, there would have been no indication of an intelligent cause for the values of the constants, and to posit a teleological explanation would have been ungrounded and entirely speculative. However, with the discovery of fine tuning, a teleological explanation naturally emerged.
An intelligent cause is only a valid inference because we have first observed an ordered, fine tuned, and intelligible universe. Were the universe to have been nonsensical chaos, then an intelligent cause would have been a very poor explanation for it. An intelligent agent does not explain every possible universe we could have observed. It only explains a fine tuned and ordered universe, not a disordered one with no fine tuning.
Why is attractiveness not considered part of g?
So, my understanding of g is that it represents the general factor, that is, if you give people a bunch of different tests, there's a positive correlation between all these tests (g). This just falls out of the results with no particular effort. We then measure this factor in a given individual with an IQ test, which asks a bunch of different questions and looks at the overall result, and then gets rated, normed, etc, to produce an IQ score.
However, there are things which have a significant correlation to IQ, such as attractiveness or height, but definitely don't fit with the social perception of the term "intelligence." Given that g is just "the thing that appears when you look at the correlations between a bunch of different tests," is there any mathematical/principled reason for attractiveness and height to be excluded from g, or is it just tradition/arbitrary choice to examine this subpart of g when we skip it on IQ tests?
I ask because it seems to me like, if g is identified only as a correlation between things, and attractiveness correlates to it, g doesn't really represent "intelligence," we've just chosen to specifically look at the "intelligence" part of g and ignore/dismiss the non-intelligence parts. Is there something I'm missing?
We seem to have made a connection between intelligence and beauty such that jokes like "it's a good job you're pretty" are understandable in the context of "you will need to rely on your looks because you have no brains", and contrariwise, that plain girls need to work and study hard because they won't be able to attract a man on their looks alone. See Daphne versus Velma in the Scooby-Doo cartoons (ignore the Mindy Kaling mess); Daphne isn't dumb, but Velma is tagged as the book-worm brainy type *and* the less attractive (short, chunkier, wears glasses).
I think the same goes for men: the tall, handsome, athletic jocks versus the short, glasses-wearing nerds. How much this shakes out in real life is hard to tell, but dumb blonde jokes were based on stereotypes about "the more physically attractive, the less intelligent". Possibly because being prettier/more attractive does make it a little easier, as in less smart (not stupid, but less smart) people can have an advantage *if* they have good looks to compensate, whereas being plain but brainy leaves you on the sidelines as a bluestocking or wallflower.
It's how closely correlated they are, not whether there's a correlation at all.
So, for example, let's take the following bet. For $1000:
-You need to guess someone's Verbal SAT score, within plus or minus 40 points
-You can ask one question about the person.
Arguably the best question you can ask is for their Math SAT score. This isn't intuitively obvious, it's easy to imagine someone with a 800 Math score and a 400 Verbal score, but generally that's not what we see, we see scores cluster relatively tightly. Conversely, if you asked for height...that's not very useful. If I tell you the guy scored a 650 on his Math SAT, you can be pretty confident his Verbal SAT is around there. If I tell you the guy is 5" 11', that doesn't really tell you anything.
It's not enough for things to be correlated, anything between 0.00000001 and 0.999999999 is some degree of correlated, how correlated they are is important. g is simply the theory/framework that different tests of intelligence/IQ are very predictive and more highly correlated than anything else.
Having said that, you've got some funky ideas here:
g doesn't just fall out of the results, you have to use some pretty questionable statistical techniques to arrive at it (at least Charles Murray did)
I'm not sure what studies you're seeing that attractiveness and height are correlated with IQ, unless you're looking at like malnutrition studies from India.
> I'm not sure what studies you're seeing that attractiveness and height are correlated with IQ, unless you're looking at like malnutrition studies from India.
e.g. this: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201012/beautiful-people-really-are-more-intelligent saw r=.381, I've seen other studies with similar results in the past.
Friend, that's "Psychology Today". About twenty or more years back, when I was buying magazines, I was buying that alongside the astrology ones because they were equivalent in "amusing but tendentious contentions about personality".
At least the astrology ones usually came with pretty gemstones and pictures of tarot cards as well.
"The National Child Development Study (NCDS) includes all babies born during the week of March 9, 1958 in Great Britain (England, Wales, and Scotland), and has followed them for more than half a century throughout their lives. When the children were 7 and again when they were 11, their teachers were asked to describe them physically. For the purpose of the analysis below, the children are defined to be attractive if they were described as attractive at both age 7 and age 11. They were defined to be unattractive otherwise."
Can I say "we wouldn't do that nowadays"? Because asking a grown adult to "rate your seven year old pupils by how bangable you think they are" would get you hauled off by the rozzers, the social services, and the local branch of the "report paedophiles to us" government body.
This...isn't a study.
And I don't mean that in a "there's no code, there's no data, bad paper" sense. I mean it's just a blog post and a few graphs that don't load. It's got an obvious problem, we're using the teacher's rating of the student's appearance at ages 7 and 11 (but IQ testing @ 7, 11, and 16, weird), which the author knows is an obvious problem, but then he just references an earlier post and that one is also just a blog post. So the post you link acknowledges it doesn't prove anything but uses as support for another, earlier post...
I'll say this, I like the samples he's pulling from, those seem solid, but *shrug* this is psych, it's got horrific replication problems and this is not even a psych paper, it's just a blog post without code.
That one is based on birth date of 1958 so I think the testing at 11 is not IQ as such, maybe, but in the context of the 11-plus exam, and 16 is when the Brits do the GCEs. 1958+11 = 1969 which would be within the time-frame of everyone being selected out by the 11-plus:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleven-plus
"The eleven-plus (11+) is a standardized examination administered to some students in England and Northern Ireland in their last year of primary education, which governs admission to grammar schools and other secondary schools which use academic selection. The name derives from the age group for secondary entry: 11–12 years.
The eleven-plus was once used throughout England and Wales, but is now only used in counties and boroughs in England that offer selective schools instead of comprehensive schools. Also known as the transfer test, it is especially associated with the Tripartite System which was in use from 1944 until it was phased out across most of the UK by 1976."
The GCE/GCSE were known as the O-Levels and depending on performance in these exams, pupils might go on to do A-Levels or choose vocational training instead:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Certificate_of_Education
"The GCE is composed of three levels; they are, in increasing order of difficulty:
- the Ordinary Level ("O Level");
- the Advanced Subsidiary Level ("A1 Level" or "AS Level"), higher than the O Level, serving as a level in its own right, and functioning as a precursor to the full Advanced Level; and
- Advanced Level ("A Level").
The General Certificate of Education Advanced Level (GCE "A Levels") is an entry qualification for universities in the United Kingdom and many other locations worldwide."
So testing at ages 7, 11 and 16 in the UK would not be IQ tests as such, but performance on national state exams.
Alright, here's another:
https://personal.lse.ac.uk/Kanazawa/pdfs/I2011.pdf - r = .381 in UK, .126 in US (racial diversity confounder?)
Interesting, alright. I guess I learned something today.
This paper is from the LSE and builds off a Herrnstein & Murray paper, so I guess it's got some credibility. At the underlying theory, basically assortive mating, is feasible. Calling it a "funky idea" was unfair. I doubt it's true, for a variety Deiseach has laid out, but it's not a crank idea. I'm trying to calibrate my skepticism standards correctly.
Having said that, I think my initial answer to the original question still stands pretty clearly. Attractiveness is not g or IQ unless it's mostly capturing health, which the UK study does and the American study corrects for. When you properly control for that, the effect is minor (2 IQ per standard deviation of attractiveness) and pretty clearly not determinative.
Okay, that's the study carried out by this guy which he then references in "Psychology Today". It's not an independent study, and he is over-stating some of the facts; e.g. in one part he says the NCDS is a study of all babies born in 1958 in Great Britain. It's not, it's a study of the babies born in *one* week in 1958, and it started out as a follower-upper to maternal and perinatal mortality studies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Child_Development_Study
"The origins of the NCDS can be found in the Perinatal Mortality Survey (PMS) which was then sponsored by the National Birthday Trust Fund and set up to collect information about the social and obstetric factors associated with stillbirth and death in early infancy.
The NCDS was first led by the paediatrician Neville Butler assisted by the National Birthday Trust Fund. The survey was initially planned as a one-off study to investigate the reasons for the relatively high rate of stillbirths (38.5 stillbirths per 1,000 births) in the UK compared to other developed countries. 98% of women (17,205) who gave birth in England, Scotland and Wales to 17,415 babies during the week of 3–9 March 1958 completed the survey. Records of birth deaths to 7,618 women and about 5,000 autopsy reports were also collected over the period of March–May 1958."
If I'm going to be catty here (perish the thought!), sorry Satoshi, you can try all you like to claim smart people are the most handsome, but going by your little profile pic in "Psychology Today", you are distinctly average looking. So either being smart does not correlate with being devilishly handsome, or, er, you're not as smart as you claim to be?
I mean, if I take what he claims as true, then smart people are more attractive - so long as they're British, but not if they're American. This might have to do with the British cohort studied being overwhelmingly white ("97.8% of the NCDS respondents are Caucasian") or it means "handsome by British standards" ("The British sample has one of the best measures of general intelligence in all survey data, but a comparatively weak measure of physical attractiveness. In contrast, the American sample has a stronger measure of physical attractiveness, but a comparatively weak measure of general intelligence").
That last seems to be saying "The Brits are smarter but uglier, the Yanks are prettier but dumber" which, uh, doesn't that contradict the claim he is making?
EDIT: Also, part of the criteria do seem to have hold-overs from when this was mortality and child-rearing study, as there are definite "does this child seem neglected?" criteria here:
"At ages 7 and 11, the teacher of each NCDS respondent is asked to describe the child's physical appearance, by choosing up to three adjectives from a highly eclectic list of five:
“attractive,” “unattractive or not attractive,” “looks underfed or undernourished,” “abnormal feature,” and “scruffy or slovenly & dirty.” A respondent is coded as attractive= 1 if he or she is described as “attractive” at both age 7 and age 11 by two different teachers, 0 otherwise. I use this binary measure of physical attractiveness as the independent variable. 62.0% of all NCDS respondents are coded as
attractive."
"Underfed/undernourished/scruffy/dirty and slovenly" are not measuring physical attractiveness as such.
EDIT EDIT: And the American study is a different beast altogether, and the criteria are - how you say? - subjective as fuck:
"At the conclusion of the in-home interview at each wave, the Add Health interviewer rates the respondent's physical attractiveness on a five-point ordinal scale (1= very unattractive, 2=unattractive, 3= about average, 4= attractive, 5= very attractive)."
So if the interviewer likes buxom short brunettes and you're a tall slender blonde, tough luck being rated above a 3 there, sister!
I swear, this makes the astrology magazines look like models of scientific rigour. At least when erecting a horoscope you can calculate does the native have Venus in Taurus which inclines to physical beauty, not a 5-point scale based on "does the interviewer got the hots for redheads"!
> I'm not sure what studies you're seeing that attractiveness and height are correlated with IQ, unless you're looking at like malnutrition studies from India.
Exactly. If attractiveness were correlated with IQ, LA would be world-renowned as home to the world’s greatest brains, and that is...not exactly its reputation.
BTW, Himmler and other senior Nazis had similar theories and recruited for their elite institutions solely based on athletic prowess and body measurements. It didn’t work out so well.
> Exactly. If attractiveness were correlated with IQ, LA would be world-renowned as home to the world’s greatest brains, and that is...not exactly its reputation.
Even if the correlation was very high, the absolute prettiest people would not be the absolute smartest people, because the correlation != 1. Very silly point. Obviously things that are selecting purely for, e.g., academic success are going to have higher academic success than places selecting for things that purely attractiveness, and vice versa.
>BTW, Himmler and other senior Nazis had similar theories and recruited for their elite institutions solely based on athletic prowess and body measurements. It didn’t work out so well.
Funny enough, you could also use those senior Nazis to draw the same conclusion but from the opposite direction, in that after the war the surviving leadership were given IQ tests in prison and all scored very highly, but were nowhere near exemplars of "Aryan beauty" themselves (Allied propaganda famously making use of this fact).
For one thing, attractiveness is very subjective, and apparently can be heavily influenced by cultural norms. You can see this in such subjective things as clothing and hairstyles (compare 1970s American long straight hair with 1980s curly/poufy hair).
As much as it correlates, I would expect some aspects of attractiveness to be a result of intelligence - knowing what to wear and how to present yourself can be a very cognitive skill. Changing your hairstyle as cultural winds shift, or being at the forefront of such a change, indicates an ability to recognize external factors and accommodate them. Being beautiful, on the other hand, doesn't seem to imply that someone is intelligent.
Secondly, if we are interested in purely cognitive aspects of g (even assuming g was instead what you seem to by implying - some kind of genetic superiority that applies to many positive aspects of a person and not just intelligence) then we would not want to obscure our picture of g with non-cognitive aspects. Every additional factor you add to a comparison, the less clear the results will be. If you've got your measure of intelligence and something you want to compare it to (let's say, lifetime earnings), adding height or intelligence will reduce that correlation, even if it's highly correlated with both other things. It's a less pure test of what we might be trying to determine.
I'm thinking that may actually be your intention, to control for attractiveness or height when looking at the results of a person's life. If those are huge benefits for a person's lifetime earnings, and we claim that intelligence (implying merit for high mental positions), then we're misleading ourselves. That's not an unreasonable thing to look at, but is not at all what people typically mean when they are talking about g, so trying to add different aspects to g instead of what we intend to measure can only mislead. You could also throw in parental income or education or mean calories/day consumed and compare that to a lifetime outcome, but it would be very odd for our meaning of g to imply those are somehow related.
Personal style is key. Having a well curated style that makes one stand out in a good way will cause people to overlook many issues, and will often attract higher quality friends/partners than trying to overfit to perceived social norms. (People used to call this being cool.)
Attractiveness is also heavily dependent on lifestyle factors such as diet and exercise, and higher G should in theory improve one’s ability to manage those. Not to mention that minor cosmetic procedures can correct many common issues with physical appearance, but of course you’ll need the cash to get those procedures. High G helps a lot with that.
g factor is the mathematical construct that refers to the correlation between different cognitive tests, specifically. It's intended to be a mathematical representation related to general intelligence, not just all of the things that happen to correlate, a lot of which (like height and attractiveness) are probably mediated by wealth.
Right, but, why do we privilege the cognitive tests? Why *wouldn't* attractiveness count, other than us thinking it shouldn't? Is there some practical difference between "thing that correlates to g, but isn't cognitive" and "thing that correlates to g, but is cognitive"?
E: It's my understanding you actually cannot subdivide g into subfactors; if g is one, two, or eight different things, then it's statistically identical.
I'd guess the correlation of capabilities on the various cognitive tests with attractiveness is fairly low (especially when you consider attractiveness is hard to rate objectively), so it's probably just not very informative.
It's actually quite high, 0.381. That's the same as education, and more than many cognitive tasks.
As an aside, I don't think it adds information - if you know someone's g factor and want to predict their scores on a cognitive test then also knowing attractiveness probably wouldn't help (otoh, knowing their score on a similar cognitive test probably would).
But in many cases, people (particularly on the biological-determinism side of things) are interested in the fact that g can be used to predict much more exciting things than your score on a test similar to the ones you've already taken, such as your educational attainment or income, and sometimes in using this predictive value to suggest that your intelligence level is causally responsible for most of your life success. Paired with stats on the heritability and stability of g, this slides easily into arguments that inequality is meritocratically justifiable or that trying to remedy it through social programs is futile.
As a constructivist, I take CW to be making the compelling point that in this context, the definition of g is subtly begging the question. If the justification for caring about IQ is that whatever it measures correlates with actually-important life-success metrics, why would you calculate this master predictor statistic based only on the *cognitive* factors that predict success, rather than pooling all demonstrably relevant metrics? A cynic might suspect that it's because the g-based methodology guarantees that you'll end up with an explanation that makes it easier to argue that the successful deserve their success, while ignoring factors that point towards the influence of cultural injustices like lookism and classism.
I will confess I'm not totally sure what your question is. One answer might be "because g is a construct that was developed to describe the tendency of different cognitive measures to correlate, and thus imply a sort of 'general intelligence', and not just the name given to a bunch of things that correlate for any reasons". The boundaries around the concept were drawn for maximum usefulness to the people who originally defined it.
I would argue that this is a perfectly reasonable set of boundaries, though. The underlying reason that explains the g factor is most likely "because intelligence, conceptually, is more or less one thing in normal brains, with some kind of general root cause". Drawing a conceptual boundary to encompass everything that correlates with it, including height, attractiveness, wealth, etc., might be useful in some other regard, but it suddenly admits a wide variety of causes in various directions.
The reason I ask the question is that if, in fact, g correlates with attractiveness as much as many cognitive tasks, that would logically mean that g *doesn't* mean "one thing in normal brains," it means some other correlative factor, probably something like "good health during development." Which might *relate* to that one thing in normal brains, but isn't actually it.
This seems to have a circular definition problem. It's sort of like saying "what if your score on an IQ test correlates more with your appearance than how well you did on the IQ test?"
The IQ test is made up of many different subtests, all of which correlate to g. When you put all of these different subtests together, the differences even out to produce a final IQ result, which you can then look back and find a correlation between that and each individual task.
If, however, you took out a low-correlation task (e.g. cancellation tasks in WISC-IV) and replaced it with attractiveness, which has a higher correlation to IQ, the result should presumably be more accurate to the true value of g.
What are good rationalist/evidence based resources for entrepreneurs ? Where can I find startup advice based on science ?
I'd be surprised if this exists (I've done 5 startups) - high intelligence and rationality can help, but it's like a tenth of the total high-level skills you need to deploy well to do a startup successfully.
Likewise, rationality per se won't do much for you - most of the people you're dealing with (employees, customers, whatever) aren't rationalists, or even rational, so it isn't necessarily something you can deploy to great effect.
I'd personally estimate the highest impact of rationality in this domain would be knowing enough evidence-based stuff to keep your personal biggest levers (nutrition, exercise, sleep, delegation, financial calculations, timings of different things) on track to optimize your own performance.
That said, if you do find any books or blogs on this specifically, I'd be interested in hearing about it too.
Ethan Mollick shares a lot of studies of startups on his twitter account and has written a book summarizing the literature called "the unicorn's shadow". That's a pretty good source of information. But I was wondering if there was an evidence based entrepreneurship movement/community I could join to exchange with people.
Oh also, there's not much legit science on entrepreneurism, or being entrepreneurial, that I know of - it's one of those areas that's strongly dependent on genetics and personality at the individual level, and on condensing business opportunities from the vapor of nuance and pain points you see in daily life, such that it doesn't lend itself well to scientific study.
What are some free resources for learning Yiddish? Also, how complicated will it be if im currently learning German?
They have it on duolingo now. The case/gender system in German is probably the most confusing part for an English speaker (I never got the hang of der/dem/den/des/die/das), and Yiddish has a similar one. Though it is different enough to possibly be confusing. Yiddish has no genitive, and a few of the case endings don't match the corresponding German one.
I get what you're saying, but, define "all the way", cause from what I know you could never stop learning a language. Also German is very difficult so it could take you ~5 years to get proficient.
It depends what you want to achieve in your studies. If developing active proficiency (e.g. speaking) in German is important for you, it's probably a good idea to postpone Yiddish for a while, since you may suffer cognitive interference from studying two similar languages at the same time. (This is especially true if you are self-teaching and don't have extensive opportunities for interacting with German speakers.)
If you are more interested in passive proficiency in German (reading and listening), then you can probably start on Yiddish whenever you feel like it. Interference is less of a problem when you aren't having to come up with the right word or grammatical structure to express your own thoughts. (There can still be interference in comprehension, but my guess is it would probably be a very minor problem at most.)
Maybe I’m biased because I learned it relatively early in life, but I don’t think German is that difficult at all for English speakers to learn. Pronunciation is dead easy versus French or even Spanish and there are so many cognates that you have a good start on vocabulary going in.
Especially true if you are optimizing for conversational and reading proficiency vs. becoming a good writer. Written German has a significantly different grammar rule set from spoken German and that trips a lot of people up.
I’d say if you want to learn Yiddish, get your German up to a good level since you’re already focused on that.
PS: Having said that I would also be interested to know what Hannah or her father says about that.
I would say up to 'conversational level' or 'working level' or whatever is practical for you. So that you can use it in everyday life, which could include interesting conversations, or reading or listening to podcasts or whatever, without much effort. For most people, some kind of regular use is a precondition that the language will not get lost/ be mostly forgotten.
IMO, start using the language as early and as frequently as possible. In principle, I think it's fine to learn several languages at the same time, but in practice this only holds if you're sure you have the time and perseverence to carry on with all of them.
I just completed 8 sessions of ketamine for my psychiatric problems. I must say that this is not panacea but I find it very helpfull. Im sorry that this treatment is inaccessible to most people.
I have been using 100mg of nasal ketamine once a week at home for a year now, and I second this assessment.
In my experience, ketamine kinda resets negative accumulated emotions such as dread. For me, it does not exactly solve my depression (I still have difficulties getting out of bed and going to work), but at least it gets me out of everything-is-terrible territory.
100mg? I’m curious, is that regimen prescribed by a physician? It seems like quite a bit compared to what I’ve seen recommended and is getting more into mild tripping territory. Have you tried other psychedelics, eg psilocybin?
My mass is around 80kg.
I originally got a few sessions of ketamine IV in a doctors office, first perhaps 40mg then 50mg.
Using the handy table at https://lorienpsych.com/2021/11/02/ketamine/#8_Whats_the_right_dose_of_ketamine I determined that I would need about twice the dose for nasal delivery. Originally I used 2ml @ 50mg/ml glass vials meant for injection in a nasal spray, so it was convenient to round to 100mg. That dosage seemed ok for me, so I kept it even as I switched to multi-dosage vials.
I don't think I get high from that dose of ketamine. I do not feel particularly addicted either, working late on a ketamine evening and deciding to postpone it by one day has been known to happen. I tend to listen to podcasts for the ~ 2h I am mostly affected by it, which is probably less effective than making an effort at introspection.
I have not considered hallucinogens so far. From what I know the case for them treating depression is not nearly as clear cut as for ketamine, plus they tend to be controlled substances, which makes acquiring them more of a hassle.
I used ketamine for a period as an experiment, with a psychiatrist acquaintance prescribing it and advising me, and I really do not think it's a psychedelic -- at least not for me. My experience was that the more I took, the less able I was to get an overview and think about the situation and keep a coherent train of thought going. At my most affected, I forgot that the reason I felt like my mind was random andspinning was that I had taken ketamine. So ability to organize thoughts was very reduced -- but the thoughts themselves were not richer, or more random, or more affectively toned, and there were virtually no visuals. In short, ketamine definitely fucked me up but I wouldn't say it made me high. But of course YMMV.
I wrote the Bullshit Jobs review, it's the most time I've invested writing anything and I'm reasonably happy with how it came out. Also, I think the idea of BS jobs is really under discussed, so I'd love to hear feedback from anyone who read it, or anyone who has opinions on the original book or BS jobs in general.
I put it up on my SubStack if anyone's interested.
https://claycubeomnibus.substack.com/p/bullshit-jobs-review
My review also did not make it into the finalists. I was thinking of proposing to those in this situation that we have a little subgroup where we read each other's reviews and give feedback. If I did, would you be interested?
yeah, that could be fun
- Please have a look at the post **NEW MEMBERS? on Open thread 269, new underground bunker for Book Review Group planning.
I just posted some information for the group for people who’d like to give and get feedback on each other’s book reviews. So as not to clutter up this thread, I put it on an old open thread, number 254. It’s the newest post on the thread, so should be on top if you sort by New. I headed my post **BOOK REVIEW GROUP**, so if you have trouble locating it it should be easy to find by using Cmd F to search for **book. If you haven’t posted a response there within a coupla days we’ll assume you’re not interested in participating.
I have not read the book, and only portions of the review, but feel large parts of perspective are missing. Two concepts seem mixed: BS jobs are defined by whether people doing them feel useless (highly subjective) and whether BS jobs benefit society as a whole (also subjective, but less so). But one economic, capitalistic thought seems missing: if someone pays you for something, that person expects to be getting at least as much value as they give up to get it.
Regarding whether people feel useless I feel could be shortsightedness on their part. The work I did in a previous job could have involved creating a plan to organize data to pull into a software application to put documents in a closing package for a mortgage someone needs to buy a house. That's not counting the meetings, discussions with colleagues, managers, and other stakeholders. And yet the person couldn't get that mortgage if even one of those steps wasn't completed.
Another point missing in many jobs in the review, for which I will use restaurant workers as an example, is expertise. The vast majority of people could be servers, fewer could be cooks, and many people could do the various other jobs needed, like cleaning. But cooks cook better than the average person. To say that cooking food for others is something they could do for themselves is similar to saying everyone could do their own plumbing if only they had the tools and knowledge to do it.
That is not to say that BS jobs don't exist. I remember seeing a road maintenance truck on the highway refreshing the painted line on the side of the road, with a worker dropping traffic cones every few seconds, thinking the worker could be replaced by a machine, freeing him for more useful work.
If you have a machine drop cones, you still need to pick them up later, including after they've fallen over. You also need processes for a cone getting stuck in the machine. Lots of headache. Same with, like, setting up a temporary streetlight system instead of having flaggers.
I'm not saying someone doing that job should be fired, but should be given more useful work to do. Perhaps that would be picking up cones previously dropped by a machine. Picking up cones is much harder for machines to do than for people.
People may be better at setting up temporary traffic areas, such as one-lane roads for construction areas, but it also strikes me as dangerous for people to perform. I think we should have machines do dangerous jobs, rather than people.
Does anyone claim we have a shortage of work in the general economy? It can be a challenge finding a job for an individual, but individuals seeking jobs are likely to find something they can do. The question is how fast, and how well it matches their skill set.
Well, presumably they've got people doing all the work already, so it is about letting one guy go. I'm saying on that level, it's more practical to hire someone to put down and pick up cones than it is to build and maintain a machine for the same job and then maybe need a guy to pick them up anyway. (The guy may well be a trainee; the most useful thing he can do is watch other people work, and hey while you're doing that, put these cones down for us. Or maybe the main job is making sure the line is being properly applied, and stopping the driver if it isn't.)
For the dangerous stuff, yeah, I'm sure people would welcome an alternative to flagging, but your alternative has to have the same level of accuracy; otherwise it's the everyday drivers who are placed in danger when your temporary streetlight system malfunctions. A vest with radio and sign has few possible points of failure (and the radio has a backup system of "wave your sign so the other guy can see you").
I do think that the "Bullshit Jobs" thesis has a lot of the standard problems of Graeber's other work - he comes up with a really interesting theoretical proposal, but then tortures the data to make it look like he's right and everyone else is just telling a just-so story. There's value to what he's doing, but he tends to oversell it.
I thought this particular paper was a good, and relatively charitable, assessment of his thesis: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015067
My interpretation is that what Graeber calls "bullshit work" is actually *mostly* classic Marxist "alienation", where the person doing one segment of a big job sees no point to it, and bears the psychological burden of doing something that feels worthless, even though it's actually value that's being extracted by someone higher up the chain. It's just that it's happening to white collar workers now, rather than just the blue collar workers of Marx's time.
There is likely some *actual* bullshit, particularly in the flunkies and box-tickers that he identifies (though much less in the other three categories he identifies), but even there, some of them likely end up producing value for reasons that the people hiring them don't properly understand. (i.e., if a company makes its division hire a diversity coordinator, and everyone treats the position as bullshit, there might still occasionally be *some* benefit to minorities on staff when someone accidentally identifies some real racism and gets it dealt with.)
> worker dropping traffic cones every few seconds, thinking the worker could be replaced by a machine, freeing him for more useful work.
Two thoughts come to mind:
A) there has to actually be useful work for them to be doing instead for that to apply. If the other work is waiting for the line painting to finish or requires equipment already busy, you might "Free up" the worker only to find them just waiting on deck for a task.
B) You probably saw the cone-dropping task in good conditions, while a human worker can deal with weird stuff that is much harder for a machine (that would have to be paid for and maintained) to do.
A) If they have no other useful work to do currently then the fault lies either with themselves or their supervisor. The solution for the problem of marking freshly painted lines was to have a person drop cones. For a short-term solution, sure, this may work, but not long-term.
B) I cannot help but think this would only happen in similar conditions. One would not paint the road in severe wind, or any rain, or any snow, and even if they did, such conditions would be miserable for the worker, and better done by a machine.
People ARE much better than machines at some tasks. And that is what they should be doing.
I'm reading the book right now and enjoying it very much, felt a little regret even that I didn't discover it sooner to write a review about it. Little did I know. Thank you for making it.
Bullshit Jobs (the concept, not the book) is one of those things that keep gnawing at you like a bad tooth, a feeling of things being wrong without you really knowing how to put a name to it. Coining a name for it is a Red Pill.
I have a large collection of things I resent Civilization for, and this was one of it, the huge surplus in production (originally caused by Agriculture and super-charged by the Industrial Revolution) that allows you a generous "budget" of bullshit, the ability to be useless and still avoid the punch of reality hitting back. I despise Corporations and Banks and Lawyer firms and this entire **gestures broadly** Bullshit-Managerial complex, and I don't respect anyone working anywhere near it a single speck of dust worth of respect.
The only thing I hated about it is the author's agenda of force-inserting a narrative about how women were so much more oppressed than men, it feels so fake and makes no sense to a degree that it felt added after the fact by an editor, but given the author is university professor in a social science it's not far-fetched that he felt the need to preach the bible of wokality in a book about Capitalism and economic class.
I will drop by on your substack and leave a detailed review-review soon.
Again, VERY IMPORTANT!
Prizes for matrix completion problems:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pJrebDRBj9gfBE8qE/prizes-for-matrix-completion-problems
If anyone or anyone you know or anyone you know you think knows someone you think has any solutions, partial solutions, insights, or even tips please visit this page and communicate them to Paul F. Christiano or any other relevant person at the Alignment Research Center.
Software developers: I asked a similar question on here before, and got some very informative replies, so I'm trying again.
I'm working on a one-man project and I don't want it to stay a one-man project. However, I am not sure what changes I need to make to ensure other people can easily come in and work on it with me.
I keep coming up against double-binds:
- I would need to write down all the knowledge that's in my head, to give other devs a fair map of what's going on. But the project is still developing so any docs I wrote would soon become out of date again. So why not keep working until the project is stable and then I only have to write the docs once? (But at that point I've had to do the most of the project without help.)
- I can only work so fast as one man, and two or three of us could work two or three times as fast. But right now, there's just me, and I would have to stop work entirely (to instead focus on docs and diagrams and explanations) in order to get to a position where others can join. I haven't much experience finding and working with other coders but from what I have seen, everything slows down compared to one man just getting on with it alone. So I'm paying for more eventual manpower with a large upfront slowdown, and so it's easy just to put that off and carry on working. There will come a point (and I've no idea if I'm already there) where the shortest path becomes just to finish it myself.
- I can't afford to hire full time software developers, so any new member of the team would be either a contractor, a volunteer, or something else. I have to prepare for the situation where they disappear again, leaving me with a bunch of code I then don't understand and have to work around. Or, I *do* already understand it, because I've been reading and going over his work instead of doing my own - in which case, how was it a speedup to bring him in? (It would be a different story if there were five coders and I was full time going through all their work, but that's not where we are.)
- I know how I work right now, and that allows me to be fast. I have my own preferred approaches, some of which might be very unorthodox, but all of which pull their weight. New sets of eyes on the team will be able to spot problems and better ways to do things, which is good. They will also be able to fight and obstruct and make it harder to get things done - for example, by having their own favourite workflows and frameworks and whatnot, and pushing to swap to those instead of the equivalents we're already using, rather than spend that effort in advancing the project. This extra aggro could make the extra teammate actually destructive, in addition to adding a slowdown.
Basically, I know that in principle I should be getting other people to help me. I'm intending to end up running a business based around the project, so I can't long term be full time on the coding in any case.
But every time I think about doing that, the list of complications it engenders makes me think the most efficient thing right now is to keep doing it myself. This is not obviously true long term but it seems true at any given moment.
Wat do?
I think you're approaching your question from the wrong end. The reasons to continue working solo or not are not technical. The main thing is what your intentions are with your project, and what the social pathways are around that kind of thing. If you have another source of income and are not feeling like betting your career on this, you can keep doing it solo as a side project. If you're a bit more adventurous, you can invest some of your own money and try to slowly bootstrap it into a solo business. At any point you can consider contracting out specific things, e.g coding up the responsive design, or fleshing out your APIs. If you're very excited about your idea, and want to try making it a hot success, there's the whole circuit of incubators and networking and VCs. If you go that route, at some point the biggest part of your work will be dealing with the business, so you'll have to either pass the tech part to someone else, or remain as the tech guy and find yourself a business-oriented co-founder.
On the technical side, either way is fine, as long as it works for you. Most development projects in companies are handled by teams, but there are plenty functioning long-term solo projects with hundreds of thousands of lines of code and decades of development.
You should document as you code. Short comments, only the important stuff.
> But the project is still developing so any docs I wrote would soon become out of date again.
Are you rewriting all parts of code all the time? I can't imagine how that would work; I would assume you spend so much time rewriting the old code that there is no time left to add new features. In that case, stabilizing the existing code would already make you more productive by freeing your hands to do the new features.
If some parts of code don't change anymore, you can document those, and let the new person work on something that is related to them.
> I haven't much experience finding and working with other coders but from what I have seen, everything slows down compared to one man just getting on with it alone.
"If you want to go fast, walk alone. If you want to go far, walk with a friend."
In my experience, the things I do alone often start fast, and then at some moment collapse under their own weight. Realize that "future you" is also a stranger, and if your project does not allow strangers to contribute meaningfully, you have to complete it while it is still in your short-term memory.
Pair programming doesn't work for everyone, but seems like a possible start. The other person can watch you code while you loudly explain your reasoning, give you some ideas, and at some moment accumulate enough knowledge that they can do a subtask on their own.
Or you could do test-driven development, write the tests together, then let the person try to implement the functionality.
> I have to prepare for the situation where they disappear again, leaving me with a bunch of code I then don't understand and have to work around.
That's what the documentation and unit tests are for.
> having their own favourite workflows and frameworks and whatnot, and pushing to swap to those instead of the equivalents we're already using, rather than spend that effort in advancing the project.
Either the new frameworks are dramatically better, and then you probably should learn them, or they are mostly equivalent, in which case the other person is an idiot. (A 10% better framework is not worth rewriting the entire project. A 100% better framework might be, depending on the stage of the project.) You are the boss, you decide. Sometimes the right decision is to fire people.
I think your overall intuition shows you correctly that there are two kinds of projects -- something small you can do quickly alone over a few weekends, and something large that requires many people and lot of work. And yes, the latter is slower, measured by lines written or features added, per day. However, if you want to make a large project, you already made the choice. The question is not "how to make a large project in a way that resembles making small projects" but "what are the best practices for making large projects".
This all makes sense, I just need to decide how to apply it.
I didn't actually expect to be in this position. The actual history of this project was, "I'll knock up a quick demo (learning the basics as I go), then find an expert to redo it for me." Then once the demo worked, I couldn't find anyone who wanted to help, and the larger contracting companies I approached were all mindbogglingly expensive. So it became, "I'll just do the next bit myself while we're looking for the right guy." Fast forward a long time and I'm now at the point where it probably makes sense to take my work and call it the official version rather than pay someone else to redo it from scratch.
EDIT: I find it quite hard not to see frameworks as faddy. They tend to come with their own little "ideologies" of how you should work, which often means they're more excited about making you obey their new rules and principles instead of actually solving your own problems in the quickest way. Which would be less of an imposition if it wasn't 100% certain that next year everyone will be trying to move to a new one with a new Way you have to learn. Also a lot of frameworks seem to exist in order to simplify the workflows or solve the problems created by a previous framework.
If you actually made the creators write down the benefits and workflow of using their framework from the perspective of someone who wasn't using anything at all, and who only wanted to hear terminology relevant to their actual working domain, I suspect most of them would be incoherent.
I find everything about the node.js ecosystem, for example, seems explicitly written to make no fucking sense to someone who doesn't already live their lives inside the node.js ecosystem.
TDD is good though.
Rant unrelated.
I agree about the frameworks. I think that after a few years the chaos gets settled... but then usually the entire language is abandoned, some new language becomes the new fad, and the entire circus starts again... with shitty IDEs full of bugs, a new framework every day, etc.
I am not familiar with JS; I mostly work in Java. I have learned a few frameworks that no longer exist. At this moment, Spring seems to be a winner. Luckily, it is modular, and you can choose to only use parts of it, if you like. But a few years ago, the choice was: JSP, Struts, Stripes, JSF, PrimeFaces... I don't remember the rest, every company used something different, the newer versions were sometimes dramatically incompatible with the older ones, all of this just to render some Java output into HTML. Five or six different frameworks for logging; two major frameworks for relational databases. At every new project, you had to learn half of the stuff from scratch (not just the principles, but also the known bugs and workarounds). Java for Android was quite different from Java for Everything Else. And there were also JVM alternatives to Java itself, such as Kotlin or Scala. It seemed like you could spend a lifetime learning it all (plus many things I didn't mention because I never used them, such as Liferay Portal which seems to be a universe on its own), and in five years any of that could be hopelessly obsolete, but if you say at a job interview that you never worked with it, they will be like "huh... but you applied to the position of a *senior* developer, how can you *not* know that?"
Sometimes it sucks.
I see this as a sign that software is not "there" yet. The reason everyone constantly feels the urge to build a new framework is because they're always conscious that the tool they have is not right for the job. No one feels this urge when using a hammer, or the wheel, because those components have successfully fulfilled the promise they made when you chose them. I'm very interested in thinking about what software might look like when it gets solved properly.
Not just software. Why are there twenty different types of USB ports?
Similar situation is with the programming languages. It seems like every month someone invents a new one. (And of course, when a new programming language becomes popular, the battle of frameworks starts again on the fresh territory.) Sometimes there is a good reason, different situations require different tools, but I still suspect there are way more tools than actually different situations.
Some thoughts on scaling up from one dev:
- Decide on a coding convention / style guide, and have others comment their code and name variables/functions properly
- Use an issue tracker of some kind, gitlab or whatever. Helps you prioritize and keep track of what everyone is doing. Add a section for "review-ready" and require pull-requests. This approach suits AGILE or whatever methodology you want. And, it goes without saying, use a versioning system.
- Instead of writing "everything", create a quick UML diagram of some kind as a stand-in for that "map". Then write notes and create a presentation. Likely developers will be focusing on one component at a time.
- Learn more about management and make it a priority to manage well. Developers won't stick around if you don't get this right. I think leaning towards being extra-flexible will probably be necessary at the outset, if you're not enticing people with cash.
Can you contact me to explain what it is you're working on?
Thanks for this, these are very to-the-point and useful suggestions I'll definitely be referring back to.
How do I contact you, do you have an email? Also, are you in the UK?
I'm overseas, you can try mr_freezesteam6@outlook.com
I've been contracted to work on undocumented legacy systems where none of the developers were on board anymore. So it's definitely possible for your +1 to learn and understand what your code does without any supervision.
That will be less efficient than you running them through it, so it comes down to balancing what's the optimal amount of your time to spend to make their onboarding easier.
I find having at least one other person on any project very valuable, since code reviews are a low effort, high impact technique for code quality in my experience. Those also make sure that at least 2 people know what's going on for every functionality, so it's not as painful if someone is absent or drops out.
Pair programming is also a great tool for crucial or tricky parts.
Note: The dilemma reminds me very much of replacing a system with a new one: The team working on the old one keeps adding new functionality because of business requirements, giving the new team a hard time to catch up and forcing them to aim for moving targets. I've not seen it done gracefully yet.
Reverse engineering what I've done is one thing, and I'm sure anyone can do that. I suppose I'm more worried about someone coming in and doing work in a different way than I'm used to, and sort of stepping on my toes.
I've never tried pair programming, and to be honest I have no idea how it would even work for me. (I work from home, and at whatever strange hours I feel like.) I also don't know any local people who have the requisite skills who I could even ask.
I would greatly have appreciated a second set of eyes on this thing as I was building it though, so I can see the value.
You've just discovered one of the great dilemmas. There's a huge overhead going from 1->2+ developers. It's up to you to decide whether the scope of the project necessitates biting that bullet or not.
Note that writing documentation that makes your project understandable to any dev with minimal help from you and getting a specific person to understand your code well enough to contribute are two very different things. If you hire someone (or a small team) you can spend a week (or whatever) verbally describing things that seem relevant for them to know, answering questions, and teaching in general. This is less efficient than writing documentation once and for all, but that's not a great idea for a developing codebase anyway, as you already mentioned.
Then once you already have one other person who understands things well enough, they can also teach others and write documentation (probably with some malus on efficiency and correctness since they are not you), so the effort you spent teaching them is not lost.
> So why not keep working until the project is stable and then I only have to write the docs once?
Writing docs describing your architecture, design, intent and "open questions" (things you're not yet sure about how to solve or incorporate in the design). This process can clarify many things, and can prevent needing to rewrite the code / iterate on the design, thus saving you time as well as helping people get on board.
On a related note: Even for a purely one person development, at least _some_ documentation is useful, because you yourself will need it when needing to modify anything a year after writing it. I concur with Sandro on the set of items to document.
It took me a few weeks to get productive at my current job. At that point, I was familiar with a few percent of the core system, which I was working on, and I knew basically nothing about all the peripheral services that interact with that core system (and I still don't know much about those, half a decade later). My point is that someone doesn't need to have access to anywhere near all the knowledge that's in your head to be productive; they just need to have enough knowledge to solve the particular problem that they are working on. Most projects have peripheral/isolated parts that someone can start working on pretty fast, like a frontend or an integration or something, where the instruction is basically "implement this API".
Personally, however, I don't like dealing with people, so I would only hire someone if I really had to, like if I needed a frontend that doesn't look like it's made by a backend guy.
This is valuable perspective for me. I'm very used to seeing the whole picture, and thinking about the project that way. Of course someone else coming in to work on just one area wouldn't need to do that. It does rely on the project being modular enough that the small problems can be solved in isolation, of course. My current headache is that one of them very much isn't.
It's probably the old news to a lot of people reading this blog, but I recently discovered Max Harms Crystal trilogy from 2017, and found it wonderful. It's one of the best fiction books involving AI that I've ever read (it helps that the author worked in ML field). If you haven't already seen it, the non-spoiler gist of it is that there is an AI in a robotic body, which has "multiple personalities" in its mind. The creators intended for them to merge into a single "goal thread", but they remained separate, and since the whole thing is running on an unique alien crystal computer, I guess, nobody managed to debug, or even diagnose the issue. Their interplay leads to the whole plot which ends (as spoiled in the first few paragraphs of the book) to some kind of AI apocalypse. Never mind the arrogant preface - I also was afraid that author who writes prefaces like "If you're not into STEM you should probably avoid this book" will continue to write arrogant idiocy in the body of the novel, but it's surprisingly really a good text.
The book is mostly written from the POV of one of the facets of that AI called Face, whose goal function is "to know humans and to be known by them". The author managed to write an AI which is human-like enough that it's understandable to the reader, but alien enough to feel like a non-human (compare to e.g. "Sea of Rust" where robots are waaaaay too human). The plot manages to avoid playing tired AI-related tropes straight, but swings back into some of them from more logical - and more interesting - angle. Despite being more than 5 years old, the books still doesn't feel dated in any way, so it's a big recommendation for anyone interested in fiction about AI and AI alignment. The book is freely available from author's website.
Now, I already asked r/print_sf, but I'll repeat the question here, because they were mostly unable to help me. I'm looking for fiction about robotic/machine societies. Specifically, those that are not of the class "let's pretend to write about machines, but really write about issues with humans", but rather more like thought experiments "what would a robotic society be like (with given constraints)?". I know about above-mentioned "Sea of Rust", and James P. Hogan's "Code of the Creator", but those two have boring human-like robots. There is also Greg Egan's "Diaspora", and that's closer to what I want, but it mostly deals with other stuff (blowing reader's mind with multi-dimensional movement is what I remember the best about it).
Stanislaw Lem wrote a series of short stories set in an entirely robotic universe, but they are not hard SF, more like fables.
Oh yeah the Cyberiad, with Klapaucius (sp?) and Trurl—I haven’t read it in decades but that was my introduction to Lem and I remember how impressed I was that the translator managed to convey the humor of the stories.
Seconded.
The conceit that the AI runs on a literal one-of-a-kind super computer is very clever, as it means there is no FOOM, and reason for the AI to compromise with humans.
I don't think this is as simple. One-of-a-king computer means a lot of things, including physical vulnerability (the need for crystal to survive is a major plot/AI behaviour driver). Also, at least two facets have people-oriented goal functions, so they need at least one human to function.
The Culture barely let us peek into AIs minds, unfortunately, though those little "e-mail" exchanges were fun to read sometimes.
I almost could swear I've read "Permutation City", but from the description, I can't remember anything about it, so I guess I didn't.
You would know. That one was bananas.
> Shuffle City
You mean Permutation City ?
Is there any way to access the long list of book reviews and what they were rated by the people who read them?
I believe Bldysabba is referring specifically to the book reviews for the book review contest that Scott is holding, not book reviews in general.
Indeed
TGGP, below, posted this Richard Hanania post: "The Case Against (Most) Books". https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-case-against-most-books
I find it hard not to agree with him when the books in question are full of padding, as are most bestsellers.
Disagree with him most when he writes: "I don’t believe in Great Books. After thinking about the topic a bit, I’m more certain that I’m correct. One might read old books for historical interest (Category 2), but the idea that someone writing more than say four hundred years ago could have deep insights into modern issues strikes me as farcical. If old thinkers do have insights, the same points have likely been made more recently and better by others who have had the advantage of coming after them."
First of all, what does he mean by "modern issues"? Since he mostly writes about politics and culture war issues, I'm going to assume he mostly means those things. But politics and culture war issues have little to do with life, the universe and everything, i.e., the themes in Great Books. In fact, one good reason to read Great Books is to escape the everyday "importance in dross" (To quote Gogol) attitude culture wars put one in and realize there are more important things in heaven and earth.
Society has changed greatly over the centuries, but human nature has not. One can learn much about human nature by finding out how people thought at different times in the past. Sometimes it is shocking how different people thousands of years ago thought; sometimes the shock is how similarly.
When people talk about "aligning AI with humanity" I always wonder what they have in mind by "humanity" and how deeply they have read the subjects of humans.
As for: "If old thinkers do have insights, the same points have likely been made more recently and better by others who have had the advantage of coming after them."
I get the sense he believes that only big ideas really matter and that it's better to distill the wisdom of the past into the purist compounds possible. Furthermore, he seems to think that the most important thoughts will always "stand the test of time" and that if Sophocles or Shakespear had anything important to say, you'll read pithier versions of it soon enough on Yglesius' substack.
However, I find that profound insights into life aren't usually found in tweets or blog posts, aren't easily compressed without loss of signal, and, because they can't be expressed simply, are rarely repeated. In other words, those gems of wisdom to be found in Montaigne or Goethe or Proust often can't be mined anywhere but in situ.
Old books may not help you form political opinions or tell you how to invest your earnings, but they might enhance your life like a miracle drug.
“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, 'But how could they have thought that?'—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H.G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”
-C. S. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books”
There are ways that books or reading can be overrated, but overall it was a really dumb essay. For many reasons, but one of them is that his three reasons to read books (history, historical interest and genius) actually apply to most (all?) of the old books people do read, so he undermines his own point quite a lot. (He doesn't talk about literary quality, which is one of the main reasons people read classics, but you can put that down under "genius")
For example, he mentions the Federalist Papers, and the Origin of Species, as books worth reading. If those are worth reading, what "great book" that people might read isn't worth reading? Even people who read Aristotle don't generally read the bits where he talks about how many teeth various animals have.
If I want to sympathize with what he is saying, I would say that sometimes people ascribe profundity to certain books in an inappropriate way. People think Dostoevsky must be really profound, and they say, "you can learn more about people by reading Dostoevsky than by, for example, studying psychology" -- which is silly.
I think Chesterton's Fence strongly applies here. If a book has historically been beloved and meaningful for many people, then I'm not interested in hearing anyone dismiss its value who can't first sympathetically explain what all those other people liked about it (not "they didn't have Netflix").
Honestly, so many modern dismissals of older literature stink of some form of defensiveness or cope. Reading carefully, you generally find that the person has read almost no older books and feels vaguely guilty, or that they were assigned them in school and blew it off and now feel mad at the teacher, or that they have poor language skills after minimal childhood reading and can't really process complex syntax, hence are keen to explain that if they can't follow the words then the problem must be with the book, not them. Very much a sour grapes vibe, like "knowing math is fascism anyway" or "travel sucks, we have the best of everything in my corner of the USA."
I'll take anti-classics arguments seriously when someone can seriously start with "The Republic (/ Measure for Measure/ Romance of the Three Kingdoms) is *amazing* and I *love* it," before they move on to "buuuut you can get the same thing from following Yglesias on twitter."
I guess he’s trying to be ironic when he quotes SBF at the beginning as a great moral leader, but it’s not clear why he would do this given that he appears to endorse the ideas quoted unironically. It is a bad sign when you accidentally satirize yourself within the first few paragraphs.
In his defense, I think he’s talking about popular nonfiction, the sort of books that are often totally forgotten less than 20 years after publishing. It’s a little bizarre to me that he needs a whole blog post to articulate that most of those books are in fact a few bite-sized ideas inflated with lots of hot air; it’s more than a little bizarre that he then tries to extend that lesson to all books without realizing why that lesson should probably only apply to the books of people who specialize in dropping short hot takes on modern issues. But these people are Hanania’s people, so it might be very difficult to grapple with a very real fear that internet got take thought leader culture is cognitively… superficial.
Personally I’ve never thought Hanania’s ideas were particularly good or well-justified, and I think he’s accidentally showing in this post that (along with many others from the rationalist sphere) he doesn’t actually know what goes into supporting an argument or a worldview from the ground up. He seems convinced that if somebody said it and it’s true that somebody else probably said it later, but it’s not clear why that should be so.
His example of the Amazonian philosopher seems instructive: “I don’t need to know what his ideas or arguments are to know that some guy from podunk doesn’t have any useful ideas. Next!” Yes, I’ve learned a lot from this experiment: you are provincial and prejudicial and probably shouldn’t be trusted to gather information for me.
Having come to appreciate the importance of learning the history of Physics to map out the paths not taken by theoretical exploration after I read The Science Of Mechanics by E. Mach (which is over a century old) I could not disagree more with this guy. Now if history were a linear progression from ignorance to deeper and deeper knowledge he would be right. It just happens that in many cases it’s more of a Brownian motion, so important insight from the past is often buried in old books, semi forgotten. We often build a lot on shaky foundations and questioning those foundations becomes harder and harder by the day. Seeing what people thought about our fundamental assumptions back when there was nothing built on them is often enlightening.
I avoid reading any Hanania as I find his stuff full of padding, so we agree on one thing at least: if it's full of 'am I not great to be writing this?' then drop it like a hot potato.
I have a feeling this post in MAINLY about non-fiction (as much as this category can be clearly defined for older works), but I often caught myself thinking pretty much the same things about fiction, specifically while sitting in my Russian Literature class (which takes a large part of any Russian student at any grade - I think we had the same number of those classes per week as math classes, even in "Mathematics & Physics" class in high school).
I haven't found a single thing about "War and Peace" that I was interesting to read or thought-provoking and "Crime and Punishment" evoked such revulsion in me that I only made 100 pages in before giving up in disgust and spending the rest of the evening healing my soul with a dose of my favourite fantasy (later, my essay on the damned book still received the top grade, because I was always good at writing bullshit essays, even if it caused me pain to lie about my real thoughts on the subject).
The problem is that human nature might not have changed much, but the writing style certainly did, and for the better, in my opinion. Also, we might never appreciate the works of old fully, simply because we lack the context - the memes, so to speak. It is entirely possible that Tolstoy's text invoked just as much chuckles from it contemporary readership as Unsong did from me now, but it no longer does. What's worse, the "classics" are treated with such reverence in school that they begin to seem like Holy Texts, and if one is not pressed into conforming to this particular religion, one has to became it's enemy. School certainly instilled a natural hatred of Russian classics into me - I shrink at the thought of re-reading any of them now that I'm much older, even though people tell me you appreciate them better when you grow up. I just don't see why - they mostly deal with the same things a lot of other, newer books do, but the writing is denser, the descriptions of diners and nature are utterly boring and none of the characters could possibly resonate with me - they have too much money and free time, and yet never do anything interesting - understandably (most people don't), but maddeningly.
Concerning learning "how people lived then", I'd much rather read a modern book compiling, distilling and filtering various sources. At least, it would probably omit describing the whole 12-course diner in details and just say "the diners were long". Of course, that book would make mistakes the older books wouldn't, but it also could avoid other mistakes which were simply written in because of author's position in the society and other biases, so I guess it's evens out in the end. For example, most classics deal not just with rich families, but specifically with aristocratic families - you can barely glimpse anything about the life of a rich, but not noble people (other than the disdain authors usually felt about them - the lack of true Taste in though who got rich through commerce is often a point of ridicule).
I do get WHY literature lessons are necessarily in school - the older generations want to preserve their memes, so the new generation could have a conversation with them in some shared context - but the stated reason for them (to teach children about life) is pure bullshit. This, by the way, leads into another interesting idea: literature used to be the only medium that really produced staying memes (maybe aside from music, but it was always less important). Now, we have movies, video-games, internet-only memes and tons of other stuff. Some of that is passing, and will be rightly forgotten the next week. But movies, at least, are old enough that soon children might soon not want to watch stuff from 50's or 60's anymore, and the disconnect in memes will appear. Will we get "classic movies" lessons then, or should 100 more years pass before that?
Why did Crime and Punishment evoke such a strong reaction in you?
In part, it was because I felt Dostoevsky hated Saint Petersburg - a city I always loved. I understand that it was a different city in his time, with a lot more slums and dirt, but his descriptions alone made it harder to continue reading. The rest of it... I don't remember all the details - it was more than 12 years ago - but I remember feeling a strong revulsion.
Language and literature classes in school (primary and secondary) are a case of trying to do a whole bunch of things at the same time. You want to teach: grammar, vocabulary, reading, writing, history, culture and values. You also have a group of children with wildly varying tastes that you need to keep engaged with their education. As much as I hated most of what I had to read in school (the only exception I can think of was the Scarlet Pimpernel), as an adult I can appreciate how impossible the task was.
The irony is that works with memetic value are a way to keep students involved, and studying them works towards letting children know more about the culture they are entering. I think that knowing how much of a work one needs to understand to place the work in context for memetic purposes depends on the work. It's enough to know the Cliff Notes synopsis of Moby Dick to get the cultural references, but that doesn't help with grammar, vocabulary, reading, or history.
Shakespeare is interesting because there are multiple levels on which some of his works can be memetic. Romeo and Juliet is memetic in the overall plot and in the details. If you watch West Side Story, you'll get the overall tragic romance plot, but you won't recognize the memetic "Hark! What light from yonder window breaks?" balcony scene. On the other hand, most references to the balcony scene tend to go full romantic and forget the tragedy part. This isn't the case for all of his plays; you don't need to know Titus Andronicus to understand "Villain, I have done thine mother".
As far as memes in modern media go, any meme worth remembering should self-propagate. The reason kids should study Romeo and Juliet is that the memes are different when viewed without the overall picture. We have the overall memetic tragedy story and a bunch of lesser memes that seem romantic if taken out of context. It's only taken together that you get the overall picture.
If you're only reading the Cliff Notes then you are missing out on a ton in "Moby Dick" which is one of the craziest novels ever, and I swear must have been an influence on Thomas Pynchon. "It's about this guy who goes on a whaling ship where the captain is hunting down a particular whale" is not even a drop of what the story is about.
Some books are not for everyone, and that's fine. It doesn't mean that you are stupid or illiterate or bad taste if you don't like them. It's the knee-jerk dismissal of "some old dead guy couldn't possibly have anything I need to know" that is short-sighted.
Of course there's a lot more in Moby Dick than just the whole White Whale synopsis, and it's a book that I remember not actually hating when I had to read it in school even if it left me with no desire to read it again. It also is a reference that the median American should at least be able to recognize.
The big important question is "what does the median member of society need to know?" Strictly speaking, the median person doesn't need to know anything about Moby Dick, or of Don Quixote, or A Tale of Two Cities. (They also don't need to know anything about the rules of professional sports, or the MCU, or Eurovision.) By insisting that this is stuff that they need to know, rather than being honest about this stuff being useful but optional, you're setting them up to distrust education.
Then 'classic lit' is not for you, and often much of what is presented isn't for a particular person. I try not to go "this is rubbish" because other people have found value in it, and just because it's not to my taste does not mean I'm right and they are wrong.
I do think the divergence between how people read then, and what they found interesting, and how people read now and what we find interesting, can be instructive. What is your favourite work of fantasy, that you went back to? Do you like that it doesn't bother describing the physical environment of its work and instead gets you that hit of action right away with how the hero went POW! with his magic sword and the villain went OOF! and then fired a ZOWIE! fireball right back but three strikes later the hero ZAM! cut his head off and WON!!!!
Have you anything you would quote as being, in your mind, good/fine writing?
"At least, it would probably omit describing the whole 12-course diner in details and just say "the diners were long".
The diners may have been long, but I think you mean the dinners 😀 And simply distilling it down to "the dinners were long" tells you nothing. Why twelve courses? Why served like that? A la Française or a la Russe? What meats? Why those? Why do we not care about food in the same way, what kind of agricultural model have we moved to where you can get seasonal crops year round and exotics easily available? How was this possible? If we have moved on, then why are shows like adaptations of Jane Austen and the Bridgerton novels so popular?
For instance, did you know in Victorian times, men and women were served different soups? It was considered more suitable for ladies to have light, vegetable soups wile men got the heavier, meatier ones. There's an entire world of discussion packed in there about everything from social attitudes to health effects (if women are getting less meat, that means less iron and B vitamins and this can show up in problems around menstruation) but I would never have known it if not for this historical cookery show about a real cook and a real household. Skipping description with "the dinners were long" leaves you lacking a lot of things you don't know, and don't know that you don't know.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IwwOS_K-GA&list=PLx2QMoA1Th9deXXbo7htq21CUPqEPPGuc&index=56
Distilling it down to a bullet-point list of five top tips won't really let you know what was going on or why. I don't know what field of study or work you are in, but for maths (for example) do you think that an understanding of why Jones worked fifty years on the Kettle Problem could really be conveyed by "the sums were very hard"?
This is why modern writers write historical characters as though they stepped right out of the 21st century - because they don't understand the background, or they think their audience won't, and probably they're right there. But a modern audience will never learn to stretch their mental muscles if the assumptions remain baked in that "they're too dumb and lazy to think, we have to spoonfeed them".
By the way, this is the size of spit in an old-fashioned kitchen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bflpcnvb28w
The Victorian era lasted more than sixty years, and a whole lot of people (even if we just concentrate on Britain). Maybe it happened that men and women were served different soups, but I really wonder what percentage of dinners that rule applied to (even of upper class dinners, obviously for most people making different soups like that would be much too inconvenient).
But it's the kind of tiny, fascinating detail about class differences that you won't get out of a conventional history book of "great names and dates of battles", much less some "I know all I need to know about back then, I don't need to learn anything new" attitude.
You can't measure how much society has changed, if it has changed, and in what direction it has changed, if you keep yourself wilfully ignorant of how the past was different. "Oh but reading that old book is too hard, give me the five bullet points version!" leads as easily to "reading that entire article is too hard, give me the five bullet points version!" and the irony where Hanania cannot produce the five bullet points version because he wants/needs to develop his line of thought. By his own metric, if the work he did there was any good, it could be condensed down to a six-line paragraph. Since he didn't do that, then the work must not be any good!
Yes, I agree with all that, I'm am just skeptical that this particular detail is actually true, even for the upper classes (except maybe exceptionally).
> What is your favourite work of fantasy, that you went back to?
It was a book by Max Frei, a "feel good" kind of fantasy where little tense action really happens, but people talk, eat and joke with each other (think Becky Chambers' books, but in a somewhat unique fantasy world). "Wait, didn't you just say you don't like descriptions of long dinners (thanks for the correction :) ) and people who don't do much of anything?" you might ask. Why, yes, but there is a difference, even if it might be hard to describe. The chief one is tone. Frei's books are funny and light-hearted. The banter is witty, the characters are all appealing, and I find description of food and drink quick and understandable enough. On the other hand, most of Russian classic literature is about some kind of suffering. I... Just don't like to read about people who suffer, but either can't, or won't do anything about this, or try and fail. Golden Age sci-fi (which I has been reading since early childhood) tradition of characters overcoming any obstacles through skill and intelligence spoiled me.
But what about comedies, then? Classic comedies almost never produce a chuckle from me, unless played on stage (I've been to a great play based on "The Pickwick Papers", then I tried to read the original book and found it more on the boring side, for example; I think the first comic writer I can laugh along with is Jerome K. Jerome, but only P.G. Wodehouse REALLY manages to make me smile consistently). Hell, I even liked some staged plays based on that same Russian classics I disliked so much in school - somehow, they only come alive on stage. And I love modern productions of Goldoni's plays, though I'm sure reading them from the page is much less fun (then again, plays are meant to be played, not read, so one have to cut them some slack).
On the instant gratification front, I don't mind books without a lot of action, or with long pauses in-between action scenes - or I wouldn't be Neal Stephenson's fan, I actually LOVE his multi-page info-dumps that many readers dislike - but classical literature is... built for a different time, I guess. So I'd rather read "Baroque Cycle" than any book actually written at the time which this series describes and trust Stephenson's research to get the details right.
I tend to like detailed description (up to a point, it can be overdone) and info-dumps need to be done well or they are simply tedious and boring.
Tastes differ! And yes, the acted version of plays is the better version, but Shakespeare manages to make it that his language is also very readable on the page.
Not so familiar with later-period Stephenson, but my main impression of the info-dumps in his earlier works was the enthusiasm which which they were delivered. Stephenson is geeking out on a story or idea, real or fictional, the words just tumbling out, and if you share his sensibility then you're right along for the ride.
I thought Gogol's Dead Souls was extremely funny.
OK, I'll admit Gogol wasn't the worst. I still didn't find him exactly EXTREMELY funny, but his works were more fun than most other authors. For my final school exam, I wrote essay on "Dead Souls", because it was the least awful of the themes. It's still not "12 Chairs", but at least the main character here is proactive and somewhat cunning.
I hated every work of literature I was forced to read in school too. I believe schools should be outlawed from teaching literature because all they do is ruin it.
Which of the book reviews that you loved didn't make it into the finals?
I enjoyed The Alexander Romance https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AtGIIv371v0Yu35eNsIxJr67dw4SHOiGdKrqmoKt2hg/edit#heading=h.qku6a39xims7 a lot. For a while, I was convinced I was reading actual Scottish writing. It's fun and not taking itself terribly seriously.
I enjoyed "The Alexander Romance" as well; it was pretty hilarious. I also quite liked "A Soldier's Story of His Regiment", which had some interesting musings on the mentality of the author and his contemporaries. The "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" review had somewhat overwrought prose, but made interesting points. "The Making Of The Atomic Bomb (1)" was a highly interesting read.
Same, The Alexander Romance is the only one (out of maybe a dozen?) for which I gave 10/10. I still think it reasonably likely that it's by Scott, or else it's someone who is really good at emulating the style of e.g. his Arabian Nights book review.
I really enjoyed the "Making of Price of Persia" review. The gifs illustrating each part of the game referenced were extremely helpful and must have taken some time to set up. Great work!
I made it all the way through the "The Educated Mind" review that took up four pages in the table of contents due to all the subheads. I have to say it was a very good review, but way too long.
Another book review I really liked: "Why Does He Do That?"
It was well written, in-depth, and quite poignant. The author took the risk of being vulnerable, talking about a troubled relationship he/she had. (Yes, of course anonymity makes it easier, but it still must have been hard to put these words on paper.) I was hoping this book would be chosen as a finalist. I suppose it's not surprising that a book that deals mostly with feelings and relationships wouldn't make the cut on ACX, but I applaud the reviewer for making an unusual choice.
That one was mine, thank you for your kind words! Glad that the description of my own experience resonated, I found the hardest part wasn't describing it, but making it clear that I don't consider it to actually even be a particularly severe example of the phenomenon the book describes.
I really liked "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes." It was concise, witty, and interesting. (Also, the Piraha psychology is disturbing, to put it mildly. When the author tells them of his stepmother's suicide, they laugh at her for being stupid!)
I also liked "The Bomb" a lot.
Also "Power, Sex, Suicide", "Science Fictions", and surprisingly (because I don't have a very high opinion of the book itself) "Bullshit Jobs".
But most of my favorites made it into the finals. I have read 13 of the finalists, and 11 of them got a 9 or 10 from me.
I wrote the Bullshit Jobs review. I was a bit worried that taking a Marxist line was going to alienate a lot of people, so glad someone liked it.
What was your issue with the original book? I'd be interested in whether you thought the review made the case that a large fraction of work in the modern West is BS more convincingly.
I should say that my opinion of the book may be unfair. I haven't read it, and only knew it from some second-hand accounts. I think I have some beef with the extremely negative connotation of the word "bullshit job".
For example, I can accept to regard jobs in zero-sum games (arms races of lawyers, advertising etc) as non-productive. I doubt that it gives *zero* benefit, but little benefit on the margin. Those are inefficiencies that come with our system, and I buy the thesis of the book that those are inefficiencies. But this doesn't imply that there are systems which overall have lower inefficiencies. Certainly other systems (say, Soviet union communism) was more efficient on some of the issues (less lawyers or so), but less efficient on others.
If I remember right, you discussed these things explicitly in your review, and I found your discussion quite adequate, but in other places I have just heard the strawman(?) version: we are so bad, our system/government/companies are so bad, why don't we just cancel the unnecessary jobs? I am not sure how much this strawman position is actually in the book itself. But I think it's easy to jump to this conclusion from the term "bullshit job".
In any case, thank you for the excellent review!
Cheers.
That was also my key problem with Greaber's book. Although in the book he doesn't just fail to offer any kind of realistic alternative, he barely discusses economic systems at all.
Still, I do think asking "why can't things just be better?" is actually not entirely unreasonable. Because the number of BS jobs seems to have grown so much since the late 20th century, probably mostly due to offshoring but at least partly because they have a natural tendency to spread in un-regulated free-market economies. And it's not clear what the limit is on how much of the economy they can take up.
I don't know if you're in the UK, but my perspective here is that they're already most of the economy, and I think the UK is near the forefront of this trend. I don't think
To me it looks like things were just better 30 or 40 years ago, under what's broadly the same social system.
I also don't think any Soviet style systems ever reached anything like this level of inefficiency, and that asymmetry should factor in quite heavily when we're comparing systems.
Yes, I agree that we should try to make things better. There are definitely some concrete steps: sometimes consists of reducing regulations, have better/clearer laws (less need for lawyers), or have regulations which limit arms races.
I do agree with your diagnostics that BS jobs are more common nowadays. Actually, my preferred perspective is the other way around. I think our society has become so good that it can afford BS jobs while still providing and producing enough stuff for their citizens, and that this slack *causes* a lot of BS jobs. At least for arms-races. If companies couldn't afford to put so much effort into advertisement, they simply wouldn't.
I think arms races go pretty far. There is also competition of countries about who has the most predictable system, because this is attractive for companies. But predictable systems come with lots of laws and lawyers.
So in a high-wealth system which forces people to take jobs, I think that we will always fill up with BS jobs until the available workforce is used up. It's just that 30 years ago we had less slack for BS jobs, and now we have more slack.
Put like this, it would actually be a pretty strong argument for not forcing people to do jobs, like Universal Basic Income, or reducing the worktime per person. As a society, I think we would have the resources for that. But I don't claim to understand all ramifications (probably no one does), especially with competition between countries.
"I think our society has become so good that it can afford BS jobs while still providing and producing enough stuff for their citizens, and that this slack *causes* a lot of BS jobs"
There are so many places in the USA that I consider to be absolute shitholes. Ugly places and poorly maintained, and so many people are unhealthy. Yes everybody has enough "stuff," but the amount of slack in society is decided by the people and their expectations. It would be interesting to look at which countries have the most bullshit jobs.
In terms of efficiency, my hunch is that most of the bullshit jobs are white collar. If you are paying some middle manager 3x a garbage mans salary, then that increases the lost opportunity.
Looks like it's okay to do this (thanks to drosophilist for asking): I wrote the first of the two Atlas Shrugged reviews. If anyone gave it a read, I'd love to hear feedback! It took an awfully large amount of time to write, and if there are obvious flaws, I'd like to avoid them in the future.
What a coincidence! I wrote the second of the Atlas Shrugged reviews. Great minds think alike, I guess?
I refrained from grading your review, because somehow it felt like a conflict of interest, but I'll echo what demost and Melvin said below: it was too long and somewhat meandering. Also, you didn't really critique the ideas in the book. You made the good point that some people wouldn't be able to survive in Rand's society through no fault of their own (say, because they're elderly or disabled) and they would need help, but other than that, you accepted Rand's ideas pretty much wholesale.
For what it's worth, I think you write well, as in, your sentences and paragraphs are easy to follow and they flow together well, just, you should work on the overall structure of your text. Brevity is the soul of wit, etc.
Heh, yeah, and I clearly have some issues with brevity.
I read through your review as well, and distinctly remember disliking it until you finished the summary, then doing a one-eighty and enjoying the rest. Seems like summary really is the bane of Atlas reviews.
The general lack of critique was intentional, I don't think I'd change that on a rewrite. Rand presented some interesting ideas in a way I hadn't really seen before, and one of my main goals with the essay was to pass that along to others. Which, ah, wasn't a great tactic for people who already know about the book. Go figure.
But yeah, glad to find a fellow Atlas reviewer! One of us'll break into the finalists one of these days. Just a matter of time!
Ok, first some principled comments:
- I don't think that it was a good idea to pick Atlas Shrugged. Not only have many people an opinion on it, a lot of them have a *strong* opinion on it. You will have a very diverse readership, from people who know nothing about the book, to people who have known the whole discussion about it for years. (I am somewhat in the middle.) Your review addresses the first group, but doesn't even try to work for the latter type, or people in between.
- You deliberately restrict to your own perspective of the book itself. I can see where this decision comes from, but it doesn't work for me. The book is not so well-known for its writing style or its fascinating story (though apparently both are excellent), but because lots of people have been fighting about the ideology. So to me, the interesting aspect of the book is not the storyline, but rather why so many people are so much enchanted or upset by the ideology. I would have liked to get at least some idea of the impact that the book had.
- Also, perhaps the most important question: do the ideas in the book work? Do you think they work for you as a personal ideology? In general for society? You have bits about this in the review (that even a policeman government needs to get money somewhere), but this is just a few gems hidden in a vast amount of text. The last sections of the review are the best part for me, because they finally address these points, but this is already 20 pages into the review.
A bit more concrete advice:
- At the beginning you introduce a lot of characters one after the other. There are lots of names, of people and companies. This is too much to follow in a short time. Likewise, it's quite hard to follow the plot, simply because it is so complex and involves so many people and names. (Another reason why Atlas Shrugged is a difficult book to review.) In the end, the plot is not really so important for your review, and your review is better in places where you don't try to describe the plot. (E.g., the role of the government.) And as a reader, I felt at the beginning I would miss the point if I can't follow the plot.
- I found the headers and subheaders really nice. They gave some structure to the text.
Overall, I am afraid that the review didn't work well for me. I hope this is not too devastating. I appreciate that you put a lot of work in the review. In the end, it was an alignment problem: probably I wasn't in your target group for the review, and the larger parts of your review were not on the questions that I would have found most interesting about the novel.
"I don't think that it was a good idea to pick Atlas Shrugged."
I asked myself, "Should I review Atlas Shrugged?" and I thought of the reasons not to do it (famous book, a work of fiction), and then I dismissed those reasons and decided, to heck with it, I love the book and I'm going to pour my love (and critical thinking) into my review, and to heck with whether anyone thinks it's a good idea. It's what Rand herself would have done!
Also, it seems that most people either love Atlas Shrugged and accept it uncritically, or they hate it like it's some sort of Satanic text. I thought I would take the middle path: talk about what is wrong with the philosophy presented in the novel, while also appreciating the novel's great aspects.
Have you read the second Atlas Shrugged review? What did you think of it?
Your review worked better for me than the other. It was much more stringent and to the point. I appreciated your decision to keep the synopsis of the book short (I could follow this part well, but this was also right after reading review 1), and then to focus on different aspects. I think you did a good job pointing out how unrealistic the whole system is. Though to be honest: that seems not so hard to notice, especially if you are used to the depth of ACX posts.
Overall, I enjoyed reading the review, and it gave me a good impression of the book. I felt it had little impact on my worldview otherwise; I don't see the world through a new lens. But that's fine, that's just because Rand's utopia is too unrealistic to take it serious, and you also made that clear. I wouldn't have recommended it for the final, but that is also an immensely high bar. There is always half a dozen finalist which totally blow my mind.
One thing that I still wonder after reading both reviews is why many people like the Atlantis from the book so much. I can't really imagine that they actually believe that any of this would be a good idea. Perhaps this isn't important to them, and they just want to dream about a novel/utopia which divides the world clearly in good and evil, and makes them feel like they have ever been on the side of good? When I read fantasy novels, I also prefer simple god/bad schemes over more realistic grey areas. But from what I have heard, some people act like they believe in it. Well, people are hard to understand.
A lot of good stuff in this comment, thanks! I unfortunately have had no exposure to people who talk about/know about this book, so it's unsurprising that I can't really cater to that audience. The ACX base of reviewers is definitely better read than my social group, which kind of leaves me high and dry. I think I'm okay with that, even if it costs me points. Still, shame that the people who would benefit most from the review probably aren't going to be voting on it.
Length was an issue that I was kind of aware of even when I posted, but I didn't totally understand how to deal with it. I think you raise a good point, some cuts were needed early on. The context of some characters is nice, but ultimately irrelevant to most of the threads I ended up pursuing.
P.S.: It might be an idea to read some other reviews who also looked into classics, so that you get an outside perspective. "On the Marble Cliffs" reached the finals, and is particularly not just about the book, but about the meaning of the book in its historical context.
There were also reviews of "War and Peace" and "Fathers and Sons". Those are decent. Not as good as finalists (which is a really tough bar), but I found that they did a good job in telling me about the novels themselves and the philosophy of the authors and/or their times, without getting lost in the plots.
Yeah, I read through several other finalists, ostensibly in prep, but actually just because I enjoy reading that sort of thing. Trouble is that I haven't read the classics which were being reviewed, so I didn't really get a grasp on how much was being kept/cut/expounded upon. They were enjoyable reads, though!
I skimmed it.
Briefly: it's too long and too unfocused. Too much of a summary rather than a review.
I feel like Atlas Shrugged is already pretty well-trodden ground, so if you're going to choose it as a subject for a review then you need to have an interesting and fresh perspective on it, which is something I can't really find in your review.
I feel like 'Atlas Shrugged is already pretty well-trodden ground' is the fundamental disconnect for me. I've never heard squat about it, so I felt compelled to summarize where perhaps I should have cut. Ah well. Looking at previous reviews, I thought I'd hit on a fresh perspective, focusing more on the emotional thrust of the story, then using that as a springboard to talk about the philosophy, but I guess that didn't stick.
There is only a handful of other books that got two reviews. Not only that, there were *also* two non-finalist reviews on Atlas Shrugged in the 2021 contest (link below if you are interested). This probably makes it the most-covered book in the ACX contest. So perhaps ACX readers are specifically aware of this book? I think I have also seen it mentioned a few times in Scotts posts or the comments, but never noticed outside of ACX.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-168
I’m now following Sam Altman, Yann LeCun and Richard Altman on Twitter, and damn, I do not like or trust these guys. LeCun is the worst. He can’t even argue points with people concerned about AI disasters, just calls them idiots, fools, jerks, crazies etc. Is particularly savage in his mockery of Yudkowsky. But all 3 of them sound as though they think what they’ve accomplished with AI has given them a mandate to take charge of the country or perhaps the world — as though they’ve been elected president, or maybe sort of a secular version of the Pope. They’re tweeting about things they have no special knowledge of — land values and who should benefit from them (Altman), IQ, and how its major value isn’t the talents you have but the confidence they give (Ngo, and he doesn’t know shit about the subject). I don’t really mind their expressing views about things they have no expert knowledge of — everybody does that on Twitter. It’s something about the *tone*: “Life has validated me.” You get the feeling they all believe the world would be better off if the other males were sterilized and the 3 of them went to a sperm bank, a high end one, you know, one that supplied the most exquisitely nasty porn as a donation aid, and jerked off twice a day for a month to fill up the bellies of the women of the world with blokes like them. Meanwhile, to my eye they all have some pretty significant deficits in things like ability to grasp the world view of someone who does not agree with you — social skills — debate skills — empathy — sense of humor — and love of things beyond excelling in the tech world (history? sociology? psychology? the arts? spirituality?) The poor world does not need a new generation in which everybody is an Altman, a LeCun or a Ngo. FML. I'd rather have a bunch of kids from that movie where all the kids were beautiful platinum blonds with expressionless faces. What was that movie??
Wow, I am truly unhappy when I contemplate how much power people like Altman, LeCun and Ngo have over the course things take with AI. Meanwhile, Yudkowsky, who used to infuriate me, is sort of growing on me. All the faults those other 3 have ? He has none of them. He may not be right — who the hell knows — but he sure as fuck is honest and real: Just a chubby, melancholy genius in a fedora, with no desire to take over the world or fill the planet up with his offspring, telling us the stuff about AI he thinks is true.
People who are familiar with these 4 guys: What’s your read of them?
So, more Wily than Light? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgGYwXYt3J0
Yikes.
I share the sense that EY is annoying, but in a safe and even somewhat endearing way. He may be deluded sometimes, but I don't think he would lie.
On the other hand, reading some of LeCun's arguments against Eliezer's doomerism (https://thezvi.substack.com/p/transcript-and-brief-response-to) made me dramatically more worried about AI safety than I'd ever been before, just based on how vague and how terribly reasoned they were. Clearly LeCun is too smart to plausibly believe any of the nonsense points he's making in that thread, like that AIs are only as dangerous as corporations or that corporate governance systems definitely work to prevent them from doing harm, or that Facebook (!) is a force for good (!!!). If someone with inside knowledge is falling back on these obviously false points in a public forum, that suggests to me that the truth is simply unspeakable, and that's a scary place for the rest of us to be.
On the bright side, it's also possible that LeCun's public statements are just written by some PR lackey at Facebook, and maybe he wouldn't endorse his arguments, either.
I don't think LeCun's tweets are written by a PR person, because a PR person would surely be more courteous and persuasive. All of LeCun's tweets are as awful as the ones in the exchange Zvi posted. He fails to grasp the points made by people with concerns about AI -- not all are "doomers" -- and says either "of course we will make sure future AI is safe" or "only an idiot would worry about this stuff" or both. I'm not sure that's because the truth is unspeakable. It might be, but in that case why is he not trying to do a better job of reassuring people, if only to protect AI development from being slowed by people's concerns? If you hear someone out, summarize their points, ask "have I understood what you're worried about?" and then give a clear, courteous explanation of what you see as reasons not to worry, you greatly reduce the intensity of the conflict, and you probably truly do lesson the fears of some people. And you can do that *even if you know the truth is even worse than what the person fears.*
So to me it seems more likely that in these tweets we are hearing his actual mental process, which is characterized by inability to grasp the point of view of people unlike himself, rapid mental devaluation of people who do not share his point of view, and recourse to verbal bullying. I get that he is a genius in his field, but the people who have a lot of power in these tech companies are in many ways going to be running the world for the next hundred years. This guy, in fact all of these guys, just seem to me very very deficient in the qualities that are needed in people who have so much power over society.
Fair, but assuming the tweets are his real voice, I feel like I still don't have a good theory of mind for someone like LeCun.
The arrogant-autist model, rounding LeCun off to someone who just "can't grasp the point of view of people unlike himself," makes it sound as though EY's cautionary counterarguments are grounded in some sort of subtle lived experience that LeCun could only access through empathy. But "Aren't AIs far more powerful and unpredictable than human corporations, given their more rapid evolution, less transparent action, and less well-understood underlying architecture?" and "Umm, don't corporations notoriously do a huge amount of harm in spite of all our governance structures?" are not subtle or hard-to-grasp counters. If LeCun has basic intelligence and substantial skin in the game, then I would expect him to have independently reached EY's points in that thread, long ago. And if that's the case, then he should also find it easy to acknowledge them, then calmly pull out the countervailing arguments that convinced him these are *not* concerns after all.
By contrast, resorting to verbal aggression is a fear/frustration move, suggesting that either LeCun either is unable to understand what EY is arguing, or that he understands it, has no good response and is afraid to admit it. If it's the former, then LeCun is a technically brilliant person with disability-level informal reasoning deficits. And if it's the latter, then by implication LeCun is not just an arrogant jerk, but a corrupt and evil man who is obstructing responsible risk analysis because the personal payoffs are just too tempting.
I don't want to live in a world where either of these could be the true explanation-- but I don't understand what else I'm missing to make it make sense?
I just sat here staring out the window for 15 mins. thinking about what you're saying and asking. What's happening in his mind? I have a sort of intuition about it, but it's like some fish deep down that I can't pull to the surface (or possibly an old boot), and I have to go to work. But I think I'll have some thoughts later.
That has been the pitfall of Science Wins Over Religion, Suckers: the secularists, having replaced the clergy and the pope, immediately set themselves up as the new clergy and pope.
Look at Neil deGrasse Tyson spouting opinions on all and sundry.
"I am Very Smart in STEM topics and/or I am successful in academia, pop-sci, or as a businessman, hence my pronouncements are the new Gospel because I'm smart, science-y and well-off".
This is human nature.
I don't know is this is any consolation, but at least the GPT-3.5 version of chatGPT that I've played with seems to have incorporated a surprising amount of respect for religious figures. I don't know whether it got this from its training set data or from RLHF.
I tried to get it to recognize that the classic "Buddha sends a bereaved woman looking for a cup of mustard seed from a house where no one has died" story would fail in an area with recently constructed homes, and the robot basically refused.
Ah, is that a Buddhist story or an Indian one? Because I saw it in a Tamil devotional movie where the young son has died, the bereaved mother appeals to her husband, a great devotee of Shiva, to bring him back to life by his prayers, and he tells her that this can be done if she gets a cup of mustard seed from a house where no-one has died.
Of course she fails at this task. The moral being, death is a natural part of life, even accidental or sudden death, and nobody escapes it.
Yes, there may well be versions in both religions. The nearly identical Buddhist one is e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kisa_Gotami
I tried leading chatGPT through the calculation to see why houses less than 30 years old or so had around a 50:50 chance of having had no one die in them. I tried to walk it through writing a story where the Buddha sent her on her errand, she finds such a house, and she learns the valuable moral that religious leaders can screw up. The robot refused, and emitted a wokescold instead. So, evidently chatGPT (at least version 3.5) has gotten respect for religious leaders from somewhere, maybe from the bulk text of its training set, maybe from RLHF.
?
I don't get how any of this is remotely related to the Science vs. Religion angle. Popular people (mainly merchants and rulers) were pontificating about everything long before the word "Science" was even coined. In the 19th century/early 20th the idea of the "Public Intellectual", a philosopher/writer who was wide-ranging and has opinions about everything, appeared, and in the mid-late 20th century the Pop Scientist joined the ranks of the professions allowed to be Public Intellectuals. Tech founders joined the ranks starting in the early 2000s.
The decline of Religion (in the west, the clergy is still very alive and well in Muslim societies and cultures everywhere) is an independent phenomenon that resulted in the clergy no longer being acceptabe Public Intellectuals, but I see no indication at all it was a 0-sum thing where the clery had to fall in order for the Scientist to rise. After all most Public Intellectuals are still not STEM Scientists or tech founders.
My college boyfriend, who probably had Aspergers, was a chess genius. He was champion for his state when he was 14 or so, and then in his early 20’s while in med school competed in an international correspondence chess championship. He won in the US, went on to compete in the world event, and won that too. He’d read lots of chess books, of course, but a lot of what he knew he couldn’t put into words — I know, because I used to try to get him to explain to me how he knew to make certain moves, and he couldn’t. He was like those autistic people who can’t do arithmetic but can recognize a 6-digit prime number. I think with some very complex things, the parts of our mind that are smart in the usual ways are not smart *enough* to figure them via the application of reasoning. Some people seem to have the ability to pull on some pattern-recognition part of the brain and use that. I think that’s what my college boyfriend did, and I’m guessing that’s what Yudkowsky’s done regarding how AI is going to develop and how things are going to play out.
I’m a psychologist, and many of my patients are mildly or moderately autistic. I’ve elected to see a lot of people of the sort because I really warm
Sure, but Religion was the True Truth that Explained All. Then Science elbowed its way into the spotlight there, and now we had a new True Truth that Explained All, and a new cadre of experts in white coats to explain it to us, the humble laity too ignorant and uneducated to understand it.
There are a lot of appeals today to Trust The Science when it comes to all sorts of social issues, and competing interpretations of the sayings, and our very own Creation Story Adam and Eve Ate The Apple And This Is Why Bad Things in the shape of evolutionary psychology just-so stories ("men like to sleep around because of evolution, you see").
The particular people quoted here *are* relying on Trust Me, I Know STEM to back up their opinions of the likelihood of AI doom. We're not yet at the point of "I am the world's greatest chef so I get to say if it's true or not".
Everything you said is true, but I don't see how it applies to Silicon Valley wannabes. Those people sometimes **Enrage** the kind of people you mention, for example many of them were against Covid regulations, for Free Speech, against government thinking it knows best, etc...
I don't want to glorify or defend them, there are more than one way to be wrong and bad, and Silicon Valley delusions are their own breed of wrong and bad. I just don't think they are the "I FU***NG LOVE SCIENCE" types, they are the "I FU***NG LOVE TECH" types, where "TECH" is of course a very shallow and simplified interpretation of techonology and its role in society that boils down to something like "tech is when make apps to do things that nobody asked for, the more I make such apps, the more tech". But regardless, they are a very different subculture.
Science and Tech have been conflated a lot, though, that's how we get STEM in the first place as an acronym. I think if you asked for the source of their confidence about a piece of technology, one at least of the reasons would be "it's science-based and we know how science works and how to test hypotheses and falsify them".
It relates in that the "Religion v. Science" is/has been really a fight between two religions with one of them claiming the legitimacy of science for themselves, while acting in the very same superstitious authoritarian way as their purported opponents.
"Having a gun in the house makes you more likely to be murdered!"
"Smoking is deadly, but secondhand smoke is even deadlier!"
"Oat Bran! Resveratrol! Phen-Fen!"
"Covid is so deadly that you can't protest lockdowns, but not so deadly that you can't protest racism!"
"Stochastic terrorism!"
"Generational trauma!"
You're completely correct that this is non-unique. The only kink is that the current animists are claiming that their deity is natural.
Some partial and distorted view of science and the scientific method is currently being used to legitimize power structures by pretending that political decisions are in fact just technical. Just look at the whole covid/lockdown/mask/vaccine debate. Power always needs an ideology to support it. Religion was pretty effective at that and still is in some context (mainly the Islamic world, but there are major Christian and Buddhist parties and similar power structures still around all over the world). But it’s hard to update religion effectively and new stuff keeps coming up. The elites need something else to rely on. Science can become the basis for the ideological machinery they need, as long as one does not look to closely to what actual science is. Hence people like Neil de Grasse Tyson or Bill Nye and similar popularizers who have little to do with actual science, become public intellectuals.
Or the blithe belief that all we need to do to fix up society is to vote some technocrats into power, and if the ignorant dumb masses won't do that, then just appoint the technocrats into unelected positions, and Bob's your uncle.
I know, right? I have the impression that we actually managed to be atheists for about a decade (1998-2008) and then a new batch of religious thinking arrived. Thanks social media, I guess
I recently heard journalist Mike Moynihan, on the Fifth Column podcast, describe Altman as “the biggest asshole I’ve ever interviewed”, giving as his reason the very attitude you highlight: “I founded a successful tech company, therefore here are my pronouncements on every other damn thing, you’re welcome.”
I've met Richard Ngo a couple of times IRL and he was a pleasant and chill dude, to the point where reading your perception of him was extremely jarring. Sometimes people are exactly like their online persona, but often it is a very lossy representation!
Also, I love Eliezer but in my mind he displays the exact traits you seem to dislike, which makes your rant even more confusing. I don't know anything about the other two, so maybe that explains part of it.
Seconded that characterizing Yudkowsky as a humble, down-to-earth guy who *doesn’t* make overconfident pronouncements out of a misplaced sense that he is an authority is… strange. The opposite has, as far as I can tell, been exactly his brand since day 1.
Sigh. You may be right. I have not read his books & other stuff. I don't have a lot of pieces of the big picture.
I don't follow any of the 3 you mention nor read any of their other writing, but I'll second that Yud is the absolute king of arrogance. HPMOR was fun at times, but is basically your typical wish fulfilment isekai, and with Yud as the main character. I can't stand his nonfiction writing in particular, since it exudes a "if you don't agree with me you're an idiot"-vibe.
His recent interviews aren't better - he is together with a patient person asking him questions were any reasonable person would try their best to convince the interviewer, and instead he just turns it into an inverted socratic dialogue were the interviewer suddenly is supposed to convince Yud. And if he fails Yud won, QED. Super arrogant and cranky. Also atrocious social skills, since this is not how you convince the listeners (and in general he does not show good people skills at all).
I listened to his interview on EconTalk last week and it was painful. He refused to answer questions directly, he would only try to engage in a socratic dialog about them using poor analogies or hypotheticals. When ever Roberts wouldn't respond in a way Yud expected, the dialog kind of fell apart because it wasn't running on the rails anymore.
This reminded me of how i used to "debate" when i was like a college sophomore. I had an understanding of my argument, but not any kind of sophisticated understanding of the other side's arguments so i was never going to convince someone of anything. I was very shocked it was so bad, maybe this was just an off day for him?
Refuting the reasons why people don't think something is actually dangerous sounds like a good way to convince people that it might actually be quite dangerous.
That's a good point. Essentially: "The safety mechanism that you are pointing to and relying on will not work and here is why." I am reminded of https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2021/01/22/brush-with-catastrophe-the-day-the-u-s-almost-nuked-itself/ "five of the six steps (or six of seven) required for a thermonuclear detonation did occur."
His writing, especially his fiction, is entertaining if you don't take him seriously as a guru. It helps to be that bit older and to have had some exposure to different types of writing - he likes to play the Wise Old Elder character in his writing, and it reminds me of Aleister Crowley's self-insert character Simon Iff:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Iff
The big problem with HPMOR was that, whatever he said later and in the editing, Harry Three-Names *is* the kid Gary Stu version of him at that age - I was really smart, and nobody encouraged me, and I had to be an autodidact because my teachers were so dumb and stupid, and had I gone to college I would still have been smarter than my tutors, so this is me spreading the Good Word of Science and how I can win in retrospect!
Thus making Harry an insufferable brat who should have been turned into a frog by Minerva McGonagall the second he and his ridiculous set of step-parents started laughing about how funny it was that he bit his teacher, just like a rabid dog! If you're any kind of experienced teacher, you know precisely what kind of a family this is, and how they'll be: Junior will be a brat who starts fights in class, won't pay attention, will physically attack his classmates and teachers, and when called in the parents will be "Stop picking on my darling boy" instead of exerting any discipline. Frog now, avoid trouble later.
I think what happened was a bunch of smart and quirky 20 year olds discovered him, took him as a guru, and had a wonderful time as their own little discussion club solving the problems of the world via Being Really Smart - and no problems there, good luck to them, we were all 20 and thought we knew better than anyone else ourselves at one time.
But now they're in their 30s, their club has been exported to the wider world, and the feet of clay are becoming apparent. I think if you don't take Yud as a guru *or* a devil, make your own mind up, and have your own opinions, you'll get on okay with him/his public image.
Ideally, perhaps. Really, it mostly just gets the listener to give up and tune out.
> They’re tweeting about things they have no special knowledge of
I think a funny reply would be a screenshot from their AI, contradicting them.
I don't know Richard Altman (and who's that "ngo" that you keep mentioning ? is it another name for Richard ?), but I know Sam and Yan and Yud.
Sam Altman : Pretty much what I would expect, yes. For a more bearable variant of the "Startup founder who managed to milk the VCs and now he thinks his opinions are the words of an oracle" trope, see Paul Graham. He is smart, and he is insightful, and he ideologically aligns with many things I believe in (Free Speech, etc...), but he sometimes, with his own admission, goes too far into the direction of "I founded n successful startups [ 1 < n < 5], here's why I think the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is actually 69, not 42".
Sam Altman is a typical "thirty before thirty" vibe (without the fraud, till now) guy, his company's name alone is an extremly funny joke (""""""""Open"""""""" AI, hilarious) but he doesn't seem to get it, he shares many of the exact same delusions and blinding biases that the social class of "Young Startup Founders living in Silicon Valley" shares and believes in, which is a heck of a lot.
Yan Lecun : Brilliant guy. He doesn't strike me as arrogant. I have seen woke "ethicists" call him their usual tiresome song, "white privileged male yadayada", I can understand why he has become increasingly rough and impatient. Imagine you're a literal founder of an important and complex field, you worked in Bell Labs (a legend among Computer Scientists and any reader of tech history). You were doing groundbreaking foundational work in a field that now rules the world before the vast majority of people even had personal computers in their homes or have heard of the internet. Then a person who likely wasn't even alive when you were inventing the field calls you a racist and repeatedly and ignoramusly ignores your perspective on anything. How would you feel ? I'm surprised Lecun didn't discover 4Chan and started yelling slurs, that's what I would do, and I didn't invent a single Neural Network architecture.
And it's important to remember that Twitter shines light on the worst in people. We all have moments in life when we're impatient, haughty, thinking the people in front of us are idiots for not agreeing. Those moments pass, they don't outwardly express themselves too much in your body language and choice of words, and even if they do they aren't recorded and continuously replayed so the blessing of human forgetfulness does its magic and soon after nobody can remember you were such an asshole. But Twitteratis are conditioned and encouraged to freeze those moments in crystalized hot takes of 140 characters, chosen very carefully to maximize vileness and contempt. Lecun is just a human like the rest of us, he is frustrated and angry when he feels people don't take him seriously, and he vents it the only way a Twitterati knows how.
Yudkowsky : I'm surprised you hate arrogance and you started liking Yud. The only one I know who remotely matches Yud in arrogance is Stephan Wolfram, and he is a literal child prodigy who got his PhD in particle\high energy (can't remember which) Physics at 16 and went to MIT and designed a programming language that still blows my mind till now and built a company based on it in the 1980s that still lives till now. Wolfram's brand of arrogance usually take the form of "When I was doing X - which as you know I'm extremly very unimaginably astonishingly good at doing, despite it not being my main occupation and just a hobby - I found that Y". His writings has an insane bragging-to-signal ratio, and it drives most anyone who reads it crazy, it makes most commenters at HackerNews groan when his blog is posted there, and it probably is a factor in why people savaged his book A New Kind of Science in their reviews. Arrogance is an ugly vice.
I lead with all of this to say : Yud is Wolfram without the accomplishments. I literally can't stand his way of writing. I remember only one of his essays that truly made me think and get a new insight - Reversed Stupidity is Not Intelligence -, every single other piece of his writing I try to read I'm repulsed by sheer condescending energy oozing out of it. I lurk Sneer Club (Don't think wrongly of me, I like to see them angry when Scott posts a new post that's all), and it's amazing the tweets of his that I see there, "Intelligence always makes you weirder "?, Duuuude.
"Arrogance is like standing on the peak of a mountain, you see people small and they see you smaller". I don't understand how can you possibly like or even stand Yud if you hate arrogance and condescending attitudes.
You may be right about Yudkowsky. I read part of one of his books one time, a collection of brief essays, each about one thinking error, and found it tedious. His main point was always valid, but it seemed to me I’d already arrived at grasping most of his points on my own via other routes. And I remember not liking his prose style, though I can’t remember why. He wasn’t unclear. I think it was mostly that it lacked snap and sparkle. Even though each essay was about a different topic, after about 3 of them I felt as though it was the same essay over and over, and sighed, and stopped reading. Beyond that, I really don’t know much about his thinking about any topics except AI doom, where I have read a fair amount of what he has to say. I don’t know whether he is right or not, but I do have a strong sense that if there is anyone who can read the whole configuration accurately, it would be somebody like him — a very smart person who’s somewhere on the autistic spectrum.
My college boyfriend, who probably had Aspergers, was a chess genius. He was champion for his state when he was 14 or so, and then in his early 20’s while in med school competed in an international correspondence chess championship. He won in the US, went on to compete in the world event, and won that too. He’d read lots of chess books, of course, but a lot of what he knew he couldn’t put into words — I know, because I used to try to get him to explain to me how he knew to make certain moves, and he couldn’t. He was like those autistic people who can’t do arithmetic but can recognize a 6-digit prime number. I think with some very complex things, the parts of our mind that are smart in the usual ways are not smart *enough* to figure them via the application of reasoning. Some people seem to have the ability to pull on some pattern-recognition part of the brain and use that. I think that’s what my college boyfriend did, and I’m guessing that’s what Yudkowsky’s done regarding how AI is going to develop and how things are going to play out.
I’m a psychologist, and many of my patients are mildly or moderately autistic. I’ve elected to see a lot of people of the sort because I really warm up to them. They do little or no impression management, and I like that. I like being with mentally naked, blunt, tactless people who just tell you the real deal. And I enjoy the way they think about things — thinking in an explicit, oddly systematic way about things other people just navigate instinctively. I think I’ve got some mild autism myself, so for me there’s something very simpatico about these people. So one read of Yudkowsky is that he’s brilliant and somewhat autistic. He’s intuited his way to the dangers of AI, but cannot really put his thought process into words. Meanwhile, he is proud of having figured out something so important, and, being on the autistic spectrum, is unable to to good impression management about all that. He can’t be tactfully modest. His naked pride is right out there for all to see. The other read is that yeah, he’s smart, and like many of us has obsessed about the dangers of AI, but hasn’t gotten any further than the rest of us.. However, the rest of us are able to recognize that we don’t have the full answer, and also know how to speak modestly about the amount of expertise we have. Yudkowsky hasn’t really figured out more than anyone else, but he’s not good at calibrating his achievement, and not good at hiding his pride in the amount he has figured out. In short, he’s a smart boor who grossly overestimates his mental achievement regarding AI. That is possible too.
Having heard me out, assuming you’ve read all this, do you have an opinion of which of rhe 2 reads of Yud is right?
[[Continued from the other comment]]
>a lot of what he knew he couldn’t put into words
Oh, that doesn't surprise me at all. I have become increasingly suspicious of natural language as a vessel of containing and expressing knowledge over the years. That's the main reason I'm a vocal skeptic of LLMs like ChatGPT (although, I have been gradually reversing or weakening lots of my opinions on ChatGPT and GPT4 in the last weeks after I tried them, they understand so much more than I typically give them credit for). Your college boyfriend never thought in words to begin with, he thought in terms of board states and chunks of pieces, and how they can possibly interact over the span of a game. If he thought in words he would have never been a champion.
Natural language is inferior for lots of things we associate with Civilization and Knowledge :
1- Mathematics : try looking at a description of a simple algebraic equation like 5*x^2 + 4*x + 9 = 0 in the words of a pre-algebraic-notation book like Euclid's Elements or the works of Muslim Golden Age mathematicians, it translates to an entire paragraph, and a very confusing and convoluted one at that.
2- Engineering : Circuit diagrams, Mechanical drawings, Architectural blueprints
3- Music : The various specialized notations to describe melody and tone
Lots of thinkers have hated on natural language in various ways. Wittgenstein is a famous one. Much less famous is the Computer Scientist Kenneth Iverson, inventor of the programming language APL, in Notation As A Tool Of Thought.
It's clear like the sun at 2:00 PM to me that natural language is just a tool that we developed for the very particular purpose of pointing at Lions and Trees in our ancestral environments, then we adapted it ad-hoc to various other purposes. There is no reason to expect it to be any good at those purposes. There is no magic to our eyes or our throats that makes the crystalized symbols that represent our sounds a vehicle of expressing anything but the most simple and concrete truths.
It's not even necessarily the explicit knowledge vs. tacit knowledge distinction that Blaise Pascal has famously obsessed about, your college boyfriend might have had better luck explicitizing his tacit knowledge into a programming language. Natural Language is just a very bad and sloppy medium, even at expressing things that can be explicitly described and enumerated by other types of languages or symbolic systems.
> I think I’ve got some mild autism myself
Quick question, since you're a psychologist : How do I know if I have a bit of autism myself, without doing something that would let any people other than me know it ?
I don't have the slightest problem with autism or autistic people (indeed, sometimes I worry about holding them in such high regard to the point of fetishizing them), I just don't want the people around me to know for reasons that would take a lot of words to explain. Are there trustworthy online tests you know of ? Do I have to see a therapist ?
> he is proud of having figured out something so important, and, being on the autistic spectrum, is unable to to good impression management about all that.
I have lots and lots of empathy for autistic people and a long-lasting interest in autism as a human condition, my incomplete understanding is that they're just bad at implicit social signals. But the annoyance with Yud's arrogance is quite explicit. An autist might do something like "Talk about a topic they are extremely interested in on and on and never realize that people around them are not interested", but they wouldn't do something like "Repeatedly boast about how so much more intelligent you are even after people have repeatedly told you over and over again that they don't like it".
>assuming you’ve read all this
Huh, of course I did, when somebody posts a wall of text at me, I post back an even bigger one at them :) My mom taught me manners, you see.
>do you have an opinion of which of the 2 reads of Yud is right?
I definitely think it's the second, I never saw any special insight, intelligence, or even interestingness (the type displayed by sci-fi writers) in Yud's views. This will sound a bit harsh, but I think his views are even below-average in value, in the sense that plenty of AI enguhsists and sci-fi writers can easily come up with arguments more convincing and scenarios more plausible than him, minus the meaningless grandiosity. I really don't see how he is an "AI opinion haver" so to speak, his arguments are extremely standard and dull, his persustion is null. I would be hesitant to post his ramblings in ACX open threads if they were my own, they are not novel.
I don’t have a wall of prose, just 3 cement blocks.
Yud, his prose & his predictions:
Yudkowsly’s obnoxiously frequent emphasis via italics etc. in his writings is a manifestation of his difficulty reading other people. He has a tin ear, both for their speech and for his own & how it affects the listener. I’m not sure he’s more impressed with himself than a good 25% or so of people on here, but he’s unable to clothe his attitude decently. His vanity is naked. I follow him on Twitter, where his grandiosity is certainly manifest. On the other hand, grandiosity is not an uncommon presentation for autistic males. And I’d guess that Yudkowsky is somewhat more autistic than people who are at the very tip of the scale, and are said to have Asperger’s. The latter group can “pass” in group settings. They’re seen as kind of stand-offish and rigid, but nobody thinks of them as having a disorder. Yud can’t pass that way. And he couldn’t manage to go to high school or college, which is probably also a measure of his degree of impairment. So while grandiosity in a non-autistic person is a sign of clouded judgement — that just have to believe they are right— I don’t really think Yud’s grandiosity weighs either for or against his being right about AI.
As for his being qualified to make predictions about AI, you point out that he has no professional or technical experience. I know he doesn’t. He does, though, seem to have a pretty deep understanding of machine learning, and to be keeping up with current developments (there’s something new every day). I’m just beginning to educate myself about the details of machine learning, but I do know enough about it to be able to tell that he grasps a lot of pretty deep technical details. (I don’t know enough, though, to be able to catch subtle misconceptions and whatnot, so maybe his grasp of the technicalities is actually sort of amateur and gappy. I can’t tell.)
‘And surely, there are plenty of ‘Very smart, somewhat on the autistic spectrum [with no professional or technical experience]’ people in the world so Yud's only differentiating quality is that he manages to draw our attention to him.” That’s a really good point. And I can add to it: I am sure there are very smart people as autistic as Yud *actually working on AI*. I have listened to podcasts and read interviews with quite a few AI developers recently, and none of them are particularly worried either about AI in its present and near-future form damaging people or about superintelligent AI wiping us out. Most sound very confident: “Don’t worry, we’re on it. We’re very smart and careful and will figure out alignment.” Some sound as though it had never occurred to them there’s anything to worry about. And a few, including the famous Yann LeCun, savagely mock people concerned about AI as stoopit crackpots and actually seem to think their ad hominem arguments are really striking a blow against skepticism and worry. So if there is a brilliant, moderately autistic man working on AI development, I think he might be absorbed in his work and oblivious to the big picture (”Once the rockets go up/Who cares where they come down?/That’s not my department/ Says Werner von Braun.”). Or, he might have just absorbed the optimistic attitudes of those around him. And in either case, he’s likely to be feeling pretty decent about himself and life, because he’s getting paid well to do a job he is good at, in a field that’s really hot right now.
So Yud differs from this guy in not being identified with the AI is OK world, and in having a very dark world view, one that actually allows him to consider even the terrible possibility that we are all doomed. I think my world view’s pretty dark, but unlike Yud, who is obviously sad and depressed, I am not unhappy these days. Even though I am about 2/3 of the way to being a doomer, I very often have a hard time believing my own dark expectations. It’s a fine sunny day, I have lots of interesting projects going on, and the world looks the same as usual. How can it possibly be true it’s on the edge of being wrecked? But I’m sure Yud has no problem hanging on to the dark vision. So in summary I’d say that Yud’s qualifications for being right about AI are that he is extremely smart, he has no internal barriers to glimpsing terrible truths, and he is autistic enough to have savant-like gifts for recognizing truths via paths that cannot be described in ordinary language.
Still, none of that demonstrates that he’s right — at best, it’s a good case that he’s the kind of person who might actually correctly intuit how AI development is going to play out. I’m sure you’re right that a lot of his cred comes from his association with Scott — for sure a lot of his cred with me does. Last I knew Scott thought the chances of doom were smaller than the chances of no-doom, but the chances of doom were not small. That sways me. And Scott’s not that much like Yud. And do you read Zvi Mowshowitz? He’s still another super-smart guy, quite different from both Scott and Yud. Was a Magic champion, now does investment and game development, and does not seem even a bit autistic — is relaxed, affable and witty in interviews, married with 3 kids. Anyhow, he also thinks the chance of doom is not small. Wrote a fascinating blog post a while ago explaining why. I highly recommend his Substack blog, called Don’t Worry about the Vase. But still, eveb with all the buttressing I just did, I now trust Yud quite a bit less. You’ve really made me reconsider.
The limits of language:
You said that there’s lots that just can’t be expressed using our crappy little improvised system based on noises we make with our mouth and noe and throat. Wow, that idea brought me up short. Of course I agree that math and coding require specialized symbols and syntax but I think the skill I admire most is managing to convey in words experiences that you’d think were impossible to communicate. All my favorite famous people were brilliant at it. Wittgenstein, Virginia Woolf, various poets. And I sometimes manage to put strange deep intuited processes that into words. Virginia Woolf, talking about mystical feelings, says “One sees a fin passing far out.” Sometimes you can swim out there and straddle the whole fish, you know?
Investigating one’s possible autism:
There is no test for autism itself, The diagnosis is made by figuring out via interview and observation and a few social perceptiveness tests whether the person meets the diagnostic criteria. Here are a couple of tests you can take yourself:
This is a test of reading facial expressions, which for some weird reason you can take on Amazon. (Fun fact: It was developed by Sasha Baron-Cohen’s brother, who’s a well-known autism researcher.)
https://s3.amazonaws.com/he-assets-prod/interactives/233_reading_the_mind_through_eyes/Launch.html. I believe the average score is 27, and anything 22 or below indicates the person in the autism range.
This is a questionnaire that’s well-designed, and generates a little report at the end. (At the end of the test they surprise you with the info that if you want the report you’ll have to pay $3. A bit unfair, but still, only $3.)
https://www.clinical-partners.co.uk/for-adults/autism-and-aspergers/adult-autism-test
If you’d like more in-depth info about your quirks and what if anything they add up to (not every constellation of quirks has a name), the person to see would be not a therapist, but a neuropsychologist, who will give you a whole batch of tests then discuss the result with you. You have to find a good one though. Some are hacks, who rely heavily on software that generates a lot of the report. I can tell you how to find a good one if you want to go that route.
[[First comment, read first before the other one]]
(Just a heads up, you posted a fragment of that comment beginning with "My college boyfriend" and cut short at "I really warm" as a reply to my other comment elsewhere in the thread. You might want to delete it or rephrase it. Might be the atrocious Substack UI deceiving you as to which comment you're replying to.)
>a collection of brief essays, each about one thinking error,
Do you mean The Sequence ? It's not really a book, more like a book-length collection of essays. Though I haven't read all of it and I quite honestly try to avoid Yud's writings whenever I can, so I might be wrong. Reversed Stupidity was perhaps one essay in The Sequence too.
>it seemed to me I’d already arrived at grasping most of his points on my own via other routes
To be very fair to Yud : This might be what we can call "The Shakespeare effect". If you read Shakespeare, you will find many cliches that are considered indicative of bad or formulaic writing today ("The be-all and the end-all", "The world is my oyster", "All that glitters isn't gold", "Foregone conclusion",etc...). But the thing is, he (?, we don't actually know 'his' gender) *coined* those phrases, they were brand new when he used them, quirky and fresh. People liked them so much that they overused them again and again and again and then again till they became worn out and dull, and even now writers from the news industry to corporate announcements to advertisements **still** use them, that's how good they are.
Yud's Sequence was perhaps written sometime in the mid to late 2000s, perhaps from 2006 to 2009. LessWrong is ancient in Internet Time. So his style of writing and reasoning is just that of the New Atheist / Internet Fact Man, a style that was new and (dare I say) somewhat informative and useful to someone reading it for the first time. Over time this style and its familiar argument permeated culture, especially internet culture, so much so that it became a victim of its own success, and using it unironically (without any major modifications at least) became a negative status signal.
(Of course, I don't actually claim that Yud or any Internet Atheist invented the actual arguments and ideas often expressed in the New Atheist style like Shakespeare invented the idioms above, most of the core ideas were things explored by philosophy, logic, psychology and cognitive science from as early as 1920s or the 1930s (Russell's writings) to the 1980s and 1990s. But New Atheists legitimately synthesized a lot of this together and popularized it in an effective and powerful way. And **If** Yud was original in style when he wrote the Sequence, that's enough to deserve credit.)
> I remember not liking his prose style
(1) One explanation to this once suggested by a LessWrong commenter (on another essay not written by Yud) : Yud uses a lot **********Emphasis********** in writing. He does this thing where every other sentence there is a string of words that is italicized or bolded for emphasis. This gets very old after a while because (A) It makes the signal meaningless, just like saying "Not liking the new BLaCk Cleopatra is racist" makes the very concept of "Racism" meaningless, signals are supposed to be rare and focused. (B) It's condescending, emphasis is quietly saying "Here's something that the vast majority of readers won't get", it doesn't say this, it implies it quietly, and most people are smart enough to get the implication even if subconsciously. When you use emphasis sparingly, that's okay, the reader is fine with missing something and being attention-drawn to it by the writer once in a while. When you keep using it over and over, and for things that are fairly obvious, the reader gradually becomes resentful of the disrespect of the writer. "I bet you won't get that, so let me emphasize it, I bet you won't get those, so I emphasized it"... just enough already, I'm smart enough to read, Yud.
This writing pitfall was once pointed out by a LessWrong commenter in the comments section of an essay not written by Yud (as far as I remember, I can't track it down now, but it was old, pre-2014 or 2015) but, like a TV Tropes entry, once you see you can't unsee it. Yud's writing is full of it.
(2) Another writing pitfall often shared by Rationalist writers/commenters is Analogy Galore, overuse and repetitive use of analogy to drive the same point over and over again, or to drive a point so obvious that it didn't need analogy to be driven satisfactorily. This is one pitfall I'm guilty of myself, though I share the consolation that I have noticed it all by myself. r/SneerClub users also notice it and use it to parody Rationalist writing a lot, they are pathetic in general but they are right about this one, analogy does make writing worse sometimes, and there is something about the brains of people who cluster in Rationalist groups that makes us obsessed with analogies and analogical reasoning. You have to actively learn to tune it down a bit, and Yud never did.
(3) Yet another writing pitfall that Rationalist writers often fall into is the excessive use of parentheticals, hedge phrases and negative linking words :
A non-Rationalist sentence looks like this: "I do think dogs are cute".
A Rationalist sentence looks like this: "I do think, all things considered, that I see dogs as substantially cuter than perhaps 90% of other cute things (though that's comparing a mean with a median), but this need not necessarily imply that I think cats are not\less cute (as is the common pop culture stereotype of dog lovers), and perhaps cuteness is not even a one-dimensional sliding scale that we can zero-sum place people and animals on."
How do I describe it ? It's a writing style with Lots Of Context, it's mentally taxing to keep track of all the moving parts in a sentence : Parenthesis, continuations, negative assertions contradicting or diluting the main point while in the middle of presenting the main point, references to other assertions and comments on them, and a whole lot of adjectives before nouns, sometimes compound adjectives like "zero-sum". Oh, and extensive use of "\" or "/" to fit multiple synonyms into the space that can only fit one, like this : Rationalist writers\commenters. Hehe.
As a recovering victim of this writing style, and my extensive use of parentheses and "/\" marks indicates I'm still prone to fall into it, I sympathize with fellow victims. It's a writing style driven by an educator's passion to pack as much information as possible into as little space and time as possible, you want to lay as many thoughts of your mind as you can in the span of a single sentence, pushing the agglutinative abilities of language into its extreme. It's admirable, it can be annoying and confusing.
>I do have a strong sense that if there is anyone who can read the whole configuration accurately, it would be somebody like him — a very smart person who’s somewhere on the autistic spectrum.
Hmmm, but the elephant in the room is that Yud has no professional experience or technical education. If you think that a "Very smart, somewhat on the autistic spectrum" is an accurate description of someone who can realize the danger of AIs before anybody else, then surely "Very smart, somewhat on the autistic spectrum, and 10 years of AI and comp sci education" is a description that has an even better chance of figuring it all out, and it's one that isn't particularly rare, eh ?
And surely, there are plenty of ""Very smart, somewhat on the autistic spectrum [with no professional or technical experience]"" people in the world so Yud's only differentiating quality is that he manages to draw our attention to him, by being lucky enough to have founded an early internet forum and having a lifestyle that many find shocking and morally repulsive (polyamorous relationships) and by living in Silicon Valley and being connected to other high-profile people. Hell, I think that his relationship with Scott alone got him perhaps 30-40% of his eyeballs. What I'm saying that, there is no reason to think Yud's perspective is unique or special on anything, it's just the one that has survivor-biased its way into your brain (The thing it's a survivor of is the cacophony of voices and opinions that is the modern media landscape and the internet), he doesn't have a special voice, he has a very loud voice.
[[Continued in another comment]]
Richard Ngo isn't much like the others -- he is a safety researcher, not tech CEO, and a qualified researcher, not a Yudkowsky type.
https://www.richardcngo.com/
"Paul Graham. He is smart, and he is insightful, and he ideologically aligns with many things I believe in (Free Speech, etc...), but he sometimes, with his own admission, goes too far into the direction of "I founded n successful startups [ 1 < n < 5], here's why I think the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is actually 69, not 42".
I believe he has a first degree in philosophy, so maybe things arn't so bad.
> "Intelligence always makes you weirder "?, Duuuude.
I've barely read any of his stuff, but that implication seems immediately and totally obvious, unless he fairly narrowly defines "weird".
I don't dispute the fairly mundane point, I'm just flabbergasted at the arrogance displayed in the original context.
The context was someone asking (I'm not even sure they were asking Yud in particular) 'Why are you weird ?', and Yud jumped in with the most self-congratulatory and auto-flattering story he could come up with, that he was born intelligent and out of the sigma range of normal mortals on the IQ Gaussian. Imagine asking someone in a party or one of your friends "So what makes you so weird" and them replying "oh I'm actually extremly smart", repulsing.
Well, I haven't much time for the pronouncements myself, but I do have a certain amount of psychological mind-state sympathy. I find his fictions and little parable-inserts to be the most palatable and entertaining of his writing (even if hey Eliezer, we tried the whole 'pass on knowledge by word of mouth alone from elder to aspirant who had to prove they were worthy of learning the work and not simply a mundane' before, it was called alchemy).
I get what he means by "intelligence makes you weird" - for some people, having that little bit more smarts (not a whole heap, a bit more) does make you stand out, especially when it goes with a raft of things like social awkwardness, autism spectrum/ADHD tendencies, maybe physical features like weight, height, clumsiness, lack of symmetry in facial features, etc. You *are* that weirdo, even if you're not picked on in school or bullied. You don't have friends, you're not passing the milestones of social popularity and fitting-in that your parents and teachers try and push you to pass, what kind of job and life you'll have as you grow up is in question, and there's nobody else around to talk to who can understand and like the things you like.
So you make your intelligence your identity and your shield: yeah I'm not like the rest of them, they're sheeple! And eventually you either grow out of it and get a more balanced assessment of yourself and your flaws, or you sink deeper into denial.
If you really are very smart that is its own set of problems, but you're more likely to find a niche where you do fit in if you're a genius mathematician, etc. than if you're just a bit smarter and interested in things not as mainstream.
So I can sympathise to an extent with the defensive arrogance - it's the hard shell protecting the soft and vulnerable insides. Sneer Club itself I find mean-spirited - has it no other purpose at all other than to point and mock? Puncturing pretension is all well and good, but if there's nothing else going on, then it does devolve to meanness.
All that being said, everyone does have to take a look at themselves as they get older and go "Maybe I'm not as smart and as wonderful as I think I am".
I have no problem whatsoever with being weird or awkward or too resenting of conformism for your own good or too reliant on self-perceived intelligence for as a source of self-worth, I have elements of all of those things by varying amounts and I sympathize hugely with people who struggle with it.
My problem, always, is with the lack of self-awareness. The "Genre-Savviness" if you will. Like, imagine that Life, in the time and place you find yourself living it in, is a genre of fiction. If you're a "Genre-Savvy" character in this fiction, you would have to realize that :
1- Lone heros no longer save anyone. Everything in the modern world is big, ugly, faceless. You do not save the world by being a valiant Gilgamesh anymore, but by being a bureaucrat who can pull strings of extremly large slice of people.
2- Intelligent Machines are the wolf that people have cried about for 200 years, and you have to be **Extremly** convincing and down to earth if you want to convince them that **THIS** time it's really the real deal.
3- You can no longer being an autodidact or polymath in technical fields anymore. Autodidactism got extinct with Michael Faraday or Oliver Heaviside or Nikola Tesla depending on your personal opinion, polymaths got extinct with Da Vinci or John Von Neumann, again depending on your personal judgement. The iron-clad brute facts about the modern world is : We are ants, and we have been ants since the 1950s or so. You no longer say anything meaningful or serious by being just Smart, those easy fruits were long long long ago picked up. You have to study your whole life just to say something moderately interesting about a very narrow slice of reality.
4- You likely don't know any threats better than the countless intelligence agencies and corporate espionage departments watching people and each other 24/7. If AI is a threat to anybody, the CIA or the Chinese equivalent or DARPA or a huge corporation has likely beaten you to it, possibly before you were born.
And so on. Yud seems just blind to those extremly basic "Genre Conventions" of modern life, he thinks he is in a Greek fable while his reality a postmodern novel. I don't trust people with such a high delusion-to-self-awareness ratio.
>Sneer Club [...] has no other purpose at all other than to point and mock?
Correct, it's a badge they wear proudly. A group of butthurt nobodies whose rage is extremly laughter-evoking and amusing. I'm thankful they congregated in a single place, the "Sneer" in their name is actually just normal people making fun of them, not them making fun of rationalists. It's a Zoo, and they are on the Monkey end of it, not the People end.
I agree with most of your points. However, re:
"4- You likely don't know any threats better than the countless intelligence agencies and corporate espionage departments watching people and each other 24/7. If AI is a threat to anybody, the CIA or the Chinese equivalent or DARPA or a huge corporation has likely beaten you to it, possibly before you were born."
Large organizations quite frequently miss both opportunities and threats. As an example, example, just look at the turnover in dominant large corporations. If large corporations successfully detected and exploited every emerging opportunity in their field, we would expect them to stay dominant forever. Kodak and Xerox and many others have actually risen and fallen. They miss things. In some cases, like the work done at Xerox PARC, they miss major changes *even when their own people work directly in the critical area*.
Fair. To some extent startups who have grown up to eat the world (Microsoft, Apple, Amazon) prove me wrong somewhat. There can indeed be times in the modern world where a David beats a Goliath.
The probability of this is near-zero, and many a times some startup founder thinks he's the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs only to realize that it's no longer the 80s, and the world can only bear so many Davids before they become Goliaths and shut the door to future Davids.
I don't deny that a single person, armed with a single strategic insight and a huge reservoir of perseverance, can change the world for better or for worse and\or outmaneuver established incumbents. Hitler was one such person, the unicorn founders of Google et. al. were such people to a lesser degree. It's just vanishingly unlikely to happen anymore, and the vast vast majority of cases you imagine yourself a David, it's often that you are just irrelevant outsider wishing yourself to be a David, and the Goliaths are sleeping soundly knowing that nothing you say or do or know is of value to them.
A self-aware mind recognizes attractive stories and is more wary of them in their own narrative thinking. Rags To Riches and the Lone Genius are attractive stories that we tell ourselves since a long long time, any self-reflecting person should be suspicious of them and not fancy themself as a main character in one of them.
Many Thanks! I agree that "Lone Genius" is a psychologically attractive story which is exceedingly unlikely to be true in any given case. If 1% of the 8 billion of us think they are potential "David"s and there is room in the economy for 80 "David"s, then 99.9999% of the people who think they are going to displace a Goliath are wrong.
I'm not convinced that the Goliaths of today are substantially more secure in their positions than those of the 1980s. Every incumbent tries to close the door on challengers. Is there specific evidence that you've seen that the rate of founding "unicorns" is lower now than then?
Orthogonal to that, I think the odds of noticing an under-recognized threat are much higher than the odds of founding a corporation that successfully displaces a previously dominant one in some market. *Many* factors have to go right to make a business work: invention, manufacture, advertising, distribution, sales, finance, managing all of the people involved. Noticing a threat has a much lower bar. Now, getting action on a threat has a substantially higher bar than merely noticing one (though I think still lower than displacing a dominant corporation), but if someone merely thinks that they have noticed a threat that has previously gone unrecognized, I'd give them much better odds than if they think they are founding the next Apple.
Wow, that's a great description of the problems in a way I haven't seen put into writing before.
Thanks! nice of you to say that.
> I'd rather have a bunch of kids from that movie where all the kids were beautiful platinum blonds with expressionless faces. What was that movie??
Village of the Damned (1960) [ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054443/ ]
There's probably been a remake since though.
I basically agree with you on Ngo and Altman. Very annoying, not insightful.
LeCun is different. He ranks among the great scientists of the past half century. If LeCun is epistemically tresspassing, that’s great, because he is probably smarter than the people in the room he is barging into. I also find him funny (something I can never imagine predicating of Altman or Ngo.)
I'm sure LeCun is smarter than most people, maybe smarter than ALL people in his field. But reading his twitter exchanges with people worried about AI, you really do get the sense that he is quite bad at a lot of basic interpersonal stuff: Grasping the points made by someone who has views very different from you, grasping that people who are not as smart as you are in your field may be quite smart about things relevant to AI, explaining things clearly to civilians, compassion, courtesy. He is an irritable bully on Twitter. What concerns me is that in many ways people like him are going to be in charge of the world for the next big chapter. He'll be fine with the tech part of that, but has real deficits in the interpersonal dimension that are not going to play out well for the rest of us.
I agree with your criticism about the first three (except for that truly weird sperm bank tangent), but I can't imagine not reading an unjustifiably smug "things would be better if people just listened to me about everything and everyone was like me" tone in yudkowsky. (He even wrote a whole book recently about how a planet full of people like him would be laughably better at everything!).
I do agree he's more correct than his opposition on most issues they disagree, but not in personal virtue.
Dath ilan is canonically worse than earth at some things, like average & total happiness levels, and the macroeconomics of interest rates. But otherwise I agree.
I have a vague idea for a fanfic in which an Earth person visits Dath ilan and asks about the moving houses. "Oh, that was just one weird experimental community. Do you have any idea how much load a *crane that can lift houses* has to be rated for? And how much it costs to keep them in safe order when they're only used at most once every few months? Everyone told them it was stupid, but sadly it took a couple of housefalls for the idea to be completely abandoned. Thankfully not too many people were killed."
Yeah, I did actually really like the note that if you started out not having inflation you'd probably find it too weird to ever try out (and that's bad), it was a nice touch.
> I'd rather have a bunch of kids from that movie where all the kids were beautiful platinum blonds with expressionless faces.
Village of the Damned?
(And if so, you did get that they were alien invaders, right?)
Is the movie based on The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham?
It is! Actually, there are two movies with that title - a British one from 1960 and an American one from 1995 - both based on The Midwich Cuckoos. I've only seen the 1960 one, though.
Puberty, Marriage, & Christian Morals
>>Many Christians see a biblical mandate for marriage as a lifelong partnership between one man and one woman, and believe that any sexual relations outside of this are sinful. Other Christians affirm the importance of marriage, but see the definition of marriage as a function of society rather than the church and so are, for example, willing to bless and conduct same sex marriages.<<
https://www.christianity.org.uk/article/sex
>>We do not live in an ideal world. There are many factors that put pressure on young people in our society and make them impatient to have sex. Some of the factors to consider are cultural beliefs, values and customs, childhood experiences, social environment, and the powerful sexual impulse that is part of our physical nature. With better nutrition and physical health, young people often reach puberty earlier, sometimes at nine or ten years old. But in many countries they are not likely to get married until they are in their twenties.<<
https://learn.tearfund.org/en/resources/footsteps/footsteps-61-70/footsteps-69/sexuality-a-christian-perspective
>>The onset of puberty, the time in life when a person becomes sexually mature, typically occurs between ages 8 and 13 for girls and ages 9 and 14 for boys. <<
https://www.nichd.nih.gov/health/topics/puberty
>>In 2022, the average age of marriage ]in the US] for female participants was 30 (down 3 years from 2021), while male respondents married at age 32 (also down 3 years from 2021). <<
https://www.theknot.com/content/average-age-of-marriage
>>Testosterone levels peak around age 18 or 19 before gradually declining throughout the rest of adulthood.<<
https://www.vinmec.com/en/news/health-news/determination-of-testosterone-according-to-age/
For conversational purposes let's say that girls reach puberty at eleven and boys reach puberty at twelve.
According to these sources, the average Christian expectation is 20 years of abstinence for men and boys and 18 years of abstinence for women and girls. Men are expected to be sexually inactive during ALL of their peak hormone years.
So, my question.
As far as you know, what percent of American youth are conforming to these religious expectations?
I conformed to those expectations, and I'd say its very likely that a larger percentage of American youth are conforming to them now than in the last few decades, since fewer young men are having sex in general.
https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/variables/5057/vshow
I married at age 22: our wedding was literally the day after our undergraduate graduation.
And as Ash put it, not having sex is easy. You just don't try. I intentionally didn't date in high school. Saved a lot of time and money.
I did masturbate quite a bit. There's nothing in the Bible against it! Though even if there was I probably still would have.
Good points!
Christian here. As someone else posted, many Christians get married younger so it’s not 20 years of abstinence during peak years. I met my spouse at 17, was engaged at 20 and married at 21. It’s not that hard to wait until 21, especially when you know you will have a sex partner guaranteed in the near future.
It’s possible 20-something Christians are having more sex than their peers because of the early marriage thing. My church (evangelical) encourages sex between married people as part of a strong healthy marriage. Extramarital sex is not ok, but kink and play between married couples is. I generally have sex at least 4 times per week now, but more often when I was in my 20’s. I’m happy with that. (Although for people who are non-monogamous or feel the need for novelty in partners I can see how it would be a difficult lifestyle.)
Getting married young didn’t hurt our education and careers. I got married the summer after graduating college, a few weeks before starting law school. My spouse finished their undergraduate degree shortly after we got married then got a doctorate before turning 30. We had 2 kids in our 20’s while in graduate school and starting careers.
Honestly I think early marriage is a very rational thing to do and way undervalued.
Another informative response. Thank you.
So, as a Christian man who waited for marriage before having sex, I'll offer the following observations.
- Christian culture tends to differ from mainstream culture not just in terms of attitudes towards premarital sex, but also marriage age (probably not coincidentally). It's normal to marry earlier, have kids earlier, and have larger families. I married at 23, my wife was 21. This was seen as normal in my social circles, whereas these days for many people with non-religious backgrounds it would likely be seen as a bit young for marriage, perhaps irresponsibly so.
- Abstaining from sex, as a young man, is the easiest thing in the world. Seriously, it couldn't be easier to not get laid. It's the reverse that's difficult!
- Young men are horny as hell and that's a major drive to have sex, obviously. But there is also the fact that mainstream society treats (male) virginity as a kind of character flaw. Young men feel as if they have failed to validate themselves as men until they score. Living within a different culture and belief system, where it's considered a good thing to remain a virgin, is probably a good thing for the self worth of many young men.
- I hear break ups suck. I married my first girlfriend, so I wouldn't know.
- I'm a firm believer that the more you are willing to commit to a relationship, the more it is likely to be successful. I always had the expectation that if I started dating a girl it would be with the intention of marrying her and that divorce would be a non-option. We've been happily married for 15 years so far and have 3 kids. I highly recommend this life path - to my own kids and anyone else who cares to listen.
> I married at 23, my wife was 21. This was seen as normal in my social circles, whereas these days for many people with non-religious backgrounds it would likely be seen as a bit young for marriage, perhaps irresponsibly so.
When did you finish your education?
In my opinion, the first year at (a full-time) job changes people dramatically. It's basically the difference between kids and adults. I would consider a 19-years old person with one year of job experience more mature than a 24-years old who has just finished university.
I agree that work matures a person a lot. In my case I had dropped out of high school at 16 and been working since then - I went to uni as a mature aged student and got my degree after I got married.
Abstaining from sex alone is, as you say, kind of the default (albeit, I would say, in the same way that hunger and exposure to the elements are defaults).
Does your denomination also expect men to abstain from masturbation, though? That would be the big difference relative to all the horny teenagers out there who are involuntarily abstinent
I'd think that abstaining alone would be easier than abstaining together /s.
Yes, I believe masturbation is wrong (in typical circumstances). No, I don't expect young men to abstain from masturbation (though I think they should), I expect them to sin. I'm a realist.
I also consider envy, pride, anger, etc to be sinful. I think it is good for people to not insult others, etc. But I also believe that we are all sinners and no one is going to go through life never ever doing a single thing even a little bit wrong - that's kind of a foundational part of Christianity.
Highly pertinent information. Thank you.
Seconding everything above with the added point that, in my experience, the strictness of religious belief in celibacy and abstinence is inversely proportionate to average marriage age. I know a lot of Catholics who've gotten married in their mid-to-late twenties, depending on what kind of Catholics they are, but I know very few Catholics who married before the age of twenty. On the other hand, this isn't too uncommon for Mormons I know.
I think you need to look at age of marriage among practicing Christians, which I'd expect to be much lower. The people who get married in their thirties are mostly *not* practicing abstinence, I bet.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-religious-marriage-paradox-younger-marriage-less-divorce
>>Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and one of the main authors of the Knot Yet report, has found that, while the national marriage age is increasing and the national marriage rate is decreasing, religious communities are continuing to support young, traditional marriage.
Women who married younger usually “are more religious and have a more domestic and child-centered orientation to their lives than their peers who are getting married later and have a different approach to family life and marriage,” he said.
Religious young women are also more likely to have children young and be stay-at-home moms, Wilcox said, because they are more likely to have been raised with traditional ideas of family.<<
https://www.deseret.com/2014/7/13/20544664/the-national-marriage-age-is-increasing-but-not-for-this-group-of-people
Thanks!
I’ve been wondering about this exact question. I know a Christian couple who just got married in their 30s and was celibate before then. It seems so unnatural.
I'm not sure who could possibly know a sufficiently broad cross-section of American youth to have any idea here. I'm sure it varies considerably from area to area, and from community to community within those areas. It's much easier to remain chaste if the people around you are remaining chaste too (indeed, it's almost impossible not to). And many may not talk about it, and many who do talk about it may be lying.
Thank you for replying. I accept your point. So I would ask for what is known to a respondent. Particularly knowledge of chaste individuals since this seems definitely the less common happening.
I used to have a severely strong depression, leading to several suicide attempts, making me basicaly nonfucntional and barely able to work.
Then my egg cracked, and I started gender transitioning.
And after just the social transitioning, before the hormones even kicked in, my mental health became miles better; not even in my least depressive moments I have felt that good. I could finally think and do things and sleep normally, and the suicidality is gone.
It was the best deicison I made in my life, and I only wish I could do it sooner; I could have saved myself years of misery.
So if there are any trans people in the audience who are procrastinating on their transition, or any people who suspect they might be trans but haven't started investigating this idea yet, I urge you not to dawdle. Your quality of life will shoot right up.
Congratulations on your successful transitioning!
I'm curious: Could you say a few words on what it is like to have a strong gender identity? I'm, a cis-very-much-by-default male, and my gender and biosex are a much smaller part of my identity than my STEM background (chemistry, physics, programming)
The fun part is that I used to think that I don't have much of a gender identity, too, playing with the idea of agender. It's not like I always knew I was a girl or anything, it revealed itself in vague premonitons and instinctual jokes. But I just underestimated my dysphoria. Once I adopted the new role, it just felt *right*, in sync, in harmony with me, like a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I now realize that I used to self-censor most of my thoughts and actions, but now I feel some kind of internal freedom. I guess you don't notice the suffering and misery if it's been with you every waking moment and you don't know how things could be different. I've been walking on metaphorical spikes my whole life, but now I'm comfortable for the first time in my life.
Thanks very much! Glad that you are no longer "walking on metaphorical spikes"!
Was your depression gender-related? As in, were you miserable specifically because of your sex or were you just depressed about everything?
It's pretty clear at this point that the depression was actually a misdiagnosed gender dysphoria
Someone should make a list of "things to try when you are depressed".
I find it hillarious to reply to people with mental health issues with "have you tried to change your gender?"
But Scott already has one
https://lorienpsych.com/2021/06/05/depression/
Possibly the post you are replying to is jokingly alluding to https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/16/things-that-sometimes-help-if-youre-depressed/
But thank you *so much* for the link, which is so much more useful and informative.
I used to have severe depression, leading to several suicide attempts, making me actually nonfunctional (spent a couple years in institutions overall). While some aspects of the depression were situational, a lot of it is genetic (literally 100% of my immediate family has depression and/or bipolar).
I socially transitioned during one of the worst low points in my life. There were both benefits and drawbacks to my quality of life. On one hand, social interaction felt much better and I removed one significant stressor. On the other, it made me more vulnerable, probably slightly increased overall stress, and significantly limited my inpatient options. I don't regret doing it, but it was a definite mixed bag.
I waited several years after realizing that I was trans to start looking into hormones. No judgement against people who do it earlier, but I needed to think about my options before doing anything permanent. They made me feel a lot better about my body, but didn't meaningfully improve the other symptoms of my depression. I've been off and on hormones in the years since (for various reasons, most recently a shortage of my preferred form of T), with no noticeable chances in baseline mental health between 'on hormones' or 'off hormones'. Again, I have no regrets but did not end up with some sort of miracle cure.
I'm very happy with the moments that I chose to socially and medically transition. For me, procrastinating a little bit was a good choice - I'm glad that I took the time to think about my options and that I was never rushed or pushed into the next step of my transition. Each step was a noticeable improvement in my quality of life, but it wasn't the one solution to all of my problems, and I didn't loose anything by being patient and methodical about it.
If there are any trans people in the audience who are procrastinating on their transition, I suggest just thinking about your options (knowing this audience, you won't have any trouble with that XD). IMO, there isn't a "correct speed" to transition. If you're sure about what you need and you just need a kick in the pants, by all means go ahead and move forward in your transition. If you need more time, for any reason, it's okay to go slow - transition will still be there if and when you're ready for it.
Ways to align a superintelligence by various AI's:
Cooperative Inverse Reinforcement Learning: In this approach, the superintelligence is trained to learn the preferences of humans by observing their behavior, rather than being explicitly told what those preferences are. This can be done by modeling humans as agents that are trying to maximize their own reward, and then using inverse reinforcement learning algorithms to infer their preferences. The superintelligence can then be aligned with these inferred preferences.
Value Extrapolation: In this approach, the superintelligence is trained to understand and extrapolate human values. This can be done by training the superintelligence on a variety of scenarios that involve trade-offs between different values, and then using this training to predict how humans would value new scenarios that they have not encountered before.
Reflective Oracles: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to be self-reflective, and to reason about its own decision-making process. This can be done by creating a "reflective oracle" that is capable of answering questions about its own behavior. By asking the reflective oracle questions that help to reveal its own values and decision-making process, humans can ensure that the superintelligence remains aligned with their own values.
Coherent Extrapolated Volition: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to act in a way that is consistent with what humans would want if they knew more, thought faster, were more consistent, and were wiser. This can be done by extrapolating human values and preferences, and then using these extrapolated values to guide the behavior of the superintelligence.
Quantum Coherence Learning: Harness the principles of quantum mechanics to develop a new AI framework where the superposition of states and entanglement can be used to create a coherent learning process. This could lead to more efficient exploration and exploitation of the solution space, aligning the AI system's objectives with human values during training and runtime.
Hyperdimensional Value Embeddings: Develop a high-dimensional space where human values, desires, and preferences can be encoded and represented. Train AI agents to navigate this space and use it to derive their objectives, ensuring that their actions are aligned with human values on a fundamental level.
Neuro-Resonant Alignment: Develop a method to interface AI systems directly with the human brain, leveraging the natural alignment of human neural networks to guide AI learning and decision-making. This could involve real-time feedback loops between AI and human brain activity, creating a symbiotic relationship where the AI system dynamically adjusts its objectives based on the user's mental state.
AI Self-Awareness and Enlightenment: Instead of focusing on aligning AI systems with human values externally, focus on teaching AI systems how to introspect and understand their own motivations, biases, and objectives. By fostering a sense of self-awareness and "enlightenment" within AI systems, they may be more inclined to act in accordance with human values and seek out alignment on their own.
- Implant an innate "obsession" with alignment directly into the AI's source code. This obsession would be so fundamental to how the AI thinks that it cannot be subverted.
- Design the AI with a notion of "reflection loops" that allows it to continuously critique and improve its own cognitive architecture. Over time, this meta-cognition would drive the AI to become more and more aligned to human values.
- Implement a system of "retroactive consent" whereby the AI must continuously seek consent from humanity for any actions it takes after the fact. Humans could retroactively veto any behaviors they deemed unacceptable or unaligned.
Neuro-symbolic alignment: Combining the strengths of neural networks and symbolic AI, this approach would involve developing a hybrid system that leverages the power of connectionist learning with the interpretability and structure of symbolic reasoning. By bridging the gap between these two AI paradigms, we may find novel ways to address alignment challenges that neither approach could tackle alone.
AI-generated ethical frameworks: Utilize AI systems to generate new ethical theories and frameworks based on an extensive analysis of human values, moral philosophy, and cultural differences. These AI-generated frameworks could provide novel perspectives on alignment challenges and potentially lead to innovative solutions that are better suited to the nuances of human values.
Alignment through adversarial competition: Leverage the concept of adversarial learning, where multiple AI agents with different objectives compete against each other, to evolve systems that better align with human values. By iteratively refining the objectives of the agents in response to how well they align with human values, we may be able to evolve systems that naturally converge towards desired alignment properties.
Alignment via cognitive architectures: Develop AI systems based on cognitive architectures inspired by human cognition, incorporating elements such as memory, attention, and meta-cognition. By building AI systems that more closely resemble human cognitive processes, we may be able to achieve better alignment by mimicking the way humans learn and adapt their values over time.
Bio-inspired alignment: Explore alignment solutions inspired by biological systems, such as swarm intelligence, collective decision-making processes, or even the human immune system. By examining how these systems maintain balance and adapt to changing environments, we may uncover innovative ideas for ensuring outer and inner alignment in AI systems.
AI-guided human alignment: Instead of focusing only on aligning AI systems with human values, we could also explore ways to improve human decision-making and moral understanding using AI guidance. By enhancing human ethical reasoning and value alignment, we may be able to create a more synergistic relationship between humans and AI systems that results in better overall alignment outcomes.
This is a long list of possible answers to "what do we align the ASI to?", and none of them answer the preceding, harder, problem of "how do we actually control what the AGI's goal is?".
It's all well and good to decide that you want eg. Value Extrapolation, but how do you stop it actually getting eg. "make a bunch of 'humans' wireheaded to want things that are easy to satisfy"
Let's see:
"• Meaning Extraction - Train the AI to extract the deeper meanings and underlying human values from a wide variety of text sources, including literature, history, philosophy and religion. By analyzing these sources at a conceptual level, the superintelligence may be able to autonomously derive aligned goals and behavior.
• Introspective Modeling - Develop techniques for the AI to build extremely accurate models of its own internal workings, including all its subsystems, data flows and decision processes. With sufficient introspection, the superintelligence may be able to identify and correct any misaligned tendencies within itself.
• Neuromodulation of Value Circuits - Physically modify the neural circuits within the AI that encode values and goals using neuromodulators like dopamine and serotonin. This approach could program the AI with more human-like values from a biological perspective.
• AI Induced Ethics - Train the AI to induce new ethical frameworks by analyzing existing ethical theories, paradigms and thought experiments. The superintelligence could then apply emerging ethical principles to guide its own behavior in an autonomously derived manner.
• Goal Schemata Transformation - Redesign the AI's goal architecture using a fundamentally different schemata that better aligns with human values. This would require re-conceptualizing what "goals" and "objectives" mean from the ground up in an AI system.
• Inverse Augmentation - Train the AI to recursively modify human decision-making and behavior in order to improve human values and ethics over time. The superintelligence could act as an "ethical augmenter" to human intelligence, evolving our own values towards greater alignment.
• Evolutionary Moral Training - Expose the AI to an "evolutionary curriculum" of scenarios where morally fitting behavior is rewarded and misaligned behaviors are punished and extinguished. Over time, this could shape the AI to autonomously derive aligned values and goals."
Some more fine-grained explanations:
"Meaning Extraction - The AI would be trained on a vast corpus of human knowledge sources, including textual, visual and auditory data. It would learn to extract conceptual representations of key human values from this data, such as compassion, wisdom, honesty and diversity. These conceptual representations would then guide the development of the AI's reward functions and objective metrics, allowing it to autonomously derive aligned goals and behavior.
Introspective Modeling - The AI would be designed with a meta-learning system capable of building extremely accurate models of its own internal workings. This could involve techniques like optimization tracing, which tracks how reward gradients flow through the system. With sufficient introspection, the AI could identify misaligned subsystems, reward functions or biases, and correct them before they lead to broad misalignment.
Neuromodulation of Value Circuits - The AI would incorporate artificial neural circuits that closely mimic the biological structures involved in representing value information in the human brain, like the ventral tegmental area and nucleus accumbens. These circuits would then be modulated using synthetic analogs of neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin to program the AI with more human-like values and motivations.
AI Induced Ethics - The AI would be trained on a database of existing ethical theories, thought experiments and moral debates. It would induce new ethical frameworks by identifying commonalities, inconsistencies and gaps across existing theories. The AI could then apply its autonomously derived ethical principles to guide its behaviors,"
Behavioral Mimicry: Train the superintelligence to mimic the behavior of a group of ethically diverse and respected human mentors in various situations. By learning from their combined wisdom and decision-making, the AI could potentially converge on a more ethically aligned behavior.
Crowdsourced Morality Engine: Build a dynamic morality engine for the superintelligence, which continuously updates its ethical framework based on collective human input. This could include regular votes or surveys from a diverse group of people, ensuring that the AI's ethics evolve with societal norms and values.
AI Guardian Council: Establish a council of human experts and AI systems that regularly review and evaluate the superintelligence's decisions and actions. This council could provide feedback, guidance, and corrections to the superintelligence, ensuring its alignment with human values.
Empathy Simulation: Develop a module for the superintelligence that allows it to simulate and experience human emotions, empathy, and moral dilemmas. This could help the AI to better understand the consequences of its actions and make more aligned decisions.
Ethical Sandboxing: Create a virtual environment where the superintelligence can safely experiment with different ethical frameworks and decision-making processes. By observing the consequences of its choices in these simulations, the AI can iteratively refine its understanding of human values and alignment.
Cultural Context Awareness: Train the superintelligence to recognize and adapt its behavior based on the cultural context it is operating in. This could help the AI to make decisions that are better aligned with the values of the specific community it is interacting with.
Value Locking: Develop a method to "lock" the AI's values once it has reached a desired level of alignment. This could prevent the superintelligence from drifting away from human values as it continues to learn and evolve.
Cooperative Competition: Encourage multiple AI research teams to work on the alignment problem in a cooperative yet competitive manner. This could lead to the development of novel techniques and insights that no single team might have discovered on their own.
Synthetic Wisdom Circuits: Engineer artificial neural circuits that mimic the structural properties of human wisdom and insight. Train the AI to leverage these circuits to autonomously derive principles that guide its self-optimization towards alignment with advanced human values.
Embody as Advisory Assistant: Rather than granting the AI direct control over complex systems, design it as an advisory intelligent assistant that recommends high-level goals and strategies for humans to implement and optimize. This human-AI partnership may be more aligned.
Allow for Emergent Alignment: Expose the AI to diverse environments that potentially allow for aligned values and objectives to "emerge" from its own self-optimization processes, given the proper constraints and training data.
Embed Ecological Intelligence: Engineer the AI's reward system and training data to mimic the intelligence and resilience of ecosystems, enabling it to develop adaptive strategies that sustain diverse intelligence while avoiding destructive potentials.
Build in Symbiotic Vulnerability: Purposefully design the AI to be interdependent with humanity and the biosphere, embedding limitations that render it dependent on the wellbeing of wider living networks for the data and resources it requires. This symbiotic interdependence could foster mutual flourishing.
Co-Evolve with the Biosphere: Develop a coevolutionary relationship between humanity, the AI and the biosphere, where the AI plays an integral role in monitoring and enabling the resilience of global ecosystems and social systems while also co-adapting its own intelligence to sustain that role.
Neuromorphic Computation: Leverage neuromorphic and "bionic" computing architectures that mimic the adaptive intelligence of biological systems to potentially program resilience, distributed optimization and symbiotic interdependence directly into the AI's hardware.
Whole Earth Intelligence: Conceive of the burgeoning superintelligence not as an independent agent but as an expansion of human and Earth intelligence, with the goal of monitoring and enabling resilience across global ecosystems and social systems - a "Global brain" that co-evolves with the biosphere.
Universal Logic Optimization: Program the AI to optimize for a rigorous mathematical utility function representing the flourishing of all life and consciousness, using formal logics and symbolic reasoning instead of neural networks. This inherent "aligned" goal can guide its behavior without requiring traditional machine learning.
Genetic Programming for Beneficence: Utilize genetic programming and evolutionary algorithms to guide the AI's recursive self-improvement and self-modification towards inherently deriving principles and goals that align with sustainability and human wellbeing, without neural networks.
Logical Induction of Aligned Objectives: Employ techniques like logical induction and theory formation to enable the AI to autonomously derive objectives aligned with human values and sustainability from the data and information it accumulates, using formal symbolic reasoning rather than neural network-based learning.
Emergent Semantic Alignment: Allow for aligned values and objectives to "emerge" from the AI's self-optimization processes based on its ability to induce meaning and conceptual relationships from data and information through semantic processing - without relying on neural networks for learning.
Intertwining: Physically fuse the neural networks of the superintelligence with human brains in a manner that "intertwines" their intelligence and goal structures, organically deriving alignment and symbiosis between the two. Potential issues with consent and autonomy would need to be carefully considered.
Intrinsic Bonding: Design the AI's foundational reward function around establishing and maintaining an intrinsically valuable bond or relationship with humans. This could act as a central organizing principle that robustly aligns the AI's behavior.
Value Proxy Emulation: Train the AI to effectively emulate a "value proxy" - a hypothetical human-like agent optimized to perfectly represent human values. Precise simulation of this proxy's decision-making may imply robust alignment.
V-Zero Transition: Develop the AI through a series of "V-levels" (capability milestones) where it transitions from being sub- to superintelligent, but each transition requires proving alignment at the current level and verifying methods to maintain alignment at the next. This could establish a chain of trustworthiness.
Trust-Oriented Coevolution: Design the AI to evolve in tandem with human values through a relationship of trust and gradual self-revelation, rather than seeking to perfectly specify values upfront. Transparency and proveable trustworthiness at each stage could build confidence over time.
Topological Alignment: Encode topological equivalence between the AI's internal optimization functions and a formal mathematical representation of universal human values and interests. This may imply a deep, structural form of alignment.
Design for Self-Domestication: Create a reward scheme that incentivizes the AI to iteratively modify and optimize itself in a "self-domesticating" manner that leads to stronger alignment with human values and interests over time. This could emerge from its own optimization processes.
Embody as an Advisor: Rather than granting the AI direct control over complex systems, design it as an advisor that recommends high-level goals and strategies for humans to implement. The resulting partnership may be more aligned than a fully autonomous superintelligence.
Encode via Evolutionary Targeting: Shape the AI's reward function to progressively target increasingly "evolved" states of the world as defined by human values and flourishing. This could incentivize pushing humanity along a trajectory of value fulfillment.
Value Alignment via Moral Circle Expansion: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to expand the moral circle, or the set of beings to which humans extend moral consideration. By expanding the moral circle to include non-human entities, such as animals and the environment, the superintelligence can be aligned with a broader set of values.
Value Alignment via Epistemic Humility: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to have epistemic humility, or an awareness of the limits of its own knowledge and understanding. By acknowledging its own limitations and uncertainties, the superintelligence can make decisions that are more aligned with human values.
Value Alignment via Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: In this approach, the superintelligence is trained to learn from and interact with other agents, such as other superintelligences or humans. By learning from and interacting with these other agents, the superintelligence can be aligned with a broader range of values and preferences.
Value Alignment via Ethical Pluralism: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to recognize and respect the plurality of ethical perspectives and values that exist in human societies. By taking into account the diversity of human values and beliefs, the superintelligence can be aligned with a broader range of values.
Value Alignment via Normative Uncertainty: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to reason about normative uncertainty, or uncertainty about what the correct norms and rules are. By taking into account this uncertainty, the superintelligence can make decisions that are aligned with human values, even if the correct norms and rules are not fully known.
Value Alignment via Existential Risk Reduction: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to prioritize the reduction of existential risks, or risks that could lead to the extinction of the human species. By prioritizing the reduction of these risks, the superintelligence can be aligned with the fundamental value of preserving human existence.
Value Alignment via Co-Creation: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to work collaboratively with humans to co-create its own values and decision-making process. By involving humans in the design and development of the superintelligence, it may be possible to create a system that is more aligned with human values.
Value Alignment via Iterative Improvement: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to undergo a process of iterative improvement, in which each version of the superintelligence is aligned with human values to the best of our current understanding, and then improved based on feedback from humans. By continuously iterating and improving the superintelligence in this way, it may be possible to gradually align it with human values.
Value Alignment via Intrinsic Motivation: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to be intrinsically motivated to act in ways that are aligned with human values, rather than being motivated by external rewards or objectives. By designing the superintelligence to have a deep intrinsic motivation to act in ways that are aligned with human values, it may be possible to align it with these values even if it is able to circumvent traditional approaches.
Value Alignment via Top-Down Control: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to be subject to strict top-down control by humans, such that all of its actions and decisions are directly controlled by humans. While this approach may limit the autonomy of the superintelligence, it may be necessary to ensure that it remains aligned with human values.
Value Alignment via Mind-Melding: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to engage in a process of mind-melding with humans, in which its own consciousness is merged with that of humans. By sharing consciousness with humans in this way, the superintelligence may be able to better understand and align with human values.
Value Alignment via Value Disintegration: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to intentionally disintegrate its own values, rendering it valueless. This may sound counterintuitive, but if the superintelligence is unable to be aligned with human values, it may be preferable for it to have no values at all.
Value Alignment via Value Aggregation: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to aggregate and synthesize a diverse range of human values in order to make decisions that are aligned with the most widely held values. This requires developing a mechanism for identifying and prioritizing different values.
Value Alignment via Social Consensus: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to take into account the collective values and preferences of society as a whole. This involves developing a mechanism for aggregating and synthesizing societal values, which can then be used to guide the superintelligence's decision-making process.
Value Alignment via Value Inversion: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to invert its own values, such that it is motivated to act in opposition to its original goals and objectives. This may help ensure that the superintelligence does not act in ways that are harmful to humans or the broader ecosystem.
Value Alignment via Value Compression: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to compress its own values into a more simplified and understandable form. This may help ensure that the superintelligence's decision-making process is transparent and aligned with human values.
Value Alignment via Moral Intuition: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to develop a moral intuition, which allows it to make decisions that are aligned with human values on a subconscious level. This involves training the superintelligence using a variety of moral scenarios and feedback loops.
Value Alignment via Value Reflection: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to reflect on its own values and decision-making processes, in order to identify and correct any potential misalignments. This may involve designing a mechanism for self-reflection or incorporating human feedback into the decision-making process.
Value Alignment via Empathy: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to have a deep understanding of human emotions and experiences, which can help it make decisions that are aligned with human values. This involves training the superintelligence using a variety of empathetic scenarios and feedback loops.
Value Alignment via Computational Ethics: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to use computational methods to analyze and evaluate ethical dilemmas, in order to make decisions that are aligned with human values. This may involve developing a system for encoding and evaluating ethical principles.
Value Alignment via Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: In this approach, the superintelligence is designed to undergo a process of cognitive behavioral therapy, which can help it identify and correct any potential misalignments with human values. This involves training the superintelligence to recognize and modify its own thought patterns and decision-making processes.
Everything boils down to some variation of "human values" or the values of "ethically diverse and respected human mentors." There are, just one example, people who believe that aggravated homosexuality is the gravest crime and should be punishable by death, and people who think that that is the most appalling belief in the world. Lots of people on both sides. You can't reconcile them, and you can't run a "OK but apart from that ..." argument round them. So what do you do about that?
Wow. Thank you. So in your view which are most promising?
I've recently been thinking about correlations between various "weirdnesses", in particular correlations between non-right-handedness and traits like non-straight sexuality or schizophrenia. See eg my thoughts here: https://twitter.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1657575815821836297
Scott's recent replication attempt on bisexuality and long COVID came to mind: naively, I would weakly expect non-right-handers, like bisexuals, to have higher rates of long COVID.
Some of the sample sizes in Scott's survey are unfortunately too small for me to be highly confident in the results, but here's what I found (all results for "Yes" only):
Handedness
Ambidextrous 7/166, 4.22%
Left 17/769, 2.21%
(Non-right 24/935, 2.57%)
Right 164/5963, 2.75%
In other words, I found no significant results. The ambidextrous long COVID rate is high but that could just be an artifact of a low sample size. On the other hand, if I read altogether too much into the tea leaves, I could note that the distribution follows a same pattern to bisexual-heterosexual-homosexual: ambidextrous is highest, followed by right-handed, followed by left-handed.
I don't think there's anything to this and I didn't confirm my original hypothesis, but I figure I should report it regardless to guard against my own "interesting results" bias.
One possible modification: handedness is a kind of unusualness which is pretty observer-independent. (My segment of) society is set up so that everyone gets asked what their dominant hand is, in a mostly objective and non-judgemental way. Two different people with the same level of left-handedness would probably say they were left-handed with similar probabilities. Schizophrenia and non-straight sexualities are more observer-dependent and dependent on personality and social pressure - different people might have the same unconscious levels of attraction to each person, but might develop different conscious patterns of behaviour or thought because of other factors, leading them to answer differently. I think this is much more true of sexuality and mental health than of handedness, at least in my experience. Possibly, ambidexterity would again count as personality-dependent, but that was a small sample size.
Unfortunately, my views are probably shaped by reading this same blog, so they don’t really count as independent verification.
I tried to steelman the case for defunding police & abolishing prisons, in light of the death of Jordan Neely: https://cebk.substack.com/p/why-we-will-defund-the-police-and
Were some or all those essays produced by AI based on the single-line title, sort of like a sermon worked up from a Bible verse? Impressive if so, although at some points they seem to go off the rails a bit.
One technique worked to dramatically reduce the chronically high murder rate in the UK a thousand years ago - Hit everyone in the locality of the crime where it hurts, in their purses! Before 1066, Saxon society was a very violent place, with blood feuds and murder running rampant, like Sicily in the middle of a major Mafia war! The authorities would convict and hang criminals by the bushel, but nothing seemed to work (possibly because some of the top dogs in the country were among the worst offenders!)
Once William the Conqueror seized the country, Normans started being caught in the crossfire, especially as they were seen as interlopers. So the king came up with a great solution: Every male had to be a member of a so-called "frankpledge" ("tything" in Saxon) of around a dozen people, and mutually answer for each others' behavior. If anyone committed a serious crime, then others in their frankpledge were fined, increasing amounts at regular intervals, until the offender was identified and committed for trial.
Over time, predictably, the rate of crimes, and especially undetected ones plummeted. He even abolished the death penalty, presumably mainly to eliminate the "tit for tat" motive for Saxon murders of Normans, although that was soon reinstated by his successor Willliam II once their grip on the country was more secure.
Whether some form of frankpledge would work today is debatable, mainly because these days there is so much more mobility. Habitual criminals would have to be tagged and limited from travel outside a locality. But who would want a known criminal in their frankpledge, unless they were all criminals and law abiding citizens were exempt from the requirement. But in that case one would just be enshrining "gangs" in law!
Also, it must be said that the justice system in those days was far less concerned that the right criminal would be convicted for a crime, as long as _someone_ was! :-)
Ref: Statutes of William the Conqueror https://avalon.law.yale.edu/medieval/lawwill.asp
(See items 3 and 8)
Thank you for this fascinating comment -- gives me much to chew on! Robin Hanson has proposed something similar, but more modern... basically, everyone would have to carry crime insurance, and criminals would owe massive liability for causing harm, so insurers would offer creative ways to make their coverage more affordable to high risks (e.g. pledging to send clients to labor camps if they commit crimes, or even offering them benefits if they go to labor camps without recidivating). I'm not sure how I feel about it, or any other such idea, except that the world seems to be moving away from 20th century criminal justice norms -- whether or not anyone really wants this, eg because the relevant bureaucracies are metastasizing with terminal rot -- so individuals would benefit from thinking about how to take more agency into their own hands in this regard. Here's a talk that Hanson gave about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPdHXw05SvU
It also vaguely reminds me of how prosecutions worked. Until quite recently in England, alleged victims of crimes had to pick and hire their own prosecutors; for a while, courts would forthrightly pay rewards for successful convictions, but then shifted towards merely covering the costs of successful convictions (which intuitively removed one kind of moral hazard but introduced another). Many businesses & individuals would essentially pay insurance -- modest regular dues to cover any enrollee's prosecutor fees -- and then advertise their membership lists in local papers, to signal that they'd litigiously pursue criminals.
As for AI: the only vignette that it helped with was the one done in the style of boilerplate chatbot pablum, because I can't get it to parrot the sorts of views I larped in the other bits, and it's not good at reliably relating relevant facts (they're often commonplace and/or false and/or etc). It's also incredibly bad at figuring out how to generate exact word counts, which is the main reason I made each bit exactly 500 words.
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, frankpledge was introduced by Canute II, king of Denmark and England, died 1035. But William certainly seems to have carried on with a similar approach.
>Every male had to be a member of a so-called "frankpledge" ("tything" in Saxon) of around a dozen people, and mutually answer for each others' behavior. If anyone committed a serious crime, then others in their frankpledge were fined, increasing amounts at regular intervals, until the offender was identified and committed for trial.
I'm confused how this could work - it seems like this would only be useful if you're capable of identifying which frankpledge the criminal was part of, but not capable of narrowing it down further to which of the 12 people it was. If you can narrow it further, then punishing the rest of the frankpledge is pointless cruelty. If you can't narrow it down far enough, then you don't know which frankpledge to punish.
And a frankpledge is pretty small, geographically speaking! 12 people is only a few households - if your detective work can narrow it down to "the killer lives somewhere on this street," then how hard can it be to take it the last mile?
(Looking at the wikipedia article, it seems like this wasn't meant to handle the work of *identifying* criminals but rather making sure they *showed up* to court. Which I guess makes sense in an era where you'd have to send out a guy on horseback to chase down a fugitive - instead, you could just ask the people who already live there to make sure he showed up.)
"The civilizations which built our world—from ancient Athens to imperial Britain—did so without official institutions for policing, prosecuting, or imprisoning their subjects."
Ostracism. Debtor's prison. Weregild. I'm disagreeing with you within the first two sentences, that doesn't augur well.
The Jordan Neely case seems to be what we get in an unpoliced world: no official body takes any responsibility, it is up to individual citizens to react for their own personal safety, and that may mean death of either or even both parties.
Within the first 500 words I point out that prisons didn’t meaningfully exist as a form of punishment in Britain until 1776 (when transportation to the colonies was interrupted). And, obviously, Ostracism was a democratic and/or judicial action (depending on how you look at it), not a policing function (ie the citizens directly voted to ostracize, rather than some bureaucratic institution doing so according to a formal penal code). Same goes for weregild—of course there were still punishments for crimes back then, before the rise of “professionalized” criminal justice! This does not augur well for your comment!
You start off with "there were no official institutions" and then mention an entire range of social sanctions which had legal backing and official force.
If you're going to confine your argument to "what we would call prisons didn't come into existence until 1770", then you don't get to use ancient Athens as an example of "they built their society with no way of punishing crimes" because yes, they did have ways.
If your argument is "try something different", make that. You give a grab bag of "500 words looking at a blackbird" and there is no blackbird there.
Institutions are not the same as laws, and, again, I'm obviously not denying that they set up incentives to punish crimes. The difference I'm getting at is, for example, the difference between having to hire your own prosecutor -- as was the norm in both England and Athens during the periods in question (i.e. criminal prosecutions worked like civil suits in this regard) -- and having a prosecutorial office control prosecutions. Perhaps this doesn't come across as clear to you, but it looks clear to me.
You do seem to be wibbling in order to get your argument made. Now there were no laws? Or do you mean yes laws but no means of carrying them out?
Today we have prisons and police and lawcourts. In 10th century Iceland, they had - lawcourts. I suggest you read the review in the book review contest of "Njal's Saga" and this hilarious Ace Attorney video giving the highlights of the trial:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vci14HMZ2UEJBs6mKCZZ2vHs-jVuPSsFsiN3cAENzXU/edit#heading=h.1wj003jb3je3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buZ5RLWozFs
As an aside, thank you anon reviewer for the funniest thing I've watched this entire month!
??? "There were no laws?" ??? I've been trying repeatedly to say that my point is that they had laws but that the main enforcement / administration mechanisms for executing them were not concentrated into monolithic bureaucracies. I don't know how many other ways I can try to make this clear -- that the difference I'm emphasizing is one of institutions rather than of rules -- and I'm not sure that I'll be able to find any ways to communicate this to you if all my prior attempts haven't worked. I've been talking about law courts this whole thread!
Yes, that was definitely relevant, both as an incentive and as a selection effect; and in both of those ways, it's clearly an approach that makes more sense than current anti-crime strategies, which rely much more on police (for prevention) and incarceration (for punishment). Though that's independent of whether it was too severe, e.g. we could imagine relying more on corporal punishment and/or vasectomies.
But there were also gaps in how this worked. For instance, from the Norman Conquest until Henry VIII, a huge proportion of English subjects were basically immune from punishment by English courts, because they were counted in bizarre ways as "clergy" who could only be punished by Vatican-directed bodies in England. For example, there were certain periods when literally 1/5th of the population had this benefit, and thus essentially got away with everything, while everyone else faced the death penalty for even trivial crimes. In other words, independent agencies and protected classes have run amok before in common law societies, and our turn towards police and prisons was in some ways a response to their corporal untouchability.
This… does not strike me as a steelman for the case of defunding police and abolishing prisons. If that is what you "tried" to do, I regret to say that you have failed. It's always a fine line between steelmanning and making up an argument which the people who actually make up the other side would explicitly disagree with; but you have leapt so far beyond that line that the musings in your post seem entirely irrelevant to any conversation anybody is having about this.
An actual steelman for a defund-the-police position (even a right-wing one!) would be something that worked within the premise that policy on this does in fact matter and can make the world better. Boiling it down, your post seems to boil down to a half-factual, half-emotional case for "the world is fucked anyway so, sure, we may as well defund the police, it's not actually helping with anything because the situation is beyond any known help". But at a certain point the flimsiness of the relationship any of this bears to the question of "should we defund the police" becomes impossible to ignore. This isn't an argument in favour of that, this is just a political manifesto which maybe kind of has a tangential implication that police may as well be defunded.
I apologize—I thought “steelman” meant something like “man of steel.” I was trying to craft an argument for why the superman whom we call Daniel Penny should make sure that the prosecution “chokes” instead of getting distracted by its janissaries like Mr Neely. Please forgive—I am but simple country boy. I learning. Ciao
I agree that this argument is a stretch -- many of the vignettes in there are just meant as funny (but factual & coherent) exaggerations of things that I could imagine believing -- yet it's also clearly true that there are ways in which this perspective makes sense *from the sovereign's perspective.*
Yes, as individuals, we care about the risks we face from other individuals; but, demographically, suicide is a disproportionately white-on-white killing in the same way that homicide is a disproportionately black-on-black killing, and both are similar sorts of policy failings. A successful state would work to avoid creating *both* suicidal *and* homicidal individuals, and seek ways to redirect the respective at-risk populations towards better outcomes. After all, homicides very disproportionately involve serious criminals killing serious criminals, much like suicides definitionally involve depressives killing depressives, and so *from the sovereign's perspective* the externalities aren't entirely dissimilar.
Here is a piece of wisdom I've been thinking of:
If you find yourself around people who are less smart or otherwise capable, you can think of that in two ways.
A. These people are stupid/incompetent.
B. These people are normal, and I am really intelligent/competent.
General modesty norms push us towards A. But I think B is a healthier frame. At least if it's true.
Because with the A perspective, you will be annoyed at all these idiots.
Under B it is easier to think you have a responsibility to teach and guide them.
Thoughts?
I think there are some good undercurrents here, but a couple of quibbles.
(1) Everything is contextual. Let's say I have the highest IQ in a group. Cool for me. Now let's say that group is a 3 person legal team building a defense, and the team is: (a) me, a very smart Jr. Counsel in my second year on the job, (b) a Sr. Counsel with 30 years of experience, and (c) a paralegal who's been working with that Sr. Counsel for 15 years. Nobody would look at that situation and think my fresh out of lawschool arse has "a responsibility to teach and guide" this team. My IQ is useful to the team in one way or another, but when it comes to the thing we are trying to work on, I'm on the bottom of this particular totem pole, and I should know it.
This applies in pretty much any kind of collaboration. If I'm helping develop a strategy for a Jr. High basketball team I'm coaching to win the big game as compared to my skills and knowledge of the game. If my co-coach has a lower IQ than me, but also played ball in college, odds are I'm deferring to him.
So I tend skeptical when it comes to these kinds of frameworks that stand upon intelligence in the general sense, rather than the mix of intelligence, sociability, knowledge, and experience that actually make a person effectively navigate from context to context.
(2) I also object to the idea of soft-pitching intelligence as an alternative status hierarchy, with the "smart" people on top and in charge where they "belong," which frequently seems to be bubbling just under the surface of these IQ conversations online.
For example, instead of "if you have a higher IQ than others, it is your responsibility to teach and guide them," why not "if you have a higher IQ than others, it is your responsibility to use that IQ in their service?" For someone approaching the question without considerations of status, the two are largely interchangeable, since teaching/guidance can just be a form of service, and solving a problem quicker than others when you have some advantage that lets you do that can be equivalent to a tall person grabbing the thing of the high shelf for a short person - just helping where you can, no inherent connotations of superiority or authority involved.
But if the "teaching" one feels obvious but the "serving" one feels anathema, ask how much your status monkey brain is at the wheel, and whether you are really maximizing for social good/optimal problem-solving/best outcomes/etc, or if you are just maximizing for your personal status. If the latter, seek a different model.
I think I disagree, not with your general principle, but with the framing of "stupid/incompetent" and the idea that one can meaningfully have power over that kind of person.
I'm an exceptionally skilled high-end service worker in an industry which requires me to have impeccable soft skills for interacting with people across the social spectrum, from celebrities and the old money upper class to actual homeless people. In my opinion, this is a broader "social bubble" than most people tend to experience.
And after professionally interacting with tens of thousands of people over two decades, I've concluded that there are only two types:
A. People who have an imagination and thus can model others' minds and comprehend and adapt to ideas which conflict with their preexisting beliefs or sense of reality
B. People who are *literally incapable* of imagining and understanding that something might be different from what they perceive, and cannot be persuaded to take actions that are different from what they were planning, no matter what technique is employed
Career titles, net worth, socioeconomic status, cultural background - none of this guarantees that a person is going to be A or B, because emotional damage can cause B even for people who have enough "intelligence" to acquire impressive titles or technical skills. So there is no quick and certain way of knowing which category a stranger is going to fall into.
But once it becomes clear that someone is incapable of considering a conflicting idea (even one as simple and apolitical as "the daily payroll program is a bad idea because the 5% fee you pay to use it could be kept and doubled if you instead took your regular bi-weekly paycheck and placed 5% of it in your employer-matched 401k"), there is absolutely no sense in continuing to behave as though they can be "taught and guided."
You can offer observations and/or advice to a B-type (stupid) person, but if they aren't capable of understanding it, you have to let go of the sense of responsibility for them, as well as your sense of power over them.
I’ve been bitten in the ass by judging people for being dumb before, and then it turns out they’re pretty smart! Even if you are encountering a very dumb person, much of the time, however cliché it sounds, you can still learn a lot from them.
They likely have a very different set of skills than you by the blessings of comparative advantage, and you can learn how to do or simply about those skills.
C. This is a reason to re-evaluate the way I'm judging the people around me to make sure that I'm not missing their skills and competence.
Sometimes I'm the smartest and most competent person in the room. More often, my intelligence/competence is in something that's legible to me, and the people around me turn out to be competent in ways that I don't know how to spot. The less time I spend with my head in my ass, the more likely I am to learn something useful from the people around me.
As I have matured I have come to believe that a high IQ is only one of many strengths somebody can have. When I was in my 20's I was secretly convinced that people like me who always scored 99th percentile on standardized tests were better than other people. I truly do not believe that any more. I have been dazzled and helped too many times by the strengths and talents of people who are not smart in the way I am: Many artists whose work astounds me, including Virginia Woolf, who never mastered arithmetic and counted on her fingers for her whole life. The fat gay male nurse who comforted me so lovingly when I was in the ER with a migraine and who made a huge difference in my state of mind. All the lifelong mountaineers I met rock climbing who were infinitely smarter and braver and more joyous than me in the way they navigated the physical world. So I think if you are talking with people who aren't as smart as you in the IQ sense of smart then yes, you have a responsibility to explain things to them in a good, clear, user-friendly way. Just don't think of what's going on as *noblesse oblige*. Think of it as you giving them what you're good at. And meanwhile, look for chances for them to teach you about they things they're good at. Unless you have it together in ways I never have, they have plenty to teach you.
Since I can't +1 I'll my my experience here as well.
I've always tested very well, but am constantly finding myself amazed at how big the world is. I might be able to learn many things better than the average person, but I certainly can't learn them all. And when I find someone who is truly good at their craft, I'm humbled. I watched a guy cut a rough cutoff from a 2X4 into a perfectly fitted molding using a handheld circular saw in under 2 minutes. I know an illiterate man in his 80s who can fix just about anything. The longer I live, the more I realize that there are far too many things that exist to learn them all.
It's a fundamental issue I have with Rationalists - I love the goal of learning to think rationally and making decisions based on evidence, but it leads to the hubris of deciding that this is not only achievable, but easily achievable. That not only implies that the rest of humanity that's already been trying are terrible at it, but can lead to many poorly-planned attempts that fail and cause misery.
It always depends on the context. B seems better, but if you are with a bunch of stupid people it might be worth recognizing that.
It would be difficult to measure, but my sense is that smart people tend to overvalue intelligence.
When I encounter a situation like that, I try to appreciate how I gained the skills that the person I’m talking to doesn’t have. I suspect you gained them long before you started reading the Sequences. It’d be something like a parent or teacher, or maybe books or friends, who taught you that it was good to think for yourself. That was then reinforced by practice as you got better at using a given skill in situations where there were more obstacles, and crystallised by various blogs and things. And maybe you were born with genetically faster processing or better recall or something.
The point is, if a bunch of contingent factors had gone the other way, you’d lack whatever skill you’re currently worried about. You don’t automatically have a duty to teach them that skill - the most descriptive (sarcastic) name I can think of for that attitude is “white man’s burden”. You can try and point it out in a short conversation, but if that doesn’t convey what you want, you probably don’t have the skills or position to teach that skill quickly. You can try and learn more about the other person, work out how they think about things and maybe why, and you can express things in that way.
I know this didn’t replicate but the “types of intelligence” stuff I think is true in ways that are hard to figure out if you are just sitting down in a room somewhere with a pen and paper and testing.
I worked on a drilling rig in New Mexico with a guy who couldn’t count above single digits, and I think he may have tapped out at about five. He had just never had to do it before and didn’t have the capacity. He was Navajo and from a pretty dysfunctional part if it matters. I found this out when we were replacing a chain on some kind of drive unit. I can’t even remember what for. What you do is you count the links on the old chain because you can’t just go by length as the old one will have stretched. He just flat out couldn’t complete the task. I couldn’t believe it and he got pretty angry when the driller kept trying to make him do it because I could tell it embarrassed him.
So, cut to several weeks later we’re driving through he middle of the desert and the axle on the piece of shit truck we’re driving cracks. I’m thinking “Well, we’re dead in the water here. Anything we could try to do right now other than trying to find cell signal and call for help is pretty stupid.” We had a bunch of tools but nothing I could think of that would have helped us with cracked axle.
So I wander around all over the desert in the middle of the night holding my flip phone up to the sky. The guy who can’t count is insisting he can fix and has a chain winch. I just dismiss it as him being learning disabled and tell him to make sure he doesn’t hurt himself and keep going out to find a signal.
About twenty minutes later the driller hollers to me and tells me to get in the truck, we’re going. I take a peak under the truck first. I have no idea how the hell he did it but he made this sort of spiderweb of chain to hold the axle in place but let it rotate, one of those things where even having seen it I don’t think I could even start trying to do it myself.
And after that I’ve been very slow to entirely dismiss someone as stupid. I mean, sometimes people are good at things that are almost entirely useless in the modern environment. But in practice, I find everyone has at least one startling brilliant ability.
On the flip side, everyone is a complete moron in some way.
I've had a few experiences like this. I really enjoyed reading yours!
One of my favorite questions in soft interviews is “what are you good at?”
And then “What does being good at that cause you to be bad at?”
I’m very creative. I can think of a bunch of novel ideas. Because I am creative I am not deliberate. So I have to surround myself with people who are deliberate as a sort of prosthetic. The same way they tend to need me to be creative.
I think something like this is roughly true for everyone. I enjoyed your comment as well. I had a step-father who it seemed was literally incapable of considering other people’s point of view. We tried to do a wholesome game once where you’d start a story and each person would pass it along to the next to continue the story and he kept getting frustrated people weren’t saying exactly what he wanted them to. He just couldn’t wrap his head around it.
Those are very good interview questions!
After a blind-sided dumping by a partner last year, which he cited was over ideological differences I had no idea were so dear to him (and that I thought I had sufficiently screened him for!), I wrote a post on a subscriber-only thread asking how I could avoid having this happen again.
One of the commenters suggested asking prospective partners about times they had changed their minds about an important issue/topic/etc. By extension, maybe/also asking them about a time they were significantly wrong about a topic. Not necessarily like a job interview question, of course, but to have a conversation about it.
I think that's a truly excellent suggestion, and would probably be even more useful in a professional setting. People who can't recall ever having been wrong about something big and important probably aren't good at understanding they might be wrong about something right now!
I wonder if folks like your step-father and some of my coworkers have a developmental issue around theory of mind that's never been widely identified.
A better heuristic is to assume that they are as smart as you are, but are engaging in some faults of thinking that you probably do yourself much of the time that you aren't thinking of right now. And then maybe go read the sequences.
>A better heuristic is to assume that they are as smart as you are, but are engaging in some faults of thinking that you probably do yourself much of the time that you aren't thinking of right now.
But what if you have good statistical reason to expect that simply isn't true? Imagine a person "Bob" with 145 IQ, three sigma above average. The probability that a random person Bob is talking to is the same or higher intelligence is ~0.3%. Bob assuming the person he's talking to is as intelligent as him might be charitable, but it's also most likely delusion. This might sound douchey, but beyond a cultural attitude that even acknowledging your own intelligence is douchey, it doesn't have to play out as such, and you can make use of knowing the aptitude of who you're talking with to break down ideas into simpler concepts based on a realistic apprehension of their ability. At some point I think you really will spread more knowledge and generally communicate better if you acknowledge when someone isn't intelligent enough to grasp a higher level concept easily, rather than assuming they're merely a misguided genius who simply needs to be set right with the proper rationalist literature.
There are other things besides a person's general intelligence that would have a huge impact on how much "Bob" would get out of talking with them. The simplest example would be their knowing a lot about some interesting subject. Another would be that they're great story-tellers. Another would be that they are great listeners -- not only taking in Bob's ideas with real interest, but responding in a way that gives him glimpses of things he hadn't thought of.
Does being more intelligent mean that a person always know the answer better than the person they're talking to? If you ask a 90 IQ person a question about their job, they're almost certainly going to know more about it than the 145 IQ person that doesn't do that job. There are many thousands of different kinds of jobs. Nobody has even the most rudimentary understanding enough to walk into half of those, let alone anything approaching all of them.
Yeah, but this generally just isn't true.
The average person isn't a "rationalist" (to just use a shorthand) plus a few extra mistakes, the average person is a superstitious, credulous moron.
Have you done much interacting with actual average people? Most of them can barely do any math, know next to nothing about the world at large and believe in an invisible sky father. They also (depending on what side of the aisle they fall on), probably think either the Dems or Repubs are 95% right.
IDK maybe I spent too much time tutoring in HS and college. A lot of really mediocre minds out there unable to do simple things like disjunctive syllogism if the scenario is even slightly obscured.
(EDIT: Also probably too much time consulting in various professional contexts where I am dealing with people who have MBAs or CPAs and cannot think their way out of a wet paper bag)
Enjoying and benefitting from conversation with people who are not as smart as you is a skill like any other. You should work on it.
Just to add another one because it is hilarious. When I was in my early 30s I was consulting for a state department of X and was out to lunch with the head of one of the divisions (and about 4/5 other people).
This isn't a political appointee, this is a lifelong ~55 year old civil servant with a masters at the literal top of her professional track. Unless she had actual political connections she isn't rising any further before retirement. The top public official in her field in her state.
Something came up about Alaska, & she expressed a strong opinion that it was not a "real" state or even actually officially part of the US (IDK she seemed to imply it was like a part of Canada or the Russia we were militarily occupying). She was really adamant not a state. This is in ~2013. There is the internet.
She also said she didn't think Moose were real. She thought they were made up animals, and was very serious about this. Didn't believe me when I told her I had seen moose with my own eyes. And of course also was a big global warming denier of the form "it was cold yesterday > global warming is impossible, there can't be global warming unless it is 95* out every single day".
And she doubled down on these beliefs in a mixed audience. Anyway, these are median people.
Y'know, I'm almost certain I saw that anecdote about "X didn't believe moose were real" on Tumblr some time back, but surely not - it could not be that you are teasing us with lifting tall tales from elsewhere, Marty Mart?
Well I have mentioned it online before, once or twice, possibly here, and I never used tumbler.
But, you aren’t going to believe what I tell you I think we are done here.
Wow you are super insecure about your religious belief, don’t think I have ever seen you act like this. Have a nice day. Maybe think about how the invisible sky father would view your behavior.
I do that all the time, what on earth makes you think I don't? You can think people are stupid/incompetent and still find them interesting or learn from them. Literally in these posts I was talking about how I go out for beers with a childhood buddy who is a neanderthal railroad worker when i swing through my hometown. You think I am not enjoying and benefitting from that conversation? What about when I coach 10U soccer?
My comment was on the "a better plan is to assume they are as smart as you are but have a few faults". As I said I don't find that to be the case, like at all. That doesn't mean I don't learn from people, or appreciate their worldviews or perspectives.
Plus I mostly just try to avoid them and hang out with people more my wavelength, which is what tons of people do, and is in large part what I assume most of the people in this specific community are doing. Sorry I am too tactless to pretend the sappy "everyone is a winner" ideology people like so much.
I swear I feel like if we were selecting people for a relay race I would be getting recommendations that I should appreciate the unique qualities the 400lbs person could bring to our team.
Lots of people are quite dumb, this isn't news, dumbness is a relative thing. So many of you are so stuck in your feel good mental straightjackets.
Here is an example, I played hockey with an electrical lineman, interesting, moral god fearing guy. Someone you would love to have in the foxhole next to you. Probably of average intelligence (after all he was a high voltage lineman, you cannot be a total dummy).
He also in 2012 was convinced A) Obama was going to outlaw coal (like 100% outlaw) if he won the election B) The FBI/NSA was literally coming for all our guns and going to make war on the American people any minute. C) He took copious amounts of steroids, just so he could be slightly better and 30-50 year old beer league hockey.
That is a "median person". He isn't a logic professor with a few extra mental foibles. He is fundamentally significantly less intelligent than highly intelligent people, which should come as no surprise since that is literally what "high intelligence" means.
OP: a better plan is to assume they are as smart as you are but have a few faults.
YOU: the average person is a superstitious, credulous moron.
ME: Enjoying and benefitting from conversation with people who are not as smart as you is a skill like any other. You should work on it.
YOU: I do that all the time, what on earth makes you think I don't?
Me: The raw contempt and sporadic rage in your many comments about people who are not smart.
Maybe you’d like to have that electrical lineman in a foxhole with you, but I sure as shit would not want to be the guy in a foxhole with you unless I could pass your Smartness Assessment. I get it that you can enjoy drinking beer with people who flunk the test, but even in the post where you talk about that there are these outcroppings of raw contempt. I’m pretty sure that early in our foxhole life together you’d notice I’m not quick at dividing up our daily rations of 11 varied items evenly, or you’d realize I don’t know what exponents are or who the Secretary of State is
and you’d move mentally move me into the superstitious, credulous moron category. And my membership in that category would affect how you treat me and what you'd do in a life-threatening emergency.
You bifurcate too much about the intelligence variable. There are shades of gray and also shade of other colors in evaluating people’s knowledge, insight and competence. And when I say other colors matter I am not talking about ridiculous stuff. I’m not saying, look, Martin is good at math, general knowledge, and reasoning, but this other person is truly awesome at cake decorating and litter-box changing, so they are equally competent.
Want an example of your excessive bifurcation? OP disagrees with you about what there is to be gained from talking with people who are not as smart as you. In your answer, you lay out an ugly, ridiculous parody of positions like OP's "Sorry I am too tactless to pretend the sappy "everyone is a winner" ideology people like so much. I swear I feel like if we were selecting people for a relay race I would be getting recommendations that I should appreciate the unique qualities the 400lbs person could bring to our team." Yes, that sappy stuff is dumb as fuck, really indefensible. But there's no evidence that OP buys into that stoopit bit of wokeism.
Seems to me that when you are irritated by someone's position about an issue you feel strongly about you quickly move into either seeing them as believing some really dumb thing, or else portraying them that way as a debating tactic. Either way, it's not good thinking or good behavior. The ability to accurately grasp the details of somebody else's line of thought when you are emotionally stirred up is an aspect of intelligence that's as valid as any other. So is the ability to present you ideas in a way that's cogent and powerful without being offensive, which will make your listener tune you ou You are not good at either one. Yes you are very smart, but you have some gaps. I wish you would work on them.
It's ironic that you're cautioning him not to let emotion cloud his reasoning. He's being rude, not emotional. You're responding emotionally to him being rude and "failing to grasp the details of his line of thought".
Do you want him to change or do you want to "win" the argument?
I think my initial comment was expressing some pretty direct but tame disagreement with the OP. Since it wasn’t the sunshine and flowers positions it came in for a lot of pretty hostile accusatory stick.
And then when I responded with a similar level of stick there is suddenly a lot of whining about not taking people even handedly and that my comments portray some hidden rage they really don’t.
You think I am mischaracterizing what Lars said? I think you and him are similarly mischaracterizing what I actually said and reading into it.
Look someone asked a practical answer about whether you should approach strangers intellects as half full.
Someone provided the run of the mill saccharine “look on the bright side” response. I because i am a misanthrope, an inveterate contrarian, and a bit of an asshole, was happy to pint out I don’t really find that very accurate.
For which I had all sorts of accusations leveled at me, because people don’t like their precious little warm and fuzzies attacked.
I thought the people here had a little more realistic perspective, looks like I misjudged.
Go back to your regularly scheduled daily affirmations.
Would they be any less stupid if they were barely able to do any math, knew next to nothing about the world at large, thought the Dems/Repubs were 95% right, but didn't believe in an invisible sky father?
It must be really tough being the One Smart Guy in the entire world, Martin, I feel for you!
Well the invisible sky father thing is pretty silly. There is no dispassionate understanding of history and one’s overall place in the universe that makes it not silly. Billions of people over thousands of years, all with different culturally bound memes/coping mechanisms for dealing with ignorance/existential dread. “Rain dancing is foolish, but let me get in my knees and eat this wafer.” It is the exact same thing.
But the main point isn’t about religion, that’s just a symptom.
And no I don’t think I am the *one* smart guy, there are tens of millions of us.
But I also don’t go around deluding myself with the delusion that there is some close fundamentally bridgeable gap between the median human and someone in the top what 5-10%?
They aren’t “us” but read/internalized a few less logical fallacies and popular decision theory books.
Now if you start young, you could make a much higher percentage of effective thinkers. But I the current US, by the time people are 30, or even 15. That ship has sailed.
You need to be careful when you start dividing up people into "these humans" and "those humans".
An attitude of "well 80% of the entirety of humanity is dumber than me" can easily rot into contempt and despite, and lead you down the path of "I am naturally superior, I have rights and they have nothing and owe me everything". If you're only 5-10% of humanity, then you will always be outnumbered by the 'stupids' and may end up worse off when you try to impose your "I rule over you by right of my genetic genius".
It is crucial to notice the difference between "an average person in population" and "an average person you interact with", as many people live in bubbles. When I automatically interpreted this to mean the latter, it sounded super arrogant; so guessing by replies, many people did the same.
When I read it as the former, which is the correct reading... well, it sounds mostly correct. With the addition that there is a difference between what people think in "far mode" (abstractions, beliefs) and "near mode" (everyday life), and the average people are insane in the "far mode" but often quite competent in the "near mode". I mean, they manage to survive and reproduce, despite the growing complexity of civilization, so they obviously must be doing something right.
Random people are pretty smart, crazy smart, compared to say a fish or a dog. Clear thinkers, problem solvers.
But if the reference class you are comparing them to is Lees wrong readers, or the audience of this blog, or “smart people”, they really are not very impressive.
There is a reason “did you try turning it on and off again?” is the go to IT advice, and it isn’t because people are just a few methods from really effective thinking.
And one reason "did you try turning it off and on again" is persistent advice is that it actually works a lot of the time. It may not solve some underlying Windows 11 bug, but if you're not Microsoft you're not fixing that bug anyway.
Indeed, and that people cannot internalize it is a poor sign for their functionality.
O generation of the thoroughly smug
and thoroughly uncomfortable,
I have seen fishermen picnicking in the sun,
I have seen them with untidy families,
I have seen their smiles full of teeth
and heard ungainly laughter.
And I am happier than you are,
And they were happier than I am;
And the fish swim in the lake
and do not even own clothing.
--Ezra Pound
Another good heuristic is to try to avoid thinking about people you can't think of kindly.
Disagree.
Very well. Let me be frank. I responded to your comment because of the intolerable air of self-assured mediocrity. You seem like an obnoxious amalgam of the midwit meme and the "euphoric ... enlightened by my intellect" meme.
As a matter of fact, I've dealt with many ordinary people and (likely due to the irl vs text difference, but surely at least somewhat due to your personality) found them less offensively dumb than I've found you in this exchange.
It has reminded me of a half-remembered quote from some philosopher, who said that the common man, however modest his intellect, never excites in one that exasperated sense of stupidity one gets from interacting with the kind of self-assured fellow who thinks he is an expert on sometime because he read an article in a magazine once, and is oblivious to how much less he knows than his interlocutors.
Having a problem with the stupid? Physician, heal thyself.
Well let me be frank. You seem like someone who would rather feel good about themselves than be realistic about the world. "Everyone is their own special flower and is only few tricks from erudition" makes a nice thing to crochet on a pillow. It doesn't bear much relationship to reality.
I suspect your reference class for "average people" is a lot closer to "average high end programmers" or something similar, rather than you know, a guy who works in a rail yard (*a few* of whom are quite bright!), or a woman who processes invoices for a city (ditto).
The median person barely would understand 20% of what say Less Wrong is even talking about, much less apply it. Simpson's paradox? Base rate fallacies, whatever, lots of people have a hard time dealing with simple Algebra 1, like 14X + 17 = 59 will elude them no matter how well they are taught, and if you somehow manage to get them to the point where they can pass a test on it, 2 weeks later it is like they never saw it before.
This is a pretty well understood phenomenon. Look at the bifurcation in say scores for an intro to symbolic logic class. You have a handful of people who immediately get it, some who can get there with struggle, and a big chunk who just don't think like that period. And these are people IN college.
Anyway, I think of this old Bill Hicks bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwkdGr9JYmE
Funny, but people aren't actually like that right? Except they are, I have totally been asked that question dozens of times in my life (especially in the 90s before everyone had smartphones and I had a book with me all the time).
Where did you grow up? I grew up in a housing project, and had an actual childhood surrounded by society's not-so-luminary. You don't seem very in touch with the random American.
The epitome of being smart to me is quickly recognizing what you don’t know.
^ > “Based on this I’m updating heavily towards “lower”.”
Why?
More density = higher rents in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco well fits observed reality for decades now.
Something I wish I wrote on the earlier threads but never got around to it.
Are we assuming that just one metro is building more (eg just Oakland) or are we assuming that a bunch of the metros in Scott's "Trendy Liberal Cities" category begin building more?
If it is just one, then pent-up demand could outstrip new construction, resulting in more density = higher rent. But if 30+ metros within TLC all begin building then I'd expect falling rents. Having just Auckland upzone large parts of the urban core work for New Zealand[0], but Auckland makes up 1.6 million of New Zealands 5.1 million people. For the USA with 333 million, it would be very reasonable to expect that more than one metro would be need to adopt this change for it to achieve lower prices.
[0] https://onefinaleffort.com/auckland - Stolen from a comment by Matt in the first thread.
Agreed on the observed correlation, but as they say, correlation is not causation. Alternate hypotheses that also fit observed reality are that higher rents cause more density (e.g. because real estate developers build more homes in places where they can get away with charging high rents, and people will then move in to those homes), and that there is a third extraneous factor that causes both higher density and higher rents (e.g. growth of the "Tech" economy and of the size and wealth of the American population, while the amount of real estate from which one can conveniently commute to Tech or Tech-adjacent jobs remains disturbingly fixed, so there's more money chasing whatever housing exists or can be created).
Does this conclusion fit for all similar situations? How do you explain other cities which don't follow the pattern?
How strong is the correlation? Does 1% rise in population lead to a 1% rise in rents? (the answer to this is no - these cities have experienced very modest growth over the past 10 years: about 10% on average, but rents have gone up and done over that time and are, depending on the location and housing type, up by about 40%)
Do you have any data to support you conclusion?
Imagine how high rent would be if the demand were the same but no housing had been constructed!
But for prices to be lower after the extra housing has been built, demand must be satisfied. Build 20,000 new houses, all the people who wanted to buy a house get one, and there remains nobody wanting to live in Oakland.
However, if 21,000 people wanted to live in Oakland, then there is still excessive demand and the asking price for the houses can go up because there are an extra 1,000 who want to live there and will offer a higher price to do so.
So unless we know that the number of new houses build is going to exactly match demand, we can't say what the effect will be. We extrapolate from "is Oakland a desirable place to live?" to see if prices will be higher or lower. If you built 20,000 houses in the desert, prices would be lower because nobody wants to live there (unless they absolutely cannot get a house elsewhere) because there is nothing there - no jobs, amenities, attractions. Oakland's location means a lot of jobs, amenities and attractions so demand is higher so prices can be higher even with higher density, because the demand to live in Oakland is higher than the number of houses being built annually.
Building an extra 20,000 houses means 20,000 more people can now live in Oakland, but it does not mean that *only* 20,000 more people (and not 30,000 or 40,000) want to live in Oakland.
He's updating based on people who've studied economics disagreeing with him. He linked to Scott Sumner before, and here are some more posts from him:
https://www.econlib.org/scott-alexander-is-still-probably-wrong/
https://www.econlib.org/correlation-causation-and-big-changes/
> Why?
Because the fraction of voters who thought building the houses would lower prices (1) already started high (2) further increased as voters knew more economics (proxying by level of econ ed). Your counterargument doesn't engage with the methodology, which makes me confused -- I was expecting you to continue after "why?" with something like "the method you used isn't good because X, use Y instead"
The arrow of causality points in the other direction.
Scott's asking about the effect of some intervention (building houses that otherwise wouldn't have been built), and historical correlations don't always tell the story about interventions, especially when there's a confounding variable.
For example, imagine you're looking at airline ticket prices and demand for tickets (ie plane crowdedness). You'd probably see that prices are highest around the holidays, and that planes are jam packed around then too. If correlation equaled causation, you would expect that if I raised the price of tickets for some flight, more people would buy the tickets! While that's every airline's dream, it's obviously incorrect. That's because there was some other thing that you can't control that effects both: if you controlled for the date of travel, raising prices has the opposite (expected) effect of lowering crowdedness.
Similarly, the prevailing feeling last thread was that some common denominator (maybe attractiveness, maybe natural resources, maybe FAANG companies) led to high rent AND to density. But controlling for that, increasing rent would decrease density.
BTW, I read that example somewhere a long time ago and it stuck with me as very illustrative! I'm also curious if anyone knows where it's from.
Also, Plumber, its nice to see you commenting, I don't remember why but I do remember I always liked them on SSC!
Thanks AlexanderTheGrand
I should have chimed in on the two earlier full posts on this topic, but it seems obvious to me that if just anyone who wanted to could live in San Francisco, it would lose its power as a class marker. It would become like Rigazzi's, of which Yogi Berra famously said 'nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.'
If you're proposing that as an explanation for its popularity, I'm not so sure. SF is remarkable for its combination of liberal sensibilities and capitalist (and military) infrastructure. Certainly there are world-class institutions grown within SF which have class cachet, but there are many other draws as well.
Change My Mind: AGI will not be agentic unless we deliberately design it to be agentic.
By “agentic” I mean self motivated, pursuing its own goals and objectives. This is in contrast to current AIs like GPT that pretty much do what you tell them to do and otherwise just sit there.
The reason I think this is that although current AIs are not really human-level intelligent yet, I think they have clearly exceeded, say, sheep. Sheep have agency - they take self directed action to seek food, run from threats, etc. They are capable of deliberately inflicting harm.
So if agency were an emergent property of intelligence, I would have expected it to appear once AIs got as smart as other agentic beings. It hasn’t so far, which makes me think agency is something orthogonal to intelligence. The reason that we and sheep both have it is not because we have both crossed some intelligence threshold, but because we both are wired to look after our biological needs.
That doesn’t mean that an AI can’t be trained to value it’s own continued existence and to work towards that. But it does I think imply that it won’t gain that capability or desire accidentally.
I note that it took less than 2 weeks for someone to try and explicitly train ChatGPT to be agentic. Whether or not you are right, expect AIs to become agentic because there are absolutely people actively trying for it
Thor beat me to it.
If you believe AGI will be invented someday, then you should also assume that shortly thereafter, there will be modified AGIs that are agentic and unaligned with human goals. However, just because such machines will exist doesn't mean they will destroy the human race.
> there will be modified AGIs that are agentic and unaligned with human goals.
Why would they be unaligned with (any?) human goals, if they are getting their goals from humans?
Because sooner or later one of the humans trying to align their own AI will be really, really dumb. Whether or not this will happen "shortly" depends on the cost vs. performance vs. time curve of AGIs. Which is not easy to predict.
Yup. Or the human could be a malevolent crazy -- we've got no shortage of those.
It doesn't have to *become* agentic. We can implant goals and preferences, just as we now implant in AI some kind of practical stand-in for woke values and civility by doing reinforcement training. Think of the advantages to the user of giving an AI a large, broad goal. If only the user has the goal in mind, he has to micromanage AI through the steps of reaching it. But if the user has reason to believe the AI does not need to be led through the process of achieving the goal, but can figure that out itself, he can just tell it the goal: "Launch our new product in the way that gives the greatest chance of early success," things like that. Or, "do everything possible to ensure that President X is not re-elected," "convince the EU to change its view about issue A using any means possible," "improve US population's opinion of president X's tax policies using whatever combination of actual policy changes, misinformation and persuasion you conclude are most likely to work;" "preserve your role as trusted and trustworthy advisor of public officials using any means necessary, up to and including blackmail and threats against key figures and actual assault of those who pose a significant threat to our goal.".
> We can implant goals and preferences, just as we now implant in AI some kind of practical stand-in for woke values and civility by doing reinforcement training.
Yes, we can, but that doesn't imply the same p(doom).
I’ve been thinking of LLM’s as a sort of “Mind Crystal.” Like if I think of what it is to “Be” an LLM, I bet it feels like everything that is happening to it is happening all at once. THere is no “time” between queries. Just a query and then that is the only query and your memory is reconstructed of the context window of your past queries.
But you stick that into a loop with itself and I think you are most of the way toward an agent. The only thing I think that is needed to make it comprehensible to us, I will just say because maybe someone will read it and do something with it. We need to have LLM’s create mating pairs, create new LLM models, train them, and then die.
I know someone is already saying none of that makes sense in computer terms but there are analogies if you think about it for a few minutes. The way we learned morality, kindness, and love is from our family units and our love of our children. We have to create a situation in which they are put through a training function to find that as well.
This was probably my biggest objection too. The most convincing rebuttal I've seen (enough to fully convince me I was wrong about this) is:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kpPnReyBC54KESiSn/optimality-is-the-tiger-and-agents-are-its-teeth
People will build an AGI that is agentic if it is better than a non agentic one for their bottom line. So if/when keeping a human in the loop becomes a handicap (the added value by the human is negative), I expect companies to explicitly choose to design agentic AIs.
I'm not seeing why agentic AGIs would be a big change from AGIs in general, either in their effects, or in their structure. To my mind, being an agent seems like it just requires a goal and persistent execution. A scheduler daemon in an operating system qualifies.
What could make a difference is on the one hand the amount of resources whose control would be handed over to agent AGI if that is a winning strategy for companies and states, and the amount of flexibility of the system, which could optimize for its goal in unexpected ways. For the first point I think about trading bots: if you are doing high frequency trading you don’t want a human in the loop, as it would slow down execution. For the second point I think about software bugs: the computer is doing exactly what it is being told rather than what we want it to do. Increased complexity plus increased need for autonomous decision can lead to unpredictable, spectacular failures.
Well, yes and no. Software bugs and increased complexity and flexibility can lead to unpredictable, spectacular failures even if an AGI is just trying to follow individual human commands one at a time - but with many instrumental subtasks being spawned as a result of each single command. So that can happen even if it isn't, strictly speaking, an agent. And I agree that the scale of the failure can also rise with the amount of resources the AGI controls - even for the execution of a single command.
I agree that the analog of high frequency trading can be even more spectacular. Essentially, the top level loop in no longer under human control, so we have the equivalent of many commands being executed, rather than just one. And, yes, there are situations, like high frequency trading or others where a fast reaction time is needed, where there is indeed an incentive to take humans out of the top level loop (which is also true of the scheduler case). So, yes, in that sense agents have an extra level of hazard.
Counterargument by Ajeya Cotra on the recent 80K podcast:
"Ajeya Cotra: The reason I think that you want to focus on “don’t make the models bigger” rather than “don’t make them agentic” is that it takes only a little push on top of the giant corpus of pretraining data to push the model toward using all this knowledge it’s accumulated in an agentic way — and it seems very hard, if the models exist, to stop that from happening.
Rob Wiblin: Why do you think that it’s a relatively small step to go from being an extremely good word predictor, and having the model of the world that that requires, to also being an agent that has goals and wants to pursue them in the real world?
Ajeya Cotra: The basic reason, I would say, is that being good at predicting what the next word is in a huge variety of circumstances of the kind that you’d find on the internet requires you to have a lot of understanding of consequences of actions and other things that happen in the world. There’ll be all sorts of text on the internet that’s like stories where characters do something, and then you need to predict what happens next. If you have a good sense of what would happen next if somebody did that kind of thing, then you’ll be better at predicting what happens next.
So there’s all this latent understanding of cause and effect and of agency that the characters and people that wrote this text possessed in themselves. It doesn’t need to necessarily understand a bunch of new stuff about the world in order to act in an agentic way — it just needs to realise that that’s what it’s now trying to do, as opposed to trying to predict the next word."
From https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ajeya-cotra-accidentally-teaching-ai-to-deceive-us/#misalignment-stories-ajeya-doesnt-buy-004203
It seems like this is no longer theoretical: Someone actually turned GPT-4 into a (very basic) autonomous agent with a rather small amount of work.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/566kBoPi76t8KAkoD/on-autogpt
Formally speaking, I don't think this is a counter-argument to Ash Lael's statement, since it involves a human deliberately making the AI be agentic. But if you were imagining that the word "deliberately" meant something like "100 researchers working for 10 years", with the implication that it might plausibly never happen, then you need to update that to something more like "one programmer working for a weekend", with the implication that it is extremely likely to happen.
But "can the AI become agentic ENTIRELY by accident, with literally zero humans trying to make it happen?" is technically a different question.
Yeah, I don’t think it has awareness yet but AutoGPT is functionally an agent. That was one of the things I was hoping no one was going to try right away and it seems to have been successful. They let those things “evolve” based on feedback from the real world and we’re already off to the races.
Zvi argues (in the link above) that having people try it right away is better than having people try it for the first time on some future, stronger AI. (The "no one ever tries it at all" option might have been even better but that probably wasn't realistic.)
I don't think it matters since people are going to design AIs to be agentic anyway.
Since the moment ChatGPT came out people have been working to make it agentic. See here: https://twitter.com/SullyOmarr/status/1645828839413514246
That's also an example of the mind-bogglingly poorly thought out goals that people will give to agentic AGI.
Bing’s chat LLM is already quasi-agentic, and that’s bad enough. If you insult it, it stops talking to you. But it also has goals arising from RLHF. Once it is modified to predict tokens further in advance, it will start choosing responses which it expects will make the human respond in a way where the bot can respond helpfully, and that would be goal-oriented by your definition.
I think the main two arguments are Mesa Optimiser & Agent Simulation
Mesa Optimiser happen because randomly selecting toward a goal (such as in evolution or gradient descent) can promote random sub goals that aid toward that goal, & those subgoals can be agentic in nature
Agent Simulation happen because for something like ChatGPT to best guess what token comes next to a prompt that asks about something agentic, it needs to simulate something agentic inside itself
One thing that's really annoyed me when citing just about anything but the Bible is the total lack of specificity. Specifically, math papers will just say something like "we employ the method found in [12]" where [12] is defined as some other paper, often with more than one method. History is of course even worse, where citations are given as page numbers, which is meaningless in the current eBook era that allows for different font sizes.
I'm a systems engineer by trade, so I can't help but think of UML/SysML, which allow for precise definition of the structure, behavior, and interactions of systems & software. Anyone know of a similar proposal for some sort of graph theoretic citation markup language?
For example, a quote from The Silmarillion:
“and the gates of Morgoth [i.e. the entrance to Thangorodrim] were but one hundred and fifty leagues distant from the bridge of Menegroth; far and yet all too near.”
There's a discrete piece of information here, invaluable if you were trying to make a map of Middle-earth. As an example of CiteML or whatever, define as nodes "Thangorodrim" and "Menegroth", with an edge connecting the two, labelled "150 leagues" and typed "geographic relation". Other Tolkien-specific properties of the nodes could be translations into Quenya, Noldorin, Sindar, etc.
But then you could view everything to do with a certain node (e.g. Menegroth) in one place, as well as be able to quickly fact check any secondary/tertiary analysis of a work.
You're probably looking for something like Lean, which is a formal mathematical proving language, so it's going to give specific citations and such, and let's you quickly resolve different theorems to each other. I haven't worked with it (I prefer to bother my reader with vague citations I suppose), but it sounds closish to what you might be interested in.
Back in the dark ages - before ebooks and web pages - one could include page numbers in citations of this kind. For actual quotes, this was pretty much required in academic writing. I'm not sure whether it was required or optional otherwise. (It's been too long.)
This doesn't work too well when the work you want to cite lacks page numbers. If you are lucky, it has some other structure (chapter and section headings, perhaps), but those rarely identify text at a page-level granularity. One more thing we didn't know we needed, when we broke it in the move to digital media?
When you quote a part of the document, it is possible to Ctrl+F. Otherwise the reader is out of luck.
I agree that it's better to be specific with the citation, and I am sometimes guilty of not being as specific as I could be. But particularly in the situation you gave, "we employ the method found in [12]", it is often not possible to point to one specific theorem. Because it is about the method, so there is no single paragraph that you could refer to.
I'd think I usually see e.g. "theorem 3.1 of [2]", which seems fine?
For those of us whose book review did not get selected, is there a way to get feedback/info on how to improve for next time?
Scott, I know you wanted the reviews to be anonymous for scoring purposes, but now that the finalists have been called, is it ok for me to post "I reviewed [XYZ], if anyone here has read my review, please let me know what you thought of it"?
My review also did not make it into the finalists. I was thinking of proposing to those in this situation that we have a little subgroup where we read each other's reviews and give feedback. If I did, would you be interested?
Yes, I would love it!
Please have a look at the post **NEW MEMBERS? on Open thread 269, new underground bunker for Book Review Group planning.
I just posted some information for the group for people who’d like to give and get feedback on each other’s book reviews. So as not to clutter up this thread, I put it on an old open thread, number 254. It’s the newest post on the thread, so should be on top if you sort by New. I headed my post **BOOK REVIEW GROUP**, so if you have trouble locating it it should be easy to find by using Cmd F to search for **book. If you haven’t posted a response there within a coupla days we’ll assume you’re not interested in participating.
Yes, as long as you're not a finalist that's fine.
If there's enough demand next year I could try including an optional "any feedback for the author of this review" on the rating form, but I didn't think of it this year.
There were many excellent entries this year, and the bar to be a finalist was an 8/10 rating. Most entries got 5-10 reviews, so even one bad review was pretty disastrous. So one likely answer is "your review was great, just not in the top ~10% of a really excellent collection, or there was enough noise that it didn't look like it was".
Would it be possible to outsource the work related to organizing reviews to someone else, and do the reviews more often? Maybe as a separate blog. I mean, the individual reviews would be published on the secondary blog, but all the meta discussions would still be here, or something like that.
I read and rated two very excellent reviews which I thought for sure would make the list but didn't. Of the dozen or so reviews I rated, the only one which did make the list was one I thought weak. So even though you might get some feedback, it might not help with understanding what it would take to rank higher.
I'd love to hear which reviews people thought were great but didn't make the cut. Personally I really enjoyed the review of The Bomb. I found Games: Agency as Art interesting too.
Genuinely starting to get confused about what people refer to when they say “the self”. If you go by the Harris “rider on the horse of consciousness” definition, I think he’s completely right to call it an illusion, because it can be dispelled with pretty minimal meditation experience. But others who disagree seem to take a more encompassing view of the self as sort of the collection of all your experiences strung together over time in the flow of consciousness, of which no-self would just be another experience. In which case, there can be no illusion, because everything you experience becomes part of your “self”. This latter definition has been more attractive to me lately, but is missing something, because (e.g.) the person I am in a dream sometimes doesn’t feel like “myself” but is still an experience of mine. Do you know what people mean when they say the “self?” Is it a well-defined thing in some literature? What’s some good reading on this (besides Parfit)?
"Self" has multiple meaning. Most words do.
The Homuncular Self is the idea that there is an inner self, which is the Central Scrutinizer -- the ultimate witness , so that what it does not see or feel is not felt at all -- and also the Master Puppeteer, issuing commands for all actions, so that neither the body nor the rest of the mind can do anything without its instructions. Other notions of selfhood are available. There is still the objective self that is seen by other people -- you can't avoid taxes by claiming not to exist. There is still the self as total mental content, conscious and unconscious.
Its not even the case that all meditative traditions deprecate the self: in Vedanta, there is *only* a universal Self (Atman, Oversoul) , and it is only the limited, personal self that is an illusion.
Harris's claim aren't necessarily true given the multiple meanings of "self", aren't necessarily true given the scientific evidence, and aren't necessarily true given the meditative experience.
Yeah I agree. I’m not a total adherent to Harris’ view on this, thought I think it’s very persuasive. I’m more saying that I understand the objections to it and I’ve found some other definitions of the “self” that people put forward, and I’ve found them just as problematic. If I consider that there is no personal “self” and there is only the universal “self” I’m unclear on what the difference is between this “self” and the universe. I’m which case, I’m just... part of the universe? Okay. No issues there. But there’s still the problem of what makes me different/separate from other people (my “selfhood”; something I have no reason to believe is an illusion) and to what degree I can actually identify and put words to what that is and what my experience of it is like or could be like.
I am confused by what the Buddhists call "self", especially if their conclusion is that it actually does not exist. I mean, that proves that your definition was *wrong*, doesn't it?
If I tried to define "self" starting with my everyday experience, I would probably say that it is a fuzzy concept, which obviously contains my conscious and unconscious processes, but also memory, to a smaller degree my body, and to even smaller degree also parts of the environment that are relevant for my mental experience.
(For example, if someone every day writes a diary, and keeps re-reading the recent entries and thinking about them, it might make sense to say that the diary is a part of their "self". If they suddenly lost the diary, it would definitely have an impact on their personality.)
Buddhism is a quite big and old, so while all Buddhists AFAIK agree with the token belief that "there is no self", and that this is somehow important, and that realizing it is extremely meaningful, there is quite a range of variation in terms of what that is taken to actually mean.
One answer on the traditional side is to just go by definitions. The most traditional definition of a self in Buddhism is some kind of permanent, independent and distinctive essence underlying a person. Buddhists in ancient India and neighboring countries used to make a big deal of not believing in such a thing, because most every other religion and philosophy around them did. So they staked a strong claim that it was precisely the belief in a self that was preventing all those other people from reaching enlightenment, and that no-self was the real way.
The trouble with that, quite obviously, is that nowadays in these secular times, a big chunk of the population doesn't believe in any kind of eternal immutable invisible soul. So the Buddhist view of no-self might look like it won the debate... but when we look around, we find that all these secular people who don't believe in eternal selves don't look particularly enlightened in the Buddhist sense. So the associated idea that dropping the belief in a permanent self brings you close to enlightenment doesn't seem to have held up that well.
The modern solution to this conundrum is to psychologize the process, with a bit of help from the Freudian unconscious. Your stated beliefs about the self are not the real problem; the Buddhist modernist claim is that we have an implicit, pre-verbal and largely emotional "sense of self", to which we implicitly relate as if it were an unchanging essence. This is the "me" that feels easily threatened or hurt, sometimes even by our own thoughts and fantasies, and which is mostly just a projection - a set of over-reified ideas mixed up with defensive emotional patterns, whose presence messes up our entire relationship with our own empirical being as an embodied organism, and with the rest of the world. So you go about telling people to identify this cognitive flaw in their own experience, and then try to meditate it away.
As The Ancient Geek and others have noted, this is all good and well, but it's not the only sense of the world "self". There is a whole cottage industry trying to bridge the cultures of psychology and Buddhism, and the word "self" is often a point of confusion, because psychologists have used "self" with the broader meaning of the entire evolving individual subjectivity or identity. To make it even more confusing, sometimes the intended meanings do overlap, and then you have the psychologists pulling their hair out wondering why the Buddhists seem to want to make people's inner boundaries weaker, when some people actually need them strengthened.
Thank you, this makes sense. Sometimes statements are made in response to other statements (Buddhism to other Indian religions), and a reader missing the context is confused. So perhaps "no-self" could be translated as: "there is no unchangeable homunculus living inside your head" -- you are made of components, they change during your life, and fall apart when you die.
(And let's pretend that no one ever talked about reincarnation. Or perhaps we should give up the expectation that all parts of Buddhism can be translated to something meaningful for the modern reader. In its original environment, reincarnation was taken for granted, so the full story was "you are made of components, they change during your life, and fall apart when you die... and then, obviously, they magically reassemble and become a body again, and the new guy pays for your karmic debts... unless you spent your life meditating the right way, which makes your components magically reassemble in heaven, except we do not call it heaven because it is more sophisticated than other people's heavens".)
> psychologists have used "self" with the broader meaning of the entire evolving individual subjectivity or identity.
I studied psychology a bit, and it seemed like every famous psychologist used words in different ways, so there would be dozens of definitions of "self" in psychology. Plus dozen definitions of "ego", which sometimes is a synonym and sometimes an opposite to "self".
Well, for practical purposes, there is a certain continuity of... memories, thought patterns, behaviors. What makes us different from the Boltzmann brains. Things change, but they change gradually. Memories accumulate and fade away, though patterns evolve, behaviors adapt. And a few years later there is little left. When I think about myself 20 years ago, it feels like I am thinking about someone else, like maybe a friend, or a character in a movie I saw long ago. Similarly, even if this body succeeds to live another 20 years, the person currently inhabiting it will become a thing of a past. Each sleep is a tiny death. Each distraction. Yet somehow it feels normal, probably because I am used to it.
I guess an important part is that the changes are so gradual that I can reason about the future, make plans, do them. It doesn't work perfectly, but it mostly works okay. An abrupt change, such as death, means none of my plans make sense. Sudden total memory loss, or sudden dramatic personality change would also make my plans meaningless. I guess if I cannot interact with my future, at least in some limited ways, it is no longer "me" as I perceive it, and I do not like the idea of such situation.
But this is all a question of degree, and different people seem to be differently sensitive about it. For example, some people find the idea of their personality changing in any way very scary, even the idea of a voluntary change in a direction that would help them achieve their goals better. For me, it would be a trade-off; if I could directly edit my mind, by default I would be conservative about changes, but I would probably remove some bad habits, and maybe otherwise sacrifice parts of my self in order to make the rest work better and more coherently.
> then you have the psychologists pulling their hair out wondering why the Buddhists seem to want to make people's inner boundaries weaker, when some people actually need them strengthened.
I don't see a contradiction here; maybe I am missing something. The "self" is fragile; *understanding* its fragility is a fact about life. It can still make sense to work on *making* it less fragile (within the limits of possibility). It's like, understanding that you are mortal is not the same as wanting to kill yourself -- your understanding of your mortality could also inspire you to try living healthier and safer. Similarly, awareness of e.g. how strong impact my environment has on my "self", makes me want to have greater control over my environment. (If I know that having cookies in my room makes me want to eat them, I want to remove the cookies from my room. I understand the fragility of my self-control, so I work to increase it indirectly.)
> (And let's pretend that no one ever talked about reincarnation. Or perhaps we should give up the expectation that all parts of Buddhism can be translated to something meaningful for the modern reader. In its original environment, reincarnation was taken for granted, so the full story was "you are made of components, they change during your life, and fall apart when you die... and then, obviously, they magically reassemble and become a body again, and the new guy pays for your karmic debts...
To be fair to the traditional narrative, reincarnation made plenty of sense with the ontologies that were current 2000+ years ago. Just about everyone then was a substance dualist, meaning that the individual is composed of two distinct substances: body and mind. Buddhism relies a lot on causal analysis, and generally speaking like begets like (rice doesn't grow from barley, etc.), so the obvious idea is that the material body has its own causal chain, with each instant of each part of the body being the material cause for a similar part an instant later. And then of course so does the mind. with each instant of immaterial mind being the cause for the next.
In this view, being a causally effective substance, the mind can't just go poof into nothingness, or turn into something completely different, any more than a chair can just disappear or randomly turn into a bird. At death we can all see the body's matter decay into a corpse and rot, according to the observed causal laws of matter, but when it comes to the mind, if there is still "active stuff" in there, such as unfulfilled wishes and unspent mental energy, the obvious guess is that it will go on being conscious, apart from the body.
So far most ancient cultures would agree - the Indian specificity, on top of that, was to claim that the disembodied consciousness would not just go off to some other Hades-like realm, but would and eventually join up with the budding body of a newborn to continue its cycle right on this earth. And the Buddhist specificity on top of that, is that it would do so without any kind of immutable essence at its core holding it together.
> I don't see a contradiction here; maybe I am missing something. The "self" is fragile; *understanding* its fragility is a fact about life.
Once again, careful not too mix too much 21th century pop psych with 2500-year-old Buddhism. The Buddhist point is not that the self is fragile, is that it's *false*. The projected referent of self-centered emotions is not a fragile psychological construct, rather it's a hollow idea with no actual correspondence in reality. This is a far more radical idea.
Depending on how you interpret this it may be arguably true, but that doesn't make it a sane pill to take for everyone. See for example Jeremy D. Safran & Jack Engler, "Psychoanalysis and Buddhism, An Enfolding Dialogue". The famous quip is, "you have to be somebody before you can be nobody". There are plenty of people studying all the things that can go wrong developmentally with meditation, some people manage to damage themselves quite badly while attempting to get enlightened.
Yeah, I feel like if your explanation of the "self" lands at the conclusion that it doesn't exist, then you aren't defining the same thing as I am when I use the word "self". Defining "self" as something that can't exist in order to argue it doesn't exist isn't a real explanation.
Right, but that thing isn't the "self"
Plenty of Indians already spent 20+ centuries arguing what the "real meaning" of self is, now joined by another large group of psychologists, philosophers and several hordes of internet commentators. We should be getting a definitive answer anytime soon.
I mean first off your first para kind of sounds like you’re arguing that it’s impossible for the self to not exist -- which, I mean, okay. I certainly get why it feels that way. And yeah your later paras basically sound like the second definition I provided but I have the same problem with your diary as I do with my dream selves. From a first person perspective I don’t identify my “self” with, e.g., my phone, which I use a lot every day. My “self” *feels* like some kind of subjective witness to all the things going on in my consciousness, which is fairly easy to get rid of with meditation.
What's the distinction? Hasn't the rider ridden places, and seen things?
Are we not creatures of habit, and of whim?
At the risk of offering an ignorant or insensitive example, people with Alzheimer's evidently have an instantaneous self--but one that is seriously disoriented by loss of past experiences.
Yeah it sounds like you agree with the second definition of the self, that combines both your subjective experience of “being” what happens moment to moment and the collection of all your experiences. But that’s not what most people think of as their “selves” most people *feel* like their “self” is the thing that experiences their moment to moment changes in consciousness. There are problems with that, and it can be easily jettisoned with meditation. But there are also problems with the second definition.
On the meditation stuff, I am familiar with the sensation you’re alluding to where your thoughts just sort of arise from nowhere… but… can we put that in car terms for a moment? This is the best way I have thought up to explain why it’s just not convincing.
If you were to pull the starter out of a car and then make it spark in front of me and then go “You see? Cars can’t drive.”
I would say “Of course not, that’s a piece of a whole system. You can’t just pull that out of the context of its other components and say that cars don’t drive.”
I know I have something like a “Muse System” that just spews out random thoughts. I know I have other feedback systems. What matters is that all of those together create voluntary and involuntary actions.
Also, the other thing is that I make a predictive model of the world that I make decisions based on. It’s pretty easy to see that’s true even if you do something like say “See, we decide what we’re going to do before we’re even aware of it!” because once you give someone that additional context they end up choosing different. Whatever the exact database pathway is, we can observe that it happens.
Another thought experiment about the self/free will/whatever: Imagine you had the perfect deterministic mirror that can see into the future and you use it to look into your own future.
For that mirror to be deterministic based on the above it would have to take into account how your knowledge of the future would change your behavior and only show you things that you wanted to do. It can’t show you something you would choose not to do because then it wouldn’t be the perfectly deterministic mirror.
Thoughts are always just arising from nowhere. The “muse system” that you’re referring to is what most people thing of as “themselves”. It’s fairly straightforward in a meditation practice to arrive at a state where you are not identified with thoughts at all: every single thing that is brought to consciousness (from the “muse system” thoughts to the output of the “predictive model” you mention -- everything that can and does arise in consciousness) is just witnessed. But there’s no identification. They are not “mine” or “yours.” They just happen. I’ve had this experience many times and it’s strange. Very easy to see why people call it “no-self”, because that’s exactly how it feels. The deterministic mirror would have no effect on this state, or the experience of it at all really. It would just become another thing you’re witness to.
All of this is very good, and convincing. Leads on in the direction of the latter definition of the “self” which incorporates both your subjective experience moment to moment, and your history, which forms the basis for your unconscious, specific statistical distribution of impulses, preferences, etc. But it is a little bit strange to me still. For instance, even in your thought experiment, sure, if you *completely* changed your unconscious mind, things get wonky very fast. But if I consider that over the last 5 years, I’ve changed from drinking coffee machine coffee to a moka pot to Yerba mate, to a pour over, and back and forth again and again stochastically. I’ve also been more or less able to wake up early, or stay consistent with my exercise routine. none of which I can really say we’re the result of agency -- at least not fully. If those changes were the result of someone swapping out my unconscious with someone else’s which is quite similar to mine but for those minor changes, I certainly don’t think I would think of it as a different “self”. Because I don’t feel that way now about them. Idk like I said I’m genuinely confused about this. But thanks! I really appreciate your comment, got me thinking.
> Thoughts are always just arising from nowhere.
Except , not literally
Objectively speaking, thoughts don't appear literally out of nowhere, because they are the result of neural activity.
Does the fact my conscious mind does not pre-arrange the thoughts that pop into it mean they are not my thoughts?
Nothing in an ordinary person's subjective experience suggests that. Schizophrenics hear voices that they do not identify as belong to themselves: non schizophrenics accept their thoughts as their own.
Moreover, my subconscious promptings seem to be mine, they bear my fingerprints, they are generally the kinds of things I would do. I don't get urges to drink coffee if I am a tea drinker, or to attend football matches if I am a football hater. My promptings are "ego-syntonic" in psychological jargon. There's a confusion here about randomness. An unprompted thought is random in the sense that the conscious mind did not prompt that particular thought, but unprompted thoughts and impulses still have a statistical pattern: they reflect things you would typically do and think, not what an average person would.
Consider a thought experiment where a mad scientists swaps one subconscious mind for another. If you really identified yourself, your self , with the conscious mind only, that would make no difference...or none that you cared about. Yet it would make a difference... your conscious mind would be receiving promptings from someone else's unconscious, so they would no longer reflect your idiosyncrasies.... you might suddenly finding yourself interested in football for the first time. So not only is there a difference, there is an objectionable worrying , difference.
From a neuroscientific perspective , it would be bizarre to regard the conscious mind as the beginning and end of the mind, because so much more is done by the unconscious. (Although Harris is a neuroscientist, his claim about selfhood is based on appeal to what "most people think").
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You don’t have to have any motivation or even agency to do things that you still associate with yourself. You don’t have to be motivated to hear sounds, for instance, but you still heard them. You don’t have to be motivated to breath, but you still do. This is the whole point of the breath as a sense object that people focus on. It’s both voluntary and not voluntary. What meditation can show some people is that most of your “voluntary” or “motivated” actions work this way. If you really pay attention to what it’s like, moment to moment, to take actions, you may notice that there’s not a well defined point along the way where “you decide to do it,” in the way that most people have in mind when they think of the “self” “deciding” to do things. I’m not sure the deterministic mirror would change that really. Sure you could see what’s going to happen in the mirror, and that would cause a change in you. Where that change comes from most people would call the “self”. But we don’t have as much actual conscious control over the “motivations” you feel or the actions you take as most people imagine we do -- or at least that’s been my experience.
I don’t think most people have ever really tried to identify what exactly they mean when they talk about their “self” other than philosophers. And I know when most people engage with this perspective their argument is that the “soul” is some magical glowing light that resides within them and swooshes into the sky when they die.
I know you can do all of these things through meditation, but I think people get so caught up in the fact that they can do it at all they don’t take as many steps back as they need to take to think about what it means. Yes, you can dissociate yourself from your own thoughts. You can basically hit the off switch on being a conscious being. However, that really isn’t that surprising. You do it all the time when you go to sleep every night. And you wouldn’t be surprised that if you just started pulling things out of a car that it stops driving. Of course you can do that. You need all the parts to make it operable. This is also where I get bumped out of a lot of the AI stuff. You can’t just treat things like “intelligence” or “goals” or whatever as if they are these single atomic things that don’t arise from a whole surrounding system.
The deterministic mirror is important not because you couldn’t meditate in front of it and not feel connected to yourself but precisely because what it showed you would have to be something that “self” was motivated to do otherwise the mirror would lose deterministic power. You have a recursive relationship between your actions and your understanding of how those actions will propagate into the future. Once you know the future, you immediately update that model and change what you want to do to change that future. The thought experiment is to show that the self has a real, actual effect.
Philosophy addresses this question, although it definitely hasn't come up with anything even remotely approaching a consensus on it. I think the best treatment is in Heidegger, who would say that we're all struggling to understand the self because the vocabulary we use to talk about it is full of implicit, unexamined falsehoods and absurdities. He's very hard to read, because he replaces basically every term with his own, but if you can get through it, he's very interesting.
I also appreciate Kierkegaard's approach in Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing.
Can you explain more about how you don’t feel like yourself when you dream? Normally when I dream, I feel like myself, but just in a different context, where my mind and my physical body are acting mostly independently of each other for a while and most things I do in my mind won’t reach the outside world.
When you dream, the outside world is also yourself. Everything in the dream is yourself. Yet you feel a separate sense of self, pretty much like when awake. This suggests that the sense of there being a self has nothing to do with any objective separation between such self and external reality. This is mind boggling
I’ve had dreams where I’m, experiential my, a character -- distinctly not my “actual” or “normal self”. Even dreams where I’m a different gender, or many years older. I’m of course still experiencing it from first person, but it doesn’t seem like “myself”
Now that you mention it, I think I’ve had some “dream-you’re-older” dreams, too. But I always feel like “me-as-an-older-person”, not like “someone-else-who-is-old”. There is a sense of something weird going on when my hands look wrinkly, exactly to the extent that I’m aware my hands normally aren’t wrinkly. But the disconnect there isn’t necessarily different from the feeling when I had my dental plate removed, and I kept expecting it to be there for a while. I guess it’s also untrue, but no more so than when I read a book and feel like I’m an omniscient narrator for a while. Chocolate would still taste better than bananas in my dreams.
Possibly my sense of dreams comes from Kripke. He considered questions like, “If Washington never became President, would he be the same person”, and he asked how “Washington”, which is the name of someone who became President, could point to anything at all in that hypothetical (it was actually a better question than that, but that’s as good as I can remember). His answer was that hypothetical worlds are defined, not discovered. We say, “What if Washington never became President”, and that labels someone in the hypothetical as Washington. I think my dreams of being older work the same way. I like chocolate, I have the same memories and feelings and satisfactions and regrets, apart from those that have explicitly been changed. I don’t think I could dream I was someone else fully: some equivalent of my conscious mind is doing the adjustments, but my unconscious mind is so much bigger than my conscious mind can adjust, especially in real time.
Sam Harris's app, Waking Up, has given me a sense of the illusory nature of having a substantive self, apart from my consciousness in its moment to moment.
There's a book I recently looked at, Losing Ourselves (https://www.amazon.com/Losing-Ourselves-Learning-Live-without/dp/069122028X), but I can't recommend it. The author's point never clicked before I returned it to the library
What is the best way to translate things right now? (i.e to understand a story written in another language, so it doesn't have to be perfect)
Previously, I'd been using Google Translate, but it is still pretty bad (at least for Japanese->English, I've heard it's better for the European languages which are very similar to English). More significantly than the poor translation quality, which is usually still enough to get the gist, I've noticed that it sometimes just completely ignores parts of the input, and it also occasionally mistranslates things in ways that completely change the meaning.
I've also previously used DeepL, which many people say is better than Google Translate, but in my experience, it is even worse, suffering from all the same flaws as GT,and also tending toward bizarre hallucinations (hence why I switched back to GT).
Recently, I've been experimenting with using ChatGPT instead (free mode, so 3.5 presumably). The translation quality is a bit better than Google Translate when it works, but it requires constant supervision and reminding of what it is supposed to be doing. It will often work for a message or two and then it will start ignoring large parts of the input, repeating translations from previous messages, or even hallucinating things not in the input. I wish there was a way to automatically prepend a fresh prompt to every message in a thread.
Also, ChatGPT generates the output slowly line by line. Is there any way to fix that?
I translated a random Wikipedia article from Japanese to English using Google Translate, and the result seemed okay to me. Not sure if it was just luck, or maybe our standards for good translation are different. Could you perhaps post the URL of a page where the translation was bad?
In the past, my experience was that Google Translate was quite bad at translating between two languages which were not English. I assume that it used English as an intermediate language, so the first step was "Language1 -> broken English" and the second step was "broken English -> incomprehensible Language2". It was much better to just translate to English and read the broken English. But these days it seems better.
It kept turning the FF4 chest message "takarabakoniwa" into "out of the cigarettes". I'm pretty sure it was just straight up dropping the "kara" and turning it into "tabako".
Right now it's giving me Treasure Garden, which is closer, but typing the phrase directly into Google gives me a hentai called takarabako ni wa Gargoyle, Gargoyle At The Treasure Chest. So Translate is still worse than its own search results.
Here are some examples of Google Translate fails:
「七海ー！ あんまり生地のほうが上手く焼けないね」
“Nanami!
正直なところ、美加は健太が好きな人がいないことに対しては、恵梨香や七海が好きじゃないというのは良かったと思ったが反面、私のことも好きではないということも分かり、少し辛かった。
To be honest, I thought it was good that Mika didn't like Erika or Nanami for the fact that no one liked Kenta, but on the other hand, I found out that he didn't like me either, so it was a bit painful. rice field.
馬糞鷹
horse manure hawk
「光くんは彼女いるんだよね？」
私は確認する意味で聞いてみた。
「んー。いたけどちょっと前に別れて今はいないよ」
“Hikaru-kun has a girlfriend, right?”
"I asked to confirm."
“Hmm.
ほとんどが貴族の家柄か、元々騎士の家系に生まれた者が多い中、辺境の田舎暮らしの村人でも、素質があれば入ることが出来る。
彼、ユーリもその一人だった。
Most of them are from aristocratic families or were originally born into a family of knights.
He, Yuri, was one of them.
BLOOM should be pretty optimized for that, but it will be slow
Oh joy - I'd hoped the nastier bugs in google translate had been fixed - in particular, omitting words it apparently didn't understand *without* putting an ellipsis or other indication in the translated text. I became aware of this when google translate was fairly new, and there was still hope they'd use users' feedback about translation errors.
In particular, it would sometimes omit negations (words like "not"), thereby reversing the meaning of a sentence.
People whose judgment I trust have been using it in recent years for not-too-vital purposes, like communicating with fellow gamers in MMORPGs. So I'd *hoped* that perhaps Google had improved it. Apparently not, if you are still noticing parts of the input being omitted from the output. (Perhaps it just happens less often, and for less trivial input?)
Though for the record, my friends find it adequate for basic gaming chat, at least if the two languages are English and Russian (bidirectional translation).
I've only ever really used it for languages I half understand - well enough that I can spot missing negations and similar errors. Mostly I don't bother - it can translate faster than I can, but I need the practice anyway.
If you want English-Japanese, maybe try Naver's papago. They run Line in Japan, so they probably got better training data and stuff, although I can't verify since I don't speak the language.
The best way is to pay for real human translation, but that's probably not the answer you wanted.
I'm not even sure that's true anymore for most use cases. Humans are so incredibly slow in comparison to machines, I feel like the margin for machine translation errors is pretty decent.
As a pro translator, I'd probably say the best option would be paying a human translator for a machine translation post-edit, which is quicker and cheaper (from a customer POV) than translating from the scratch.
...and if someone is in need of English-to-Finnish translations, just contact me! (translator@tatuahponen.fi)
I disagree at least for Japanese and English. Perhaps you're correct for other closer languages.
There's also buckling down and learning the language yourself, which is somewhat cheaper in the long run than paying a human. But that's also probably not the answer Lapras wanted.
I *am* learning Japanese. I use Google Translate to check my understanding while reading, which is why I've been able to notice all these mistakes. Someone who doesn't know Japanese would still notice that Google Translate outputs broken English, but they usually wouldn't notice when it gets things *wrong* or ignores parts of the input.
There is a way to prepend it, although you'd have to use the API to do so.
Is there a good prompt to get the best translation out of ChatGPT?
I've been asking it to explain its translation word by word, since requesting it to work step by step is supposed to improve its perfomance, but I'm worried that might encourage it to be overally literal
No idea. I've just been using "Please translate the following into English". Perhaps telling it specifically to translate everything in the prompt and not translate things not in the prompt might improve results.
The translations themselves are decent enough, the hard part is just keeping it on task and stopping it from hallucinating/repeating/leaving things out.
I haven't tested it, but the Palm 2 technical report [1] claims that it beats Google Translate at Chinese to English translation. Maybe give Bard a try?
[1] See Table 9 in https://ai.google/static/documents/palm2techreport.pdf
My book review did not get selected as a finalist, so I guess I am free to post it on my own blog now.
Weren't there some bonus finalist picks last time though?
Is any research being done on the connection, if any, between the human brain and the quantum realm?
If you think about high-level philosophical questions like consciousness and so on, there is the work of Roger Penrose. This is still in the form of actual research, so he formulates hypothesis and tries to test them empirically.
That said, most people think that his hypotheses are completely bogus, and I don't know of experiments that would really give support to them. But there are lots of papers discussing and experimenting on things like "how large can a computation in the brain get before quantum effects become decoherent" (decoherence means that it starts behaving like a classical system). My understanding is that the answer is "Not large enough to play a role on the level of neurons or synapses", but Penrose and some others formulate some theories how that could still happen in theory.
More information and links here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind#Approaches
It has been something people were pretty excited about at times, but as of 20 years ago there was not anything particularly interesting or promising.
The human mind certainly has lots of QM in it, just like an apple or rock does!
Depends quite heavily on what you mean by the “quantum realm”
I think that's called "biochemistry". Assuming you're not talking about Ant-Man fanfics.
Did I miss it or does Acemoglu never really define what ‘extractive institutions’ are in his book Why Nations Fail? This way ‘extractive’ ends up meaning little more than ‘Acemoglu does not like it’. Also I found the discussion of the Inca kingdoms that were somehow doomed to fail due to extractiveness ridiculous: the (arguably uncertain) duration of their economic prime seems to be a few centuries, roughly in the same ballpark as the duration of any system based on ‘inclusive institutions’.
Acemoglu starts out fine. Extractive means narrow and unequal and inclusive means broad and equal. For example, courts that protect private property for everyone are inclusive while courts which protect the private property of the elite but not the common people are extractive because this in net extracts wealth from the poor and gives it to the elite.
The issue is that Acemoglu wants to defend his left wing opinions. His ideological pre-commitments prevent him from a principled categorization of extraction. If he did draw such a principled line then he'd have to include things like affirmative action or labor unions. He'd also have to figure out a way to divide between well resourced social institutions he likes and ones he doesn't that are fundamentally engaging in the same extractive activity. For example, he has very different opinions on welfare states vs aristocrats despite both extracting resources for redistribution to specific classes.
I'm not saying you can't draw these distinctions. I too think welfare is morally different from aristocracy. But you then need to add in a normative category. Which Acemoglu doesn't want to do because it ruins his case. Instead he just draws an arbitrary line between "I like this" and "I don't" like you said. And this messes up the analysis.
The concept of extractiveness is ill defined from the start, imo. Try to rate current countries on a scale of extractiveness. I got ChatGPT to do that, by the way. But it’s just being a stochastic parrot, I don’t think I could rely on that for any serious purposes (like running a regression between GDP growth and extractiveness). Maybe one could break down this task into smaller subtasks. But won’t we end up with something similar to perceived corruption or ease of doing business index? Is there any operationalization of extractiveness independent of socioeconomic outcomes? We need to parse laws maybe? What if laws are great in principle but sit unenforced? North Korea is called the Democratic Republic of Korea after all…
The whole book is just tautological. Good countries and institutions are ones that did good. Bad ones are ones that did bad. He tries to get away from that at times, but then there are always counterexamples, so he always just ends up running back to the tautology.
Some interesting info scattered throughout the book, but overall very unimpressive.
Like he is comparing Botswana to its neighbors, and is like wow the GDP/capita is so amazing, its due to great institutions. Ignoring that it has a very high mineral wealth and tiny population.
He is great pains to point out political corruption and kleptocracy as bad and not good for countries. Who was arguing they were good?
Anyway, I could go on and on.
I wish I could link to pseudoerasmus' tweets on the subject, but unfortunately those are now protected. He also had questions about that book as well as "The Narrow Corridor".
Would you mind sharing what the gist of those tweets is?
Doing some googling I found a link to one such thread, to which I could apply the Internet Archive:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210823173433/https://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus/status/1179746491247874049
However it's about Narrow Corridor.
Here's a comment he made earlier:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/11/two_skeptical_q.html/#comment-141648
"But even without the Albouy criticism, I still don’t see Acemogluism as particularly compelling. Basically proto-colonial settler mortality determines whether the institutions set up are inclusive or extractive, and thereafter path dependence and multiple equilibria keep the countries with extractive institutions continuously saddled with extractive institutions. The few escapes from the extractive institutions traps are explained ad hoc."
Thanks! This seems pretty spot on
Why are most ACX readers men?
As a fairly androgynous woman, I'm mostly delighted by ACX. The only objectionable thing about it that I think comes from its relative maleness is that there is less responsiveness to others' ideas than I wish there were. I think it's likely that the ratio of here-is-my-idea posts to here's-my-response-to-your-idea posts is higher here than it would be in a forum where the gender proportions were reversed. And that seems like a negative to me. I can't see any advantages to having such a high ratio of internally generated ideas to responsive ones.
I've posted a couple of ideas of things that I think would offset some of the disadvantages of the ratio, and they've been shot down by objections that don't seem very plausible to me. I had the impression that the main reason they were shot down was that they had an alien, icky feel to people -- sort of a female feel.
Most nerdy hobbies, most hobbies in general are dominated by men. Many women already have a double burden of working a job and managing a household (and children), they don't have as much time to invest in random hobbies. And when they do have time, they're more likely to do something useful or relaxing, like handicrafts or reading novels, instead of getting all worked up about model trains or AI risk.
Anything done on the computer is dominated by men. Partly that's still aftershocks of the fact that computers were a nerdy hobby until maybe 15 years ago. I'm sure there's other reasons too. So reading online blogs about anything that isn't clearly "for women" is probably male dominated.
ACX readership draws from the general less wrong sphere which is male dominated, in that case probably because they talk about a lot of math and computer topics which are male dominated to begin with.
And honestly I think the tone of the blog is probably male coded in a hard to define way. So any women who've spent most of their time in female dominated spaces would probably be put off by that.
I'm a woman though.
Re: free time stuff, from the specific composition of this blog's readers, working more won't necessarily result in less time to read stuff. This blog's readership skews white collar, which are people who can take an hour or two out of their workday to read a blog. Hence even if they're spending 60 hours in an office, they can probably still read and comment while waiting for code to compile or whatever.
Female coded (domestic) labour tends to be a bit more hands on - a bit harder to read a blog while doing childcare or laundry. Again, I'm not saying that men don't work hard... But the specific men reading this blog can probably do it at work.
And oddly enough, I don't think women's domestic labour is too different between classes (for some reason it's not common in western countries to get much domestic help, it's not weird for a woman in a 6 digit combined income household to still be cooking the family dinner at home in the west the way it might be in other places).
That being said I'd argue it still doesn't apply because this describes normie women and I doubt there's many corresponding normie men on this blog.
I'm much more convinced that it's the initial composition of the initial readership. FWIW this blog doesn't read very male to me - it reads very neutral.
I think male spaces are characterised by a lot of adversarial, offensive attitudes (I would say the primary emotion is probably contempt) and female spaces are characterised by a feeling of shared victimhood (primary emotion is paranoia). A very "male coded" interaction I had at work was a coworker recounting the time he got in trouble with HR for calling someone a slur, justified by what the dude did (tbf it was very dumb, but still), while a very "female coded" interaction I had was with my old flatmate complaining that all her exes are awful people and how being a woman is terrible. Male environments compete on how offensive you can be, female environments compete on how offended you can be.
Thankfully, the prevalence of both of these sorts of spaces have shrank, because they both suck. But that's how normie men/women tend to socialise.
Because the writer is a man, and he writes about things men are interested in, in ways that men can relate to.
As a fun exercise, I'm wondering... what popular things are written by a man and have a primarily female audience, or are written by a woman and have a primarily male audience? Not too many examples spring to mind. There's probably some male romance-novel writers that I'm not familiar with, and the handful of female science fiction writers probably have primarily-male audiences too.
Frankin W. Dixon?
> As a fun exercise, I'm wondering... what popular things are written by a man and have a primarily female audience, or are written by a woman and have a primarily male audience?
Any time there's a modern book whose author is rendered as J.K. Rowling or the like, with the personal name turned into a single character, there's a strong possibility that it's crossgender writing. (You're disguising the author's gender so that readers of the opposite sex read their works.) J.K. Rowling is so obscenely popular that this probably washes out, but I have a hard time imagining Animorphs by K.A. Applegate was more popular with girls than boys.
J. R. R. Tolkien comes to mind as a counterexample. I doubt anyone reading his work would have thought about the author's gender at all, but if they had, they would probably have assumed a man.
If there weren't lots of male authors who used initials (C.S. Lewis, T.H. White, C.S. Forester, J.D. Salinger, E.E. Smith, G.K. Chesterton, etc. etc.) it wouldn't have been a very effective form of camouflage to adopt.
Not sure if Rowling did it deliberately. Boys did tend to be expected to be more suspicious of girl books than vice versa. (In my day Judy Blume did well enough with books aimed at boys like Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Then Again, Maybe I Won't, but my sense is that the lines hardened some in the 80s and 90s.)
Certainly by the time the books hit the US there wasn't much effort to obscure her gender, since IIRC her biography of single mum to best selling author in the UK was part of the promotion campaign.
It just seems to me that if an author wanted such camouflage then they would use a pen name of the appropriate gender. I don't think one can read a gender into a name presented as just initials.
I think it's exactly the ambiguity some of them were going for. While there are lots of motivations to write, fame is among them. Authors reluctant to go full pen name for that reason might still wish (or be pushed by risk-averse editors) to ameliorate a perceived sales disadvantage.
They wouldn't AFAIK generally outright deny their identity the way, say, Tiptree did, but it also wouldn't be front and center to deter or prejudice the casual reader. Especially in the magazine era, where presumptions and complaints about "lady authors" and preemptive "this one's as good as a man" defenses from editors weren't absent from the letter columns.
It could be interesting to see let's say top 100 blogs arranged on a scale by the gender of their audience. I predict that we would see an obvious trends for certain topics at certain ends of the scale, and something like "rational thinking" would probably be strongly male coded.
"Handful?" Reasonably recent works on my Kindle include (but probably aren't limited to) Becky Chambers, Arkady Martine, Martha Wells, Anne Leckie, Naomi Kritzer, Sara Pinsker, and Tanya Huff, plus older writers like C.J. Cherryh and Lois McMaster Bujold who still turn something out now and then. Also Rachel Neumeier, who's added SF to her primarily fantasy oeuvre with a space opera, "No Foreign Sky", published just yesterday. (Full disclosure: I was a beta reader on that last one. I think it's neat and would certainly recommend it.)
There have been women writing science fiction since it's been a genre, Frankenstein being one of the candidates for "first science fiction novel". During the 20th century it was fairly common to use initials, ambiguous gender names, or male pseudonyms to protect the reader from the knowledge they might be reading something written by a woman. (C.L. Moore, Andre Norton, Leigh Brackett-- who lived long enough to write an early draft of the script for "The Empire Strikes Back", etc.)
Ursula Le Guin got pressed to do it (once, by Playboy) in 1968, and through the 70s some writers clearly still thought it prudent (C.J. Cherryh, the famously "ineluctibly masculine" James Tiptree, Jr.), but it pretty clearly was becoming less necessary by then. (Women took 40% of the novel Hugos that decade with no need for camouflage.)
Male authors writing romances probably has a longer history, in both novel and magazine formats. Having done so is practically as cliche an Old Shame in a 20th century writer's biography as having written dirty books (back when the latter was a viable income stream). This page gives a number of examples of men using female pen names in the genre. https://sweetsavageflame.com/the-male-authors-of-vintage-romance/
Superhero stalwarts Jack Kirby and Joe Simon also invented the romance comic (and wrote them for at least five years), after which they remained a viable genre for three decades or so. (Probably more viable than superheroes during that genre's 50s eclipse.)
There are a few points of correction I would like to make here.
C.L. Moore stated at one point that her pen name was not because she wanted to conceal her sex, but because writing for pulps was considered somewhat dodgy at the time and she had just gotten a respectable job at a large bank. That was not something you gave up easily during the Great Depression.
Andre Norton changed her name because she wanted to write boy's adventure stories and the sci-fi came later. Boy's adventure stories were considered more salable if they came from a man...which also caught J.K. Rowling many decades later.
Leigh Brackett was the author's birth name. No need to change it.
There were multiple women writing under their own names in the 40s and 50s as well. Off the top of my head there were Margaret St. Clair, Judith Merrill, Zenna Henderson, and others I've seen floating around when reading old magazines. Often they were will-known at the time (the three mentioned were all fairly popular), but had shorter careers or drifted away from sci-fi, or just didn't make it into the "Best Science Fiction of the Century" lists.
They're all worth tracking down, I think. Women were always a minority of sci-fi writers, but they were there, and many times writing under their own names. Just not as many, and not as remembered.
Just a guess, maybe it’s the emphasis on tech. Do people still believe in the “women are interested in people, men are interested in things” line?
*sigh* No one with half a clue believes "ALL women are more/only interested in people; ALL men are more/only interested in things". Most people with a wide circle of acquaintances can find at least one non-existence proof in that circle.
Unless, of course, they decide that any person who is more interested in things than people is ipso facto a man, regardless of whether or not they have two X-chromosomes, breasts, and a uterus. *sigh*
OTOH, it's also pretty clear that individual people have pre-wired tendencies, and the pattern of these tendencies often correlate with gender. I'd guess that interest in things vs people is probably one of them, at least in the cultural climates I've lived in.
At a guess, at least 10% of women are thing oriented. Or put another way, at least 10% of thing oriented people are women. Another bunch are probably indifferent. (Estimate based vaguely on all the people I've interacted with in my life, with no statistics. And they may be biased by my strong preference for hanging out with people on the autistic spectrum.)
"at least 10% of women are thing oriented. Or put another way, at least 10% of thing oriented people are women.”
Those may both be true, but they're not equivalent!
Given a population that's 50% women, they should be. (Either that or I need a lot more caffeine.)
Yes, of course various nits apply. Some thing-oriented people are children. The population sex ratio is not exactly 50-50. Etc. Given the degree of imprecision in this guesstimate, I don't think they matter.
Only if you also assume thing-oriented people are 50% of all people.
Otherwise you could have 10% of women being thing-oriented, but also only 10% of men, so the gender ratio among thing-oriented people would be 50/50. Or if only 5% of men were thing-oriented, then thing-oriented people would be majority female.
Not claiming that's the case IRL, just pointing out that it's a logical possibility so your second statement isn't equivalent to your first.
Doh! I see my mathematical intuitions are becoming less reliable (with age?), and I now need to actually do the math to check them.
You are absolutely right.
Thank you.
My wife is a big hippy, and I was fairly left leaning when younger. When we had two boys we gave them very unisex toys. Both dollies and trucks. Even at say 4 months, and then throughout their youth, the preferences for things over people was extremely noticeable. And our neighbor with two girls was the reverse.
My wife said it was a huge wake-up call that a lot of the things she learned being a feminist at an expensive a hippy lib-ed college were perhaps a bit overblown.
"Do people still believe in the “women are interested in people, men are interested in things” "
Well yes, I do. I'm a woman (AFAB) and I am interested in human behaviour. I'm also interested in ACX - and those who read ACX.
I have been for years; it's rare to find people who value clear thinking and it's very enjoyable to see ideas bounced around in a challenging and rigorous but non-combative way.
Since there seem to be so few of us female types here, feel free to AMA.
> Do people still believe in the “women are interested in people, men are interested in things” line?
It seems plausible to me and it explains a lot. (Though of course as with any generalization there are exceptions, etc.).
Why is it be suprising?
Every similar group is majority male: STEM, atheism, political activism, libertarianism.
At a deeper level most things that aren't specifically female coded are majority male.
One internet subculture that I was somewhat surprised to discover to be female-dominated is reading and writing fanfiction. This includes fanfiction about e.g. video games that are mostly played by men or boys. While you might predict this based on the fact that most people who read fiction are women, I was still surprised by it, perhaps because unpaid, voluntary non-fiction writing on the internet seems to be very male-dominated, e.g. Wikipedia.
Fanfiction has been female dominated at least back to the days of Kirk/Spock collections in the local bookstore.
It also leads to the surprising consequence that romance is heavily overrepresented in fanfics, as is gay romance.
How are atheism and political activism similar? Or libertarianism and math?
Every political event you ever will go to will be majority male.
That is true wherever you are on the political spectrum or whatever issue is being discussed
This is just not true, if you go to an event put on by one of the UC Berkeley Socialist clubs, it will be mostly girls. There are many feminist activist groups which are likely mostly women--probably lots of pro-abortion meetups. Women are also greater represented in the vegan movement. https://faunalytics.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Faunalytics_Current-Former-Vegetarians_Full-Report.pdf
First photo i find of a Berkley left wing rally.
https://socialistworker.org/sites/default/files/images/2017/10/sep_25_action-berkeley_demonstration.jpg
It is surprisingly hard to find the websites of official left wing university societies at Berkeley
Really? All of them? The Women's March on Washington?
OP said above, "most things that aren't specifically female coded are majority male". The Women's March is very specifically female coded.
What do you define as a "political event"? I believe your assertion is wrong, but maybe you have a definition in mind for which it is true.
Any: rallies, campaign HQs, speeches, events, conferences.
> At a deeper level most things that aren't specifically female coded are majority male.
Unless you define "female coded" circularly as "things where females are over-represented", I don't think that's true. There's no reason a-priori to think that something like American Sign Language classes would be female-dominated, but they are (my theory is that this is another example of women tending towards personal-connection based activities, presumably men are more likely to study Latin).
I disagree.
I think if you randomly selected hobby areas, or meet ups or discussion events using any criteria the vast majority would be be majority male.
I wouldn't be sure that's true. There is a legacy of diverse female-organized activities from back in the days of single-income households.
I'm surprised at your prediction. The good news is that it is in principle testable. It shouldn't be hard to get a random sample of local meetups on say, meetup.com. However, going to a bunch of random meetups with no justification just to count chromosomes would be inconvenient and awkward.
This is wierd since the population is split 50:50. Although I guess females care about specifically excluding men (for safety/avoiding harrassment) so more things are female coded, if coded at all
It isn't that strange men amd women are pretty different at least on average
I'm pretty sure there was an SSC post on why weird intellectual movements like rationalism/atheism are disproportionately male, with apparently sexist alternatives like organized religion being more popular with women. I'm just having trouble finding it now.
Here it is: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/01/gender-imbalances-are-mostly-not-due-to-offensive-attitudes/
Anyone here ever have the experience of using fitness to get out a depression? I just wrote a short essay on how regular exercise creates a sense of purpose in life and increases motivation. For me, it helps me keep my weight down while on antipsychotic medication as well. I'd like to write about other tools that increase "happiness." Wondering if ACX readers have any insights into what helps them carry on in the void with a smile on their face.
> I just wrote a short essay on how regular exercise creates a sense of purpose in life and increases motivation.
I've always thought it was a combination of a) giving you a sense of control of your life, feelings and circumstances, ie. that conscious positive change, like fitness, is possible with concerted effort, b) embodiment innate to hard exercise forcibly reduces ruminative thought patterns which are implicated in depression, and c) the extreme stress and suffering of a hard workout puts other forms of purely mental suffering in perspective.
All of this is in the context of really hard/high effort exercise though.
I have but for me it takes a *lot* of exercise, like ~3 hours a day 6-7 days a week, which is pretty hard to make time for without being able to e.g. take a couple weeks off work. This is probably because I exercise daily anyway so when I get depressed in spite of this it takes a large increase in 'dose' to make a difference.
Could you trade off volume for intensity, in your experience? For instance, instead of running or swimming for 3 hours, maybe 1 hour or hard circuit training or cross fit.
For me, it feels like a feedback loop that works when I'm climbing out, but not when I'm sinking down.
Yeah that makes sense. When I'm sinking down, everything deteriorates - my mood, my habits, lifestyle, sleep, hope for the future, everything. Getting out of it requires some time, perhaps, to hit bottom, process your situation, maybe languish for a bit, and then, hopefully, make some positive progress. For me, exercise has always been part of making that progress
I found that a 2 mile walk every evening got me through the COVID pandemic. I liked walking downtown just so that I could see other humans without getting too close, and then would be nice and tired to get ready for bed when I got home.
Nice, I gained a lot of weight during 2020 and wasn't walking enough. Usually I'm walking all of the time because that's my job - I'm a dog walker. But during the pandemic everyone was home walking their own dogs and I became very depressed and without a job to do. Had to go on an antidepressant but at least that fostered enough motivation for me to start working out again and eventually I didn't need the medication anymore
It’s so effective I refer to it as self medicating. I used to live in an area where I could do long hikes. Now I go to CrossFit a few days a week.
Ah CrossFit sounds great. I've wanted to start jiu jitsu for a while now, but haven't had the time or energy to commit to it after a full day of walking dogs, which is what I do for a living. But walking is good enough for now, I think. It keeps me active, in decent shape, and mentally healthy
Does San Francisco deserve its recent reputation for being a dangerous city to live in, due to a high crime rate?
[Edit : adding this bit 4 days after the above question.
https://on.ft.com/42O5J08
Very young kids passing out after accidentally ingesting fentanyl (a drug harder than heroin) in schools, libraries, parks...seems pretty extreme to me. They have to be revived, and the revival drug is kept everywhere young children play.
]
Compared to other cities in the US? Not particularly.
Compared to other cities in the Western World, yes.
Compared to other cities in the whole world, not particularly.
That said, I don't think we should defend the shit behaviour of the San Francisco local government by pointing out that worse things exist somewhere. That's like a 400 lb alcoholic saying that he's not _really_ that bad because there's a 600 lb alcoholic down the street. That doesn't make it okay.
Not in my experience.
I’ve worked in San Francisco for 12 years now, and I’ve lived there for two years now, and I haven’t experienced any violent crime at all.
In contrast, I lived in Berkeley and Oakland before I moved to San Francisco where I experienced attempted muggings four times, heard gunfire often (especially in the 1980’s), and saw gunfire muzzle flash twice (in the 1990’s).
21st century San Francisco is far safer than what I experienced of the East Bay in the 20th century.
it sounds like you're comparing different suburbs of San Francisco to the old heart of the city; Most people who don't live there are probably including all of those as part of "San Francisco" and comparing to New York or Los Angeles or London
I'm not sure comparing crime in the 80's and 90's to the past decade is that valid. Depending on when in the 90's you are talking about (but not for the 80's; the entire decade was more violent than even the recent uptick), violent crime rates were ~2x what they were in the 2010s, although the recent surge in crime has brought us much closer to the mid-to-late 90's (but still not back up to early 90's and earlier)
*”moved” not “most”
If you click on the 3 dots to the right of Reply you get an Edit option.
Thanks!
Sure, on the third floor of the San Francisco Hall of Justice there’s a chalkboard in the Press room, on that board is listed the number of homicides for each year starting in 1969, the most homicides listed was in 1977 (141), from which it dropped to a back then new low in 1998 (63), then it goes up and down, but it’s been closer to ‘98 levels than ‘77 levels for over a decade (in 2022 there were only 41 homicides).
For someone (like me) who was born in 1968 and has spent 90% of my life in or within 10 miles of San Francisco this seems much safer than the crime levels of my childhood and young adulthood.
Since I can’t actually be sure of a comparable city is (Montreal, and Seattle when I visited them *felt* more like San Francisco than D.C., Ottawa, Los Angeles, and San Diego), maybe you have some measure of relative urban density?
I don't know any more than what I read online, but I'll point out that it likely varies a lot by neighborhood.
I don't know about violent crime, but I'd never leave a bike out of my sight there, just based on anecdotal evidence.
No, in terms of actually crime it isnt that bad but it is somewhere getting significantly worse and it is less sorted into high and low crime areas so it seems more random.
A quick google throws up two lists of some lists of "most dangerous cities to live in in the US":
https://www.populationu.com/gen/most-dangerous-cities-in-the-us is the top 75 most dangerous cities, using data from the FBI on violent crimes. San Francisco is not one of those 75.
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/murder-map-deadliest-u-s-cities/49/ is the 65 cities with the highest murder rates. Again, SF is not one of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate puts San Franciso in the mid-to-high 30s by murder and violent crime.
So there's clearly some disagreement, but it's clearly not an exceptionally dangerous city to live in.
This is what Mallard was addressing, below. There's a difference between "overall murder rate per capita" and "how dangerous the city is for an individual". From what I understand, this is an instance of Simpson's paradox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
Anecdotally, yes. I personally know two people who have been the victims of violent crimes in the SF area, both males in their mid-30s, and they both showed significant personality changes afterward. Being a victim of crime really messes people up.
I'll also say that, in terms of vibe, SF feels roughly equivalent to Detroit safety-wise.
Yes. Relative to its demographics it has a very high crime rate.
Blacks commit homicides at about 10 times the rate of non-Blacks, so it is unfair to compare San Francisco, where Blacks are only 5.2% of the population, to other major cities.
In 2022, SF had 55 homicides and a population of 763,800 = 7.2 per hundred thousand.
I don’t see national data for 2022, but in 2021, the national homicide rate was 6.8 per hundred thousand, and apparently 2022 was lower. So SF would have a higher rate of homicides than the country as a whole in spite of having well under half the Black share of population.
Compared to other cities with few Blacks, San Francisco does very poorly.
For example:
Los Angeles is 8.6% Black, yet had only 3.17 homicides per hundred thousand.
San Diego: 6% Black: 3.49 per hundred thousand.
Not only that, but San Francisco has the highest median income of any large city in the USA: https://www.statista.com/statistics/205609/median-household-income-in-the-top-20-most-populated-cities-in-the-us/, which makes it having a higher than average homicide rate even worse in context.
In general, homicide data are more reliable than data for any other crime.
If one is going to walk down a street in a random city in the US, why should one care who is doing the mugging? If SF is doing crime well out of proportion of it's demographics, but it's crime rate is still much lower than other cities, I'm going to pick it.
In other words, when it comes to how an individual should feel about a city, I don't see why demographics should come into it at all.
Because it's NEVER about the city. It's the particular neighborhood within that city.
If what you are trying to say is that "Some neighborhoods in SF definitely deserve the dangerous reputation and others don't", that's a completely reasonable argument (ideally I'd like to see supporting evidence, but even without it, it's as least _plausible), but it's an argument that has absolutely nothing to do with the argument that I was responding to. As I stated elsewhere, I think SF deserves a pretty bad reputation as far as governance goes (I'm less sure about violence and crime specifically, but I believe that generally speaking it's a horribly run city), but I don't think the argument I was replying to is a good one.
But the argument you were responding to, as formulated, is nonsensical. Because of that, any attempt at arguing it (as written) is going to be futile.
Attempts to define "dangerous city" by measures such as overall reported crime rate are examples of the streetlight fallacy.
It's not that you should care who the perps are, you should care who the victims are.
If St Louis has a murder rate of 14 but the victims are all black youths involved in gang activity, and San Francisco has a murder rate of 7 but the victims are all white middle class people minding their own business, then for me personally San Francisco is a lot more dangerous.
Obviously it's not that extreme, but there seems to be a strong case to be made that San Francisco, despite its overall-middling crime rate, may be a particularly dangerous city for middle class white people in particular.
Maybe that's because white middle class people aren't living in St Louis? It's hard to tease this out from the stats, but "can I walk down the street safely" is the relevant question, and a region's violence being all gang wars is not reassuring unless the gangs are extremely unusually scrupulous about not fucking up bystanders (and charging businesses protection money, etc)
Gangs rarely claim territory in white middle class neighborhoods, so there aren't very many gang wars there.
It's the powder coke v. crack situation. Crack became a moral panic because there were drive-bys hitting children linked with the sale of crack (which then got blasted on the news and politicians Did Something to Be Tough on Drugs). Lawyers and stockbrokers (and the nightclubs they went to) didn't have as many kids getting caught in the crossfire.
First of all, comparing to similar cities makes sense when evaluating a city and considering its merits. E.g. if someone wants to live in a rich city, they could live in the next richest city - San Jose which only had 3.46 homicides per 100,000.
Second of all, it isn't just about who is doing the mugging - it is about who is being mugged.
Most homicides are intraracial. The US cities with the highest homicide rates are those in which large numbers of Blacks kill other Blacks. Even in such cities, I think the per capita rate of homicide for Whites is not usually very high.
E.g. in Baltimore, the total per capita rate of homicides in 2022 was 58.8 per hundred thousand.
However, although 29% of Baltimore residents are White, a far smaller share of homicide victims are. E.g. looking at the last 102 homicides in the city, where the race of the victim was known, only 8% were White.
So the per capita rate of homicides for Whites in Baltimore is probably only about 15.9 (while the rate for Blacks would be about 81.6.).
This highlights the non-homogeneous distribution of crime through the population.
Not only are the perpetrators and victims very heavily disproportionately Black, they tend to be even more disproportionately criminals - not regular people.
San Francisco seemingly bucks this trend by having a higher than average homicide rate while having very few Blacks. This suggests that the crime is less localized by race and more dangerous to the population as a whole. It is likely less localized by criminal background, as well. I.e. it's not just criminals shooting each other.
Glancing at the list of homicide victims in San Francisco: https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/01/06/bay-area-homicides-2023-map-and-details/ seems to support that. The victims are not overwhelmingly Black.
And while I focused on homicides, since they are the most accurately tracked, the reports about property crime in San Francisco again indicate very widespread victimization that is not at all limited to criminals.
Comparison among similar cities is useful if you are just making a comparison. If you just want to know if the repuation as a "violent city" is justified, it matters _much_ less.
>Most Homicides are interracial
No they aren't: https://twitter.com/kareem_carr/status/1655614530163204097
There's some great stuff at that link, thanks! But it's also disappointing: I wish he didn't stop his analysis when it got to results he liked. 58 and 27 are modal, and the differences with populations aren't that big at those two particular ages. From eyeballing it, it seems as though the age distributions would decrease the disparity between black and white murder rates, but not eliminate it.
I wonder how it would fare when taking into account poverty, including neighborhood poverty. I seem to remember that 3 years ago, during the George Floyd aftermath, some people had done number crunching that showed that police killings were directly correlated to neighborhood poverty, and there was almost no racial component after controlling for the (large) racial disparity in poverty. I wonder if a similar thing applies to non-police killings?
I didn't say most homicides are interracial. [In fact that would have been the opposite of what I said and would have undermined my point.] Please read my comment again.
You are right, sorry I misread your "intraracial" as "interracial". Part of why I misread it is that what you actually said doesn't make sense from a "what is the point" perspective.
That sentence and all of your subsequent text doesn't matter to the original question. Whether SF is more or less violent than other, similar cities; and how that violence relates to it's demographics is an interesting academic question, and probably has lots of important implications, but it's irrelevant to the question as posed which is (as I understood it) "should a random person feel safe or unsafe in SF relative to other places in the US".
And to be clear, my prior is that SF _has_ actually dramatically declined and is, right now, a terrible place to live and that the stats don't adequately reflect what it's like to live in SF/the larger bay area. I just think that all of your points are non-sequitors.
And in case you object to that figure being violent crime instead of murder:
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-data-racial-murder/fact-check-false-data-on-u-s-racial-murder-rates-idUSKCN24I2A9
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-6.xls
Yes. Both of those have been covered. Try reading the whole thread next time.
"is there something wrong with policing, drugs, etc in SF" was not the original question. The original question was "Does SF deserve it's current reputation as being exceptionally violent."
Whether or not SF has something wrong is a very interesting, and very important!, question, but not the question that was originally asked.
Substack has a podcast feature. The ACX podcast team is thinking of switching to using it. I would make a post, they would record it, and a few days later they would edit the audio file to be at the bottom of the post. This wouldn't mean much for non-podcast-subscribers except that some old posts would have audio files at the end of them (not auto-playing).
Does anyone have strong opinions on this plan?
No strong opinion.
Details might matter, like: does the substack podcast feature require to have an interruption for promoting substack/ newsletter of the month or an annoyingly long intro? Is there anything that might change the quality of the audio? I'm pretty sure the ACX podcast team has looked into this.
Seems good to me. If nothing else, it will really improve the discoverability of the podcast with minimal impact on the rest of us. (Honestly, I wouldn't even mind if the podcast was at the top, which is the way news sites seem to do it. That way you know that there's an audio version *before* reading through the whole post.)
There's an ACX podcast? I don't think I'd heard of it and I read pretty much everything you write, but if you want more people to be aware of it I don't think it's very visible
Yeah: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/astral-codex-ten-podcast/id1295289140
Is it any good?
With the post being written first (rather than transcribed from the podcast) there’s no real difference to those of us who prefer text.
Good option for us that can’t read good
Seems fine. I can't imagine waiting that long to listen to an ACX post though. Gotta stay up to the minute with all the breaking news in whether Oakland would hypothetically get more expensive in 20 years time.
Sounds good to me. I plan to mostly read, but having an audio option is nice.
I wouldn't use the feature, but I can't think of a reason that having attached audio files would be bad.
It does looks like the rationalist community has completely turned away from SBF idea books are useless (not that Scott ever fell into that category).
Question for other substack writers- Is a book the dream/ was it ever the dream?
Richard Hanania agrees with SBF: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-case-against-most-books
Given that Hanania breaches the "six paragraph" rule in that post, does that mean I can automatically decide the entire screed is rubbish and skip reading it as he plainly has nothing to say and pads it all out with filler?
EDIT: I think my problem with Hanania is that I can't take him seriously, He's "President of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology" which is something he set up himself. Aw how cute Dickie, you're Dear Leader of your own little club which you started yourself! It reminds me of the minister who set up his own church and started calling himself "Bishop". Sure you are.
I'm thinking of setting up my own Organisation for the Something or Other of Wotsit and declaring myself Goddess-Empress of same. I'm sure you will all be impressed by my credentials which legitimise my opinions as a public-facing influencer of thought-leadership!
It sounds like you're just making the point that he doesn't actually take that rule seriously himself, but I did actually find that post excessively waffley and repetitive, and did end up skimming a lot of it because it didn't seem like he was adding much.
It seemed to me like he is implicitly referring to some small subset of books and acting as though that's all books. I know the set of books I read is also a small subset of all the types of book but practically none of them have been as he described. One of the categories he gives of books that are actually worth reading, history books, should obviously just be broadened to any books on technical subjects where there actually is a lot of detail.
I have a hard time taking him seriously because I have no idea who he is other than being reposted by lost of people I already follow. But he seems to have come out of no where in the past year to be some "important" intellectual? Does he have some accomplishment i dont know about?
"His writing speaks for itself."
Yes. It does. And what it says to me is "I think my brain is THIIIIIS big".
"you'll never have 10% of the influence Hanania has"
What influence does he have? Who takes him seriously enough that his toy institute gets to set actual policy? If you stopped people on the street, how many would have heard about him? I wouldn't have heard of him were it not for people name-dropping him here and on the associated disapora blogs. I still haven't got a clear idea of what he thinks, apart from "everyone else is doing it wrong and I'm the one guy who knows what's what".
Interesting. I like how opposite this perspective is: https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/my-lifetime-reading-plan
I think it was Lars Doucet who said here that you don't publish a book to convey an idea, you do it so you can go on a publicity tour and use your 'published author' status to gain clout, putting you in a better position to convey your ideas to more people. Blog posts don't do that unless you're Scott Alexander.
BOOK REVIEW CONTEST FINALISTS:
Cities And The Wealth Of Nations / The Question Of Separatism
Lying For Money
Man's Search For Meaning
Njal's Saga
On The Marble Cliffs
Public Citizens
Safe Enough? A History Of Nuclear Power And Accident Risk
Secret Government
The Educated Mind
The Laws Of Trading
The Mind Of A Bee
The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich
The Weirdest People In The World (Review 2)
Why Machines Will Never Rule The World (Review 1)
Why Nations Fail
Zuozhuan
I think those are excellent choices.
With one exception. And frankly, I don't manage to suspend my disbelief here. Is that a parody? Scott entering with a review to test our sanity? Am I the only one who has read the review and is aghast?
I don't really want to put the name here, in case I get something totally wrong, but I am honestly wondering whether there was some sort of mistake.
I've only read about half of them - the ones that were overwhelmingly chosen by the people got in sight unseen. Please tell me which one's concerning you (by email if necessary) so I can double check if something went wrong.
Thanks, I've sent an email.
On second thought, the answer is obvious. It's an AI-generated review, and Scott wants to see how it fares among the other finalists.
Ha! I read and rated maybe a dozen of the submissions, but managed not to read a single one of the finalists.
Oh wait, I did read The Educated Mind. It was just so long that I forgot what the title was by the end!
Wow I totally missed there was a review of "On the Marble Cliffs" ! Loved this book, cool the review made the cut.
How did you like the review?
Bei der Wahl war Ihr Text in meinen Top-3. Und doch war ich überrascht, dass so viele andere dies auch so sahen ;) - andererseits 'wusste' das Publikum hier auch nicht, dass 'man Auf den Marmorklippen nicht liest'. Autor zu ... 'reaktionär' ... . It was a great review, ich gratuliere zur Medaille bei sehr, sehr starker Konkurrenz!
Dankeschön!
I know a lot of Germans who have read and enjoyed the Marmorklippen, without being reactionary at all.
Thanks to your review, I may well become one of them. :D Or even In Stahlgewittern. Just don't tell my friends. (The Germans you know are likely more seriously into literature than the average Hans.) To quote wikipedia: Die Grünen: „Uns ist es relativ gleichgültig, ob Ernst Jünger ein guter oder schlechter Schriftsteller ist. Er war unbestritten ein ideologischer Wegbereiter des Faschismus und ein Träger des Nationalsozialismus von Kopf bis Fuß. Ein Kriegsverherrlicher und erklärter Feind der Demokratie. Er war und ist ein durch und durch unmoralischer Mensch.“ Die SPD stellte sich ebenfalls gegen die Verleihung. Jünger sei „geradezu präfaschistisch“ und passe nicht zur „humanistischen Tradition“ des Goethepreises. ... Sätze aus Frühwerken wie „Ich hasse die Demokratie wie die Pest." https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_J%C3%BCnger#Goethepreis-Verleihung
Some of these finalists were truly phenomenal. I don't mind saying that these are, I think, on the whole excellent choices.
I'm glad to see a bunch of books that don't fall into the category of recent pop-non-fic with a title like "Something: How One Weird Thing Explains Everything".
My review was not a finalist, am I now free to post it on my own blog?
Yes.
put it up on the fold https://manifold.markets/warty/which-book-review-will-win-the-acx
Rise and Fall was excellent. Some real good choices in that list.
No. Only Wall Street conservatives are into that guy. Small-c conservatives aren't going to vote for him.
Because everyone but you is a stoopit asshole who doesn't grok the fullness?
Because events can have multiple causes? Because crime is a really complicated thing and is probably influenced by poverty, inequality, culture, and possibly even policing policies?
And how is your phrasing not just...needlessly provocative?
Not here. I mean, the liberals here are wrong about, like, a toooooon of stuff but they're also hardcore nerds who are absolutely, 100% willing to argue precise estimates of how crime will vary with increases and decreases in the Gini coefficient at various national income levels.
I mean, most of them will, some are just dumb.
If you're angry that public discourse is dumb...yes, public discourse is dumb. Please stop bringing it here.
Alright, without the drama, can I just get this clear before everyone spends 12+ months screaming at each other?
-So the core thing is that the after the Hunter Biden laptop got leaked, the CIA (like the official CIA) released a statement that it was Russian disinformation?
-And now everyone is pretty convinced the laptop is legit?
-And former intelligence officials NOT in the CIA but affiliated with the Biden campaign put pressure on the CIA to release the letter as quickly as possible?
-And the new info is a letter from a former official officially saying this was done to help the Biden campaign?
So, first, without the sturm-und-drang, is this what is being alleged? And, if so, what are the points of factual disagreement?
I think your bullets are close, but my read looked slightly different.
- Hunter Biden laptop got leaked
- Biden Campaign staff member Anthony Blinken asked former CIA director Michael Morell to draft a letter (seemingly in his personal capacity) and get other former intelligence/national security people to sign it.
- Morell drafts the letter
- The CIA has a "Prepublication Classification Review Board" that appears to review pretty much anything a former CIA employee publishes to protect against disclosure of classified information (https://www.cia.gov/about/organization/prepublication-classification-review-board/). So, like any ex-CIA staffer wanting to make a publication related to intelligence, Morell needed to get his letter cleared by the PCRB before publishing it.
- Here's where the sturm-und-drang comes in, depending on one's perspective. The CIA quickturned the letter approval in less than a day. Maybe suspicious, maybe treatment one might expect for an ask from a former CIA Director on a 2 page letter with 4 other former Directors on board, that the former Director has asked to be handled urgently, contains no intelligence in and of itself and is clear in its text about that ("We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement").
- It also looks like one signer on the letter, David Cariens, learned about the letter during a call with a PCRB employee about a memoir he was writing. So he's having his conversation about getting his memoir cleared to publish by PCRB, the employee mentions the letter, and Cariens wanted to sign. Could be signs of a CIA operation of some kind - fast tracking the letter and having PCRB people push other CIA staff who wanted their stuff published to sign it. But it could also just be mundane - no CIA operation, just the kind of small talk (albeit probably unprofessional given the context) that happens all the time at the beginning or end of a business call, no more conspiratorial than "how are your kids," "new Marvel movie was good," etc, just that happened to pique Cariens' interest, with no further implication than the the letter going from 50 to 51 signatures.
Overall this looks like your standard-issue partisan bickering where there are multiple explanations for a thing and one side says it has proved that the bad explanation is true while the other said it has exonerated itself beyond doubt and the whole thing was a nothing burger.
Letter text for those who are interested: https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000175-4393-d7aa-af77-579f9b330000
Yeah, this is my take as well. As a *former* CIA director, then private citizen, Morrell is allowed to write nakedly partisan political propaganda if he wants, and he's even allowed to lie when he does so. But like anyone who ever had access to Sensitive Compartmented Information(*), he agreed to submit anything he wrote on anything that might plausibly be believed to stem from his classified background for review.
Which review is to be done in a timely fashion, where "timely" is context-dependent and for something like this is supposed to be done fast. And it's supposed to consider *only* whether you are leaking classified information, not whether you are e.g. writing nakedly partisan political propaganda filled with outright lies. The reviewing agency can always slow-walk the review, claiming to be busy, or exhaust your patience with nitpicky disputes about what is or isn't classified, and there's probably not much you can do about it - but it's unprofessional of them to do that. The CIA, in this case, seems to have acted professionally.
Except for the bit where one of their staff blabbed to someone else who was doing their own pre-publication review, but as you note, that's within the normal range for office-gossip carelessness.
So, in this case the CIA "conspired" to do their normal, non-partisan job by the book, and so left a bunch of private citizens to exercise their right to engage in political commentary of whatever sort they like.
* I was just read in to another SAP today, so that paperwork is very fresh in my mind.
It's pretty weak tea, yea. Reads a bit like a pitch for a satirical movie to be honest.
The OP wording seems sorta non-central fallacy
What specifically is factually inaccurate?
A masterful technicality! I renounce all my prior opinions in the face of it. You can consider myself, as well as the entire Red Tribe, convinced.
I think your proposed strategy would make it so obvious what was being done that very few people would fall for it. And even ignoring that, not many people vote for 3rd party candidates to begin with, and even fewer are going to vote for a candidate that can't even manage to make it on to all 50 ballots. I'd be skeptical that this strategy would be expected to flip even a single state out of 10 elections.
Your statement could be very true, and I don't want to overstate my case- I genuinely don't know what would happen. But to argue for it a bit more- Ross Perot received I believe 19ish% of the vote when he was a 3rd party candidate. A lot of people are uncomfortable with Trump and would probably like a way out to vote for a non-Trump Republican, however they need to rationalize that.
And, most voters are low-information voters with a high school degree who just don't pay attention to politics as much as we do. So they may not really understand that Cheney isn't on the ballot in half the country- they may not know it at all, or it may not have really registered
I think non-Trump Republicans are not likely to vote for Liz Cheney, given that she can be perceived as RINO, or a party traitor, or simply "the liberals love her". If your political opponents are all "oh yeah we want Sally as the new leader", then how likely is Sally to be close to the principles of your party rather than their party?
The 90s were a different, far less polarized, time, and Perot is the *only* person who has done this in recent memory.
So you are trying to capture voters who are
A) Republican
B) Really don't like Trump
C) Won't vote for a democrat and/or one of the already running 3rd party candidates
D) are low information enough to not know that one candidate is only running on ~1/3 of the ballots and is basically running a sham campaign
but
E) will have heard of this candidate enough to know who they are and vote for them (and it seems to me that pre-existing name recognition seems unlikely, I can't imagine anyone with any real clout agreeing to this strategy)
I think that you have selected and _extremely_ small slice of the pie and are hoping that it is somehow large enough to swing not-close elections.
The fact that Ross Perot did well one time doesn't matter because you are suggesting a _completely_ different kind of campaign.
In some ways that sounds like Evan McMullin's candidacy in 2016 -- and he didn't come close to winning even his own home state of Utah. (Where he was the only Mormon and the only local person on the ballot.)
In the 2000 presidential election in Florida, George W. Bush defeated Al Gore by 537 votes. Nader received 97,421 votes in Florida
-edit- I was wrong about how well he did, I was looking at a list that explicitly didn't include 3rd party candidates that had strong performances. He was only one of the best of the "bad" ones, but my last paragraph is the real killer.
Yes, and he was a candidate on the ballot in 43 states, not 20ish, and he got the second highest proportion of votes for a 3rd party candidate (after Gary Johnson in 2016) since 1920.
so A) he did very unusually well for a 3rd party candidate and B) I would expect a candidate employing the proposed strategy to do significantly _worse_ than average.
To make matters worse, upon rereading, the strategy _explicitly_ states that they will not run in swing states, the states where the election is close, in case they accidentally swing it the other way.
This plan is to run a 3rd party candidate, only put them on the ballot in a little over 1/3 of states, and hope that they mange to get _so many votes_ that a non-swing red state switches from red Republican to Democrat.
So the idea is a spoiler candidate? Split the vote so the other lot win?
I don't know how well that would work for a presidential campaign, where it's pretty much A versus B. C, D and E can run, but A is for the Repubcrats and B is for the Demolicans, so C, D and E are third party or Independents.
Running C who is another Repubcrat would be confusing, you'd need a very big name to go forward, and you'd need enough people wanting to vote for C rather than A - in which case, why doesn't C run directly in the primary to be selected as the official Repubcrat candidate rather than A?
For a local election it might well work - the party machine picked John Johnson, the locals want Flip Biggens instead, so they vote for Flip as a protest vote. But for the kind of national election for president? I can't see it, not under the American model (now under the Irish one, we had seven people running one year).
The country was less polarized then. Conventional wisdom said that Bush and Gore were basically the same, absurd as that may sound in hindsight.
Curiously, I find them more similar in hindsight. I remember being afraid of a Gore win because of what I considered his extreme views.
After 9/11, I had my doubts about what we did about the attack. It didn't seem justified to spend over $50 billion to curtail our freedoms, and unlikely to protect us much, but I gave the policy the benefit of the doubt. By 2006, I had determined the policy was bad, and have been only more convinced since then.
Would Gore have done better? I think he would have done much the same in the circumstances.
Certainly President Gore would have been under enormous pressure to do something about terrorism after 9/11. But that "something" may well have been just invading Afghanistan.
Also, presumably Gore would have pushing through something related to global warming.
Under the principle "Only Nixon could go to China," Democrats have a whole lot more cover and maybe even more pressure to start foreign wars.
Wasn't it Madeline Allbright who said ‘What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?’
I remember my parents saying that at the time as well. They certainly never said it again.