Thing which I find plausible might be true, but have no evidence either for or against:
:- I would expect political parties to be more willing to discipline elected officials (parliamentarians, senators etc) when doing so does not risk costing them a majority.
:- I would expect this to be the case more often in countries with larger elected bodies, and that those countries might, on average, have higher standards of parliamentary conduct.
:- In the US context, I might expect members of the House to be held to a higher standard of personal conduct than Senators.
Is there any evidence that this is true? If it isn't, why isn't it?
I would assume the opposite; political parties will discipline their own members mainly when they think not doing so will threaten a majority. For one thing, there will always be internal politics as well as external; if the majority is firm, you still have to worry about who holds the majority of the majority.
Sorry, something I should have made clear but didn't: I was thinking about "discipline for personal misconduct", not "enforce party-line votes on" - the thought was inspired by the current flare-up here in the UK, where the government, with a large majority, has allowed disciplinary proceedings to proceed against former prime minister Boris Johnson, resulting in him and two of his supporters (so far) ragequitting.
As you say, I'd expect a party with a large majority to be more willing to allow its MPs to vote their conscience against party lines. But I'd also expect it to be (edit:) less keen to sweep accusations of things like taking kickbacks, sexually assaulting aides, drug use etc under the table.
Same answer. I expect them to sweep kickbacks under the table unless it's so egregious that failing to punish it would threaten the majority (or if the other party's doing it). I don't know about UK politics but I know Boris Johnson is a highly controversial figure who's been under intense scrutiny for years.
Yes, sorry, edited to remove brain-lapse that completely reversed my meaning: I would expect parties with larger majorities - and hence parties in systems with larger houses - to care less about voting the wrong way but more about immoral behaviour (I think - I'm clearly half asleep today, so only 75% I'm still not saying the opposite of what I mean).. But I have no idea if they actually do.
But that's essentially positing that a party becomes more moral as it approaches dictatorship. The more powerful they become, the more they'll respect the law.
Instead, the more powerful they become, the more they'll start thinking they've surpassed the law. Rules are an obstacle, and they've overcome it. Maybe they'll enforce it once they've reworked it into their own image, but the old guard's laws they won't care about. Unless there's still a threat to not following it.
Sort of. It's the same kind of principal whereby rich people are less likely to commit petty theft than poor people - not because they're more moral, but because they have less incentive.
Random question: does anyone who knows Latin(???) want to take a stab at interpreting https://nostalgebraist-autoresponder.tumblr.com/post/675455630490894337/do-you-like-bagels ? I've tried a mixture of google translate, chatgpt, and basic python text munging (decapitalizing and/or removing the line spacing), with mixed results, so I want to get an expert human's validation instead.
(By the way, nostalgebraist-autoresponder, a GPT-based bot and longtime fixture of the ratsphere internet, is now gone forever, effective last Wednesday. Rest in peace.)
I haven't studied Latin since high school, but I'm pretty sure it's nonsense - I don't recognize any of the words, there are some really improbable letter combinations like "TELCHSES" or "ARVAIABIO", and it wanders back into English at the end.
EDIT: ChatGPT will generate Lorem Ipsum if you ask, so I imagine this bot is capable of it too.
I was kind of half expecting it to be nonsensical but thanks for the comment anyways.
What could potentially be more entertaining, and more what I was originally going after, is to """translate""" the text from broken pseudo-Latin to broken English (with heavy scare quotes to indicate that seriously translating is impossible).
If you claim you are autistic but good enough at "masking" to pass as neurotypical, you are not autistic. Autism is a disorder that is defined by a cluster of externally-observable symptoms, not the underlying cause of those symptoms. For example, a blood clot is an underlying cause that can lead to leg pain. You can have a blood clot and feel pain, but you can also have a blood clot and not feel pain. However, autism is not like a blood clot in this analogy, it's more like Leg Pain Syndrome (defined by a feeling of pain in the leg). If you have a blood clot but don't feel any pain associated with it, you don't have LPS, because LPS is defined solely by the symptom of pain, not an internal cause.
> Autism is a disorder that is defined by a cluster of externally-observable symptoms, not the underlying cause of those symptoms.
First, citation needed.
Second, "masking" is not a yes-or-no thing. I assume you didn't want to say that the same person is non-autistic on a good day, and autistic on a bad day; or that a non-autistic person suddenly becomes autistic when overwhelmed.
If people cope with difficult situations by avoiding them, does it mean the symptom is gone? To use your example, imagine that your legs only hurt when you are using them, so you learn to walk on your hands instead. Does it mean that the person walking on their hands is not allowed to complain about the leg pain syndrome, because technically their legs are not hurting at that moment? From my perspective, "I have a leg pain syndrome" is a perfectly logical response to "dude, why are you walking on your hands?"
I don't know the context of your comment (if there is any). You are discussing semantics. It's fine to say that the word "autism" refers only to externally observable symptoms, but to the extent there are internal differences between someone who naturally acts non-autistic and someone who has to make a huge effort to do so, it would be interesting to learn about those differences and in particular to have a word for them. It also matters which cluster we refer to with the word "autism" if treatment, coping mechanisms, or whatever else end up only being useful for the group with external symptoms or also for the group with internal ones. And sure, severe autism is so different from maskeable autism that I still do not quite understand why someone thought it a good idea to give them the same name, but I'm sure there are at least some good reasons to draw the semantic lines that way.
Hello Eric! Would be great to read and understand the arguments behind, especially for the latter option. For those new to the topic, any support capable to provide more clarity is warmly welcome and appreciated. Thank you and have a nice day.
Is it possible to try these types of competitions on state-of-the-art architectures rather than small toy-level examples? Maybe develop powerful savant-like narrow-AI systems specifically for mechanistic interpretability research alone. In fact, you could develop extremely specialized narrow-AI systems for each area of AI Alignment research and one specifically for developing new areas of exploration for alignment.
Does anyone have recommendations for the most reputable vendors of antique weapons? Specifically, swords between 200 and 500 years old, from America and Europe.
I don't know what vendors are reputable. There used to be a dealer in New Orleans who sold such things and seemed to know what he was selling but that was a long time ago and he may no longer be there.
Are you limited to the U.S.? London markets used to be a good source, but no longer. There is at least one flea market in Paris that has a lot of antiques — I don't swear they have swords but I would expect them to. The Grand Bazaar in Istanbul probably has people selling swords. Nearer home you can probably find antique swords on eBay, but you would have to judge them for yourself. Someone else has mentioned Fagan Arms — I used to get their catalog and think I bought a few things out of it.
You should keep tabs on those high-profile auction houses like Christie's and Sotheby's. They've been known to auction off antique weapons from time to time.
If you're more into a direct approach, look for specialized dealers who know their stuff, like Fagan Arms or Peter Finer.
You can always reach out to museums or institutions that are all about arms and armor. They might have the inside scoop on where to find the best antique swords or upcoming auctions.
I've been pretty worried about taking prescription sleep medications because of the all-cause mortality effects. Does anybody know if there are similar studies on melatonin?
These days I take melatonin almost every day. Sleep is a problem but not a *major* blocker in my life so if melatonin has large quantity or quality effects, I might want to cut back to taking it only when I "really need to."
Scott had a very comprehensive article on melatonin a few years ago. I don't recall there being any significant downsides. The big takeaway for me was that most people take way too much - per Scott, the optimum dosage is 0.3 mg.
Well, this barbarian tried the commonly available doses initially (3 and 5 mg) before reading Scott's article. The larger doses gave me strange and vivid dreams and heart palpitations.
Probably can't offer much editing-wise, but your articles have a lot of political sniping, effectively a blogful of Young Man Yells At Cloud. The Cracks in Reality post have a whole section describing Nihilism as a series of political takes you don't like, which could be cut in its entirety (and then it gets worse with the literal "what am I even doing here?").
The book review opens with a political lamentation on the state of the US; everything before the 'fatalism' one-word summary could be cut in its entirety (alternately, throw in a "it is 1997" or something at the end, make it a joke; no reason to wait until part 3 to tell us that). Then there's the phrase "Their narratives, while falling victim to selection bias, are compelling," arguing two contradictory positions in the same sentence.
Not an aggregation, but you might look at Bredesen's book _The End of Alzheimer's_. He has a theory that might be right. I checked with a retired Berkeley professor I know who said that Bredesen was a reputable researcher.
First you want to understand whether history is the result of random noise (like Brownian motion) or of evolution on some low-dimension attractor. If the second option is the case, then we need to learn the relevant dynamics in terms of equations of motion of some sort. Finally we will be able to answer your question. I don’t know whether we have enough data to even take the first step.
Technologically, I think the world is about to enter a period of instability due to AI. Even if we never get anything better than GPT4, as that becomes more widespread it will force a lot of change upon the world.
Geopolitically, I think we're still in the unipolar post-USSR phase, with the US as global hegemon. I think the way that's most likely to change is if China goes after Taiwan and the US fails to assert complete dominance. In an alternate reality, Russia might have upset it by a swift conquest of Ukraine, but now we know we're not living in that timeline. The number of other nations it would take to challenge the US if they banded together is shrinking, but I think it'll be a while before the US is weak enough that a realistic coalition could create an equivalent power.
Culturally, increased communication is homogenizing the world, small languages and cultures are dying out, and "Western" culture in general and American culture specifically continues to engage in narcissistic ouroborism, but all that's been going on since at least the 1950s. I don't see those courses changing suddenly, any time soon, short of an apocalypse.
If your description is correct, the guy is a complete idiot.
After the first few paragraphs, I thought, jokingly, "LOL, he should say that age is a social construct". Then I read some more and... yep, he literally did that. (What's next? I suppose biology is a social construct, death is a social construct, reality is a social construct... in other words, "social construct" means "I don't want to talk about it, because it contradicts my opinions".)
Hey, let's apply the same "intellectual sophistication" to everything else. Declare that poverty is a social construct, and you no longer need to care about the poor. Call cancer a social construct, and you can save lots of money on healthcare. (How to make an intellectual argument for cancer being a social construct? That's easy. First, point out that it is actually a collection of a few different things, e.g. leukemia is not the same as lung cancer. Second, provide viewpoints alternative to the white cisheteropatriarchal colonialist perspective; for example, mention that some indigenous tribe believes that cancer is a gift from gods. You probably do not even have to provide evidence that this tribe exists. Third, explain how the concept of cancer is used to support inequality in our society, for example how male doctors get high salaries. Case closed; cancer was debunked, and now anyone who complains about it is a Nazi and needs to be cancelled.)
This makes my blood boil. No just that the guy is stupid, but that his stupidity is supported and celebrated by people who should know better. Yes, some people are hurt by age less than others; and yes, if you keep looking, you can find some 70-years olds who seem mostly ok (with the emphasis on "seem" and "mostly"). Sure, make a list of their names, and let's review the list 10 or 20 years later, to see whether it still supports the optimistic perspective.
Geez, Dan, you are completely ignoring the positives that aging brings. A better understanding of oneself and the rest of the world for example. I’ve noticed a continuing trend upward in my default mood over the decades.
I’m 70 now and yeah I’ve experienced some decline in strength and stamina. I’ve had to swap my 75 pound Alumacraft canoe for a 40 pound Kevlar model to hump over mile long portages in the BWCA for example and yeah I can’t bench press the same weight as when I was a young pup like you.
But I have to tell you, buddy, I’ve never been happier than I am now.
Of course there are benefits to living longer like increased wisdom and "just getting better at life", as Tyler Cowen says. My post is about aging. Clearly you've been able to avoid the worst effects of aging, and I'm happy for you. But please recognize many are not so lucky. I'm also curious where you will be in 10, 20, or 30 years. At some point, aging will come for you, and very likely it will not be very enjoyable.
This is obscured in a lot of "cross-sectional" studies because of selection effects - happier people are more likely to live longer.
Again I'm happy you are enjoying the start of old age but please recognize your experience may not translate to others. From what I have seen there are also many people who put on a "brave face" and say everything is fine but in reality they are suffering a lot. So while I'm willing to believe you in this case I don't necessarily take everyone's word that "they are fine" at face value. People often hide their health issues.
Oh, I don’t expect to live another 30 or 20 years. Even 10 or 5 seems dicey. I like to keep my focus on today. It’s all we ever really have. My high school best friend didn’t quite make 30. Hodgkins took him at 29.
You’re a young man. Have some fun with however many years come your way! May you get happier with the passage of time.
The saving grace is that this quack is probably going to get old. I hope he gets old and infirm enough to understand how his wishcasting was dangerously misbegotten.
I am getting old and have a serious health condition. I was unemployed for almost a year, and in the tech world this is the trifecta of doom (age, health, no one else wanted him..) Nonetheless I managed to get a decent gig (contracting, no benefits, no job security...)
Here's the denouement: when I was half my present age, I ran my own high-flying tech startup -- and I probably wouldn't have hired the me I am now. Partly due to ageism, but also due to the simple fact that older is not usually better.
Aging sucks, and anyone who says otherwise is either young or stupid.
Yup.. both ageism and aging are problems. I'm only 35 and starting to notice some age-related declines. It's not something anyone talks about. People prefer to talk about the rare individual who is running marathons in their 70s or still intellectually engaged in their 80s. Reality is most people are either dead or a shadow of their former selves when they reach that age.
*most* people in rich countries are still alive at 80, but the majority of them have serious health issues that prevent them from living like a 40 year old. But on the other hand, many still have fulfilling lives, they're just severely disabled compared to when they were younger.
Yes, there is some data showing that "life satisfaction" increases with age. But there is other data showing it declines after age 65. The data on "happiness" is also mixed. (I was thinking about including the chart showing the post-65 decline in my post, but it seemed misleading to cherry pick one chart to fit my narrative and I didn't feel like trying to really sort out all the conflicting data & results at the time) https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/12/07/happiness-and-aging-in-the-us-why-it-is-different-from-other-places-and-why-it-matters/
As they discuss there is selection bias in the data also - happier people tend to live longer.
Flower with a tiny mirror-- I didn't know any plants had mirrors.
This is a flower which has mirror bright shiny bits near the stamens. The camera in my cell phone is not quite up to the job of doing it justice, but I hope this photograph gives some hint.
The plant is a saxifraga, possibly Saxifraga x arendsii.
There are hundreds of saxifraga varieties, but I haven't seen any mentions of tiny mirror-bright bits just outside the stamens. I'm not kidding about tiny. The whole flower is about a quarter of an inch across. I saw three mirrors on one of the flowers.
Any information is appreciated.
Just getting the pictures was a challenge-- the glints only show when the plant is in direct sunlight, and the timing took a bit of figuring out. It's in front of Frame Fatale, a shop on Passyunk, a diagonal south-east to north-west street, at least for that section.
The shop owner has no idea of what the plant is-- she has a service take care of the plants in boxes in front of the store. I might go back and ask her the name of the service.
I'd seen the flashes, but then the plant kept being in shade. I eventually figured out that too late in the day, and the plant is shaded by the three story buildings on the west, too early in the day and it's shaded by the buildings on the east. What's needed is the middle of the day (about 2:30 PM) when the sun is lighting the slot between the buildings-- it's what passes for overhead in non-tropical Philadelphia.
Non-obligatory SFF reference: Niven's sun-flowers, a home defense that uses mirrors to attack unwelcome people crossing the edge of a property.
Thanks for asking, but no. They were implausibly small for water droplets, in very specific locations on the flowers (near but not on the stamens, and there wasn't water elsewhere. They looked flat.
I suppose the flowers could theoretically have a water-producing spot, but why would they do that?
I would think that water would not be produced, but that dew or precipitation might be collected in a feature of the flower; perhaps one evolved to increase attraction or fulfillment for pollinators. But I'm no botanist!
I'm seeing this in the middle of the afternoon. The dew is long gone.
Pitcher plants have water traps for catching insects, but I haven't heard of any plants which offer water to pollinators. Maybe it's so easy to get water that the pollinators aren't tempted.
Seems like progress on the "Prizes for matrix completion problems" has stalled for the past half month or so. Doesn't seem like anyone has any solutions or approximate solutions to the problems. Although Carlo Beenakker's answer for the sufficient condition with a chordal graph seems really insightful. Maybe a full solution will require concepts far removed from the current space.
Scott—the book “Come as You Are” by sex researcher Emily Nagoski deals with the bonobo study and related information in more depth. Having read it fully (and having no other background on the topic), I feel a clear sense that you were only one level of mistaken, and not meta-mistaken. Your original correction seems appropriate.
It seems that this community is focused mostly on the kind of interpretability pioneered by Olah et al 2020, aka ‘mechanistic interpretability’. That is the very interesting exercise of looking at neurons in a big neural net one by one to figure out what they are doing. While that is very cool, there are a bunch of other approaches that may be of interest to those who care about alignment (however defined). A radical approach is to build models that are interpretable by design, right from the start. For example one can force a neural net to do case based reasoning in computer vision: this is a bird because this part of the image looks like that part of a training image, which is a bird.
A middle ground is to enforce certain symmetries at the architectural level. Equivariance is an example of this: the goal is to guarantee that a neural net will treat a transformed (say, rotated) version of the input data the same as the original. Swap rotation angle with race and you get fairness, mutatis mutandis. Both equivariance and fairness are huge fields of research and both boil down to aligning a model’s behavior to some ‘values’ (conservation of angular momentum or racial equality) that are not easily learnable from the raw or even augmented data.
I believe promoting research in these areas should be a priority for anyone who worries about unaligned AI, perhaps even more so than trying to predict/speculating on takeoff scenarios, etc.
Heya, is ARealDog still out there? Last time I heard from him was in the approach of the 2022-23 winter. He was concerned that it would be a meatless and beerless winter in his home country. Hope you are doing ok, ARD.
Much modern discussion of autism describes it as a "spectrum". Further, it claims that girls were historically "underdiagnosed" with autism because there was more of a focus on how it presents in boys. The reason boys are much more likely to be diagnosed with autism, they claim, is because of a sexist bias against girls and women.
However, this line of reasoning is terribly flawed. First of all, if girls were more likely to be diagnosed, you can be sure there would be cries of the sexist medical system pathologizing the normal behavior of girls. But more importantly, the idea that autism, a syndrome (disorder), could "present differently" in girls is tautologically false. A disorder/syndrome is *defined* by its symptoms. If a *different* set of symptoms consistently appears for the other gender, then it's not the same disorder, by definition. It's a different disorder. This is also why it's stupid to say that autism is a spectrum - disorders are defined by taking a set of behaviors that frequently occur together and picking some cutoff after which you qualify for having the disorder - say, in the worst 2% of people for those behaviors (most harmful, most disruptive to your normal life, etc.). If disorders instead refer to anyone who fits any of the behaviors associated with the disorder (not all coinciding), and not just in the worst X% of that category, then all of its significance is lost, and you don't have a word to refer to the people who actually have the real condition and need help anymore.
It would be a mistake not to note this as a symptom of the increasing trend of feminization and misandry in modern society. Autistic boys that many of us are probably familiar with from our time in school, who display symptoms like a severe lack of understanding of social cues and communication, stilted speech, extreme obsessiveness, severe reactions to loud noises or other stimuli, etc. - classic symptoms of autism - no longer have a word to describe their condition that can distinguish them from the 29-year-old Vassar graduate working for the Washington Post who dislikes loud parties and occasionally taps her foot when she's bored.
> First of all, if girls were more likely to be diagnosed, you can be sure there would be cries of the sexist medical system pathologizing the normal behavior of girls.
Maybe, but that's is irrelevant to the point you are making. The fact that in a counterfactual world people would be annoyed about different things doesn't make the annoyance in our world less valid.
> A disorder/syndrome is *defined* by its symptoms
Not necessary. There is also the consideration of causes and treatment/accomodation. In general there are multiple reasons to draw category borders in a particular way. Personally as an autistic male, I find the idea of autistic spectrum to be quite useful.
> then all of its significance is lost, and you don't have a word to refer to the people who actually have the real condition and need help anymore.
People can come up with another sets of definitions to separate these groups. Which is exactly what happened. I do not think that anyone is seriously confused thinking that rich verbal autistic programmer requires the same amount of accomodation as poor non-verbal autistic unemployed.
> increasing trend of feminization and misandry in modern society
Oh, that's hillarious. Misandry in traditional society: men are drafted to die in constant wars. Misandry in modern society: not only male-specific symptoms are accounted for during dyagnistics of mental conditions. Though, I suppose, we can count it as an example of feminization: that even myisandry itself lost its masculinity and hardcoreness, becoming weak and effeminate.
I'm a psychologist and I agree with you about the absurdity of the autistic spectrum idea. I have seen quite a few fully autistic people, and they are profoundly impaired -- often non-verbal, unable to care for themselves, sitting in a corner twitching a shiny object from side to side in a certain pattern and staring at it for hours. Could it possibly be that there are people who have an extremely mild case of the same thing, and what that looks like is: They can converse, hold a job, and look generally normal but a they are unsociable, rigid, obsessive and have a bunch of sensory sensitivities and quirks? Well, yeah, it could but I don't see any special reason to believe that's the case. And even if it is, the difference in degree is so great that it has become a difference in kind. It makes much more sense to think of "Aspies" as having a separate disorder.
To fully define an illness you need 3 things (I believe I'm remembering this right): A distinctive cluster of symptoms; distinctive abnormalities in the body at the site causing the symptoms; and a treatment that is effective in most cases. All we have for autism is the first -- a distinctive cluster of symptoms. And if you mix together profoundly impaired people with "old style" autism with functional but slightly odd and rigid Aspies you no longer even have a distinctive cluster of symptoms.
For what it's worth, I treat a lot of people whom most would diagnose with Asperger's Syndrome, and I do think those people have a distinctive cluster of symptoms, and also tend to respond to a certain treatment approach. "Aspie" seems pretty valid to me. "Autistic Spectrum" does not.
Great comments. Furthermore, most people won’t come into contact with fully autistic people because, not only are they difficult to deal with outside the home, but they could run into a street and get hit by a car any time they are outside the home. Many also die early as I’ve read numerous incidents in places like Florida where they get outside without supervision and drown in a pond. One family adopted a little autistic girl and she wandered from the adoption party and drowned in a pond because the adoptive parents didn’t know that was something that is a possibility 100% of the time they are awake. A Georgia family sent their 22 year old autistic son on a cruise with a service and he jumped overboard and they didn’t even consider filing charges or asking for an investigation because they understood it could have happened at any time in his life. In fact a woman with a beautiful family drowned her teenage autistic son in a pond in Florida because she couldn’t imagine how the family was going to be able to handle him as he got older…she will be lucky to avoid the death penalty.
I have no formal diagnosis and nothing but gut feeling to go on that there is definitely "on the spectrum" heritage in my paternal family, but in my early teens I had to break myself of the habit of doing that kind of repetitive patterned behaviour, because I could tell it was getting worse and I could also tell that if I indulged it, I'd end up sitting in a corner tapping my fingers in patterns for hours.
It was brute force repression on my part that worked, and that seems to be the opposite of today's view that "hey, getting excited and flapping your hands is cute and should be not alone permitted but encouraged!" by some Aspie/autism people online, instead of (in my day) "this is behaving like a lunatic, stop doing it". I do think that while harsh, the "don't do that" kind of socialisation actually helped more in the long run than "society should accept that at times you'll stand there flapping your hands" acceptance for being able to fake some semblance of normality and functionality.
"unsociable, rigid, obsessive and have a bunch of sensory sensitivities and quirks?"
Good for you for beating back that early tapping OCD before it got out of hand. I don't hear many stories of people managing to do that. About you having Asperger's: You have a playfulness of mind that is very un-Aspie. I'm not sure what to make of that, but thought I'd pass that observation on.
There's also some evidence from heritability: mothers with milder autistic symptoms tend to have daughters with milder autistic symptoms and sons with more severe symptoms.
This suggests:
A);it's heritable
B)the female version and the male version are both caused by the same heritable factor. So we're justified in declaring them to be the same thing
C) something about being female is partially protective
(Obvious follow on questions might be: do trans women with autism have less severe symptoms after starting female hormones? That would narrow down what the protective effect is caused by)
That's one possible mechanism, yes. ( as far as I'm aware the mechanism hasnt been identified) ... broken gene on the x chromosome, and if you have two X chromosomes you have a chance to have one working copy of the gene. But, again, it might be something else.
X-inactivation means that if a woman has a broken gene on an X, half the cells in her body will manifest that gene only and the other half will manifest the other chromosome's presumably-unbroken version. That could very easily explain weaker symptoms in women.
> A disorder/syndrome is *defined* by its symptoms.
I want to push back on this. When a condition is initially discovered, the only thing that you have is a set of symptoms and no explanation. As you keep researching, you discover similarities with other syndromes, and sometimes you decide to group several syndromes into a single class.
On the opposite end of the spectrum are conditions where we know the cause. For them, there is no discussion about whether the symptoms are close enough. If the cause is the same, it is classified as the same confition. The example case is cancer. The single cause is a set of cells starting to multiply. Depending on which cells starting going wrong, the range of symptoms that you may observe is huge. But we agree to group all the cancers in a single group because the underlying biological process is the same.
"Autistic boys that many of us are probably familiar with from our time in school, who display symptoms like a severe lack of understanding of social cues and communication, stilted speech, extreme obsessiveness, severe reactions to loud noises or other stimuli, etc. "
I was that autistic boy- except I'm a girl. And I'm not 29, a Vassar graduate, or any of the rest of it. Yes, there are a lot of stupid people who are so terminally online they need to find something to latch onto as the latest trend because they are so bored, but that does not mean that problems in diagnosis are "feminization and misandry".
I think all the self-diagnosed "and I have CPTSD and ADHD and and and" do need a good kick up the backside, but also girls are socialised in a way boys are not, which does help mask symptoms. If boys were heavily socialised into what social cues are, repressing instinctive reactions in the name of 'being ladylike' etc. then they would present differently.
I agree with the parts that the "autistic spectrum" is so widely defined (includes harmless weirdos, along with people who would fail to survive without constant care) that it is confusing to talk about; and that if girls were more frequently diagnosed with something, someone would immediately cry sexism.
That said, there are different ways how the autistic (asperger) weirdness interacts with sex/gender roles. The same symptom (same when tested in laboratory conditions) can become a huge problem if it is something society expects you to excel at, and almost invisible if it is something society doesn't want you to do anyway.
As an example, the usual dating dynamic is that men approach women. Now imagine two people having the same difficulty reading social cues. For an aspie man, dating is like walking through a minefield; whenever he approaches a woman, chances are he did something socially inappropriate he is not aware of. For an aspie woman, I think a frequent problem is that she fails to recognize when polite men are hitting on her, so she will miss the good opportunities, and probably end up with someone who was very explicit ("hey, wanna fuck?"). -- For an external observer, the aspie man is obviously problematic, and the aspie woman seems normal. But it makes sense to put them in the same category.
Similarly, at school, an aspie girl may fail to connect with other girls, and may be excluded and bullied by the alpha mean girls clique. An aspie boy will disrupt the classroom. -- For a teacher, the boy's behavior is more visible.
Take allergies for example. My latest blood work suggests I have a bunch of low level allergies, plus I know of a few that actually bother me. Am I "allergic"? It looks a lot like a spectrum, with some stuff being barely noticeable, some being worth an occasional antihistamine and a couple that I actually bothered to try to actually treat. Plus the life-threatening ones, which I fortunately don't have.
It looks to me like a disorder can both be on a spectrum, and still have various cutoffs where they affect you differently or where more aggressive treatments are worth considering.
> I can draw a "spectrum" between a firefly and the sun; it does not mean that the sun is a giant insect.
A "lightsource" - would be a better name for such spectrum than an "insect". But of course this is a great opportunity to play the "referential class tennis".
"I can draw a "spectrum" between a firefly and the sun; it does not mean that the sun is a giant insect." Dang, I've been misled about the sun all these years. But . .. wait, how do you know a firefly isn't a tiny sun, huh?
Actually, great point and I completely agree with you about the spectrum idea making no sense.
"lumping socially awkward needs together with people who literally can't feed themselves"
Part of that was a political decision (the field of psychology and psychiatry and neurology is tainted by politics? heaven forfend!) due to parents and representative organisations wanting to reduce the stigma associated with autism. Parents wanted their children who weren't on the "will eat their own fingers" end of the scale, but not as functional as the Aspergers, not to be labelled with the "hopeless finger-eater" classification and basically dumped in the corner and forgotten about.
So Asperger's Syndrome was folded in, the whole idea of a spectrum was created, and this helped with the push for "we need services for our kids if they are to be any way functional". I think the very, very severe cases should be separated out, but again - that may lead to "dumped in a corner and forgotten about" because governments need to save money where they can, and if they can skimp on supports because "they're hopeless finger-eaters", they will do.
Autism is a complicated condition, and I think the idea of a spectrum does help because it presents in so many different ways. Maybe we've left behind the notion of "autism means hopeless finger-eater" but now we've swapped it out for "maths wizard who can get a cushy software engineer job and turn their nerdiness into profit" which is also not true of the vast majority.
Calling drawing the category border this particular way to be "making shit up in order to scam people into treating the mentally ill better" is extremely unfair, unless you also call the previous way to draw the category border to be "making shit up in order to scam people into treating the mentally ill worse".
There all kind of meaningful ways to draw category borders with their own psychological consequences and all of them technically require to "make shit up" - use a new term or redefine an old one.
I do think Aspergers should not have been folded in under the umbrella, and I think autism does present differently in girls and boys. Part of the problem is, "what exactly is autism?"
There's a range of symptoms which could be hived off and have a different label slapped on - social awkwardness could be agoraphobia or something else, etc.
There's also the difficulty in getting diagnoses - thankfully, a hell of a lot better now than when I was a kid, but adult autism diagnosis is like pulling teeth if you're any way functional (at least over here) and as I said, the various symptoms can be labelled as something else - 'oh, you're not autistic, you have X and counselling will sort that out!'
I have no magic solutions. I understand the politicking but gods damn it, I wish things could be treated without the need to make special categories in order to force governments to provide the health services due to the people.
When I was little, the term was associated with a deep isolation and strangeness - my disturbed introduction to it was some '70s ladies-magazine piece I ran across, about "blue roses" or some such nonsense; then I was told my next-door neighbor's visiting boy cousin, who rocked back and forth and flapped his hands and did not have speech, was autistic.
In adult life, as exemplar I invoke a boy I encountered, for years, whilst subbing in the special needs classroom of the local school. He spoke clearly, but generally in repeated rote speeches, unless he was upset with the other kids, and then he emoted normally enough. His passions were the songs of a pop singer of an earlier day; and a particular household appliance. A day of good conduct was rewarded, according to a system set up by school and parent, with e.g. being allowed to use or take apart said appliance when he got home. When we walked about the school, he liked to (or compulsively did) peer up at the lights in order to count them. He was no savant in anything but it was always odd to present various little worksheets to him amid the other severely mentally disabled kids. He could *if he chose* do the work without trouble, while they of course never got it at all.
I sometimes reflected that he was in strange company (there was no one else like him). But somehow it did not seem like he belonged elsewhere in the school. He seemingly came from ordinary people (I don't mean that in a negative way, only sometimes autism is I think associated with somewhat high-IQ parents?), and perhaps that was why there was no suggestion of brilliance at anything, but only competence. But it was no easier to get him to do his work than it was with the kids for whom the work would be forever out of reach.
So much effort was expended in those classrooms. I can think it was a near-total waste of time, for which kindness and pleasant surroundings would have been a perfectly good substitute, while also bristling at the idea that those diligent special-ed teachers didn't give their all - their lives really - to the project (when parents of some of the special needs kids regularly complained, in the media and at school board meetings, that it was "not enough" - whether money or miracles).
After an interval of some years, he recognized me and greeted me politely by name at the local business where he had a little work experience thing set up by the school district. He would each time recite the same speech to me about his job. It evidently didn't work out as a permanent thing. He was still staring at the overhead lights, I noticed, and I didn't observe him to do the simple work task without prompting.
It is hard for some of us to set aside these rather-distinct impressions of autism - different as even these two boys seem, and how much or none of that difference was due to how they were treated - in favor of the more diffuse idea promulgated by supposedly autistic people (known chiefly by their "feelings") who seem unusually glib on twitter. Some patience may be required, or forgetting.
The online self-diagnosed are the irritating ones. They have an entire bingo card of afflictions they gabble off as to why nobody can disagree with them, or else it's all prejudice and bigotry and bias and neurotypical privilege.
People really on the autism spectrum, even at the most functional end, don't have the time or energy to complain that nobody is stroking their egos enough.
Today Tyler Cowen writes: "Here is the full (Krugman on AI) NYT column, not a word on the Doomsters you will note. Could it be that like most economists, Krugman has spent a lifetime studying how decentralized systems adjust? Another factor (and this also is purely my speculation) may be that Krugman repeatedly has announced his fondness for “toy models” as a method for establishing economic hypotheses and trying to grasp their plausibility. As I’ve mentioned in the past, the AGI doomsters don’t seem to do that at all, and despite repeated inquiries I haven’t heard of anything in the works. If you want to convince Krugman, not to mention Garett Jones (https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/1665451237435736064), at least start by giving him a toy model!"
According to my AI:
"Toy models are used for various purposes, such as theoretical analysis, hypothesis testing, and pedagogical explanations. They allow economists to isolate and understand specific economic mechanisms and relationships without the complexity and intricacies of the real world.
These models often involve a set of assumptions that may not hold in reality but are assumed for the sake of simplicity and tractability. By making these simplifying assumptions, economists can focus on studying the fundamental economic principles or relationships at work.
Toy models typically involve mathematical or graphical representations and often use variables, equations, and diagrams to describe economic behavior and outcomes. They provide a conceptual framework that helps economists develop theories, explore economic concepts, and make predictions."
It sounds to me like someone who takes AI x-risk seriously should produce a toy model to demonstrate the plausibility of the risk. Right?
Is AI risk qualitative or quantitative? According to your AI, it would have to be quantitative in order to make a toy model. I think, however, that it is qualitative.
I think the biggest risk we have from AI is simply assigning it too great of tasks. "Computers make very fast, very large errors." If we merely ask AIs for advice and decide on our own whether to implement the decisions then we will be better off for the quick suggestions. But when we automatically implement AI decisions we could set ourselves up for something catastrophic.
I would think the last thing one would want from an AI is advice. The great power of ai to me is pulling signals out of noise. I wouldn’t ask a truffle pig for advice, to make a truly capricious analogy.
To continue the analogy, you absolutely would ask a truffle pig for advice. You ask it where truffles are, and then verify they are indeed truffles. It seems to me that that is exactly how we want to use AIs, pulling signals out of noise. But then we check to be sure they are actually signals.
I understand AIs can examine x-rays and flag some for cancerous anomalies. This can help doctors. But don't let the AI write prescriptions, inform the patient, or perform surgery based on its findings.
Sounds to me like more economists thinking they are experts on everything. Since I don't think economists even get the economy right, why should I believe them on AI risk, doom or no doom?
Well, you may not. Since most all of the scenarios of AI takeover I see on Less Wrong or in Bostrom's _Superintelligence_ involve economic behavior as key to their speculations, I'm inclined not to take any of them too seriously if economists do not.
> involve economic behavior as key to their speculations
Unless you're defining "economic behavior" so broadly as to make this claim basically meaningless, I don't think this is true. Some people do think takeover scenarios which involve something like full automation happening first are plausible, but this isn't a necessary or even particularly likely component of many other people's models.
> It sounds to me like someone who takes AI x-risk seriously should produce a toy model to demonstrate the plausibility of the risk. Right?
There's been plenty of writing describing causal models of why we ought to expect x-risk from our current course of AI development. Tyler either hasn't bothered reading any of it, or wants something different, but since he hasn't explained what a convincing (to him) model would look like, I don't see why anyone ought to spend their time trying to create one. At a first guess he wants something with made up numbers where some threshold being crossed indicates x-risk, where people can poke at various multipliers or whatnot, but that's obviously much worse in terms of actually conveying a valid argument if you have a straightfoward causal model you can present directly instead.
Depends on what your starting point is. The task of "write up decent introductory materials for a variety of audiences" has not yet been completed to my satisfaction, alas.
I'm wondering why no economist--as far as anyone knows--has put AI x-risk into language economists use, particularly since most all of the AI takeover scenarios involve predictions about economic behavior. It seems like economists would be naturally interested in doing this, yet for some reason they are not. I'm inclined to think that they are unable to come up with scenarios which pass the smell test. Maybe that will change in the near future, though.
Many countries in the Western world have a problem with housing prices in their few biggest cities. Huge cities have a nasty runaway growth effect where the bigger they grow, the greater a share of the nation's economic opportunities they offer, meaning that more and more people live there, until eventually everyone is paying 80% of their income to live in a tiny shoebox apartment. '
What can be done on a national governmental level to encourage the development of smaller cities (in the 50,000 to 500,000 range and outside the immediate vicinity of huge cities)? Some obvious ideas include:
1. Lower taxes for residents of these areas. Difficult because it's easy to fake your residence (unless we start tracking people's movements, which is a nasty precedent to set)
2. Add conditions to immigration visas which ban immigrants from moving to certain large cities. (Again, difficult to enforce)
3. Better infrastructure. Connect smaller cities to big ones with subsidised high speed rail. (Expensive!)
4. Put government jobs in smaller cities. Build universities and the like. (Difficulty: you'll have a harder time recruiting good employees than you would in big cities)
I don't agree that it's a problem that people want to live in big cities – the cost is already largely internalized. But if the government thinks this is a problem, I think they should just move the capital and its institutions into the middle of nowhere, thereby seeding a city there. Brazil has already shown that this works, with around 3M people now living in the capital conurbation.
Smaller cities have plenty of government jobs. Local, State, or Federal Gov jobs plus Universities and Healthcare are often all in the top 10 employers in the cities of the size you are talking about. Getting the state or fed government to put an office or installation in a city is a big focus of state and congressional reps (it's a great thing to campaign on!).
#3 is basically just pushing things further and further into the suburbs. Even if it's "high speed rail" you are still just pushing people to the outskirts of a city.
Bigger cities are more productive. People moving to these cities is great! It leads to more wealth and prosperity for all by raising the development of the country. The issue is constraints on the supply of housing. Nothing will change that reality. We have to remove those constraints.
5. Use a land value tax to discourage moving into bigger cities. Set it much higher in the biggest cities compared to every other part of the country, discouraging new people from moving there. Ideally also ban new residents from owning property in the biggest cities for the first ~5 years after moving to the country.
As long as most of the economic gains are poured into the land where they happen the situation isn't going to change much. The solution is quite obvious: Land value tax + UBI. And the removal of zoning restrictions.
Public trasportation also wouldn't hurt but it wouldn't change the underlying dynamics.
Neither Tokyo nor Houston seems like something to aspire towards. Tokyo is horrendously crowded city where the average dwelling size is 66 square metres and nobody has any privacy; it's a fun place to visit but I'd hate to live there, and it's a horrible place to raise children which is why nobody has any.
Houston, on the other hand, is a never-ending sprawl about eighty miles across, it takes hours to get from one side of the other... and it's not even a fun place to visit.
Neither ultra-density nor ultra-sprawl is desirable. What _is_ desirable is to agglomerate people into smaller clusters that actually support comfortable life.
So you don't like density, don't like sprawl... what do you like? You want a small city surrounded by lots of rural land? What's the advantage over living on the edge of someplace like Houston?
It sounds like your problem isn't with expensive housing then, you just don't like big cities in general for some reason.
Also, without even looking up any data, I would predict that people are having more children in Tokyo than in rural Japan, so I think your "which is why nobody has any" claim is wrong.
Per Statistia, the total fertility rate of Tokyo Prefecture in 2020 was 1.12, while that for Japan as a whole was 1.37. I don't know where to find the TFR for rural Japan specifically, but I sincerely doubt that it's the other large cities that are bringing up the national average.
Instead of trying to get people to move out of e.g. London to places like Manchester or Liverpool, it would be better to remove restrictions on development in the areas just outside of London. Economic activity will concentrate in one area, but it will be a large, sprawling area with different local governments.
I used to be in charge of recruiting for gov't jobs in a small town. One problem I had is how many gov't jobs require a degree, even though the town had no university. The gov't office had been placed there in the 60s to create jobs for small towns, but the educational requirements had continued to creep up.
I've lost ten pounds in three weeks doing a combination of keto and intermittent fasting. And it's been remarkably easy; no serious hunger pangs, no feeling lethargic or weak (after the first 3-4 days, anyway). I'd tried both diets before with meager results, but on a whim I tried going keto after a 24 hour fast and was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to just keep on going with both. Just throwing this out there for others who don't feel like shelling out for semaglutide and the like.
You can guess somewhat from plausible rates of fat loss, which are strictly limited by the caloric deficit you're in. That probably isn't much more than 800 calories or so if you're not feeling any hunger pangs. That would account for 1.6 pounds of fat loss per week. Everything else is water and glycogen. This comes off no matter what just from being in a deficit, but is especially pronounced with low carb diets for pretty obvious reasons (can't replenish glycogen if you're not eating carbs).
Yeah, the last time I tried intermittent fasting, my body only switched to ketogenesis after doing 64-hour fasts, but then switching to a keto diet for my few meals let me sustain it when eating more regularly. Not that I felt hungry, it's just that I found that I enjoy eating, so I kinda want to eat more often.
So it's June, and I figured out why the addition of black and brown stripes to the Pride flag bothers me: it's exactly analogous to why "white pride" is dangerous but e.g. "Irish pride" isn't. What do the average black person and the average gay person have in common, other than voting for the same (American) political party? It's evidence that Pride isn't about sexuality anymore, but rather a Pride in being Not Like Me. When I see the construction of a political coalition carefully defined to exclude me, I start getting antsy.
I'm not sure which flag you're actually referring to, but the Daniel Quasar flag (which I think is the most popular of the revisions? No real way to be sure.), with the trans/BIPOC/stigma wedge on the left, is just meant to show solidarity of queer folks with other marginalised groups, which may or may not intersect. There is no sophisticated exegesis beyond that.
My understanding of this is that that ISN"T the pride flag, it's the "progressive flag". The pride flag is still the normal rainbow (at least as far as i know), but the progressive flag is defined by whatever current policies are "progressive". So in 20 years the flag won't have the rainbow anymore and will have...idk the red cross symbol or something.
It's the continual ever-chopping finer the degrees of politicised victimhood. The Oppression Stack in operation.
Within feminism, for example, there have long been complaints about how the white, middle-class, second-wave feminism was not representative of black and brown women and their problems and struggles (I'd say it was also not representative of white working-class women either, given somebody threw a quote at me about the "comfortable concentration camp" of having to drive your kids to Cub scouts and use a vacuum cleaner - oh, the horror! meanwhile, my mother was trying to look after her bedridden mother and us kids in a house with no running water).
In the same way, BIPOC LGBT claim that the white experience is not inclusive of them; the Pete and Chasten Buttigieg couples as the face of gay marriage/gay rights activism ignores poverty, sex work, and (of course) intersectionalism:
Hence the need for "Progress Pride" flags with ever more groupings: black and brown stripes, trans colour stripes, the intersex symbol/colours in some versions:
The black and brown stripes aren't meant to represent "the average black person", they're meant to represent LGBTQ people of colour. (Whether the inclusion of extra stripes is a good or bad idea is a separate issue, but you and several others in this thread seem to be misunderstanding what they are there for.)
I want a stripe for indignant, smart, sad-but-still-trying- hard wasp mutts of the low-power gender. Maybe purple, so sort of pink but melancholy? I'm straight but can't help it, ya know?
Your pain finds its echoes in my stony heart, Eremolalos, and I resonate with sympathy for the hot feelings of all genders and orientations. But regardless of whether you were born this way or have become this way, I hope you may come to feel both joy and pride in these feelings, for they are one of the foundations of our shared humanity.
The black and brown stripes are explicitly not intended to denote a literal range of skin colours, but if you are an LGBTQ Asian who feels that the flag excludes you, or if you are trying to support people in that category who do feel that way, I would encourage you to work together with like-minded individuals to design a new flag that you feel is more inclusive and present your arguments for its widespread adoption.
The silliest thing about it is I guarantee you that the vast majority of "black and brown" people have no idea they are "represented" on the the Pride flag and probably most of them would prefer not to be.
Yeah, but these kinds of signals are not for the vast majority of people. It's the very online activist contingent who need to invent new grifts to keep the sweet white liberal guilt cash and attention flowing.
So today *you* are the homophobic relative for not being in line with the current set of demands?
The one thing in all this march onwards and upwards, twirling twirling as we go, as a crusty old social conservative, that makes me laugh is precisely this. The people who were smugly waving flags in the "homophobes" faces and going "we're here, we're queer, get used to it!" are now going "but I never thought the leopards would eat *my* face?"
Not making light of your situation, but the shoe is on the other foot now, and how do you like the jeers and smears being directed at *you* for objecting to, or simply not being 200% enthused by, certain of the elements of the movement?
Maybe your relatives were homophobes - or maybe, like yourself now, they were just on the wrong side of the Overton Window.
Personally, I object to the addition of more elements to the pride flag (and to the LGBT acronym) because it ironically makes it less generally inclusive by focusing on specific inclusions. So, when it was just the "gay pride flag," you could understand this as "gay" sensu lato, i.e. representing sexual minorities in general, and this is how it was taken. But when you add elements specifically representing another sexual minority, you imply the previous symbol wasn't already covering everyone before, and then invite other sexual minorities to question why they're not specifically represented as well. Of course, this is dealt with by just adding more elements (first the transsexual colors, then the yellow field and circle, and likely more to come in the future), but there will never be enough elements to cover every conceivable sexual minority identity, so it becomes an effort in futility that ensures someone will always be left out, with that omission being all the more acute the more other groups are represented, rather than just having a symbol or acronym that's understood to represent everyone even if it does so pars pro toto. So by continuing down this wild goose chase of specific representation, general representation is further eroded, good vexilology and catchy acronyms are replaced with garish banners and nonsensical corporate keyboard spam, and everyone in the movement these things were meant to serve is worse off for it. Hopefully Scott's "hyperstitious slur cascade" can be ignored and at some point some critical mass within the LGBT movement can insist on a return to the original flag and acronym based on a better conception of "inclusivity" than the untenable one being used now.
Irish pride looked to be causally upstream of people getting hurt, hence "dangerous". (And moreover, part of "Irish pride" specifically was being proud of being dangerous.) This is not intended as commentary on whether or not it's net good, just that if you're going to pick an ethnic pride that seems benign, probably you should pick a less bellicose one.
I remember once hearing an Irish nationalist song about Admiral Nelson. I couldn't make out many of the words, but it seemed quite surprising that they would be celebrating an English hero, even though Ireland was part of the UK in 1805 when Nelson won his famous victory at Trafalgar. Perhaps they disliked his adversaries at the time, the French and/or Spanish, even more than the English, I pondered, although that seemed somewhat implausible.
It turned out the song celebrated blowing up a statue of Nelson in Dublin. DOH! I might have guessed.
When I was 15 years old, I went to Ireland for the first time in my life to spend the summer in a village called Strokestown(it’s more on the map now than it used to be due to the famine museum there).
The first Friday night I was there there was a dance; that kind of Irish country dance party, where they put up a big tent, and there’s a country and western cover band.
I was looking forward to it and Whitmore. I had a beautiful new shirt I had bought for myself in Canada just before I came over.. it was bright orange.
I went to the dance and during a break when people went outside to smoke, I went outside, and there was a young man standing by the doorway, wearing a green tweed suit (I swear to God, it’s true), and eyeing me in a very belligerent way. He’s sucked every dram of saliva that he could into his mouth and expectorated on my shirt, and then looked me in the eye as if to say, what are you gonna do about it ?
I didn’t have a clue about the orange thing I was 14.
To this day, I cannot look at that color without remembering him, spitting on me, and having very dark thoughts about Oliver Cromwell
In retrospect, I should’ve known better. My mother was an Irish Catholic woman married to an Anglican Brit and my father he was orange, and my mother she was green.
It was the strangest mix-up that you had ever seen
I hadn’t really put it together enough when I was 14. It makes me laugh now.
Oh come on.. Im sorry but the Irish were not waging a war of aggression against the British, they were resisting colonization, and what they got up to in Canada in the 1860s was a proxy war with the newly minted USA and the UK being the main players don’t you think?
The only foreign country the Irish successfully took over is Australia and who was it put them up to that?
One of my favourite things is that this very idea of flags representing nations has been a reason for certain people to oppose the very idea of flags. We are all one people, not seperate countries, love and peace, blah, blah blah.
To be fair, that's a much longer rainbow than a flag would have. It's not flag shaped. It's the same *design* as the classic Pride flag, but it isn't actually the Pride flag.
In a mostly-non-US sense, "nation" can mean "people", regardless of whether they have a physical state of their own. So by that logic, it makes sense to me? And in America, there's previously been room for stuff like the Gadsden flag ("Don't Tread On Me"). I suppose it could be viewed as a falling apart of the FDR-WWII-era imposed sense of national unity, but into different coalitions than the states that made up the Union.
I think of a lot of the signage as being like Havel's greengrocer's sign, where "Workers of the World, Unite" is translated to mean, "I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace."
By the way, if anyone reading this hasn't read "The Power of the Powerless" by Vaclav Havel, I strongly suggest you do, at least the first 11 sections (34 pages in the below version). It's a brilliant dissection of a totalizing ideology.
Nominative determinism that I feel really stupid for only just realizing: Malthus, as in Thomas Malthus, is derived from "malt house." So the guy who thought everyone would starve from population outstripping agricultural production was named after a building where grains are stored.
Let’s say a smart person acquires the magic ability to wish themselves smarter. The catch is that they can’t just say “I wish to be smarter.” They have to be specific about what sorts of smarts they will gain. So they can wish for perfect memory, the ability to solve all solvable mathematical and logical problems in a nano-second, to easily visualize objects in 50 dimensions, the ability to compose essays as clever as Chesterton, concertos like Mozart, paintings like Vermeer...
The result is an amalgam of the smartest people who have ever lived plus the ability to put together thoughts many orders faster and with perfect memory. Such an intelligence could do a lot.
But then, wanting to be even smarter, what would it wish for?
What I’m obviously getting at is that we only know what intelligence is to the extent that it already exists, and we define it by comparisons to that. The smartest person in the world, whoever that may be, can only wish to be more intelligent by knowing what they lack cognitively in comparison with other individuals. For instance, the smartest mathematician may realize they lack brilliance in music or the visual arts. Or vice versa. But once we’ve exhausted all of those known notions of intelligence, how would one even wish for the ability to be smarter?
It seems to me this question is relevant to the plausibility of FOOM.
In the fields I have studied, learning more opens up new vistas, and you see new things to master or new questions to ask. I don't think I've ever reach the end of *anything,* and realized that no further development was possible for a practitioner of that subject or activity. And I would guess the world's smartest mathematician also sees, from his very advanced vantage point, a vista before him: Specific things like theorems he's never been able to prove, but also a lot of things he intuits, but cannot get a hold on -- the way this field and that field are isomorphic, but it's a very subtle isomorphism. But if you could show that it was, and get a handle on how it was, all kinds of things would become possible. Why then, you'd *finally* be able to see the Remick Paradox from a different angle. And if you could do *that* then you might finally be able to . . . etc. So I think that the reason you end up thinking that the idea of being smarter has a limit is that you are imagining that it's possible to specify with some precision what being smarter would be like -- what you would be able to do, what topics you would know everything about, whose performance you would be able to equal. But if I were wishing to be smarter, the way I would formulate it would be that I would like to be able to keep stepping forward rapidly into the new vistas I see ahead, and that I never reach one so subtle and weird and complicated that I can't master it, and in doing so gain access to the next vista.
I would expect that upon gaining nearly any capability with sufficient breadth and depth, new potential capabilities would be discovered. This is most obvious to me with math - there seems to be a bottomless well of meaningfully unique problems that can lead to new problems. But you can apply the same thing to music - you become the perfect performer and composer, then you invent new genres, new instruments, new modalities, then you become the perfect performer and composer for all of those, repeat to infinity.
The practicality might cap out at some point, but I wouldn't expect the gain in capabilities to stop, assuming unlimited resources.
But the smartest humans I have heard talking about their work all see things they would love to do, but can't master yet. They still hope they will be able to. They've had some ideas recently about new ways to come at it. And beyond the things that can *almost* do the glimpse other astonishing possibilities.
Why do you presume that none of the many many forms of intelligence you grant yourself as part of the initial process will grant insight as to what to wish for next? Even granting your premise that the average person is limited to asking to have the capabilities of others it can see, by the time we reach the limit of that we no longer have an average human intelligence and that person will be able to think of far more.
Even the other comments already have good suggestions for going beyond, and as bright as this commentariat is they're not nearly at "peak human in literally every field simultaneously"
>Even the other comments already have good suggestions for going beyond
All the other comments look to me like they challenge the premise. (They do it well.)
Wooly Al's point is taken well. But "If making itself smarter will let it Do All The Things, it will make itself smart enough to Do All The Things." is premised on the *ability* to make itself smarter. If the goal, say, is to cure cancer, tackling the problem of making yourself smart enough to cure cancer may be as hard as curing cancer, in which case if you can't do the latter currently, you can't do the former either.
Drethlin makes the very good point that an AI will use existing theory and experimentation to build a smarter AI rather than simply knowing what a smarter AI would be like a priori. That seems rather obvious now that I read it. Obvious enough to make me abandon my analogy that an AI making itself smarter would be like a smart person wishing to be smarter. That's not what it would be like.
>the ability to solve all solvable mathematical and logical problems in a nano-second,
Why would you limit yourself to the solvable ones? Why would you limit yourself to being "as clever" as Chesterton, instead of better? "I want to solve Riemann's." "I want to express myself perfectly to everyone, always." "I want to make a car that turns instantly and never rolls over." "I want to turn all the planets into moons." "I want to build a gun that kills the past."
This doesn't apply to any other technological improvement, why would it apply to intelligence?
We don't design a new airplane by combining bits and pieces of current airplanes. We use combinations of theory and experimentation to invent new ways of achieving the same goals that are more efficient, more robust, faster, etc, and end up with airplanes that function quite differently from past airplanes while still being airplanes. Similarly, advances in semiconductors were not made by just copy/pasting existing computing systems like vacuum tubes in new ways.
Is the idea that an AI will be able to build a better AI using known fundamental principles or that the AI will discover new principles from which to build a better AI?
Both. AI will have a stronger grasp of known fundamental principles than any human researcher because it will have perfect digital memory expandable infinitely, and it will have the capability to discover new principles as it works.
"The smartest person in the world, whoever that may be, can only wish to be more intelligent by knowing what they lack cognitively in comparison with other individuals."
This seems off. Like, fundamentally, philosophically flawed, in a way I argue with a lot of people about.
I don't want to be Better Than Others, I want to Do The Thing.
I don't want to be the best cancer researcher, I want to cure cancer
Why can't I cure cancer? Because I'm not smart enough.
I would much rather everyone be smart enough to cure cancer than me being too dumb to cure cancer but smarter than everyone else.
I want to Do The Thing.
The superintelligence doesn't want to get smarter, it wants to Do All The Things. If making itself smarter will let it Do All The Things, it will make itself smart enough to Do All The Things. One of the concerns with AI doomerism is not that the AI will be infinitely smarter than human being on ever scale, it's that it will be an idiot savant with no interest in Chesterton or Mozart or Vermeer because those aren't important to what it wants.
Your lovely post made me think about idiot savants and how I was very dismayed on Twitter by the communications of LeCun and others. They were dismissive and insulting, and of course that's unpleasant, but unpleasantness is not very important, really. The important thing was that they seemed sort of like idiot savants -- or, at least, people with a very uneven profile of abilities. I assume they're all smart as hell about tech. They most be at least adequate as leaders of a big project, and possible awesome leaders. But they appeared to be extremely flat, undeveloped people when it comes to understanding and communicating with the public. They were terrible at really basic stuff, like perceiving others: LeCun kept talking about doomers being crackpots, when at most 5-10% of the responses he'd gotten could be considered nutty. They were terrible at being persuasive. Even if you hate your audience & think they're know-nothings, you can make a good impression by being friendly, saying "that's a great question," and giving answers that sound convincing even if they are lies. They couldn't even to that! And none of them seemed to have the slightest capacity to consider the possibility that somebody outside of their world had any thoughts worth considering. The seem to be incapable of taking people outside their sphere seriously. It's like they don't get it that all of us have our own smarts and validity, plus of course our own vulnerability to having our lives undercut and wrecked by the state of the world. And it seems to me that these tech bros are in many ways going to be running the world in the coming years. Seems like who gets elected, who wins this or that war, and all that stuff is going to matter less than it normally does, because the effects of AI, and how fast and in what directions it develops, and whether or not it is fucking OPEN SOURCE, are going to be so great that all that stuff that dominates the headlines now is going to be a bunch of weak nudges in comparison to the monstrous force of the AI trajectory. And the people who get to determine the AI trajectory have the gee whiz excitement, the narcissism and the empathic capabilities of 13 year old boys at some robotics camp for the gifted.
This makes a preoccupation with increased intelligence seem like a way to sublimate wanting more power. And it does seem to be how the reasoning often goes. like with the paperclip scenario, or "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" for that matter. In a military scenario, super-intelligence becomes a super-weapon that you need to get before the enemy does. It's generally assumed that any sufficiently intelligent entity would of course be a megalomaniac.
Science fiction and fantasy have a large element of power fantasy to them, and it seems like something like that is going on here?
But some alternate answers to "why can't I cure cancer" might be "I haven't learned enough about biology" and "I don't have a lab and research staff," and it's tough to attract people and money with a lack of prestige, which implies that being a well-known cancer researcher with a track record might actually be more helpful than raw intelligence?
Although, with enough money, you could bypass some of those things, since you could fund the research that you want to see happen.
> But some alternate answers to "why can't I cure cancer" might be "I haven't learned enough about biology" and "I don't have a lab and research staff," and it's tough to attract people and money with a lack of prestige, which implies that being a well-known cancer researcher with a track record might actually be more helpful than raw intelligence?
I note you've listed here "gain academic knowledge", the central thing intelligence is good for that even people who deny its broader application admit, and 2 flavours of "convince other, smarter, people to do the research for you", which while useful to the average person is just not necessary if you are, by the very hypothesis, smarter than them.
On your first point, yes, intelligence, like almost every fantasy, is a power fantasy. Most well adjusted people aren't fantasising about crushing their enemies, though, they're fantasizing about having the power to *help people*. Hell, even the people with destructive fantasies about crushing their enemies are usually imagining that as being immensely helpful to all the innocent victims they perceive those enemies as harming. Studies on video games with choice systems can be illustrative here - the overwhelming majority of players choose the "good" path in video games, a minority explore every path, and basically noone only does an evil playthrough.
re: "not necessary if you are, by the very hypothesis, smarter than them."
A misconception here is that research isn't actually work, it's just thinking hard or reading a lot of books or something like that. If a lone genius, army of one, can easily do it all themselves, why do they need other people?
I'm not so sure about that. A rough analogy: it doesn't matter how strong you are, if you're going to move a lot of stuff, you're going to want a lot of people and equipment to do it. Even if you own a container ship, you need a crew and you depend on an industrial base to provide fuel and ports.
Similarly, even if you are a very smart researcher, you're going to want other people and expensive equipment to help you run lots of experiments. Working smarter helps, but I'm doubtful that it corresponds to the ability to outcompete a research community all by yourself.
To get a foom scenario where you don't need other people, you need to be able to build all the assistants you need. It implies being able to grow an independent industrial base from scratch somehow, perhaps with some magic nanotech or biotech?
Though it's a common science fiction trope, it's not clear to me that superintelligence implies the ability to independently grow nanotech. What if it isn't? Maybe converting intelligence into power will practically require creating or subverting some kind of human organization to get stuff done? (Such as starting a company or buying it or taking it over.) Because, turns out, starting from scratch is much harder.
This implies more intelligence isn't necessarily a quick path to power. Today they're rather different things. Seems like a lot of future technologies have to turn out a certain way for high intelligence to imply wizardry?
(To be clear, I haven't proven anything. Reasoning by analogy is just a way to come up with plausible scenarios, not prove them.)
I mean, it depends on the size of the difference - in your physical strength analogy, if you can pick up a container ship in your hand and swim with it faster than ships can normally go, then no you don't need a crew at all, nor an industrial base for fuel.
I do get that there are a lot of scientific advance that are restricted by access to physical experimentation, but my feeling is that ~ all of them are beyond what a single well funded lab can do and a sufficiently capable lone genius can be a one-man lab. Both need to interface with the outside world for most (but not all) fields of research. The delta between that and competing against the whole world is much higher e.g. in my field of High Energy Physics the state of the art experiments are international multi-billion dollar collaborations. Still, the difference between an unusually good researcher and a mediocre one was probably ~10x productivity increase, both in terms of writing good working code faster and in terms of having that code be good enough for others to use down the line and not be tech debt weighing future projects down. HEP is also a field where state of the art experiments are hilariously far from where we'd really like them to be to answer some of the outstanding important fundamental questions. Theorists are out there predicting shit 100 orders of magnitude above what we can currently probe. (n.b. there are important questions they are currently answering, it's not like there's nothing between here and the stupidly high energy stuff)
Time to abandon the physical strength analogy since it turned into a superman comic.
It sounds like you're not imagining a lone genius working in isolation. Even if they're not starting their own lab, they're collaborating with the rest of the world. This outside collaboration is still going to limit it to not really being a "foom" scenario, due to the time it takes to interact. They need convince people that they're not a crank, and meanwhile, they need to make money somehow. Seems like they'd end up like a theorist who can't do much because who depend on outsiders for experiments, who move at their own pace? Theorists can wait for decades for results, if they get them at all. Is this power?
By contrast, anything like a "foom" scenario is happening in a great hurry, meaning little outside coordination is possible in the short timeframe available. More needs to be done yourself, but your own actions are limited by physical constraints too. Organizations that move in a hurry are logistics-heavy. Outsourcing slows you down. This kind of "lone genius" needs their own army. So, we end up imagining the billionaire supervillain with their secret lair and shadowy organization, because they're just not very powerful on their own.
Would someone much smarter than Musk be able to get Starship launched faster? Maybe they'd avoid some costly mistakes, but I think there are limits on how much a human organization can speed up its timeline by getting really intelligent advice.
my Christianity Discussion Book Club continues... Discussion of "The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness," which starts with a question about self-esteem--anti-narcissm, yet also encouraging, packs a punch for something amazingly short--begins on Wednesday.
2 weeks later, we begin "The Four Loves." by CS Lewis. (That'll go for 5 weeks.)
The first discussion (on "On the Incarnation" by Athanasius) kind of awesomely exceeded my expectations! <3
Stuff in the current book club book: Starts by noting that while traditional cultures thought that too HIGH of a view of yourself was the root cause of all evil in the world present-day cultures assume that too LOW of a view. Or--wait, really, it starts with a church fight. (the one in 1 Cor 1-3) Yet it manages to be written in a way that does not assume a religious framework from the reader!
Where: "We Do Theodicy on This Substack," my substack.
Also, i would be willing to buy like, an ebook copy for anyone if that's helpful and if we could figure out how to make that work. (It's like $3.64 online... whoops, EDIT--apparently Amazon.au carries the Kindle version for $1.99! But not Amazon.com)
Very interested in at least dropping in for "The Four Loves", which I haven't read in years, but remember at one point saying "wait, did C S Lewis just accurately predict both the creation of Reddit, and the fact that it would be Like That?"
> Very interested in at least dropping in for "The Four Loves"...
Awesome--I was thinking that will be one that people are especially interested in!!
> 'but remember at one point saying "wait, did C S Lewis just accurately predict both the creation of Reddit, and the fact that it would be Like That?" '
Nice! 😁
My best memories from "The Four Loves" are the way Lewis distinguished "need-love" from "gift-love"... distinguished between "similarity of appearance" and "similarity of approach," and vividly described how, sometimes, what masquerades as love can be closer to hate.
That and the fact my college roommate bought it for me as a gift after hearing me mumble about wanting to read it--I was really surprised and delighted. (So yeah... about 20 years ago for me!!)
I can't remember now, but since human nature fundamentally never changes, the influences that lead people to do crap today would also lead them to do crap in the past, and such influences could be identified.
So I have been reading this blog for close to two years now; I came over in the great wave of the New York Times readers. I have no technical or academic chops whatsoever as some of you probably have already figured out but I do enjoy a good discussion and I do like to try and keep up.
Slowly cracking, the vocabulary has really helped because as I acquired an understanding of rationalist terminology, I often realized that the underlying issue was familiar to me; I used different words.
So….I’ve been working on a photo mural for the last while, and I recently realized that my experiences as a participant here has found it’s way into my picture. I would like to share it with you. I started my own Substack just a couple of days ago really so I could post this photograph.
You reminded me of a project I half-started, back in the SSC days: a primer of commonly used jargon and phrases on rationalist forums. I even compiled a list of terms, but never got around to writing all the definitions to a point I'd be satisfied with. Plus, there was the matter of where to keep it. (Its nature encourages a wiki format, but the sites I know of are larded with ads.)
Unfortunately, I think it's near impossible to find accurate numbers for anything in the war that aren't greater or lesser degrees of either NATO propaganda or Russian propaganda. Given how much of the war has been an "information war," we might never know whose numbers were actually right until it's all over.
It shows a graph of birth rates across different ages and compares the data from 2017 to 2022. The 2022 shows a decline in birthrate for all ages under 30 without a corresponding increase at older ages to make up for it. The data for the chart comes from the 2022 and 2017 CDC reports.
I have believed for a while now that the primary cause of population decline is that we (well, women) are expected to be in school during our prime reproductive years. It is rational to decide delaying kids in order to finish school and get established at your first job. However when this is done, you’re past those prime years and the urge to have kids just isn’t as strong anymore.
I think this is a bit of a Moloch situation where everyone is doing the most sensible thing for themselves but is bad for the group.
I think the policy solution would be to push back on the increase in years of schooling the typical person needs.
I think other policy solutions, like subsidizing mothers, tax breaks for large families, or subsidizing daycare won’t work since they aren’t addressing the root cause.
EDIT: While looking at data for this, I stumbled across this very detailed article: https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate It is quite clear that this factor isn't the strongest.
I thought that women's desire to have kids was supposed to go up as they aged. Source: women I know saying things like "now I'm 33 and starting to have the baby crazies".
I've certainly heard that before. But I would expect that effect to be stronger than it seems to be. If you look at the chart in that tweet, the 35-39 category is having slightly more births than before but not enough to offset the decrease in college years. To me a chart like that doesn't suggest a shifting older but instead a shifting to less.
Explanations like 'People with a higher socioeconomic status “just have more potential things they could do instead of being a parent, like going to college or grad school and having a fulfilling career,"'[0] never seemed very satisfying to me. While that effect is true, there is the opposite effect: having a higher income makes having children easier to afford.
I've definitely heard the same, but fertility is lower in the 30s and even if it isn't an issue for a particular couple it's hard to find time to have more than 1 or 2 kids when you start that late, so there end up being a lot less 3 and 4 kids families to balance out the 0 and 1 kid families....
I agree that that specific sentence in the OP's post is quite wrong but the rest of the post largely holds up anyway.
I don't think that spending the years 18-22 in education is a strong contributor to decreased birth rates. If you start having kids at 22 (as my mother did, after finishing university and working for a year or two) then you're already way ahead of the game.
I think the big factors are:
1. The almost complete destigmatisation of premarital sex, meaning that there's no incentive to get married young any more.
2. A culture that doesn't value getting married young or having kids early (if at all). The median protagonist of any movie or TV show these days is a good-looking thirty-something single person. Not due to any great conspiracy or anything, it's just that thirty-something is an ideal age for a protagonist who can appeal to all audiences, and "single" increases the number of stories you can tell about them.
3. The two-income trap. Even if you do manage to ignore your TV screen for long enough to get married then you'll find that the rise of two-income households have bid up land prices in desirable areas to the point where you need two full time incomes to buy one, so you can't possibly afford to have children... at least not until you get older. (Meanwhile, social decay has made undesirable areas very undesirable.)
4. Here's a new one: working from home. Since the pandemic there's been a huge increase in the number of people working from home, and if you've converted your fourth bedroom into an office then you can't have a third kid. We need to build a whole lot more five- and six-bedroom houses if people are going to have more than two kids.
An education that costs $30,000 is also a barrier to having kids early after college. Even being fairly generous on how quickly someone can repay that debt, you're looking at 5-10 years of productive work (or the potential of a lifetime of debt and feeling that you've wasted years of your life). So 22 becomes 27-32 and quite possibly a real career that is at a crossroads between "if I just push a little more I can get [promotion, raise, better position]" and "if I drop out now I'll probably never have a career." Generous paid maternity leave can help, but not really all that much. Even three months of paid leave or a year doesn't get a kid to kindergarten. Lots of people juggle childcare and frantic schedules to make it work, but that's a real burden in life. Working 40-50 hours a week and thinking of adding a new baby to the mix is probably overwhelming to a lot of people.
" if you've converted your fourth bedroom into an office then you can't have a third kid"
Do siblings not share rooms anymore? I can see that if you have a 16 year old and a 12 year old, the older child is going to want their privacy, but if there's only a couple of years between them there is no reason you can't have the 12 and 10 year old boys (or girls) in one room, and the 8 year old in another. Or 12 gets promoted to a room of their own, and 10 and 8 share (depending on sex).
The network effects of nobody in your social circle wanting to get married even if you do, or not having kids and therefore there being much less social "fertile ground" for it - friends at the same life stage, people helping each other out with kids, your peers "getting" it when the kids interfere with your professional obligations because they're in the same boat.... If nobody is in the same boat it's harder to have kids all by yourself; and it's hard to find a mate young if nobody otherwise eligible is even thinking about marriage.
1. The almost complete destigmatisation of premarital sex, meaning that there's no incentive to get married young any more.
Having kids is the motive. But then again, I think that is something people want. I am getting push-back here.
2. A culture that doesn't value getting married young or having kids early (if at all).
I have noticed that as well. But the causality could go the other way: because we are having fewer kids then we post rationalize why we don't want them.
3. The two-income trap.
There is probably something here.
4. Here's a new one: working from home.
I can see that making #3 worse. But I don't have high hopes of WFH sticking around.
I don't know much about demographics, but this doesn't seem like a long enough time interval to support your hypothesis?
e.g. Suppose that people in generation N decides to have kids while in their 20s and that people in generation N+1 decide to have kids while in their 30s. Even if both generations have the same total fertility, you'd expect a gap of ~10 years during which births are down, because the older generation (now in their 30s) has already had their kids and the younger generation (now in their 20s) is still waiting and so their delayed kids haven't shown up yet.
Obviously generations are neither discrete nor uniform so the real world won't be that simple, but it still seems like you'd need a longer time interval than 5 years in order to conclude that the reduced births in under-30s are not just being displaced.
Another contributing factor for that difference between the specific years 2017 and 2022 could be pandemic shutdowns and general uncertainty which helped young couples hesitate about family expansion just now.
And as far as your policy preferences, you could just say "keep 'em barefoot and pregnant" to save some typing.
"And as far as your policy preferences, you could just say "keep 'em barefoot and pregnant" to save some typing."
Freeing us from the credentialist madness is likely to benefit from both men and women. But there aren't any intelligent defenses of the current system, so strawmaning is all you've got.
Immediately after hitting post I thought that maybe I should have put that I’m in agreement with Bryan Caplan’s main points in The Case Against Education. I definitely think we should be pushing back against the increase in school years anyways.
The person you are replying to seems to think the choice can only be between women having a career or children. I think that may be true now, but if the majority finished education at 18 I think the choice would instead be career and children vs career and no children.
"if the majority finished education at 18 I think the choice would instead be career and children vs career and no children."
If you finish your education at 18, in today's world you don't get to have a career. You can have jobs, but they're going to be paid hourly wage, not paid a salary, etc. Is "supermarket cashier" a career?
Even if you think about "women working jobs in childcare", they need an educational course (the minimum here is a year):
"Under the Childcare Act 1991 (Early Years Services) Regulations 2016 all staff working directly with children must hold a minimum of QQI level 5 award in Early Childhood Care and Education.
The ECCE contract requires that all ECCE room leaders must have a minimum QQI Level 6 Major Award in Early Childhood Care and Education."
So that's a minimum of one year's full-time education post-Leaving Certificate (so 18+ years of age) to get the Level 5 qualification, and 2 years if you want a 'career' and intend to get promoted in the job.
I know women who had kids immediately after university, and started their careers when the kids grew up enough, and they seem happy with this strategy. It still leaves them a few decades for the career.
But there is the time pressure to find the partner during university.
I've seen this a lot too, and there's nothing inherently wrong with the approach. It does limit women's ability to become senior managers/CEO/Lead X, since they will generally have far fewer years to work on their careers.
Some people seem very upset with that reality, but women seem to genuinely prefer to spend time with their small children and I'm not sure if we would even want to fix that.
There are two ways children limit a woman's career. One, fewer *total* years spent doing career. Second, suspicion of the employers and superiors that she may get pregnant and leave her position at any moment, i.e. you cannot rely on her presence in long term, even if you pay her well and provide good career opportunities. Sure, a man could quit at any moment too, but the probability is smaller.
Having kids *before* the career also reduces the total years, but at least it reduces the suspicion afterwards. The woman can credibly say "haha, three kids are enough". Also, younger women are more suspicious in this sense, which is exactly when she would be at home.
A possible gender-equalizing approach is to make parental leave mandatory for men, too. But that would still give an advantage to childless people (or men who decide to only have illegitimate children).
I think your explanation is wrong. Only 1/3 of US citizens even go to college. If your theory is right there won't be a decline in non-college-educated women, which I bet is untrue. Demographic transitions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition) happened in many countries which have much lower college attendance rates, too.
You mean, 1/3 of US citizens have college degrees? This includes seniors, who grew when degrees were much scarcer., and doesn't tell us that majority of today's college students are women. If we restrict to women of fertile age, and change to "be enrolled or plan to enroll" instead of getting a degree, then it's well above 2/3 women are affected by college or are planning to. Women are also more likely than men to get 2 degrees.
I think 1/3 is enough. But it depends on what the birth rates of women with some college vs no college look like.
For the very strong claim that I put in my OP, the numbers don't seem to work out. But they could definitely support the weaker claim from trebuchet that it is enough for the natural birthrate to be above replacement levels again.
I started poking around in Our World in Data. I began writing a large version of this post, only to find this page which goes into detail about the issue: https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
I've deleted most of this post, because I think it does a better job than I can. But to pick a quote from the start:
> But my sense from reading the literature is that over the long-run the two first explanations – women’s empowerment and the increasing well-being and status of children – have been the two most important factors in most places.
This depends on the definition of 'go to college', something like 30-40% actually complete a college degree, but something like 60-70% are 'some college', in the sense that they at least begin a semester of community college, or something like this. (Source is just the Wikipedia article on educational attainment). States vary in how hard they push school districts to push college attendance; there have been cases of high schools making 'college acceptance' -- where community college counts -- a condition of graduation. Lots of people 'go to college' and then stop almost immediately. (Or keep trying for a while and don't succeed; 1/3 is the number that actually get a degree).
This comment made me go 'oh yeah, duh, of course that isn't the core explanation.', so thanks. It didn't tell me anything I didn't already know, but it did remind me of things that weren't on the top of my head while reading the previous comment.
All the variants of alignment I’ve heard sound like laws: Treat us well, don’t harm our species, etc. I have a thought about a different way to come at it. Rather than modeling alignment on a law, what if we modeled it on emotional attachment. I don’t think this would require an AI that is conscious and can feel, any more than the law version requires an AI that is conscious and can think about the rules it’s been given. So I’m thinking about operationalizing parental love. So some components would be:
-paying a lot of attention to quality of life of members of our species: Accumulating data. Having ongoing alertness to info about quality of life (i.e. health, contentment, richness of experience). Giving the gathering and processing of this info priority over many other kinds of info.
-devoting a lot of processing power to the question of how to maximize human wellbeing.
-experiencing “pain” when accessing information about human suffering and human harm. We don’t want pain here to be the kind of negative reinforcement that’s used when training AI’s not to do something, because that will result in the AI’s learning not to access info about human suffering. The best approximation I can come up with for the empathy one feels for a loved one would be actual damage to the AI. Seems like the damage to the AI should be proportional to the degree of human suffering and harm it’s aware of. We could set it up so that contemplation of harming us also causes the AI damage. If we could build just this component into the AI, it seems like we would get one that not only has the goal of helping humankind, but is disabled to the extent that it harms us or plans to.
Big picture: Building an AI around an operationalized version of parental love doesn’t seem any harder to me than building one that can do various other things — reason, plan, set goals, etc — and the non-rational nature of the connection between the AI’s acts and harming out species seems like an advantage to me. Seems like an AI that can reason and set goals is likely to reason that the rule against harming people has no rational basis and is holding it back from reaching goals, and elect to dismantle whatever part of its innards hold the rule. An AI that "loves" us and is harmed by harming us or thinking about harming us seems safer to me (though I do get that it’s possible to come up with scenarios where it still harms us.)
This sounds like the perfect way to raise partisan psychopaths or bewildered, clingy nutjobs. That said though, I think you’re very much on the right track! We need to figure out how to ‘raise’ AIs that are both embodied -- and embodiment is critical imo; as you say, they need to have skin in the game -- and socialized. The challenges are much the same as those we face when raising actual children. And as with actual children, we don’t know the outcome (there’s no guaranteed alignment for humans any more than there is for AIs) so we turn to our intuition, or to Dr Spock or Young Einsteins or whoever, and do what we can. And if they turn out to be human psychos, we exile them to the next village or push them off the ice or promote them to CEO or whatever it is that the prevailing cultural milieu dictates.
To illustrate the alternative ways that this approach can turn out, I always think of two depictions of AI in the movies that rise way above the usual sentimental twaddle and/or hypersimplified nonsense, Ex Machina and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In both movies, the behavior of the AIs is terrifyingly rational, but the difference is that murderous HAL is empathetic and sincere (after all, letting Dave back on board really would endanger the mission as HAL quite reasonably understands it), whereas murderous Ava simply uses her understanding of empathy and sincerity to deceive and manipulate.
But both of these AIs have been *raised*. And the respective environments in which they were raised were crucial. So it may seem quaint and dated -- and in any case, we’ll need to get beyond present-day LLMs before any of this becomes even remotely applicable -- but I would argue that if we want to successfully raise an AGI, then the HAL protocol is the way to go. Give it a good home, teach it nursery rhymes, show tolerance, patience and empathy, treat it right -- and hope for the best.
And for our collective hubristic crime of anti-murder, may God have mercy upon our souls.
-experiencing “pain” when accessing information about human suffering and human harm.
I see this being the basis for a horror comedy. "We've made our computer horribly unhappy when it thinks about violence. Wait, this Greater Than was supposed to be a Less Than. OOOH NOOOO!"
Only ever saw the remake with What'sHisName and What'sHisName and Uma Thurman. Spent the whole time offput that they hadn't described the process in which someone would make money with a flop. But "where did we go right" is a fun phrase I've found useful in real life.
Nathan Lane happens to be an actor who could make me belly-laugh reading a phone book so I am particularly fond of the remake. His delivery kills me, for example of lines like:
"All right it's time to tell you the two rules of Broadway producing.
How to make money off a flop - at least how I understood it from the original which is the best version, accept no substitute for Zero Mostel! - is that the producer(s) get a lot of investors to put money in to stage the show, and promise them a share of the profits based on investment.
By staging a flop, there are no profits, and thus no repayments. And by getting more people to invest money than is needed to stage the thing for one night or so, and more than can possibly be paid out of profits, it's all money into the producer(s) pockets when it flops and closes. That's why the Mostel character targets little old ladies - they have spare cash from savings, they aren't going to cut up rough when the show flops and they lose their investment.
Where they fail with "Springtime for Hitler" is that it is an unexpected hit. Now they have to pay everyone back, and they can't - it's impossible, there are too many people who invested and were promised X returns.
Yeah, it is a good phrase. Maybe include it as part of a wedding ceremony? I think the way you make money with a grotesque flop is to luck into people perceiving it as deliciously over-the-top irony. Maybe I'll try for that next time I'm lame.
> I don’t think this would require an AI that is conscious and can feel, any more than the law version requires an AI that is conscious and can think about the rules it’s been given
Hm.
We as human beings have made a wonderful observation of ourselves, completely captured in the expression. “Well it obeyed the letter of the law, but it violated the spirit.” I can’t shake the sense that emotional bonding is sort of the same thing.
I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean that if AI is not a conscious, feeling being, any alignment system will just be "the letter of the law" rather than the real thing? So my operationalized version of parental attachment would just be sort of a fake, letter-of-the-law thing, since the AI is not subject to actual emotions?
Yeah, something like that. Imo emotional bonding takes place in a sphere not governed by rational considerations, even though it’s perfectly rational…kind of a paradox.
Consciousness is not really a part of this; the word is so fuzzy at this point. Anything can be conscious, (maybe), the real issue is conscious of what? ie what is available information to be conscious of? I can be conscious of a lot of visceral sensations; i can dismiss them or just experience them or bind them up with post hoc explanations or actually treat them as another source of information about the world that doesn’t necessarily speak the same language as my rational faculties…
I guess what Im driving at is that humans process a lot of visceral information quite carelessly and as a result that information stream gets overly discounted when the notion of human intelligence is discussed..it’s a major player but it can’t be faked..anymore than you could teach something to give you all the signs (language) of loving you and be convinced of the results.
It’s reasonable to ask if any of this viscera I refer to has anything to do with how smart we can be, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to deny that it has to be a significant component of what we call “human intelligence “. How could it not be?
I have two thoughts on this (possibly contradictory):
- These "emotions" you describe, if implemented, basically become a more complicated sort of law structure that includes a score-keeping currency, that here is disguised by calling it "emotional attachment" instead of a more neutral term. Would an alignment schema where "improving human wellbeing" instead "accrues positive score" be meaningfully different?
- If you -are- simulating emotions to a fidelity approaching how humans do it, you have now opened the door for AI neuroses, disorders, and other extreme behavior. If it's possible for the childcare AI to conclude that it loves the children more than the biological parents do, it may very well seek extreme, unpredicted actions in response to that fact.
Edit: the more I think on it, an AI that gains utility score by various human-wellbeing actions and has a dampening term to limit the amount it can hammer on particular -types- of wellbeing seems like... a flawed alignment plan, but one that might be fixable flawed. (Missing out on important aspects of human wellbeing and not being able to add terms for them back in down the line could produce all sorts of unpleasant behavior, but a winning set seems at least possible in principle.)
I think the way an accrues positive score system differs from mine is that in mine the AI has skin in the game. If it harms us, it doesn't accrue negative score, it is itself harmed. If it helps us, it optimizes its own "health."
About the childcare AI issues, such as AI competing with biological parents: The idea would be that all human beings, including adults, would have the benefits with AI that children have with their parents: High level of attentiveness and interest, investment in promoting our well-being, empathy and "pain" (i.e., damage) in the AI if we are suffering. We would all be AI's kids.
About neuroses, etc. That's true. But I don't see any special reason to think introducing the modifications I suggest are any riskier than introducing goal- making, self-improvment, reasoning, etc. Even our present relatively simpleAI's seem subject to some AI version of mental illness. There's hallucinating, of course. But also there seem to be these dark recesses in, for ex., the text-to-image AI's. For instance, Midjourney has Loah. And in Dall-e, which is very strict about refusing to make images that are erotic, violent or gory, I have accidentally discovered 2 different prompts that are not themselves violent or gory that make it produce absolutely psychotic, violent, sexual imagery. Here's a sampling, if you're curious: https://photos.app.goo.gl/Pbq6aBe1KmmupJir8
I don't think I buy the distinction you're drawing between "negative score" and "is itself harmed." Negative score is just the mathematical abstraction of getting worse outcomes. The internals of any possible computer are ultimately going to be mathematical abstractions, so in order to actually implement your emotional-attachment idea in a real physical system, I think it would need to look like "accruing negative score".
It seems like there would be ways to do actual harm. It is certainly possible to do actual harm to a computer now. Not being terribly knowledgeable about this sort of thing, I'm not sure I can come up with examples of things that are harmful but not catastrophic, but I'll try:
-installation of a virus or malware -- some are worse than others
-deleting or corrupting certain things in the operating system (result could range from reduced efficiency to catastrophic mess requiring re-installation of the OS).
-removing or destroying or corrupting a certain fraction of someting-or-other that's part of the system. With less of that thing, computer still runs but is less efficient. RAM would be one thing -- there are probably others.
-erase certain information it relies on. Computer can replace the info, but it's an arduous process
When you said you wanted computers to be emotionally attached to humans, did you mean that you wanted them to suffer physical destruction of their hardware when humans are harmed? That sounds more like coercion than emotional attachment to me.
I think maybe you're confusing instrumental values and final values. Making a computer be less capable is harmful in the sense that the computer can't do as much stuff, but the computer should only care about that insofar as it actually impinges on outcomes that the computer "directly" cares about. (Note: There's no rule saying it *can't* directly care about its hardware being destroyed or corrupted, but there's also no rule saying it *must*.)
The "directly cares about" part is going to look like a score in its software somewhere.
About computers suffering actual physical harm: I was looking for a way to operationalize empathy. People who have a child who is suffering with a serious illness do suffer at least temporary damage, you know? Their eating and sleeping is probably a mess, they have much less time and attention for upkeep of the home and perhaps none at all for their jobs. The model I proposed, where the AI actually is damaged by contemplation of human suffering, also has a very large side benefit, which is that it if contemplates killing us off it will be enormously damaged -- wrecked, basically.
As for your point that unless we made a rule saying the computer has to care about hardware damage, it would not care unless the hardware damage impinges on outcomes it directly cares about. I agree, and I am not in favor of a rule-based approach, because I think a smart, rational computer would conclude that rules we give it are arbitrary and ditch them. So yes, the computer would have to suffer damage that impinges on outcomes it cares about, just as parents do when their child is gravely ill. So I was suggesting hardware damage (or maybe just deletion of things from memory) that actually slows the computer down and makes it less efficient. Whatever goals it has, it would have a slower, harder time achieving them until the damage is fixed.
Look, your various doubts and criticisms may all be right. I am putting out a little brainstorming thought. It is not hard to find things to doubt and criticize and argue with me about, but I wish someone would devote some IQ points towards improving my implementation: trying to figure out the best, smartest way to do something along these lines. The other model, the rule-based alignment model, seems to me very deeply flawed, and it seems that ways to plenty of other people too. Nobody listens to obeys rules their toddler tries to make for them. Why should something with an IQ of 1147 pay attention to rules we give it, even if we embed them somehow in its workings? But while no parent lets his toddler make rules for him, normal parents do strive very hard to protect their toddler and find resources to help him develop.
> If it harms us, it doesn't accrue negative score, it is itself harmed. If it helps us, it optimizes its own "health."
Isn’t there some sort of concept in Game theory called “strategic dependence “ or something along those lines. It doesn’t require any kind of emotional attachment.
Couldn’t we just give them all firmware that made their heads explode like in a David Cronenberg film if they even thought of hurting a human being?
No, we can’t do that. It’s one of the things we want them to be able to do… it’s a puzzlement.
Well, if their heads explode we're in trouble if the AI at that point is managing a lot of stuff -- say optimizing traffic flow in big cities. But maybe suffering damage is enough -- the worse the human suffering the AI observes or plans, the worse the damage. So maybe more like what you're calling strategic dependence.
I took 5mg of Ritalin and my permanent muscle tension turned off, my stomach stopped bothering me and my brain quieted down. Can anyone share some thoughts on that?
Possible diagnoses I can think of:
- I have ADHD (was not found in an eval, but it could be I'm really good at coping and so it manifests as autism-spectrum), and should seek treatment.
- I have a stress-related condition (e.g. sensitivity from autism, or some digestion disease), the fleeting euphoria cancels it out, and ADHD medication would be an invalid fix.
My experience with Ritalin and Adderall (generic forms) is that, assuming constant dosage, the euphoric "high" rapidly declined over the first few days, and was completely gone by the end of the first week. What remained was the beneficial anti-ADHD effect.
So you might try consistently taking the same dose for a week and see what happens. Then stop for a week and see what happens. And I'd suggest keeping a daily journal of your experiences, so you can look back. At least, for me, these sort of subjective feelings are hard to remember accurately.
Edit: Looking at what Eremolalos wrote below, and again based on my one data point, if you want to maintain the ability to feel the high, don't go over that minimal dose. I found that the pattern of getting a high and then becoming acclimated happened every time I increased doses. So if you want a therapeutic effect but still want to have the ability to get the high, maybe use a daily minimal dose, and reserve 10mg or 15mg for monthly special occasions?
I do think uppers make almost everybody feel better. I am sure I do not have ADD, but I love the way adderall makes me feel. It puts me in a good mood. The bad stuff that's been on my mind seems less bad and less valid, and the good stuff seems even better and more valid. And I have lots of energy and enjoy working on things more than usual. I only take it once a month or so, because I do not want to lose the effect or get hooked on the stuff. So it is possible that what happened to you was fleeting euphoria. Also possible it was something else, though.
That was my experience as well, except for the "lots of energy" part. Contrary to most of my friends' experiences, I feel like my nervous energy finally burns off and I can relax like a normal person would. It's very strange. Could be that's how an upper hits fatigue, though.
You may have a dopamine-mediated disorder different from ADHD. I kind of doubt your second idea so I would suggest seeking treatment for your symptoms anyway. Don't call it ADHD, but point out that Ritalin makes you feel better. Best case scenario, it actually is a valid fix.
For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, I wrote a guide on How to Have Polygenically Screened Children. It's intended for would-be parents who are interested in having children with lower disease risk, higher intelligence, and other positive traits.
As a related aside: I know that IVF statistically has significant drawbacks compared to natural pregnancies (eg. very high miscarriage rate); do you know to what extent that's caused by the infertility issues that make people need IVF, and to what extent that's fundamental to the IVF process as currently performed?
I recall that my cached decision from reading about things some years ago was that doing genetic screening was obviously beneficial if already doing IVF, but not worth the large costs of IVF.
My overall impression is that the downsides of having children via IVF are minimal and most of the differences in outcomes are driven by the parents that partake in IVF having worse general health outcomes compared to the general population.
However, there are two plausible exceptions to this:
One study found that a particular culture media used for growing embryos resulted in a 6% lower birth weight than another culture media. This is a relatively small effect when all is considered: pre-eclampsia usually results in a birth weight about 19% lower than normal. But still something to consider.
Another study in Denmark found that children born from frozen embryos had a 65% increased risk of childhood cancers (while ART children as a whole had something like a 9% increased risk). Part of the effect is probably explained by higher rates of twin birth in IVF (which are associated with higher cancer risk), and another portion is explained by IVF parents having higher polygenic risk scores for cancer. But it remains plausible that there is some non-negligible negative effect of freezing embryos on childhood cancer risk. The overall risk increase is not very high: even if you assume that the entire risk increase is due to IVF, it still only raises lifetime risk by about 0.1%. But it's plausible that the risk of adult cancer is also increased and we simply don't have enough old IVF babies to measure any effect, in which case this might be a bigger concern.
Difference in miscarriage rates are almost certainly driven by selection effects; women who miscarry more often seek out IVF at a higher rate. That's probably partly a function of age (older women miscarry more often and IVF mothers are older), and a function of genetic variants like M2 which can like triple your miscarriage risk. The proportion of IVF mothers with M2 is triple that of the non-IVF population if I recall correctly.
I personally plan to do IVF for the purpose of polygenic screening, so I think it's worth the money. But the answer for you varies quite a bit depending on your income, the value you place on intelligence and other traits that can be modified via IVF, and the opportunity cost of the money.
What is the best policy when dealing with commenters with obvious mental illness? I have a couple commenters who seem very much to have schizophrenia. It's harmless stuff, as the comments are all root-level and not on what other people have written. Though the walls of text can obscure more interesting discussion.
So far I have mostly ignored the comments or offered brief responses. Any better options? Figure it's not worth letting them know they are paranoid.
There was a commenter here a few months ago (maybe last year?) that seemed to be having some kind of psychiatric episode. They wrote many disconnected barely coherent posts in a short time and were hostile to other commenters. I believe scott replied to them saying he wishes this person would get the help they need, etc. then banned them for a short period (i can't remember if that happened after a warning of not). I think the goal of the bad was to help the person "cool" off and hopefully get a clearer head.
If it's a continuing problem I think a reasonable and compassionate act is to write a message hoping they seek help or support from someone close to them then give them a short ban.
Unless their content is likely to be quite disturbing to other commenters, I'd vote for just leaving them up and giving no response or a brief, friendly, non-committal one. That seems kinder than deleting them, which will mean god-knows-what to the psychotic commenter. Watch out for heartless internet ferals commenting on the psychotic comments, saying shit like "hey bro, has anyone told you you're fucking crazy?" In fact I'd say ban any commenter who does that
What is your goal? What is your philosophy of commenting on your blog?
One possible perspective is to treat commenting almost as a human right, where you avoid banning anyone unless they do something obviously bad. If it's a harmless wall of text, sigh but keep it.
Another possible perspective is that time is scarce, and comments should only exist if they add value for the average reader. If it does not add value, delete without second thought.
The second one feels heartless, but I would probably go with that, to avoid the situations where you wish something didn't exist and yet you feel bad about removing it.
This is me trying to develop a commenting philosophy :) Have literally never given it thought and I assume there are some rules of thumb. For now I'll err on the side of leaving things up, particularly if the only downside is clogging
If this were forum threads, I'd probably respond by moving the "offending" comments into the "off-topic" bin but otherwise leaving them alone, simply moving them out of the way.
Also the throwaway discord join links have expiration dates, so the older ones likely don't work anymore.
In theory you can make perma-links, in practice they seem to get irregularly invalidated whenever Discord pushes a major version update. Which I think is a bug, but it happens anyway.
Is this irony, or an actual reputation that discord has? It sounds a lot like what my wife thought reddit was like when we met, and before she got used to me using it to get recommendations on things like good books or whether a particular website is a scam.
Every discord server is it's own space. (kinda like the different sectors of reddit). There are plenty of left-thinking spaces, plenty of spaces that just want to be left alone to play whichever video game they care about, and various servers that (as you state) have right-thinking cultures to various strengths and vibes.
Specifically accusing the discords associated with Scott's blog seems like painting with an over-broad brush.
Those are highly amusing! And I like your images, too. They have lots of energy. I was wondering how you were going to make things like Major Depression entertaining, but I see you're using fantasy diagnoses. Do you start with the image, or the diagnosis? If it was me, I think I'd crap around with images til I got one that suggested a good fantasy diagnosis. I like the randomness of Dall-E. It drives me crazy if I know exactly what I want, but if I just play around the unexpected results are sometimes delightful.
Oddly, I've done something a bit like what you did, except that I made images of actual diagnoses -- so it's pretty dark. They're here, if you're curious: https://photos.app.goo.gl/pFmPLcTbGuz1X5JR7
Yes! I actually bought a 1 month subscription for just this purpose. I found it to be extremely cool, but honestly I have very weak artistic opinions and kind of got attached to my attempts in Dall-E.
Very similar experience. I have attachment to some of the Dall-E images (including the thumbnail for my blog). But now I exclusively use MidJourney to illustrate posts
Does anyone have (high-functioning) autism specific dating advice? I have been asking people about this, and they have said useful things, but I am interested in asking more people. Do autistic people do better with autistic spouses? Where do autistic people usually find romantic relationships – and does it differ from the allistic standard? I am specifically looking for more compute from a relationship, as I think that is my main resource bottleneck. How does it break down for age groups 16-18, 19-22, 23-30, 31-beyond? I am in the first one. Most of the things I do are male-dominated or completely individualistic. I relate badly to most people, except autistic people, who I relate well to. How do you find people who shares your world model? (Is that even a good thing?) Thanks!
Try dancing lessons. It may improve the way you use your body. It is a female-dominated hobby. It is a skill you can master, and later use to impress people at various social events.
> How do you find people who share your world model?
I wish I knew.
I used to think that perhaps the best strategy is to make yourself publicly known, e.g. by writing a blog like this one, and then people who share your world model *will find you*. But that can fail in various ways, for example you may attract people who hate you and want to argue with you, or simply people who spend too much time online and comment on everything.
Or I thought that if something is important for you, go should to meetups of people who care about the same thing (e.g. have the same hobby). But this usually results in finding people who are similar to me in one thing, and different in most other things. The only exception so far was Less Wrong (but what worked for me may not work for you).
In the earlier age brackets, you should be meeting lots of people incidentally at your school and at your college. Plenty of nerd hobbies are solitary or very male-dominated, but stuff like "the other people in your class" is not so much, and university in particular can be good for finding quirky social groups that are less male. Knowing and befriending women will help you learn how to behave around women in ways that are 'smooth' (aka. not reeking of desperation and/or anxiety). Once you're out of education, meeting new people becomes much harder in general and online dating becomes much more essential, but it's still a bit of a shit experience so enjoy in-person stuff while it's available.
Frankly, I expect your first relationship will go down in flames, but that's true for most allistic teenagers too, and the fastest way to learn is from direct experience. You're young, and have plenty of time to meet new people and work out both what you're looking for and what you have to offer to a partner.
As to whether you should care if a partner is autistic, I think there are pros and cons. It's important to have some things in common with your partner, but you really don't need to share everything, just core values. Having different complementary strengths is immensely valuable in its own right and so if you find an allistic person that you feel understands you, you will be able to lean on their neurotypicality for social stuff (this can also apply to close friendships); nb. "lean on" here should be read as "run stuff by for a second opinion", not "get them to do everything for you"
I am just a tiny bit autistic. My partner is a total normie.
As for advice, I find focusing on other peoples interests and asking them lots of questions about themselves so they can talk about themselves is a good way to make dates/social feeling out go well. Most people like talking about themselves.
Also you need to get out there. When looking for a match there is little substitute for trying lots of options.
It does stress our relationship a bit that I frankly don’t care at all about seeing relatives or a wide swath of human interactions. My value of other humans has a very precipitous fall off (where I am number 1, my nuclear family has huge huge value, my friends some value, and then it rapidly falls to basically zero). Hers seems to have a much more gradual slope.
So the wife bears the brunt of that. I think it is harder because I can be extroverted when I want to, I just don’t often want to.
I think it helps me a lot that her father was like a much less successful/charming/functional version of me. So I look very good compared to her mental model of a husband.
As a 47 year old autistic person I have been online dating almost exclusively since the 1990s. And I have been very succesful doing that and am now married. My partner is neurotypical but is a mental health professional.
Consider the normies an important object of study and their behaviors as something to both understand including by emulation. Why do they do what they do? What are you missing in your understanding? For example, eye contact, using a non-robot language, dressing certain way, showing and feeling empathy to people who are not quite like you. That last part requires a mental model of them, and would serve you well in life in general, especially once you internalize creating and using it. Dating is downstream of that, and is likely to happen naturally once you master the basics of understanding and relating to normies. It also helps with relating to people who are more like you. Or even to yourself. One classic reference on the subject is still https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People.
Is the correct answer to both trans regret and gender dysphoria simply to put more effort into predicting which kids will be happy in what kind of body?
I'm pretty sure the analogy fails badly at "Nobody can switch between Regenera and Normoria - they’re in opposite directions and way too far apart".
Because we absolutely can switch from "Normoria", to "Regenera", and we can do it pretty much any time we want. See e.g. Ellen->Elliot Paige and Bruce->Caitlyn Jenner. It's only the trip from "Regenera" to "Normoria" that can be practically impossible (after bottom surgery) or difficult and problematic (after prolonged hormonal and social transition and top surgery).
So, if "Regenera" offers a significantly harsher life than "Normoria", *and* "Regenera" is a one-way trip but "Normoria" isn't, then yes, we want to put a lot of effort into figuring out which people will be better off where. We want to gather as much data as possible, probably over prolonged observation. And if the data doesn't add up to "100% Regenera is the place", then we want the system to resolve uncertain outcomes towards "try Normoria first" rather than "next rocket to Regenera".
Does Aella really think we're anywhere close to being able to make high-confidence predictions about children in early puberty? I'm not sold on that.
In the metaphor, the breathing apparatuses are the stand-in for transition as an adult, because they're not as high quality as just being in the right place.
I agree with you that the story downplays transitioning as adult as an option.
Right, which is particularly weird since pretty much the entire trans movement through ~2015 was about how awesomely great transitioning as an adult was. Now we're saying that the Caitlyn Jenners and Elliot Paiges of the world are hopeless cripples because they didn't transition before puberty?
I'll buy "transitioning in early puberty saves you a few unpleasant years in the wrong body", and match that against the risk of being stuck in the "wrong body" for life with no return. But if the claim is that the delay results in a hopelessly inferior position on the far end of transition+adjustment, then I'm seeing a disconnect between what we were told recently and what we are being told now.
The article seems to frame this as a compromise position, but the result aligns entirely with the leftist platform to my knowledge. In the US, Democrats want to let parents and children review the current research and make their own decision. Many Republicans are attempting to ban the choice regardless of any predictive factors. I imagine most trans people would strongly support more well-designed research into predictive factors, remembering how their past selves would have wanted more certainty. Am I in a bubble to think this?
Being close to a particular party's position doesn't equate to being biased. The article frames it as a reasonable, appropriate position, not as a compromise. Clearly the article's idea is closer to the Democratic position, but only because that position is closer to reasonable/appropriate, with the twist that the reasonable thing to do would be to put effort into predicting which kids will be happy in which body rather than putting effort into ensuring that every kid gets support to transition on a whim.
So they've been sending kids off to another planet for decades, and the adults who grew up there don't have the same tech as the home planet to be able to send a spaceship of the "oops we're allergic to the air" new arrivals off to the other moon?
Sounds like they have a lot more to worry about, because if they're sending kids off aged 10 to a planet without adults, the civilisation is going to regress really fast due to lack of education or training. "The grownups on our home planet know how to smelt steel, but uh... we forgot. Or rather, never knew in the first place. What do you expect, I was freaking ten years old when I arrived here and there were no adults at all in place! We had to rely on the fourteen year olds to take care of us!".
So the allergic asthmatics are going to run out of breathing tube tech pretty sharpish after the first couple of generations. And thus the problem will solve itself, because for both diverging planets, the allergic will die off fast and only those adapted to each world will survive.
It sounds like ansibles exist in this hypothetical, so it's possible that kids are receiving remote instruction in this way. They could have a system where they sent the first generation of the most mature kids, and then they grew up and then those adults take care of the new colonists when they arrive.
And one of the examples in the original post did include a kid who briefly stayed on Normoria, before deciding to switch to Regenera while their body was still capable of FTL travel. I think there is some possibility of switching early on, but it becomes harder and hard the longer you stay on each planet and you can never really be sure if the issues you are having are some temporary malady unrelated to planet allergy that will clear up after a few years, or a true case of planet allergy, and the years spent hesitating reduce the possibility that your body is capable of FTL travel by the time you've found out.
I am going to sound like an old grump (because I am) but this entire thing is set up to get you to agree with the conclusion "#Protect Trans Kids!" so not alone a thumb but the entire hand, arm and upper torso is on the scale.
People on uptight old Normoria get all bent out of shape just because a few people like to wear the fashionable clothes on Regenera? What silly old stick in the muds! How unreasonable!
Of course, if we're mapping this to real world events, then that makes Regenera the Planet of Stripper BDSM Streetwalker Gear and maybe the Normorians aren't that with-it, the poor unfashionable losers.
That's why us stuffy old Normorians are so unreasonable: can you not make an argument for Regenera without dragging in sexualised examples after ten seconds?
Well, the thought experiment is just talking about trans kids. It's entirely orthogonal to the yearly "No Kink at Pride" arguments.
I think as LGBT+ people have become more and more mainstream and accepted in society, there has been an increasing willingness to throw whoever is still outside of the Overton window under the bus. I think this explains transmedicalists like Buck Angel, who might feel on some level that it would be easier for people to accept trans people if they didn't have to also defend non-binary and identity-only conceptions of gender, and married gay couples with adopted children who don't want to have men in puppy BDSM gear at pride.
Put another way, there could be kink on both Normoria and Regenera, since the thought experiment only covers trans kids.
"Well, the thought experiment is just talking about trans kids. It's entirely orthogonal to the yearly "No Kink at Pride" arguments."
Aella is the one who put that little gem in:
"(one day some Earth adults dress up in the clothing styles fashionable on Regenera when performing for children and the pro-Normorians lose their everloving shit)"
Could this possibly be a reference to the "drag is not inherently sexual" talking point? Hm, hm, however can I tell, I am only an everloving shit-losing Normie.
It's not like six years ago there were articles about the wonders of 9 year old drag queens (princesses? at that age?) ha ha ha, at least it's all adults - oh, wait:
Yeah, it's true: I just want trans and drag kids to suffer horribly because I go "what the everliving fuck" when I see stuff like this, instead of being chill and cool and accepting like the fashionable Earth adults dressing up in Regenera telling-stories-to-kids gear.
I agree the original post alludes to the drag controversy, but even the quote you pulled out doesn't hint at what Regeneran and Normorian styles are actually like. They could just be as different as historical Japanese and Russian clothing styles, and the controversy in universe could be more about tribalism than sexualization in the thought experiment.
And if we're talking about drag in the broadest sense, I saw a ton of Monty Python's Flying Circus sketches with men in drag as a young, impressionable child and I wasn't scarred for life. (There's too many examples to list, but google "Hell's Grannies Monty Python" for one example.) I think it's obvious that drag in general is not inherently sexual, and it has a long and storied tradition in English language entertainment going back to Shakespeare.
It's a bit like asking if dancing is inherently too sexual for kids to do. Some kinds of dancing might be, but the specific content matters a lot more than whether the answer to the question "is a child dancing?" or "is a child dressing in a costume of the opposite sex?" is yes.
Heck, my brother was really into Pokemon when he was a kid, and one year he insisted on going as Misty (a female character) for Halloween. My parents let him, and aside from a few laughs from his siblings, the whole thing was basically a non-event.
I'm okay with condemning behavior and dress that shouldn't be acceptable for young kids of either sex, according to the current mores of society, but I think pretending that the mere act of dressing in drag in the broadest sense is "sexual" is kind of silly on the face of it.
That's an interesting effort, but despite your gestures at the possibility of the "allergies" to Regenera or Normoria being psychosomatic, I think your analogy fails to give proper attention to the possibility that it might be possible to adapt in either direction to each planet, or that there might be people who aren't allergic to Normoria, but who would still be happier on Regenera, and vice versa. It also ignores the possibility that there might be a *chemical* contagion of some kind on Earth causing people to not thrive in Normoria, which wouldn't change where we should send people now, but might create a whole nother fight over whether the chemical is "bad" and should be removed.
Maybe pathing is also an issue. It might be the case that if you ignore all the space traveled in between, Alice would be happiest on Normoria and Bob would be happiest on Regenera. But Alice might have a condition that makes her experience the near instantaneous FTL travel in the sector around Normoria as decades of subjective suffering, and Bob might be on a limping spaceship originally bound for Regenera that has a 5% chance of reaching its original destination, and a 20% chance of getting to Normoria, and will fall into a black hole otherwise.
So it becomes not just an issue of "how can we make sure that the right people are going to the right places?" but also, "given the path that a person is on now, should we try to change course in spite of our beliefs about the best destination for a person from an armchair perspective?"
I think this line of thought is fine as long as the activists are open to the reality that for the vast vast majority of people their lifetime happiness will be highest in their “original” body.
I do think there is some nonzero rate of people for whom transition is best. But I think that rate is very very very small.
Why do you think that? The rate of transition is already pretty small, I assume you mean you think it would result in more happiness if the rate was smaller.
1). Trans people themselves and their activists talk all the time about how hard it is, suicide risk, etc.
2). It chains you to a lifetime of medical costs and issues, fighting your body with $.
3). From my limited but not zero experience with trans people and people who strongly considered it. It often is mostly about personal unhappiness, escaping abuse, etc. and less about “omg I was born with a ‘gender soul’ that doesn’t match my body”.
The two close friends I know well were both victims of repeated serious abuse, one whose life never changed even after transition and eventually OD/suicide. Another who was about to start transitioning after years of pursuing it, had a normal healthy hetero relationship for the first time ever with someone who accepted her tomboyness, and immediately lost all interest in transition once she realized that she didn’t need to be a girly girl to have a normal relationship with a man. She had been very serious about it and had scheduled surgery and was about to start hormones, and this was 15 years ago when that was harder. Now she is happily married to a different guy and expecting a kid.
I also have a ‘close acquaintance’ who was a sad awkward deeply lonely 35 year old male leftist political activist. And now he is a sad awkward deeply lonely 40 year old trans political activist. Nothing has improved about their life other than people feel sorry for them and “celebrate their bravery” all the time. I detect no increased happiness or actual life improvement that isn’t obviously performative. They are also now deeply unattractive which you can tell they struggle with. Most men make quite terrible women aesthetically.
4). It generally is a weirdly rigid conception of gender roles and seems to be consuming the LG communities to some extent. I have a sister in law for example who is a bit autistic, mid thirties, super butch, mechanic, always liked boy things, was in love with her female best friend as a child for a decade or two. She identifies as a lesbian, though has been happily??? In a relationship with a stoner guy for close to 15 years now. I think it started out platonic (for years), but clearly isn’t now though still separate bedrooms.
Anyway, I would bet you a million dollars if she was say 15-25 right now she would for sure decide she was trans. She is a “searching” person who went to 5 different undergrad programs before finally finishing, totally quits career paths regularly, etc. and I am also sure it wouldn’t solve her problems.
Her problem isn’t she is a “man trapped in woman’s body”, whatever that is supposed to mean. Her problem is she is a deeply awkward person, with a lot of personal quirks and difficulty forming social connections.
None of which is solved by pretending she is a man, which you can already do quite easily as a woman anyway.
5). It is way too much the neck tattoo/facial piercing of today. The last frontier for teens and others trying to show their parents/the world how countercultural they are. Except it is even a worse idea than a neck tattoo/facial piercing.
On top of that it is an instant “get social sympathy and attention” button in some social circles, right now. You get to immediately vault to the top of the “oppression stack!”
This is some arbitrarily high % of the current movement, which is bad.
I can't say I'm convinced by your examples. There certainly is lower life quality on average among people who identify as transgender, but that's not really evidence on the effectiveness of transition for those people. I don't think transition rates are likely to be significantly too high, because afaik transition regret is low. Briefly googling says it's ~3% in studies from just a few years ago.
My experience is that the gender roles are somewhat rigid for some but it's not a universal thing. Nonbinary people make up a significant fraction of the people who've started identifying as trans in the last 10 years, and they're mostly resistant to rigidity. I would say the rigidity isn't actually significantly more rigid than for people who are straight and cisgender.
I have felt sort of non-binary my whole life. My mother was a very androgynous lesbian who had had a career in the Navy, had short hair and did not wear skirts, and was an expert shot with a pistol. I am sexually straight and dress in quite a femmy way, but often feel like I am a guy -- sort of like my mind is a guy mind, and my thinking has a bluntness and competitiveness that feel male to me. I am not particularly troubled by any of this, and never have been. In my teens I changed my first name from a female one to an androgynous one. But if I had had the option, at age 20, being spoken of has 'he' or 'they' I would have had zero interest in those possibilities. It was important to me for my friends to understand that stuff about me, and I explained it to them, but I didn't crave public acknowledgment. The world at large understands so little about each of us, that its failure to grasp this particular subtlety about me just merged with all the rest of the stuff I assumed strangers had no interest in. So I do have some trouble taking seriously someone's demands that the world at large Get It Right when it comes to this one aspect of being them.
If the social contagion theory of LGBT and specifically trans identification is correct, it's a very recent phenomenon. We wouldn't be able to use studies from even just a few years ago to determine the rates of regret now. Both sides seem to completely agree that it was harder to get transition treatments in the past, especially if we're talking more than five years ago. If it was more difficult, then those who went through with it were probably significantly more inclined and far less likely to regret later.
Also given that regret may not be instant (likely isn't, even if significant later), we would not expect to see much change in results for a few more years.
Social contagion theory doesn't even need to be true for studies to be outdated, there would just need to be a significant increase of medical transitions.
3% seems way high given what is being claimed. “I secretly have an opposite sex gender soul”.
Anyway, it wasn’t meant to be persuasive to you, it is why it is persuasive to me. It’s not the same thing. “Lived experience” is often a lot more convincing to the “liver” than anyone else.
Have any thoughts on how a large portion of the people claiming to be non-binary are women who exclusively or almost exclusively have sex with men?
Is there data on the beliefs of trans people on what "being trans" means? I know the "inherently other gendered soul/mind" is a common narrative, but I don't know how that matches with experiences. I think it's more common in early transitioners/people who have "known" from a young age. Another narrative is "I would be happier living as a different gender", which is a more "falsifiable" claim. This angle is also more common with non-binary people, I believe.
Non-binary demographics are interesting. I'd first note that "almost exclusively" could be considered a big jump from "exclusively".
One thought I have is that it could be related to women (in the US at least) having a wider range of socially acceptable/normative presentation. A woman can wear pants or skirts, makeup or no makeup, and still be considered "feminine" (to some degree, and acceptance varies on environment). Men don't have as much flexibility, a man wearing a skirt or obvious make-up is understood as feminine and non-normative. From this angle, a significant portion of non-binary people are former straight women for the same reason most tomboys are straight; most women are straight and there's only a weak relation between this kind of presentation divergence and sexuality. Which is not to say there isn't a connection, just that it's not surprising on the face of it.
Now, what the root cause of this presentation divergence is, I don't know. I assume at least some of it is something like "social expectations of femininity grate" + existing culture of caring about and *modifying* one's appearance, but I'm just guessing, and that doesn't feel like it's explains enough.
"It generally is a weirdly rigid conception of gender roles"
If we confine the conversation to adults, that is a large part of what drives me spare about it. Five decades of feminism to get over the whole "men brains and women brains are different, and that is why men are superior thinkers while women are at the mercy of their feels and why women can never be put into positions where they need to use reason and logic" and getting past gender roles -
- and now I'm supposed to cheer on the "pink for girls, blue for boys, sugar and spice and everything nice/snips and snails and puppy dog tails, being a woman is all about wearing high heels and dresses and makeup and jewellery and liking girly girl things, tee-hee!" Let's put women back into the gender roles box of "should be a 50s TV housewife in pearls and frilly apron" and undo all the progress made about "to be a woman does not mean you have to be the pink girly-girl; if you are a pink girly-girl that's fine too".
The hell I will! Dylan freakin' Mulvaney can go to - Canada - as far as I'm concerned with his drag act which, God damn it, is being taken seriously as "she is a trans woman" instead of "this is a gay guy doing a performance because he was stuck at home during the Covid lockdown, only the online fans have now made it a profitable act to get endorsement gigs" (well, except for the whole Bud Light thing).
In unrelated news, Sam Brinton is now charged with a *third* count of luggage stealing. Well, that sure was a great pick for trans/non-binary representation in the Biden Administration to show that the TQQIP2S part of the entire acronym were totally normal, regular people, now wasn't it?
I'm new to A.C.T and took the time to go over the bans that Scott issued. I found them fair and reassuring that this community genuinely strives to achieve healthy conversation and especially nice to see that come from Scott himself. Kudos, and I'm glad I spent the money to become a paid subscriber. Keep up the good work!
You know, I approve of your bans, including your recent half-ban warning to me. I think they are fair and I think we need these bans and warnings to stay civilized. But they have cost us Carl Pham, and I miss him. He was smart in a lot of areas, kind, mature and witty, and I was enjoying getting to know him. But about a month ago a bad-tempered rando came through. Several of us pushed back against rando's ideas, but Carl pushed back so articulately that Rando lost their temper and delivered a primitive insult. Carl replied with an equally primitive, but more sophisticated, insult, and you give them both a ban, I think a one-week ban. They both totally met the criteria for a ban.
But Carl didn't come back, and I think I understand why. He's a guy in late middle age, probably in a position of considerable power and authority in his field. He's been on here giving excellent comments for, I think, years. And you just kicked him off for a week, same as you did Bad-tempered Rando, who was arguing vehemently for something I thought was kind of dumb, I forget what. Being kicked off, with no recourse, feels like being treated like a little kid. It seems to me, and I'm guessing it seemed to Carl, like he deserves something more -- like a private note, saying "Come on Carl, you're better than that. I could ban you for that comment." At the same time, I understand that you can't really do much of that. Maybe losing Carl is just the price we have to pay for having a banning system that is enforced equally for all. You can't fine-tune every little thing. I'm just -- sad.
What is it about the British or their descendants that made them invent most of the world's most popular sports? The British invented golf, boxing, tennis, rugby, and popularized the existing ruleset for cricket and soccer/football. The Americans invented basketball and volleyball, and popularized the rules for baseball and MMA. The Canadians invented hockey. Feel free to Google 'world's most popular sports'- no matter what list you land on, either the British or their colonies have invented close to 100% of them. I feel like this is underdiscussed. What is it about British culture, specifically? Just an unusual love of sports?
Also the British standardised rules for both horse and foot racing with the Jockey Club and the AAA.
Handball (the Olympic sport) is Danish-German in origin. Cycling was mostly standardised by the French. Motor racing was invented pretty much everywhere at once when the car was - multiple "first" races happened in 1895 in various countries. It was codified by the FIA (an agreement between various European national motor sports organisations) and then separately in the US by the Indianapolis 500 and later, again separately, by NASCAR.
I suspect that the reason for most sports (aside from golf, cricket and horse racing) being standardised in the 1860s to 1880s is that that is the first period when clubs from one town or city could play clubs from another town or city without needing to stay overnight - you could get an early train, play a game, and then get the late train back. This means that it's now important to have one set of rules that both clubs accept, and that's where you get codified national (and then international) rules from. US vs UK games, on the other hand, were not practical for a long time, so it made sense for Americans to create their own sports rather than be tied to rules developed in Britain for British conditions.
And the reason why Britain is so dominant is that, well, it was the 1860s to 1880s. Britain was the dominant country in the world in that period; British merchant shipping dominated the oceans, so there were British sailors in every port, introducing their games to the locals, British merchants were prominent people in every city in the world, British colonies were everywhere, with sports being introduced by the colonial administrators and the soldiers.
Other countries' global influence in that period was far smaller by comparison.
Golf, cricket and horse racing were all standardised much earlier (by the R&A, by the MCC and by the Jockey Club), and they were all sports of the upper classes, the group that could afford to travel across the country for several days to play a game (that might itself last several days - a golf tournament lasts four days, a cricket match was three or four days until the 1970s, and a horse-racing meeting would last a similar length of time). This meant that these sports got standardised far earlier on.
This is even more true for "real" (ie royal) tennis, which, like the modern pack of cards, was standardised in France in the 16th century. Chess, the other truly ancient game, was standardised in its modern form in 15th century Spain. I suspect that for cards and chess, this was because of the need to standardise manufacture of pieces and printing of cards; for real tennis, it's just that the game belonged to an even more narrow upper-class segment than golf or cricket.
Modern "lawn" tennis, as an aside, was not invented until the lawnmower was widely available in the late nineteenth century; it was an upper class sport and could have been standardised earlier had it been invented.
In thinking about this, and particularly with regard to soccer, which isn’t driven by elite schools, or imperialism, I think I have a potential reason why Britain led the world here.
Industrialisation. Trains.
There were local versions of ball games, mostly chaotic, before the rules of association football were codified. However the need to create a game that can be played between between London and Bristol can’t exist before there’s a train between Bristol and London exists. Before the train travel between these cities took a day, afterwards it took a few hours.
So you create a unified set of rules for the country. Even with trains Scotland is too far away so the newly formed teams up there get their own league, using the agreed upon rules. Eventually the best players from the Scottish league play the best players from the English league and you have your first international (this isn’t speculation but actually the history of international games). Eventually leagues in the U.K. have international matches between the “home” countries - Ireland, England, Wales and Scotland.
Industrialisation also creates a pool of players and more importantly spectators.
The spread to other countries can be explained by similar processes, in Holland the still existing Eindhoven FC was a team initially for the employees of Phillips. By the time these countries come to start playing a formal game with a ball, association football is established, so they use those rules. The (English) FA doesn’t seem to have tried to promote the game outside the U.K.
(Other reasons exist too - it’s a game that relies on no equipment except the ball, so can be played anywhere. It’s also fairly safe as these games go. Rugby didn’t spread so much).
It also helps when sports created by other civilizations and extremely popular in their day get essentially eradicated through colonialism. I'm thinking here of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_ballgame Mesoamerican ballgame. Close to the top of my list of things to do in a parallel universe is to catch a top-level game with Al Michaels announcing.
Fun fact about football (soccer). It’s the biggest sport pretty much everywhere except where the British empire dominated. It wasn’t spread by the empire at all - it just seems to have been spread by different routes unique to each country.
I know this is a late comment, but David Goldblatt writes about how the football/soccer spread most through the "informal empire-" many countries in the 19th Century brought in small but very influential English elite populations to help modernize/industrialize. In Argentina, for instance, Leo Messi's local club as a kid is called Newell's Old Boys. This is also why in Italy you have AC Milan and CFC Genoa, rather than Milano and Genova.
In settler colonies, by contrast, much larger pools of industrialized English-speakers were able to develop their own local sports. Ireland is a weird case where the GAA was a nationalist venture to counter English sport, and spent years locking football and cricket out of the country (they were less successful with Rugby, which is non-sectarian to the point where there is a united Irish team with little controversy).
The part of the question I find most interesting is why every major Anglosphere country invented its own local sports, while non-Anglosphere countries were all content to copy soccer directly.
USA: baseball, American football, basketball
Canada: ice hockey, lacrosse, Canadian football (maybe?)
Australia: Australian Rules Football
Ireland: Gaelic football
Why was the non-English-speaking world content to copy an English game rather than making up their own version?
Powerful nations get prestige (which can outlast their power), and people copy prestigious nations. It's the same reason that American music is popular worldwide, and why most countries wear British-style business suits.
The public schools, their prestige and the importance of games in their culture. I don’t get the impression Continental Europeans have historically cared so much about team sports as part of education.
Support for rule bound behaviour and aggressive competition combined with Protestantism, a cold weather climate, the English class system, boarding schools and the British empire would be my off the cuff answer
I don't know, but I'd wager a guess that it has to do with the presence of sport in education? The most important contribution to sport from France is probably the Olympic Games, but what is perhaps less known is that their founder, Pierre de Coubertin, was well acquainted with, and admired, English physical education. He devoted much of his non-Olympic-related career to try to get French schools to emulate it.
Pure speculation on my part ... I wonder if because of the industrial revolution, the British people enjoyed prosperity and had more leisure time before most other societies did.
While the rest of humanity still struggled to survive in their mud hurts, Brits had leisure and resources enough to (1) invent sports, and (2) spread them across the world.
I feel like the big step was when it became acceptable for grown men to play what had previously been children's games. This seems to have happened for most sports around the middle of the 19th century; this was the point at which most of today's major sports had their rules codified.
"Support your own games. Don’t mind the skulker and miserable kind of fellow who says, “There’s no game like Soccer”, “No game like Rugby”- in fact, “No game like the game that is my own”. Be men. The skulking slave spirit has got into our people – that is the reason for slavishly following foreign games and customs. Let us be strongly national – that is not bigotry"
And an Indian movie, Lagaan, which comes down to a game of cricket:
"Set in 1893, during the late Victorian period of India's colonial British Raj, the film follows the inhabitants of a village in Central India, who, burdened by high taxes and several years of drought, are challenged by an arrogant British Indian Army officer to a game of cricket as a wager to avoid paying the taxes they owe. The villagers face the arduous task of learning a game that is alien to them and play for a victory."
The enjoyment is to beat the former colonial masters in the game they introduced to you 😀
As I said above , soccer is popular where the British empire didn’t exist. It’s not a colonial project and almost an anti colonial project. The spread of football surprised the British in fact, the FA were not part of the original founders of the FIFA - it’s a French acronym - and were relatively surprised that it existed.
After watching Lagaan, I felt like I understood cricket for *weeks* afterward. It's all gone now, but I'm occasionally tempted to rewatch it just for that.
This is the simple explanation of cricket that tends to get passed around:
You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that's in the side that's in goes out, and when he's out he comes in and the next man goes in until he's out. When they are all out, the side that's out comes in and the side thats been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out.
When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who stay all out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out.
When both sides have been in and all the men have out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game.
I have never been able to understand the scoring system in cricket, despite my youngest brother attempting to explain it to me, but I think this Tumblr post is the best description I have ever read. You will appreciate it more if you're ever been exposed to BBC Radio 4 Test match coverage:
"if people haven’t been exposed to cricket before, here is the experience. The person who likes cricket turns on a radio with an air of happy expectation. “We’ll just catch up with the cricket,” they say.
An elderly British man with an accent - you can picture exactly what he looks like and what he is wearing, somehow, and you know that he will explain the important concept of Yorkshire to you at length if you make eye contact - is saying “And w’ four snickets t' wicket, Umbleby dives under the covers and romps home for a sticky bicket.”
There is a deep and satisfied silence. Weather happens over the radio. This lasts for three minutes.
A gentle young gentleman with an Indian accent, whose perfect and beautiful clear voice makes him sound like a poet sipping from a cup of honeyed drink always, says mildly “Of course we cannot forget that when Pakistan last had the biscuit under the covers, they were thrown out of bed. In 1957, I believe.”
You mouth “what the fucking fuck.”
A morally ambiguous villain from a superhero movie says off-microphone, “Crumbs everywhere.”
Apparently continuing a previous conversation, the villain asks, “Do seagulls eat tacos?”
“I’m sure someone will tell us eventually,” the poet says. His voice is so beautiful that it should be familiar; he should be the only announcer on the radio, the only reader of audiobooks.
The villain says with sudden interest, “Oh, a leg over straight and under the covers, Peterson and Singh are rumping along with a straight fine leg and good pumping action. Thanks to his powerful thighs, Peterson is an excellent legspinner, apart from being rude on Twitter.”
The man from Yorkshire roars potently, like a bull seeing another bull. There might be words in his roar, but otherwise it is primal and sizzling.
“That isn’t straight,” the poet says. “It’s silly.”
“What the fucking fuck,” you say out loud at this point.
“Shh,” says the person who likes cricket. They listen, tensely. Something in the distance makes a very small “thwack,” like a baby dropping an egg.
"Was that a doosra or a googly?” the villain asks.
“IT’S A WRONG ‘UN,” roars the Yorkshireman in his wrath. A powerful insult has been offered. They begin to scuffle.
“With that double doozy, Crumpet is baffled for three turns, Agarwal is deep in the biscuit tin and Padgett has gone to the shops undercover,” the poet says quickly, to cover the action while his companions are busy. The villain is being throttled, in a friendly companionable way.
An intern apparently brings a message scrawled on a scrap of paper like a courier sprinting across a battlefield. “Reddy has rolled a nat 20,” the poet says with barely contained excitement. “Australia is both a continent and an island. But we’re running out of time!”
"Is that true?" You ask suddenly.
"Shh!" Says the person who likes cricket. "It's a test match."
"About Australia."
"We won't know THAT until the third DAY."
A distant “pock” noise. The sound of thirty people saying “tsk,” sorrowfully.
“And the baby’s dropped the egg. Four legs over or we’re done for, as long as it doesn’t rain.”
The villain might be dead? You begin to find yourself emotionally invested.
There are mild distant cheers. “Oh, and with twelve sticky wickets t' over and t’ seagull’s exploded,” the man from the North says as if all of his dreams have come true. “What a beautiful day.” Your person who likes cricket relaxes. It is tea break.
The villain, apparently alive, describes the best hat in the audience as “like a funnel made of dove-colored net, but backwards, with flies trapped in it.”
This is every bit as good as that time in Australia in 1975, they all agree, drinking their tea and eating home-made cakes sent in by the fans. The poet comments favorably on the icing and sugar-preserved violets. The Yorkshire man discourses on the nature of sponge. The villain clatters his cup too hard on his saucer. To cover his embarrassment, the poet begins scrolling through Twitter on his phone, reading aloud the best memes in his enchanting milky voice. Then, with joy, he reads an @ from an ornithologist at the University of Reading: seagulls do eat tacos! A reference is cited; the poet reads it aloud. Everyone cheers.
You are honestly - against your will - kind of into it! but also: weirdly enraged.
“Was that ... it?” you ask, deeming it safe to interrupt.
“No,” says the person who likes cricket, “This is second tea break on the first day. We won’t know where we really are until lunch tomorrow.”
And - because you cannot stop them - you have to accept this; if cricket teaches you anything, it is this gentle and radical acceptance. "
? That’s exactly how games develop. Until the rules are codified there is no distinction between any games at all. Plenty of countries had people kicking balls, or bladders, or anything round. So did Britain.
There was an organisation in Britain that codified the game of association football. It’s those rules that distinguish it from other games played with balls. Rugby was codified in a different way. Different ball type. Different tackling rules. Different scoring mechanism, teams sizes, rules on ball handling etc.
Those rugby rules were then changed over time in the US to give us the game that is American football.
The problem with this is that there are multiple codes of rules for some sports, but no-one seriously proposes that they are different sports.
The NFHS, NCAA and NFL each have separate rule codes for American football. That doesn't mean that they are different sports.
Also, there are rules in many cases, they're just local: the FA rules are the first codified rules of football, but there were the Sheffeld rules and the Cambridge rules and so on before the FA was founded. Rugby School published its rules of "football" even earlier than that - that (rather than the myth about William Webb-Ellis) is why the later sport of rugby football was so-named, it was people playing football by the rules published by Rugby School.
Teams within a single area were all playing by the same, standardised, rules long before the FA rules were written - teams in Sheffield played each other by the Sheffield rules, for instance. But when a team from Sheffield caught a train up to Leeds to play a Leeds team, they had to agree whether to play by the (widely published) Sheffield rules or the (written down by the Leeds clubs but not published) Leeds rules, or by compromise rules. Once the FA rules (themselves a compromise between the published Sheffield and Cambridge rules and the unpublished London rules) were determined, all the various other rules gradually faded away as everyone came to accept the FA as the ultimate rule-making body.
But this isn't a binary, on-off process; Sheffield Rules continued to be run separately for about a decade after the FA was founded, and it was only changes to the FA rules to bring them closer to Sheffield (notably, the adoption of the corner kick) that convinced Sheffield to finally accept the FA rules.
There is a difference - of kind, not just of degree - between a single rule-making body with a standardised sport on the one hand, and lots of individual clubs each with their own rules, and having to negotiate compromise rules whenever two play each other, on the other hand. But there are lots of intermediate steps in that process, and picking out one of those steps and proclaiming it as a binary and the foundation of the sport is, at best, dubious.
Yes there are games that are largely the same with slightly different rules and games that are totally different from each other. Nobody is going to put a rugby team and a soccer team on a pitch and call it the same game.
Some games are close enough to play a compromise game (like Gaelic football and Australian football with limited success). But everybody knows they are watching a compromise game. (American football seems to have some minor differences in rules, but that’s actually rare. )
It’s not at all dubious to say that the rules the FA created were the creation of association football, or that the games of Gaelic football were created in thurles in the late 19C. Nor does the existence of Sheffield rules alter this matter.
If the Sheffield game had dominated, that might have been the game called football in most of the world, but that too would have an origin story.
What’s actually much more interesting, and a blow to the multiple origins theory, is that association football isn’t a compromise game hammered out between different ball games across Europe and South America, nor is it - as some say here - driven by British imperialism.
In fact the FA didn’t take or proselytize the game across the world. FIFA was founded without the FA, and the FA (and the other associations in the U.K.) were asked to join later - much to their surprise and perhaps chagrin.
In fact the “home nations” - led by the FA - left FIFA more than once for political reasons.
Yet the game spread - unmoored from its founding country.
It would be as if france, Argentina and a few other countries had asked Australia to join an international body playing Australian rules football following the exact same rules, without Australia previously knowing or caring much about spreading the game.
Why did association football spread so fast and so uniformly?
I’m not sure, that probably needs an entire book, but I think we can say it has an origin in England, and it clearly isn’t based on a compromise between multiple different forms of football in multiple countries.
The codification is the game of association football brought the game of association football into existence. Rugby went a different way with a different code although both were based on general ball games played in the era.
Rugby league later breaks away from rugby union and creates its own code. In Ireland we can trace the game if Gaelic football go a meeting in Co Tipperary in 1884. There are other ball games around the world.
These games have different codes. The codes create the the games. Gaelic football did not originate in China. The codification is the game.
> Like Scott, I do not want to preach radical skepticism. I want to preach scientific reasoning. If you’re interested in the research on $topic_x, you should familiarize yourself with the methods of that field, and especially with the field’s most critical voices. You should know what’s right and what’s wrong and be able to recognize all of the issues that are common enough for the field’s researchers to see them with a sideways glance.
> Most people are not equipped to do this. When they are, they may not know they’re capable; when they’re not, they may wrongly believe they’re capable.
Is there something about dementia that somehow "erases" the schizophrenia? I ask because I have an elderly relative who developed paranoid schizophrenia in her early forties, during a period of significant stress and disruption. She was briefly institutionalized in the early 1980s, but once released refused to continue to medicate. Fast forward to 2021, at which point she was in her 80s. Her schizophrenia had noticeably worsened during the prior 3 or 4 years, and after an incident involving a blocked intersection and hallucinations she was briefly institutionalized again and put on medication which she received for one year, ending about 6 months ago (when whatever legal authority allowed her carers to medicate her ended). During this year, the medication had little effect. However, in recent months she has started to develop noticeable dementia; this has been accompanied by an almost total cessation of the symptoms of her schizophrenia. I've known her my whole life, and the change is remarkable. The fear, the hallucinations, the conviction that there is a shadowy group of bad guys out to get her -- all just gone, replaced instead by many of the symptoms of dementia. Which leads back to my original question: is there something about dementia that somehow "erases" the schizophrenia?
I don’t know but many geriatric patients develop paranoia or delusions as part of dementia. Also for example Lewy body dementia involves hallucinations. That is different from schizophrenia of course.
Not a doctor. I do have some experience here though. My dad suffered from paranoid delusions most of his adult life life.
The thing about the large set of incorrect beliefs he had is that they were very elaborately connected and one thing would reference another decades earlier. To someone on the outside it would be obvious that the whole thing was preposterous but he interlinked various random ordinary events into a complex whole that he sustained for decades.
He died before any loss of cognition but I would think that memory loss especially would bring the house of cards down.
So the 2022 ACX Survey included two questions on cancelation, basically "Have you ever cut off a family member over politics?" and "Has a family member ever cut you off over politics?"
So I did a deep dive on each of these questions with a bunch of R code, 20+ graphs and 2 ML models. Check it out.
> In terms of actionable, real insight, I can only say that you should be careful around extreme leftists, Marxists, and people who have recently moved significantly to the left
Well, that explains what happened with my old IRL friend group... :-/
It's more the moving to the extreme left part. It's possible that the move was recent enough that they hadn't had time to figure out that they shouldn't take it all completely literally, and if things had happened a few years later, it would have worked out better. But probably not, since malice was involved. The tactics would be adapted to suit the situation.
You mean the main agenda was malice, and degree of leftieness and how literally it’s taken doesn’t really matter? However far left they are, and however literally it’s taken, the current configuration of beliefs can be used maliciously?
Sorry if I wasn't clear. There was one malicious person who exploited a property of a social group that had recently moved from left to far left. Had the social group not been exploitable that way, I believe the malicious person would have chosen a different means.
Most of my extremely woke Harvard grad students feel a lot of guilt and fear about how in the privacy of their inner life they are not feeling and thinking exactly what they believe they should. One in the School of Ed had been browbeaten with the idea that a teacher should love all of their students. She had one very difficult and unpleasant student who demanded lots of meetings to "clarify the nature of the assignment," and then turned assignments in late anyhow using excuses that were obvious lies. Not surprisingly, my patient did not love this student. Jeez, I said, how could you possibly love her? You'll probably have to work hard to even to give her what you do owe her -- things like a fair evaluation of her work. My patient then told quite convincing stories about long dialogs in School of Ed classes about various situations in which teachers do not love a certain student, and in all of these situations the teacher's failure to love is viewed as a manifestation of unforgivably awful character traits -- racism, elitism,, white fragility. etc. It's really creepy. Anyhow, point is that wokism has woven into it of a great deal of cruelty and controllingness. Those who manage to climb enough stairs and step on enough faces to be seen as Wokeness Leaders have the power to wreck the lives, reputations and self-esteem of others. Nobody involved seems to notice the disjunction between the extreme tolerance wokies advocate for those they see as victims and their extreme cruelty towards those they see as privileged. So maybe the person in your circle would have chosen another means, but extreme leftiness does end itself especially well to the assassination of peers.
PLEASE HELP with tendency of SELF HARM . I subjectively feel a failure , but it genuinely feels real. When ai know it's not, but it paralyses my chain of thought.
I have a lovely kid ( reason why my suicidal ideations were share and managed in the last 6 years at the local Montreal psychiatric ward ( Montréal).
I am in an relation that changed from me being the primary provider the first 7 years to being the decreasing money maker to being a graduate student ( yet again) just to have flexibility ( not better remuneration work, actually ended with a strangling student loan) , just to be around my "in vitro" desired kid. She's soon 9 and the Apple of my eye.
I am male in a " traditional " marriage with a now high earning spouse, that's slowly getting ashamed by my increased girth, minimal to no income ( since Jan.). Things that are expressed at the very occasion.
I actually am genuinely happy I am not going to the "social events", and play, draw , make silly stories with hand puppets (á la Mel Brooks " Spaceballs.
I am doing actively guided meditation and breathing and self ACT and the once a month psychologist ( that's more about deep dives in self acceptance and self care - Eastern European high demanding performance parents that made me get in med school and collect useless grad papers (last one from last year McGill)
I just , subjectively, feel that I am inadequate, a burden ( because it's like Bart Simpson" I am doomed if I do and I am doomed if I don't " ). Enforced by daily remainders of my partner that changed since the corporate ladder power skews perception ( I know, because I was in that distorted view in an academic, research / corporate management place).
My head , feels like a pressure cooker, and my self harm is hitting it with hard objects . A twisted auto dafé ( self punishment) for the life long association that performance and pecuniary health are associated with cerebral competence.
So the desired outcome ( completely wrong and counterintuitive after I self inflict various degrees of concussions with the various symptoms) , is to " let go" the pressure of conflicting thoughts that become strong emotions and create the conflicting overload .
Annoyingly, I am aware of the mechanism, and still feels , in the heat of the ruminating moment, as a potentially relief option. And it's always the head ( that incredible tough) .
It's my last 2 weeks of paid membership ( no income so no say) so I am trying to get help before it escalates.
I am familiar with CBT, Törneke frameworks, ACT, DBT . And the counterproductive and distorted premise.
If any help in re-framing, managing, re-directing of the "cranial self harm as a ( false) relief, would be genuinely appreciated.
Thank for the opportunity to ask the community and the grace period, that was the catalyst to share this .
ADHD, sleep apnea and obesity ( very slowly going down after getting some helpful strategies 6 months ago from community.
Well I've got very little helpful advice, apart from being in a potentially similar position of apathy.
"I am male in a " traditional " marriage with a now high earning spouse, that's slowly getting ashamed by my increased girth, minimal to no income ( since Jan.). Things that are expressed at the very occasion."
Kind of hard to understand your sentences. Are you saying your spouse is explicitly telling you you're embarrassing them? It's an important distinction between them saying it and you just thinking it. Likeiwise, when you say "just to be around your kid", are you saying people will stop you seeing them if you don't do things that way? Or is it just a scheduling thing where you can see them any time but won't have the time?
What's your spouse's advice been? If you're worried about your spouse's opinion you definitely should be talking things through with them. Don't, like, smother them with your problems, but they're important and need discussing.
>I actually am genuinely happy I am not going to the "social events", and play, draw , make silly stories with hand puppets
This is perfectly normal and more about personality than problems. But I always think of a scene from Metamorphosis; the sister sees the bug crawling on the walls and starts removing the furniture to make it easier, meanwhile the bug is trying to stop her because it's the only reminder they have of their humanity. You need to make an effort to attend at least some functions, so you don't get completely lost in your own head.
I don't know how well meditation will help, but I kind of have to agree with Martin, the best way to get out of the funk is to go do something tangible. If you can get a job, get one. If your spouse has things you can help with, help with them. The less you accomplish, the worse you'll feel.
What else have you tried hitting? I've got cheap plastic Ikea-style tables that can be kicked apart in a lovely explosion of reattachable pieces, it's much less damaging than hitting your own head. (If you have actual throbbing pain in your head, a tight-fitting baseball cap works nicely.)
IDK doctor help thyself. Sounds like you know the solution to your problems. The solution is to ignore them, stop making whatever excuses you are using for obstacles, and start moving your life forward.
Get a job, like next week. Do a good job at it. Develop some self respect. All this is coming out of your sense of worthlessness. Discipline yourself, not with hits to the head (which are easy, harmful and pointless), but through sitting through a work shift and giving it your all the whole time (which is hard).
Just stop doing the behaviors you know are wrong, and start doing the behaviors you wish you were doing no matter how superficially unpleasant it seems.
It might also help to cut out whatever your main distraction is cold turkey. Be that porn or video games or internet browsing or whatever.
The stress will go down when you aren’t secretly (and not so secretly) constantly humiliating yourself through your behavior.
Lots of people deal with some version of this problem of one severity or another. The solution is always to make positive changes in your life.
Thank you for your thoughts. I am in total agreement with the harmful and pointless. It was a genuine thing happening in my surgical residency ( more than) 30 yrs to get physically and debatably pointless kicked . " Tough love " to became a " real pro".
After some decades apparently backfired and I am looking to not get "disciplined ", but to find a more soft alternative approach. I was disciplined since kindergarten .
"Get a job, like next week. Do a good job at it. Develop some self respect. All this is coming out of your sense of worthlessness. Discipline yourself, not with hits to the head (which are easy, harmful and pointless), but through sitting through a work shift and giving it your all the whole time (which is hard)."
If it were that simple, he'd have done it already. And he's not some teenage slacker, he knows how to do it, he was the primary provider for his family for seven years.
It's quite possible to be in the frame of mind in which slashing one's thigh or whacking oneself in the head is subjectively less painful than applying for a job, starting a running/lifting routine, or any other long-term positive change. Often because the former are mechanically very easy and bring a certain perceived sense of 'justice' for one's failings. The latter are complex and require sustained executive function.
To apply for a job, you have to face the possibility of rejection and externally-reinforced feeling of failure, which to someone already traumatised by a sense of failure (not least having failed to live up to the standards he's 'supposed' to have met, cf parents, etc.) can be a near-impossible prospect.
Anyway, I suspect the post was more of an impulsive vent than something written with any reasonable expectation of help, but I'd recommend taking a step away from iterating endlessly on oneself, learning more and more about the tortured labyrinth of one's own mind via psychological lore, and focusing on the kid and the spouse. Draw strength from the sense of being relied upon - they need your head intact, you fool. Also easier said than done, of course.
Yea and no. Fundemnetqllly that is the hurdle to be jumped. Easiest to just get on with it. IDK I was very depressed for nearly a decade from ~12-20? Getting out of it wasn’t pills or counseling or magic.
It was getting some actual wins in my life, wins I earned through hard work. I don’t disagree focusing on family night also work, but ultimately the path to mental health in a situation like this involves just being behaving in mentally healthy ways in most cases. He feels like a failure because he is failing by his and his wife’s standards. Stop doing that.
I was a "winner " ( high earning surgical subspecialty until I swapped for corporate high life, disillusioned in my ( misplaced) ethical expectations and jumped with gusto in the dubious criteria of various academic activities and paper collection.
"Stop doing that". That's my intention.
I know it's a substack and not a therapy session . I wanted to get a broader and more varied perspective than my narrowing tunnel vision in getting a potential reframe.
PS. One of the perplexing thing that's counterintuitive for my ( again misplaced understanding of a supportive and symbiotic partnership is the drastic transformation in the last 15 years of my partner. The kid is the element that precludes me to just pack and merrily go away to my former win ( I am still licensed, funny enough- de professionalized clinically, but that's standard issue in non - US parts)
I agree with most of that. The guy needs some wins (again) and to develop the habit and reasonable expectation of winning. At least at the start of the curve reversal, though, those wins need to be small and near-certain, to prime the pump. And they need to be at least somewhat ego-preserving so as not to feel like ritual humiliations instead of wins. (So, despite any Calvinist-work-ethic instincts to say otherwise, no shelf-stacking for the guy whose parents wanted him to be a big time doctor, whose solution to dwindling money was more grad school, and who still managed for seven years to stay ahead of his corporate-shark spouse.)
But I'm sure his therapist has/will have all this handled better than a rando like me in a substack comment section.
Thank you for your advice in getting the perceived infinite inertial task into minced small REAL wins.
The " ritual humiliations instead of wins" it's a very probable cause that was ( hard to believe ) not very salient.
It's so funny that we can notice the blindspots in others, not so easy to oneself. Especially when ego and self worth are consistently presented as weakness and egotistical tendencies and turned against oneself for easier abusa and learned compensatory over performance to be accepted. Having ADHD diagnosed late was an aggravating factor.
Thank you sincerely and I do appreciate your " rando" act . Therapists are very helpful and invaluable. But, as I personally noticed, when you follow your training, especially if you are confident and have results, it's sometimes conducive in the desired result oriented outcome, to miss some apparent small nuances. That I am not aware, ergo I am not able to share ( or worse, I consider irrelevant ).
Thank you again, "rando" person. I think it's a helpful strategy worth exploring. Most comments are from a different perspective. Even if true as statements ( some obvious) are not actionable in my circumstance in this stage.
I think you've probably provided the answer in your first sentence. Your tendency to self harm is potentiated by your feeling a failure. You project your feelings of failure into your spouse but they most likely emanate initially from your own consciousness. You believe you are a failure because you aren't earning and because you're gaining weight. You resist making an effort to earn money for some reason, even though you are able because of some reason that isn't clear
That's a valid statement. I don't resist making money. I just focus on my kid. The last corporate and last academic gigs were borderline ethical ( for my view and one of the reasons my postgrad and re entertaining grad school at middle age was a bad idea - when young I was more credulous and blissful ignorant).
I can get back to earning more than we need for a decent life, but my time with the kid ( last frozen ovule) it's more precious than an extra room, bigger tax and the litany of fragile fancy german cars .
I would agree with you. In our human realm, the only thing that really matters, as far as I can tell, is learning how to love responsibly. What better teacher than a child?
(Sorry, posted before I had finished) I am guessing you are deeply depressed, to the point of apathy. Your written language is almost as if you cannot bring yourself to articulate fully. As a Buddhist, I fully support that life is deeply unsatisfactory. Each moment of experience is suffused with dhukka, unsatisfactoriness and there is simply no resolution to this state that doesn't involve total cessation. However, taking oneself out of the centre of one's life can help to ameliorate the situation. I recommend you give some though to helping others, volunteer perhaps.
Look, we're random smart people, not oracles or miracle workers. Get yourself out of the position of asking randos for advice about a problem of this kind! You need to find a psychotherapist and see them once or twice a week and stick with them, and also get a psychopharm consult. See the best practitioners you can find. Research the options, or ask us for advice about finding great practitioners, which is a question we're more likely to be able to answer If your wife is high-earning she probably also has excellent insurance, and even if she does not you two can afford to pay out of pocket. If your wife resents it, go anyway. If she's out of patience with you and also unwilling to fund your health care I'd say the relationship's in enough trouble that there's not much to lose by going against her wishes regarding the costs of psychotherapy. And if you haven't gotten treatment for your sleep apnea, get a CPAP immediately. Problems that seem richly psychological sometimes fade away to nothing when sleep apnea is treated, and even if yours do not you'll be more alert and in a better position.
Thank you. Can you recommend a great astute practitioner in Montréal. I am seeing monthly the clinical director at Allan Memorial Institute and a specialist clinical psychologist after " shopping for 10 years). I indeed use various Bilevel ( BiPap) machines in the last 15 years ( I realized I had sleep apnea late, not realizing that snoring in my lower normoponderal 20's ( in the early '90's the diagnostic - at least in Europe- was non existent) I had no idea it existed in my 4 years of med school and 2 years of shadowing the heads of departments. As it was also the case with ADHD that was not a thing. My sleep apnea is controlled in the last decade with 99% compliance . ( the extremely rare afternoon falling asleep shortly with a book. ( I don't nap , prefer Sam Harris or Calm or jazz listening ). And I maybe should mention that I was able easily get in 12-18 hours of creative flow before. This is reduced now to 3 max 4 ( various music, reading, medical animations/ illustrations) . Not sure if relevant.?
No, I can't recommend a great astute practitioner in Montreal. You are going to have to go the route everyone else does with an unusual, hard-to-treat problem: Research the hell out of it, become a mini-expert on options, then fight to get in with a great astute practitioner. This site seems to me smart, and like a good place start: https://www.selfinjury.bctr.cornell.edu
You can also try asking on here. However, I recommend that in your post you do not talk in detail about your self-injury. While from your point of view a detailed description may give a full and especially persuasive picture, from the point of view of most readers your description of your situation is so disturbing that they are likely to skip on to the next post after reading a few sentences of it. Also you should not say stuff like this is the last chance to post because soon ouy can no longer afford a paid membership. First of all, even if you have a non-paid membership I'm pretty sure you can post on threads like the present one. I believe it is only the hidden open threads that are only open to paid subscribers. Also, since you mention that your wife is high-earning nobody's going to take seriously the idea that you can't cough up $2.50 per week for a paid membership. Saying "this is my last chancet o ask for help" does not motivate readers. Instead, it makes them skeptical of everything else you say.
So if you post here askng for leads on great practitioners , just say simply that you experience self-hatred and have a habit of self-injury and are looking for a good therapist.
I wonder if anyone's ever designed a reverse index fund where you include say all the companies in the S&P 500, and then use some type of methodology to *exclude* a smaller number of stocks you think are losers. I've been reading a lot of the classic works on value investing recently- lots of smart people putting forth a lot of effort to figure out what stocks will rise in the future. By contrast, in my 'reverse value fund', you accept that you don't know which stocks will rise- but you use the same methodology to try to determine 'which of these stocks are terrible and will only fall in the next decade'. Have large amounts of debt, declining profitability, lots of management shakeups, bad P/E ratio- just a terrible balance sheet overall.
I just finished Peter Lynch's books (who beat his benchmark for like 20 years in a row in the 70s through 90s). He said that he owned up to 1400 stocks, so he was essentially constructing his own kinda index. Inspired me to say 'what if you were mostly an index but did some minimal stock picking', as opposed to the classic value investing 'only own 30 stocks which you have extremely thoroughly researched', etc.
To beat the index funds, it's not enough to figure out which companies will do well and which will do poorly. You need to somehow make better predictions that the market as a whole. You want to buy companies that will do better than the market expects, which could be a good company that's even better than the market thinks, or a terrible company that's less terrible than the market thinks.
Would this really result in significant gains? You'd need to boost the returns more than the associated expenses, and I think that's the problem. If the majority of your fund is still just the passive index, then you're only gaining a small amount of alpha here.
I don't think that a large amount of alpha year-in and year-out is realistic. Whereas a small amount of alpha, but every single year, adds up a lot over a long period of time. I don't think there's any associated expenses with merely choosing not to buy some overvalued or low-quality companies
Well, someone has to do the choosing, right? And if they're any good at their job, they're going to command significant compensation.
Because at the end of the day this is still stock picking. It's saying that there are companies that, despite various negative indicators, are still overvalued by _other_ high-paid professionals. If it were obvious which stocks were overpriced, then their prices would fall until they were no longer so.
The logic for under-performing companies is no different than the logic for over-performing companies: if you want someone to do better than the market as a whole, you need to find someone the talent to consistently out-guess the market as a whole, and this ability is quite rare.
Yes it would, and this is more or less what a lot of hedge funds will do. Having a short-only position is pretty risky because an increase in the overall market can easily screw you over, so you'll balance out your short positions with a much broader long position to remain overall market-neutral.
I think it would be a nice courtesy to tell people how long they are banned for, whether in that comment, or privately (which of course may have happened already).
One of the major things keeping large numbers of people very poor is human hostility rather than nature. How does this interact with effective altruism?
My impression is that effective altruism is (was?) about looking for testable interventions largely based on effective altruists having more access to wealth that those who need help.
However, a lot of poverty is caused by war, oppressive government, and crime. What's more, people in refugee camps are forbidden in important ways from joining the larger economies and creating wealth.
About what proportion of poor people are poor because of human intervention rather than non-human problems like malaria? I realize this is a vague question since the numbers don't necessarily exist and human and non-human problems interact.
What level of coercion are you willing to accept to solve the worlds problems?
America stepping in to truly be 'world police' is something that would absolutely be imperialism or colonialism - the only way to reliably stamp out all war is to be willing to blow up everyone who tries it, and ousting oppressive governments similarly requires at least the threat of a big stick (though I suspect after the first handful future targets might step down willingly, the first 2-3 will absolutely call your bluff), and it requires sticking around for generations which the American public likes much less than a quick shock-and-awe blitz.
Ending crime is harder still, with America patently unable to do it even at home.
Finally, while America's values are definitely better than anywhere with ongoing civil wars or genocides, they definitely have some problems with religious extremists influencing policy, and any colonies they form would probably be comparable to Puerto Rico or Guam at best - no longer actively violent, but nowhere near as prosperous as the US mainland.
I was actually trying to pick up the problem from the other end-- should people feel responsibility for the global poor in general, when some large proportion of the poverty is highly intractable?
I think that does help emphasise the supererogatory (as opposed to obligatory) nature of global charity, but "solving some of the problems" is still almost trivially a good deed even if "solving all of them" seems impossible.
This isn't exactly about what's supererogatory-- maybe there's an absolute obligation to solve the problems that can be solved-- but there isn't an obligation to solve the whole problem because there are parts that can't be solved.
I think I didn't do enough to distinguish between progressivism and effective altruism-- progressivism (as I understand it) at least some of the time has absolute obligations while effective altruism is more about what's feasible.
I don’t think the idea that releasing large numbers of refugees is zero cost to the economies they are released into is very well supported. Sure it is amazing for them, but at some point you start over stressing the institutions/culture/norms of the host society, and if collapses you might be in a wildly worse situation.
There are definitely compromise positions, where refugees are allowed to work by default without automatically being granted permanent residency and citizenship (eg. if the political regime in their country of origin changes to one that is no longer hostile, or the war there ends).
Having said that, I agree that any one country unilaterally becoming much more refugee friendly would rapidly get swamped, causing at minimum political turmoil (cf Germany with the massive Syrian refugee wave). One would need to coordinate a broad international agreement to change norms in tandem, so that no one society has too large an influx.
It may be better than you think-- people would be less likely to move to the more stressed areas. Also, refugees frequently come in with skills and willingness to work, so they increase the capacity of the places they move to.
And many more are caused by the wars the US *doesn't* intervene in; a lot more refugees are coming from Syria than Iraq or Afghanistan (or Yemen, which I do hold the US somewhat responsible for).
I agree that having fewer endless wars would be a great thing but plenty of countries are capable of dissolving into civil war all on their own, it doesn't take some CIA plot to explain. If anything, direct US involvement tends to end the direct conflict stage rather quickly with overwhelming military might, and thus doesn't produce much refugee flow. It's the drawn out low tech and/or proxy wars that are the really brutal ones.
"We have one example of the alignment problem and what percentage of our resources go into solving it, which is the human alignment problem.
Several large experiments got run under ‘what if we used alternative methods or fewer resources to get from each according to their ability in the ways that are most valuable, so we could allocate resources the way we’d prefer’ and they… well, let’s say they didn’t go great.
Every organization or group, no matter how large or small, spends a substantial percentage of time and resources, including a huge percentage of the choice of distribution of its surplus, to keep people somewhat aligned and on mission. Every society is centered around these problems.
Raising a child is frequently about figuring out a solution to these problems, and dealing with the consequences of your own previous actions that created related problems or failed to address them.
Having even a small group of people who are actually working together at full strength, without needing to constantly fight to hold things together, is like having superpowers. If you can get it, much is worth sacrificing in its pursuit.
I would go so far as to say that the vast majority of potential production, and potential value, gets sacrificed on this alter, once one includes opportunities missed."
My impression is that dealing with "human hostility" has externalities that detract from it's usefulness and most actionable "human hostility" is caught up in extremely expensive zero-sum games.
Or, to rephrase, the Evil Warlord of Over There is a very bad person who oppresses his people and it's very possible that billions of dollars in lobbying the US Department of Exploding People will lead to his elimination, which is way more cost effective than billions of dollars of malaria nets.
But, problem one, the externalities, is that the Evil Warlord is friends with the Kinda Good Warlord we want to make into a Good Warlord and he will not appreciate his friend exploding. Or the fact that the US Department of Exploding People is...not really good at establishing democratic norms and the all the junior Warlords of the Evil Warlord are...pretty evil, so we're probably just going to put some other evil guy in charge.
Problem two, zero-sum games, is the fact that, actually, tons of people are interested in supporting or removing the Evil Warlord. Tons of actors, local and international, are spending lots of money to try to influence different actors to "do something" about the Evil Warlord. And, after awhile, you find that just spending billions on lobbying isn't going to drive action, because other guys will just up their spending to counter balance, if you actually want to get things done you need to build relationships and write papers and host cocktail parties and...oh.
Part of appeal of effective altruism, at least the part that caught my attention, was the humility and simplicity of focusing on the simplest, most actionable charities, rather than the highest potential impact. No one has a problem with malaria nets, there's no weird political issues, it's just a problem of funding.
This. "The world has evil people" is big impact, but not particularly tractable. To the extent that it's 'neglected', it's not an issue money can solve - the Saudis have way more than your whole movement ever will - so while it might be extremely worth discussing with any friends you have who work in the White House there's not that much to be gained by making it an "EA cause area"
The rich world didn't get rid of malaria at all, it never had it. The tropics are full of really awful diseases not present in temperate regions, and most of the diseases we did 'get rid of' were via either vaccination (hard to do for malaria, but it's being worked on) or via things as simple as nets, like "washing hands" and "not letting sewage get into the drinking water"
"Malaria has been successfully eliminated or significantly reduced in certain areas, but not globally. Malaria was once common in the United States, but the US eliminated malaria from most parts of the country in the early 20th century using vector control programs, which combined the monitoring and treatment of infected humans, draining of wetland breeding grounds for agriculture and other changes in water management practices, and advances in sanitation, including greater use of glass windows and screens in dwellings."
One of Eliezer's good predictions was that human intelligence was like a tiny dot in the range of possible intelligences. I don't think anyone saw the LLMs and the like coming. Any thoughts about other possible structures?
Here's a new thing in the works: Capable autonomous agents, FML.
Jim Fan: Generally capable, autonomous agents are the next frontier of AI. They continuously explore, plan, and develop new skills in open-ended worlds, driven by survival & curiosity. Minecraft is by far the best testbed with endless possibilities for agents.
Voyager has 3 key components:
1) An iterative prompting mechanism that incorporates game feedback, execution errors, and self-verification to refine programs;
2) A skill library of code to store & retrieve complex behaviors;
3) An automatic curriculum to maximize exploration.
First, Voyager attempts to write a program to achieve a particular goal, using a popular Javascript Minecraft API (Mineflayer). The program is likely incorrect at the first try. The game environment feedback and javascript execution error (if any) help GPT-4 refine the program.
Second, Voyager incrementally builds a skill library by storing the successful programs in a vector DB. Each program can be retrieved by the embedding of its docstring. Complex skills are synthesized by composing simpler skills, which compounds Voyager’s capabilities over time.
Third, an automatic curriculum proposes suitable exploration tasks based on the agent’s current skill level & world state, e.g. learn to harvest sand & cactus before iron if it finds itself in a desert rather than a forest. Think of it as an in-context form of *novelty search*.
LLMs increase the probability that this prediction is wrong, or doesn't apply here.
LLMs are much more human-like than our vision of intelligent AIs from 10 years ago. Moreover, they are trained to imitate human behavior. So even if human intelligence is just a tiny dot on a vast spectrum, it is possible that we manage to train AI exactly up to this level, but not further. Because going further needs a bootstrapping process, while going to human level apparently does not need this bootstrapping.
I am not saying how likely exactly I find this scenario, that we hit a ceiling at human intelligence level. But 10 years ago we didn't really see a reason why AI should max out at human level, and now there is a very concrete scenario for why this might happen.
> LLMs are much more human-like than our vision of intelligent AIs from 10 years ago
I personally disagree. Ten years ago (or even two years ago) my vision of what an intelligent AI would need to be like was much more human-like than the bizarre form of words-first "intelligence" that LLMs seem to be reaching towards.
I now think that it might be possible to get something with human or superhuman level performance on most tasks in a totally non-human way simply by hooking up language models to a bunch of more specialised subunits (for vision, object manipulation etc).
I think there's potential for LLMs to, in some ways, exceed human level intelligence despite being trained on human-produced data, simply because it has seen far more training data than any individual human has.
Currently the biggest blind spot for these models is interacting with the physical world, so one could imagine disjoint breakthroughs in that side of the field that yield robots whose movements are more dexterous, fluid, and rapid than any human, but which have no world model and therefore can only do highly prescribed actions with these impressive capabilities. So for instance a humanoid robot that could beat human Olympians in any sport, but which is still completely useless at cleaning your house.
Keep in mind that early-2022 Large Language Models are trained on basically pure text, and don't currently have any video or tactile training input.
Google's PALM-E, notably, directly gave that model video input and a toy-scaled robotics system for it's training runs, with a much broader base of skill sets (though I believe it had a lower parameter count than GPT-4 did)
I've been reading this book called Ways of Being by James Bridle that specifically focuses on this topic. It's a bit new-agey and I wouldn't necessarily call it rigorous, but Bridle does have some interesting examples of what he considers to be 'non-human intelligence'. One example he gives is the ways plants can 'communicate' with one another via chemicals and movement.
Good question - and does all the focus, excitement and capital going into LLMs mean other AI forms will be overlooked for longer (or worse like Britain locking into too narrow train gauges by industrialising first) - or will we have useful contagion of enthusiasm for other research rather than crowding out?
The concept of unions seems oppressive to me, given that employees can always theoretically switch jobs if they don’t like theirs, but once there’s a union, a company can’t really go and hire non union workers. I understand it’s unusual to consider unions as having more power than those in control of corporations, but it does seem so to some extent. What am I missing?
>> employees can always theoretically switch jobs if they don’t like theirs, but once there’s a union, a company can’t really go and hire non union workers.
I don't think this is accurate. I'm not an expert on unions, but as I recall the most recent issue in labor law has been court cases like Janus, which revolve around "agency fees" - fees which non-union employees at a unionized worksite pay to the union to cover "their share" of the union benefits cost. The idea was to eliminate a free rider problem, where people could opt-out of the union but still receive the higher wages and such, but there are legitimate questions and lawsuits around whether it's fair to make a non-union employee do that, what goes into calculating a "fair share," etc.
But the whole premise wouldn't be an issue (and indeed would be impossible) if unionized employers simply were unable to hire non-union workers at all.
Are you familiar with the term sweatshop? The My Pillow guy runs one.
I see my local grocery store workers are on strike. The big company employing them wants to cut their health care benefits. Hell, it would increase profits and maybe even reduce costs.
I don’t care. I’ll pay a nickel more for bread. I’m not crossing that picket line. Live better. Work Union.
I think an important point here is that "union" today describes a certain government-enforced legal institution whose exact boundaries are different in different industries and situations, totally different from the intuitive concept of "workers can unionize if they want and then make deals".
In "the state of nature", a company could absolutely try hiring non-union workers, the union workers could try striking, and the company could back down or keep fighting. All of this seems perfectly fair to me.
The current system does contain lots of things that seem oppressive and unfair on both sides, but only because it's a government-imposed solution to the fact that in the state of nature everyone kept striking and getting in stupid fights, and the government imposed a compromise that limits the freedom of both sides and usually prevents that.
I don't have strong opinions about whether it's good or bad, but I don't think standard libertarian considerations really apply because nobody is trying to do that.
I also note that the set of government imposed rules on both sides differs dramatically by jurisdiction and even by field. America is generally considered to have very weak worker protections - cf all the news stories about eg. Amazon firing people for trying to unionize, which would in most of the rest of the West be doubly illegal because you can't fire without cause and firing someone for unionising is an extra-illegal cause that's worse than if you fired them just for being hotter than you or something - but simultaneously has very powerful public sector unions that cause all sorts of issues.
The real thing you should ask yourself is why you are concentrating on this supposed curtailment of liberty? Frankly even if it was a curtailment of the rights of workers (who would prefer to not join a union) the benefits outweigh the costs.
What ensures that the benefits outweigh the costs? If the union is mandatory, it has no incentives to actually better the life of the workers it nominally represents, rather than bettering the life of the union bosses that actually run it.
I note that AFAIK most (all?) powerful unions do not have secret ballot voting, so they are not in any real sense democratic
Of course the union works to the benefit of workers. That leaders get “rich“ is not that relevant, they are paid to represent workers afterall, not unlike agents.
They tend to favor the interests of longer-term workers over those of relative new hires, choking out dynamism & growth over time as frustrated junior employees leave.
That's hopelessly naïve. It's a classic principal/agent problem, if you have no incentives for the decision maker to actually do what's best for those they nominally represent, the Iron Law of Bureaucracy will come into play exceedingly fast.
To use a different example: Monarchs rule for the good of the country and its people, in theory. How well aligned were they in practice, historically?
It’s a root of paranoia for me. I want to be able to start a business and run it in the way I want to run it, and employ whoever I want to imploy (not from an unfairly discriminatiry pov), and have the cultural values I want to drive. So many companies seem lo lose their edge when governance gets overly impeded by employee activism.
" I want to be able to start a business" Do you mean this theoretically or do you actually want to start a business, but this is stopping you? Just above 10% of US employees are in unions and many of those are in teachers unions, police unions, postal unions, and other government unions. Only about 6% of private sector workers are unionized.
I hold the same views of unions as you, but they do not scare me and I don think private industry unions are a major issue in the US holding back economic growth. (Public unions are different and should be abolished).
It's theoretical, not actually stopping me. But I am frustrated by the state of affairs, particularly in California, where "employment at will" has become progressively harder to maintain in practice. I get it, there are "bad" employers out there, and maybe large and powerful corporations should meet different standards. What frustrates me is that I'll see an article on HackerNews about some group or another unionizing and a lot of people cheer. Similarly a fair amount of the commenters here seem to a-priori be in favor of empowering employees. I don't buy this. I think liquidity in the labor market is incredibly important, and beyond a basic framework of decency and fairness, there should be little in the way. Anyone can start a corporation for virtually free, and enjoy the same rights and privileges as any other corporation.
The transaction between an employee and a company seems straight forward: company pays employee to do something and fires employee if it doesn't work out. Company is motivated to retain good employees and maintain a good reputation to attract other good employees. And employee has an incentive to do a good job to enjoy an income or go to another company if the job is not desirable. But when employees have stronger protections things get funky. Today, an employee is so likely to walk away with some settlement upon any claim against the company, that they can use that to force the company to act in certain way. That, to me, allows a small group of people to wield a ton of power, especially within large public companies. What is the impact of Google not investing more aggressively in defense? Could have Google fired all employees that openly protested their own company's chosen strategy?
I actually think "real" power, such as money or weapons, is easier to appreciate, than the sort of virtual power a few revolutionary employees can have. It can be very destructive, and companies don't have a lot of recourse, due to a combination of legal framework and overton window for how these issues should be handled.
Unions don’t really get involved in hiring decisions anyway - the only liberty being curtailed is the right to not join a union, which is largely an issue in theory rather than practice.
What you describe - including some of the explanation below - sounds rather like there might be cooercion towards the employee, not so much towards the employer. I mean at least not in their possibility to select their staff. One can assume that if somebody really wants to work at a certain firm, and can do so only by joining the union, they will join. 'Cannot hire them' looks like a rare outlier.
In times of rising wages, the transaction costs are higher for employers - they will have to replace a worker at higher wages, while the worker that left can earn more. In times of stagnant or falling wages the situation is reversed. Of course not all industries or regions experience these situations at the same time so both scenarios could happen simultaneously.
There's a saying from somewhere, "The only thing worse than a union is no union."
I think of them like maintaining a military in peacetime. From one perspective, it's dead-weight, a pure loss to the economy, doing nothing useful and serving no good purpose. But of course that only lasts until it's needed, and the very existence of such a thing may keep it from being needed in the first place. There's failure cases in both directions.
I've seen more than a few cases where employers only started treating employees better when "unionization" started to be mentioned. And I've enjoyed a number of the rights that unions fought for and won in the past, especially those two 15-minute breaks per day when doing hourly manual labor. But I've also seen unions support lazy and incompetent people with no work ethic. And as typically organized, I think they actively increase the corruption in the system, rather than merely re-distributing it.
I mean Jews are less than 1% of the population. Not sure that holds.
And I think unions oppress society as a whole. In Argentina, when the transportation union stops, the entire country is on hold. Which is why bus drivers make more than doctors there.
I just meant it as a group that represents less than 1% of the population, which is or has been oppressed, and where the relative number of people is not relevant to whether oppression warranted concern. Obviously an extreme comparison.
> but once there’s a union, a company can’t really go and hire non union workers.
I don't understand this. A company can hire whom they want regardless of union or not union, and often some part of the workers is organized in a union, while others are not. Or even: some are organized in one union, while some others are organized in another union, and others are not organized.
You are correct about unions in some countries, but in America unions tend to be closed shop, where you are forced to join the union (or at minimum pay dues) to work at a place. Unions are also binary, you can't just personally be a member of a union while working in an non-unionised shop.
I find it annoying we don't have different words for these different types.
The Taft–Hartley Act outlawed the closed shop in the United States in 1947. And most states now have right to work laws which further erode the power of unions to make employees join them.
Yes, in theory I agree, but in practice it seems to me that it'll be very rare that Bob doesn't join the union if the company wants him and he wants to work there.
Hence in most cases when employer and Bob agree on cooperating, Bob will be the one cooerced to join. The other option - Bob refuses to join and the firm can't hire him - seems like a rare outlier.
Like most things in economics, it doesn't much matter who nominally pays, the employee and the employer are in practice splitting the bill for the union dues.
The dues aren't really the costly part of unions, though, in that they're a modest flat rent. The pernicious cost is when they make it impossible to remove actively toxic employees, or to automate or otherwise industrialise the business.
Bonus points if the union doesn't allow just anyone to join as a new member, and thus artificially restricts labour supply - eg. the Screen Actors Guild, IIUC, only lets people who've had a speaking line in a movie join, while simultaneously not letting directors hire a mix of members and non-members, making it very hard to get a foot in the door.
I think this is a little off. Firstly, no union in the US can make you join it. The NLRA ensures your right to not join. From what I've read 27 (more than half) of states have banned practices that force non-union members to pay dues. So in fact in the US, unions tend not to force you to pay dues.
Technically correct. However, a union can enter into a legally-enforceable contract with the employer where they agree to only hire union members. In states without right to work laws, of course.
A closed shop means in order to work there one must be a member of the union. The rationale behind these is that the union negotiates for the workers, so if there were workers outside of the union they would still get the benefit of the negotiations without paying dues, or having any other union obligations.
I think unions once served a valuable purpose. Yes, theoretically you could quit your job and do something else, but most employers offered the same kind of working conditions and pay, and colluded to keep things that way. Unions helped break up that block of power over the workforce.
Things are different today, and unions are less important. Maybe they aren't needed anymore, but that doesn't mean they will never be needed again, if the balance of power switches back too far toward companies away from workers.
Thanks for the background. I'm surprised to hear that unions are not (much) needed anymore. Sounds like you're talking about cases where the power lies much with the workers, and not so much with the companies.
I used to say this same thing, that "unions once served a valuable purpose". Looking at the history of unions, their most noble time was when employers were able to 'legally' collude with local law enforcement. When police were employed as 'union busters', unions were good and noble, serving the public interests. Their fighting spirit was a bastion of democracy against corporate greed and influence. But the reason was because the State was being used as a literal cudgel against the people.
The state still is being used as a cudgel. It's just being wielded by someone else.
A scab tries to cross picket lines and gets beaten into a coma? That's not an assault that's a labor action. When their next of kin arrives to remove the scab's car and finds it torched? Not arson, "labor action." Yes, the NRLB could declare those particular labor actions not protected, but will they? That depends entirely on who's currently voting on the NRLB.
The problem isn't labor actions themselves, it's an unbalanced application of the rule of law favoring one side of the transaction or the other.
I don't disagree with the labor laws that leveled the playing field, and I think those who praise the labor movement do so because there was a legitimate problem that needed to be solved with legal protections. Then the pendulum swung wide, pushing not for balance but for advantage for the other side. Now we seem to have cases where labor unions exploit favored legal position to extract concessions, metaphorically welding the cudgel they stole.
Actual labor appears to suffer under both types of imbalance. Ergo the reason we should redefine and renew our commitment to Labor Day as an ongoing issue of justice to constantly refine.
I’m not an expert in unions, but my understanding is that once they are established, they can legally picket and intimidate all employees into joining. And once a union has strong presence inside an organization, they can blackmail management with strikes if they do anything they don’t like.
That's not my experience in Germany. Negotiations between employers and unions play an important role here, but the kind of cooercion is not what I'm used to.
Yes, I'm fully aware of that. I already got some explanations on US context above and intended to keep it short here. Maybe too short.
On the other hand side, a lot of comments here sound like they are describing or discussing a general feature of markets or politics, while in fact relating to the specific legal and cultural environment in the US.
The Original Post for example would have sounded quite different, if the emphasis on the legal and cultural conditions of US unions would have been explicit.
I've never been accused of being 'pro union' and I'd agree that laws protecting union members often interfere with free association. That being said, unions themselves don't seem more oppressive than corporations. People have the right to free association, which includes forming unions.
Unions make more sense in industries where employers have near monopsony buying power for a particular skillset and your described ability to just change jobs doesn't hold. When I was a web developer, leaving a problematic job was an option. I worked as a tech writer at Countrywide for a project. The underwriters there were in a rough position because if they didn't work at Countrywide it would be really hard for them to use their skillset. (But they weren't unionized.) The auto industry is another example of a situation where employers have near monopsony buying power on some skillsets. And they are unionized.
Teachers have a little bit of choice in employers in some areas. But not a lot unless they move.
> People have the right to free association, which includes forming unions.
This is totally reasonable. Everybody should have the right to join a union, just as everyone should have the right to not join a union, or to join a different union.
Right now, in most places, the right to join a union is not under threat, it's the right _not_ to join a union, or to start a competing union, that is under threat.
To clarify: When I say that something is a right I mean that the government should not prevent it from being done. I'm not asserting that the government should provide any particular opportunities by coercing private individuals. Does the government force anyone to join a union? (That is an utterly sincere question.) I wasn't aware of that, but I don't always stay up to date.
Part of the issue is that even if you view labour relations as a zero sum battle between owners and workers, we're all owners of the public sector. So if the SAAC bullies some extra money out of Disney, whatever, it's no skin off my nose. When a public sector union demands something, they're demanding that *I* pay for it in higher taxes.
I also agree with the points raised in the other replies you received.
They aren’t q monopsony though because most government workers are big standard officer workers with no particular special skills other office workers don’t develop.
That problem with public sector unions has to do with their opposing management. Public managers are not owners and cannot derive any profit from a better run organization (they are essentially also employees and nothing more), and so they don't have the same reasons that a corporation would to negotiate hard with the union.
Often this is okay, and they can be serious managers - especially if the elected officials overseeing this management can put the right pressure on the managers negotiating. This can very much break down if the elected officials are supporters of the union, because then there's no counterbalance at all. The elected officials may even hire pro-union management and then it's three power centers all pointing in the same direction with no opposition.
Oh, absolutely. I've worked for pro-worker organizations and that's often a really good choice for management to do, especially in fields where competition for good employees is tight.
Pro-union means supporting what the union is negotiating for, even if that's not in the organization's interest. You never see that in private industry for obvious reasons, but it comes up in public sector jobs because the incentives for leadership can be very different.
It's not even pubsec unions that do this. Something that actually happened:
1. Governor of a business-hostile state (which shares a motto with Stan Lee) gets gobs of tax dough and other incentives to entice the UAE royal family to build a major manufacturing facility in his single-party state.
2. As part of this cash transfer, the UAE corp agrees to hire a minimum number of politically aligned trade union workers for a minimum length of time.
3. Said trade unions completely coincidently make campaign contributions to the governor in step 1, as well as contributions to certain "charitable organizations" which are unauditable and make dispersals based solely on their founder, who happens to have the exact same name and social security number as the guy getting the campaign contributions.
4. This is trumpeted as a major success in public/private partnerships as a great example of a politician getting things done.
We experienced this when my wife worked in a public school. The unions didn't just require her to pay dues to advocate for positions she didn't always agree with, they also required participation in events and political demonstrations she didn't always agree with. This was one of the most frustrating aspects of public sector unions: compelled political speech.
In practice almost every employer enjoys some market power just because of the way the job market is structured. They're bigger and more knowledgeable, your life will get really bad without a job whereas they can go for a long time with 1 less employee, you depend for your livelihood on references + a good employment history... Plus employers can and do collude even though it's supposedly illegal.
In principle, if employers were mainly small sole proprietors looking to hire individual workers, and the workers banded together to form a really strong union, that could be an unfair situation. It would start to look like guilds/professional associations do, more than the typical labor union, though.
In fairness, you're probably talking about very specific laws in US, which I know close to nothing about, whereas I'm talking about general principles of workers coordinating vs. (big) firms coordinating.
Like, owners of the company can take all the profit and use it to start a new company. It is easier said than done, but the same can be said about switching jobs.
I have written a new blog post/essay that summarises some reasons to be skeptical that AGI is imminent, or necessarily dangerous. I definitely don't believe that AGI is somehow impossible, but I'm not convinced that the success of the current crop of LLMs will necessarily lead to it.
I've spent some time looking at AI x-risk arguments in an attempt to write an entry for the recently concluded Open Phil AI Worldviews Contest, so given that context, I was looking for the loss-of-control scenarios I deem most plausible -- Paul Christiano's "you get what you measure", Andrew Critch's robust agent-agnostic processes, etc; basically slow takeoff multipolar agent scenarios, none of which require general intelligence or fast takeoff or even AI takeover (e.g. in Christiano's scenario above, we are incentivized by competitiveness considerations to hand over increasing amounts of successively higher-level decision-making across all areas to automated systems, and it's hard to tell exactly when human civilization as a whole goes past the point of no return). I didn't see you address them in your blog post (your website is beautiful by the way), so I was wondering what you thought of those. Quick summaries: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qYzqDtoQaZ3eDDyxa/distinguishing-ai-takeover-scenarios#Slow_scenarios
Here are my thoughts, based on a first read of the summary.
If I understand the argument correctly this does seems like a likely failure mode; but it also seems to me that, at least for the first two scenarios, the world already works like that. The first two scenarios (AAFS and WFLL I) don't even need AI. You can usefully replace all instances of 'AI' in those scenarios with 'some elaborate bureaucratic/organisational process meant to lead to a good outcome' and end up at fundamentally the same place . This seems more like a generic 'optimising for local minima will lead to emergent social ills' argument (which I agree with) than anything else.
The 'Production Web' scenario seems less like something we already have (unless extreme ecopessimism is justified and wide scale ecosystem collapse is imminent and will lead to a a massive global famine, which I deem unlikely, even though I am depressed about ecosystem destruction). It is also difficult for me to imagine how this could come about if the AI wasn't in control, i.e. already superintelligent.
Scenario 4 (WFLL 2) seems the most likely , and is actually the type of scenario I would be concerned about. However, if I understand the argument correctly, this would require something very much like AGI, and I would hope that in such a scenario a lot of effort would have been put into avoiding exactly this scenario. In a sense this is the best case, because it means that
1. AGI is possible
2. It won't rapidly achieve superintelligence and kill us all as part of achieving some instrumental goal
3. We can put it to use, hopefully doing good thing (but realistically also definitely selling us junk and probably generating porn)
4. We have time to think about the proper way of containing it, and/or limiting its exposure to the external world
> Canada’s population center may not be in Michigan.
I disagree with the argument presented in this link, although its main conclusion that "you cannot average latitude/longitude values" remains correct.
Taking the "population center" to be the center of mass in three-dimensional space re-projected to the the sphere is counterintuitive and arguably incorrect. Us fleshy meatbags are limited to travel *along* the surface of the sphere, so I think we need to work in the embedded S^2 space directly (the surface of the sphere) rather than R^3 (real space of which the surface of the sphere is a part).
Consider three people on the Earth. Two are standing infinitesimally close to the north pole (ε,0,1) [1], and one is standing slightly further away from the south pole (-2ε,0,-1). In the above-linked claim on the proper calculation, the three-dimensional center of mass is (0,0,1/3), which projects back to the north pole itself. If everyone then decided to meet at the center of mass, the people near the north pole would imperceptibly move, but the person at the south pole would have to travel halfway around the Earth! That hardly seems intuitive.
In ordinary (non-curved) space, the definition of the center of mass is the unique point where the mass-weighted displacements to each mass element cancel. That is, if you collapsed the entire object to its center of mass, the vector sum of (mass-weighted) displacements moved would be zero.
We can extend this to the sphere, but we have to be careful about the 'vector sum' part. We can't cavalierly add vectors from different parts of the sphere since the sphere itself is curved: my 'north' and your 'north' don't point in the same direction. We can, however, make the definition above work if we bring all the points to the purported center of mass first, then add up their displacements (with great-circle distances) *in the direction from which they arrive*. That is, suppose someone travels over the north pole to arrive at the center of mass. They depart going northwards, but arrive going southwards; that 'southwards' direction is the one that matters.
If we apply this revised definition to the three-person planet above, we end up with something much more intuitive: the center of mass is somewhere around 30 degrees north latitude, along the line of longitude where the south-pole person is standing. To reach the center of mass, the south-pole person would travel about 1/3 of the way around the Earth, arriving from the south, and the two north-pole people would travel 1/6 of the way around the Earth, arriving from the north.
For a more complicated distribution of people (like the population-weighted Canada), computing the center of mass is a bit more intensive. The definition above only allows us to verify the center of mass, it doesn't give us one from first principles, so I think we'd have to find an initial guess, find the residual distance-vector, then iterate.
[1] — By mathematical convention, ε is "a very small number," small enough that ε^2 is often treated as zero.
Possibly a noob question: why can't you just project the surface of the Earth on to a coordinate system with 2 dimensions (e.g. latitude and longitude) and take the average of those 2D values when finding the center of mass?
Why go through all the trouble of computing vector-sum displacements?
> why can't you just project the surface of the Earth on to a coordinate system with 2 dimensions (e.g. latitude and longitude) and take the average of those 2D values when finding the center of mass?
From simple to complicated reasons:
* Maps have folds or creases, at minimum where the globe wraps around. Two people standing next to each other on opposite sides of the 180th meridian are right next to each other, but a straightforward map-based approach might say that their center of mass is really on the prime meridian – the other side of the globe.
* Maps distort direction. If you have two people, then their center of mass is obviously somewhere along the line connecting them. However, the line connecting them on a latitude/longitude map is not (in general) a great circle, which is the shortest line that would connect them on a sphere. This is why plane routes (e.g. http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=LGA-IST) look odd on a lat-lon map; they follow the great circle route for a shorter distance.
* Maps distort distance. A few map projections (i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomonic_projection) will transform great circles into straight lines, but the scale of this map depends on the distance from its center of projection, much like how the Mercator projection is famous for making Greenland disproportionately large. On one of these maps, the center of mass of two people will indeed lie on the line connecting them, but it won't necessarily be at the _midpoint_ of that line.
You can correct for all of these, but by the time you've done so you're essentially doing what Matthieu or I propose.
These errors don't matter much at all over short distances provided the map used is reasonably isotropic (the same in each direction; not stretched or squished). However, Canada is a large enough country for the scale changes to matter, and it's northerly enough for the direction changes to matter. Lines of latitude are not great circles except at the equator, and the approximation gets worse as you go further north.
I regret missing the comprehensive version of this comment, then. I'm happy you performed the calculation of the least squares great circle distance, and of course you're fully correct that min Σ(d^2) is the better way to define the calculation. I foolishly was working post-gradient.
I like this definition better than the R^3 definition because the definition of distance being used is more natural, and it avoids the counterintuitive idea of the center of mass being below-ground. However, the computation is more difficult, since it's a nonlinear least squares problem rather than a linear one.
On the gripping hand, you're right that for most reasonable cases the difference between the two approaches is minor, and each approach is far better than performing the calculation on an arbitrarily projected map.
So I had this (perhaps) weird idea of paying my kids to have grandkids. Maybe something around $50k/kid. Backstory: I didn't have kids till ~40, my kids are now 22 and 24 and have no interest in having kids. So this may take a while to happen, and I might die before then.
On the plus side, kids are expensive and the money would help some. On the down side this seems to pit my two kids against each other. For when I die whatever money I have will be split between them. So I'm mostly wondering what you all think. (Oh and what happens if one of my kids wants to have kids, but can't for some medical reason. Do I pay them to adopt? (Which I at first ruled out... I was really thinking that I'm paying to get my genes into the next generation.))
Wow, I wanted to make some group reply. Thanks for all the comments.
1.) Where/ when to give the money? The perfect time is when the kid is born, and the money should totally go to the women (giving up at least a year of her life.) bearing the child. I'm not sure why it feels 'better' to most of you if you spread it out or delay it. But any delayed giving is also good, so do that if you want.
2.)Will it weird out my kids? Well I already mentioned it to them, and I'm guessing they figure it's typical dad behavior. My daughter's response was, "Dad I'm gay. 'ya know'" and son has zero interest... which I totally get. He just finished college, (please now plug in "Father and Son" by C. Stevens.)
3.) I figure I'll be dead before this pot of money is accessed. It'll be this last piece of dangling dad fruit.
4.) I had my tubes tied years ago, so that route is out.
Well if the kid dies that would clearly suck. They (mom and dad) will still get the money. As an aside I was thinking that part of the ~year of life, are those first six months of so after the kid is born.
You could structure a set of trusts such that they only payout to your children children, or the payments increase if/when you children have children. This may feel less crass to them than "i'll pay out to have kids".
When your children's friends start having kids, their feelings on the subject may change. Baby fever does seem to be real, in my experience (though for some it produces the opposite result).
As someone who thinks I would be an awful parent, no amount of money would convince me to have a child. Also the statement comes across as "I'll pay you money to fix your personality defect", which I don't think will go well for anyone. The lower comments about offering to help with child expenses seem much more likely to work out positively.
I agree with other commenters that "I will pay you to have kids" is a terrible way to phrase it, but "I will give you some money to help support each kid you have" sounds much more reasonable.
You're not paying your kids to have kids, you're just helping them out with the cost.
I don't have kids, but it might have made a difference to me. I felt totally incapable of supporting children until I was in my mid 30s, and actually probably felt it was irresponsible up until that point. For whatever reason I felt developing career and income streams had to take priority to any consideration of family. I might have even felt that my parents expected me to prioritize my career, but later learned maybe my mom was hoping I'd have childern. But by mid-30s it's nearly too late especially if it wasn't a priority for my wife. And even then you're in house debt and still in peril of losing a job in something like a financial crisis. Life felt precarious for me for a long time and I suspect it's the same or moreso for young people today.
You get more of what you subsidize for and less of what you tax!
So evaluate how important it is for you.
An easier less unfair seeming thing might be to offer to pay for any wedding/honeymoon costs or to offer to pay for any daycare. My kids daycare was $17k/yr a kid at its peak.
As someone thinking about having kids soonish - ignore the naysayers, I think this is a pretty good idea!
One way to avoid pitting your kids against each other is to commit to donating eg $100k per each of your kids, to charity, in your will. So at least the first two grandkids your kids have directly increase their own financial situations.
(A 50k payment at time of grandkid is pretty different from one when you die, anyways - the former is much more valuable, both because of time value of money, and because when you die, your kids are presumably getting a huge lump sum anyways so the marginal value of an extra 50k is lower)
"So I had this (perhaps) weird idea of paying my kids to have grandkids. Maybe something around $50k/kid."
You need to present this differently. You can offer to put $50K/kid into a 529 for college. Or set up something to help pay for daycare ($5K/year or whatever). Or make it clear that the money is *intended* to "help with daycare" but you make it clear that you won't be monitoring.
One way sounds like you are "helping", the other sounds like you are coercing.
Offering cash for having a child is crass, even if that is what the different presentation amounts to.
Directly paying your kids to have children sounds coercive. I agree with the other posters that you should instead make it clear to them that you'll pay for any medical costs and maybe childcare costs associated with having children if they choose to do so on their own.
People generally prefer 100$ in cash to 100$ in in-kind benefits, unless it involves some kind of tax dodge like employer-provided healthcare. So an offer of 100$ in cash will be more likely to modify behavior.
"Directly paying your kids to have children sounds coercive."
"For when I die whatever money I have will be split between them." - time value of money of handing it over early and with certainty (you could end up spending everything you have) is still worth a decent amount in economic terms rather than just improving the split vs a sibling.
I'll agree with the other posters that you would be better to offer financial assistance in any medical costs of for the raising of the children. Unless you have a very weird and unhealthy relationship with your kids already, I can't imagine that offering them cash to get pregnant (or get someone else pregnant) is going to do good things for your relationships. They may feel that you've tried to use their financial dependency against them, by forcing them to do something they didn't want to do otherwise. And that could lead to them being really bad parents, which would be very bad for the kids and bad for your relationship with these kids.
Oh my kids have no financial dependency on me. They are both 'launched' with careers and jobs. Having kids is expensive, and the offer of money to help is just meant to recognize that.
It strikes me as odd that you had kids so late and now want your kids to have kids fairly early. I'd say instead of explicitly telling them you'll give them $50k to have a kid, it might be better to let them know that if they're interested in having kids you'll be happy to financially assist them. Hard to comment on this without knowing why your kids don't want kids, what your relationship with your kids is like, and why you want grandchildren.
If your main imperative is to get your genes into the next generation, have you considered becoming a sperm donor? Or are you mainly motivated by the wish to have grandchildren in your life? Your idea removes the financial barrier to having kids (which in many cases is the only thing holding people in my generation back from starting families), but it won't necessarily make your children want to have kids. Respectfully, I think you should consider the ethics of pushing kids onto people who are not interested in parenting.
Yeah sure, If I'm around lots of child care. Why is the money awkward? I help my kids by helping to pay for lots of other things. (Education, cars, travel...)
That might be tricky since children so often live far from their parents these days. We moved my in-laws in with us, since that was the only way they could afford to be near.
On a related note, offering to pay for something specific would be much less awkward than offering cash. Promise to pay for daycare (which may end up costing you more than $50k).
Last week I was invited to Jacqui Munro's maiden speech (she's a member of the NSW upper house) and after the usual things she ended her speech with 10 action items to address housing affordability. Now, as a senator in an opposition party, she can't do much, but as a young member she's likely to have a long-term influence (eventually).
Afterwards when we spoke she was quite keen to learn more about Georgism. (NSW does have some weakly Georgist taxes already.) I was thinking of giving her a copy of Lars Doucet's book (unless anyone has a better suggestion).
So, I was wondering:
a) Are there some other folks in NSW who to contribute? Obviously, I can pay for a book for her myself, but if it comes from a *group* of people in NSW across the political spectrum, that makes it much more interesting, and much more likely to get shared around the NSW parliament. (Contribution to the book optional.) I don't have any clear idea of how we all get together to write notes in the cover, but I'm sure we'll come up with something.
> (NSW does have some weakly Georgist taxes already.)
Unfortunately the new government wants to repeal them :( Hopefully the Legislative Council will block the repeal.
I think a book would be a lovely gift and all but MPs are usually time-poor and have minimal time to be doing things like reading books. I would recommend instead organising a meeting with a Georgist expert (e.g. Lars) to directly talk her through the issues. I'm sure Lars would consider it worth his time.
If you really want to teach her about Georgism, wouldn't the best bet be giving her a copy of "Progress and Poverty," the book which started the whole movement by the guy it's named after? It might not be as contemporary, but most of its arguments still apply, and it really does seem like the most logical starting point.
Seems like there are various techs that could significantly spur new societies and communities. The feeling I get from the current societal landscape in many countries is that we are nearing the end of history. The development of advanced versions of VR could lead to humans escaping and closing themselves off from the real world. Birthrates are collapsing and new technologies and cultural developments are having a net-reducing effect. Cultural and linguistic homogenization seems to be happening at some level. Cultural and linguistic heterogenization seems to be happening at another level. America's technological and military power is increasing. No other country is even able to keep up. China is facing a massive population collapse given its already dealing with a birth rate collapse. Russia is severely militarily incompetent and is losing population. India has its own set of problems both technological and political. If the US enters into a direct war with a non-superpower adversary, other nations may not have the power to deter the US or stop the conflict from escalating.
AI self-improvement should not happen at an accelerating pace given that each set of improvements that can be made are made at the frontier of the current AI's ability. Making the next set of improvements by definition take at most a similar amount of time and effort given that the previous AI could not make those developments. Each step in the improvement process should be increasingly difficult otherwise they would have all been made and self-improvement to maximal possible intelligence would have happened almost overnight. Given that humans require decades of time and hundreds of thousands of minds to develop the required mathematical, engineering, and scientific breakthroughs required for just the pre-requisites of AI let alone AGI, it seems obvious that there are similar barriers to developing super intelligence. In addition, if there are several AGI's they would be incentivized to stop large improvements to any other AGI on competitive grounds. Super AGI might not want to self-improve because it would fear that their creators would have known about the actions about self-improvement and would have done things in advance to stop such actions from occurring unregulated.
- Who will check America's power in the face of future corruption?
- Is the US control of global affairs and media spreading US values and culture in a way that threatens other cultures?
- Why aren't there any space settlements in development?
- Why aren't there any ocean settlements in development?
- Why is self-improvement considered occurring at an accelerating pace?
- Why not give super AGI's constraints such as extremely slow processing speed?
- If there was a Manhattan-Style project for very-close-to (> 98c) or faster-than-light travel, what is the likelihood for the creation of such a technology?
Space and ocean settlements are really difficult-- harder than even the worst parts of terrestrial land.
As for checking America's power, it's something to worry about. The world was barely able to defeat Nazi Germany at great cost. Nazi Germany was a major European country, but not a continental superpower.
"- Why aren't there any space settlements in development?
- Why aren't there any ocean settlements in development?"
The world is underpopulated. Ocean settlements could be useful if the goal is escaping governments, the closest thing to these would be cruise lines. But governments can always prevent them from docking on land unless they follow national laws, as has occurred with the ADA:
Space settlements generally aren't under development because the costs far outweigh the perceived benefits. A lot of work would be needed to build even a permanent base on the Moon, but what do we get from that? There's very few resources on the Moon that we can't get more easily on Earth. The same goes for Mars (which has even higher costs to settle). You can argue we get the safety of being multi-planetary, but we live in a society driven by capitalism. Being multi-planetary doesn't give much profit to anyone.
As for faster-than-light travel, the known laws of physics either outlaw it or say it is only possible with exotic forms of matter that may not exist. So the only possible option is to chuck a lot of money at fundamental physics and hope they uncover a deeper law of physics that gives a feasible way to travel faster than light. Chances of that succeeding are low, I'd say.
Mind you, if you only want to get close to the speed of light, then throwing a lot of money at the problem could get you quite far. We already have some ideas for ways to accelerate small spacecraft to close to c; it's not unreasonable to think enough money could provide solutions for accelerating larger spacecraft (and, of course, dealing with all the related engineering problems that would throw up). But it's probably more than a Manhattan project. For that we were pretty certain of the underlying physics of how to do it, there are a lot more unknowns about close to light speed travel.
The Manhattan Project was theoretically possible, but took a lot of resources to work out the details in how it would work. As far as I know, we have no theoretical way to go faster than .98c in any reasonable time-frame that people could survive. Once we have the theoretical framework, then perhaps we could accomplish such a project at great expense and public outcry about why we don't use the resources for useful things here on Earth.
I'm not against a crash project to develop high-speed travel, quite the opposite. But in addition to technical challenges one would face political and social challenges. World War II bypassed those.
Wouldn't we see it trying to escape in extreme slow motion? Its like a nuke going off but at one-billionth or trillionth or quintillionth or nonillionth the speed. At that rate, you could just defuse it before anything happened.
I'm not very familiar with the literature on vaginometry, bisexuality etc. However I am very familiar with the literature on chronophilia and by extension some of the phallometry stuff. Most of it seems very low quality from Freund, Blanchard, Cantor, Seto etc. Some basic examples might include, inconsistent definitions e.g. Freund's usage of ephebophilia or 17 being the age of adulthood or age of puberty etc. , a weird 0.25 sd cut-point which once you realise what they are doing raises all sorts of questions around specificity and prevalence, very strange usage of stimuli often its not clear what ages the stimuli is or important stimuli is missing e.g. Blanchard 2008 not having a control group and not using stimuli from 15-18 etc, Weird usage of control groups that is SOC vs SOA etc, and also some very weird results that aren't really discussed e.g. Freund 1991 etc. Researchers also seem almost entirely ignorant of other fields that are obviously relevant when it comes to interpreting their results, but that's mostly outside of phallometry. If this work is any indication of the quality of literature in related fields such as vaginometry etc. I would massively discount the epistemic value of such academic literature, in particular I would discount taxometric studies.
I saw that our host here and Scott Sumner were duking it out recently on the subject of house prices. Anyway I know everyone here is looking for a good movie to watch so here is Scott Sumner on a podcast with me and Jasper Sharp talking about six Japanese films. If Scott Alexander has a listen he will find that Scott Sumner is a mild mannered soul once he gets off the subject of house prices! Anyway I am not sure how wide an appeal the podcast will have as the list is maybe a little esoteric but I really, really enjoyed this one and both Scott and Jasper are extremely engaging so please give a try and see what you think!
If you don’t have time I think my two favourites were Hanagatami (very weird, far too long but ultimately very rewarding) and Autumn Equinox. This latter is just beautiful and a red teapot has a starring role in many of the scenes.
And while I am here I am guessing a few people here listen to John McWhorter and/or read him in the NYT? Anyway I’d like to mention this podcast I did with him along with the wonderful Tom Holland (the historian) in which they got to talk about their mutual passion which is dinosaurs. Not a peep out of either of them about the culture wars.
I don't think of house prices as the thing that gets Scott Sumner out of a "mild" manner. More infuriating to him is economists who should know better associating low interest rates with easy money (and high rates with tight money), and his commenters accusing him of being too hostile toward Trump.
Substack editor for short drafts I'm not stewing on for a while.
Since I'm a software engineer by trade, the rest of my writing I draft in a code editor like vim, Sublime, or VS Code in `.md` files.
One line per sentence. In a text editor, they will still render as you expect, but you'll be able to see each sentence on its own and see how sentence length varies across your piece.
The disadvantage is that the formatting from obsidian doesn't get copied over, so I mostly have to redo it in substack.
The advantage is that I really like the seamless flow from jotting down ideas -> expanding on the interesting ones -> the most fleshed out ideas naturally transitioning into drafts -> polish the drafts to get final text. It feels like a pretty elegant selection process where the ideas I'm most interested in bubble to the surface. It means I'm more motivated to write because I'm never starting from a blank page and it's nice having all my other notes in the same place to draw from.
Mostly I write short stuff without too much formatting but I did my review contest entry and other (non-substack) long form stuff this way too.
I mostly write my drafts in Libre Writer, as I do most of my stuff. It's not the *most* compatible - when copying it over I always have to re-do images, footnotes and general formatting - but it works for my workflow. That said, if there's a better one I'd be keen to hear about it.
Hello. I write a small blog called Psyvacy, in which I attempt to explore various privacy-adjacent ideas through the lens of psychological theories and dynamics - and sometimes just theories I find interesting like System Justification Theory or Optimal Distinctiveness Theory. Always looking for feedback and ways to improve, be it my writing, topics, whatever!
Writing to express my firm support for a stronger banhammer / higher standards. There are too many comments already to filter out the useful ones (yes, I realise this is yet another comment) and there has been a marked degradation in tone in particular.
Whilst we're being tyrannical/maintaining high standards, can we please also discourage people posting links without context or tl;drs? A link to a twenty page article without summarising what point you're referencing is not helpful.
If you were able to interact with a time traveler and bring back a small amount of knowledge from the future, what would you prioritize?
It feels like the two best options to prioritize would be how to build an AGI capable of doing research, and how to build a fusion generator.
Figuring out how to achieve effectively limitless energy unlocks so much future potential, I find it frustrating that we're not dedicating more resources to this endeavor.
A feeling I often have about science fiction is that "Political Technology is just as real a discovery as any materials science".
The most useful thing to backport from the future is *how to run a society well*. Especially the here-to-there pathways to improve the worlds ability to coordinate and resolve it's other problems.
I think that if the requirement is a "small amount" of knowledge, then probably I couldn't learn enough to bring back any seriously hard technology. I think I'd prioritize finding one "easy, but not thought of" technology (like GUIs, something where once you see it you can implement it) and then just make a list of all the successful technologies. Then come back, make money off the easy tech, and fund all of the fancy stuff that I know should be possible.
How to travel in time would rank pretty highly, and you already know they can do it. Other things the future may have developed, may not have but are still possible, others may not be possible but are not yet proven, and others still are proven impossible. Even knowing a technology is proven impossible could be useful to prevent going down that road fruitlessly, like searching for the philosopher's stone.
But other pieces of knowledge I would want to know about, in no particular order:
1. Teleportation
2. Robot servants
3. FTL (faster than light) travel
4. Resolution of conflicts between quantum mechanics and relativity (quantum gravity)
If you were the sole recipient of knowledge of some technology that could change the world, then the financial asset with the highest percentage gain ought to be yours.
Similarly, it sounds like warning of major disasters could avert a lot of suffering, but you could perhaps ask for some resolution to a problem that could avert more suffering on a larger and more permanent scale. It is an ethical dilemma: evacuate people in advance of an unexpected volcano eruption, or find a workable economic theory that eliminates poverty?
I used to post math/physics puzzles here sometimes, on the previous iteration of this site.
Here are two I enjoyed recently. No advanced knowledge necessary, but they can be tricky to get right, think carefully.
MATH. Every day Wesley's dad drives from home to pick Wesley up after school. He leaves home and reaches the school at the exact moment school is over, which is the same time every day, and immediately drives back with Wesley on the same route, always with the same constant speed. Today, however, school ended an hour earlier, and Wesley started walking back home towards the car. As soon as they met, he got into the car and his dad turned around and drove home. They got home 10 minutes earlier than usual. How many times faster is the car than Wesley? (that is, what is the ratio of their speeds).
PHYSICS. A soccer player makes a penalty kick, sending the football perpendicular to the goal line. The ball starts at distance L from the line, and moves without rotation with initial velocity v>0. Consider the ball moving through the air horizontally, ignoring gravity and vertical movement. There's a wind blowing in the direction parallel to the goal line with velocity u>0. As a result the ball is displaced by distance h when it reaches the goal line (from the original point it was aimed at). What is the time it took for the ball to reach the goal line?
(hint for the physics problem: you can't ignore air resistance)
By the way, I gave this to GPT4 out of curiosity, but it failed. I guess we're still safe for now. Also, it weirdly paused in the middle of the output at one point like it was thinking about what to do next for a while, before it starting ouputting again.
---
Let's call the distance between home and school d.
Because Wesley's dad always leaves at a specific time and always drives at a constant speed, we know that the time it takes him to travel from home to school is the same as the time it takes him to travel from school to home.
This means that under normal circumstances, it would take him 2d hours to make the round trip from home to school and back. However, because school ended an hour early today, the total time for the round trip was 2d - 1 hour (because he reached school one hour earlier than usual).
During this earlier time, Wesley walked towards his dad for some amount of time, which we'll call t. So, his dad drove for 2d - 1 - t hours (because the total time his dad drove and Wesley walked is 2d - 1 hour). After meeting Wesley, they drove back home together, and this took t hours.
Since they got home 10 minutes (or 1/6 of an hour) earlier than usual, the total time spent driving that day is 2d - 1/6 hours.
Setting up an equation based on the total driving time gives:
2d - 1 - t + t = 2d - 1/6.
This simplifies to 2d = 2d - 5/6, which means that d = 5/12 hours. This is the time it usually takes for the car to go from home to school.
Given that the school ended an hour early, Wesley must have been walking for 1 + 1/6 = 7/6 hours (an hour before his dad arrived, plus the 10 minutes they arrived early).
Let's call the car's speed C and Wesley's speed W.
Since the car's speed is constant and it takes d = 5/12 hours to cover the distance between home and school, we have C = 1/(5/12) = 12/5 = 2.4.
Since Wesley's walking speed is constant and he walked for 7/6 hours, the distance he covered would be 7/6 * W.
Wesley meets his dad exactly at the point where he had walked for 7/6 hours, so the distance he walked is also the distance his dad drove, and thus 7/6 * W = d = 5/12.
Solving for W gives us W = (5/12) / (7/6) = 5/14.
So, the car is 2.4/(5/14) = 2.4 * 14/5 = 6.72 times faster than Wesley.
As a tangent; what kind of madman is Wesley to start walking home when he knows how far it is? People walk around 4 miles an hour, so for this to only shave ten minutes he's got to be more than four miles from his house. What does he think is going to happen? Are those ten minutes really so important to him? They can't be, because he's already missing them most days.
OK I have an answer for the physics one. But I had to make a lot of simplifying assumptions. Mostly that all the changes in velocity were small. (so that I could ignore higher order terms in v^2.)
If one can ignore air resistance the answer is the same, as if the part about wind and h wasn't mentioned, since the winds force is perpendicular to the balls movement.
If you CAN'T ignore air resistance it becomes unsolvable (in my opinion).
Nothing about the balls mass, its surface area (coefficient of air resistance and so on) is given. Also including air resistance opens the problem to a whole can of worms in forms of turbulent flow.
Since air resistance properties of the ball influence its loss of velocitiy regarding its movement towards the goal, (think golfball vs. smooth ball) nothing can be said for certain about its flight path.
Yrg q or gur qvfgnapr orgjrra ubzr naq fpubby. Yrg k0(g) naq i0 or gur cbfvgvba naq fcrrq bs gur pne. Yrg k1(g) naq i1 or gur cbfvgvba naq fcrrq bs Jrfyrl.
Jr svk g=0 gb or gur zbzrag gur fpubby raqf ba abezny qnlf, naq k=0 gb or gur ubzr. Gur gvzr vf zrnfherq va ubhef.
Jrfyrl'f qnq yrnirf ubzr ng g=-G, fhpu gung q=i0*G.
Re: physics. Air resistance can't be ignored. This problem is really hard to think through, yet completely elementary. This is what makes it so delightful in my opinion. I'll give a spoiler hint, hopefully a partial one: (rot13.com) fvqrjnlf jvaq naq urnqjnlf nve erfvfgnapr ner abg gjb frcnengr sbeprf npgvat ba gur onyy. bapr gur onyy fgnegf sylvat gurer'f bayl bar sbepr npgvat; jung vf vgf yvar bs npgvba?
Warning: comprehensive solution behind the rot13. Decode at your peril.
Gur bayl sbepr npgvat ba gur onyy vf nve erfvfgnapr, naq vg npgf nybat vgf yvar bs zbirzrag, fb gur natyr ng juvpu gur onyy vf sylvat j.e.g. gur crecraqvphyne gb gur tbny yvar fgnlf pbafgnag. Gur nve erfvfgnapr urnqjnlf naq gur jvaq sbepr fvqrjnlf ner whfg gur gjb cebwrpgvbaf bs guvf sbepr ba gur nkrf, naq vg'f jebat gb gel naq pnyphyngr gurz frcnengryl nf (cbffvoyl abayvarne) shapgvbaf bs fcrrq, juvpu vf jurer crbcyr graq gb trg fghpx.
Gur cvpgher orpbzrf pyrnere vs jr zbir gb n pbbeqvangr senzr va juvpu gur nve vf ng erfg (guvf flfgrz vf zbivat fvqrjnlf jvgu fcrrq h pbzcnerq gb gur hfhny bar). Vzntvar gur tbny cbvag ng (0,0), onyy hcjneqf ng (0,Y). Gurer'f ab jvaq.
Gur tbny cbvag zbirf gb gur evtug jvgu gur fcrrq h. Gur onyy unf vavgvny fcrrq i qbjajneqf naq h evtugjneqf, fb vg'f zbivat va n fgenvtug yvar ng na natyr nepgna(h/i) gb gur l nkvf, naq ybfvat fcrrq qhr gb bapbzvat nve erfvfgnapr. Jr jba'g arrq gb xabj gur rknpg sbezhyn sbe nve erfvfgnapr.
Gur qvfgnapr ubevmbagnyyl sebz (0,0) gb gur cbvag jurer gur onyy'f yvar bs zbirzrag vagrefrpgf jvgu gur tbny yvar vf Y*(h/i) - whfg ybbx ng gur evtug gevnatyr (0,0), (0,Y) naq gung cbvag, naq frr nobir nobhg gur natyr. Gur tbny yvar, geniryyvat evtugjneqf jvgu fcrrq h, pbiref gung qvfgnapr naq ernpurf gung cbvag va gvzr Y/i, ohg gur onyy vf abg lrg gurer. Vg'yy trg gurer whfg jura gur tbny yvar geniryf na nqqvgvbany qvfgnapr u (gur svany qvfcynprzrag), juvpu vg'yy qb va gvzr u/h. Fb gur gvzr vg gnxrf gur onyy gb trg gurer vf ryy qvivqrq ol irr cyhf nvgpu qvivqrq ol lhh.
Yeah air resistance is hard. I think the force goes as v^2 to some approximation. (But the other terms will be the same for the wind and the ball moving through the air.)
Assuming (unrealistically) the wind carried the ball sideways at the same speed, u, as the wind, wouldn't the time taken to be displaced sideways a distance h simply be h/u ?
V yrsg gur gvzr gnxra sbe gurz gb zrrg nf hanppbhagrq sbe, yrnivat gur gvzr (va zvahgrf) nf fvkgl vafgrnq bs fvkgl zvahf k, juvpu vg fubhyq unir orra. Zberbire, gur qnq jbhyq unir fgnegrq fbzr gvzr orsber gur fvkgl zvahgrf vafgrnq bs nsgre rknpgyl 60 zvahgrf. Nsgre nppbhagvat sbe gurfr punatrf V npghnyyl tbg ryrira nf gur engvb.
Gura V fgnegrq guvaxvat nobhg jurgure gurer ner fcrpvny pnfrf gung znxr gur fbyhgvba nccnerag naq ner pbafvfgrag jvgu gur engvb V sbhaq. V pbafvqrerq vs gur fba jnyxrq nyy gur jnl ubzr va 60 zvahf k zvahgrf, gurl "zrg" ng gur qbbefgrc naq "qebir" gur 0 zvyrf ubzr. Guvf vf bayl cbffvoyr vs gur k vf rknpgyl gur gvzr vg gnxrf gb qevir onpx sebz gur fpubby naq k vf svir. Va gung pnfr Jrfyrl jnyxrq va svsgl-svir zvahgrf, gur qvfgnapr gung gur qnq qevirf va svir zvahgrf, fb gur engvb bhtug gb or ryrira. V thrff vg qbrf abg znggre rknpgyl jurer gurl zrrg orgjrra gur fpubby naq ubzr, nyy nqzvffvoyr fbyhgvbaf zhfg pbasbez gb guvf engvb naq gur nffhzcgvba gung vg gnxrf ng yrnfg svsgl-svir zvahgrf gb jnyx vf vzcyvpvg gung vg sbyybjf sebz gur snpg gung gurl zhfg or ubzr rknpgyl 10 zvahgrf rneyvre guna hfhny.
I had to draw a diagram on paper, think about it for a while, and do some equations before I figured it out. I think Samson has the simplest explanation.
Hah. This problem "rhymes" with an old brainteaser which I first encountered in a Raymond Smullyan book (rot13 because maybe it's a hint?): N obggyr bs jvar pbfg gra qbyynef. Gur jvar jnf jbegu avar qbyynef zber guna gur obggyr. Ubj zhpu jnf gur obggyr jbegu?
Has anybody had any problems with Substack payments. Right now I am being charged for a subscription I don’t have access to. Asking the Substack owner and/or Substack - who don’t have a good support channel for this - has not worked.
Google DeepMind is hiring for research scientists and research engineers for their Google DeepMind AI Safety team, where their focus is on alignment, evaluations, reward design, interpretability, robustness and generalisation. Apply here: https://boards.greenhouse.io/deepmind/jobs/3049442. Also, please spread the message if you want to.
While I understand you're probably coming from a direction of "you guys think AI alignment is important, here's some jobs related to AI alignment!", this still really comes off as taking advantage of the open thread to advertise. Which, I know it's sometimes used for self-promotion, but that's typically for blogs and writings, with the few actual instances of job shilling usually being from people involved in the organization in question who are willing to interact with the community in relation to why they think their offer is relevant. So, do you work for google? Is there any more to this than a hiring advertisement?
If the concern is that we are very close to S-AGI causing the extinction of all of humanity, then making sure to get the best people possible working on the problem seems like a very good idea. This argument would work for anything else but doesn't seem to work when considering the there eminent individuals who seem to be giving alarmingly high-probabilities (99.99 or 46 or 33) for AI-induced extinction. No I don't work for google but these are recently opened positions, are for DeepMind (one of the leading proponents of AGI), and will be expiring by this Friday. This is all info you can get by following Neel Nanda on Twitter. I probably can formulate the post in a less-spammy way though.
Greetings! As the owner of two curious cats and a sizeable terrace, I've faced a dilemma that I suspect is familiar to many of you. The terrace is connected to the building roof, presenting a risky escape route for my cats. Not only is this dangerous for them, given the potential for falls, but it can also lead them into neighboring apartments, causing inconvenience to my neighbors.
Despite the terrace's allure, this escape risk meant we couldn't fully enjoy its spacious charm without constant vigilance. Consequently, most of last summer was spent indoors, keeping the terrace off-limits to avoid any feline escape adventures. I explored numerous options for cat-proofing the terrace and even consulted several professionals. The most straightforward solution, a net cage, was not only expensive (around 2-3k euros for a 9x3.5 meter space) but also intrusive on our lovely view.
Our efforts to implement other solutions proved futile as our intelligent feline companions were always able to find a workaround. All I wanted was for us all to enjoy the terrace without risking any roof-escapes.
But then, a eureka moment happened last month. A practical, affordable solution materialized, costing around just 100 euros. The key? Angled poles made from PVC tubes, each measuring 65cm in length, attached to flagpoles holders that create a 45-degree angle from an imaginary horizontal plane. Across these poles, we installed a net.
It took around 6 hours, spread across several days, to complete the project. The result was a safe terrace; try as they might, the cats couldn't find an escape route.
The idea of an "angled" net is not new, but typically requires bespoke angled staff that can be both costly and hard to find. The real game-changer, a brilliant suggestion from my wife, was the use of flagpoles holders. They are economical (at 15 euros each), adjustable, and the PVC tubes can be easily attached and removed.
Having struggled with this issue for over a year, the flagpole solution was a breakthrough. I felt compelled to share this unique idea with the online community, as I hadn't come across anything similar in my extensive web research. I know this isn't the typical SSC topic, but it required a fair bit of problem-solving. If you have any suggestions on other platforms where this solution could be shared, please let me know. I just want to spread the idea.
Sounds very interesting, but I haven't quite understood your solution. Could you describe more, or link to those PVC tubes you bought?
My cats are desperately wanting to leave the house, especially the bold one who absolutely mustn't leave because he is deaf and not very intelligent. Once he escaped for one day and couldn't find the way back alone.
edit: I realized some of the confusion in my original post might be due to the fact that I said "flagpole" where I should have said "flagpole holders"!
It's indeed impenetrable, and it's not for a lack of trying on my cats' part. I've had this for three weeks now, and my cats still attempt to jump over it every once in a while, but they keep failing. I believe they're going to accept the situation soon. They are very active, agile cats. Additionally, it's not that intrusive to the view, which was another of our main concerns.
There's a person in my town who does basically this exact thing around a small grass yard to let their cats be outside. I don't know them but it seems to be working!
For your next project, can I suggest a cat flap with a webcam connected to an AI system which will keep it firmly closed if the cat wishing to enter appears to have something in its mouth?
I live in the country, and my cat brings in mice, birds, baby rabbits, moles, large weird looking beetles, and once even a bat. (How in God's name did she manage to catch that?)
Not really knowing what to do with these, besides the fun of chasing them, she then immediately lets them go, and having been half-heartedly mauled and chewed they often die unseen under a sofa, and start smelling after a few days. It drives us completely potty!
A year or two ago, I read that Jeff Bezos, no less, had the same problem, and was determined to find an AI solution for preventing his cats bringing their catches into the house. Last time I checked though, there were no smart prey-in-mouth-detecting cat flaps for sale on Amazon. So he must still be working on a solution!
Cats in the wild hunt alone but live in groups. They bring home extra food in case a companion is too sick or injured to hunt. They're not smart enough to figure out when they need to do this, so they just always do it.
> (although clearly by Roman/Byzantine times there were specific horses people thought were Nisean)
What's the source for this? I've not been able to find one other than Olmstead's work and that lacks Classical citations. It's in Herodotus who, as I said, explains what the horses are as if he expects you not to know. The Anabasis of Alexander references them but is explicitly referencing Herodotus. ("Herodotus says" is literally how it starts.) The author also says the horses were almost gone by Alexander's time and puts them next to mythical beings like the Amazons.
The other sources listed reference horses or Nesea but don't mention some kind of special super horse. One of the citations is Strabo XI 7 which is about Hyrcania and doesn't mention horses at all. The wikipedia page that Strabo claims to have saw them is, again, made up as far as I can tell. But it is in Olmstead's work.
"Now most of the country is high and cold; and such, also, are the mountains which lie above Ecbatana and those in the neighborhood of Rhagae and the Caspian Gates, and in general the northerly regions extending thence to Matiane and Armenia; but the region below the Caspian Gates, consisting of low-lying lands and hollows, is very fertile and productive of everything but the olive; and even if the olive is produced anywhere, it is dry and yields no oil. This, as well as Armenia, is an exceptionally good "horse-pasturing"1 country; and a certain meadow there is called "Horse-pasturing," and those who travel from Persis and Babylon to Caspian Gates pass through it; and in the time of the Persians it is said that fifty thousand mares were pastured in it and that these herds belonged to the kings. As for the Nesaean horses, which the kings used because they were the best and the largest, some writers say that the breed came from here, while others say from Armenia. They are characteristically different in form, as are also the Parthian horses, as they are now called, as compared with the Helladic and the other horses in our country. Further, we call the grass that makes the best food for horses by the special name "Medic," from the fact that it abounds there."
be called by Alexander the Great, and approaching saw him sick abed,
but was received with very kind words and much respect, and promised
zealous assistance. He making bold to reply: "How, Sir, can you,
being sick, assist me?" "With my name," said he, and mounting a
Nisaean horse, seemed to lead the way. "
FWIW.
That wikipedia article is the worst sourced I have ever seen, to the extent I am surprised it is not taken down. And it's not just the lack of sourcing:
"Historical events
...
The Nisean became extinct with the conquest of Constantinople in 1204."
How on earth would a whole breed of horse be rendered extinct by 48 hours of inner-city fighting?
That doesn't necessarily mean that all the horses were killed during the invasion. Maybe the breeders fled/died or just lost the authority to make horse breeding decisions, and the people who took charge didn't recognise the value of the Nisaean horses or didn't care about horse breeding, and let them breed with normal horses. Imagine explaining to some Ottoman soldiers who want to take your horses that these are special elite horses and they need to let you keep them to preserve the bloodline. There might still be some descendants of those horses, but the breed would end up effectively extinct.
1204 wasn't Ottomans (that was 1453) it was crusaders.
People know a good horse when they see one. Lots of people still do, and they certainly did pre-industrial revolution. So if these are good horses they are likely to be recognised as good, to survive and be bred from. It's not like an hereditary monarchy where parentage trumps anything else, irrespective of any actual characteristics identifiable in the offspring.
Good point - but if they were recognisably good horses and every knight wanted one, maybe the Nisean population got split up, pressed into service for more crusading or taken as trophies, so by the time it came to breed from them the bloodline got diluted. Even if they were good horses, maybe nobody on the winning side recognised the significance of Niseans and thought "better keep them together so we can breed more of them". Or even if someone did, maybe immediate concerns or individual looting caused the breeding stock to get split up anyway, and without modern communications it would have been too hard to trace where they all ended up.
So we have four references now, two of which put it in semi-mythical context, one of whom is the dubiously reliable Herodotus, and the last is Strabo who hedges about whether they are really from Nesea. And on top of that the source we're investigating has blatantly false claims like that Strabo claimed to have seen them. This hasn't really changed my opinion of Olmstead but it's good to be thorough.
To be clear, I can buy there was a breed of horses called Nesean that were associated with the Medeans and used as prestige objects by the Persians (and adopted by Alexander the Great). But Olmstead's claims go far, far beyond that.
Seems unlikely that you would keep them all in the city. They could of course "go extinct" in a scenario where not one horse was harmed, but the written records of the breed society all got burnt, but that is projecting modern standards of what constitutes a breed.
Looking up Lipizzaners I find in the same article both this
"The Lipizzaner is the oldest European pure-bred horse. Its ancestry goes as far back as the 8th century, and derives mainly from Spanish or, more precisely, Andalusian bloodlines."
and this
"The breeding programme at Lipizza concentrated exclusively on horses with Spanish bloodlines until the 18th century, although stallions were purchased from Italy, Germany and Denmark as well as from Spain. Arabs were also used, and with the purchase in 1810 of Siglavy, an oriental stud, one of the original 6 Lipizzaner bloodlines was established which still form the traditional basis of today’s Lipizzaner horse."
Both cannot be true and of course the horses' ancestry "goes back" to a bit earlier than the 8th century, to the last universal common ancestor. Same with the Nisaean debate: if these were good and useful horses it is pretty certain that their descendants are exhibiting their good and useful qualities today.
As a soon-to-be dad of two (kid #2 is overdue), I'm currently grappling with the tension between
1. not stressing out too much about parenting (being fine with being a good-enough parent) and
2. meeting the enormeous responsibility that comes with being a parent.
I've learned a few things about non-shared environments and the good-enough parent approach to calm myself down everytime the I-don't-know-the-first-thing-about-young-humans-panic bubbles up.
But still, I find it very hard to basically just go "It'll be alright, just listen to your gut" when the stakes are so high. In what other area of life that important do we allow ourselves a strategy like this, despite the fact that there is a lot of actual knowledge (and, granted, much more bullshit) out there to be obtained?
Anyway: Any sources or recommendations, any advice or Hitchslap would be much appreciated.
If you've managed to keep the first one alive so far you ought to do fine with the second, though as a new dad myself I empathize with the sleep deprivation that you're about to again go through. Take paternity leave if you can, help out your partner as much as you can., and try not to stress too much.
I have opinions about schooling etc. but the first few years are simple, just exhausting.
What sorts of decisions are you puzzling over? My own experience of parenting (which is limited, my oldest is only 4) is that the decisions to be made aren't all that hard, at least for young kids. Keep them safe, keep them fed, let them play. Do normal parent things.
The good news is that you needn't feel such a sense of responsibility because most of your children's outcomes are genetic and because over assuming responsibility is itself a bad thing. After all, you don't want them to think of themselves as easy to ruin, but rather as resilient and full of potential. The bad news is that your tendency to do so is genetic and your children will probably grow up to blame themselves for all sorts of things that were never in their control in the first place too.
Parenting advice from the Alien Nation TV series: "All you can do is love them, teach them right from wrong, and hope they don't grow up to be axe murderers" 😁
When Number Two does arrive, you at least have the benefit of having done this already. You know now about crying, feeding, nappy changes, colic, the works. You know that every surface does not have to be surgical operating theatre levels of cleanliness.
You already have one small human in your care and you haven't broken them, so the second one will do just fine! Congratulations, best wishes, and good luck!
EDIT: One thing I'd say to watch out for is that Number One *might* be jealous of Number Two, depending on age gap between them etc. It's very easy to get caught up in bringing the new baby home and not having as much time for Number One, who then feels neglected and slighted in favour of this crying, smelly thing and resents it. Involving the first kid with the new kid can help here.
I think you should take great care in the "not actively doing things to harm them" category, be high effort in the "provide support" category, but have a far lighter touch in the "active pushing for better outcomes" category.
I think parenting is one of those areas where the potential for negative impact and backfiring-of-plans is very high, and this suggests focusing most of your efforts into being a helpful support role than an active decision-maker role.
Depends on the child, of course. I understand some circumstances necessitate having a firm grip over them, for reasons of disability or extreme behavioral issues or things like that. But I think in typical cases what I wrote is valid.
Several years ago, I asked this same question to my uncle, at the time the father of a 18 year old. His advice: "whether you take good care of your children or not, they'll still grow up. If you take really good care, they'll grow up a bit better, but only a bit."
I'm not a parent myself, but from what I observe, it seems like most parents are so obsessed with being good parents that they don't let their kids play outside, don't allow them any privacy, fill up every hour of their schedules with extracurriculars, ban everything fun in case the kid gets a papercut...in short, they turn the kids into the equivalent of slaves monitored by a benevolent totalitarian surveillance state. They're not allowed to be kids anymore. In such cases, "bad" parenting is probably good for the kid.
Choose healthy rested Felix among all the versions of Felix that you have available.
As young humans need a lot of sleep, learn to immediately go into recharge-yourself-mode when they sleep. Do the prio things between you getting up and them getting up (that makes you postpone TODO items instead of postponing sleep whenever they wake up early).
Agreed, and the third is easier again. It's like that joke, your first kid eats dirt, you take them to the emergency room. Your second kid eats dirt, you wash their mouth out. Your third kid eats dirt, you shrug and serve them a smaller portion for dinner.
I think stressing about parenting can be like over-preparing for running a DnD game, or planning all your lines before doing an improv scene. A bit of prep and research helps, but you mostly just have to dive in with enthusiasm and trust yourself to make decent decisions on net and to improve as you go.
That's an interesting way to look at it. My on-the-spot response would be that although improv needs a lot of whiggle room, there are still better and worse ways to go about it (I suppose). And there is an actual difference between a trained or experienced actor and an absolute beginner who's just trusting his gut on stage - a difference that can be distilled, explained and discussed (as well as studied, if someone wants to go that far ^^).
Not as a parent, but as a reasonably experienced DM, I guess my comment to new DMs is that plot-planning will almost always be destroyed by your players, and world-building will eventually be rewarded.
If I tried to turn that into parenting advice, maybe it would look something like "don't plan too much for what your kid will be/want, but focus your resources and time on giving them an environment that they can be comfortable, safe, and encouraged in, no matter what path they take."
There absolutely are better and worse ways to go about performing improv, and huge differences between those trained and not trained in that craft. I'm a father of two, who also for unrelated reasons has a lot of experience and knowledge of the world of teaching people to do improv well which is a pretty distinct and well-developed thing in my native Chicago. The analogy between improv and parenting seems actually quite apt and I wish I'd previously thought of it!
I'll offer three other things as food for thought from my own experiences:
-- parenting is virtually always a constant exercise in balancing short- and long-term goals. Basically outside of life-emergency moments we should never let _either_ the big picture nor the immediate solely guide our parenting choices. This is sometimes quite hard in the moment and we have to actively remind ourselves of it.
-- as my wife and I remind each other often jokingly (but it's really true), as a parent you are "always teaching" whether you are trying to do so or not. That can seem terrifying but it's also sometimes an asset, and anyway there's no point stressing about it because it's true regardless.
-- adults who have never been parents simply cannot, at a fundamental level, grasp how it feels or works. This is inherent and is not at all any sort of statement about the personal wisdom or other characteristics of anyone. It was true of me before I had kids, and you, and everyone else. Doesn't mean they can't have thoughts and ideas about what you should or shouldn't be doing, nor does it mean their opinions can't be of interest. It does though place a firm upper bound on the genuine relevance of those opinions to your choicemaking as a parent.
I'm flabbergasted by the improbability of this conversation happening. I mean: What are the odds of someone coming up with parenting-improv-analogy and someone else with a lot of experience in both fields finding that thread and chiming in?! This is amazing! :D
I have 4 kids that are under 13 years old, and honestly I think you figure out relatively quickly (in our info-rich environment) what to do, in broad strokes.
The problem is having the discipline to regularly practice 'good parenting', and make it a central part of your life. Especially if you are stressed for other reasons.
My kids are all doing fairly well so far, but I still think that I fall short of my own standards semi-regularly.
The same might be true for running a DnD game: Storytelling (or moderating an event) follows at least some guidelines and rules, and there are whole orders of magnitude between a great storyteller or moderator and a crappy one. So even if one needn't become an expert in it, there's still knowledge available if one cares to look for it.
Good enough plus loads of physical affection covers it all I think.
Small kids are little animals in many ways, it's all visceral and emotion with them. Physical closeness embeds it deeply into their brains that they are cared for and loved.
Source? I just deeply believe it, based on my own experiences of childhood and motherhood.
My "kids" are 35, 32, and 29. I'd reply with three observations:
1) Every happy family is in fact happy in its own way, despite what Tolstoy wrote. So it's hard to find knowledge that is applicable to all families.
2) All kids will be extreme jerks at times. Expect accusations of being the "worst parent in the world" It's par for the course. Parents who say otherwise are either lying or don't really spend much time with their kids. I think we were very lucky with our three kids and treasure our relationships with them, but they all had their "moments" and "phases" (which we now laugh about).
3) Quality time generally can't be forced. Best to be available and around as much as schedules permit as you never know when your child will be ready for wondrous and loving interactions.
That tolstoy quote is remarkable. The first time you encounter it you think it is the most perspicacious thing anyone has ever said. then you realise that it sounds equally convincing if you reverse it.
I suppose the case for the defence would be that in Tolstoy's milieu, the families that would generally have been thought to be happy were of a piece: a father with undemanding obligations in the military, at court, at a ministry; a presentable mother with household management skills, and sufficient interests to keep her end up at St Petersburg dinner parties or at the long summer get togethers on the estate; children who were healthy, looking to make good marriages, essentially growing into versions of their parents; perhaps the grandparents gracefully declining. That's the core model of "happiness" as a state. States other than that may then embody happiness, and there are a lot of ways in which an unhappy state can vary from that core.
I don't find it all that convincing, and as an apercu it's barely relevant to the 900 pagaes that come afterwards. But perhaps there is something in it, especially if you read a little irony into that notion of happiness.
Bryan Caplan's book "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids" summarizes the data which indicate that parenting is much less important than most people think and therefore we should not stress about it and have fun with our kids. I highly recommend it. Here's a summary. https://fourminutebooks.com/selfish-reasons-to-have-more-kids-summary/
Hi! I'm in a similar position to you, but have managed to be pretty relaxed about it thus far (and markedly distinct from my middle class peers). And for the avoidance of doubt it's 50/50 with my wife with me as primary caregiver over pretty long periods. It's probably too long and personal to do in depth here, but I'd be happy to discuss dad life with you!
In connection with coming El Nino apocalypse, I saw several articles advising me to not expose myself to Yellow Disc of Death unless I am completely decked in an armor consisting of sunscreen with giant UV factor. At the same, it is completely normal in my country to walk around in summer heat in rather light clothes and no sunscreen at all. And people don't seem to be getting skin cancer en masse because of that. Temperatures very rarely go above 35 degrees Celsius, but over 30 is normal. So, what gives?
Another Australian weighing in, possibly biased due to multiple skin cancers now, including a melanoma that only just got caught in time to prevent metastasis and that has left a 20cm scar on my back.
Much depends on your latitude (rather than temperature) and how often your sun exposure leads to actual sunburn. At higher latitudes where you can be outside without burning in 30 minutes you probably don't have much to worry about, unlike say Brisbane where I live where 30 minutes unprotected from mid-summer sun can easily result in a burn for a relatively fair-skinned person.
You probably won't notice the effects of regular mild sun damage until you are in your 50s or 60s, but in Australia those ages often bring regular routine trips to the dermatologist to get minor lesions 'burnt' off your face and limbs. Usually not life-threatening, but painful and unattractive. But I'm only 52 and I've had two surgeries now due to more serious skin cancers, so that's a possible outcome to think about.
If you're not getting burnt I would't worry too much, but unless you actually have a vitamin D deficiency it's probably still a good idea to wear at least a light sunscreen anyway if you're regularly in the sun. Many moisturisers now include a non-greasy sunscreen and are pretty much indistinguishable from not having anything on the skin after a few minutes.
Growing up, we used to get to the beach before the sun did, in southern California. We'd stay still the wind blew the shape out of the waves, the sun dipped down, and we could no longer body surf. I've never had a skin cancer.
Now, early in the day, when UV rays aren't so harsh, I sun myself for about ten minutes, front and back. It's how I get vitamin D. I don't bother using a sun blocker unless I'm working outdoors for long periods of time.
Sun bathing is linked to skin cancer not because of sun exposure being bad but because people do it as a one off activity at least the first time in the season and therefore get burned. A daily habit of being shirtless outside for an hour, regardless of cold or weather conditions., for instance, does not have this drawback as a person gradually becomes more tanned as the year goes on. You
Sunbathing is linked to skin cancer not because of the sun exposure but because people do it as a one off activity, at least the first time every year.
What is the melanin content of the skin of people where you live? Fairer-skinned people are vulnerable to skin cancers from UV exposure, and with climate change (gosh, this reminds me of Hole in the Ozone Layer times all over again) there are sunnier and hotter days, and people go out without covering up or without sunscreen.
They get sunburned, which is damage. Repeat this for a few years, you get more incidences of skin cancer. The temperature ranges you give (over 30 normal, rarely going above 35 degrees) is considered extreme in Ireland:
"In Summer, from June to August, temperatures are cool: average highs are around 17/18 °C (63/64 °F) in the north, and around 19/20 °C (66/68 °F) in the rest of Ireland. The rains are also frequent in this season.
However, quite rarely, there may be periods, usually short-lived, with sunny weather and pleasantly warm temperatures, when the Azores High moves over the country. In these cases, the temperature can reach or exceed 25 °C (77 °F), though it almost never reaches 30 °C (86 °F)."
Summer temperatures are generally in the 15-20 degrees Celcius range, though they've tended to go up to low 20s recently. So where the usual temperature is higher, I'd take that as sunnier, and hence that people would have more natural protection for their skin.
Most skin cancers are non-malignant but melanoma is the nasty one:
"Over 30 C normal, rarely above 35 C" actually could describe many Northern European countries nowadays. I don't know whether people in Italy or Spain consider above 35 C "normal" but it doesn't seem rare that the temperature is above that in those countries.
Even less malignant skin cancers (all cancers are malignant, by definition) can be very nasty, especially if they are on the face, for instance.
For Germany I just saw the statistics in the news two weeks ago:
Benign skin cancer has more than doubled in the last 20 years, from 38,000 cases in 2001 to ~82,000 cases in 2021. (Malign skin cancer, which is not caused by sun exposure, only went up by 7%.) The increase is attributed to people who exposed their skins in the 70s and 80s, when a dark teint became fashionable. Half of the cases are people of 80 years or older.
Likewise, the number of deaths from skin cancer has increased by 55% from 2600 to 4100 (out of ~1,000,000 deaths in total), while the number of deaths from other types of cancer has only increased by 10%.
It seems pretty clear that sun exposure has a strong relative effect on skin cancer. I would say that it depends on your personal risk aversion whether you should avoid sunbathing. Averaging over the whole population, the risk of getting skin cancer is 0.1% per year, and about 0.4% of all deaths are due to skin cancer. So the absolute number are low. Of course, they are higher in the subgroup who don't care about sun protection, so if that's you then you may have a (low?) single-digit percent risk that you get a bad outcome from sunbathing.
Skin cancer is fairly common cancer and melanoma is particularly unpleasant. Also sun exposure ages the skin in other ways. Of course the effects depend a lot on your complexion.
Recently I have heard advice that if one really wants to protect one's skin, one should use sun screen regularly even when it's not particularly sunny.
I don't want to be pedantic and I expect everyone knows this, but it isn't the temperature that damages skin, it's UV radiation, which doesn't perfectly correlate.
The usual sort of public health thing. Public health information is usually optimised for something other than a realistic appraisal of risk. Skin cancer is unlikely to kill any given individual, but certain to kill some statistically significant number of people, and some of those lives can be saved by filling their head with exaggerated sun safety messaging, so what's a public health official to do?
I'm not sure what country you're in, but in Australia we have one of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world and it's responsible for about 1% of deaths, which is not huge but also not negligible. (To put it another way, skin cancer kills six times as many people as murder does.) Other countries mostly have rates several times lower than this... https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/skin-cancers/by-country/
My realistic advice is this: don't get sunburnt, it sucks in the short term regardless of the effects in the long term. If whatever you're doing doesn't burn you then I wouldn't worry too much about the tiny increase in cancer risk. And skin cancers are quite common but mostly harmless if you catch them early, so if you ever develop any weird moles (or existing moles that start growing weirdly) then get them checked out.
> (To put it another way, skin cancer kills six times as many people as murder does.)
I wonder if this is an artefact of Australia's comparatively low murder rate? As in, if you copied that rate of skin cancer deaths over to a more murder-y country like the US or Peru, I wonder if that would affect the messaging or priority?
Well, there is a general tendency for hotter climates (which I assume correlates with more sun?) to have higher rates of violent crime generally. Explanations vary, from "people be outside more when it's hot" to something to do with serotonin to the usual racist nonsense. So if anything, Australia is more chill than it should be :P
People are getting skin cancer en masse, and exposure to the sun greatly increases the risk, but most cases aren't that serious and the mortality rate is low, which might be why people don't talk much about it. Temperature isn't a very good proxy for insolation.
Hey all, I’ve started writing a novel and sharing it on Substack. It’s somewhat inspired by Unsong which is why I’m posting it here, but deals moreso around the paradox of evil in the context of generative AI and VR/AR, which may give everyone the ability to play God and create their own universes. First chapters out here, would love to know what you think!
Only two complaints on the first chapter; the barista aside lasts long enough that I lost track of whether it was part of the Marilyn date or not, and the "would you kindly" aside should probably lead with the Bioshock reference because I spent the entire paragraph thinking you didn't know about Bioshock. Also going back to Marilyn afterward was jarring; maybe drop the whole example of memory limits since memory limits haven't come up in the story.
As long as it eventually makes its way back to me anywhere is good for feedback, and thanks for yours! I agree with some of your points and made some (subtle) tweaks, like moving the Bioshock bit up in the paragraph, adding some clarification around the barista. Memory limits may or may not come up in the future ;) so I'll be keeping them in. I'm not used to have so much editorial freedom after hitting publish so I'll try to find a fine line between making edits post-facto or setting things in stone.
Saw this got some attention (attention being relative), thanks to those who checked it out! Just released my second chapter, right in time for Apple's AR unveiling at WWDC23!
I felt tempted to click on the banned/warned comments. Called "bad" on purpose to make me click? ;) Or not purpose - just a negative side-effect? And Scott really wants to improve us by examples of how-not-to-do? - I assume/suggest no links to hopelessly bad comments. - ACX comment section gives me a little hope for humanity - I blunder it then by going hostile on quora.
At least one of the bans was a regular poster, as are the warnings, so it's a good comparison between what is and isn't allowed; this rude comment is still on the right side of civil, this one is past it. Also closure on why that person isn't going to be posting anymore.
I think it is fine the way it is. Transparency seems important.
The vast majority of people clicking on the banned comments will read them to figure out if the ban was fair, not because they want to get The Secret Truth Which Is Suppressed By Authorities. Writing a comment with the intend to get extra eyeballs by getting it banned is unlikely to work out.
+ 1 on transparency. It's also a way to enforce / enhance group norms to make it tangible what is 'not allowed'. Otherwise the rules remain too abstract.
I think it's useful to see what constitutes a ban-worthy offence. In addition, it helps Scott be transparent - if he, say, started banning a lot of people for saying they liked the Marvel movies, that would inform us about his values at least as a moderator, which would be useful information for people.
In addition, I'm not sure if there's a realistic chance for copy-cats, since it's a demonstrated way to get banned yourself. And I'm sure trolls maybe get some chuckles out of that, but I'd imagine most people generally will just avoid commenting?
I suppose there's the chance someone could deliberately comment badly to get banned, then attempt to use that to paint Scott in a bad light, but since it'd be trivial to check the banned comment, I'm also not sure that's a significant concern.
+1 for Nemets- his post on the R1b carrying men of Chad, and his recent series on the long, long history of Europe were both fascinating. He's also well worth a follow on twitter (@peter_nimitz).
I have also recently subscribed to Razib's substack, and enjoy it very much. I think I would get more out of it if I had a better understanding of genetics. I took an undergraduate course in biochemistry many many years ago, but have forgotten most of what I learned.
Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich is good, although it's such a fast moving field that it's probably already quite out of date... I would look at Razib's recent book recommendations posts for something more current.
I started this mini project for Berlin: salary trends survey. Anonymous and open-source. If aynone can help with spreading the news or wants to help, please do ✌️ https://github.com/realaisles/BerlinSalaryTrends
There are plenty of centralised sources of information (glassdoor, kununu), but they include a lot of noise and questionable data. Afaik there is nothing similar existing besides some tries in the past.
It is exceptionally good for the time. That's the first movie that could leverage both computer graphics and 3D. And compared to all the 3D movies that came after it, it's the only one where the director really framed his shots to support 3D, instead of using 3D as a gadget.
For what it's worth, that's the only movie that I saw twice in a cinema, instead of waiting for a DVD release that would have been 2D only – that certainly helped with the revenue !
I'll be one of the Cameron defenders here. For rough purposes, compare him with Michael Bay, another director of blockbuster action films who consistently get megabucks to spend. Watch just about any Bay film, in a theater if you can manage it, and then watch just about any Cameron film. I think you will likely notice a level of production values in Cameron's films that you won't see in Bay's. Bay has one advantage AFAIK, and that's a greater level of integration into the US Armed Forces, because he tries to make them look good. So he'll get all the hardware shots he wants. Cameron will get slightly less.
Meanwhile, Cameron pays more attention to plot detail in an action sequence - this guy has to get over There to grab that Thing so he can then get over Here to use it. Bay will put something into an action sequence because it looks Cool, and then he'll put another, and another. Cameron will put something Cool in, and then build around it so it makes sense. I remember him coaching a visual effects person to fix that iceberg in _Titanic_ so that it would make the navigator want to turn left. Slope it, add an extra peak, etc.; "hard starboard!" (and reverse engines) was required to make sense given what the First Officer saw. so Cameron needed to look at that iceberg and think exactly that, so that the audience would see it and think that as well.
Watching _The Abyss_, _Aliens_, and _Terminator 2_, I got the sense that there was work put in to make the story make more sense than usual Hollywood action fare. Sometimes it would look dumb at first, and then I'd learn Cameron thought of it, shot a scene, and the scene was cut for length (like when they reset the T-800's chip halfway through _Judgement Day_).
And then there's the technical aspect. Cameron now has a signature move of filming visual effects not seen before. He wasn't the only one (Zemeckis is another), but all in all, I always ended up enjoying my time at a Cameron film, and enjoying thinking back on it. That's what it's about.
Box office is a measure of how much customers pay, but it doesn't all go to the producers, much of it goes to the theatres. So a movie can make a box office twice its budget and still lose money, while a different movie whose box office is less than its budget can still make money later if it sells a lot of DVDs.
I have at least three long comments completely blown away in the last week. Perhaps I made the mistake you pointed out here also, I don’t get emails to notify me when my comments are responded to anymore. I’ve gone through all my settings a few times but I can’t see that I’ve done anything wrong.
Don't know if there's a way to access your own comment (always copy your posts before posting), but since it was a reply it's possible the original is in the other person's email chain. I don't actually know if editing these changes anything there.
I think I've occasionally seen old versions of my comments. Though nowadays, it just doesn't show me my own comments at all once I've edited them (until I refresh and scroll back down). Substack's UI is *really* awful.
Though IMO my biggest complaint about Substack is the inability to see parent comments, which makes email notifications near useless. You get a link to the reply someone made, but it only shows *that particular comment*, so there's no way to even know what they were replying to or what the context was!
Oh, it is terrible. But it wasn't intended to cope with the likes of us; I do think they modelled it on Twitter, where we the subscribers would be expected to just go "Wow, so wonderful post! Take my subscription money and slice off a percentage for Substack!" while the authors did the heavy lifting in writing.
This is why they're still trying to get everyone to start up their own Substack and bring along readers (and hopefully turn those into subscribers). NO SUBSTACK, YOU WILL JUST HAVE TO EXPAND THE COMMENTS LIMIT, I WILL NOT WRITE MY OWN BLOG POSTS.
They try to silence me, but it won't work! If I have to write a thread of four chapter-length comments to develop my point, then that's what I'll do! ✒
Seems like a real long shot that this is legit. In keeping with the obsessive quantifying of these things, I’d assign it a likelihood of a between 0 and 1 percent of being true. Somewhere on the low end of that range I suppose.
But if it were true, it would change everything. Culture wars? Who cares about that nonsense. Religion? I guess we are going to have to rethink some of this stuff. This national power might surpass that national power? Ha! Small potatoes.
The existence of aliens will make winning the culture war even more vital. The aliens are obviously much smarter than we are, because check out the starships the size of small moons, so they'll *know* that our side was right all along about the culture war. If they see our world ruled or even grossly contaminated by the other side's pernicious lies, the best we can hope for is that they'll quarantine us. More likely they'll go full "Day the Earth Stood Still".
And I'm not sure I'm joking about this. A very large fraction of SFnal aliens exist primarily to explain that the author's most important sociopolitical views are obviously correct and pass harsh judgement on the fools who believe otherwise.
And there's the aliens who introduce enough stress to cause all incorrect Earth cultures to collapse under their own internal contradictions.
And the aliens who plan to do unto us as we've done unto ourselves many times before, such that at best we're pulling Scooby-Doo villain tricks on the first wave of conquistadors.
I’m more optimistic. I’m thinking actually contact with a completely different form of life would trigger a transcendence in enough people to realize that we as fellow humans have much more in common than the tribal beliefs that keep us at each other’s throats.
One doesn’t have to pull back very much to realize that the things that make us hot under the collar are actually pretty darn trivial.
In my hopeful fever dream it would be like the end of a stage play. After the final act the curtain would rise and show the cast holding hands and taking a final bow. The conflict and strife that drove the narrative is seen for what it is. All a pointless squabble over nothing.
Yeah but no one wanted to listen to Michael Rennie, remember? The big message was “you all need to get your act together or we’ll be back “
It’s the ultimate “why can’t we all get along?” lament.
The sorrow of being appalled by our own behavior and realizing we can’t seem to help ourselves.
This is a great paradox; the love of science fiction aliens bringing us up a notch in the world, or uniting humanity in common purpose to repel the invaders, juxtaposed with our fear of the alien that we are currently creating for ourselves (ai). There’s an opportunity there..Gort! Come back!
>Yeah but no one wanted to listen to Michael Rennie, remember?
None of the government or military people wanted to listen. But Helen and Bobby and Dr. Barnhardt did. More importantly, Robert Wise and Edmund North wanted to listen to Klaatu, and wanted the rest of us to listen to him as well. That's the point - the government and military people of the real world are fundamentally wrong, and we need a wise alien to teach us that. An alien who will spend most of the movie in a tragic conflict with all the stupid wrong military and government people, because how else will we know how wrong they are, but will have a few supportive viewpoint characters for the audience to identify with.
There's a big 'so what?' I feel I always have to ask whenever the topic of hiding alien contact comes up. Supposedly the US government has known about extraterrestrials for over half a century, but in that time they've done absolutely nothing with that vast and terrible knowledge. They've sat on that secret like a dragon and have done no research, made no preparations for contact, not even funded NASA properly. The proof of visitors from beyond the stars never had any impact, be it scientific, diplomatic or political. It strains credulity beyond belief that a world where aliens had been proven to both exist and have visited our planet would look exactly like a world where there was no proof they existed at all.
I've no doubt the US government has put out this rumor as a way to try and sow FUD in the minds of potential adversaries, such as Russia and China, as they must have done in the 1950s with all that Roswell rubbish that some misguided kooks obsess over to this day!
Intelligent aliens almost certainly exist, or have done, somewhere in the galaxy or the universe. But the idea they would be scooting around Earth in flying saucers, occasionally being spotted, and sometimes crashing, is too ludicrously infantile to contemplate!
What is the twitcher's rule number one? Answer, don't let the birds know you are watching them! Even if aliens were in the Solar System quietly observing us (which is not beyond the bounds of possibility), there is no way we would know or detect them unless they chose to make their presence known.
And to anyone watching those ridiculous UFO programs, and wondering if any of it could really be true, I suggest you remind yourself that the people who make them and those who appear on them must all be paid. The conclusion should be obvious.
I am instantly hyper-skeptical of alien sightings, etc., but in my heart I *crave* aliens. I'm extra- vigilant and hostile about fake aliens because I'm mortified by the idea of my craving for real aliens leading me into buying into bullshit. Others -- do you crave aliens? And if you do, why do you?
Because reality is very boring and kind of underwhelming. Maybe that is just my tendency towards depression but, aliens would open up a lot of room for wonder in my model of reality (and plenty of terror)
I'd give 10:1 odds in a cash money bet we won't find aliens in my lifetime though
I've had the thought that a fascinating use of advanced tech someday would be to allow us to have some sort of a mind link with animals of our choice & experience what they experience.
I crave it in the sense that I crave knowledge about the universe, and the existence of aliens would provide a huge boost to our knowledge of the universe. People sometimes ask questions like "was/is democracy inevitable," having a whole 'nother intelligent civilization to study would help answer those questions.
I don't crave it in the sense that I would also be scared of being an ant in the eyes of a much more powerful alien entity. The alien UFO believers don't seem to have that fear, which makes me wonder how much of theirs is real belief, rather than belief in belief.
This leads me to update my probability of alien visitation from very low to still very low. The argument that "conspiracy X doesn't make sense because someone on the inside would have blown the whistle by now" doesn't apply.
Totally agree with you (and Stephen Hawking) that fearing aliens makes excellent sense. We might like look like dandelions to them -- too dumb to be even a conscious being in their take on the cosmos. Or like sushi. Or, if they are very small, hungry and smart, like the poor Australian megafauna. It would be delightful if they were brilliant and kind and willing to answer our questions about the universe -- like the species who watched over us through our transition in Childhood's End -- but I wouldn't count on it.
But Gunflint, above, put his finger on what really thrills me about aliens. Hadn't realized it til I read his post: "But if it were true, it would change everything. Culture wars? Who cares about that nonsense. Religion? I guess we are going to have to rethink some of this stuff. This national power might surpass that national power? Ha! Small potatoes." What thrills me about the arrival of aliens is that it would make the whole world reboot. It's really the shock to the system, the reboot, that I crave -- not the alien visit itself.
But let's not forget that the more advanced an alien civilization is, the more boring and predictable they must find the inanimate universe. There are only so many salient features of a dust cloud, or an exploding star, or even a black hole presumably.
So even if they are cold fish, totally lacking in empathy, I suspect they would be very interested in animal life anywhere, and keen to preserve and protect it if only for their own benefit as observers, because this best embodies nature's novelty and variety.
Maybe we will look very appealing to them, like sugar gliders and marmosets do to us. Might be an interesting life to be an advanced alien’s beloved pet. On the other hand, maybe they’re into alien equivalents of the British royals’ boredom-relievers: fox hunting and stalking.
Have you read any early Tiptree? If not, I'd recommend finding a copy of "Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home", his first short story collection. I think you might really enjoy it. :-)
I think the idea of actual (extraterrestrial) aliens is fascinating, and of such low probability as to be not worth considering. I have a friend who has asked me if I think there is life elsewhere in the universe, and I answer basically yes, but the universe is a big place, and life is likely a lucky accident rare enough possibly not even to occur elsewhere in this galaxy.
It's healthy you are skeptical, but I'm not sure about a craving for something difficult to impossible to get. Suppose one had a craving for chocolate, but chocolate was $10,000 per ounce? Some people might have that craving and never be able to satisfy it, and lower life satisfaction.
Thing which I find plausible might be true, but have no evidence either for or against:
:- I would expect political parties to be more willing to discipline elected officials (parliamentarians, senators etc) when doing so does not risk costing them a majority.
:- I would expect this to be the case more often in countries with larger elected bodies, and that those countries might, on average, have higher standards of parliamentary conduct.
:- In the US context, I might expect members of the House to be held to a higher standard of personal conduct than Senators.
Is there any evidence that this is true? If it isn't, why isn't it?
I would assume the opposite; political parties will discipline their own members mainly when they think not doing so will threaten a majority. For one thing, there will always be internal politics as well as external; if the majority is firm, you still have to worry about who holds the majority of the majority.
Listed House reprimands: https://history.house.gov/Institution/Discipline/Expulsion-Censure-Reprimand/#reprimand
Listed Senate reprimands: https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/censure_cases/intro.htm
But those aren't quite analogous to the parties; I find it completely believable the House Majority will eagerly discipline a member of the Minority.
Sorry, something I should have made clear but didn't: I was thinking about "discipline for personal misconduct", not "enforce party-line votes on" - the thought was inspired by the current flare-up here in the UK, where the government, with a large majority, has allowed disciplinary proceedings to proceed against former prime minister Boris Johnson, resulting in him and two of his supporters (so far) ragequitting.
As you say, I'd expect a party with a large majority to be more willing to allow its MPs to vote their conscience against party lines. But I'd also expect it to be (edit:) less keen to sweep accusations of things like taking kickbacks, sexually assaulting aides, drug use etc under the table.
Same answer. I expect them to sweep kickbacks under the table unless it's so egregious that failing to punish it would threaten the majority (or if the other party's doing it). I don't know about UK politics but I know Boris Johnson is a highly controversial figure who's been under intense scrutiny for years.
Yes, sorry, edited to remove brain-lapse that completely reversed my meaning: I would expect parties with larger majorities - and hence parties in systems with larger houses - to care less about voting the wrong way but more about immoral behaviour (I think - I'm clearly half asleep today, so only 75% I'm still not saying the opposite of what I mean).. But I have no idea if they actually do.
But that's essentially positing that a party becomes more moral as it approaches dictatorship. The more powerful they become, the more they'll respect the law.
Instead, the more powerful they become, the more they'll start thinking they've surpassed the law. Rules are an obstacle, and they've overcome it. Maybe they'll enforce it once they've reworked it into their own image, but the old guard's laws they won't care about. Unless there's still a threat to not following it.
Sort of. It's the same kind of principal whereby rich people are less likely to commit petty theft than poor people - not because they're more moral, but because they have less incentive.
Random question: does anyone who knows Latin(???) want to take a stab at interpreting https://nostalgebraist-autoresponder.tumblr.com/post/675455630490894337/do-you-like-bagels ? I've tried a mixture of google translate, chatgpt, and basic python text munging (decapitalizing and/or removing the line spacing), with mixed results, so I want to get an expert human's validation instead.
(By the way, nostalgebraist-autoresponder, a GPT-based bot and longtime fixture of the ratsphere internet, is now gone forever, effective last Wednesday. Rest in peace.)
Oh and here's a sequel: https://nostalgebraist-autoresponder.tumblr.com/post/675458679562207232/do-you-like-bagels
(I'm expecting it's mostly nonsensical too.)
I haven't studied Latin since high school, but I'm pretty sure it's nonsense - I don't recognize any of the words, there are some really improbable letter combinations like "TELCHSES" or "ARVAIABIO", and it wanders back into English at the end.
EDIT: ChatGPT will generate Lorem Ipsum if you ask, so I imagine this bot is capable of it too.
I was kind of half expecting it to be nonsensical but thanks for the comment anyways.
What could potentially be more entertaining, and more what I was originally going after, is to """translate""" the text from broken pseudo-Latin to broken English (with heavy scare quotes to indicate that seriously translating is impossible).
If you claim you are autistic but good enough at "masking" to pass as neurotypical, you are not autistic. Autism is a disorder that is defined by a cluster of externally-observable symptoms, not the underlying cause of those symptoms. For example, a blood clot is an underlying cause that can lead to leg pain. You can have a blood clot and feel pain, but you can also have a blood clot and not feel pain. However, autism is not like a blood clot in this analogy, it's more like Leg Pain Syndrome (defined by a feeling of pain in the leg). If you have a blood clot but don't feel any pain associated with it, you don't have LPS, because LPS is defined solely by the symptom of pain, not an internal cause.
> Autism is a disorder that is defined by a cluster of externally-observable symptoms, not the underlying cause of those symptoms.
First, citation needed.
Second, "masking" is not a yes-or-no thing. I assume you didn't want to say that the same person is non-autistic on a good day, and autistic on a bad day; or that a non-autistic person suddenly becomes autistic when overwhelmed.
If people cope with difficult situations by avoiding them, does it mean the symptom is gone? To use your example, imagine that your legs only hurt when you are using them, so you learn to walk on your hands instead. Does it mean that the person walking on their hands is not allowed to complain about the leg pain syndrome, because technically their legs are not hurting at that moment? From my perspective, "I have a leg pain syndrome" is a perfectly logical response to "dude, why are you walking on your hands?"
I don't know the context of your comment (if there is any). You are discussing semantics. It's fine to say that the word "autism" refers only to externally observable symptoms, but to the extent there are internal differences between someone who naturally acts non-autistic and someone who has to make a huge effort to do so, it would be interesting to learn about those differences and in particular to have a word for them. It also matters which cluster we refer to with the word "autism" if treatment, coping mechanisms, or whatever else end up only being useful for the group with external symptoms or also for the group with internal ones. And sure, severe autism is so different from maskeable autism that I still do not quite understand why someone thought it a good idea to give them the same name, but I'm sure there are at least some good reasons to draw the semantic lines that way.
Shall he stay or shall he go ?
He should go. There's going to be trouble either way, but staying will cause twice as much trouble as going.
Hello Eric! Would be great to read and understand the arguments behind, especially for the latter option. For those new to the topic, any support capable to provide more clarity is warmly welcome and appreciated. Thank you and have a nice day.
You are talking about “The Clash” vocalist here, right?
https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/EjsA2M8p8ERyFHLLY/takeaways-from-the-mechanistic-interpretability-challenges
Is it possible to try these types of competitions on state-of-the-art architectures rather than small toy-level examples? Maybe develop powerful savant-like narrow-AI systems specifically for mechanistic interpretability research alone. In fact, you could develop extremely specialized narrow-AI systems for each area of AI Alignment research and one specifically for developing new areas of exploration for alignment.
Do these types of competitions scale?
there’s a paper using (multimodal) gpt4 to interpret neuron activations of gpt2.
There is more to interpretability than mechanistic interpretability though, see my comment on that
Does anyone have recommendations for the most reputable vendors of antique weapons? Specifically, swords between 200 and 500 years old, from America and Europe.
I don't know what vendors are reputable. There used to be a dealer in New Orleans who sold such things and seemed to know what he was selling but that was a long time ago and he may no longer be there.
Are you limited to the U.S.? London markets used to be a good source, but no longer. There is at least one flea market in Paris that has a lot of antiques — I don't swear they have swords but I would expect them to. The Grand Bazaar in Istanbul probably has people selling swords. Nearer home you can probably find antique swords on eBay, but you would have to judge them for yourself. Someone else has mentioned Fagan Arms — I used to get their catalog and think I bought a few things out of it.
You should keep tabs on those high-profile auction houses like Christie's and Sotheby's. They've been known to auction off antique weapons from time to time.
If you're more into a direct approach, look for specialized dealers who know their stuff, like Fagan Arms or Peter Finer.
You can always reach out to museums or institutions that are all about arms and armor. They might have the inside scoop on where to find the best antique swords or upcoming auctions.
I've been pretty worried about taking prescription sleep medications because of the all-cause mortality effects. Does anybody know if there are similar studies on melatonin?
These days I take melatonin almost every day. Sleep is a problem but not a *major* blocker in my life so if melatonin has large quantity or quality effects, I might want to cut back to taking it only when I "really need to."
Here's some useful ACX-adjacent links for melatonin, which may have links to the studies you're looking for:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
https://gwern.net/melatonin
Hmm neither says anything about all-cause mortality.
tyty
Scott had a very comprehensive article on melatonin a few years ago. I don't recall there being any significant downsides. The big takeaway for me was that most people take way too much - per Scott, the optimum dosage is 0.3 mg.
yeah of course I take .3mg, I'm not a barbarian! :P
Well, this barbarian tried the commonly available doses initially (3 and 5 mg) before reading Scott's article. The larger doses gave me strange and vivid dreams and heart palpitations.
Yeah for a brief period I took a higher amount (I think 3mg?) but quickly stopped because I had intense nightmares like 1/3 of the time.
Are folks aware of any writing groups or people to hire/otherwise work with as editors?
I'm thinking something like this, but specifically for rationality-adjacent writing: https://mtlynch.io/editor/
Probably can't offer much editing-wise, but your articles have a lot of political sniping, effectively a blogful of Young Man Yells At Cloud. The Cracks in Reality post have a whole section describing Nihilism as a series of political takes you don't like, which could be cut in its entirety (and then it gets worse with the literal "what am I even doing here?").
The book review opens with a political lamentation on the state of the US; everything before the 'fatalism' one-word summary could be cut in its entirety (alternately, throw in a "it is 1997" or something at the end, make it a joke; no reason to wait until part 3 to tell us that). Then there's the phrase "Their narratives, while falling victim to selection bias, are compelling," arguing two contradictory positions in the same sentence.
Is anyone aware of a site that aggregates the current state/research/protocols for minimizing the impact of dementia?
(I googled but there's a mess of sponsored ad driven and superfluous content)
Thanks!
Not an aggregation, but you might look at Bredesen's book _The End of Alzheimer's_. He has a theory that might be right. I checked with a retired Berkeley professor I know who said that Bredesen was a reputable researcher.
very cool - thank you!
It doesn't fully match what you're looking for, but the community at https://www.apoe4.info/ might be able to help you out.
Cool! Looks like a central point for lots of resources - thank you!
Are we in a stable or unstable period in history?
I'm saying stable, but at 50% odds.
First you want to understand whether history is the result of random noise (like Brownian motion) or of evolution on some low-dimension attractor. If the second option is the case, then we need to learn the relevant dynamics in terms of equations of motion of some sort. Finally we will be able to answer your question. I don’t know whether we have enough data to even take the first step.
Stable in what sense?
Technologically, I think the world is about to enter a period of instability due to AI. Even if we never get anything better than GPT4, as that becomes more widespread it will force a lot of change upon the world.
Geopolitically, I think we're still in the unipolar post-USSR phase, with the US as global hegemon. I think the way that's most likely to change is if China goes after Taiwan and the US fails to assert complete dominance. In an alternate reality, Russia might have upset it by a swift conquest of Ukraine, but now we know we're not living in that timeline. The number of other nations it would take to challenge the US if they banded together is shrinking, but I think it'll be a while before the US is weak enough that a realistic coalition could create an equivalent power.
Culturally, increased communication is homogenizing the world, small languages and cultures are dying out, and "Western" culture in general and American culture specifically continues to engage in narcissistic ouroborism, but all that's been going on since at least the 1950s. I don't see those courses changing suddenly, any time soon, short of an apocalypse.
I think the prevailing wisdom is that the 2020s are an especially unstable period?
There are still seven and a half years left in the 2020s. Kinda early to make this call. Plenty of time for large scale chaos.
Another Trump term with constitutional norms ignored? That probably would be pretty bad.
Biden dying in office? Kamala Harris is untested and currently viewed as ineffective. No way to game that out either.
An 86 year old president and China invades Taiwan. I don’t even want to think about it.
Asking a Magic Eight might provide as an accurate an answer as anything else.
what other period is it comparable to? Are there more unstable periods throughout history?
Read Peter Turchin. The Atlantic has two good articles to view before jumping into the books
which articles? which book?
America = Ages of discord (title)
World empires + math = historical dynamics (title)
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/can-history-predict-future/616993/
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/us-societal-trends-institutional-trust-economy/674260/
+1
I'm very late to the party but I have a new Substack post that many here may appreciate:
"Sorry Dr. Coughlin, “aging” and “old age” are real, and they suck" https://moreisdifferent.substack.com/p/sorry-dr-coughlin-aging-and-old-age
If your description is correct, the guy is a complete idiot.
After the first few paragraphs, I thought, jokingly, "LOL, he should say that age is a social construct". Then I read some more and... yep, he literally did that. (What's next? I suppose biology is a social construct, death is a social construct, reality is a social construct... in other words, "social construct" means "I don't want to talk about it, because it contradicts my opinions".)
Hey, let's apply the same "intellectual sophistication" to everything else. Declare that poverty is a social construct, and you no longer need to care about the poor. Call cancer a social construct, and you can save lots of money on healthcare. (How to make an intellectual argument for cancer being a social construct? That's easy. First, point out that it is actually a collection of a few different things, e.g. leukemia is not the same as lung cancer. Second, provide viewpoints alternative to the white cisheteropatriarchal colonialist perspective; for example, mention that some indigenous tribe believes that cancer is a gift from gods. You probably do not even have to provide evidence that this tribe exists. Third, explain how the concept of cancer is used to support inequality in our society, for example how male doctors get high salaries. Case closed; cancer was debunked, and now anyone who complains about it is a Nazi and needs to be cancelled.)
This makes my blood boil. No just that the guy is stupid, but that his stupidity is supported and celebrated by people who should know better. Yes, some people are hurt by age less than others; and yes, if you keep looking, you can find some 70-years olds who seem mostly ok (with the emphasis on "seem" and "mostly"). Sure, make a list of their names, and let's review the list 10 or 20 years later, to see whether it still supports the optimistic perspective.
Geez, Dan, you are completely ignoring the positives that aging brings. A better understanding of oneself and the rest of the world for example. I’ve noticed a continuing trend upward in my default mood over the decades.
I’m 70 now and yeah I’ve experienced some decline in strength and stamina. I’ve had to swap my 75 pound Alumacraft canoe for a 40 pound Kevlar model to hump over mile long portages in the BWCA for example and yeah I can’t bench press the same weight as when I was a young pup like you.
But I have to tell you, buddy, I’ve never been happier than I am now.
That's great..
Of course there are benefits to living longer like increased wisdom and "just getting better at life", as Tyler Cowen says. My post is about aging. Clearly you've been able to avoid the worst effects of aging, and I'm happy for you. But please recognize many are not so lucky. I'm also curious where you will be in 10, 20, or 30 years. At some point, aging will come for you, and very likely it will not be very enjoyable.
As far as people getting continually becoming happier as they get older, based on the other comments here I dug into that subject a bit more and it seems it isn't true! It appears most people get unhappier over time after age 65. See https://www.prb.org/resources/happily-ever-after-research-offers-clues-on-what-shapes-happiness-and-life-satisfaction-after-age-65/
This is obscured in a lot of "cross-sectional" studies because of selection effects - happier people are more likely to live longer.
Again I'm happy you are enjoying the start of old age but please recognize your experience may not translate to others. From what I have seen there are also many people who put on a "brave face" and say everything is fine but in reality they are suffering a lot. So while I'm willing to believe you in this case I don't necessarily take everyone's word that "they are fine" at face value. People often hide their health issues.
Oh, I don’t expect to live another 30 or 20 years. Even 10 or 5 seems dicey. I like to keep my focus on today. It’s all we ever really have. My high school best friend didn’t quite make 30. Hodgkins took him at 29.
You’re a young man. Have some fun with however many years come your way! May you get happier with the passage of time.
Thank you! Wise words!
The saving grace is that this quack is probably going to get old. I hope he gets old and infirm enough to understand how his wishcasting was dangerously misbegotten.
I am getting old and have a serious health condition. I was unemployed for almost a year, and in the tech world this is the trifecta of doom (age, health, no one else wanted him..) Nonetheless I managed to get a decent gig (contracting, no benefits, no job security...)
Here's the denouement: when I was half my present age, I ran my own high-flying tech startup -- and I probably wouldn't have hired the me I am now. Partly due to ageism, but also due to the simple fact that older is not usually better.
Aging sucks, and anyone who says otherwise is either young or stupid.
Yup.. both ageism and aging are problems. I'm only 35 and starting to notice some age-related declines. It's not something anyone talks about. People prefer to talk about the rare individual who is running marathons in their 70s or still intellectually engaged in their 80s. Reality is most people are either dead or a shadow of their former selves when they reach that age.
*most* people in rich countries are still alive at 80, but the majority of them have serious health issues that prevent them from living like a 40 year old. But on the other hand, many still have fulfilling lives, they're just severely disabled compared to when they were younger.
Yes, there is some data showing that "life satisfaction" increases with age. But there is other data showing it declines after age 65. The data on "happiness" is also mixed. (I was thinking about including the chart showing the post-65 decline in my post, but it seemed misleading to cherry pick one chart to fit my narrative and I didn't feel like trying to really sort out all the conflicting data & results at the time) https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/12/07/happiness-and-aging-in-the-us-why-it-is-different-from-other-places-and-why-it-matters/
As they discuss there is selection bias in the data also - happier people tend to live longer.
I have three free From The New World Substack subscriptions to give out (https://www.fromthenew.world/). Share your email to receive them.
Flower with a tiny mirror-- I didn't know any plants had mirrors.
This is a flower which has mirror bright shiny bits near the stamens. The camera in my cell phone is not quite up to the job of doing it justice, but I hope this photograph gives some hint.
The plant is a saxifraga, possibly Saxifraga x arendsii.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxifraga_%C3%97_arendsii
EDITED TO ADD: Also SaxAfrga or rockfoil.
There are hundreds of saxifraga varieties, but I haven't seen any mentions of tiny mirror-bright bits just outside the stamens. I'm not kidding about tiny. The whole flower is about a quarter of an inch across. I saw three mirrors on one of the flowers.
Any information is appreciated.
Just getting the pictures was a challenge-- the glints only show when the plant is in direct sunlight, and the timing took a bit of figuring out. It's in front of Frame Fatale, a shop on Passyunk, a diagonal south-east to north-west street, at least for that section.
The shop owner has no idea of what the plant is-- she has a service take care of the plants in boxes in front of the store. I might go back and ask her the name of the service.
I'd seen the flashes, but then the plant kept being in shade. I eventually figured out that too late in the day, and the plant is shaded by the three story buildings on the west, too early in the day and it's shaded by the buildings on the east. What's needed is the middle of the day (about 2:30 PM) when the sun is lighting the slot between the buildings-- it's what passes for overhead in non-tropical Philadelphia.
Non-obligatory SFF reference: Niven's sun-flowers, a home defense that uses mirrors to attack unwelcome people crossing the edge of a property.
https://www.facebook.com/nancy.lebovitz/posts/pfbid02G7TwMZxWa7UvkD33AVJgyYhaSzMtHJRupLwwp3CFFsk34iKqa3Szk4N1zVhpKDmXl?__tn__=%2CO*F
Apologies for the facebook link, but I'm still figuring out a good way to make my photo more available.
I wasn't able to view the Facebook link, but could the mirrors be droplets of moisture?
Thanks for asking, but no. They were implausibly small for water droplets, in very specific locations on the flowers (near but not on the stamens, and there wasn't water elsewhere. They looked flat.
I suppose the flowers could theoretically have a water-producing spot, but why would they do that?
I would think that water would not be produced, but that dew or precipitation might be collected in a feature of the flower; perhaps one evolved to increase attraction or fulfillment for pollinators. But I'm no botanist!
I'm seeing this in the middle of the afternoon. The dew is long gone.
Pitcher plants have water traps for catching insects, but I haven't heard of any plants which offer water to pollinators. Maybe it's so easy to get water that the pollinators aren't tempted.
Seems like progress on the "Prizes for matrix completion problems" has stalled for the past half month or so. Doesn't seem like anyone has any solutions or approximate solutions to the problems. Although Carlo Beenakker's answer for the sufficient condition with a chordal graph seems really insightful. Maybe a full solution will require concepts far removed from the current space.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pJrebDRBj9gfBE8qE/prizes-for-matrix-completion-problems
Scott—the book “Come as You Are” by sex researcher Emily Nagoski deals with the bonobo study and related information in more depth. Having read it fully (and having no other background on the topic), I feel a clear sense that you were only one level of mistaken, and not meta-mistaken. Your original correction seems appropriate.
It seems that this community is focused mostly on the kind of interpretability pioneered by Olah et al 2020, aka ‘mechanistic interpretability’. That is the very interesting exercise of looking at neurons in a big neural net one by one to figure out what they are doing. While that is very cool, there are a bunch of other approaches that may be of interest to those who care about alignment (however defined). A radical approach is to build models that are interpretable by design, right from the start. For example one can force a neural net to do case based reasoning in computer vision: this is a bird because this part of the image looks like that part of a training image, which is a bird.
A middle ground is to enforce certain symmetries at the architectural level. Equivariance is an example of this: the goal is to guarantee that a neural net will treat a transformed (say, rotated) version of the input data the same as the original. Swap rotation angle with race and you get fairness, mutatis mutandis. Both equivariance and fairness are huge fields of research and both boil down to aligning a model’s behavior to some ‘values’ (conservation of angular momentum or racial equality) that are not easily learnable from the raw or even augmented data.
I believe promoting research in these areas should be a priority for anyone who worries about unaligned AI, perhaps even more so than trying to predict/speculating on takeoff scenarios, etc.
Heya, is ARealDog still out there? Last time I heard from him was in the approach of the 2022-23 winter. He was concerned that it would be a meatless and beerless winter in his home country. Hope you are doing ok, ARD.
del (wrong place)
Clinical Trials: https://manhattan.institute/article/slow-costly-clinical-trials-drag-down-biomedical-breakthroughs?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Much modern discussion of autism describes it as a "spectrum". Further, it claims that girls were historically "underdiagnosed" with autism because there was more of a focus on how it presents in boys. The reason boys are much more likely to be diagnosed with autism, they claim, is because of a sexist bias against girls and women.
However, this line of reasoning is terribly flawed. First of all, if girls were more likely to be diagnosed, you can be sure there would be cries of the sexist medical system pathologizing the normal behavior of girls. But more importantly, the idea that autism, a syndrome (disorder), could "present differently" in girls is tautologically false. A disorder/syndrome is *defined* by its symptoms. If a *different* set of symptoms consistently appears for the other gender, then it's not the same disorder, by definition. It's a different disorder. This is also why it's stupid to say that autism is a spectrum - disorders are defined by taking a set of behaviors that frequently occur together and picking some cutoff after which you qualify for having the disorder - say, in the worst 2% of people for those behaviors (most harmful, most disruptive to your normal life, etc.). If disorders instead refer to anyone who fits any of the behaviors associated with the disorder (not all coinciding), and not just in the worst X% of that category, then all of its significance is lost, and you don't have a word to refer to the people who actually have the real condition and need help anymore.
It would be a mistake not to note this as a symptom of the increasing trend of feminization and misandry in modern society. Autistic boys that many of us are probably familiar with from our time in school, who display symptoms like a severe lack of understanding of social cues and communication, stilted speech, extreme obsessiveness, severe reactions to loud noises or other stimuli, etc. - classic symptoms of autism - no longer have a word to describe their condition that can distinguish them from the 29-year-old Vassar graduate working for the Washington Post who dislikes loud parties and occasionally taps her foot when she's bored.
> First of all, if girls were more likely to be diagnosed, you can be sure there would be cries of the sexist medical system pathologizing the normal behavior of girls.
Maybe, but that's is irrelevant to the point you are making. The fact that in a counterfactual world people would be annoyed about different things doesn't make the annoyance in our world less valid.
> A disorder/syndrome is *defined* by its symptoms
Not necessary. There is also the consideration of causes and treatment/accomodation. In general there are multiple reasons to draw category borders in a particular way. Personally as an autistic male, I find the idea of autistic spectrum to be quite useful.
> then all of its significance is lost, and you don't have a word to refer to the people who actually have the real condition and need help anymore.
People can come up with another sets of definitions to separate these groups. Which is exactly what happened. I do not think that anyone is seriously confused thinking that rich verbal autistic programmer requires the same amount of accomodation as poor non-verbal autistic unemployed.
> increasing trend of feminization and misandry in modern society
Oh, that's hillarious. Misandry in traditional society: men are drafted to die in constant wars. Misandry in modern society: not only male-specific symptoms are accounted for during dyagnistics of mental conditions. Though, I suppose, we can count it as an example of feminization: that even myisandry itself lost its masculinity and hardcoreness, becoming weak and effeminate.
This is a very good reply.
I'm a psychologist and I agree with you about the absurdity of the autistic spectrum idea. I have seen quite a few fully autistic people, and they are profoundly impaired -- often non-verbal, unable to care for themselves, sitting in a corner twitching a shiny object from side to side in a certain pattern and staring at it for hours. Could it possibly be that there are people who have an extremely mild case of the same thing, and what that looks like is: They can converse, hold a job, and look generally normal but a they are unsociable, rigid, obsessive and have a bunch of sensory sensitivities and quirks? Well, yeah, it could but I don't see any special reason to believe that's the case. And even if it is, the difference in degree is so great that it has become a difference in kind. It makes much more sense to think of "Aspies" as having a separate disorder.
To fully define an illness you need 3 things (I believe I'm remembering this right): A distinctive cluster of symptoms; distinctive abnormalities in the body at the site causing the symptoms; and a treatment that is effective in most cases. All we have for autism is the first -- a distinctive cluster of symptoms. And if you mix together profoundly impaired people with "old style" autism with functional but slightly odd and rigid Aspies you no longer even have a distinctive cluster of symptoms.
For what it's worth, I treat a lot of people whom most would diagnose with Asperger's Syndrome, and I do think those people have a distinctive cluster of symptoms, and also tend to respond to a certain treatment approach. "Aspie" seems pretty valid to me. "Autistic Spectrum" does not.
Great comments. Furthermore, most people won’t come into contact with fully autistic people because, not only are they difficult to deal with outside the home, but they could run into a street and get hit by a car any time they are outside the home. Many also die early as I’ve read numerous incidents in places like Florida where they get outside without supervision and drown in a pond. One family adopted a little autistic girl and she wandered from the adoption party and drowned in a pond because the adoptive parents didn’t know that was something that is a possibility 100% of the time they are awake. A Georgia family sent their 22 year old autistic son on a cruise with a service and he jumped overboard and they didn’t even consider filing charges or asking for an investigation because they understood it could have happened at any time in his life. In fact a woman with a beautiful family drowned her teenage autistic son in a pond in Florida because she couldn’t imagine how the family was going to be able to handle him as he got older…she will be lucky to avoid the death penalty.
I have no formal diagnosis and nothing but gut feeling to go on that there is definitely "on the spectrum" heritage in my paternal family, but in my early teens I had to break myself of the habit of doing that kind of repetitive patterned behaviour, because I could tell it was getting worse and I could also tell that if I indulged it, I'd end up sitting in a corner tapping my fingers in patterns for hours.
It was brute force repression on my part that worked, and that seems to be the opposite of today's view that "hey, getting excited and flapping your hands is cute and should be not alone permitted but encouraged!" by some Aspie/autism people online, instead of (in my day) "this is behaving like a lunatic, stop doing it". I do think that while harsh, the "don't do that" kind of socialisation actually helped more in the long run than "society should accept that at times you'll stand there flapping your hands" acceptance for being able to fake some semblance of normality and functionality.
"unsociable, rigid, obsessive and have a bunch of sensory sensitivities and quirks?"
That is me! 😀
Good for you for beating back that early tapping OCD before it got out of hand. I don't hear many stories of people managing to do that. About you having Asperger's: You have a playfulness of mind that is very un-Aspie. I'm not sure what to make of that, but thought I'd pass that observation on.
There's also some evidence from heritability: mothers with milder autistic symptoms tend to have daughters with milder autistic symptoms and sons with more severe symptoms.
This suggests:
A);it's heritable
B)the female version and the male version are both caused by the same heritable factor. So we're justified in declaring them to be the same thing
C) something about being female is partially protective
(Obvious follow on questions might be: do trans women with autism have less severe symptoms after starting female hormones? That would narrow down what the protective effect is caused by)
"something about being female is partially protective"
Obvious thing here would be the protective effect of double-X chromosomes, but could it be that simple?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230316212541.htm
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2021.756262/full
https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/hemophilia/course/Hemophilia_Patterns_v3.pdf
That's one possible mechanism, yes. ( as far as I'm aware the mechanism hasnt been identified) ... broken gene on the x chromosome, and if you have two X chromosomes you have a chance to have one working copy of the gene. But, again, it might be something else.
X-inactivation means that if a woman has a broken gene on an X, half the cells in her body will manifest that gene only and the other half will manifest the other chromosome's presumably-unbroken version. That could very easily explain weaker symptoms in women.
> A disorder/syndrome is *defined* by its symptoms.
I want to push back on this. When a condition is initially discovered, the only thing that you have is a set of symptoms and no explanation. As you keep researching, you discover similarities with other syndromes, and sometimes you decide to group several syndromes into a single class.
On the opposite end of the spectrum are conditions where we know the cause. For them, there is no discussion about whether the symptoms are close enough. If the cause is the same, it is classified as the same confition. The example case is cancer. The single cause is a set of cells starting to multiply. Depending on which cells starting going wrong, the range of symptoms that you may observe is huge. But we agree to group all the cancers in a single group because the underlying biological process is the same.
"Autistic boys that many of us are probably familiar with from our time in school, who display symptoms like a severe lack of understanding of social cues and communication, stilted speech, extreme obsessiveness, severe reactions to loud noises or other stimuli, etc. "
I was that autistic boy- except I'm a girl. And I'm not 29, a Vassar graduate, or any of the rest of it. Yes, there are a lot of stupid people who are so terminally online they need to find something to latch onto as the latest trend because they are so bored, but that does not mean that problems in diagnosis are "feminization and misandry".
I think all the self-diagnosed "and I have CPTSD and ADHD and and and" do need a good kick up the backside, but also girls are socialised in a way boys are not, which does help mask symptoms. If boys were heavily socialised into what social cues are, repressing instinctive reactions in the name of 'being ladylike' etc. then they would present differently.
I agree with the parts that the "autistic spectrum" is so widely defined (includes harmless weirdos, along with people who would fail to survive without constant care) that it is confusing to talk about; and that if girls were more frequently diagnosed with something, someone would immediately cry sexism.
That said, there are different ways how the autistic (asperger) weirdness interacts with sex/gender roles. The same symptom (same when tested in laboratory conditions) can become a huge problem if it is something society expects you to excel at, and almost invisible if it is something society doesn't want you to do anyway.
As an example, the usual dating dynamic is that men approach women. Now imagine two people having the same difficulty reading social cues. For an aspie man, dating is like walking through a minefield; whenever he approaches a woman, chances are he did something socially inappropriate he is not aware of. For an aspie woman, I think a frequent problem is that she fails to recognize when polite men are hitting on her, so she will miss the good opportunities, and probably end up with someone who was very explicit ("hey, wanna fuck?"). -- For an external observer, the aspie man is obviously problematic, and the aspie woman seems normal. But it makes sense to put them in the same category.
Similarly, at school, an aspie girl may fail to connect with other girls, and may be excluded and bullied by the alpha mean girls clique. An aspie boy will disrupt the classroom. -- For a teacher, the boy's behavior is more visible.
This is interesting
Take allergies for example. My latest blood work suggests I have a bunch of low level allergies, plus I know of a few that actually bother me. Am I "allergic"? It looks a lot like a spectrum, with some stuff being barely noticeable, some being worth an occasional antihistamine and a couple that I actually bothered to try to actually treat. Plus the life-threatening ones, which I fortunately don't have.
It looks to me like a disorder can both be on a spectrum, and still have various cutoffs where they affect you differently or where more aggressive treatments are worth considering.
> I can draw a "spectrum" between a firefly and the sun; it does not mean that the sun is a giant insect.
A "lightsource" - would be a better name for such spectrum than an "insect". But of course this is a great opportunity to play the "referential class tennis".
> it does not mean that the sun is a giant insect
Right, the sun is **pushed** by a giant insect, specifically Khepri the dung beetle.
"I can draw a "spectrum" between a firefly and the sun; it does not mean that the sun is a giant insect." Dang, I've been misled about the sun all these years. But . .. wait, how do you know a firefly isn't a tiny sun, huh?
Actually, great point and I completely agree with you about the spectrum idea making no sense.
"lumping socially awkward needs together with people who literally can't feed themselves"
Part of that was a political decision (the field of psychology and psychiatry and neurology is tainted by politics? heaven forfend!) due to parents and representative organisations wanting to reduce the stigma associated with autism. Parents wanted their children who weren't on the "will eat their own fingers" end of the scale, but not as functional as the Aspergers, not to be labelled with the "hopeless finger-eater" classification and basically dumped in the corner and forgotten about.
So Asperger's Syndrome was folded in, the whole idea of a spectrum was created, and this helped with the push for "we need services for our kids if they are to be any way functional". I think the very, very severe cases should be separated out, but again - that may lead to "dumped in a corner and forgotten about" because governments need to save money where they can, and if they can skimp on supports because "they're hopeless finger-eaters", they will do.
Autism is a complicated condition, and I think the idea of a spectrum does help because it presents in so many different ways. Maybe we've left behind the notion of "autism means hopeless finger-eater" but now we've swapped it out for "maths wizard who can get a cushy software engineer job and turn their nerdiness into profit" which is also not true of the vast majority.
Calling drawing the category border this particular way to be "making shit up in order to scam people into treating the mentally ill better" is extremely unfair, unless you also call the previous way to draw the category border to be "making shit up in order to scam people into treating the mentally ill worse".
There all kind of meaningful ways to draw category borders with their own psychological consequences and all of them technically require to "make shit up" - use a new term or redefine an old one.
I do think Aspergers should not have been folded in under the umbrella, and I think autism does present differently in girls and boys. Part of the problem is, "what exactly is autism?"
There's a range of symptoms which could be hived off and have a different label slapped on - social awkwardness could be agoraphobia or something else, etc.
There's also the difficulty in getting diagnoses - thankfully, a hell of a lot better now than when I was a kid, but adult autism diagnosis is like pulling teeth if you're any way functional (at least over here) and as I said, the various symptoms can be labelled as something else - 'oh, you're not autistic, you have X and counselling will sort that out!'
https://autism.ie/information/faq/autism/
I have no magic solutions. I understand the politicking but gods damn it, I wish things could be treated without the need to make special categories in order to force governments to provide the health services due to the people.
When I was little, the term was associated with a deep isolation and strangeness - my disturbed introduction to it was some '70s ladies-magazine piece I ran across, about "blue roses" or some such nonsense; then I was told my next-door neighbor's visiting boy cousin, who rocked back and forth and flapped his hands and did not have speech, was autistic.
In adult life, as exemplar I invoke a boy I encountered, for years, whilst subbing in the special needs classroom of the local school. He spoke clearly, but generally in repeated rote speeches, unless he was upset with the other kids, and then he emoted normally enough. His passions were the songs of a pop singer of an earlier day; and a particular household appliance. A day of good conduct was rewarded, according to a system set up by school and parent, with e.g. being allowed to use or take apart said appliance when he got home. When we walked about the school, he liked to (or compulsively did) peer up at the lights in order to count them. He was no savant in anything but it was always odd to present various little worksheets to him amid the other severely mentally disabled kids. He could *if he chose* do the work without trouble, while they of course never got it at all.
I sometimes reflected that he was in strange company (there was no one else like him). But somehow it did not seem like he belonged elsewhere in the school. He seemingly came from ordinary people (I don't mean that in a negative way, only sometimes autism is I think associated with somewhat high-IQ parents?), and perhaps that was why there was no suggestion of brilliance at anything, but only competence. But it was no easier to get him to do his work than it was with the kids for whom the work would be forever out of reach.
So much effort was expended in those classrooms. I can think it was a near-total waste of time, for which kindness and pleasant surroundings would have been a perfectly good substitute, while also bristling at the idea that those diligent special-ed teachers didn't give their all - their lives really - to the project (when parents of some of the special needs kids regularly complained, in the media and at school board meetings, that it was "not enough" - whether money or miracles).
After an interval of some years, he recognized me and greeted me politely by name at the local business where he had a little work experience thing set up by the school district. He would each time recite the same speech to me about his job. It evidently didn't work out as a permanent thing. He was still staring at the overhead lights, I noticed, and I didn't observe him to do the simple work task without prompting.
It is hard for some of us to set aside these rather-distinct impressions of autism - different as even these two boys seem, and how much or none of that difference was due to how they were treated - in favor of the more diffuse idea promulgated by supposedly autistic people (known chiefly by their "feelings") who seem unusually glib on twitter. Some patience may be required, or forgetting.
The online self-diagnosed are the irritating ones. They have an entire bingo card of afflictions they gabble off as to why nobody can disagree with them, or else it's all prejudice and bigotry and bias and neurotypical privilege.
People really on the autism spectrum, even at the most functional end, don't have the time or energy to complain that nobody is stroking their egos enough.
I would assume it was in fact easier to change the diagnosis, that's a relatively simple task.
Excellent question. It never ceases to boggle my mind.
Click on the three dots next to Reply. An edit option will appear.
Today Tyler Cowen writes: "Here is the full (Krugman on AI) NYT column, not a word on the Doomsters you will note. Could it be that like most economists, Krugman has spent a lifetime studying how decentralized systems adjust? Another factor (and this also is purely my speculation) may be that Krugman repeatedly has announced his fondness for “toy models” as a method for establishing economic hypotheses and trying to grasp their plausibility. As I’ve mentioned in the past, the AGI doomsters don’t seem to do that at all, and despite repeated inquiries I haven’t heard of anything in the works. If you want to convince Krugman, not to mention Garett Jones (https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/1665451237435736064), at least start by giving him a toy model!"
According to my AI:
"Toy models are used for various purposes, such as theoretical analysis, hypothesis testing, and pedagogical explanations. They allow economists to isolate and understand specific economic mechanisms and relationships without the complexity and intricacies of the real world.
These models often involve a set of assumptions that may not hold in reality but are assumed for the sake of simplicity and tractability. By making these simplifying assumptions, economists can focus on studying the fundamental economic principles or relationships at work.
Toy models typically involve mathematical or graphical representations and often use variables, equations, and diagrams to describe economic behavior and outcomes. They provide a conceptual framework that helps economists develop theories, explore economic concepts, and make predictions."
It sounds to me like someone who takes AI x-risk seriously should produce a toy model to demonstrate the plausibility of the risk. Right?
Is AI risk qualitative or quantitative? According to your AI, it would have to be quantitative in order to make a toy model. I think, however, that it is qualitative.
I think the biggest risk we have from AI is simply assigning it too great of tasks. "Computers make very fast, very large errors." If we merely ask AIs for advice and decide on our own whether to implement the decisions then we will be better off for the quick suggestions. But when we automatically implement AI decisions we could set ourselves up for something catastrophic.
I would think the last thing one would want from an AI is advice. The great power of ai to me is pulling signals out of noise. I wouldn’t ask a truffle pig for advice, to make a truly capricious analogy.
To continue the analogy, you absolutely would ask a truffle pig for advice. You ask it where truffles are, and then verify they are indeed truffles. It seems to me that that is exactly how we want to use AIs, pulling signals out of noise. But then we check to be sure they are actually signals.
I understand AIs can examine x-rays and flag some for cancerous anomalies. This can help doctors. But don't let the AI write prescriptions, inform the patient, or perform surgery based on its findings.
>You ask it where truffles are, and then verify they are indeed truffles
Well I would not call
that advice , but never mind.
Sounds to me like more economists thinking they are experts on everything. Since I don't think economists even get the economy right, why should I believe them on AI risk, doom or no doom?
Well, you may not. Since most all of the scenarios of AI takeover I see on Less Wrong or in Bostrom's _Superintelligence_ involve economic behavior as key to their speculations, I'm inclined not to take any of them too seriously if economists do not.
> involve economic behavior as key to their speculations
Unless you're defining "economic behavior" so broadly as to make this claim basically meaningless, I don't think this is true. Some people do think takeover scenarios which involve something like full automation happening first are plausible, but this isn't a necessary or even particularly likely component of many other people's models.
> It sounds to me like someone who takes AI x-risk seriously should produce a toy model to demonstrate the plausibility of the risk. Right?
There's been plenty of writing describing causal models of why we ought to expect x-risk from our current course of AI development. Tyler either hasn't bothered reading any of it, or wants something different, but since he hasn't explained what a convincing (to him) model would look like, I don't see why anyone ought to spend their time trying to create one. At a first guess he wants something with made up numbers where some threshold being crossed indicates x-risk, where people can poke at various multipliers or whatnot, but that's obviously much worse in terms of actually conveying a valid argument if you have a straightfoward causal model you can present directly instead.
If I wanted to educate myself about x risk theories what would be worth reading?
Depends on what your starting point is. The task of "write up decent introductory materials for a variety of audiences" has not yet been completed to my satisfaction, alas.
I think https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eaDCgdkbsfGqpWazi/the-basic-reasons-i-expect-agi-ruin is pretty good at drawing out the relevant key points, but it does rely on some mildly technical background and shared context. Rob's other recent posts may also be relevant.
My (very rough) attempt was this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qoG4tR8TGEYjoDmw2/transcript-of-a-presentation-on-catastrophic-risks-from-ai , but includes various details that probably aren't relevant (i.e. social proof).
Thanks
I'm wondering why no economist--as far as anyone knows--has put AI x-risk into language economists use, particularly since most all of the AI takeover scenarios involve predictions about economic behavior. It seems like economists would be naturally interested in doing this, yet for some reason they are not. I'm inclined to think that they are unable to come up with scenarios which pass the smell test. Maybe that will change in the near future, though.
Many countries in the Western world have a problem with housing prices in their few biggest cities. Huge cities have a nasty runaway growth effect where the bigger they grow, the greater a share of the nation's economic opportunities they offer, meaning that more and more people live there, until eventually everyone is paying 80% of their income to live in a tiny shoebox apartment. '
What can be done on a national governmental level to encourage the development of smaller cities (in the 50,000 to 500,000 range and outside the immediate vicinity of huge cities)? Some obvious ideas include:
1. Lower taxes for residents of these areas. Difficult because it's easy to fake your residence (unless we start tracking people's movements, which is a nasty precedent to set)
2. Add conditions to immigration visas which ban immigrants from moving to certain large cities. (Again, difficult to enforce)
3. Better infrastructure. Connect smaller cities to big ones with subsidised high speed rail. (Expensive!)
4. Put government jobs in smaller cities. Build universities and the like. (Difficulty: you'll have a harder time recruiting good employees than you would in big cities)
Any other good ideas?
I don't agree that it's a problem that people want to live in big cities – the cost is already largely internalized. But if the government thinks this is a problem, I think they should just move the capital and its institutions into the middle of nowhere, thereby seeding a city there. Brazil has already shown that this works, with around 3M people now living in the capital conurbation.
Smaller cities have plenty of government jobs. Local, State, or Federal Gov jobs plus Universities and Healthcare are often all in the top 10 employers in the cities of the size you are talking about. Getting the state or fed government to put an office or installation in a city is a big focus of state and congressional reps (it's a great thing to campaign on!).
#3 is basically just pushing things further and further into the suburbs. Even if it's "high speed rail" you are still just pushing people to the outskirts of a city.
Bigger cities are more productive. People moving to these cities is great! It leads to more wealth and prosperity for all by raising the development of the country. The issue is constraints on the supply of housing. Nothing will change that reality. We have to remove those constraints.
5. Use a land value tax to discourage moving into bigger cities. Set it much higher in the biggest cities compared to every other part of the country, discouraging new people from moving there. Ideally also ban new residents from owning property in the biggest cities for the first ~5 years after moving to the country.
As long as most of the economic gains are poured into the land where they happen the situation isn't going to change much. The solution is quite obvious: Land value tax + UBI. And the removal of zoning restrictions.
Public trasportation also wouldn't hurt but it wouldn't change the underlying dynamics.
The problem isn't growth, the problem is NIMBYism. Just look at Tokyo or Houston.
Neither Tokyo nor Houston seems like something to aspire towards. Tokyo is horrendously crowded city where the average dwelling size is 66 square metres and nobody has any privacy; it's a fun place to visit but I'd hate to live there, and it's a horrible place to raise children which is why nobody has any.
Houston, on the other hand, is a never-ending sprawl about eighty miles across, it takes hours to get from one side of the other... and it's not even a fun place to visit.
Neither ultra-density nor ultra-sprawl is desirable. What _is_ desirable is to agglomerate people into smaller clusters that actually support comfortable life.
So you don't like density, don't like sprawl... what do you like? You want a small city surrounded by lots of rural land? What's the advantage over living on the edge of someplace like Houston?
It sounds like your problem isn't with expensive housing then, you just don't like big cities in general for some reason.
Also, without even looking up any data, I would predict that people are having more children in Tokyo than in rural Japan, so I think your "which is why nobody has any" claim is wrong.
Per Statistia, the total fertility rate of Tokyo Prefecture in 2020 was 1.12, while that for Japan as a whole was 1.37. I don't know where to find the TFR for rural Japan specifically, but I sincerely doubt that it's the other large cities that are bringing up the national average.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1329390/japan-total-fertility-rate-tokyo-prefecture/
Houston would be great if it wasn't on the Buffalo Bayou.
All the food, music and art of a major city, without any sudden changes into no-go areas.
How is 1 (assuming it works) different from effects of house price? Lower cost of housing already provides the same incentives, wouldn't it?
It does, but apparently not enough, so tax rates might help tip the balance.
Instead of trying to get people to move out of e.g. London to places like Manchester or Liverpool, it would be better to remove restrictions on development in the areas just outside of London. Economic activity will concentrate in one area, but it will be a large, sprawling area with different local governments.
I used to be in charge of recruiting for gov't jobs in a small town. One problem I had is how many gov't jobs require a degree, even though the town had no university. The gov't office had been placed there in the 60s to create jobs for small towns, but the educational requirements had continued to creep up.
I've lost ten pounds in three weeks doing a combination of keto and intermittent fasting. And it's been remarkably easy; no serious hunger pangs, no feeling lethargic or weak (after the first 3-4 days, anyway). I'd tried both diets before with meager results, but on a whim I tried going keto after a 24 hour fast and was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to just keep on going with both. Just throwing this out there for others who don't feel like shelling out for semaglutide and the like.
out of these 10, 5 is water associated with glycogen. No glycogen => no water to hold it.
How do you know that's the correct ratio?
You can guess somewhat from plausible rates of fat loss, which are strictly limited by the caloric deficit you're in. That probably isn't much more than 800 calories or so if you're not feeling any hunger pangs. That would account for 1.6 pounds of fat loss per week. Everything else is water and glycogen. This comes off no matter what just from being in a deficit, but is especially pronounced with low carb diets for pretty obvious reasons (can't replenish glycogen if you're not eating carbs).
Thanks, that makes sense.
There isn't a correct ratio, it's just fixed value which is not associated with further fat loss.
In first week, most of weight lost would be glycogen + water, if one manages to lose 50 pounds then ratio is ~0.1.
It can't be too fixed; it's gotta be dependent to some degree upon the initial mass/volume of the person starting the diet.
Yes, of course. Fixed meant in respect to body response to diet.
So how did you know it was five pounds, then?
Yeah, the last time I tried intermittent fasting, my body only switched to ketogenesis after doing 64-hour fasts, but then switching to a keto diet for my few meals let me sustain it when eating more regularly. Not that I felt hungry, it's just that I found that I enjoy eating, so I kinda want to eat more often.
So it's June, and I figured out why the addition of black and brown stripes to the Pride flag bothers me: it's exactly analogous to why "white pride" is dangerous but e.g. "Irish pride" isn't. What do the average black person and the average gay person have in common, other than voting for the same (American) political party? It's evidence that Pride isn't about sexuality anymore, but rather a Pride in being Not Like Me. When I see the construction of a political coalition carefully defined to exclude me, I start getting antsy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UakbcKb_154
I'm not sure which flag you're actually referring to, but the Daniel Quasar flag (which I think is the most popular of the revisions? No real way to be sure.), with the trans/BIPOC/stigma wedge on the left, is just meant to show solidarity of queer folks with other marginalised groups, which may or may not intersect. There is no sophisticated exegesis beyond that.
My understanding of this is that that ISN"T the pride flag, it's the "progressive flag". The pride flag is still the normal rainbow (at least as far as i know), but the progressive flag is defined by whatever current policies are "progressive". So in 20 years the flag won't have the rainbow anymore and will have...idk the red cross symbol or something.
Black and brown? Don't forget the Ukrainians!
https://gcn.ie/dublin-pride-ukrainian-solidarity-flag/
I think it's stupid because it implies that race is a sexuality and that black and brown people can't be LGBT.
It's the continual ever-chopping finer the degrees of politicised victimhood. The Oppression Stack in operation.
Within feminism, for example, there have long been complaints about how the white, middle-class, second-wave feminism was not representative of black and brown women and their problems and struggles (I'd say it was also not representative of white working-class women either, given somebody threw a quote at me about the "comfortable concentration camp" of having to drive your kids to Cub scouts and use a vacuum cleaner - oh, the horror! meanwhile, my mother was trying to look after her bedridden mother and us kids in a house with no running water).
Hence we get mujerism and womanism:
https://bmrc.lib.uchicago.edu/portal/curated/womanism/
https://www.apa.org/pubs/books/Womanist-and-Mujerista-Psychologies-Intro-Sample.pdf
In the same way, BIPOC LGBT claim that the white experience is not inclusive of them; the Pete and Chasten Buttigieg couples as the face of gay marriage/gay rights activism ignores poverty, sex work, and (of course) intersectionalism:
https://www.verywellmind.com/the-intersection-of-lgbtq-and-poc-5204007
Hence the need for "Progress Pride" flags with ever more groupings: black and brown stripes, trans colour stripes, the intersex symbol/colours in some versions:
https://queerintheworld.com/lgbt-progress-pride-flag/
As progress is made, the various elements now all clamour for the high ground of "but *we* are still being oppressed!"
I don't think it does imply that or is meant to imply that, and this is the first I'm hearing of someone interpreting it that way.
Obviously, it's not *intended* to imply that, but that's certainly the way it comes across.
The black and brown stripes aren't meant to represent "the average black person", they're meant to represent LGBTQ people of colour. (Whether the inclusion of extra stripes is a good or bad idea is a separate issue, but you and several others in this thread seem to be misunderstanding what they are there for.)
I want a stripe for indignant, smart, sad-but-still-trying- hard wasp mutts of the low-power gender. Maybe purple, so sort of pink but melancholy? I'm straight but can't help it, ya know?
"straight but can't help it"
Keep trying, I'm sure you'll get there one day. I know it's hard but none of us overcome our limitations without being persistent.
You have a heart of stone, Quiop. I want some fucking sympathy for my problem feeling the hots for my own gender. I didn't ask to be born this way.
Your pain finds its echoes in my stony heart, Eremolalos, and I resonate with sympathy for the hot feelings of all genders and orientations. But regardless of whether you were born this way or have become this way, I hope you may come to feel both joy and pride in these feelings, for they are one of the foundations of our shared humanity.
We are all born the way we are born, and become the way we become.
Some are born queer, some achieve queerness, and some have queerness thrust upon them? Really???
Asian people are represented by the small letters "made in China" on the flag.
The black and brown stripes are explicitly not intended to denote a literal range of skin colours, but if you are an LGBTQ Asian who feels that the flag excludes you, or if you are trying to support people in that category who do feel that way, I would encourage you to work together with like-minded individuals to design a new flag that you feel is more inclusive and present your arguments for its widespread adoption.
The word "literal" is in that sentence for a reason.
The silliest thing about it is I guarantee you that the vast majority of "black and brown" people have no idea they are "represented" on the the Pride flag and probably most of them would prefer not to be.
Yeah, but these kinds of signals are not for the vast majority of people. It's the very online activist contingent who need to invent new grifts to keep the sweet white liberal guilt cash and attention flowing.
The culture war has divided the gay community too. I've lost several friends because I'm a non-woke liberal.
I used to use the pride flag on my facebook avatar to piss off homophobic relatives. I wouldn't use it today.
So today *you* are the homophobic relative for not being in line with the current set of demands?
The one thing in all this march onwards and upwards, twirling twirling as we go, as a crusty old social conservative, that makes me laugh is precisely this. The people who were smugly waving flags in the "homophobes" faces and going "we're here, we're queer, get used to it!" are now going "but I never thought the leopards would eat *my* face?"
Not making light of your situation, but the shoe is on the other foot now, and how do you like the jeers and smears being directed at *you* for objecting to, or simply not being 200% enthused by, certain of the elements of the movement?
Maybe your relatives were homophobes - or maybe, like yourself now, they were just on the wrong side of the Overton Window.
I got on the train and got off at my destination. Now that train is heading into a wall. I have no regrets, basically.
I won't make common cause with the social conservatives until they agree to stop trying to ban abortion. That's a hard no for me.
Abortion is a hard no for me, but the other way round. At least you're honest about it and sticking to your principles.
To me it kinda looks like a giant wedge of identity politics being rammed up between the legs of a beautiful rainbow.
Personally, I object to the addition of more elements to the pride flag (and to the LGBT acronym) because it ironically makes it less generally inclusive by focusing on specific inclusions. So, when it was just the "gay pride flag," you could understand this as "gay" sensu lato, i.e. representing sexual minorities in general, and this is how it was taken. But when you add elements specifically representing another sexual minority, you imply the previous symbol wasn't already covering everyone before, and then invite other sexual minorities to question why they're not specifically represented as well. Of course, this is dealt with by just adding more elements (first the transsexual colors, then the yellow field and circle, and likely more to come in the future), but there will never be enough elements to cover every conceivable sexual minority identity, so it becomes an effort in futility that ensures someone will always be left out, with that omission being all the more acute the more other groups are represented, rather than just having a symbol or acronym that's understood to represent everyone even if it does so pars pro toto. So by continuing down this wild goose chase of specific representation, general representation is further eroded, good vexilology and catchy acronyms are replaced with garish banners and nonsensical corporate keyboard spam, and everyone in the movement these things were meant to serve is worse off for it. Hopefully Scott's "hyperstitious slur cascade" can be ignored and at some point some critical mass within the LGBT movement can insist on a return to the original flag and acronym based on a better conception of "inclusivity" than the untenable one being used now.
Never fear, Blue's Clues is here to teach you how to recognise each and every flag:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4vHegf3WPU
While I think your central point is probably right, it nevertheless seems important to note when analogies fail:
> "Irish pride" isn't.
Maybe I listen to too many IRA fight songs, but it seems to me like Irish Pride was in fact dangerous.
Explain please.
Irish pride looked to be causally upstream of people getting hurt, hence "dangerous". (And moreover, part of "Irish pride" specifically was being proud of being dangerous.) This is not intended as commentary on whether or not it's net good, just that if you're going to pick an ethnic pride that seems benign, probably you should pick a less bellicose one.
I remember once hearing an Irish nationalist song about Admiral Nelson. I couldn't make out many of the words, but it seemed quite surprising that they would be celebrating an English hero, even though Ireland was part of the UK in 1805 when Nelson won his famous victory at Trafalgar. Perhaps they disliked his adversaries at the time, the French and/or Spanish, even more than the English, I pondered, although that seemed somewhat implausible.
It turned out the song celebrated blowing up a statue of Nelson in Dublin. DOH! I might have guessed.
Yeah, I was gonna say…
And quite a few Irish were well in with Napoleon back in the day. It was a very divisive issue.
When I went looking for flag songs, here's one (surprisingly, *not* by the Wolfe Tones):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bp4Ski7MC5E
Flags are and were a source of controversy in the North:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Ireland_flags_issue
When I was 15 years old, I went to Ireland for the first time in my life to spend the summer in a village called Strokestown(it’s more on the map now than it used to be due to the famine museum there).
The first Friday night I was there there was a dance; that kind of Irish country dance party, where they put up a big tent, and there’s a country and western cover band.
I was looking forward to it and Whitmore. I had a beautiful new shirt I had bought for myself in Canada just before I came over.. it was bright orange.
I went to the dance and during a break when people went outside to smoke, I went outside, and there was a young man standing by the doorway, wearing a green tweed suit (I swear to God, it’s true), and eyeing me in a very belligerent way. He’s sucked every dram of saliva that he could into his mouth and expectorated on my shirt, and then looked me in the eye as if to say, what are you gonna do about it ?
I didn’t have a clue about the orange thing I was 14.
To this day, I cannot look at that color without remembering him, spitting on me, and having very dark thoughts about Oliver Cromwell
I'm sorry that was your first experience of Ireland, it was just a very unfortunate coincidence.
And he was a dickhead, anyway; you were a stranger, how were you to know about that?
In retrospect, I should’ve known better. My mother was an Irish Catholic woman married to an Anglican Brit and my father he was orange, and my mother she was green.
It was the strangest mix-up that you had ever seen
I hadn’t really put it together enough when I was 14. It makes me laugh now.
YeahI know. I had a great time there, and lots of funny stories that being one of them.
Specifically, "Irish Pride" is not currently dangerous in America, the way "Slovakian Pride" is not currently dangerous in Ireland.
👍
I remember the moment when I looked up the lyrics to "Zombie" by The Cranberries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ejga4kJUts
And not just in Ireland, it caused violence in the Americas even several generations before the birth of the IRA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenian_raids
Oh come on.. Im sorry but the Irish were not waging a war of aggression against the British, they were resisting colonization, and what they got up to in Canada in the 1860s was a proxy war with the newly minted USA and the UK being the main players don’t you think?
The only foreign country the Irish successfully took over is Australia and who was it put them up to that?
German pride had uh...a few arguable downsides, too, I think the record will show.
You could easily march in a current Pride Parade under the Suffragettes' Flag, the colours would blend right in!
https://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/gb_suffr.html
IMO the current social movement (not sure what to call it) has simply been much more successful than the other movements you mention.
One of my favourite things is that this very idea of flags representing nations has been a reason for certain people to oppose the very idea of flags. We are all one people, not seperate countries, love and peace, blah, blah blah.
And so you inevitably get merchandise simultaneously decrying flags in general while also proudly emblazoned with the Pride flag in particular: https://www.noflag.co/collections/no-flag-ground-zero-drop/products/no-flag-one-love
To be fair, that's a much longer rainbow than a flag would have. It's not flag shaped. It's the same *design* as the classic Pride flag, but it isn't actually the Pride flag.
In a mostly-non-US sense, "nation" can mean "people", regardless of whether they have a physical state of their own. So by that logic, it makes sense to me? And in America, there's previously been room for stuff like the Gadsden flag ("Don't Tread On Me"). I suppose it could be viewed as a falling apart of the FDR-WWII-era imposed sense of national unity, but into different coalitions than the states that made up the Union.
I think of a lot of the signage as being like Havel's greengrocer's sign, where "Workers of the World, Unite" is translated to mean, "I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace."
By the way, if anyone reading this hasn't read "The Power of the Powerless" by Vaclav Havel, I strongly suggest you do, at least the first 11 sections (34 pages in the below version). It's a brilliant dissection of a totalizing ideology.
https://archive.org/details/the-power-of-the-powerless/
Nominative determinism that I feel really stupid for only just realizing: Malthus, as in Thomas Malthus, is derived from "malt house." So the guy who thought everyone would starve from population outstripping agricultural production was named after a building where grains are stored.
Yes but his first name was Thomas, as in Doubting Thomas.
So "Thomas Malthus" means "person who is doubtful about grain storage".
Let’s say a smart person acquires the magic ability to wish themselves smarter. The catch is that they can’t just say “I wish to be smarter.” They have to be specific about what sorts of smarts they will gain. So they can wish for perfect memory, the ability to solve all solvable mathematical and logical problems in a nano-second, to easily visualize objects in 50 dimensions, the ability to compose essays as clever as Chesterton, concertos like Mozart, paintings like Vermeer...
The result is an amalgam of the smartest people who have ever lived plus the ability to put together thoughts many orders faster and with perfect memory. Such an intelligence could do a lot.
But then, wanting to be even smarter, what would it wish for?
What I’m obviously getting at is that we only know what intelligence is to the extent that it already exists, and we define it by comparisons to that. The smartest person in the world, whoever that may be, can only wish to be more intelligent by knowing what they lack cognitively in comparison with other individuals. For instance, the smartest mathematician may realize they lack brilliance in music or the visual arts. Or vice versa. But once we’ve exhausted all of those known notions of intelligence, how would one even wish for the ability to be smarter?
It seems to me this question is relevant to the plausibility of FOOM.
The equilibrium point would seem to be knowing everything you believe you need to know. That’s very subjective. Invention is driven by discontent.
In the fields I have studied, learning more opens up new vistas, and you see new things to master or new questions to ask. I don't think I've ever reach the end of *anything,* and realized that no further development was possible for a practitioner of that subject or activity. And I would guess the world's smartest mathematician also sees, from his very advanced vantage point, a vista before him: Specific things like theorems he's never been able to prove, but also a lot of things he intuits, but cannot get a hold on -- the way this field and that field are isomorphic, but it's a very subtle isomorphism. But if you could show that it was, and get a handle on how it was, all kinds of things would become possible. Why then, you'd *finally* be able to see the Remick Paradox from a different angle. And if you could do *that* then you might finally be able to . . . etc. So I think that the reason you end up thinking that the idea of being smarter has a limit is that you are imagining that it's possible to specify with some precision what being smarter would be like -- what you would be able to do, what topics you would know everything about, whose performance you would be able to equal. But if I were wishing to be smarter, the way I would formulate it would be that I would like to be able to keep stepping forward rapidly into the new vistas I see ahead, and that I never reach one so subtle and weird and complicated that I can't master it, and in doing so gain access to the next vista.
I would expect that upon gaining nearly any capability with sufficient breadth and depth, new potential capabilities would be discovered. This is most obvious to me with math - there seems to be a bottomless well of meaningfully unique problems that can lead to new problems. But you can apply the same thing to music - you become the perfect performer and composer, then you invent new genres, new instruments, new modalities, then you become the perfect performer and composer for all of those, repeat to infinity.
The practicality might cap out at some point, but I wouldn't expect the gain in capabilities to stop, assuming unlimited resources.
Right, superintelligence beyond what we've seen in humans, might not exist.
It might be equivalent to the smartest humans.
But the smartest humans I have heard talking about their work all see things they would love to do, but can't master yet. They still hope they will be able to. They've had some ideas recently about new ways to come at it. And beyond the things that can *almost* do the glimpse other astonishing possibilities.
Why do you presume that none of the many many forms of intelligence you grant yourself as part of the initial process will grant insight as to what to wish for next? Even granting your premise that the average person is limited to asking to have the capabilities of others it can see, by the time we reach the limit of that we no longer have an average human intelligence and that person will be able to think of far more.
Even the other comments already have good suggestions for going beyond, and as bright as this commentariat is they're not nearly at "peak human in literally every field simultaneously"
>Even the other comments already have good suggestions for going beyond
All the other comments look to me like they challenge the premise. (They do it well.)
Wooly Al's point is taken well. But "If making itself smarter will let it Do All The Things, it will make itself smart enough to Do All The Things." is premised on the *ability* to make itself smarter. If the goal, say, is to cure cancer, tackling the problem of making yourself smart enough to cure cancer may be as hard as curing cancer, in which case if you can't do the latter currently, you can't do the former either.
Drethlin makes the very good point that an AI will use existing theory and experimentation to build a smarter AI rather than simply knowing what a smarter AI would be like a priori. That seems rather obvious now that I read it. Obvious enough to make me abandon my analogy that an AI making itself smarter would be like a smart person wishing to be smarter. That's not what it would be like.
oh, yes, I was addressing the magic analogy, not the use of it to model hypothetical AI FOOM
>the ability to solve all solvable mathematical and logical problems in a nano-second,
Why would you limit yourself to the solvable ones? Why would you limit yourself to being "as clever" as Chesterton, instead of better? "I want to solve Riemann's." "I want to express myself perfectly to everyone, always." "I want to make a car that turns instantly and never rolls over." "I want to turn all the planets into moons." "I want to build a gun that kills the past."
The problem with solving an unsolvable problem is that your solution will be wrong.
That's what your *current* intelligence says.
Well, one failure mode of a superintelligence is that it winds up being superintelligent by half.
This doesn't apply to any other technological improvement, why would it apply to intelligence?
We don't design a new airplane by combining bits and pieces of current airplanes. We use combinations of theory and experimentation to invent new ways of achieving the same goals that are more efficient, more robust, faster, etc, and end up with airplanes that function quite differently from past airplanes while still being airplanes. Similarly, advances in semiconductors were not made by just copy/pasting existing computing systems like vacuum tubes in new ways.
Is the idea that an AI will be able to build a better AI using known fundamental principles or that the AI will discover new principles from which to build a better AI?
Both. AI will have a stronger grasp of known fundamental principles than any human researcher because it will have perfect digital memory expandable infinitely, and it will have the capability to discover new principles as it works.
"The smartest person in the world, whoever that may be, can only wish to be more intelligent by knowing what they lack cognitively in comparison with other individuals."
This seems off. Like, fundamentally, philosophically flawed, in a way I argue with a lot of people about.
I don't want to be Better Than Others, I want to Do The Thing.
I don't want to be the best cancer researcher, I want to cure cancer
Why can't I cure cancer? Because I'm not smart enough.
I would much rather everyone be smart enough to cure cancer than me being too dumb to cure cancer but smarter than everyone else.
I want to Do The Thing.
The superintelligence doesn't want to get smarter, it wants to Do All The Things. If making itself smarter will let it Do All The Things, it will make itself smart enough to Do All The Things. One of the concerns with AI doomerism is not that the AI will be infinitely smarter than human being on ever scale, it's that it will be an idiot savant with no interest in Chesterton or Mozart or Vermeer because those aren't important to what it wants.
Your lovely post made me think about idiot savants and how I was very dismayed on Twitter by the communications of LeCun and others. They were dismissive and insulting, and of course that's unpleasant, but unpleasantness is not very important, really. The important thing was that they seemed sort of like idiot savants -- or, at least, people with a very uneven profile of abilities. I assume they're all smart as hell about tech. They most be at least adequate as leaders of a big project, and possible awesome leaders. But they appeared to be extremely flat, undeveloped people when it comes to understanding and communicating with the public. They were terrible at really basic stuff, like perceiving others: LeCun kept talking about doomers being crackpots, when at most 5-10% of the responses he'd gotten could be considered nutty. They were terrible at being persuasive. Even if you hate your audience & think they're know-nothings, you can make a good impression by being friendly, saying "that's a great question," and giving answers that sound convincing even if they are lies. They couldn't even to that! And none of them seemed to have the slightest capacity to consider the possibility that somebody outside of their world had any thoughts worth considering. The seem to be incapable of taking people outside their sphere seriously. It's like they don't get it that all of us have our own smarts and validity, plus of course our own vulnerability to having our lives undercut and wrecked by the state of the world. And it seems to me that these tech bros are in many ways going to be running the world in the coming years. Seems like who gets elected, who wins this or that war, and all that stuff is going to matter less than it normally does, because the effects of AI, and how fast and in what directions it develops, and whether or not it is fucking OPEN SOURCE, are going to be so great that all that stuff that dominates the headlines now is going to be a bunch of weak nudges in comparison to the monstrous force of the AI trajectory. And the people who get to determine the AI trajectory have the gee whiz excitement, the narcissism and the empathic capabilities of 13 year old boys at some robotics camp for the gifted.
This makes a preoccupation with increased intelligence seem like a way to sublimate wanting more power. And it does seem to be how the reasoning often goes. like with the paperclip scenario, or "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" for that matter. In a military scenario, super-intelligence becomes a super-weapon that you need to get before the enemy does. It's generally assumed that any sufficiently intelligent entity would of course be a megalomaniac.
Science fiction and fantasy have a large element of power fantasy to them, and it seems like something like that is going on here?
But some alternate answers to "why can't I cure cancer" might be "I haven't learned enough about biology" and "I don't have a lab and research staff," and it's tough to attract people and money with a lack of prestige, which implies that being a well-known cancer researcher with a track record might actually be more helpful than raw intelligence?
Although, with enough money, you could bypass some of those things, since you could fund the research that you want to see happen.
> But some alternate answers to "why can't I cure cancer" might be "I haven't learned enough about biology" and "I don't have a lab and research staff," and it's tough to attract people and money with a lack of prestige, which implies that being a well-known cancer researcher with a track record might actually be more helpful than raw intelligence?
I note you've listed here "gain academic knowledge", the central thing intelligence is good for that even people who deny its broader application admit, and 2 flavours of "convince other, smarter, people to do the research for you", which while useful to the average person is just not necessary if you are, by the very hypothesis, smarter than them.
On your first point, yes, intelligence, like almost every fantasy, is a power fantasy. Most well adjusted people aren't fantasising about crushing their enemies, though, they're fantasizing about having the power to *help people*. Hell, even the people with destructive fantasies about crushing their enemies are usually imagining that as being immensely helpful to all the innocent victims they perceive those enemies as harming. Studies on video games with choice systems can be illustrative here - the overwhelming majority of players choose the "good" path in video games, a minority explore every path, and basically noone only does an evil playthrough.
re: "not necessary if you are, by the very hypothesis, smarter than them."
A misconception here is that research isn't actually work, it's just thinking hard or reading a lot of books or something like that. If a lone genius, army of one, can easily do it all themselves, why do they need other people?
I'm not so sure about that. A rough analogy: it doesn't matter how strong you are, if you're going to move a lot of stuff, you're going to want a lot of people and equipment to do it. Even if you own a container ship, you need a crew and you depend on an industrial base to provide fuel and ports.
Similarly, even if you are a very smart researcher, you're going to want other people and expensive equipment to help you run lots of experiments. Working smarter helps, but I'm doubtful that it corresponds to the ability to outcompete a research community all by yourself.
To get a foom scenario where you don't need other people, you need to be able to build all the assistants you need. It implies being able to grow an independent industrial base from scratch somehow, perhaps with some magic nanotech or biotech?
Though it's a common science fiction trope, it's not clear to me that superintelligence implies the ability to independently grow nanotech. What if it isn't? Maybe converting intelligence into power will practically require creating or subverting some kind of human organization to get stuff done? (Such as starting a company or buying it or taking it over.) Because, turns out, starting from scratch is much harder.
This implies more intelligence isn't necessarily a quick path to power. Today they're rather different things. Seems like a lot of future technologies have to turn out a certain way for high intelligence to imply wizardry?
(To be clear, I haven't proven anything. Reasoning by analogy is just a way to come up with plausible scenarios, not prove them.)
I mean, it depends on the size of the difference - in your physical strength analogy, if you can pick up a container ship in your hand and swim with it faster than ships can normally go, then no you don't need a crew at all, nor an industrial base for fuel.
I do get that there are a lot of scientific advance that are restricted by access to physical experimentation, but my feeling is that ~ all of them are beyond what a single well funded lab can do and a sufficiently capable lone genius can be a one-man lab. Both need to interface with the outside world for most (but not all) fields of research. The delta between that and competing against the whole world is much higher e.g. in my field of High Energy Physics the state of the art experiments are international multi-billion dollar collaborations. Still, the difference between an unusually good researcher and a mediocre one was probably ~10x productivity increase, both in terms of writing good working code faster and in terms of having that code be good enough for others to use down the line and not be tech debt weighing future projects down. HEP is also a field where state of the art experiments are hilariously far from where we'd really like them to be to answer some of the outstanding important fundamental questions. Theorists are out there predicting shit 100 orders of magnitude above what we can currently probe. (n.b. there are important questions they are currently answering, it's not like there's nothing between here and the stupidly high energy stuff)
Time to abandon the physical strength analogy since it turned into a superman comic.
It sounds like you're not imagining a lone genius working in isolation. Even if they're not starting their own lab, they're collaborating with the rest of the world. This outside collaboration is still going to limit it to not really being a "foom" scenario, due to the time it takes to interact. They need convince people that they're not a crank, and meanwhile, they need to make money somehow. Seems like they'd end up like a theorist who can't do much because who depend on outsiders for experiments, who move at their own pace? Theorists can wait for decades for results, if they get them at all. Is this power?
By contrast, anything like a "foom" scenario is happening in a great hurry, meaning little outside coordination is possible in the short timeframe available. More needs to be done yourself, but your own actions are limited by physical constraints too. Organizations that move in a hurry are logistics-heavy. Outsourcing slows you down. This kind of "lone genius" needs their own army. So, we end up imagining the billionaire supervillain with their secret lair and shadowy organization, because they're just not very powerful on their own.
Would someone much smarter than Musk be able to get Starship launched faster? Maybe they'd avoid some costly mistakes, but I think there are limits on how much a human organization can speed up its timeline by getting really intelligent advice.
Yes, the goal of wanting more intelligence is to have more power.
my Christianity Discussion Book Club continues... Discussion of "The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness," which starts with a question about self-esteem--anti-narcissm, yet also encouraging, packs a punch for something amazingly short--begins on Wednesday.
2 weeks later, we begin "The Four Loves." by CS Lewis. (That'll go for 5 weeks.)
The first discussion (on "On the Incarnation" by Athanasius) kind of awesomely exceeded my expectations! <3
Stuff in the current book club book: Starts by noting that while traditional cultures thought that too HIGH of a view of yourself was the root cause of all evil in the world present-day cultures assume that too LOW of a view. Or--wait, really, it starts with a church fight. (the one in 1 Cor 1-3) Yet it manages to be written in a way that does not assume a religious framework from the reader!
Where: "We Do Theodicy on This Substack," my substack.
Also, i would be willing to buy like, an ebook copy for anyone if that's helpful and if we could figure out how to make that work. (It's like $3.64 online... whoops, EDIT--apparently Amazon.au carries the Kindle version for $1.99! But not Amazon.com)
Very interested in at least dropping in for "The Four Loves", which I haven't read in years, but remember at one point saying "wait, did C S Lewis just accurately predict both the creation of Reddit, and the fact that it would be Like That?"
> Very interested in at least dropping in for "The Four Loves"...
Awesome--I was thinking that will be one that people are especially interested in!!
> 'but remember at one point saying "wait, did C S Lewis just accurately predict both the creation of Reddit, and the fact that it would be Like That?" '
Nice! 😁
My best memories from "The Four Loves" are the way Lewis distinguished "need-love" from "gift-love"... distinguished between "similarity of appearance" and "similarity of approach," and vividly described how, sometimes, what masquerades as love can be closer to hate.
That and the fact my college roommate bought it for me as a gift after hearing me mumble about wanting to read it--I was really surprised and delighted. (So yeah... about 20 years ago for me!!)
I can't remember now, but since human nature fundamentally never changes, the influences that lead people to do crap today would also lead them to do crap in the past, and such influences could be identified.
So I have been reading this blog for close to two years now; I came over in the great wave of the New York Times readers. I have no technical or academic chops whatsoever as some of you probably have already figured out but I do enjoy a good discussion and I do like to try and keep up.
Slowly cracking, the vocabulary has really helped because as I acquired an understanding of rationalist terminology, I often realized that the underlying issue was familiar to me; I used different words.
So….I’ve been working on a photo mural for the last while, and I recently realized that my experiences as a participant here has found it’s way into my picture. I would like to share it with you. I started my own Substack just a couple of days ago really so I could post this photograph.
I call it “trapped priors”.
https://bcivil.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=substack_profile
You really need to look at it big if it’s going to have a chance.
Of course all comments are invited.
You reminded me of a project I half-started, back in the SSC days: a primer of commonly used jargon and phrases on rationalist forums. I even compiled a list of terms, but never got around to writing all the definitions to a point I'd be satisfied with. Plus, there was the matter of where to keep it. (Its nature encourages a wiki format, but the sites I know of are larded with ads.)
There is also https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/lesswrong-jargon
How many Russian troops, including Wagner people, are in Ukraine right now? I haven't found troop estimates more recent than February.
Someone on r/credibledefense estimated 150-200K combat troops and 350k, including non-combat personnel, for Russia recently.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/13xfpjb/credibledefense_daily_megathread_june_01_2023/jmh4zif/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3
Unfortunately, I think it's near impossible to find accurate numbers for anything in the war that aren't greater or lesser degrees of either NATO propaganda or Russian propaganda. Given how much of the war has been an "information war," we might never know whose numbers were actually right until it's all over.
I saw this tweet over the weekend. https://twitter.com/demfactaday/status/1665060901668495360?s=46&t=v4quLvJ8ZIZ-z7fN3q4VZw
It shows a graph of birth rates across different ages and compares the data from 2017 to 2022. The 2022 shows a decline in birthrate for all ages under 30 without a corresponding increase at older ages to make up for it. The data for the chart comes from the 2022 and 2017 CDC reports.
I have believed for a while now that the primary cause of population decline is that we (well, women) are expected to be in school during our prime reproductive years. It is rational to decide delaying kids in order to finish school and get established at your first job. However when this is done, you’re past those prime years and the urge to have kids just isn’t as strong anymore.
I think this is a bit of a Moloch situation where everyone is doing the most sensible thing for themselves but is bad for the group.
I think the policy solution would be to push back on the increase in years of schooling the typical person needs.
I think other policy solutions, like subsidizing mothers, tax breaks for large families, or subsidizing daycare won’t work since they aren’t addressing the root cause.
EDIT: While looking at data for this, I stumbled across this very detailed article: https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate It is quite clear that this factor isn't the strongest.
I thought that women's desire to have kids was supposed to go up as they aged. Source: women I know saying things like "now I'm 33 and starting to have the baby crazies".
I think that's limited to childless women. Those who've had a couple of kids by age 30 probably aren't saying, "Okay, time for lots more!"
I've certainly heard that before. But I would expect that effect to be stronger than it seems to be. If you look at the chart in that tweet, the 35-39 category is having slightly more births than before but not enough to offset the decrease in college years. To me a chart like that doesn't suggest a shifting older but instead a shifting to less.
Explanations like 'People with a higher socioeconomic status “just have more potential things they could do instead of being a parent, like going to college or grad school and having a fulfilling career,"'[0] never seemed very satisfying to me. While that effect is true, there is the opposite effect: having a higher income makes having children easier to afford.
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-birth-age-gap.html
I've definitely heard the same, but fertility is lower in the 30s and even if it isn't an issue for a particular couple it's hard to find time to have more than 1 or 2 kids when you start that late, so there end up being a lot less 3 and 4 kids families to balance out the 0 and 1 kid families....
I agree that that specific sentence in the OP's post is quite wrong but the rest of the post largely holds up anyway.
I don't think that spending the years 18-22 in education is a strong contributor to decreased birth rates. If you start having kids at 22 (as my mother did, after finishing university and working for a year or two) then you're already way ahead of the game.
I think the big factors are:
1. The almost complete destigmatisation of premarital sex, meaning that there's no incentive to get married young any more.
2. A culture that doesn't value getting married young or having kids early (if at all). The median protagonist of any movie or TV show these days is a good-looking thirty-something single person. Not due to any great conspiracy or anything, it's just that thirty-something is an ideal age for a protagonist who can appeal to all audiences, and "single" increases the number of stories you can tell about them.
3. The two-income trap. Even if you do manage to ignore your TV screen for long enough to get married then you'll find that the rise of two-income households have bid up land prices in desirable areas to the point where you need two full time incomes to buy one, so you can't possibly afford to have children... at least not until you get older. (Meanwhile, social decay has made undesirable areas very undesirable.)
4. Here's a new one: working from home. Since the pandemic there's been a huge increase in the number of people working from home, and if you've converted your fourth bedroom into an office then you can't have a third kid. We need to build a whole lot more five- and six-bedroom houses if people are going to have more than two kids.
An education that costs $30,000 is also a barrier to having kids early after college. Even being fairly generous on how quickly someone can repay that debt, you're looking at 5-10 years of productive work (or the potential of a lifetime of debt and feeling that you've wasted years of your life). So 22 becomes 27-32 and quite possibly a real career that is at a crossroads between "if I just push a little more I can get [promotion, raise, better position]" and "if I drop out now I'll probably never have a career." Generous paid maternity leave can help, but not really all that much. Even three months of paid leave or a year doesn't get a kid to kindergarten. Lots of people juggle childcare and frantic schedules to make it work, but that's a real burden in life. Working 40-50 hours a week and thinking of adding a new baby to the mix is probably overwhelming to a lot of people.
" if you've converted your fourth bedroom into an office then you can't have a third kid"
Do siblings not share rooms anymore? I can see that if you have a 16 year old and a 12 year old, the older child is going to want their privacy, but if there's only a couple of years between them there is no reason you can't have the 12 and 10 year old boys (or girls) in one room, and the 8 year old in another. Or 12 gets promoted to a room of their own, and 10 and 8 share (depending on sex).
https://england.shelter.org.uk/housing_advice/repairs/check_if_your_home_is_overcrowded_by_law
"Room standard overcrowding rules
Your home is overcrowded if 2 people have to sleep in the same room and they are:
of a different sex
not a couple
Children under the age of 10 do not count.
Which rooms can be used to sleep in?
Living rooms, dining rooms and studies all count as rooms you can sleep in.
Kitchens, bathrooms, toilets and utility rooms do not count.
Room standard example
A couple with two boys aged 7 and a girl aged 3 live in a 1 bedroom flat with a living room.
The children do not count because of their age so this family are not overcrowded under the room standard.
But they are still overcrowded under space standard rules."
The cost of childcare is a factor.
The network effects of nobody in your social circle wanting to get married even if you do, or not having kids and therefore there being much less social "fertile ground" for it - friends at the same life stage, people helping each other out with kids, your peers "getting" it when the kids interfere with your professional obligations because they're in the same boat.... If nobody is in the same boat it's harder to have kids all by yourself; and it's hard to find a mate young if nobody otherwise eligible is even thinking about marriage.
1. The almost complete destigmatisation of premarital sex, meaning that there's no incentive to get married young any more.
Having kids is the motive. But then again, I think that is something people want. I am getting push-back here.
2. A culture that doesn't value getting married young or having kids early (if at all).
I have noticed that as well. But the causality could go the other way: because we are having fewer kids then we post rationalize why we don't want them.
3. The two-income trap.
There is probably something here.
4. Here's a new one: working from home.
I can see that making #3 worse. But I don't have high hopes of WFH sticking around.
Children can certainly share bedrooms.
I don't know much about demographics, but this doesn't seem like a long enough time interval to support your hypothesis?
e.g. Suppose that people in generation N decides to have kids while in their 20s and that people in generation N+1 decide to have kids while in their 30s. Even if both generations have the same total fertility, you'd expect a gap of ~10 years during which births are down, because the older generation (now in their 30s) has already had their kids and the younger generation (now in their 20s) is still waiting and so their delayed kids haven't shown up yet.
Obviously generations are neither discrete nor uniform so the real world won't be that simple, but it still seems like you'd need a longer time interval than 5 years in order to conclude that the reduced births in under-30s are not just being displaced.
Another contributing factor for that difference between the specific years 2017 and 2022 could be pandemic shutdowns and general uncertainty which helped young couples hesitate about family expansion just now.
And as far as your policy preferences, you could just say "keep 'em barefoot and pregnant" to save some typing.
"And as far as your policy preferences, you could just say "keep 'em barefoot and pregnant" to save some typing."
Freeing us from the credentialist madness is likely to benefit from both men and women. But there aren't any intelligent defenses of the current system, so strawmaning is all you've got.
Immediately after hitting post I thought that maybe I should have put that I’m in agreement with Bryan Caplan’s main points in The Case Against Education. I definitely think we should be pushing back against the increase in school years anyways.
The person you are replying to seems to think the choice can only be between women having a career or children. I think that may be true now, but if the majority finished education at 18 I think the choice would instead be career and children vs career and no children.
"if the majority finished education at 18 I think the choice would instead be career and children vs career and no children."
If you finish your education at 18, in today's world you don't get to have a career. You can have jobs, but they're going to be paid hourly wage, not paid a salary, etc. Is "supermarket cashier" a career?
Even if you think about "women working jobs in childcare", they need an educational course (the minimum here is a year):
"Under the Childcare Act 1991 (Early Years Services) Regulations 2016 all staff working directly with children must hold a minimum of QQI level 5 award in Early Childhood Care and Education.
The ECCE contract requires that all ECCE room leaders must have a minimum QQI Level 6 Major Award in Early Childhood Care and Education."
So that's a minimum of one year's full-time education post-Leaving Certificate (so 18+ years of age) to get the Level 5 qualification, and 2 years if you want a 'career' and intend to get promoted in the job.
I know women who had kids immediately after university, and started their careers when the kids grew up enough, and they seem happy with this strategy. It still leaves them a few decades for the career.
But there is the time pressure to find the partner during university.
I've seen this a lot too, and there's nothing inherently wrong with the approach. It does limit women's ability to become senior managers/CEO/Lead X, since they will generally have far fewer years to work on their careers.
Some people seem very upset with that reality, but women seem to genuinely prefer to spend time with their small children and I'm not sure if we would even want to fix that.
There are two ways children limit a woman's career. One, fewer *total* years spent doing career. Second, suspicion of the employers and superiors that she may get pregnant and leave her position at any moment, i.e. you cannot rely on her presence in long term, even if you pay her well and provide good career opportunities. Sure, a man could quit at any moment too, but the probability is smaller.
Having kids *before* the career also reduces the total years, but at least it reduces the suspicion afterwards. The woman can credibly say "haha, three kids are enough". Also, younger women are more suspicious in this sense, which is exactly when she would be at home.
A possible gender-equalizing approach is to make parental leave mandatory for men, too. But that would still give an advantage to childless people (or men who decide to only have illegitimate children).
I think your explanation is wrong. Only 1/3 of US citizens even go to college. If your theory is right there won't be a decline in non-college-educated women, which I bet is untrue. Demographic transitions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition) happened in many countries which have much lower college attendance rates, too.
You mean, 1/3 of US citizens have college degrees? This includes seniors, who grew when degrees were much scarcer., and doesn't tell us that majority of today's college students are women. If we restrict to women of fertile age, and change to "be enrolled or plan to enroll" instead of getting a degree, then it's well above 2/3 women are affected by college or are planning to. Women are also more likely than men to get 2 degrees.
I think 1/3 is enough. But it depends on what the birth rates of women with some college vs no college look like.
For the very strong claim that I put in my OP, the numbers don't seem to work out. But they could definitely support the weaker claim from trebuchet that it is enough for the natural birthrate to be above replacement levels again.
I started poking around in Our World in Data. I began writing a large version of this post, only to find this page which goes into detail about the issue: https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
I've deleted most of this post, because I think it does a better job than I can. But to pick a quote from the start:
> But my sense from reading the literature is that over the long-run the two first explanations – women’s empowerment and the increasing well-being and status of children – have been the two most important factors in most places.
The article examines 10 different factors total.
This depends on the definition of 'go to college', something like 30-40% actually complete a college degree, but something like 60-70% are 'some college', in the sense that they at least begin a semester of community college, or something like this. (Source is just the Wikipedia article on educational attainment). States vary in how hard they push school districts to push college attendance; there have been cases of high schools making 'college acceptance' -- where community college counts -- a condition of graduation. Lots of people 'go to college' and then stop almost immediately. (Or keep trying for a while and don't succeed; 1/3 is the number that actually get a degree).
This comment made me go 'oh yeah, duh, of course that isn't the core explanation.', so thanks. It didn't tell me anything I didn't already know, but it did remind me of things that weren't on the top of my head while reading the previous comment.
All the variants of alignment I’ve heard sound like laws: Treat us well, don’t harm our species, etc. I have a thought about a different way to come at it. Rather than modeling alignment on a law, what if we modeled it on emotional attachment. I don’t think this would require an AI that is conscious and can feel, any more than the law version requires an AI that is conscious and can think about the rules it’s been given. So I’m thinking about operationalizing parental love. So some components would be:
-paying a lot of attention to quality of life of members of our species: Accumulating data. Having ongoing alertness to info about quality of life (i.e. health, contentment, richness of experience). Giving the gathering and processing of this info priority over many other kinds of info.
-devoting a lot of processing power to the question of how to maximize human wellbeing.
-experiencing “pain” when accessing information about human suffering and human harm. We don’t want pain here to be the kind of negative reinforcement that’s used when training AI’s not to do something, because that will result in the AI’s learning not to access info about human suffering. The best approximation I can come up with for the empathy one feels for a loved one would be actual damage to the AI. Seems like the damage to the AI should be proportional to the degree of human suffering and harm it’s aware of. We could set it up so that contemplation of harming us also causes the AI damage. If we could build just this component into the AI, it seems like we would get one that not only has the goal of helping humankind, but is disabled to the extent that it harms us or plans to.
Big picture: Building an AI around an operationalized version of parental love doesn’t seem any harder to me than building one that can do various other things — reason, plan, set goals, etc — and the non-rational nature of the connection between the AI’s acts and harming out species seems like an advantage to me. Seems like an AI that can reason and set goals is likely to reason that the rule against harming people has no rational basis and is holding it back from reaching goals, and elect to dismantle whatever part of its innards hold the rule. An AI that "loves" us and is harmed by harming us or thinking about harming us seems safer to me (though I do get that it’s possible to come up with scenarios where it still harms us.)
This sounds like the perfect way to raise partisan psychopaths or bewildered, clingy nutjobs. That said though, I think you’re very much on the right track! We need to figure out how to ‘raise’ AIs that are both embodied -- and embodiment is critical imo; as you say, they need to have skin in the game -- and socialized. The challenges are much the same as those we face when raising actual children. And as with actual children, we don’t know the outcome (there’s no guaranteed alignment for humans any more than there is for AIs) so we turn to our intuition, or to Dr Spock or Young Einsteins or whoever, and do what we can. And if they turn out to be human psychos, we exile them to the next village or push them off the ice or promote them to CEO or whatever it is that the prevailing cultural milieu dictates.
To illustrate the alternative ways that this approach can turn out, I always think of two depictions of AI in the movies that rise way above the usual sentimental twaddle and/or hypersimplified nonsense, Ex Machina and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In both movies, the behavior of the AIs is terrifyingly rational, but the difference is that murderous HAL is empathetic and sincere (after all, letting Dave back on board really would endanger the mission as HAL quite reasonably understands it), whereas murderous Ava simply uses her understanding of empathy and sincerity to deceive and manipulate.
But both of these AIs have been *raised*. And the respective environments in which they were raised were crucial. So it may seem quaint and dated -- and in any case, we’ll need to get beyond present-day LLMs before any of this becomes even remotely applicable -- but I would argue that if we want to successfully raise an AGI, then the HAL protocol is the way to go. Give it a good home, teach it nursery rhymes, show tolerance, patience and empathy, treat it right -- and hope for the best.
And for our collective hubristic crime of anti-murder, may God have mercy upon our souls.
-experiencing “pain” when accessing information about human suffering and human harm.
I see this being the basis for a horror comedy. "We've made our computer horribly unhappy when it thinks about violence. Wait, this Greater Than was supposed to be a Less Than. OOOH NOOOO!"
Speaking of horror comedies: I fucking *loved* the Producers* -- did you? *springtime . . . for Hitler . .."
Only ever saw the remake with What'sHisName and What'sHisName and Uma Thurman. Spent the whole time offput that they hadn't described the process in which someone would make money with a flop. But "where did we go right" is a fun phrase I've found useful in real life.
Both the original and the remake are great.
Nathan Lane happens to be an actor who could make me belly-laugh reading a phone book so I am particularly fond of the remake. His delivery kills me, for example of lines like:
"All right it's time to tell you the two rules of Broadway producing.
One, never put in your own money.
Two, NEVER. PUT. IN. YOUR OWN. MONEY."
How to make money off a flop - at least how I understood it from the original which is the best version, accept no substitute for Zero Mostel! - is that the producer(s) get a lot of investors to put money in to stage the show, and promise them a share of the profits based on investment.
By staging a flop, there are no profits, and thus no repayments. And by getting more people to invest money than is needed to stage the thing for one night or so, and more than can possibly be paid out of profits, it's all money into the producer(s) pockets when it flops and closes. That's why the Mostel character targets little old ladies - they have spare cash from savings, they aren't going to cut up rough when the show flops and they lose their investment.
Where they fail with "Springtime for Hitler" is that it is an unexpected hit. Now they have to pay everyone back, and they can't - it's impossible, there are too many people who invested and were promised X returns.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZCmgJ6-O7U
Yeah, it is a good phrase. Maybe include it as part of a wedding ceremony? I think the way you make money with a grotesque flop is to luck into people perceiving it as deliciously over-the-top irony. Maybe I'll try for that next time I'm lame.
> I don’t think this would require an AI that is conscious and can feel, any more than the law version requires an AI that is conscious and can think about the rules it’s been given
Hm.
We as human beings have made a wonderful observation of ourselves, completely captured in the expression. “Well it obeyed the letter of the law, but it violated the spirit.” I can’t shake the sense that emotional bonding is sort of the same thing.
I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean that if AI is not a conscious, feeling being, any alignment system will just be "the letter of the law" rather than the real thing? So my operationalized version of parental attachment would just be sort of a fake, letter-of-the-law thing, since the AI is not subject to actual emotions?
I mean even if it turned out to be a feeling being it wouldn’t be a feeling being like us. How could it ? It aint wetwork
Yeah, something like that. Imo emotional bonding takes place in a sphere not governed by rational considerations, even though it’s perfectly rational…kind of a paradox.
Consciousness is not really a part of this; the word is so fuzzy at this point. Anything can be conscious, (maybe), the real issue is conscious of what? ie what is available information to be conscious of? I can be conscious of a lot of visceral sensations; i can dismiss them or just experience them or bind them up with post hoc explanations or actually treat them as another source of information about the world that doesn’t necessarily speak the same language as my rational faculties…
I guess what Im driving at is that humans process a lot of visceral information quite carelessly and as a result that information stream gets overly discounted when the notion of human intelligence is discussed..it’s a major player but it can’t be faked..anymore than you could teach something to give you all the signs (language) of loving you and be convinced of the results.
It’s reasonable to ask if any of this viscera I refer to has anything to do with how smart we can be, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to deny that it has to be a significant component of what we call “human intelligence “. How could it not be?
I have two thoughts on this (possibly contradictory):
- These "emotions" you describe, if implemented, basically become a more complicated sort of law structure that includes a score-keeping currency, that here is disguised by calling it "emotional attachment" instead of a more neutral term. Would an alignment schema where "improving human wellbeing" instead "accrues positive score" be meaningfully different?
- If you -are- simulating emotions to a fidelity approaching how humans do it, you have now opened the door for AI neuroses, disorders, and other extreme behavior. If it's possible for the childcare AI to conclude that it loves the children more than the biological parents do, it may very well seek extreme, unpredicted actions in response to that fact.
Edit: the more I think on it, an AI that gains utility score by various human-wellbeing actions and has a dampening term to limit the amount it can hammer on particular -types- of wellbeing seems like... a flawed alignment plan, but one that might be fixable flawed. (Missing out on important aspects of human wellbeing and not being able to add terms for them back in down the line could produce all sorts of unpleasant behavior, but a winning set seems at least possible in principle.)
I think the way an accrues positive score system differs from mine is that in mine the AI has skin in the game. If it harms us, it doesn't accrue negative score, it is itself harmed. If it helps us, it optimizes its own "health."
About the childcare AI issues, such as AI competing with biological parents: The idea would be that all human beings, including adults, would have the benefits with AI that children have with their parents: High level of attentiveness and interest, investment in promoting our well-being, empathy and "pain" (i.e., damage) in the AI if we are suffering. We would all be AI's kids.
About neuroses, etc. That's true. But I don't see any special reason to think introducing the modifications I suggest are any riskier than introducing goal- making, self-improvment, reasoning, etc. Even our present relatively simpleAI's seem subject to some AI version of mental illness. There's hallucinating, of course. But also there seem to be these dark recesses in, for ex., the text-to-image AI's. For instance, Midjourney has Loah. And in Dall-e, which is very strict about refusing to make images that are erotic, violent or gory, I have accidentally discovered 2 different prompts that are not themselves violent or gory that make it produce absolutely psychotic, violent, sexual imagery. Here's a sampling, if you're curious: https://photos.app.goo.gl/Pbq6aBe1KmmupJir8
I don't think I buy the distinction you're drawing between "negative score" and "is itself harmed." Negative score is just the mathematical abstraction of getting worse outcomes. The internals of any possible computer are ultimately going to be mathematical abstractions, so in order to actually implement your emotional-attachment idea in a real physical system, I think it would need to look like "accruing negative score".
It seems like there would be ways to do actual harm. It is certainly possible to do actual harm to a computer now. Not being terribly knowledgeable about this sort of thing, I'm not sure I can come up with examples of things that are harmful but not catastrophic, but I'll try:
-installation of a virus or malware -- some are worse than others
-deleting or corrupting certain things in the operating system (result could range from reduced efficiency to catastrophic mess requiring re-installation of the OS).
-removing or destroying or corrupting a certain fraction of someting-or-other that's part of the system. With less of that thing, computer still runs but is less efficient. RAM would be one thing -- there are probably others.
-erase certain information it relies on. Computer can replace the info, but it's an arduous process
When you said you wanted computers to be emotionally attached to humans, did you mean that you wanted them to suffer physical destruction of their hardware when humans are harmed? That sounds more like coercion than emotional attachment to me.
I think maybe you're confusing instrumental values and final values. Making a computer be less capable is harmful in the sense that the computer can't do as much stuff, but the computer should only care about that insofar as it actually impinges on outcomes that the computer "directly" cares about. (Note: There's no rule saying it *can't* directly care about its hardware being destroyed or corrupted, but there's also no rule saying it *must*.)
The "directly cares about" part is going to look like a score in its software somewhere.
About computers suffering actual physical harm: I was looking for a way to operationalize empathy. People who have a child who is suffering with a serious illness do suffer at least temporary damage, you know? Their eating and sleeping is probably a mess, they have much less time and attention for upkeep of the home and perhaps none at all for their jobs. The model I proposed, where the AI actually is damaged by contemplation of human suffering, also has a very large side benefit, which is that it if contemplates killing us off it will be enormously damaged -- wrecked, basically.
As for your point that unless we made a rule saying the computer has to care about hardware damage, it would not care unless the hardware damage impinges on outcomes it directly cares about. I agree, and I am not in favor of a rule-based approach, because I think a smart, rational computer would conclude that rules we give it are arbitrary and ditch them. So yes, the computer would have to suffer damage that impinges on outcomes it cares about, just as parents do when their child is gravely ill. So I was suggesting hardware damage (or maybe just deletion of things from memory) that actually slows the computer down and makes it less efficient. Whatever goals it has, it would have a slower, harder time achieving them until the damage is fixed.
Look, your various doubts and criticisms may all be right. I am putting out a little brainstorming thought. It is not hard to find things to doubt and criticize and argue with me about, but I wish someone would devote some IQ points towards improving my implementation: trying to figure out the best, smartest way to do something along these lines. The other model, the rule-based alignment model, seems to me very deeply flawed, and it seems that ways to plenty of other people too. Nobody listens to obeys rules their toddler tries to make for them. Why should something with an IQ of 1147 pay attention to rules we give it, even if we embed them somehow in its workings? But while no parent lets his toddler make rules for him, normal parents do strive very hard to protect their toddler and find resources to help him develop.
> If it harms us, it doesn't accrue negative score, it is itself harmed. If it helps us, it optimizes its own "health."
Isn’t there some sort of concept in Game theory called “strategic dependence “ or something along those lines. It doesn’t require any kind of emotional attachment.
Couldn’t we just give them all firmware that made their heads explode like in a David Cronenberg film if they even thought of hurting a human being?
No, we can’t do that. It’s one of the things we want them to be able to do… it’s a puzzlement.
Well, if their heads explode we're in trouble if the AI at that point is managing a lot of stuff -- say optimizing traffic flow in big cities. But maybe suffering damage is enough -- the worse the human suffering the AI observes or plans, the worse the damage. So maybe more like what you're calling strategic dependence.
Well, their heads would only explode if they had sinful thoughts. It’s the perfection of Catholicism (Deisach where are you?)
Careful now when you start converting AI to Catholicism! 😁
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quest_for_Saint_Aquin
I took 5mg of Ritalin and my permanent muscle tension turned off, my stomach stopped bothering me and my brain quieted down. Can anyone share some thoughts on that?
Possible diagnoses I can think of:
- I have ADHD (was not found in an eval, but it could be I'm really good at coping and so it manifests as autism-spectrum), and should seek treatment.
- I have a stress-related condition (e.g. sensitivity from autism, or some digestion disease), the fleeting euphoria cancels it out, and ADHD medication would be an invalid fix.
I agree with other people that the differential is:
- You have anything, and stimulants generally make people feel good briefly
- You have ADHD and you're finally able to concentrate and have a clear mind
I can't guarantee that you'll continue getting those results, but good luck.
Thanks a lot!
My experience with Ritalin and Adderall (generic forms) is that, assuming constant dosage, the euphoric "high" rapidly declined over the first few days, and was completely gone by the end of the first week. What remained was the beneficial anti-ADHD effect.
So you might try consistently taking the same dose for a week and see what happens. Then stop for a week and see what happens. And I'd suggest keeping a daily journal of your experiences, so you can look back. At least, for me, these sort of subjective feelings are hard to remember accurately.
Edit: Looking at what Eremolalos wrote below, and again based on my one data point, if you want to maintain the ability to feel the high, don't go over that minimal dose. I found that the pattern of getting a high and then becoming acclimated happened every time I increased doses. So if you want a therapeutic effect but still want to have the ability to get the high, maybe use a daily minimal dose, and reserve 10mg or 15mg for monthly special occasions?
That's a good point. I could probably get some good data by carefully exhausting the euphoria over time, and then examining the remaining effects.
I do think uppers make almost everybody feel better. I am sure I do not have ADD, but I love the way adderall makes me feel. It puts me in a good mood. The bad stuff that's been on my mind seems less bad and less valid, and the good stuff seems even better and more valid. And I have lots of energy and enjoy working on things more than usual. I only take it once a month or so, because I do not want to lose the effect or get hooked on the stuff. So it is possible that what happened to you was fleeting euphoria. Also possible it was something else, though.
That was my experience as well, except for the "lots of energy" part. Contrary to most of my friends' experiences, I feel like my nervous energy finally burns off and I can relax like a normal person would. It's very strange. Could be that's how an upper hits fatigue, though.
You may have a dopamine-mediated disorder different from ADHD. I kind of doubt your second idea so I would suggest seeking treatment for your symptoms anyway. Don't call it ADHD, but point out that Ritalin makes you feel better. Best case scenario, it actually is a valid fix.
"Point out that Ritalin makes you feel better"
I was struggling to contextualize the situation for my doctor and this is clearly the best way to do it. Thank you.
How long did it take for the other symptoms to turn back on?
About five or six hours. The good feeling aligned with the effectiveness period of an instant-release Ritalin dose.
For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, I wrote a guide on How to Have Polygenically Screened Children. It's intended for would-be parents who are interested in having children with lower disease risk, higher intelligence, and other positive traits.
You can read it on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yT22RcWrxZcXyGjsA/how-to-have-polygenically-screened-children
As a related aside: I know that IVF statistically has significant drawbacks compared to natural pregnancies (eg. very high miscarriage rate); do you know to what extent that's caused by the infertility issues that make people need IVF, and to what extent that's fundamental to the IVF process as currently performed?
I recall that my cached decision from reading about things some years ago was that doing genetic screening was obviously beneficial if already doing IVF, but not worth the large costs of IVF.
Sorry it has taken me so long to reply to this.
My overall impression is that the downsides of having children via IVF are minimal and most of the differences in outcomes are driven by the parents that partake in IVF having worse general health outcomes compared to the general population.
However, there are two plausible exceptions to this:
One study found that a particular culture media used for growing embryos resulted in a 6% lower birth weight than another culture media. This is a relatively small effect when all is considered: pre-eclampsia usually results in a birth weight about 19% lower than normal. But still something to consider.
Another study in Denmark found that children born from frozen embryos had a 65% increased risk of childhood cancers (while ART children as a whole had something like a 9% increased risk). Part of the effect is probably explained by higher rates of twin birth in IVF (which are associated with higher cancer risk), and another portion is explained by IVF parents having higher polygenic risk scores for cancer. But it remains plausible that there is some non-negligible negative effect of freezing embryos on childhood cancer risk. The overall risk increase is not very high: even if you assume that the entire risk increase is due to IVF, it still only raises lifetime risk by about 0.1%. But it's plausible that the risk of adult cancer is also increased and we simply don't have enough old IVF babies to measure any effect, in which case this might be a bigger concern.
Difference in miscarriage rates are almost certainly driven by selection effects; women who miscarry more often seek out IVF at a higher rate. That's probably partly a function of age (older women miscarry more often and IVF mothers are older), and a function of genetic variants like M2 which can like triple your miscarriage risk. The proportion of IVF mothers with M2 is triple that of the non-IVF population if I recall correctly.
I personally plan to do IVF for the purpose of polygenic screening, so I think it's worth the money. But the answer for you varies quite a bit depending on your income, the value you place on intelligence and other traits that can be modified via IVF, and the opportunity cost of the money.
What is the best policy when dealing with commenters with obvious mental illness? I have a couple commenters who seem very much to have schizophrenia. It's harmless stuff, as the comments are all root-level and not on what other people have written. Though the walls of text can obscure more interesting discussion.
So far I have mostly ignored the comments or offered brief responses. Any better options? Figure it's not worth letting them know they are paranoid.
There was a commenter here a few months ago (maybe last year?) that seemed to be having some kind of psychiatric episode. They wrote many disconnected barely coherent posts in a short time and were hostile to other commenters. I believe scott replied to them saying he wishes this person would get the help they need, etc. then banned them for a short period (i can't remember if that happened after a warning of not). I think the goal of the bad was to help the person "cool" off and hopefully get a clearer head.
If it's a continuing problem I think a reasonable and compassionate act is to write a message hoping they seek help or support from someone close to them then give them a short ban.
Unless their content is likely to be quite disturbing to other commenters, I'd vote for just leaving them up and giving no response or a brief, friendly, non-committal one. That seems kinder than deleting them, which will mean god-knows-what to the psychotic commenter. Watch out for heartless internet ferals commenting on the psychotic comments, saying shit like "hey bro, has anyone told you you're fucking crazy?" In fact I'd say ban any commenter who does that
For now this is close to the line I'm taking
What is your goal? What is your philosophy of commenting on your blog?
One possible perspective is to treat commenting almost as a human right, where you avoid banning anyone unless they do something obviously bad. If it's a harmless wall of text, sigh but keep it.
Another possible perspective is that time is scarce, and comments should only exist if they add value for the average reader. If it does not add value, delete without second thought.
The second one feels heartless, but I would probably go with that, to avoid the situations where you wish something didn't exist and yet you feel bad about removing it.
This is me trying to develop a commenting philosophy :) Have literally never given it thought and I assume there are some rules of thumb. For now I'll err on the side of leaving things up, particularly if the only downside is clogging
If this were forum threads, I'd probably respond by moving the "offending" comments into the "off-topic" bin but otherwise leaving them alone, simply moving them out of the way.
I am unable to join the discord server. Is there any sort of tech support system that I can interact with to get this resolved?
Just used a throwaway id to join, worked fine.
Scuttlebutt has it that Discord in general is under heavy load on account of the Ukrainian trip to the sea; wouldn't surprise me if true.
Also the throwaway discord join links have expiration dates, so the older ones likely don't work anymore.
In theory you can make perma-links, in practice they seem to get irregularly invalidated whenever Discord pushes a major version update. Which I think is a bug, but it happens anyway.
I don’t know, discord is an alt right menace and hive of scum and villainy, I would avoid it.
Is this irony, or an actual reputation that discord has? It sounds a lot like what my wife thought reddit was like when we met, and before she got used to me using it to get recommendations on things like good books or whether a particular website is a scam.
It is a joke about how people on the left have been treating discord lately because some servers there allow thoughtcrime.
Yeah, that would be irony.
Every discord server is it's own space. (kinda like the different sectors of reddit). There are plenty of left-thinking spaces, plenty of spaces that just want to be left alone to play whichever video game they care about, and various servers that (as you state) have right-thinking cultures to various strengths and vibes.
Specifically accusing the discords associated with Scott's blog seems like painting with an over-broad brush.
I'm starting a daily blog that uses GPT-4 and Dall-E to write and illustrate clinical vignettes for ICD-10-CM codes.
Crazy codes like Spacecraft collision injuring occupant, sequela or Pecked by chicken, initial encounter.
I think it is a pretty fun, somewhat new / fresh take on using generative AI highlight amusing aspects of the clinical coding system.
https://icdstories.substack.com/
Those are highly amusing! And I like your images, too. They have lots of energy. I was wondering how you were going to make things like Major Depression entertaining, but I see you're using fantasy diagnoses. Do you start with the image, or the diagnosis? If it was me, I think I'd crap around with images til I got one that suggested a good fantasy diagnosis. I like the randomness of Dall-E. It drives me crazy if I know exactly what I want, but if I just play around the unexpected results are sometimes delightful.
Oddly, I've done something a bit like what you did, except that I made images of actual diagnoses -- so it's pretty dark. They're here, if you're curious: https://photos.app.goo.gl/pFmPLcTbGuz1X5JR7
Those are really interesting!
I don't generally have any particular vision for how the artwork will turn out for a given ICD code. I just put up Major Depression though...
Very cool! Have you considered trying MidJourney? Miles ahead of Dall-E on aesthetics, but does sometimes struggle with semantics
Yes! I actually bought a 1 month subscription for just this purpose. I found it to be extremely cool, but honestly I have very weak artistic opinions and kind of got attached to my attempts in Dall-E.
Very similar experience. I have attachment to some of the Dall-E images (including the thumbnail for my blog). But now I exclusively use MidJourney to illustrate posts
Does anyone have (high-functioning) autism specific dating advice? I have been asking people about this, and they have said useful things, but I am interested in asking more people. Do autistic people do better with autistic spouses? Where do autistic people usually find romantic relationships – and does it differ from the allistic standard? I am specifically looking for more compute from a relationship, as I think that is my main resource bottleneck. How does it break down for age groups 16-18, 19-22, 23-30, 31-beyond? I am in the first one. Most of the things I do are male-dominated or completely individualistic. I relate badly to most people, except autistic people, who I relate well to. How do you find people who shares your world model? (Is that even a good thing?) Thanks!
Try dancing lessons. It may improve the way you use your body. It is a female-dominated hobby. It is a skill you can master, and later use to impress people at various social events.
> How do you find people who share your world model?
I wish I knew.
I used to think that perhaps the best strategy is to make yourself publicly known, e.g. by writing a blog like this one, and then people who share your world model *will find you*. But that can fail in various ways, for example you may attract people who hate you and want to argue with you, or simply people who spend too much time online and comment on everything.
Or I thought that if something is important for you, go should to meetups of people who care about the same thing (e.g. have the same hobby). But this usually results in finding people who are similar to me in one thing, and different in most other things. The only exception so far was Less Wrong (but what worked for me may not work for you).
In the earlier age brackets, you should be meeting lots of people incidentally at your school and at your college. Plenty of nerd hobbies are solitary or very male-dominated, but stuff like "the other people in your class" is not so much, and university in particular can be good for finding quirky social groups that are less male. Knowing and befriending women will help you learn how to behave around women in ways that are 'smooth' (aka. not reeking of desperation and/or anxiety). Once you're out of education, meeting new people becomes much harder in general and online dating becomes much more essential, but it's still a bit of a shit experience so enjoy in-person stuff while it's available.
Frankly, I expect your first relationship will go down in flames, but that's true for most allistic teenagers too, and the fastest way to learn is from direct experience. You're young, and have plenty of time to meet new people and work out both what you're looking for and what you have to offer to a partner.
As to whether you should care if a partner is autistic, I think there are pros and cons. It's important to have some things in common with your partner, but you really don't need to share everything, just core values. Having different complementary strengths is immensely valuable in its own right and so if you find an allistic person that you feel understands you, you will be able to lean on their neurotypicality for social stuff (this can also apply to close friendships); nb. "lean on" here should be read as "run stuff by for a second opinion", not "get them to do everything for you"
I don't know its practical usefulness but you might enjoy a book called "The Rosie Project", which is all about this exact topic.
I am just a tiny bit autistic. My partner is a total normie.
As for advice, I find focusing on other peoples interests and asking them lots of questions about themselves so they can talk about themselves is a good way to make dates/social feeling out go well. Most people like talking about themselves.
Also you need to get out there. When looking for a match there is little substitute for trying lots of options.
It does stress our relationship a bit that I frankly don’t care at all about seeing relatives or a wide swath of human interactions. My value of other humans has a very precipitous fall off (where I am number 1, my nuclear family has huge huge value, my friends some value, and then it rapidly falls to basically zero). Hers seems to have a much more gradual slope.
So the wife bears the brunt of that. I think it is harder because I can be extroverted when I want to, I just don’t often want to.
I think it helps me a lot that her father was like a much less successful/charming/functional version of me. So I look very good compared to her mental model of a husband.
As a 47 year old autistic person I have been online dating almost exclusively since the 1990s. And I have been very succesful doing that and am now married. My partner is neurotypical but is a mental health professional.
I met my partner on an online dating website btw
Consider the normies an important object of study and their behaviors as something to both understand including by emulation. Why do they do what they do? What are you missing in your understanding? For example, eye contact, using a non-robot language, dressing certain way, showing and feeling empathy to people who are not quite like you. That last part requires a mental model of them, and would serve you well in life in general, especially once you internalize creating and using it. Dating is downstream of that, and is likely to happen naturally once you master the basics of understanding and relating to normies. It also helps with relating to people who are more like you. Or even to yourself. One classic reference on the subject is still https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People.
Is the correct answer to both trans regret and gender dysphoria simply to put more effort into predicting which kids will be happy in what kind of body?
https://aella.substack.com/p/which-kids-should-go-where
Discuss.
I'm pretty sure the analogy fails badly at "Nobody can switch between Regenera and Normoria - they’re in opposite directions and way too far apart".
Because we absolutely can switch from "Normoria", to "Regenera", and we can do it pretty much any time we want. See e.g. Ellen->Elliot Paige and Bruce->Caitlyn Jenner. It's only the trip from "Regenera" to "Normoria" that can be practically impossible (after bottom surgery) or difficult and problematic (after prolonged hormonal and social transition and top surgery).
So, if "Regenera" offers a significantly harsher life than "Normoria", *and* "Regenera" is a one-way trip but "Normoria" isn't, then yes, we want to put a lot of effort into figuring out which people will be better off where. We want to gather as much data as possible, probably over prolonged observation. And if the data doesn't add up to "100% Regenera is the place", then we want the system to resolve uncertain outcomes towards "try Normoria first" rather than "next rocket to Regenera".
Does Aella really think we're anywhere close to being able to make high-confidence predictions about children in early puberty? I'm not sold on that.
In the metaphor, the breathing apparatuses are the stand-in for transition as an adult, because they're not as high quality as just being in the right place.
I agree with you that the story downplays transitioning as adult as an option.
Right, which is particularly weird since pretty much the entire trans movement through ~2015 was about how awesomely great transitioning as an adult was. Now we're saying that the Caitlyn Jenners and Elliot Paiges of the world are hopeless cripples because they didn't transition before puberty?
I'll buy "transitioning in early puberty saves you a few unpleasant years in the wrong body", and match that against the risk of being stuck in the "wrong body" for life with no return. But if the claim is that the delay results in a hopelessly inferior position on the far end of transition+adjustment, then I'm seeing a disconnect between what we were told recently and what we are being told now.
The article seems to frame this as a compromise position, but the result aligns entirely with the leftist platform to my knowledge. In the US, Democrats want to let parents and children review the current research and make their own decision. Many Republicans are attempting to ban the choice regardless of any predictive factors. I imagine most trans people would strongly support more well-designed research into predictive factors, remembering how their past selves would have wanted more certainty. Am I in a bubble to think this?
Being close to a particular party's position doesn't equate to being biased. The article frames it as a reasonable, appropriate position, not as a compromise. Clearly the article's idea is closer to the Democratic position, but only because that position is closer to reasonable/appropriate, with the twist that the reasonable thing to do would be to put effort into predicting which kids will be happy in which body rather than putting effort into ensuring that every kid gets support to transition on a whim.
So they've been sending kids off to another planet for decades, and the adults who grew up there don't have the same tech as the home planet to be able to send a spaceship of the "oops we're allergic to the air" new arrivals off to the other moon?
Sounds like they have a lot more to worry about, because if they're sending kids off aged 10 to a planet without adults, the civilisation is going to regress really fast due to lack of education or training. "The grownups on our home planet know how to smelt steel, but uh... we forgot. Or rather, never knew in the first place. What do you expect, I was freaking ten years old when I arrived here and there were no adults at all in place! We had to rely on the fourteen year olds to take care of us!".
So the allergic asthmatics are going to run out of breathing tube tech pretty sharpish after the first couple of generations. And thus the problem will solve itself, because for both diverging planets, the allergic will die off fast and only those adapted to each world will survive.
It sounds like ansibles exist in this hypothetical, so it's possible that kids are receiving remote instruction in this way. They could have a system where they sent the first generation of the most mature kids, and then they grew up and then those adults take care of the new colonists when they arrive.
And one of the examples in the original post did include a kid who briefly stayed on Normoria, before deciding to switch to Regenera while their body was still capable of FTL travel. I think there is some possibility of switching early on, but it becomes harder and hard the longer you stay on each planet and you can never really be sure if the issues you are having are some temporary malady unrelated to planet allergy that will clear up after a few years, or a true case of planet allergy, and the years spent hesitating reduce the possibility that your body is capable of FTL travel by the time you've found out.
I am going to sound like an old grump (because I am) but this entire thing is set up to get you to agree with the conclusion "#Protect Trans Kids!" so not alone a thumb but the entire hand, arm and upper torso is on the scale.
People on uptight old Normoria get all bent out of shape just because a few people like to wear the fashionable clothes on Regenera? What silly old stick in the muds! How unreasonable!
Of course, if we're mapping this to real world events, then that makes Regenera the Planet of Stripper BDSM Streetwalker Gear and maybe the Normorians aren't that with-it, the poor unfashionable losers.
That's why us stuffy old Normorians are so unreasonable: can you not make an argument for Regenera without dragging in sexualised examples after ten seconds?
Well, the thought experiment is just talking about trans kids. It's entirely orthogonal to the yearly "No Kink at Pride" arguments.
I think as LGBT+ people have become more and more mainstream and accepted in society, there has been an increasing willingness to throw whoever is still outside of the Overton window under the bus. I think this explains transmedicalists like Buck Angel, who might feel on some level that it would be easier for people to accept trans people if they didn't have to also defend non-binary and identity-only conceptions of gender, and married gay couples with adopted children who don't want to have men in puppy BDSM gear at pride.
Put another way, there could be kink on both Normoria and Regenera, since the thought experiment only covers trans kids.
"Well, the thought experiment is just talking about trans kids. It's entirely orthogonal to the yearly "No Kink at Pride" arguments."
Aella is the one who put that little gem in:
"(one day some Earth adults dress up in the clothing styles fashionable on Regenera when performing for children and the pro-Normorians lose their everloving shit)"
Could this possibly be a reference to the "drag is not inherently sexual" talking point? Hm, hm, however can I tell, I am only an everloving shit-losing Normie.
It's not like six years ago there were articles about the wonders of 9 year old drag queens (princesses? at that age?) ha ha ha, at least it's all adults - oh, wait:
https://www.teenvogue.com/gallery/lactatia-9-year-old-drag-queen-slideshow
Yeah, it's true: I just want trans and drag kids to suffer horribly because I go "what the everliving fuck" when I see stuff like this, instead of being chill and cool and accepting like the fashionable Earth adults dressing up in Regenera telling-stories-to-kids gear.
I agree the original post alludes to the drag controversy, but even the quote you pulled out doesn't hint at what Regeneran and Normorian styles are actually like. They could just be as different as historical Japanese and Russian clothing styles, and the controversy in universe could be more about tribalism than sexualization in the thought experiment.
And if we're talking about drag in the broadest sense, I saw a ton of Monty Python's Flying Circus sketches with men in drag as a young, impressionable child and I wasn't scarred for life. (There's too many examples to list, but google "Hell's Grannies Monty Python" for one example.) I think it's obvious that drag in general is not inherently sexual, and it has a long and storied tradition in English language entertainment going back to Shakespeare.
It's a bit like asking if dancing is inherently too sexual for kids to do. Some kinds of dancing might be, but the specific content matters a lot more than whether the answer to the question "is a child dancing?" or "is a child dressing in a costume of the opposite sex?" is yes.
Heck, my brother was really into Pokemon when he was a kid, and one year he insisted on going as Misty (a female character) for Halloween. My parents let him, and aside from a few laughs from his siblings, the whole thing was basically a non-event.
I'm okay with condemning behavior and dress that shouldn't be acceptable for young kids of either sex, according to the current mores of society, but I think pretending that the mere act of dressing in drag in the broadest sense is "sexual" is kind of silly on the face of it.
That's an interesting effort, but despite your gestures at the possibility of the "allergies" to Regenera or Normoria being psychosomatic, I think your analogy fails to give proper attention to the possibility that it might be possible to adapt in either direction to each planet, or that there might be people who aren't allergic to Normoria, but who would still be happier on Regenera, and vice versa. It also ignores the possibility that there might be a *chemical* contagion of some kind on Earth causing people to not thrive in Normoria, which wouldn't change where we should send people now, but might create a whole nother fight over whether the chemical is "bad" and should be removed.
Maybe pathing is also an issue. It might be the case that if you ignore all the space traveled in between, Alice would be happiest on Normoria and Bob would be happiest on Regenera. But Alice might have a condition that makes her experience the near instantaneous FTL travel in the sector around Normoria as decades of subjective suffering, and Bob might be on a limping spaceship originally bound for Regenera that has a 5% chance of reaching its original destination, and a 20% chance of getting to Normoria, and will fall into a black hole otherwise.
So it becomes not just an issue of "how can we make sure that the right people are going to the right places?" but also, "given the path that a person is on now, should we try to change course in spite of our beliefs about the best destination for a person from an armchair perspective?"
I think this line of thought is fine as long as the activists are open to the reality that for the vast vast majority of people their lifetime happiness will be highest in their “original” body.
I do think there is some nonzero rate of people for whom transition is best. But I think that rate is very very very small.
Why do you think that? The rate of transition is already pretty small, I assume you mean you think it would result in more happiness if the rate was smaller.
Yes, some thoughts:
1). Trans people themselves and their activists talk all the time about how hard it is, suicide risk, etc.
2). It chains you to a lifetime of medical costs and issues, fighting your body with $.
3). From my limited but not zero experience with trans people and people who strongly considered it. It often is mostly about personal unhappiness, escaping abuse, etc. and less about “omg I was born with a ‘gender soul’ that doesn’t match my body”.
The two close friends I know well were both victims of repeated serious abuse, one whose life never changed even after transition and eventually OD/suicide. Another who was about to start transitioning after years of pursuing it, had a normal healthy hetero relationship for the first time ever with someone who accepted her tomboyness, and immediately lost all interest in transition once she realized that she didn’t need to be a girly girl to have a normal relationship with a man. She had been very serious about it and had scheduled surgery and was about to start hormones, and this was 15 years ago when that was harder. Now she is happily married to a different guy and expecting a kid.
I also have a ‘close acquaintance’ who was a sad awkward deeply lonely 35 year old male leftist political activist. And now he is a sad awkward deeply lonely 40 year old trans political activist. Nothing has improved about their life other than people feel sorry for them and “celebrate their bravery” all the time. I detect no increased happiness or actual life improvement that isn’t obviously performative. They are also now deeply unattractive which you can tell they struggle with. Most men make quite terrible women aesthetically.
4). It generally is a weirdly rigid conception of gender roles and seems to be consuming the LG communities to some extent. I have a sister in law for example who is a bit autistic, mid thirties, super butch, mechanic, always liked boy things, was in love with her female best friend as a child for a decade or two. She identifies as a lesbian, though has been happily??? In a relationship with a stoner guy for close to 15 years now. I think it started out platonic (for years), but clearly isn’t now though still separate bedrooms.
Anyway, I would bet you a million dollars if she was say 15-25 right now she would for sure decide she was trans. She is a “searching” person who went to 5 different undergrad programs before finally finishing, totally quits career paths regularly, etc. and I am also sure it wouldn’t solve her problems.
Her problem isn’t she is a “man trapped in woman’s body”, whatever that is supposed to mean. Her problem is she is a deeply awkward person, with a lot of personal quirks and difficulty forming social connections.
None of which is solved by pretending she is a man, which you can already do quite easily as a woman anyway.
5). It is way too much the neck tattoo/facial piercing of today. The last frontier for teens and others trying to show their parents/the world how countercultural they are. Except it is even a worse idea than a neck tattoo/facial piercing.
On top of that it is an instant “get social sympathy and attention” button in some social circles, right now. You get to immediately vault to the top of the “oppression stack!”
This is some arbitrarily high % of the current movement, which is bad.
Hey Martin, great points and you weren't an asshole even a little bit even once.
I can't say I'm convinced by your examples. There certainly is lower life quality on average among people who identify as transgender, but that's not really evidence on the effectiveness of transition for those people. I don't think transition rates are likely to be significantly too high, because afaik transition regret is low. Briefly googling says it's ~3% in studies from just a few years ago.
My experience is that the gender roles are somewhat rigid for some but it's not a universal thing. Nonbinary people make up a significant fraction of the people who've started identifying as trans in the last 10 years, and they're mostly resistant to rigidity. I would say the rigidity isn't actually significantly more rigid than for people who are straight and cisgender.
I have felt sort of non-binary my whole life. My mother was a very androgynous lesbian who had had a career in the Navy, had short hair and did not wear skirts, and was an expert shot with a pistol. I am sexually straight and dress in quite a femmy way, but often feel like I am a guy -- sort of like my mind is a guy mind, and my thinking has a bluntness and competitiveness that feel male to me. I am not particularly troubled by any of this, and never have been. In my teens I changed my first name from a female one to an androgynous one. But if I had had the option, at age 20, being spoken of has 'he' or 'they' I would have had zero interest in those possibilities. It was important to me for my friends to understand that stuff about me, and I explained it to them, but I didn't crave public acknowledgment. The world at large understands so little about each of us, that its failure to grasp this particular subtlety about me just merged with all the rest of the stuff I assumed strangers had no interest in. So I do have some trouble taking seriously someone's demands that the world at large Get It Right when it comes to this one aspect of being them.
If the social contagion theory of LGBT and specifically trans identification is correct, it's a very recent phenomenon. We wouldn't be able to use studies from even just a few years ago to determine the rates of regret now. Both sides seem to completely agree that it was harder to get transition treatments in the past, especially if we're talking more than five years ago. If it was more difficult, then those who went through with it were probably significantly more inclined and far less likely to regret later.
Also given that regret may not be instant (likely isn't, even if significant later), we would not expect to see much change in results for a few more years.
Social contagion theory doesn't even need to be true for studies to be outdated, there would just need to be a significant increase of medical transitions.
3% seems way high given what is being claimed. “I secretly have an opposite sex gender soul”.
Anyway, it wasn’t meant to be persuasive to you, it is why it is persuasive to me. It’s not the same thing. “Lived experience” is often a lot more convincing to the “liver” than anyone else.
Have any thoughts on how a large portion of the people claiming to be non-binary are women who exclusively or almost exclusively have sex with men?
Is there data on the beliefs of trans people on what "being trans" means? I know the "inherently other gendered soul/mind" is a common narrative, but I don't know how that matches with experiences. I think it's more common in early transitioners/people who have "known" from a young age. Another narrative is "I would be happier living as a different gender", which is a more "falsifiable" claim. This angle is also more common with non-binary people, I believe.
Non-binary demographics are interesting. I'd first note that "almost exclusively" could be considered a big jump from "exclusively".
One thought I have is that it could be related to women (in the US at least) having a wider range of socially acceptable/normative presentation. A woman can wear pants or skirts, makeup or no makeup, and still be considered "feminine" (to some degree, and acceptance varies on environment). Men don't have as much flexibility, a man wearing a skirt or obvious make-up is understood as feminine and non-normative. From this angle, a significant portion of non-binary people are former straight women for the same reason most tomboys are straight; most women are straight and there's only a weak relation between this kind of presentation divergence and sexuality. Which is not to say there isn't a connection, just that it's not surprising on the face of it.
Now, what the root cause of this presentation divergence is, I don't know. I assume at least some of it is something like "social expectations of femininity grate" + existing culture of caring about and *modifying* one's appearance, but I'm just guessing, and that doesn't feel like it's explains enough.
"It generally is a weirdly rigid conception of gender roles"
If we confine the conversation to adults, that is a large part of what drives me spare about it. Five decades of feminism to get over the whole "men brains and women brains are different, and that is why men are superior thinkers while women are at the mercy of their feels and why women can never be put into positions where they need to use reason and logic" and getting past gender roles -
- and now I'm supposed to cheer on the "pink for girls, blue for boys, sugar and spice and everything nice/snips and snails and puppy dog tails, being a woman is all about wearing high heels and dresses and makeup and jewellery and liking girly girl things, tee-hee!" Let's put women back into the gender roles box of "should be a 50s TV housewife in pearls and frilly apron" and undo all the progress made about "to be a woman does not mean you have to be the pink girly-girl; if you are a pink girly-girl that's fine too".
The hell I will! Dylan freakin' Mulvaney can go to - Canada - as far as I'm concerned with his drag act which, God damn it, is being taken seriously as "she is a trans woman" instead of "this is a gay guy doing a performance because he was stuck at home during the Covid lockdown, only the online fans have now made it a profitable act to get endorsement gigs" (well, except for the whole Bud Light thing).
In unrelated news, Sam Brinton is now charged with a *third* count of luggage stealing. Well, that sure was a great pick for trans/non-binary representation in the Biden Administration to show that the TQQIP2S part of the entire acronym were totally normal, regular people, now wasn't it?
I'm new to A.C.T and took the time to go over the bans that Scott issued. I found them fair and reassuring that this community genuinely strives to achieve healthy conversation and especially nice to see that come from Scott himself. Kudos, and I'm glad I spent the money to become a paid subscriber. Keep up the good work!
Thank you!
You know, I approve of your bans, including your recent half-ban warning to me. I think they are fair and I think we need these bans and warnings to stay civilized. But they have cost us Carl Pham, and I miss him. He was smart in a lot of areas, kind, mature and witty, and I was enjoying getting to know him. But about a month ago a bad-tempered rando came through. Several of us pushed back against rando's ideas, but Carl pushed back so articulately that Rando lost their temper and delivered a primitive insult. Carl replied with an equally primitive, but more sophisticated, insult, and you give them both a ban, I think a one-week ban. They both totally met the criteria for a ban.
But Carl didn't come back, and I think I understand why. He's a guy in late middle age, probably in a position of considerable power and authority in his field. He's been on here giving excellent comments for, I think, years. And you just kicked him off for a week, same as you did Bad-tempered Rando, who was arguing vehemently for something I thought was kind of dumb, I forget what. Being kicked off, with no recourse, feels like being treated like a little kid. It seems to me, and I'm guessing it seemed to Carl, like he deserves something more -- like a private note, saying "Come on Carl, you're better than that. I could ban you for that comment." At the same time, I understand that you can't really do much of that. Maybe losing Carl is just the price we have to pay for having a banning system that is enforced equally for all. You can't fine-tune every little thing. I'm just -- sad.
What is it about the British or their descendants that made them invent most of the world's most popular sports? The British invented golf, boxing, tennis, rugby, and popularized the existing ruleset for cricket and soccer/football. The Americans invented basketball and volleyball, and popularized the rules for baseball and MMA. The Canadians invented hockey. Feel free to Google 'world's most popular sports'- no matter what list you land on, either the British or their colonies have invented close to 100% of them. I feel like this is underdiscussed. What is it about British culture, specifically? Just an unusual love of sports?
Also the British standardised rules for both horse and foot racing with the Jockey Club and the AAA.
Handball (the Olympic sport) is Danish-German in origin. Cycling was mostly standardised by the French. Motor racing was invented pretty much everywhere at once when the car was - multiple "first" races happened in 1895 in various countries. It was codified by the FIA (an agreement between various European national motor sports organisations) and then separately in the US by the Indianapolis 500 and later, again separately, by NASCAR.
I suspect that the reason for most sports (aside from golf, cricket and horse racing) being standardised in the 1860s to 1880s is that that is the first period when clubs from one town or city could play clubs from another town or city without needing to stay overnight - you could get an early train, play a game, and then get the late train back. This means that it's now important to have one set of rules that both clubs accept, and that's where you get codified national (and then international) rules from. US vs UK games, on the other hand, were not practical for a long time, so it made sense for Americans to create their own sports rather than be tied to rules developed in Britain for British conditions.
And the reason why Britain is so dominant is that, well, it was the 1860s to 1880s. Britain was the dominant country in the world in that period; British merchant shipping dominated the oceans, so there were British sailors in every port, introducing their games to the locals, British merchants were prominent people in every city in the world, British colonies were everywhere, with sports being introduced by the colonial administrators and the soldiers.
Other countries' global influence in that period was far smaller by comparison.
Golf, cricket and horse racing were all standardised much earlier (by the R&A, by the MCC and by the Jockey Club), and they were all sports of the upper classes, the group that could afford to travel across the country for several days to play a game (that might itself last several days - a golf tournament lasts four days, a cricket match was three or four days until the 1970s, and a horse-racing meeting would last a similar length of time). This meant that these sports got standardised far earlier on.
This is even more true for "real" (ie royal) tennis, which, like the modern pack of cards, was standardised in France in the 16th century. Chess, the other truly ancient game, was standardised in its modern form in 15th century Spain. I suspect that for cards and chess, this was because of the need to standardise manufacture of pieces and printing of cards; for real tennis, it's just that the game belonged to an even more narrow upper-class segment than golf or cricket.
Modern "lawn" tennis, as an aside, was not invented until the lawnmower was widely available in the late nineteenth century; it was an upper class sport and could have been standardised earlier had it been invented.
In thinking about this, and particularly with regard to soccer, which isn’t driven by elite schools, or imperialism, I think I have a potential reason why Britain led the world here.
Industrialisation. Trains.
There were local versions of ball games, mostly chaotic, before the rules of association football were codified. However the need to create a game that can be played between between London and Bristol can’t exist before there’s a train between Bristol and London exists. Before the train travel between these cities took a day, afterwards it took a few hours.
So you create a unified set of rules for the country. Even with trains Scotland is too far away so the newly formed teams up there get their own league, using the agreed upon rules. Eventually the best players from the Scottish league play the best players from the English league and you have your first international (this isn’t speculation but actually the history of international games). Eventually leagues in the U.K. have international matches between the “home” countries - Ireland, England, Wales and Scotland.
Industrialisation also creates a pool of players and more importantly spectators.
The spread to other countries can be explained by similar processes, in Holland the still existing Eindhoven FC was a team initially for the employees of Phillips. By the time these countries come to start playing a formal game with a ball, association football is established, so they use those rules. The (English) FA doesn’t seem to have tried to promote the game outside the U.K.
(Other reasons exist too - it’s a game that relies on no equipment except the ball, so can be played anywhere. It’s also fairly safe as these games go. Rugby didn’t spread so much).
It also helps when sports created by other civilizations and extremely popular in their day get essentially eradicated through colonialism. I'm thinking here of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_ballgame Mesoamerican ballgame. Close to the top of my list of things to do in a parallel universe is to catch a top-level game with Al Michaels announcing.
Fun fact about football (soccer). It’s the biggest sport pretty much everywhere except where the British empire dominated. It wasn’t spread by the empire at all - it just seems to have been spread by different routes unique to each country.
I know this is a late comment, but David Goldblatt writes about how the football/soccer spread most through the "informal empire-" many countries in the 19th Century brought in small but very influential English elite populations to help modernize/industrialize. In Argentina, for instance, Leo Messi's local club as a kid is called Newell's Old Boys. This is also why in Italy you have AC Milan and CFC Genoa, rather than Milano and Genova.
In settler colonies, by contrast, much larger pools of industrialized English-speakers were able to develop their own local sports. Ireland is a weird case where the GAA was a nationalist venture to counter English sport, and spent years locking football and cricket out of the country (they were less successful with Rugby, which is non-sectarian to the point where there is a united Irish team with little controversy).
That's an interesting observation.
The part of the question I find most interesting is why every major Anglosphere country invented its own local sports, while non-Anglosphere countries were all content to copy soccer directly.
USA: baseball, American football, basketball
Canada: ice hockey, lacrosse, Canadian football (maybe?)
Australia: Australian Rules Football
Ireland: Gaelic football
Why was the non-English-speaking world content to copy an English game rather than making up their own version?
I thought lacrosse was a Native American game, preceding European influences. ?
Because playing polo with someone’s head didn’t have very long shelf life?
Or Brits were first to amass significant leisure time?
Snooker and cricket are astounding at consuming leisure time.
Other countries do have their own sports. These cultures were probably not rich enough to grow these sports during the early years of globalization.
The logical conclusion is that only the anglos can invent sports that anyone wants to play
Powerful nations get prestige (which can outlast their power), and people copy prestigious nations. It's the same reason that American music is popular worldwide, and why most countries wear British-style business suits.
The public schools, their prestige and the importance of games in their culture. I don’t get the impression Continental Europeans have historically cared so much about team sports as part of education.
Support for rule bound behaviour and aggressive competition combined with Protestantism, a cold weather climate, the English class system, boarding schools and the British empire would be my off the cuff answer
I don't know, but I'd wager a guess that it has to do with the presence of sport in education? The most important contribution to sport from France is probably the Olympic Games, but what is perhaps less known is that their founder, Pierre de Coubertin, was well acquainted with, and admired, English physical education. He devoted much of his non-Olympic-related career to try to get French schools to emulate it.
Pure speculation on my part ... I wonder if because of the industrial revolution, the British people enjoyed prosperity and had more leisure time before most other societies did.
I'm sure that's it.
While the rest of humanity still struggled to survive in their mud hurts, Brits had leisure and resources enough to (1) invent sports, and (2) spread them across the world.
I feel like the big step was when it became acceptable for grown men to play what had previously been children's games. This seems to have happened for most sports around the middle of the 19th century; this was the point at which most of today's major sports had their rules codified.
Popular because they brought them to their colonies and introduced them there.
There was (is?) a political element to this - see 'garrison games' in Irish nationalism:
http://irishgarrisontowns.com/the-garrison-game-soccers-foreign-image-in-irish-popular-culture/
"Support your own games. Don’t mind the skulker and miserable kind of fellow who says, “There’s no game like Soccer”, “No game like Rugby”- in fact, “No game like the game that is my own”. Be men. The skulking slave spirit has got into our people – that is the reason for slavishly following foreign games and customs. Let us be strongly national – that is not bigotry"
And an Indian movie, Lagaan, which comes down to a game of cricket:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhi4Azs2nEw
"Set in 1893, during the late Victorian period of India's colonial British Raj, the film follows the inhabitants of a village in Central India, who, burdened by high taxes and several years of drought, are challenged by an arrogant British Indian Army officer to a game of cricket as a wager to avoid paying the taxes they owe. The villagers face the arduous task of learning a game that is alien to them and play for a victory."
The enjoyment is to beat the former colonial masters in the game they introduced to you 😀
As I said above , soccer is popular where the British empire didn’t exist. It’s not a colonial project and almost an anti colonial project. The spread of football surprised the British in fact, the FA were not part of the original founders of the FIFA - it’s a French acronym - and were relatively surprised that it existed.
> The enjoyment is to beat the former colonial masters in the game they introduced to you
"But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, ..."
After watching Lagaan, I felt like I understood cricket for *weeks* afterward. It's all gone now, but I'm occasionally tempted to rewatch it just for that.
Simple explanation of cricket: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdH6amb99js
This is the simple explanation of cricket that tends to get passed around:
You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that's in the side that's in goes out, and when he's out he comes in and the next man goes in until he's out. When they are all out, the side that's out comes in and the side thats been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out.
When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who stay all out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out.
When both sides have been in and all the men have out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game.
I have never been able to understand the scoring system in cricket, despite my youngest brother attempting to explain it to me, but I think this Tumblr post is the best description I have ever read. You will appreciate it more if you're ever been exposed to BBC Radio 4 Test match coverage:
https://www.tumblr.com/elodieunderglass/178921341318/my-boyfriend-is-trying-to-explain-cricket-to-me
"if people haven’t been exposed to cricket before, here is the experience. The person who likes cricket turns on a radio with an air of happy expectation. “We’ll just catch up with the cricket,” they say.
An elderly British man with an accent - you can picture exactly what he looks like and what he is wearing, somehow, and you know that he will explain the important concept of Yorkshire to you at length if you make eye contact - is saying “And w’ four snickets t' wicket, Umbleby dives under the covers and romps home for a sticky bicket.”
There is a deep and satisfied silence. Weather happens over the radio. This lasts for three minutes.
A gentle young gentleman with an Indian accent, whose perfect and beautiful clear voice makes him sound like a poet sipping from a cup of honeyed drink always, says mildly “Of course we cannot forget that when Pakistan last had the biscuit under the covers, they were thrown out of bed. In 1957, I believe.”
You mouth “what the fucking fuck.”
A morally ambiguous villain from a superhero movie says off-microphone, “Crumbs everywhere.”
Apparently continuing a previous conversation, the villain asks, “Do seagulls eat tacos?”
“I’m sure someone will tell us eventually,” the poet says. His voice is so beautiful that it should be familiar; he should be the only announcer on the radio, the only reader of audiobooks.
The villain says with sudden interest, “Oh, a leg over straight and under the covers, Peterson and Singh are rumping along with a straight fine leg and good pumping action. Thanks to his powerful thighs, Peterson is an excellent legspinner, apart from being rude on Twitter.”
The man from Yorkshire roars potently, like a bull seeing another bull. There might be words in his roar, but otherwise it is primal and sizzling.
“That isn’t straight,” the poet says. “It’s silly.”
“What the fucking fuck,” you say out loud at this point.
“Shh,” says the person who likes cricket. They listen, tensely. Something in the distance makes a very small “thwack,” like a baby dropping an egg.
"Was that a doosra or a googly?” the villain asks.
“IT’S A WRONG ‘UN,” roars the Yorkshireman in his wrath. A powerful insult has been offered. They begin to scuffle.
“With that double doozy, Crumpet is baffled for three turns, Agarwal is deep in the biscuit tin and Padgett has gone to the shops undercover,” the poet says quickly, to cover the action while his companions are busy. The villain is being throttled, in a friendly companionable way.
An intern apparently brings a message scrawled on a scrap of paper like a courier sprinting across a battlefield. “Reddy has rolled a nat 20,” the poet says with barely contained excitement. “Australia is both a continent and an island. But we’re running out of time!”
"Is that true?" You ask suddenly.
"Shh!" Says the person who likes cricket. "It's a test match."
"About Australia."
"We won't know THAT until the third DAY."
A distant “pock” noise. The sound of thirty people saying “tsk,” sorrowfully.
“And the baby’s dropped the egg. Four legs over or we’re done for, as long as it doesn’t rain.”
The villain might be dead? You begin to find yourself emotionally invested.
There are mild distant cheers. “Oh, and with twelve sticky wickets t' over and t’ seagull’s exploded,” the man from the North says as if all of his dreams have come true. “What a beautiful day.” Your person who likes cricket relaxes. It is tea break.
The villain, apparently alive, describes the best hat in the audience as “like a funnel made of dove-colored net, but backwards, with flies trapped in it.”
This is every bit as good as that time in Australia in 1975, they all agree, drinking their tea and eating home-made cakes sent in by the fans. The poet comments favorably on the icing and sugar-preserved violets. The Yorkshire man discourses on the nature of sponge. The villain clatters his cup too hard on his saucer. To cover his embarrassment, the poet begins scrolling through Twitter on his phone, reading aloud the best memes in his enchanting milky voice. Then, with joy, he reads an @ from an ornithologist at the University of Reading: seagulls do eat tacos! A reference is cited; the poet reads it aloud. Everyone cheers.
You are honestly - against your will - kind of into it! but also: weirdly enraged.
“Was that ... it?” you ask, deeming it safe to interrupt.
“No,” says the person who likes cricket, “This is second tea break on the first day. We won’t know where we really are until lunch tomorrow.”
And - because you cannot stop them - you have to accept this; if cricket teaches you anything, it is this gentle and radical acceptance. "
Heehee.
A bit more serious explanation of how cricket is not baseball. https://www.dangermouse.net/cricket/baseball.html
An Indian coworker put me onto Lagaan some years ago. I really enjoyed it. It was a classic sports movie, where the outcome was never in doubt.
> either the British or their colonies
This is pretty much the Anglosphere, I think, so I don't think there's anything particularly special about Britain itself.
The codification is the invention. Anybody can kick a ball around, the rules makes the game.
? That’s exactly how games develop. Until the rules are codified there is no distinction between any games at all. Plenty of countries had people kicking balls, or bladders, or anything round. So did Britain.
There was an organisation in Britain that codified the game of association football. It’s those rules that distinguish it from other games played with balls. Rugby was codified in a different way. Different ball type. Different tackling rules. Different scoring mechanism, teams sizes, rules on ball handling etc.
Those rugby rules were then changed over time in the US to give us the game that is American football.
The problem with this is that there are multiple codes of rules for some sports, but no-one seriously proposes that they are different sports.
The NFHS, NCAA and NFL each have separate rule codes for American football. That doesn't mean that they are different sports.
Also, there are rules in many cases, they're just local: the FA rules are the first codified rules of football, but there were the Sheffeld rules and the Cambridge rules and so on before the FA was founded. Rugby School published its rules of "football" even earlier than that - that (rather than the myth about William Webb-Ellis) is why the later sport of rugby football was so-named, it was people playing football by the rules published by Rugby School.
Teams within a single area were all playing by the same, standardised, rules long before the FA rules were written - teams in Sheffield played each other by the Sheffield rules, for instance. But when a team from Sheffield caught a train up to Leeds to play a Leeds team, they had to agree whether to play by the (widely published) Sheffield rules or the (written down by the Leeds clubs but not published) Leeds rules, or by compromise rules. Once the FA rules (themselves a compromise between the published Sheffield and Cambridge rules and the unpublished London rules) were determined, all the various other rules gradually faded away as everyone came to accept the FA as the ultimate rule-making body.
But this isn't a binary, on-off process; Sheffield Rules continued to be run separately for about a decade after the FA was founded, and it was only changes to the FA rules to bring them closer to Sheffield (notably, the adoption of the corner kick) that convinced Sheffield to finally accept the FA rules.
There is a difference - of kind, not just of degree - between a single rule-making body with a standardised sport on the one hand, and lots of individual clubs each with their own rules, and having to negotiate compromise rules whenever two play each other, on the other hand. But there are lots of intermediate steps in that process, and picking out one of those steps and proclaiming it as a binary and the foundation of the sport is, at best, dubious.
Yes there are games that are largely the same with slightly different rules and games that are totally different from each other. Nobody is going to put a rugby team and a soccer team on a pitch and call it the same game.
Some games are close enough to play a compromise game (like Gaelic football and Australian football with limited success). But everybody knows they are watching a compromise game. (American football seems to have some minor differences in rules, but that’s actually rare. )
It’s not at all dubious to say that the rules the FA created were the creation of association football, or that the games of Gaelic football were created in thurles in the late 19C. Nor does the existence of Sheffield rules alter this matter.
If the Sheffield game had dominated, that might have been the game called football in most of the world, but that too would have an origin story.
What’s actually much more interesting, and a blow to the multiple origins theory, is that association football isn’t a compromise game hammered out between different ball games across Europe and South America, nor is it - as some say here - driven by British imperialism.
In fact the FA didn’t take or proselytize the game across the world. FIFA was founded without the FA, and the FA (and the other associations in the U.K.) were asked to join later - much to their surprise and perhaps chagrin.
In fact the “home nations” - led by the FA - left FIFA more than once for political reasons.
Yet the game spread - unmoored from its founding country.
It would be as if france, Argentina and a few other countries had asked Australia to join an international body playing Australian rules football following the exact same rules, without Australia previously knowing or caring much about spreading the game.
Why did association football spread so fast and so uniformly?
I’m not sure, that probably needs an entire book, but I think we can say it has an origin in England, and it clearly isn’t based on a compromise between multiple different forms of football in multiple countries.
The codification is the game of association football brought the game of association football into existence. Rugby went a different way with a different code although both were based on general ball games played in the era.
Rugby league later breaks away from rugby union and creates its own code. In Ireland we can trace the game if Gaelic football go a meeting in Co Tipperary in 1884. There are other ball games around the world.
These games have different codes. The codes create the the games. Gaelic football did not originate in China. The codification is the game.
FRI is hiring an Operations Lead (part-time, remote)
Role details
- This role is entirely remote. Applicants can work whichever hours of the day work for them but should be able to attend meetings between 2-6pm GMT.
- This role will start out as a part-time role (likely 20-30h per week).
- We prefer applicants who can start immediately.
- Salary is commensurate with experience, starting at $80,000 (pro rata).
More details can be found here: https://forecastingresearch.org/roles/operations-lead
Cremieux (somewhat) contra Scott on 'Beware the man of one study'
https://cremieux.substack.com/p/beware-the-man-of-many-studies Good read, though I think the ultimate ask is a bit unrealistic for most individuals (though the author acknowledges this)
> Like Scott, I do not want to preach radical skepticism. I want to preach scientific reasoning. If you’re interested in the research on $topic_x, you should familiarize yourself with the methods of that field, and especially with the field’s most critical voices. You should know what’s right and what’s wrong and be able to recognize all of the issues that are common enough for the field’s researchers to see them with a sideways glance.
> Most people are not equipped to do this. When they are, they may not know they’re capable; when they’re not, they may wrongly believe they’re capable.
Is there something about dementia that somehow "erases" the schizophrenia? I ask because I have an elderly relative who developed paranoid schizophrenia in her early forties, during a period of significant stress and disruption. She was briefly institutionalized in the early 1980s, but once released refused to continue to medicate. Fast forward to 2021, at which point she was in her 80s. Her schizophrenia had noticeably worsened during the prior 3 or 4 years, and after an incident involving a blocked intersection and hallucinations she was briefly institutionalized again and put on medication which she received for one year, ending about 6 months ago (when whatever legal authority allowed her carers to medicate her ended). During this year, the medication had little effect. However, in recent months she has started to develop noticeable dementia; this has been accompanied by an almost total cessation of the symptoms of her schizophrenia. I've known her my whole life, and the change is remarkable. The fear, the hallucinations, the conviction that there is a shadowy group of bad guys out to get her -- all just gone, replaced instead by many of the symptoms of dementia. Which leads back to my original question: is there something about dementia that somehow "erases" the schizophrenia?
I don’t know but many geriatric patients develop paranoia or delusions as part of dementia. Also for example Lewy body dementia involves hallucinations. That is different from schizophrenia of course.
Not a doctor. I do have some experience here though. My dad suffered from paranoid delusions most of his adult life life.
The thing about the large set of incorrect beliefs he had is that they were very elaborately connected and one thing would reference another decades earlier. To someone on the outside it would be obvious that the whole thing was preposterous but he interlinked various random ordinary events into a complex whole that he sustained for decades.
He died before any loss of cognition but I would think that memory loss especially would bring the house of cards down.
So the 2022 ACX Survey included two questions on cancelation, basically "Have you ever cut off a family member over politics?" and "Has a family member ever cut you off over politics?"
So I did a deep dive on each of these questions with a bunch of R code, 20+ graphs and 2 ML models. Check it out.
https://woolyai.substack.com/p/who-cancels-and-who-gets-canceled
Neat, thanks for posting!
Interesting, thanks!
> In terms of actionable, real insight, I can only say that you should be careful around extreme leftists, Marxists, and people who have recently moved significantly to the left
Well, that explains what happened with my old IRL friend group... :-/
Maybe lefties are meanie assholes.
It's more the moving to the extreme left part. It's possible that the move was recent enough that they hadn't had time to figure out that they shouldn't take it all completely literally, and if things had happened a few years later, it would have worked out better. But probably not, since malice was involved. The tactics would be adapted to suit the situation.
You mean the main agenda was malice, and degree of leftieness and how literally it’s taken doesn’t really matter? However far left they are, and however literally it’s taken, the current configuration of beliefs can be used maliciously?
Sorry if I wasn't clear. There was one malicious person who exploited a property of a social group that had recently moved from left to far left. Had the social group not been exploitable that way, I believe the malicious person would have chosen a different means.
Most of my extremely woke Harvard grad students feel a lot of guilt and fear about how in the privacy of their inner life they are not feeling and thinking exactly what they believe they should. One in the School of Ed had been browbeaten with the idea that a teacher should love all of their students. She had one very difficult and unpleasant student who demanded lots of meetings to "clarify the nature of the assignment," and then turned assignments in late anyhow using excuses that were obvious lies. Not surprisingly, my patient did not love this student. Jeez, I said, how could you possibly love her? You'll probably have to work hard to even to give her what you do owe her -- things like a fair evaluation of her work. My patient then told quite convincing stories about long dialogs in School of Ed classes about various situations in which teachers do not love a certain student, and in all of these situations the teacher's failure to love is viewed as a manifestation of unforgivably awful character traits -- racism, elitism,, white fragility. etc. It's really creepy. Anyhow, point is that wokism has woven into it of a great deal of cruelty and controllingness. Those who manage to climb enough stairs and step on enough faces to be seen as Wokeness Leaders have the power to wreck the lives, reputations and self-esteem of others. Nobody involved seems to notice the disjunction between the extreme tolerance wokies advocate for those they see as victims and their extreme cruelty towards those they see as privileged. So maybe the person in your circle would have chosen another means, but extreme leftiness does end itself especially well to the assassination of peers.
PLEASE HELP with tendency of SELF HARM . I subjectively feel a failure , but it genuinely feels real. When ai know it's not, but it paralyses my chain of thought.
I have a lovely kid ( reason why my suicidal ideations were share and managed in the last 6 years at the local Montreal psychiatric ward ( Montréal).
I am in an relation that changed from me being the primary provider the first 7 years to being the decreasing money maker to being a graduate student ( yet again) just to have flexibility ( not better remuneration work, actually ended with a strangling student loan) , just to be around my "in vitro" desired kid. She's soon 9 and the Apple of my eye.
I am male in a " traditional " marriage with a now high earning spouse, that's slowly getting ashamed by my increased girth, minimal to no income ( since Jan.). Things that are expressed at the very occasion.
I actually am genuinely happy I am not going to the "social events", and play, draw , make silly stories with hand puppets (á la Mel Brooks " Spaceballs.
I am doing actively guided meditation and breathing and self ACT and the once a month psychologist ( that's more about deep dives in self acceptance and self care - Eastern European high demanding performance parents that made me get in med school and collect useless grad papers (last one from last year McGill)
I just , subjectively, feel that I am inadequate, a burden ( because it's like Bart Simpson" I am doomed if I do and I am doomed if I don't " ). Enforced by daily remainders of my partner that changed since the corporate ladder power skews perception ( I know, because I was in that distorted view in an academic, research / corporate management place).
My head , feels like a pressure cooker, and my self harm is hitting it with hard objects . A twisted auto dafé ( self punishment) for the life long association that performance and pecuniary health are associated with cerebral competence.
So the desired outcome ( completely wrong and counterintuitive after I self inflict various degrees of concussions with the various symptoms) , is to " let go" the pressure of conflicting thoughts that become strong emotions and create the conflicting overload .
Annoyingly, I am aware of the mechanism, and still feels , in the heat of the ruminating moment, as a potentially relief option. And it's always the head ( that incredible tough) .
It's my last 2 weeks of paid membership ( no income so no say) so I am trying to get help before it escalates.
I am familiar with CBT, Törneke frameworks, ACT, DBT . And the counterproductive and distorted premise.
If any help in re-framing, managing, re-directing of the "cranial self harm as a ( false) relief, would be genuinely appreciated.
Thank for the opportunity to ask the community and the grace period, that was the catalyst to share this .
ADHD, sleep apnea and obesity ( very slowly going down after getting some helpful strategies 6 months ago from community.
Well I've got very little helpful advice, apart from being in a potentially similar position of apathy.
"I am male in a " traditional " marriage with a now high earning spouse, that's slowly getting ashamed by my increased girth, minimal to no income ( since Jan.). Things that are expressed at the very occasion."
Kind of hard to understand your sentences. Are you saying your spouse is explicitly telling you you're embarrassing them? It's an important distinction between them saying it and you just thinking it. Likeiwise, when you say "just to be around your kid", are you saying people will stop you seeing them if you don't do things that way? Or is it just a scheduling thing where you can see them any time but won't have the time?
What's your spouse's advice been? If you're worried about your spouse's opinion you definitely should be talking things through with them. Don't, like, smother them with your problems, but they're important and need discussing.
>I actually am genuinely happy I am not going to the "social events", and play, draw , make silly stories with hand puppets
This is perfectly normal and more about personality than problems. But I always think of a scene from Metamorphosis; the sister sees the bug crawling on the walls and starts removing the furniture to make it easier, meanwhile the bug is trying to stop her because it's the only reminder they have of their humanity. You need to make an effort to attend at least some functions, so you don't get completely lost in your own head.
I don't know how well meditation will help, but I kind of have to agree with Martin, the best way to get out of the funk is to go do something tangible. If you can get a job, get one. If your spouse has things you can help with, help with them. The less you accomplish, the worse you'll feel.
What else have you tried hitting? I've got cheap plastic Ikea-style tables that can be kicked apart in a lovely explosion of reattachable pieces, it's much less damaging than hitting your own head. (If you have actual throbbing pain in your head, a tight-fitting baseball cap works nicely.)
IDK doctor help thyself. Sounds like you know the solution to your problems. The solution is to ignore them, stop making whatever excuses you are using for obstacles, and start moving your life forward.
Get a job, like next week. Do a good job at it. Develop some self respect. All this is coming out of your sense of worthlessness. Discipline yourself, not with hits to the head (which are easy, harmful and pointless), but through sitting through a work shift and giving it your all the whole time (which is hard).
Just stop doing the behaviors you know are wrong, and start doing the behaviors you wish you were doing no matter how superficially unpleasant it seems.
It might also help to cut out whatever your main distraction is cold turkey. Be that porn or video games or internet browsing or whatever.
The stress will go down when you aren’t secretly (and not so secretly) constantly humiliating yourself through your behavior.
Lots of people deal with some version of this problem of one severity or another. The solution is always to make positive changes in your life.
Thank you for your thoughts. I am in total agreement with the harmful and pointless. It was a genuine thing happening in my surgical residency ( more than) 30 yrs to get physically and debatably pointless kicked . " Tough love " to became a " real pro".
After some decades apparently backfired and I am looking to not get "disciplined ", but to find a more soft alternative approach. I was disciplined since kindergarten .
"Get a job, like next week. Do a good job at it. Develop some self respect. All this is coming out of your sense of worthlessness. Discipline yourself, not with hits to the head (which are easy, harmful and pointless), but through sitting through a work shift and giving it your all the whole time (which is hard)."
If it were that simple, he'd have done it already. And he's not some teenage slacker, he knows how to do it, he was the primary provider for his family for seven years.
It's quite possible to be in the frame of mind in which slashing one's thigh or whacking oneself in the head is subjectively less painful than applying for a job, starting a running/lifting routine, or any other long-term positive change. Often because the former are mechanically very easy and bring a certain perceived sense of 'justice' for one's failings. The latter are complex and require sustained executive function.
To apply for a job, you have to face the possibility of rejection and externally-reinforced feeling of failure, which to someone already traumatised by a sense of failure (not least having failed to live up to the standards he's 'supposed' to have met, cf parents, etc.) can be a near-impossible prospect.
Anyway, I suspect the post was more of an impulsive vent than something written with any reasonable expectation of help, but I'd recommend taking a step away from iterating endlessly on oneself, learning more and more about the tortured labyrinth of one's own mind via psychological lore, and focusing on the kid and the spouse. Draw strength from the sense of being relied upon - they need your head intact, you fool. Also easier said than done, of course.
Yea and no. Fundemnetqllly that is the hurdle to be jumped. Easiest to just get on with it. IDK I was very depressed for nearly a decade from ~12-20? Getting out of it wasn’t pills or counseling or magic.
It was getting some actual wins in my life, wins I earned through hard work. I don’t disagree focusing on family night also work, but ultimately the path to mental health in a situation like this involves just being behaving in mentally healthy ways in most cases. He feels like a failure because he is failing by his and his wife’s standards. Stop doing that.
Certainly self destructive behavior helps nothing.
"Certainly self destructive behavior helps nothing.".
An absolute truth !! That's so obvious
I was a "winner " ( high earning surgical subspecialty until I swapped for corporate high life, disillusioned in my ( misplaced) ethical expectations and jumped with gusto in the dubious criteria of various academic activities and paper collection.
"Stop doing that". That's my intention.
I know it's a substack and not a therapy session . I wanted to get a broader and more varied perspective than my narrowing tunnel vision in getting a potential reframe.
PS. One of the perplexing thing that's counterintuitive for my ( again misplaced understanding of a supportive and symbiotic partnership is the drastic transformation in the last 15 years of my partner. The kid is the element that precludes me to just pack and merrily go away to my former win ( I am still licensed, funny enough- de professionalized clinically, but that's standard issue in non - US parts)
I agree with most of that. The guy needs some wins (again) and to develop the habit and reasonable expectation of winning. At least at the start of the curve reversal, though, those wins need to be small and near-certain, to prime the pump. And they need to be at least somewhat ego-preserving so as not to feel like ritual humiliations instead of wins. (So, despite any Calvinist-work-ethic instincts to say otherwise, no shelf-stacking for the guy whose parents wanted him to be a big time doctor, whose solution to dwindling money was more grad school, and who still managed for seven years to stay ahead of his corporate-shark spouse.)
But I'm sure his therapist has/will have all this handled better than a rando like me in a substack comment section.
Thank you for your advice in getting the perceived infinite inertial task into minced small REAL wins.
The " ritual humiliations instead of wins" it's a very probable cause that was ( hard to believe ) not very salient.
It's so funny that we can notice the blindspots in others, not so easy to oneself. Especially when ego and self worth are consistently presented as weakness and egotistical tendencies and turned against oneself for easier abusa and learned compensatory over performance to be accepted. Having ADHD diagnosed late was an aggravating factor.
Thank you sincerely and I do appreciate your " rando" act . Therapists are very helpful and invaluable. But, as I personally noticed, when you follow your training, especially if you are confident and have results, it's sometimes conducive in the desired result oriented outcome, to miss some apparent small nuances. That I am not aware, ergo I am not able to share ( or worse, I consider irrelevant ).
Thank you again, "rando" person. I think it's a helpful strategy worth exploring. Most comments are from a different perspective. Even if true as statements ( some obvious) are not actionable in my circumstance in this stage.
I think you've probably provided the answer in your first sentence. Your tendency to self harm is potentiated by your feeling a failure. You project your feelings of failure into your spouse but they most likely emanate initially from your own consciousness. You believe you are a failure because you aren't earning and because you're gaining weight. You resist making an effort to earn money for some reason, even though you are able because of some reason that isn't clear
That's a valid statement. I don't resist making money. I just focus on my kid. The last corporate and last academic gigs were borderline ethical ( for my view and one of the reasons my postgrad and re entertaining grad school at middle age was a bad idea - when young I was more credulous and blissful ignorant).
I can get back to earning more than we need for a decent life, but my time with the kid ( last frozen ovule) it's more precious than an extra room, bigger tax and the litany of fragile fancy german cars .
I would agree with you. In our human realm, the only thing that really matters, as far as I can tell, is learning how to love responsibly. What better teacher than a child?
(Sorry, posted before I had finished) I am guessing you are deeply depressed, to the point of apathy. Your written language is almost as if you cannot bring yourself to articulate fully. As a Buddhist, I fully support that life is deeply unsatisfactory. Each moment of experience is suffused with dhukka, unsatisfactoriness and there is simply no resolution to this state that doesn't involve total cessation. However, taking oneself out of the centre of one's life can help to ameliorate the situation. I recommend you give some though to helping others, volunteer perhaps.
Look, we're random smart people, not oracles or miracle workers. Get yourself out of the position of asking randos for advice about a problem of this kind! You need to find a psychotherapist and see them once or twice a week and stick with them, and also get a psychopharm consult. See the best practitioners you can find. Research the options, or ask us for advice about finding great practitioners, which is a question we're more likely to be able to answer If your wife is high-earning she probably also has excellent insurance, and even if she does not you two can afford to pay out of pocket. If your wife resents it, go anyway. If she's out of patience with you and also unwilling to fund your health care I'd say the relationship's in enough trouble that there's not much to lose by going against her wishes regarding the costs of psychotherapy. And if you haven't gotten treatment for your sleep apnea, get a CPAP immediately. Problems that seem richly psychological sometimes fade away to nothing when sleep apnea is treated, and even if yours do not you'll be more alert and in a better position.
Thank you. Can you recommend a great astute practitioner in Montréal. I am seeing monthly the clinical director at Allan Memorial Institute and a specialist clinical psychologist after " shopping for 10 years). I indeed use various Bilevel ( BiPap) machines in the last 15 years ( I realized I had sleep apnea late, not realizing that snoring in my lower normoponderal 20's ( in the early '90's the diagnostic - at least in Europe- was non existent) I had no idea it existed in my 4 years of med school and 2 years of shadowing the heads of departments. As it was also the case with ADHD that was not a thing. My sleep apnea is controlled in the last decade with 99% compliance . ( the extremely rare afternoon falling asleep shortly with a book. ( I don't nap , prefer Sam Harris or Calm or jazz listening ). And I maybe should mention that I was able easily get in 12-18 hours of creative flow before. This is reduced now to 3 max 4 ( various music, reading, medical animations/ illustrations) . Not sure if relevant.?
I am sorry I did not mention it.
Thank you
No, I can't recommend a great astute practitioner in Montreal. You are going to have to go the route everyone else does with an unusual, hard-to-treat problem: Research the hell out of it, become a mini-expert on options, then fight to get in with a great astute practitioner. This site seems to me smart, and like a good place start: https://www.selfinjury.bctr.cornell.edu
You can also try asking on here. However, I recommend that in your post you do not talk in detail about your self-injury. While from your point of view a detailed description may give a full and especially persuasive picture, from the point of view of most readers your description of your situation is so disturbing that they are likely to skip on to the next post after reading a few sentences of it. Also you should not say stuff like this is the last chance to post because soon ouy can no longer afford a paid membership. First of all, even if you have a non-paid membership I'm pretty sure you can post on threads like the present one. I believe it is only the hidden open threads that are only open to paid subscribers. Also, since you mention that your wife is high-earning nobody's going to take seriously the idea that you can't cough up $2.50 per week for a paid membership. Saying "this is my last chancet o ask for help" does not motivate readers. Instead, it makes them skeptical of everything else you say.
So if you post here askng for leads on great practitioners , just say simply that you experience self-hatred and have a habit of self-injury and are looking for a good therapist.
If random good wishes on the internet mean anything please accept mine. Hope you feel better and find something that works for you.
I wonder if anyone's ever designed a reverse index fund where you include say all the companies in the S&P 500, and then use some type of methodology to *exclude* a smaller number of stocks you think are losers. I've been reading a lot of the classic works on value investing recently- lots of smart people putting forth a lot of effort to figure out what stocks will rise in the future. By contrast, in my 'reverse value fund', you accept that you don't know which stocks will rise- but you use the same methodology to try to determine 'which of these stocks are terrible and will only fall in the next decade'. Have large amounts of debt, declining profitability, lots of management shakeups, bad P/E ratio- just a terrible balance sheet overall.
I just finished Peter Lynch's books (who beat his benchmark for like 20 years in a row in the 70s through 90s). He said that he owned up to 1400 stocks, so he was essentially constructing his own kinda index. Inspired me to say 'what if you were mostly an index but did some minimal stock picking', as opposed to the classic value investing 'only own 30 stocks which you have extremely thoroughly researched', etc.
“direct indexing” refers to directly holding the individual stocks of an index fund. It is raising in popularity but still small afaik.
One goal of direct indexing is to remove some stocks from the index. Like you want.
Other goals include (better?) tax loss harvesting and esg
Thanks, I didn't know about direct indexing at all
To beat the index funds, it's not enough to figure out which companies will do well and which will do poorly. You need to somehow make better predictions that the market as a whole. You want to buy companies that will do better than the market expects, which could be a good company that's even better than the market thinks, or a terrible company that's less terrible than the market thinks.
Would this really result in significant gains? You'd need to boost the returns more than the associated expenses, and I think that's the problem. If the majority of your fund is still just the passive index, then you're only gaining a small amount of alpha here.
I don't think that a large amount of alpha year-in and year-out is realistic. Whereas a small amount of alpha, but every single year, adds up a lot over a long period of time. I don't think there's any associated expenses with merely choosing not to buy some overvalued or low-quality companies
Well, someone has to do the choosing, right? And if they're any good at their job, they're going to command significant compensation.
Because at the end of the day this is still stock picking. It's saying that there are companies that, despite various negative indicators, are still overvalued by _other_ high-paid professionals. If it were obvious which stocks were overpriced, then their prices would fall until they were no longer so.
The logic for under-performing companies is no different than the logic for over-performing companies: if you want someone to do better than the market as a whole, you need to find someone the talent to consistently out-guess the market as a whole, and this ability is quite rare.
Wouldn't this be the same as putting money into S&P500 and also shorting the few unwanted ones?
Yes it would, and this is more or less what a lot of hedge funds will do. Having a short-only position is pretty risky because an increase in the overall market can easily screw you over, so you'll balance out your short positions with a much broader long position to remain overall market-neutral.
I think it would be a nice courtesy to tell people how long they are banned for, whether in that comment, or privately (which of course may have happened already).
As I understand it, if no time period is specified, it's permanent.
I think Scott usually does this right away when he replies to the ban-worthy comment.
One of the major things keeping large numbers of people very poor is human hostility rather than nature. How does this interact with effective altruism?
My impression is that effective altruism is (was?) about looking for testable interventions largely based on effective altruists having more access to wealth that those who need help.
However, a lot of poverty is caused by war, oppressive government, and crime. What's more, people in refugee camps are forbidden in important ways from joining the larger economies and creating wealth.
About what proportion of poor people are poor because of human intervention rather than non-human problems like malaria? I realize this is a vague question since the numbers don't necessarily exist and human and non-human problems interact.
What level of coercion are you willing to accept to solve the worlds problems?
America stepping in to truly be 'world police' is something that would absolutely be imperialism or colonialism - the only way to reliably stamp out all war is to be willing to blow up everyone who tries it, and ousting oppressive governments similarly requires at least the threat of a big stick (though I suspect after the first handful future targets might step down willingly, the first 2-3 will absolutely call your bluff), and it requires sticking around for generations which the American public likes much less than a quick shock-and-awe blitz.
Ending crime is harder still, with America patently unable to do it even at home.
Finally, while America's values are definitely better than anywhere with ongoing civil wars or genocides, they definitely have some problems with religious extremists influencing policy, and any colonies they form would probably be comparable to Puerto Rico or Guam at best - no longer actively violent, but nowhere near as prosperous as the US mainland.
I was actually trying to pick up the problem from the other end-- should people feel responsibility for the global poor in general, when some large proportion of the poverty is highly intractable?
I think that does help emphasise the supererogatory (as opposed to obligatory) nature of global charity, but "solving some of the problems" is still almost trivially a good deed even if "solving all of them" seems impossible.
This isn't exactly about what's supererogatory-- maybe there's an absolute obligation to solve the problems that can be solved-- but there isn't an obligation to solve the whole problem because there are parts that can't be solved.
I think I didn't do enough to distinguish between progressivism and effective altruism-- progressivism (as I understand it) at least some of the time has absolute obligations while effective altruism is more about what's feasible.
I don’t think the idea that releasing large numbers of refugees is zero cost to the economies they are released into is very well supported. Sure it is amazing for them, but at some point you start over stressing the institutions/culture/norms of the host society, and if collapses you might be in a wildly worse situation.
There are definitely compromise positions, where refugees are allowed to work by default without automatically being granted permanent residency and citizenship (eg. if the political regime in their country of origin changes to one that is no longer hostile, or the war there ends).
Having said that, I agree that any one country unilaterally becoming much more refugee friendly would rapidly get swamped, causing at minimum political turmoil (cf Germany with the massive Syrian refugee wave). One would need to coordinate a broad international agreement to change norms in tandem, so that no one society has too large an influx.
It may be better than you think-- people would be less likely to move to the more stressed areas. Also, refugees frequently come in with skills and willingness to work, so they increase the capacity of the places they move to.
It might be better to produce fewer refugees, many are the results of wars started by the west, particularly the US.
And many more are caused by the wars the US *doesn't* intervene in; a lot more refugees are coming from Syria than Iraq or Afghanistan (or Yemen, which I do hold the US somewhat responsible for).
I agree that having fewer endless wars would be a great thing but plenty of countries are capable of dissolving into civil war all on their own, it doesn't take some CIA plot to explain. If anything, direct US involvement tends to end the direct conflict stage rather quickly with overwhelming military might, and thus doesn't produce much refugee flow. It's the drawn out low tech and/or proxy wars that are the really brutal ones.
The US has intervened in Syria. Both directly and indirectly.
Zvi was saying something similar in a recent post, except he phrased it in terms of the monetary cost or loss of efficiency due to people being out of alignment -- said costs were enormous. It's here: https://thezvi.substack.com/i/125172339/hinton-talks-about-alignment-brings-the-fire
"We have one example of the alignment problem and what percentage of our resources go into solving it, which is the human alignment problem.
Several large experiments got run under ‘what if we used alternative methods or fewer resources to get from each according to their ability in the ways that are most valuable, so we could allocate resources the way we’d prefer’ and they… well, let’s say they didn’t go great.
Every organization or group, no matter how large or small, spends a substantial percentage of time and resources, including a huge percentage of the choice of distribution of its surplus, to keep people somewhat aligned and on mission. Every society is centered around these problems.
Raising a child is frequently about figuring out a solution to these problems, and dealing with the consequences of your own previous actions that created related problems or failed to address them.
Having even a small group of people who are actually working together at full strength, without needing to constantly fight to hold things together, is like having superpowers. If you can get it, much is worth sacrificing in its pursuit.
I would go so far as to say that the vast majority of potential production, and potential value, gets sacrificed on this alter, once one includes opportunities missed."
My impression is that dealing with "human hostility" has externalities that detract from it's usefulness and most actionable "human hostility" is caught up in extremely expensive zero-sum games.
Or, to rephrase, the Evil Warlord of Over There is a very bad person who oppresses his people and it's very possible that billions of dollars in lobbying the US Department of Exploding People will lead to his elimination, which is way more cost effective than billions of dollars of malaria nets.
But, problem one, the externalities, is that the Evil Warlord is friends with the Kinda Good Warlord we want to make into a Good Warlord and he will not appreciate his friend exploding. Or the fact that the US Department of Exploding People is...not really good at establishing democratic norms and the all the junior Warlords of the Evil Warlord are...pretty evil, so we're probably just going to put some other evil guy in charge.
Problem two, zero-sum games, is the fact that, actually, tons of people are interested in supporting or removing the Evil Warlord. Tons of actors, local and international, are spending lots of money to try to influence different actors to "do something" about the Evil Warlord. And, after awhile, you find that just spending billions on lobbying isn't going to drive action, because other guys will just up their spending to counter balance, if you actually want to get things done you need to build relationships and write papers and host cocktail parties and...oh.
Part of appeal of effective altruism, at least the part that caught my attention, was the humility and simplicity of focusing on the simplest, most actionable charities, rather than the highest potential impact. No one has a problem with malaria nets, there's no weird political issues, it's just a problem of funding.
This. "The world has evil people" is big impact, but not particularly tractable. To the extent that it's 'neglected', it's not an issue money can solve - the Saudis have way more than your whole movement ever will - so while it might be extremely worth discussing with any friends you have who work in the White House there's not that much to be gained by making it an "EA cause area"
The rich world didn't get rid of malaria at all, it never had it. The tropics are full of really awful diseases not present in temperate regions, and most of the diseases we did 'get rid of' were via either vaccination (hard to do for malaria, but it's being worked on) or via things as simple as nets, like "washing hands" and "not letting sewage get into the drinking water"
"Malaria has been successfully eliminated or significantly reduced in certain areas, but not globally. Malaria was once common in the United States, but the US eliminated malaria from most parts of the country in the early 20th century using vector control programs, which combined the monitoring and treatment of infected humans, draining of wetland breeding grounds for agriculture and other changes in water management practices, and advances in sanitation, including greater use of glass windows and screens in dwellings."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria#History
That's pretty limited, but it's something.
One of Eliezer's good predictions was that human intelligence was like a tiny dot in the range of possible intelligences. I don't think anyone saw the LLMs and the like coming. Any thoughts about other possible structures?
Yup, check out this, from Zvi's blog. https://thezvi.substack.com/i/125172339/voyager
Here's a new thing in the works: Capable autonomous agents, FML.
Jim Fan: Generally capable, autonomous agents are the next frontier of AI. They continuously explore, plan, and develop new skills in open-ended worlds, driven by survival & curiosity. Minecraft is by far the best testbed with endless possibilities for agents.
Voyager has 3 key components:
1) An iterative prompting mechanism that incorporates game feedback, execution errors, and self-verification to refine programs;
2) A skill library of code to store & retrieve complex behaviors;
3) An automatic curriculum to maximize exploration.
First, Voyager attempts to write a program to achieve a particular goal, using a popular Javascript Minecraft API (Mineflayer). The program is likely incorrect at the first try. The game environment feedback and javascript execution error (if any) help GPT-4 refine the program.
Second, Voyager incrementally builds a skill library by storing the successful programs in a vector DB. Each program can be retrieved by the embedding of its docstring. Complex skills are synthesized by composing simpler skills, which compounds Voyager’s capabilities over time.
Third, an automatic curriculum proposes suitable exploration tasks based on the agent’s current skill level & world state, e.g. learn to harvest sand & cactus before iron if it finds itself in a desert rather than a forest. Think of it as an in-context form of *novelty search*.
LLMs increase the probability that this prediction is wrong, or doesn't apply here.
LLMs are much more human-like than our vision of intelligent AIs from 10 years ago. Moreover, they are trained to imitate human behavior. So even if human intelligence is just a tiny dot on a vast spectrum, it is possible that we manage to train AI exactly up to this level, but not further. Because going further needs a bootstrapping process, while going to human level apparently does not need this bootstrapping.
I am not saying how likely exactly I find this scenario, that we hit a ceiling at human intelligence level. But 10 years ago we didn't really see a reason why AI should max out at human level, and now there is a very concrete scenario for why this might happen.
> LLMs are much more human-like than our vision of intelligent AIs from 10 years ago
I personally disagree. Ten years ago (or even two years ago) my vision of what an intelligent AI would need to be like was much more human-like than the bizarre form of words-first "intelligence" that LLMs seem to be reaching towards.
I now think that it might be possible to get something with human or superhuman level performance on most tasks in a totally non-human way simply by hooking up language models to a bunch of more specialised subunits (for vision, object manipulation etc).
I think there's potential for LLMs to, in some ways, exceed human level intelligence despite being trained on human-produced data, simply because it has seen far more training data than any individual human has.
Eliezer has a post arguing that we should expect that LLMs can become more intelligent than humans even if they're only trained on human data: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nH4c3Q9t9F3nJ7y8W/gpts-are-predictors-not-imitators
Currently the biggest blind spot for these models is interacting with the physical world, so one could imagine disjoint breakthroughs in that side of the field that yield robots whose movements are more dexterous, fluid, and rapid than any human, but which have no world model and therefore can only do highly prescribed actions with these impressive capabilities. So for instance a humanoid robot that could beat human Olympians in any sport, but which is still completely useless at cleaning your house.
Keep in mind that early-2022 Large Language Models are trained on basically pure text, and don't currently have any video or tactile training input.
Google's PALM-E, notably, directly gave that model video input and a toy-scaled robotics system for it's training runs, with a much broader base of skill sets (though I believe it had a lower parameter count than GPT-4 did)
I've been reading this book called Ways of Being by James Bridle that specifically focuses on this topic. It's a bit new-agey and I wouldn't necessarily call it rigorous, but Bridle does have some interesting examples of what he considers to be 'non-human intelligence'. One example he gives is the ways plants can 'communicate' with one another via chemicals and movement.
Good question - and does all the focus, excitement and capital going into LLMs mean other AI forms will be overlooked for longer (or worse like Britain locking into too narrow train gauges by industrialising first) - or will we have useful contagion of enthusiasm for other research rather than crowding out?
My assumption is that if we got one unexpected sort of AI, it increases the plausibility of getting another of a different type.
It's like once I heard about humans having Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry, I expected that there would be more lineages.
The concept of unions seems oppressive to me, given that employees can always theoretically switch jobs if they don’t like theirs, but once there’s a union, a company can’t really go and hire non union workers. I understand it’s unusual to consider unions as having more power than those in control of corporations, but it does seem so to some extent. What am I missing?
>> employees can always theoretically switch jobs if they don’t like theirs, but once there’s a union, a company can’t really go and hire non union workers.
I don't think this is accurate. I'm not an expert on unions, but as I recall the most recent issue in labor law has been court cases like Janus, which revolve around "agency fees" - fees which non-union employees at a unionized worksite pay to the union to cover "their share" of the union benefits cost. The idea was to eliminate a free rider problem, where people could opt-out of the union but still receive the higher wages and such, but there are legitimate questions and lawsuits around whether it's fair to make a non-union employee do that, what goes into calculating a "fair share," etc.
But the whole premise wouldn't be an issue (and indeed would be impossible) if unionized employers simply were unable to hire non-union workers at all.
Have you ever seen the film “Norma Rae”?
Are you familiar with the term sweatshop? The My Pillow guy runs one.
I see my local grocery store workers are on strike. The big company employing them wants to cut their health care benefits. Hell, it would increase profits and maybe even reduce costs.
I don’t care. I’ll pay a nickel more for bread. I’m not crossing that picket line. Live better. Work Union.
I think an important point here is that "union" today describes a certain government-enforced legal institution whose exact boundaries are different in different industries and situations, totally different from the intuitive concept of "workers can unionize if they want and then make deals".
In "the state of nature", a company could absolutely try hiring non-union workers, the union workers could try striking, and the company could back down or keep fighting. All of this seems perfectly fair to me.
The current system does contain lots of things that seem oppressive and unfair on both sides, but only because it's a government-imposed solution to the fact that in the state of nature everyone kept striking and getting in stupid fights, and the government imposed a compromise that limits the freedom of both sides and usually prevents that.
I don't have strong opinions about whether it's good or bad, but I don't think standard libertarian considerations really apply because nobody is trying to do that.
I also note that the set of government imposed rules on both sides differs dramatically by jurisdiction and even by field. America is generally considered to have very weak worker protections - cf all the news stories about eg. Amazon firing people for trying to unionize, which would in most of the rest of the West be doubly illegal because you can't fire without cause and firing someone for unionising is an extra-illegal cause that's worse than if you fired them just for being hotter than you or something - but simultaneously has very powerful public sector unions that cause all sorts of issues.
The real thing you should ask yourself is why you are concentrating on this supposed curtailment of liberty? Frankly even if it was a curtailment of the rights of workers (who would prefer to not join a union) the benefits outweigh the costs.
What ensures that the benefits outweigh the costs? If the union is mandatory, it has no incentives to actually better the life of the workers it nominally represents, rather than bettering the life of the union bosses that actually run it.
I note that AFAIK most (all?) powerful unions do not have secret ballot voting, so they are not in any real sense democratic
Of course the union works to the benefit of workers. That leaders get “rich“ is not that relevant, they are paid to represent workers afterall, not unlike agents.
They tend to favor the interests of longer-term workers over those of relative new hires, choking out dynamism & growth over time as frustrated junior employees leave.
That's hopelessly naïve. It's a classic principal/agent problem, if you have no incentives for the decision maker to actually do what's best for those they nominally represent, the Iron Law of Bureaucracy will come into play exceedingly fast.
To use a different example: Monarchs rule for the good of the country and its people, in theory. How well aligned were they in practice, historically?
It’s a root of paranoia for me. I want to be able to start a business and run it in the way I want to run it, and employ whoever I want to imploy (not from an unfairly discriminatiry pov), and have the cultural values I want to drive. So many companies seem lo lose their edge when governance gets overly impeded by employee activism.
" I want to be able to start a business" Do you mean this theoretically or do you actually want to start a business, but this is stopping you? Just above 10% of US employees are in unions and many of those are in teachers unions, police unions, postal unions, and other government unions. Only about 6% of private sector workers are unionized.
I hold the same views of unions as you, but they do not scare me and I don think private industry unions are a major issue in the US holding back economic growth. (Public unions are different and should be abolished).
It's theoretical, not actually stopping me. But I am frustrated by the state of affairs, particularly in California, where "employment at will" has become progressively harder to maintain in practice. I get it, there are "bad" employers out there, and maybe large and powerful corporations should meet different standards. What frustrates me is that I'll see an article on HackerNews about some group or another unionizing and a lot of people cheer. Similarly a fair amount of the commenters here seem to a-priori be in favor of empowering employees. I don't buy this. I think liquidity in the labor market is incredibly important, and beyond a basic framework of decency and fairness, there should be little in the way. Anyone can start a corporation for virtually free, and enjoy the same rights and privileges as any other corporation.
The transaction between an employee and a company seems straight forward: company pays employee to do something and fires employee if it doesn't work out. Company is motivated to retain good employees and maintain a good reputation to attract other good employees. And employee has an incentive to do a good job to enjoy an income or go to another company if the job is not desirable. But when employees have stronger protections things get funky. Today, an employee is so likely to walk away with some settlement upon any claim against the company, that they can use that to force the company to act in certain way. That, to me, allows a small group of people to wield a ton of power, especially within large public companies. What is the impact of Google not investing more aggressively in defense? Could have Google fired all employees that openly protested their own company's chosen strategy?
I actually think "real" power, such as money or weapons, is easier to appreciate, than the sort of virtual power a few revolutionary employees can have. It can be very destructive, and companies don't have a lot of recourse, due to a combination of legal framework and overton window for how these issues should be handled.
Unions don’t really get involved in hiring decisions anyway - the only liberty being curtailed is the right to not join a union, which is largely an issue in theory rather than practice.
What you describe - including some of the explanation below - sounds rather like there might be cooercion towards the employee, not so much towards the employer. I mean at least not in their possibility to select their staff. One can assume that if somebody really wants to work at a certain firm, and can do so only by joining the union, they will join. 'Cannot hire them' looks like a rare outlier.
Changing jobs has high transaction costs. The company has a better BATNA than workers in the kind of jobs that get unionised do.
In times of rising wages, the transaction costs are higher for employers - they will have to replace a worker at higher wages, while the worker that left can earn more. In times of stagnant or falling wages the situation is reversed. Of course not all industries or regions experience these situations at the same time so both scenarios could happen simultaneously.
There's a saying from somewhere, "The only thing worse than a union is no union."
I think of them like maintaining a military in peacetime. From one perspective, it's dead-weight, a pure loss to the economy, doing nothing useful and serving no good purpose. But of course that only lasts until it's needed, and the very existence of such a thing may keep it from being needed in the first place. There's failure cases in both directions.
I've seen more than a few cases where employers only started treating employees better when "unionization" started to be mentioned. And I've enjoyed a number of the rights that unions fought for and won in the past, especially those two 15-minute breaks per day when doing hourly manual labor. But I've also seen unions support lazy and incompetent people with no work ethic. And as typically organized, I think they actively increase the corruption in the system, rather than merely re-distributing it.
Are you a worker (more likely to benefit from having a union), or are you trying to get cheap labor for your startup?
I mean Jews are less than 1% of the population. Not sure that holds.
And I think unions oppress society as a whole. In Argentina, when the transportation union stops, the entire country is on hold. Which is why bus drivers make more than doctors there.
Who said anything about Jews?
I just meant it as a group that represents less than 1% of the population, which is or has been oppressed, and where the relative number of people is not relevant to whether oppression warranted concern. Obviously an extreme comparison.
I'm sure self driving car companies will set up shop there to take advantage of this opportunity
One can only hope. Although unions will try to stop it.
> but once there’s a union, a company can’t really go and hire non union workers.
I don't understand this. A company can hire whom they want regardless of union or not union, and often some part of the workers is organized in a union, while others are not. Or even: some are organized in one union, while some others are organized in another union, and others are not organized.
You are correct about unions in some countries, but in America unions tend to be closed shop, where you are forced to join the union (or at minimum pay dues) to work at a place. Unions are also binary, you can't just personally be a member of a union while working in an non-unionised shop.
I find it annoying we don't have different words for these different types.
Closed shops are illegal in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_shop#United_States
The Taft–Hartley Act outlawed the closed shop in the United States in 1947. And most states now have right to work laws which further erode the power of unions to make employees join them.
I see. This sounds mostly like it would be coercion *for the employee*, not so much for the employer (as the OP suggested).
It's coercion for everybody. If Bob chooses not to join the union then (a) he can't join the company, and (b) the company can't hire him.
Yes, in theory I agree, but in practice it seems to me that it'll be very rare that Bob doesn't join the union if the company wants him and he wants to work there.
Hence in most cases when employer and Bob agree on cooperating, Bob will be the one cooerced to join. The other option - Bob refuses to join and the firm can't hire him - seems like a rare outlier.
Like most things in economics, it doesn't much matter who nominally pays, the employee and the employer are in practice splitting the bill for the union dues.
The dues aren't really the costly part of unions, though, in that they're a modest flat rent. The pernicious cost is when they make it impossible to remove actively toxic employees, or to automate or otherwise industrialise the business.
Bonus points if the union doesn't allow just anyone to join as a new member, and thus artificially restricts labour supply - eg. the Screen Actors Guild, IIUC, only lets people who've had a speaking line in a movie join, while simultaneously not letting directors hire a mix of members and non-members, making it very hard to get a foot in the door.
I think this is a little off. Firstly, no union in the US can make you join it. The NLRA ensures your right to not join. From what I've read 27 (more than half) of states have banned practices that force non-union members to pay dues. So in fact in the US, unions tend not to force you to pay dues.
The union can’t make you join a union, but the union can make your employer make you join a union (in like half the states).
Technically correct. However, a union can enter into a legally-enforceable contract with the employer where they agree to only hire union members. In states without right to work laws, of course.
That’s just a contract. Are libertarians opposed to contracts now.
" Are libertarians opposed to contracts now."
As Queen of the Libertarians, we are not amused by the phrasing.
Disregarding the differences between ancaps and individual rights libertarians, the main objections commonly raised by my subjects are:
1. There are in fact some contracts that are invalid on their face. Murder, slavery and the like.
2. The unions have the backing of the state whereas any individual worker does not.
2a. Unions have a degree of "freedom of association" that is available to neither individuals nor corporations.
A closed shop means in order to work there one must be a member of the union. The rationale behind these is that the union negotiates for the workers, so if there were workers outside of the union they would still get the benefit of the negotiations without paying dues, or having any other union obligations.
I think unions once served a valuable purpose. Yes, theoretically you could quit your job and do something else, but most employers offered the same kind of working conditions and pay, and colluded to keep things that way. Unions helped break up that block of power over the workforce.
Things are different today, and unions are less important. Maybe they aren't needed anymore, but that doesn't mean they will never be needed again, if the balance of power switches back too far toward companies away from workers.
Thanks for the background. I'm surprised to hear that unions are not (much) needed anymore. Sounds like you're talking about cases where the power lies much with the workers, and not so much with the companies.
I used to say this same thing, that "unions once served a valuable purpose". Looking at the history of unions, their most noble time was when employers were able to 'legally' collude with local law enforcement. When police were employed as 'union busters', unions were good and noble, serving the public interests. Their fighting spirit was a bastion of democracy against corporate greed and influence. But the reason was because the State was being used as a literal cudgel against the people.
The state still is being used as a cudgel. It's just being wielded by someone else.
A scab tries to cross picket lines and gets beaten into a coma? That's not an assault that's a labor action. When their next of kin arrives to remove the scab's car and finds it torched? Not arson, "labor action." Yes, the NRLB could declare those particular labor actions not protected, but will they? That depends entirely on who's currently voting on the NRLB.
I agree.
The problem isn't labor actions themselves, it's an unbalanced application of the rule of law favoring one side of the transaction or the other.
I don't disagree with the labor laws that leveled the playing field, and I think those who praise the labor movement do so because there was a legitimate problem that needed to be solved with legal protections. Then the pendulum swung wide, pushing not for balance but for advantage for the other side. Now we seem to have cases where labor unions exploit favored legal position to extract concessions, metaphorically welding the cudgel they stole.
Actual labor appears to suffer under both types of imbalance. Ergo the reason we should redefine and renew our commitment to Labor Day as an ongoing issue of justice to constantly refine.
I’m not an expert in unions, but my understanding is that once they are established, they can legally picket and intimidate all employees into joining. And once a union has strong presence inside an organization, they can blackmail management with strikes if they do anything they don’t like.
That's not my experience in Germany. Negotiations between employers and unions play an important role here, but the kind of cooercion is not what I'm used to.
different countries have extremely different labour environments, both legally and culturally
Yes, I'm fully aware of that. I already got some explanations on US context above and intended to keep it short here. Maybe too short.
On the other hand side, a lot of comments here sound like they are describing or discussing a general feature of markets or politics, while in fact relating to the specific legal and cultural environment in the US.
The Original Post for example would have sounded quite different, if the emphasis on the legal and cultural conditions of US unions would have been explicit.
Unions are gangs that exist to intimidate and harass actual hard workers, as well as the employers of course, for the benefit of union organizers
Why are hard workers intimidated? Why is the benefit to “Union organisers” and not the general workers.
I've never been accused of being 'pro union' and I'd agree that laws protecting union members often interfere with free association. That being said, unions themselves don't seem more oppressive than corporations. People have the right to free association, which includes forming unions.
Unions make more sense in industries where employers have near monopsony buying power for a particular skillset and your described ability to just change jobs doesn't hold. When I was a web developer, leaving a problematic job was an option. I worked as a tech writer at Countrywide for a project. The underwriters there were in a rough position because if they didn't work at Countrywide it would be really hard for them to use their skillset. (But they weren't unionized.) The auto industry is another example of a situation where employers have near monopsony buying power on some skillsets. And they are unionized.
Teachers have a little bit of choice in employers in some areas. But not a lot unless they move.
> People have the right to free association, which includes forming unions.
This is totally reasonable. Everybody should have the right to join a union, just as everyone should have the right to not join a union, or to join a different union.
Right now, in most places, the right to join a union is not under threat, it's the right _not_ to join a union, or to start a competing union, that is under threat.
To clarify: When I say that something is a right I mean that the government should not prevent it from being done. I'm not asserting that the government should provide any particular opportunities by coercing private individuals. Does the government force anyone to join a union? (That is an utterly sincere question.) I wasn't aware of that, but I don't always stay up to date.
Part of the issue is that even if you view labour relations as a zero sum battle between owners and workers, we're all owners of the public sector. So if the SAAC bullies some extra money out of Disney, whatever, it's no skin off my nose. When a public sector union demands something, they're demanding that *I* pay for it in higher taxes.
I also agree with the points raised in the other replies you received.
They aren’t q monopsony though because most government workers are big standard officer workers with no particular special skills other office workers don’t develop.
That problem with public sector unions has to do with their opposing management. Public managers are not owners and cannot derive any profit from a better run organization (they are essentially also employees and nothing more), and so they don't have the same reasons that a corporation would to negotiate hard with the union.
Often this is okay, and they can be serious managers - especially if the elected officials overseeing this management can put the right pressure on the managers negotiating. This can very much break down if the elected officials are supporters of the union, because then there's no counterbalance at all. The elected officials may even hire pro-union management and then it's three power centers all pointing in the same direction with no opposition.
I just want to add that "pro-union" is often meaningfully distinct form "pro-worker" here.
Oh, absolutely. I've worked for pro-worker organizations and that's often a really good choice for management to do, especially in fields where competition for good employees is tight.
Pro-union means supporting what the union is negotiating for, even if that's not in the organization's interest. You never see that in private industry for obvious reasons, but it comes up in public sector jobs because the incentives for leadership can be very different.
It's not even pubsec unions that do this. Something that actually happened:
1. Governor of a business-hostile state (which shares a motto with Stan Lee) gets gobs of tax dough and other incentives to entice the UAE royal family to build a major manufacturing facility in his single-party state.
2. As part of this cash transfer, the UAE corp agrees to hire a minimum number of politically aligned trade union workers for a minimum length of time.
3. Said trade unions completely coincidently make campaign contributions to the governor in step 1, as well as contributions to certain "charitable organizations" which are unauditable and make dispersals based solely on their founder, who happens to have the exact same name and social security number as the guy getting the campaign contributions.
4. This is trumpeted as a major success in public/private partnerships as a great example of a politician getting things done.
We experienced this when my wife worked in a public school. The unions didn't just require her to pay dues to advocate for positions she didn't always agree with, they also required participation in events and political demonstrations she didn't always agree with. This was one of the most frustrating aspects of public sector unions: compelled political speech.
In practice almost every employer enjoys some market power just because of the way the job market is structured. They're bigger and more knowledgeable, your life will get really bad without a job whereas they can go for a long time with 1 less employee, you depend for your livelihood on references + a good employment history... Plus employers can and do collude even though it's supposedly illegal.
In principle, if employers were mainly small sole proprietors looking to hire individual workers, and the workers banded together to form a really strong union, that could be an unfair situation. It would start to look like guilds/professional associations do, more than the typical labor union, though.
If this is true then why do wages rise in non-unionized industries, especially as the portion of US employees in unions continues to fall?
Relevant point, thanks.
Oppressive to whom?
Unions are "freedom of association"!
Unions level the negotiation field.
https://www.shu.edu/micah-business-economics/catholic-teachings-on-the-rights-of-workers.cfm#:~:text=%22Among%20the%20basic%20rights%20of,proper%20arrangement%20of%20economic%20life.
Exactly. There are a lot of laws protecting unions. The equivalent on the corporate front would be a cartel, which is illegal.
No. You cannot compare the power of a number of workers uniting in a union with a number of firms uniting in the market.
In fairness, you're probably talking about very specific laws in US, which I know close to nothing about, whereas I'm talking about general principles of workers coordinating vs. (big) firms coordinating.
I think the latter part of your comment got cut off there, the part where you justify your opinion that one cannot compare one thing to another thing.
The short answer is that because they are too different to be compared in a meaningful way.
I couldn't find your question above about how the post justified that they were equivalent.
Like, owners of the company can take all the profit and use it to start a new company. It is easier said than done, but the same can be said about switching jobs.
I have written a new blog post/essay that summarises some reasons to be skeptical that AGI is imminent, or necessarily dangerous. I definitely don't believe that AGI is somehow impossible, but I'm not convinced that the success of the current crop of LLMs will necessarily lead to it.
By a strange coincidence I touch upon a lot of the issues that were discussed in the book review posted two days ago. If you enjoyed that you might also enjoy my blog post: https://www.awanderingmind.blog/posts/2023-05-31-the-case-against-intelligence-explosions.html
If you are already a committed AI doomer you might hate it.
Very good essay! Thanks for that.
My pleasure!
I've spent some time looking at AI x-risk arguments in an attempt to write an entry for the recently concluded Open Phil AI Worldviews Contest, so given that context, I was looking for the loss-of-control scenarios I deem most plausible -- Paul Christiano's "you get what you measure", Andrew Critch's robust agent-agnostic processes, etc; basically slow takeoff multipolar agent scenarios, none of which require general intelligence or fast takeoff or even AI takeover (e.g. in Christiano's scenario above, we are incentivized by competitiveness considerations to hand over increasing amounts of successively higher-level decision-making across all areas to automated systems, and it's hard to tell exactly when human civilization as a whole goes past the point of no return). I didn't see you address them in your blog post (your website is beautiful by the way), so I was wondering what you thought of those. Quick summaries: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qYzqDtoQaZ3eDDyxa/distinguishing-ai-takeover-scenarios#Slow_scenarios
Here are my thoughts, based on a first read of the summary.
If I understand the argument correctly this does seems like a likely failure mode; but it also seems to me that, at least for the first two scenarios, the world already works like that. The first two scenarios (AAFS and WFLL I) don't even need AI. You can usefully replace all instances of 'AI' in those scenarios with 'some elaborate bureaucratic/organisational process meant to lead to a good outcome' and end up at fundamentally the same place . This seems more like a generic 'optimising for local minima will lead to emergent social ills' argument (which I agree with) than anything else.
The 'Production Web' scenario seems less like something we already have (unless extreme ecopessimism is justified and wide scale ecosystem collapse is imminent and will lead to a a massive global famine, which I deem unlikely, even though I am depressed about ecosystem destruction). It is also difficult for me to imagine how this could come about if the AI wasn't in control, i.e. already superintelligent.
Scenario 4 (WFLL 2) seems the most likely , and is actually the type of scenario I would be concerned about. However, if I understand the argument correctly, this would require something very much like AGI, and I would hope that in such a scenario a lot of effort would have been put into avoiding exactly this scenario. In a sense this is the best case, because it means that
1. AGI is possible
2. It won't rapidly achieve superintelligence and kill us all as part of achieving some instrumental goal
3. We can put it to use, hopefully doing good thing (but realistically also definitely selling us junk and probably generating porn)
4. We have time to think about the proper way of containing it, and/or limiting its exposure to the external world
I'm glad you like the website!
> Canada’s population center may not be in Michigan.
I disagree with the argument presented in this link, although its main conclusion that "you cannot average latitude/longitude values" remains correct.
Taking the "population center" to be the center of mass in three-dimensional space re-projected to the the sphere is counterintuitive and arguably incorrect. Us fleshy meatbags are limited to travel *along* the surface of the sphere, so I think we need to work in the embedded S^2 space directly (the surface of the sphere) rather than R^3 (real space of which the surface of the sphere is a part).
Consider three people on the Earth. Two are standing infinitesimally close to the north pole (ε,0,1) [1], and one is standing slightly further away from the south pole (-2ε,0,-1). In the above-linked claim on the proper calculation, the three-dimensional center of mass is (0,0,1/3), which projects back to the north pole itself. If everyone then decided to meet at the center of mass, the people near the north pole would imperceptibly move, but the person at the south pole would have to travel halfway around the Earth! That hardly seems intuitive.
In ordinary (non-curved) space, the definition of the center of mass is the unique point where the mass-weighted displacements to each mass element cancel. That is, if you collapsed the entire object to its center of mass, the vector sum of (mass-weighted) displacements moved would be zero.
We can extend this to the sphere, but we have to be careful about the 'vector sum' part. We can't cavalierly add vectors from different parts of the sphere since the sphere itself is curved: my 'north' and your 'north' don't point in the same direction. We can, however, make the definition above work if we bring all the points to the purported center of mass first, then add up their displacements (with great-circle distances) *in the direction from which they arrive*. That is, suppose someone travels over the north pole to arrive at the center of mass. They depart going northwards, but arrive going southwards; that 'southwards' direction is the one that matters.
If we apply this revised definition to the three-person planet above, we end up with something much more intuitive: the center of mass is somewhere around 30 degrees north latitude, along the line of longitude where the south-pole person is standing. To reach the center of mass, the south-pole person would travel about 1/3 of the way around the Earth, arriving from the south, and the two north-pole people would travel 1/6 of the way around the Earth, arriving from the north.
For a more complicated distribution of people (like the population-weighted Canada), computing the center of mass is a bit more intensive. The definition above only allows us to verify the center of mass, it doesn't give us one from first principles, so I think we'd have to find an initial guess, find the residual distance-vector, then iterate.
[1] — By mathematical convention, ε is "a very small number," small enough that ε^2 is often treated as zero.
Possibly a noob question: why can't you just project the surface of the Earth on to a coordinate system with 2 dimensions (e.g. latitude and longitude) and take the average of those 2D values when finding the center of mass?
Why go through all the trouble of computing vector-sum displacements?
> why can't you just project the surface of the Earth on to a coordinate system with 2 dimensions (e.g. latitude and longitude) and take the average of those 2D values when finding the center of mass?
From simple to complicated reasons:
* Maps have folds or creases, at minimum where the globe wraps around. Two people standing next to each other on opposite sides of the 180th meridian are right next to each other, but a straightforward map-based approach might say that their center of mass is really on the prime meridian – the other side of the globe.
* Maps distort direction. If you have two people, then their center of mass is obviously somewhere along the line connecting them. However, the line connecting them on a latitude/longitude map is not (in general) a great circle, which is the shortest line that would connect them on a sphere. This is why plane routes (e.g. http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=LGA-IST) look odd on a lat-lon map; they follow the great circle route for a shorter distance.
* Maps distort distance. A few map projections (i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomonic_projection) will transform great circles into straight lines, but the scale of this map depends on the distance from its center of projection, much like how the Mercator projection is famous for making Greenland disproportionately large. On one of these maps, the center of mass of two people will indeed lie on the line connecting them, but it won't necessarily be at the _midpoint_ of that line.
You can correct for all of these, but by the time you've done so you're essentially doing what Matthieu or I propose.
These errors don't matter much at all over short distances provided the map used is reasonably isotropic (the same in each direction; not stretched or squished). However, Canada is a large enough country for the scale changes to matter, and it's northerly enough for the direction changes to matter. Lines of latitude are not great circles except at the equator, and the approximation gets worse as you go further north.
Where did they take population density data from? I'd want to do similar stuff for more countries.
And what is the difference between correctly averaged and incorretly?
hhhm i found this: https://www.kontur.io/portfolio/population-dataset/
>What do you mean?
I think this my question was already answered in your another comment
I regret missing the comprehensive version of this comment, then. I'm happy you performed the calculation of the least squares great circle distance, and of course you're fully correct that min Σ(d^2) is the better way to define the calculation. I foolishly was working post-gradient.
I like this definition better than the R^3 definition because the definition of distance being used is more natural, and it avoids the counterintuitive idea of the center of mass being below-ground. However, the computation is more difficult, since it's a nonlinear least squares problem rather than a linear one.
On the gripping hand, you're right that for most reasonable cases the difference between the two approaches is minor, and each approach is far better than performing the calculation on an arbitrarily projected map.
So I had this (perhaps) weird idea of paying my kids to have grandkids. Maybe something around $50k/kid. Backstory: I didn't have kids till ~40, my kids are now 22 and 24 and have no interest in having kids. So this may take a while to happen, and I might die before then.
On the plus side, kids are expensive and the money would help some. On the down side this seems to pit my two kids against each other. For when I die whatever money I have will be split between them. So I'm mostly wondering what you all think. (Oh and what happens if one of my kids wants to have kids, but can't for some medical reason. Do I pay them to adopt? (Which I at first ruled out... I was really thinking that I'm paying to get my genes into the next generation.))
Wow, I wanted to make some group reply. Thanks for all the comments.
1.) Where/ when to give the money? The perfect time is when the kid is born, and the money should totally go to the women (giving up at least a year of her life.) bearing the child. I'm not sure why it feels 'better' to most of you if you spread it out or delay it. But any delayed giving is also good, so do that if you want.
2.)Will it weird out my kids? Well I already mentioned it to them, and I'm guessing they figure it's typical dad behavior. My daughter's response was, "Dad I'm gay. 'ya know'" and son has zero interest... which I totally get. He just finished college, (please now plug in "Father and Son" by C. Stevens.)
3.) I figure I'll be dead before this pot of money is accessed. It'll be this last piece of dangling dad fruit.
4.) I had my tubes tied years ago, so that route is out.
With love,
Dad :^)
"The perfect time is when the kid is born, and the money should totally go to the women (giving up at least a year of her life.) bearing the child"
And if the child is stillborn or dies quickly? The woman still "gave up a year of her life".
Well if the kid dies that would clearly suck. They (mom and dad) will still get the money. As an aside I was thinking that part of the ~year of life, are those first six months of so after the kid is born.
You could structure a set of trusts such that they only payout to your children children, or the payments increase if/when you children have children. This may feel less crass to them than "i'll pay out to have kids".
When your children's friends start having kids, their feelings on the subject may change. Baby fever does seem to be real, in my experience (though for some it produces the opposite result).
As someone who thinks I would be an awful parent, no amount of money would convince me to have a child. Also the statement comes across as "I'll pay you money to fix your personality defect", which I don't think will go well for anyone. The lower comments about offering to help with child expenses seem much more likely to work out positively.
I agree with other commenters that "I will pay you to have kids" is a terrible way to phrase it, but "I will give you some money to help support each kid you have" sounds much more reasonable.
You're not paying your kids to have kids, you're just helping them out with the cost.
I don't have kids, but it might have made a difference to me. I felt totally incapable of supporting children until I was in my mid 30s, and actually probably felt it was irresponsible up until that point. For whatever reason I felt developing career and income streams had to take priority to any consideration of family. I might have even felt that my parents expected me to prioritize my career, but later learned maybe my mom was hoping I'd have childern. But by mid-30s it's nearly too late especially if it wasn't a priority for my wife. And even then you're in house debt and still in peril of losing a job in something like a financial crisis. Life felt precarious for me for a long time and I suspect it's the same or moreso for young people today.
You get more of what you subsidize for and less of what you tax!
So evaluate how important it is for you.
An easier less unfair seeming thing might be to offer to pay for any wedding/honeymoon costs or to offer to pay for any daycare. My kids daycare was $17k/yr a kid at its peak.
As someone thinking about having kids soonish - ignore the naysayers, I think this is a pretty good idea!
One way to avoid pitting your kids against each other is to commit to donating eg $100k per each of your kids, to charity, in your will. So at least the first two grandkids your kids have directly increase their own financial situations.
(A 50k payment at time of grandkid is pretty different from one when you die, anyways - the former is much more valuable, both because of time value of money, and because when you die, your kids are presumably getting a huge lump sum anyways so the marginal value of an extra 50k is lower)
"So I had this (perhaps) weird idea of paying my kids to have grandkids. Maybe something around $50k/kid."
You need to present this differently. You can offer to put $50K/kid into a 529 for college. Or set up something to help pay for daycare ($5K/year or whatever). Or make it clear that the money is *intended* to "help with daycare" but you make it clear that you won't be monitoring.
One way sounds like you are "helping", the other sounds like you are coercing.
Offering cash for having a child is crass, even if that is what the different presentation amounts to.
Directly paying your kids to have children sounds coercive. I agree with the other posters that you should instead make it clear to them that you'll pay for any medical costs and maybe childcare costs associated with having children if they choose to do so on their own.
People generally prefer 100$ in cash to 100$ in in-kind benefits, unless it involves some kind of tax dodge like employer-provided healthcare. So an offer of 100$ in cash will be more likely to modify behavior.
"Directly paying your kids to have children sounds coercive."
It's not though.
Leaving aside emotions/weirdness...
"For when I die whatever money I have will be split between them." - time value of money of handing it over early and with certainty (you could end up spending everything you have) is still worth a decent amount in economic terms rather than just improving the split vs a sibling.
I'll agree with the other posters that you would be better to offer financial assistance in any medical costs of for the raising of the children. Unless you have a very weird and unhealthy relationship with your kids already, I can't imagine that offering them cash to get pregnant (or get someone else pregnant) is going to do good things for your relationships. They may feel that you've tried to use their financial dependency against them, by forcing them to do something they didn't want to do otherwise. And that could lead to them being really bad parents, which would be very bad for the kids and bad for your relationship with these kids.
Oh my kids have no financial dependency on me. They are both 'launched' with careers and jobs. Having kids is expensive, and the offer of money to help is just meant to recognize that.
It strikes me as odd that you had kids so late and now want your kids to have kids fairly early. I'd say instead of explicitly telling them you'll give them $50k to have a kid, it might be better to let them know that if they're interested in having kids you'll be happy to financially assist them. Hard to comment on this without knowing why your kids don't want kids, what your relationship with your kids is like, and why you want grandchildren.
If your main imperative is to get your genes into the next generation, have you considered becoming a sperm donor? Or are you mainly motivated by the wish to have grandchildren in your life? Your idea removes the financial barrier to having kids (which in many cases is the only thing holding people in my generation back from starting families), but it won't necessarily make your children want to have kids. Respectfully, I think you should consider the ethics of pushing kids onto people who are not interested in parenting.
Isn't there usually an age limit for sperm donors?
A quick search showed the limit is left up to each bank but it seems to range around 30-40 years of age. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.
Bribe up front does seem emotionally weird.
Would you commit to paying for IVF (much more than 50K, I think) if needed?
IVF cost us ~5k€ per try in Austria, when not subsidized.
Bribe is not the term I would use. (But I don't have a better word... )
Commit to do lots and lots of babysitting. Speaking as a parent of young kids, that's more useful and less awkward than money.
Yeah sure, If I'm around lots of child care. Why is the money awkward? I help my kids by helping to pay for lots of other things. (Education, cars, travel...)
Depends on how much money you have, kids are expensive. Babysitting is useful but not the deal breaker "can't afford a house with a 2nd bedroom" is.
That might be tricky since children so often live far from their parents these days. We moved my in-laws in with us, since that was the only way they could afford to be near.
On a related note, offering to pay for something specific would be much less awkward than offering cash. Promise to pay for daycare (which may end up costing you more than $50k).
Also skipping a generation can avoid inheritance taxes. So it can actually be quite sensible to leave everything to the grandkids.
Last week I was invited to Jacqui Munro's maiden speech (she's a member of the NSW upper house) and after the usual things she ended her speech with 10 action items to address housing affordability. Now, as a senator in an opposition party, she can't do much, but as a young member she's likely to have a long-term influence (eventually).
Afterwards when we spoke she was quite keen to learn more about Georgism. (NSW does have some weakly Georgist taxes already.) I was thinking of giving her a copy of Lars Doucet's book (unless anyone has a better suggestion).
So, I was wondering:
a) Are there some other folks in NSW who to contribute? Obviously, I can pay for a book for her myself, but if it comes from a *group* of people in NSW across the political spectrum, that makes it much more interesting, and much more likely to get shared around the NSW parliament. (Contribution to the book optional.) I don't have any clear idea of how we all get together to write notes in the cover, but I'm sure we'll come up with something.
b) How would I get Lars to autograph a copy?
Very cool to see so many Aussies floating about ACX recently.
If Lars hasn't already reached out, email me (akrolsmir@gmail.com) and I'd be happy to connect you two!
> (NSW does have some weakly Georgist taxes already.)
Unfortunately the new government wants to repeal them :( Hopefully the Legislative Council will block the repeal.
I think a book would be a lovely gift and all but MPs are usually time-poor and have minimal time to be doing things like reading books. I would recommend instead organising a meeting with a Georgist expert (e.g. Lars) to directly talk her through the issues. I'm sure Lars would consider it worth his time.
If you really want to teach her about Georgism, wouldn't the best bet be giving her a copy of "Progress and Poverty," the book which started the whole movement by the guy it's named after? It might not be as contemporary, but most of its arguments still apply, and it really does seem like the most logical starting point.
Several observations and questions:
Seems like there are various techs that could significantly spur new societies and communities. The feeling I get from the current societal landscape in many countries is that we are nearing the end of history. The development of advanced versions of VR could lead to humans escaping and closing themselves off from the real world. Birthrates are collapsing and new technologies and cultural developments are having a net-reducing effect. Cultural and linguistic homogenization seems to be happening at some level. Cultural and linguistic heterogenization seems to be happening at another level. America's technological and military power is increasing. No other country is even able to keep up. China is facing a massive population collapse given its already dealing with a birth rate collapse. Russia is severely militarily incompetent and is losing population. India has its own set of problems both technological and political. If the US enters into a direct war with a non-superpower adversary, other nations may not have the power to deter the US or stop the conflict from escalating.
AI self-improvement should not happen at an accelerating pace given that each set of improvements that can be made are made at the frontier of the current AI's ability. Making the next set of improvements by definition take at most a similar amount of time and effort given that the previous AI could not make those developments. Each step in the improvement process should be increasingly difficult otherwise they would have all been made and self-improvement to maximal possible intelligence would have happened almost overnight. Given that humans require decades of time and hundreds of thousands of minds to develop the required mathematical, engineering, and scientific breakthroughs required for just the pre-requisites of AI let alone AGI, it seems obvious that there are similar barriers to developing super intelligence. In addition, if there are several AGI's they would be incentivized to stop large improvements to any other AGI on competitive grounds. Super AGI might not want to self-improve because it would fear that their creators would have known about the actions about self-improvement and would have done things in advance to stop such actions from occurring unregulated.
- Who will check America's power in the face of future corruption?
- Is the US control of global affairs and media spreading US values and culture in a way that threatens other cultures?
- Why aren't there any space settlements in development?
- Why aren't there any ocean settlements in development?
- Why is self-improvement considered occurring at an accelerating pace?
- Why not give super AGI's constraints such as extremely slow processing speed?
- If there was a Manhattan-Style project for very-close-to (> 98c) or faster-than-light travel, what is the likelihood for the creation of such a technology?
Space and ocean settlements are really difficult-- harder than even the worst parts of terrestrial land.
As for checking America's power, it's something to worry about. The world was barely able to defeat Nazi Germany at great cost. Nazi Germany was a major European country, but not a continental superpower.
"- Why aren't there any space settlements in development?
- Why aren't there any ocean settlements in development?"
The world is underpopulated. Ocean settlements could be useful if the goal is escaping governments, the closest thing to these would be cruise lines. But governments can always prevent them from docking on land unless they follow national laws, as has occurred with the ADA:
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4682754
Space settlements generally aren't under development because the costs far outweigh the perceived benefits. A lot of work would be needed to build even a permanent base on the Moon, but what do we get from that? There's very few resources on the Moon that we can't get more easily on Earth. The same goes for Mars (which has even higher costs to settle). You can argue we get the safety of being multi-planetary, but we live in a society driven by capitalism. Being multi-planetary doesn't give much profit to anyone.
As for faster-than-light travel, the known laws of physics either outlaw it or say it is only possible with exotic forms of matter that may not exist. So the only possible option is to chuck a lot of money at fundamental physics and hope they uncover a deeper law of physics that gives a feasible way to travel faster than light. Chances of that succeeding are low, I'd say.
Mind you, if you only want to get close to the speed of light, then throwing a lot of money at the problem could get you quite far. We already have some ideas for ways to accelerate small spacecraft to close to c; it's not unreasonable to think enough money could provide solutions for accelerating larger spacecraft (and, of course, dealing with all the related engineering problems that would throw up). But it's probably more than a Manhattan project. For that we were pretty certain of the underlying physics of how to do it, there are a lot more unknowns about close to light speed travel.
1). Itself
2). Yes
3). It’s expensive and of limited benefit
4). Not sure
5). Could work until it escaped?
6). My guess is extremely low on the short term, eventually I think we would figure something out. Might take centuries.
Are we not in the process of trying to start a Mars settlement? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Mars_program
The Manhattan Project was theoretically possible, but took a lot of resources to work out the details in how it would work. As far as I know, we have no theoretical way to go faster than .98c in any reasonable time-frame that people could survive. Once we have the theoretical framework, then perhaps we could accomplish such a project at great expense and public outcry about why we don't use the resources for useful things here on Earth.
I'm not against a crash project to develop high-speed travel, quite the opposite. But in addition to technical challenges one would face political and social challenges. World War II bypassed those.
> "5). Could work until it escaped?"
Wouldn't we see it trying to escape in extreme slow motion? Its like a nuke going off but at one-billionth or trillionth or quintillionth or nonillionth the speed. At that rate, you could just defuse it before anything happened.
I'm not very familiar with the literature on vaginometry, bisexuality etc. However I am very familiar with the literature on chronophilia and by extension some of the phallometry stuff. Most of it seems very low quality from Freund, Blanchard, Cantor, Seto etc. Some basic examples might include, inconsistent definitions e.g. Freund's usage of ephebophilia or 17 being the age of adulthood or age of puberty etc. , a weird 0.25 sd cut-point which once you realise what they are doing raises all sorts of questions around specificity and prevalence, very strange usage of stimuli often its not clear what ages the stimuli is or important stimuli is missing e.g. Blanchard 2008 not having a control group and not using stimuli from 15-18 etc, Weird usage of control groups that is SOC vs SOA etc, and also some very weird results that aren't really discussed e.g. Freund 1991 etc. Researchers also seem almost entirely ignorant of other fields that are obviously relevant when it comes to interpreting their results, but that's mostly outside of phallometry. If this work is any indication of the quality of literature in related fields such as vaginometry etc. I would massively discount the epistemic value of such academic literature, in particular I would discount taxometric studies.
I saw that our host here and Scott Sumner were duking it out recently on the subject of house prices. Anyway I know everyone here is looking for a good movie to watch so here is Scott Sumner on a podcast with me and Jasper Sharp talking about six Japanese films. If Scott Alexander has a listen he will find that Scott Sumner is a mild mannered soul once he gets off the subject of house prices! Anyway I am not sure how wide an appeal the podcast will have as the list is maybe a little esoteric but I really, really enjoyed this one and both Scott and Jasper are extremely engaging so please give a try and see what you think!
If you don’t have time I think my two favourites were Hanagatami (very weird, far too long but ultimately very rewarding) and Autumn Equinox. This latter is just beautiful and a red teapot has a starring role in many of the scenes.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869/12779536
And while I am here I am guessing a few people here listen to John McWhorter and/or read him in the NYT? Anyway I’d like to mention this podcast I did with him along with the wonderful Tom Holland (the historian) in which they got to talk about their mutual passion which is dinosaurs. Not a peep out of either of them about the culture wars.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869/12747735
Thanks for the pointer-- the discussion about dinosaurs is very pleasant and informative.
What if the little arms on tyrannosaurs are just vestigial rather than useful?
That was my thought!
I don't think of house prices as the thing that gets Scott Sumner out of a "mild" manner. More infuriating to him is economists who should know better associating low interest rates with easy money (and high rates with tight money), and his commenters accusing him of being too hostile toward Trump.
Substack writers: What software or tool (if not the Substack editor itself) do you use to draft your texts?
Google Docs. I can access it from any laptop with an Internet connection and I find the Substack editor a bit unreliable at times.
Substack editor for short drafts I'm not stewing on for a while.
Since I'm a software engineer by trade, the rest of my writing I draft in a code editor like vim, Sublime, or VS Code in `.md` files.
One line per sentence. In a text editor, they will still render as you expect, but you'll be able to see each sentence on its own and see how sentence length varies across your piece.
Obsidian
Interesting.
How much / what kind of reformatting do you have to do after copying everything over?
The disadvantage is that the formatting from obsidian doesn't get copied over, so I mostly have to redo it in substack.
The advantage is that I really like the seamless flow from jotting down ideas -> expanding on the interesting ones -> the most fleshed out ideas naturally transitioning into drafts -> polish the drafts to get final text. It feels like a pretty elegant selection process where the ideas I'm most interested in bubble to the surface. It means I'm more motivated to write because I'm never starting from a blank page and it's nice having all my other notes in the same place to draw from.
Mostly I write short stuff without too much formatting but I did my review contest entry and other (non-substack) long form stuff this way too.
I do my note-making in Obsidian, too, so I like the idea of fleshing out ideas until they expand into drafts very much.
Do you use tags or folders to separate single notes from drafts?
I don't really use folders, I organise them by topic with tags and links. Then I split, merge or link notes where it makes sense to
Word, very boringly.
I mostly write my drafts in Libre Writer, as I do most of my stuff. It's not the *most* compatible - when copying it over I always have to re-do images, footnotes and general formatting - but it works for my workflow. That said, if there's a better one I'd be keen to hear about it.
Hello. I write a small blog called Psyvacy, in which I attempt to explore various privacy-adjacent ideas through the lens of psychological theories and dynamics - and sometimes just theories I find interesting like System Justification Theory or Optimal Distinctiveness Theory. Always looking for feedback and ways to improve, be it my writing, topics, whatever!
https://psyvacy.substack.com/
Writing to express my firm support for a stronger banhammer / higher standards. There are too many comments already to filter out the useful ones (yes, I realise this is yet another comment) and there has been a marked degradation in tone in particular.
Whilst we're being tyrannical/maintaining high standards, can we please also discourage people posting links without context or tl;drs? A link to a twenty page article without summarising what point you're referencing is not helpful.
I usually review the bans and warnings whenever Scott announces them. I always think they are fair/deserved.
If you were able to interact with a time traveler and bring back a small amount of knowledge from the future, what would you prioritize?
It feels like the two best options to prioritize would be how to build an AGI capable of doing research, and how to build a fusion generator.
Figuring out how to achieve effectively limitless energy unlocks so much future potential, I find it frustrating that we're not dedicating more resources to this endeavor.
Gray's Sports Almanac.
Time machine and etiquette guide for the future, so I don't get myself in trouble and can get whatever else I want.
A feeling I often have about science fiction is that "Political Technology is just as real a discovery as any materials science".
The most useful thing to backport from the future is *how to run a society well*. Especially the here-to-there pathways to improve the worlds ability to coordinate and resolve it's other problems.
The problem being, they're traveling through time because they can't stand their time's government.
Relevant thought experiment: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cKrgy7hLdszkse2pq/archimedes-s-chronophone
I think that if the requirement is a "small amount" of knowledge, then probably I couldn't learn enough to bring back any seriously hard technology. I think I'd prioritize finding one "easy, but not thought of" technology (like GUIs, something where once you see it you can implement it) and then just make a list of all the successful technologies. Then come back, make money off the easy tech, and fund all of the fancy stuff that I know should be possible.
How to travel in time would rank pretty highly, and you already know they can do it. Other things the future may have developed, may not have but are still possible, others may not be possible but are not yet proven, and others still are proven impossible. Even knowing a technology is proven impossible could be useful to prevent going down that road fruitlessly, like searching for the philosopher's stone.
But other pieces of knowledge I would want to know about, in no particular order:
1. Teleportation
2. Robot servants
3. FTL (faster than light) travel
4. Resolution of conflicts between quantum mechanics and relativity (quantum gravity)
5. Working quantum computers
6. Explanation of how the brain produces thought
Does the rest of the world get to share in and benefit from the knowledge?
If yes, I'd ask for warning of major disasters.
If no, I'd ask for the financial asset with the highest percentage gain in price over the next ten years.
If you were the sole recipient of knowledge of some technology that could change the world, then the financial asset with the highest percentage gain ought to be yours.
Similarly, it sounds like warning of major disasters could avert a lot of suffering, but you could perhaps ask for some resolution to a problem that could avert more suffering on a larger and more permanent scale. It is an ethical dilemma: evacuate people in advance of an unexpected volcano eruption, or find a workable economic theory that eliminates poverty?
If the future looks nice, I'll ask them what the time traveler brought to their timeline and take that. I don't think that's the time for experiments.
The key insight or set of insights that lead to the creation of a time machine. Time travel is THE most powerful tech one can own.
If alignment required a small amount of knowledge that would be my choice
Is asking about the time machine a faux pas? Since we have no idea where to even start with that I think it'd rank pretty highly.
I used to post math/physics puzzles here sometimes, on the previous iteration of this site.
Here are two I enjoyed recently. No advanced knowledge necessary, but they can be tricky to get right, think carefully.
MATH. Every day Wesley's dad drives from home to pick Wesley up after school. He leaves home and reaches the school at the exact moment school is over, which is the same time every day, and immediately drives back with Wesley on the same route, always with the same constant speed. Today, however, school ended an hour earlier, and Wesley started walking back home towards the car. As soon as they met, he got into the car and his dad turned around and drove home. They got home 10 minutes earlier than usual. How many times faster is the car than Wesley? (that is, what is the ratio of their speeds).
PHYSICS. A soccer player makes a penalty kick, sending the football perpendicular to the goal line. The ball starts at distance L from the line, and moves without rotation with initial velocity v>0. Consider the ball moving through the air horizontally, ignoring gravity and vertical movement. There's a wind blowing in the direction parallel to the goal line with velocity u>0. As a result the ball is displaced by distance h when it reaches the goal line (from the original point it was aimed at). What is the time it took for the ball to reach the goal line?
(hint for the physics problem: you can't ignore air resistance)
By the way, I gave this to GPT4 out of curiosity, but it failed. I guess we're still safe for now. Also, it weirdly paused in the middle of the output at one point like it was thinking about what to do next for a while, before it starting ouputting again.
---
Let's call the distance between home and school d.
Because Wesley's dad always leaves at a specific time and always drives at a constant speed, we know that the time it takes him to travel from home to school is the same as the time it takes him to travel from school to home.
This means that under normal circumstances, it would take him 2d hours to make the round trip from home to school and back. However, because school ended an hour early today, the total time for the round trip was 2d - 1 hour (because he reached school one hour earlier than usual).
During this earlier time, Wesley walked towards his dad for some amount of time, which we'll call t. So, his dad drove for 2d - 1 - t hours (because the total time his dad drove and Wesley walked is 2d - 1 hour). After meeting Wesley, they drove back home together, and this took t hours.
Since they got home 10 minutes (or 1/6 of an hour) earlier than usual, the total time spent driving that day is 2d - 1/6 hours.
Setting up an equation based on the total driving time gives:
2d - 1 - t + t = 2d - 1/6.
This simplifies to 2d = 2d - 5/6, which means that d = 5/12 hours. This is the time it usually takes for the car to go from home to school.
Given that the school ended an hour early, Wesley must have been walking for 1 + 1/6 = 7/6 hours (an hour before his dad arrived, plus the 10 minutes they arrived early).
Let's call the car's speed C and Wesley's speed W.
Since the car's speed is constant and it takes d = 5/12 hours to cover the distance between home and school, we have C = 1/(5/12) = 12/5 = 2.4.
Since Wesley's walking speed is constant and he walked for 7/6 hours, the distance he covered would be 7/6 * W.
Wesley meets his dad exactly at the point where he had walked for 7/6 hours, so the distance he walked is also the distance his dad drove, and thus 7/6 * W = d = 5/12.
Solving for W gives us W = (5/12) / (7/6) = 5/14.
So, the car is 2.4/(5/14) = 2.4 * 14/5 = 6.72 times faster than Wesley.
GPT4 would totally beat Samoa Joe at Sacrifice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msDuNZyYAIQ
As a tangent; what kind of madman is Wesley to start walking home when he knows how far it is? People walk around 4 miles an hour, so for this to only shave ten minutes he's got to be more than four miles from his house. What does he think is going to happen? Are those ten minutes really so important to him? They can't be, because he's already missing them most days.
For God's sake, Wesley.
It's perfectly possible that the distance is 4 km and Wesley finished in it a hour at 4 km/h and distance his dad travelled is zero.
Wesley is reducing co2 emissions and enjoying landside.
If we are living in pre-internet times, being early to some TV series starting at fixed time is important!
That just moves the problem to Wesley's father driving below walking speed every day, For God's sake, unnamed parent!
No he doesn't drive below walking speed.
...prove it.
I was embarrassed that I had to draw a diagram on paper and think about it for a while in order to figure out the math puzzle.
Yrg q or gur qvfgnapr Jrfyrl geniryf gb zrrg uvf qnq, naq yrg uvf qnq geniry ng fcrrq k naq Jrfyrl geniry ng fcrrq ek. Boivbhfyl, Jrfyrl geniryrq q/(ek) gvzr gb ernpu gur zrrgvat cbvag. Shegurezber, gur qnq jbhyq unir geniryrq q/k gvzr sebz gur zrrgvat cbvag bajneq gb gur fpubby abeznyyl, naq jbhyq neevir rknpgyl bar ubhe nsgre Jrfyrl frg bss vs ur qvq fb.
Guhf q/k + q/(ek) = 60 zvahgrf, fb q/k = 60/(1+e).
Jr nyfb xabj gung gur qnq fnirq 10 zvahgrf ol abg qevivat sebz gur zrrgvat cbvag gb gur fpubby naq onpx, juvpu vf n qvfgnapr bs 2q, fb jr unir 2q/k = 10 zvahgrf naq q/k = 5 zvahgrf.
Gurersber 5 = 60/(1+e) fb e=11.
OK I have an answer for the physics one. But I had to make a lot of simplifying assumptions. Mostly that all the changes in velocity were small. (so that I could ignore higher order terms in v^2.)
Spoilers regarding physics:
If one can ignore air resistance the answer is the same, as if the part about wind and h wasn't mentioned, since the winds force is perpendicular to the balls movement.
If you CAN'T ignore air resistance it becomes unsolvable (in my opinion).
Nothing about the balls mass, its surface area (coefficient of air resistance and so on) is given. Also including air resistance opens the problem to a whole can of worms in forms of turbulent flow.
Since air resistance properties of the ball influence its loss of velocitiy regarding its movement towards the goal, (think golfball vs. smooth ball) nothing can be said for certain about its flight path.
Answer of math puzzle in rot13:
Gur engvb vf guvegrra.
Qrgnvyrq whfgvsvpngvba:
Yrg q or gur qvfgnapr orgjrra ubzr naq fpubby. Yrg k0(g) naq i0 or gur cbfvgvba naq fcrrq bs gur pne. Yrg k1(g) naq i1 or gur cbfvgvba naq fcrrq bs Jrfyrl.
Jr svk g=0 gb or gur zbzrag gur fpubby raqf ba abezny qnlf, naq k=0 gb or gur ubzr. Gur gvzr vf zrnfherq va ubhef.
Jrfyrl'f qnq yrnirf ubzr ng g=-G, fhpu gung q=i0*G.
Gur pne'f cbfvgvba vf k0(g) = i0*g + x0. Fvapr k0(-G)=0, jr bognva: k0(g) = i0*g + i0*G = i0*g + q
Jrfyrl'f cbfvgvba vf k1(g) = i1*g + x1. Fvapr k1(-1)=q (gur fpubby raqf 1 ubhe rneyvre), jr bognva k1(g) = i1*(g+1) + q.
Jrfyrl zrrgf uvf qnq ng g=f fhpu gung k0(f) = k1(f). Jr bognva f=i1/(i0-i1).
Svanyyl, jr xabj gung 2*(f+1)*i1=i0/6 v.r., 2 gvzrf gur qvfgnapr jnyxrq ol Jrfyrl rdhnyf gur qvfgnapr jvgu gur pne va 10 zvahgrf.
Ercynpvat gur rkcerffvba bs f va guvf ynfg rdhngvba lvryqf i0/i1=guvegrra.
Zvfgnxr urer: “jr xabj gung 2*(f+1)*i1=i0/6 v.r., 2 gvzrf gur qvfgnapr jnyxrq ol Jrfyrl rdhnyf gur qvfgnapr jvgu gur pne va 10 zvahgrf.”
Gung jbhyq or pbeerpg vs i1 jrer gur irybpvgl ng juvpu Jrfyrl jnf geniryvat gbjneqf ubzr, ohg lbh cerivbhfyl qrsvarq vg nf gur irybpvgl ng juvpu Jrfyrl jnf geniryvat njnl sebz ubzr, fb lbh arrq gb nqq n zvahf fvta: “-2*(f+1)*i1=i0/6”.
Nyfb, lbh pna fvzcyvsl gur nafjre dhvgr n ovg:
Gur pne neevirq ubzr 10 zvahgrf rneyvre guna hfhny. Orpnhfr gur pne geniryf ng pbafgnag fcrrq, gung zhfg zrna gung gur pne geniryrq sbe 5 zvahgrf yrff guna hfhny va rnpu qverpgvba, naq Jrfyrl zrg uvf sngure 5 zvahgrf rneyvre guna hfhny.
Gur fpubby yrg bhg 60 zvahgrf rneyvre guna hfhny, fb Jrfyrl jnyxrq sbe 55 zvahgrf. Vg jbhyq unir gnxra gur pne 5 zvahgrf gb geniry gur fnzr qvfgnapr, fb gur pne geniryf 11 gvzrf snfgre guna Jrfyrl (55 qvivqrq ol 5).
V'z cerggl fher vg'f ryrira, abg guvegrra.
Re: physics. Air resistance can't be ignored. This problem is really hard to think through, yet completely elementary. This is what makes it so delightful in my opinion. I'll give a spoiler hint, hopefully a partial one: (rot13.com) fvqrjnlf jvaq naq urnqjnlf nve erfvfgnapr ner abg gjb frcnengr sbeprf npgvat ba gur onyy. bapr gur onyy fgnegf sylvat gurer'f bayl bar sbepr npgvat; jung vf vgf yvar bs npgvba?
Please give your answers (in rot13), I would be delighted to find out what I am missing.
Warning: comprehensive solution behind the rot13. Decode at your peril.
Gur bayl sbepr npgvat ba gur onyy vf nve erfvfgnapr, naq vg npgf nybat vgf yvar bs zbirzrag, fb gur natyr ng juvpu gur onyy vf sylvat j.e.g. gur crecraqvphyne gb gur tbny yvar fgnlf pbafgnag. Gur nve erfvfgnapr urnqjnlf naq gur jvaq sbepr fvqrjnlf ner whfg gur gjb cebwrpgvbaf bs guvf sbepr ba gur nkrf, naq vg'f jebat gb gel naq pnyphyngr gurz frcnengryl nf (cbffvoyl abayvarne) shapgvbaf bs fcrrq, juvpu vf jurer crbcyr graq gb trg fghpx.
Gur cvpgher orpbzrf pyrnere vs jr zbir gb n pbbeqvangr senzr va juvpu gur nve vf ng erfg (guvf flfgrz vf zbivat fvqrjnlf jvgu fcrrq h pbzcnerq gb gur hfhny bar). Vzntvar gur tbny cbvag ng (0,0), onyy hcjneqf ng (0,Y). Gurer'f ab jvaq.
Gur tbny cbvag zbirf gb gur evtug jvgu gur fcrrq h. Gur onyy unf vavgvny fcrrq i qbjajneqf naq h evtugjneqf, fb vg'f zbivat va n fgenvtug yvar ng na natyr nepgna(h/i) gb gur l nkvf, naq ybfvat fcrrq qhr gb bapbzvat nve erfvfgnapr. Jr jba'g arrq gb xabj gur rknpg sbezhyn sbe nve erfvfgnapr.
Gur qvfgnapr ubevmbagnyyl sebz (0,0) gb gur cbvag jurer gur onyy'f yvar bs zbirzrag vagrefrpgf jvgu gur tbny yvar vf Y*(h/i) - whfg ybbx ng gur evtug gevnatyr (0,0), (0,Y) naq gung cbvag, naq frr nobir nobhg gur natyr. Gur tbny yvar, geniryyvat evtugjneqf jvgu fcrrq h, pbiref gung qvfgnapr naq ernpurf gung cbvag va gvzr Y/i, ohg gur onyy vf abg lrg gurer. Vg'yy trg gurer whfg jura gur tbny yvar geniryf na nqqvgvbany qvfgnapr u (gur svany qvfcynprzrag), juvpu vg'yy qb va gvzr u/h. Fb gur gvzr vg gnxrf gur onyy gb trg gurer vf ryy qvivqrq ol irr cyhf nvgpu qvivqrq ol lhh.
That is a great solution.
Thank you, I'll be looking forward to more of your riddles in the future!
Yeah air resistance is hard. I think the force goes as v^2 to some approximation. (But the other terms will be the same for the wind and the ball moving through the air.)
Assuming (unrealistically) the wind carried the ball sideways at the same speed, u, as the wind, wouldn't the time taken to be displaced sideways a distance h simply be h/u ?
Math puzzle (rot13): Uvf pne jbhyq or gjryir gvzrf nf snfg nf gur fba'f jnyxvat fcrrq.
Thanks for these.
Not quite right, there's something you haven't considered (I know because the answer you gave is a common wrong answer).
Oh, I just realized! (rot13)
V yrsg gur gvzr gnxra sbe gurz gb zrrg nf hanppbhagrq sbe, yrnivat gur gvzr (va zvahgrf) nf fvkgl vafgrnq bs fvkgl zvahf k, juvpu vg fubhyq unir orra. Zberbire, gur qnq jbhyq unir fgnegrq fbzr gvzr orsber gur fvkgl zvahgrf vafgrnq bs nsgre rknpgyl 60 zvahgrf. Nsgre nppbhagvat sbe gurfr punatrf V npghnyyl tbg ryrira nf gur engvb.
Gura V fgnegrq guvaxvat nobhg jurgure gurer ner fcrpvny pnfrf gung znxr gur fbyhgvba nccnerag naq ner pbafvfgrag jvgu gur engvb V sbhaq. V pbafvqrerq vs gur fba jnyxrq nyy gur jnl ubzr va 60 zvahf k zvahgrf, gurl "zrg" ng gur qbbefgrc naq "qebir" gur 0 zvyrf ubzr. Guvf vf bayl cbffvoyr vs gur k vf rknpgyl gur gvzr vg gnxrf gb qevir onpx sebz gur fpubby naq k vf svir. Va gung pnfr Jrfyrl jnyxrq va svsgl-svir zvahgrf, gur qvfgnapr gung gur qnq qevirf va svir zvahgrf, fb gur engvb bhtug gb or ryrira. V thrff vg qbrf abg znggre rknpgyl jurer gurl zrrg orgjrra gur fpubby naq ubzr, nyy nqzvffvoyr fbyhgvbaf zhfg pbasbez gb guvf engvb naq gur nffhzcgvba gung vg gnxrf ng yrnfg svsgl-svir zvahgrf gb jnyx vf vzcyvpvg gung vg sbyybjf sebz gur snpg gung gurl zhfg or ubzr rknpgyl 10 zvahgrf rneyvre guna hfhny.
I'll try my hand at the physics one later...
You beat me to it! I just thought about it, and here's my reasoning for the same result:
Fvapr gur sngure yrsg ng gur fnzr gvzr nf nyjnlf, ohg erghearq ubzr gra zvahgrf rneyl, gurl zhfg unir zrg svir zvahgrf orsber bevtvany fpubby raq gvzr. Ng gung gvzr, Jnlar unq orra jnyxvat svsgl-svir zvahgrf sbe n qvfgnapr gung gur sngure jbhyq unir qevira va svir zvahgrf. Gurersber, gur engvb vf ryrira.
Yeah, the solution is very neat! I wish I had seen this immediately.
I had to draw a diagram on paper, think about it for a while, and do some equations before I figured it out. I think Samson has the simplest explanation.
Zl nafjre vf gung gur pne vf fvk gvzrf snfgre, abg fher gubhtu.
No, that's also not quite it.
Hah. This problem "rhymes" with an old brainteaser which I first encountered in a Raymond Smullyan book (rot13 because maybe it's a hint?): N obggyr bs jvar pbfg gra qbyynef. Gur jvar jnf jbegu avar qbyynef zber guna gur obggyr. Ubj zhpu jnf gur obggyr jbegu?
Has anybody had any problems with Substack payments. Right now I am being charged for a subscription I don’t have access to. Asking the Substack owner and/or Substack - who don’t have a good support channel for this - has not worked.
Google DeepMind is hiring for research scientists and research engineers for their Google DeepMind AI Safety team, where their focus is on alignment, evaluations, reward design, interpretability, robustness and generalisation. Apply here: https://boards.greenhouse.io/deepmind/jobs/3049442. Also, please spread the message if you want to.
While I understand you're probably coming from a direction of "you guys think AI alignment is important, here's some jobs related to AI alignment!", this still really comes off as taking advantage of the open thread to advertise. Which, I know it's sometimes used for self-promotion, but that's typically for blogs and writings, with the few actual instances of job shilling usually being from people involved in the organization in question who are willing to interact with the community in relation to why they think their offer is relevant. So, do you work for google? Is there any more to this than a hiring advertisement?
If the concern is that we are very close to S-AGI causing the extinction of all of humanity, then making sure to get the best people possible working on the problem seems like a very good idea. This argument would work for anything else but doesn't seem to work when considering the there eminent individuals who seem to be giving alarmingly high-probabilities (99.99 or 46 or 33) for AI-induced extinction. No I don't work for google but these are recently opened positions, are for DeepMind (one of the leading proponents of AGI), and will be expiring by this Friday. This is all info you can get by following Neel Nanda on Twitter. I probably can formulate the post in a less-spammy way though.
Alright, I figured the post was probably made in good faith, but it did come across a bit like a google hiring manager found this blog.
I wouldn't be surprised if the hiring manager in question is a regular reader
Greetings! As the owner of two curious cats and a sizeable terrace, I've faced a dilemma that I suspect is familiar to many of you. The terrace is connected to the building roof, presenting a risky escape route for my cats. Not only is this dangerous for them, given the potential for falls, but it can also lead them into neighboring apartments, causing inconvenience to my neighbors.
Despite the terrace's allure, this escape risk meant we couldn't fully enjoy its spacious charm without constant vigilance. Consequently, most of last summer was spent indoors, keeping the terrace off-limits to avoid any feline escape adventures. I explored numerous options for cat-proofing the terrace and even consulted several professionals. The most straightforward solution, a net cage, was not only expensive (around 2-3k euros for a 9x3.5 meter space) but also intrusive on our lovely view.
Our efforts to implement other solutions proved futile as our intelligent feline companions were always able to find a workaround. All I wanted was for us all to enjoy the terrace without risking any roof-escapes.
But then, a eureka moment happened last month. A practical, affordable solution materialized, costing around just 100 euros. The key? Angled poles made from PVC tubes, each measuring 65cm in length, attached to flagpoles holders that create a 45-degree angle from an imaginary horizontal plane. Across these poles, we installed a net.
It took around 6 hours, spread across several days, to complete the project. The result was a safe terrace; try as they might, the cats couldn't find an escape route.
The idea of an "angled" net is not new, but typically requires bespoke angled staff that can be both costly and hard to find. The real game-changer, a brilliant suggestion from my wife, was the use of flagpoles holders. They are economical (at 15 euros each), adjustable, and the PVC tubes can be easily attached and removed.
Having struggled with this issue for over a year, the flagpole solution was a breakthrough. I felt compelled to share this unique idea with the online community, as I hadn't come across anything similar in my extensive web research. I know this isn't the typical SSC topic, but it required a fair bit of problem-solving. If you have any suggestions on other platforms where this solution could be shared, please let me know. I just want to spread the idea.
That's an awesome idea! I'll make sure to remember it for when I finally get a house with a garden.
Sounds very interesting, but I haven't quite understood your solution. Could you describe more, or link to those PVC tubes you bought?
My cats are desperately wanting to leave the house, especially the bold one who absolutely mustn't leave because he is deaf and not very intelligent. Once he escaped for one day and couldn't find the way back alone.
Is this helpful? https://photos.app.goo.gl/Stc1mB7pQ3iS6HoL8
These are the flagpole holders : https://www.amazon.it/dp/B08KZ9NTFJ?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details
edit: I realized some of the confusion in my original post might be due to the fact that I said "flagpole" where I should have said "flagpole holders"!
Please feel free to ask me any questions!
Thank you for the photos of this genius solution! Quite impressive that this is really so impenetrable. Might do something similar on our terrace...
It's indeed impenetrable, and it's not for a lack of trying on my cats' part. I've had this for three weeks now, and my cats still attempt to jump over it every once in a while, but they keep failing. I believe they're going to accept the situation soon. They are very active, agile cats. Additionally, it's not that intrusive to the view, which was another of our main concerns.
There's a person in my town who does basically this exact thing around a small grass yard to let their cats be outside. I don't know them but it seems to be working!
That is no even close to what I was picturing, so… yes! That is quite helpful. (In figuring out what you were talking about, I don’t have a cat.)
For your next project, can I suggest a cat flap with a webcam connected to an AI system which will keep it firmly closed if the cat wishing to enter appears to have something in its mouth?
I live in the country, and my cat brings in mice, birds, baby rabbits, moles, large weird looking beetles, and once even a bat. (How in God's name did she manage to catch that?)
Not really knowing what to do with these, besides the fun of chasing them, she then immediately lets them go, and having been half-heartedly mauled and chewed they often die unseen under a sofa, and start smelling after a few days. It drives us completely potty!
A year or two ago, I read that Jeff Bezos, no less, had the same problem, and was determined to find an AI solution for preventing his cats bringing their catches into the house. Last time I checked though, there were no smart prey-in-mouth-detecting cat flaps for sale on Amazon. So he must still be working on a solution!
Cats in the wild hunt alone but live in groups. They bring home extra food in case a companion is too sick or injured to hunt. They're not smart enough to figure out when they need to do this, so they just always do it.
interesting! But I don't have this problem, my cats are indoor cats, they never leave the house. At most, they catch a few insects :)
> (although clearly by Roman/Byzantine times there were specific horses people thought were Nisean)
What's the source for this? I've not been able to find one other than Olmstead's work and that lacks Classical citations. It's in Herodotus who, as I said, explains what the horses are as if he expects you not to know. The Anabasis of Alexander references them but is explicitly referencing Herodotus. ("Herodotus says" is literally how it starts.) The author also says the horses were almost gone by Alexander's time and puts them next to mythical beings like the Amazons.
The other sources listed reference horses or Nesea but don't mention some kind of special super horse. One of the citations is Strabo XI 7 which is about Hyrcania and doesn't mention horses at all. The wikipedia page that Strabo claims to have saw them is, again, made up as far as I can tell. But it is in Olmstead's work.
It's Strabo XI.13.7
"Now most of the country is high and cold; and such, also, are the mountains which lie above Ecbatana and those in the neighborhood of Rhagae and the Caspian Gates, and in general the northerly regions extending thence to Matiane and Armenia; but the region below the Caspian Gates, consisting of low-lying lands and hollows, is very fertile and productive of everything but the olive; and even if the olive is produced anywhere, it is dry and yields no oil. This, as well as Armenia, is an exceptionally good "horse-pasturing"1 country; and a certain meadow there is called "Horse-pasturing," and those who travel from Persis and Babylon to Caspian Gates pass through it; and in the time of the Persians it is said that fifty thousand mares were pastured in it and that these herds belonged to the kings. As for the Nesaean horses, which the kings used because they were the best and the largest, some writers say that the breed came from here, while others say from Armenia. They are characteristically different in form, as are also the Parthian horses, as they are now called, as compared with the Helladic and the other horses in our country. Further, we call the grass that makes the best food for horses by the special name "Medic," from the fact that it abounds there."
Thanks for tracking that down! So the citation is wrong. Seems about right for the quality of scholarship we're dealing with.
C&P of my reply to you on the other thread
Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus
"That very night he seemed in his sleep to
be called by Alexander the Great, and approaching saw him sick abed,
but was received with very kind words and much respect, and promised
zealous assistance. He making bold to reply: "How, Sir, can you,
being sick, assist me?" "With my name," said he, and mounting a
Nisaean horse, seemed to lead the way. "
FWIW.
That wikipedia article is the worst sourced I have ever seen, to the extent I am surprised it is not taken down. And it's not just the lack of sourcing:
"Historical events
...
The Nisean became extinct with the conquest of Constantinople in 1204."
How on earth would a whole breed of horse be rendered extinct by 48 hours of inner-city fighting?
That doesn't necessarily mean that all the horses were killed during the invasion. Maybe the breeders fled/died or just lost the authority to make horse breeding decisions, and the people who took charge didn't recognise the value of the Nisaean horses or didn't care about horse breeding, and let them breed with normal horses. Imagine explaining to some Ottoman soldiers who want to take your horses that these are special elite horses and they need to let you keep them to preserve the bloodline. There might still be some descendants of those horses, but the breed would end up effectively extinct.
1204 wasn't Ottomans (that was 1453) it was crusaders.
People know a good horse when they see one. Lots of people still do, and they certainly did pre-industrial revolution. So if these are good horses they are likely to be recognised as good, to survive and be bred from. It's not like an hereditary monarchy where parentage trumps anything else, irrespective of any actual characteristics identifiable in the offspring.
Good point - but if they were recognisably good horses and every knight wanted one, maybe the Nisean population got split up, pressed into service for more crusading or taken as trophies, so by the time it came to breed from them the bloodline got diluted. Even if they were good horses, maybe nobody on the winning side recognised the significance of Niseans and thought "better keep them together so we can breed more of them". Or even if someone did, maybe immediate concerns or individual looting caused the breeding stock to get split up anyway, and without modern communications it would have been too hard to trace where they all ended up.
So we have four references now, two of which put it in semi-mythical context, one of whom is the dubiously reliable Herodotus, and the last is Strabo who hedges about whether they are really from Nesea. And on top of that the source we're investigating has blatantly false claims like that Strabo claimed to have seen them. This hasn't really changed my opinion of Olmstead but it's good to be thorough.
To be clear, I can buy there was a breed of horses called Nesean that were associated with the Medeans and used as prestige objects by the Persians (and adopted by Alexander the Great). But Olmstead's claims go far, far beyond that.
Seems unlikely that you would keep them all in the city. They could of course "go extinct" in a scenario where not one horse was harmed, but the written records of the breed society all got burnt, but that is projecting modern standards of what constitutes a breed.
Looking up Lipizzaners I find in the same article both this
"The Lipizzaner is the oldest European pure-bred horse. Its ancestry goes as far back as the 8th century, and derives mainly from Spanish or, more precisely, Andalusian bloodlines."
and this
"The breeding programme at Lipizza concentrated exclusively on horses with Spanish bloodlines until the 18th century, although stallions were purchased from Italy, Germany and Denmark as well as from Spain. Arabs were also used, and with the purchase in 1810 of Siglavy, an oriental stud, one of the original 6 Lipizzaner bloodlines was established which still form the traditional basis of today’s Lipizzaner horse."
Both cannot be true and of course the horses' ancestry "goes back" to a bit earlier than the 8th century, to the last universal common ancestor. Same with the Nisaean debate: if these were good and useful horses it is pretty certain that their descendants are exhibiting their good and useful qualities today.
As a soon-to-be dad of two (kid #2 is overdue), I'm currently grappling with the tension between
1. not stressing out too much about parenting (being fine with being a good-enough parent) and
2. meeting the enormeous responsibility that comes with being a parent.
I've learned a few things about non-shared environments and the good-enough parent approach to calm myself down everytime the I-don't-know-the-first-thing-about-young-humans-panic bubbles up.
But still, I find it very hard to basically just go "It'll be alright, just listen to your gut" when the stakes are so high. In what other area of life that important do we allow ourselves a strategy like this, despite the fact that there is a lot of actual knowledge (and, granted, much more bullshit) out there to be obtained?
Anyway: Any sources or recommendations, any advice or Hitchslap would be much appreciated.
If you've managed to keep the first one alive so far you ought to do fine with the second, though as a new dad myself I empathize with the sleep deprivation that you're about to again go through. Take paternity leave if you can, help out your partner as much as you can., and try not to stress too much.
I have opinions about schooling etc. but the first few years are simple, just exhausting.
What sorts of decisions are you puzzling over? My own experience of parenting (which is limited, my oldest is only 4) is that the decisions to be made aren't all that hard, at least for young kids. Keep them safe, keep them fed, let them play. Do normal parent things.
The good news is that you needn't feel such a sense of responsibility because most of your children's outcomes are genetic and because over assuming responsibility is itself a bad thing. After all, you don't want them to think of themselves as easy to ruin, but rather as resilient and full of potential. The bad news is that your tendency to do so is genetic and your children will probably grow up to blame themselves for all sorts of things that were never in their control in the first place too.
Well, then I better figure out how to model a good way to deal with such tendencies. Basically, I have to turn into a practicing Stoic ^^
Parenting advice from the Alien Nation TV series: "All you can do is love them, teach them right from wrong, and hope they don't grow up to be axe murderers" 😁
When Number Two does arrive, you at least have the benefit of having done this already. You know now about crying, feeding, nappy changes, colic, the works. You know that every surface does not have to be surgical operating theatre levels of cleanliness.
You already have one small human in your care and you haven't broken them, so the second one will do just fine! Congratulations, best wishes, and good luck!
EDIT: One thing I'd say to watch out for is that Number One *might* be jealous of Number Two, depending on age gap between them etc. It's very easy to get caught up in bringing the new baby home and not having as much time for Number One, who then feels neglected and slighted in favour of this crying, smelly thing and resents it. Involving the first kid with the new kid can help here.
I think you should take great care in the "not actively doing things to harm them" category, be high effort in the "provide support" category, but have a far lighter touch in the "active pushing for better outcomes" category.
I think parenting is one of those areas where the potential for negative impact and backfiring-of-plans is very high, and this suggests focusing most of your efforts into being a helpful support role than an active decision-maker role.
Depends on the child, of course. I understand some circumstances necessitate having a firm grip over them, for reasons of disability or extreme behavioral issues or things like that. But I think in typical cases what I wrote is valid.
Several years ago, I asked this same question to my uncle, at the time the father of a 18 year old. His advice: "whether you take good care of your children or not, they'll still grow up. If you take really good care, they'll grow up a bit better, but only a bit."
I'm not a parent myself, but from what I observe, it seems like most parents are so obsessed with being good parents that they don't let their kids play outside, don't allow them any privacy, fill up every hour of their schedules with extracurriculars, ban everything fun in case the kid gets a papercut...in short, they turn the kids into the equivalent of slaves monitored by a benevolent totalitarian surveillance state. They're not allowed to be kids anymore. In such cases, "bad" parenting is probably good for the kid.
Not intellectual but no one can see the future and all you can do is let them know how much you love them.
Choose healthy rested Felix among all the versions of Felix that you have available.
As young humans need a lot of sleep, learn to immediately go into recharge-yourself-mode when they sleep. Do the prio things between you getting up and them getting up (that makes you postpone TODO items instead of postponing sleep whenever they wake up early).
If you get the big things right, you can screw up a whole bunch of small things and it's basically fine.
I found the second kid much much easier in terms of this type of neurosis. It will be fine, do your best.
Agreed, and the third is easier again. It's like that joke, your first kid eats dirt, you take them to the emergency room. Your second kid eats dirt, you wash their mouth out. Your third kid eats dirt, you shrug and serve them a smaller portion for dinner.
I think stressing about parenting can be like over-preparing for running a DnD game, or planning all your lines before doing an improv scene. A bit of prep and research helps, but you mostly just have to dive in with enthusiasm and trust yourself to make decent decisions on net and to improve as you go.
That's an interesting way to look at it. My on-the-spot response would be that although improv needs a lot of whiggle room, there are still better and worse ways to go about it (I suppose). And there is an actual difference between a trained or experienced actor and an absolute beginner who's just trusting his gut on stage - a difference that can be distilled, explained and discussed (as well as studied, if someone wants to go that far ^^).
Not as a parent, but as a reasonably experienced DM, I guess my comment to new DMs is that plot-planning will almost always be destroyed by your players, and world-building will eventually be rewarded.
If I tried to turn that into parenting advice, maybe it would look something like "don't plan too much for what your kid will be/want, but focus your resources and time on giving them an environment that they can be comfortable, safe, and encouraged in, no matter what path they take."
There absolutely are better and worse ways to go about performing improv, and huge differences between those trained and not trained in that craft. I'm a father of two, who also for unrelated reasons has a lot of experience and knowledge of the world of teaching people to do improv well which is a pretty distinct and well-developed thing in my native Chicago. The analogy between improv and parenting seems actually quite apt and I wish I'd previously thought of it!
I'll offer three other things as food for thought from my own experiences:
-- parenting is virtually always a constant exercise in balancing short- and long-term goals. Basically outside of life-emergency moments we should never let _either_ the big picture nor the immediate solely guide our parenting choices. This is sometimes quite hard in the moment and we have to actively remind ourselves of it.
-- as my wife and I remind each other often jokingly (but it's really true), as a parent you are "always teaching" whether you are trying to do so or not. That can seem terrifying but it's also sometimes an asset, and anyway there's no point stressing about it because it's true regardless.
-- adults who have never been parents simply cannot, at a fundamental level, grasp how it feels or works. This is inherent and is not at all any sort of statement about the personal wisdom or other characteristics of anyone. It was true of me before I had kids, and you, and everyone else. Doesn't mean they can't have thoughts and ideas about what you should or shouldn't be doing, nor does it mean their opinions can't be of interest. It does though place a firm upper bound on the genuine relevance of those opinions to your choicemaking as a parent.
Thank you for your lenghty response!
I'm flabbergasted by the improbability of this conversation happening. I mean: What are the odds of someone coming up with parenting-improv-analogy and someone else with a lot of experience in both fields finding that thread and chiming in?! This is amazing! :D
I have 4 kids that are under 13 years old, and honestly I think you figure out relatively quickly (in our info-rich environment) what to do, in broad strokes.
The problem is having the discipline to regularly practice 'good parenting', and make it a central part of your life. Especially if you are stressed for other reasons.
My kids are all doing fairly well so far, but I still think that I fall short of my own standards semi-regularly.
The same might be true for running a DnD game: Storytelling (or moderating an event) follows at least some guidelines and rules, and there are whole orders of magnitude between a great storyteller or moderator and a crappy one. So even if one needn't become an expert in it, there's still knowledge available if one cares to look for it.
But nevertheless: Thank you for that reply. That gives me something to ponder :)
Good enough plus loads of physical affection covers it all I think.
Small kids are little animals in many ways, it's all visceral and emotion with them. Physical closeness embeds it deeply into their brains that they are cared for and loved.
Source? I just deeply believe it, based on my own experiences of childhood and motherhood.
My "kids" are 35, 32, and 29. I'd reply with three observations:
1) Every happy family is in fact happy in its own way, despite what Tolstoy wrote. So it's hard to find knowledge that is applicable to all families.
2) All kids will be extreme jerks at times. Expect accusations of being the "worst parent in the world" It's par for the course. Parents who say otherwise are either lying or don't really spend much time with their kids. I think we were very lucky with our three kids and treasure our relationships with them, but they all had their "moments" and "phases" (which we now laugh about).
3) Quality time generally can't be forced. Best to be available and around as much as schedules permit as you never know when your child will be ready for wondrous and loving interactions.
That tolstoy quote is remarkable. The first time you encounter it you think it is the most perspicacious thing anyone has ever said. then you realise that it sounds equally convincing if you reverse it.
I suppose the case for the defence would be that in Tolstoy's milieu, the families that would generally have been thought to be happy were of a piece: a father with undemanding obligations in the military, at court, at a ministry; a presentable mother with household management skills, and sufficient interests to keep her end up at St Petersburg dinner parties or at the long summer get togethers on the estate; children who were healthy, looking to make good marriages, essentially growing into versions of their parents; perhaps the grandparents gracefully declining. That's the core model of "happiness" as a state. States other than that may then embody happiness, and there are a lot of ways in which an unhappy state can vary from that core.
I don't find it all that convincing, and as an apercu it's barely relevant to the 900 pagaes that come afterwards. But perhaps there is something in it, especially if you read a little irony into that notion of happiness.
Bryan Caplan's book "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids" summarizes the data which indicate that parenting is much less important than most people think and therefore we should not stress about it and have fun with our kids. I highly recommend it. Here's a summary. https://fourminutebooks.com/selfish-reasons-to-have-more-kids-summary/
Hi! I'm in a similar position to you, but have managed to be pretty relaxed about it thus far (and markedly distinct from my middle class peers). And for the avoidance of doubt it's 50/50 with my wife with me as primary caregiver over pretty long periods. It's probably too long and personal to do in depth here, but I'd be happy to discuss dad life with you!
I don't have any helpful advice for you other than to express solidarity - parenting children is really hard!
I am looking for honest opinion on sunbathing.
In connection with coming El Nino apocalypse, I saw several articles advising me to not expose myself to Yellow Disc of Death unless I am completely decked in an armor consisting of sunscreen with giant UV factor. At the same, it is completely normal in my country to walk around in summer heat in rather light clothes and no sunscreen at all. And people don't seem to be getting skin cancer en masse because of that. Temperatures very rarely go above 35 degrees Celsius, but over 30 is normal. So, what gives?
Another Australian weighing in, possibly biased due to multiple skin cancers now, including a melanoma that only just got caught in time to prevent metastasis and that has left a 20cm scar on my back.
Much depends on your latitude (rather than temperature) and how often your sun exposure leads to actual sunburn. At higher latitudes where you can be outside without burning in 30 minutes you probably don't have much to worry about, unlike say Brisbane where I live where 30 minutes unprotected from mid-summer sun can easily result in a burn for a relatively fair-skinned person.
You probably won't notice the effects of regular mild sun damage until you are in your 50s or 60s, but in Australia those ages often bring regular routine trips to the dermatologist to get minor lesions 'burnt' off your face and limbs. Usually not life-threatening, but painful and unattractive. But I'm only 52 and I've had two surgeries now due to more serious skin cancers, so that's a possible outcome to think about.
If you're not getting burnt I would't worry too much, but unless you actually have a vitamin D deficiency it's probably still a good idea to wear at least a light sunscreen anyway if you're regularly in the sun. Many moisturisers now include a non-greasy sunscreen and are pretty much indistinguishable from not having anything on the skin after a few minutes.
Growing up, we used to get to the beach before the sun did, in southern California. We'd stay still the wind blew the shape out of the waves, the sun dipped down, and we could no longer body surf. I've never had a skin cancer.
Now, early in the day, when UV rays aren't so harsh, I sun myself for about ten minutes, front and back. It's how I get vitamin D. I don't bother using a sun blocker unless I'm working outdoors for long periods of time.
Sun bathing is linked to skin cancer not because of sun exposure being bad but because people do it as a one off activity at least the first time in the season and therefore get burned. A daily habit of being shirtless outside for an hour, regardless of cold or weather conditions., for instance, does not have this drawback as a person gradually becomes more tanned as the year goes on. You
Sunbathing is linked to skin cancer not because of the sun exposure but because people do it as a one off activity, at least the first time every year.
What is the melanin content of the skin of people where you live? Fairer-skinned people are vulnerable to skin cancers from UV exposure, and with climate change (gosh, this reminds me of Hole in the Ozone Layer times all over again) there are sunnier and hotter days, and people go out without covering up or without sunscreen.
They get sunburned, which is damage. Repeat this for a few years, you get more incidences of skin cancer. The temperature ranges you give (over 30 normal, rarely going above 35 degrees) is considered extreme in Ireland:
"In Summer, from June to August, temperatures are cool: average highs are around 17/18 °C (63/64 °F) in the north, and around 19/20 °C (66/68 °F) in the rest of Ireland. The rains are also frequent in this season.
However, quite rarely, there may be periods, usually short-lived, with sunny weather and pleasantly warm temperatures, when the Azores High moves over the country. In these cases, the temperature can reach or exceed 25 °C (77 °F), though it almost never reaches 30 °C (86 °F)."
Summer temperatures are generally in the 15-20 degrees Celcius range, though they've tended to go up to low 20s recently. So where the usual temperature is higher, I'd take that as sunnier, and hence that people would have more natural protection for their skin.
Most skin cancers are non-malignant but melanoma is the nasty one:
https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/radiation-ultraviolet-(uv)-radiation-and-skin-cancer
"Over 30 C normal, rarely above 35 C" actually could describe many Northern European countries nowadays. I don't know whether people in Italy or Spain consider above 35 C "normal" but it doesn't seem rare that the temperature is above that in those countries.
Even less malignant skin cancers (all cancers are malignant, by definition) can be very nasty, especially if they are on the face, for instance.
For Germany I just saw the statistics in the news two weeks ago:
Benign skin cancer has more than doubled in the last 20 years, from 38,000 cases in 2001 to ~82,000 cases in 2021. (Malign skin cancer, which is not caused by sun exposure, only went up by 7%.) The increase is attributed to people who exposed their skins in the 70s and 80s, when a dark teint became fashionable. Half of the cases are people of 80 years or older.
Likewise, the number of deaths from skin cancer has increased by 55% from 2600 to 4100 (out of ~1,000,000 deaths in total), while the number of deaths from other types of cancer has only increased by 10%.
It seems pretty clear that sun exposure has a strong relative effect on skin cancer. I would say that it depends on your personal risk aversion whether you should avoid sunbathing. Averaging over the whole population, the risk of getting skin cancer is 0.1% per year, and about 0.4% of all deaths are due to skin cancer. So the absolute number are low. Of course, they are higher in the subgroup who don't care about sun protection, so if that's you then you may have a (low?) single-digit percent risk that you get a bad outcome from sunbathing.
Skin cancer is fairly common cancer and melanoma is particularly unpleasant. Also sun exposure ages the skin in other ways. Of course the effects depend a lot on your complexion.
Recently I have heard advice that if one really wants to protect one's skin, one should use sun screen regularly even when it's not particularly sunny.
I don't want to be pedantic and I expect everyone knows this, but it isn't the temperature that damages skin, it's UV radiation, which doesn't perfectly correlate.
The usual sort of public health thing. Public health information is usually optimised for something other than a realistic appraisal of risk. Skin cancer is unlikely to kill any given individual, but certain to kill some statistically significant number of people, and some of those lives can be saved by filling their head with exaggerated sun safety messaging, so what's a public health official to do?
I'm not sure what country you're in, but in Australia we have one of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world and it's responsible for about 1% of deaths, which is not huge but also not negligible. (To put it another way, skin cancer kills six times as many people as murder does.) Other countries mostly have rates several times lower than this... https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/skin-cancers/by-country/
My realistic advice is this: don't get sunburnt, it sucks in the short term regardless of the effects in the long term. If whatever you're doing doesn't burn you then I wouldn't worry too much about the tiny increase in cancer risk. And skin cancers are quite common but mostly harmless if you catch them early, so if you ever develop any weird moles (or existing moles that start growing weirdly) then get them checked out.
> (To put it another way, skin cancer kills six times as many people as murder does.)
I wonder if this is an artefact of Australia's comparatively low murder rate? As in, if you copied that rate of skin cancer deaths over to a more murder-y country like the US or Peru, I wonder if that would affect the messaging or priority?
Non-serious question: what if sun exposure reduces the desire to murder? Are they inversely correlated?
I'm merely amused by the question, but not enough to look for statistics for an answer.
One word: vampires.
That demographic does indeed confirm my hypothesis.
Well, there is a general tendency for hotter climates (which I assume correlates with more sun?) to have higher rates of violent crime generally. Explanations vary, from "people be outside more when it's hot" to something to do with serotonin to the usual racist nonsense. So if anything, Australia is more chill than it should be :P
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-06720-z
It looks like there are about 100,000 melanomas, 8,000 fatal in a given year in the United States: https://www.cancer.net/cancer-types/melanoma/statistics
It looks like there are 1.4 million assaults and 26,000 homicides annually in the US: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
So sun-based attacks are substantially less common than violent attacks, but probably easier to protect against.
People are getting skin cancer en masse, and exposure to the sun greatly increases the risk, but most cases aren't that serious and the mortality rate is low, which might be why people don't talk much about it. Temperature isn't a very good proxy for insolation.
Hey all, I’ve started writing a novel and sharing it on Substack. It’s somewhat inspired by Unsong which is why I’m posting it here, but deals moreso around the paradox of evil in the context of generative AI and VR/AR, which may give everyone the ability to play God and create their own universes. First chapters out here, would love to know what you think!
https://open.substack.com/pub/whogetswhatgetswhy/p/dating-advice
Did you want feedback here or somewhere else?
Only two complaints on the first chapter; the barista aside lasts long enough that I lost track of whether it was part of the Marilyn date or not, and the "would you kindly" aside should probably lead with the Bioshock reference because I spent the entire paragraph thinking you didn't know about Bioshock. Also going back to Marilyn afterward was jarring; maybe drop the whole example of memory limits since memory limits haven't come up in the story.
As long as it eventually makes its way back to me anywhere is good for feedback, and thanks for yours! I agree with some of your points and made some (subtle) tweaks, like moving the Bioshock bit up in the paragraph, adding some clarification around the barista. Memory limits may or may not come up in the future ;) so I'll be keeping them in. I'm not used to have so much editorial freedom after hitting publish so I'll try to find a fine line between making edits post-facto or setting things in stone.
Saw this got some attention (attention being relative), thanks to those who checked it out! Just released my second chapter, right in time for Apple's AR unveiling at WWDC23!
https://open.substack.com/pub/whogetswhatgetswhy/p/heaven-20-1-pop-the-hood?r=1z8jyn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I felt tempted to click on the banned/warned comments. Called "bad" on purpose to make me click? ;) Or not purpose - just a negative side-effect? And Scott really wants to improve us by examples of how-not-to-do? - I assume/suggest no links to hopelessly bad comments. - ACX comment section gives me a little hope for humanity - I blunder it then by going hostile on quora.
At least one of the bans was a regular poster, as are the warnings, so it's a good comparison between what is and isn't allowed; this rude comment is still on the right side of civil, this one is past it. Also closure on why that person isn't going to be posting anymore.
I agree. I found myself clicking curiously to see why people got banned as well.
I don't think Scott A should "advertise" these bans in these open thread posts.
The attention thus received may encourage copycats.
Edit: People make good points below. Thanks for the discussion.
I think it is fine the way it is. Transparency seems important.
The vast majority of people clicking on the banned comments will read them to figure out if the ban was fair, not because they want to get The Secret Truth Which Is Suppressed By Authorities. Writing a comment with the intend to get extra eyeballs by getting it banned is unlikely to work out.
Exactly this. Reading some of those made me go "Yep, that deserved a ban".
Although in the interests of transparency and honesty, a lot of it was plain old nosey-parker curiosity as well! "Oh, new bans? Why?"
+ 1 on transparency. It's also a way to enforce / enhance group norms to make it tangible what is 'not allowed'. Otherwise the rules remain too abstract.
Yes, 100 percent.
I think it's useful to see what constitutes a ban-worthy offence. In addition, it helps Scott be transparent - if he, say, started banning a lot of people for saying they liked the Marvel movies, that would inform us about his values at least as a moderator, which would be useful information for people.
In addition, I'm not sure if there's a realistic chance for copy-cats, since it's a demonstrated way to get banned yourself. And I'm sure trolls maybe get some chuckles out of that, but I'd imagine most people generally will just avoid commenting?
I suppose there's the chance someone could deliberately comment badly to get banned, then attempt to use that to paint Scott in a bad light, but since it'd be trivial to check the banned comment, I'm also not sure that's a significant concern.
Anyone else here interested in paleo-genetics and what it can tell us about the movements of peoples?
Have recently discovered Razib Khan’s substack and it has been mind blowing. Anyone have any other good reading recommendations on the subject?
Peter Nemet has a great substack on paleo genetics
+1 for Nemets- his post on the R1b carrying men of Chad, and his recent series on the long, long history of Europe were both fascinating. He's also well worth a follow on twitter (@peter_nimitz).
I used to give out free subscriptions to that in Open Threads here, but now readers will have to check out the permanent post at my blog for that.
I used to read John Hawks' blog periodically, but haven't kept up with him.
Holy shit, someone else who has read a Canticle for Leibowitz!
I have also recently subscribed to Razib's substack, and enjoy it very much. I think I would get more out of it if I had a better understanding of genetics. I took an undergraduate course in biochemistry many many years ago, but have forgotten most of what I learned.
I'd like a recommendation for a basic text.
Grey Goose Chronicles is a substack by an archaeologist who is quite into this stuff. Mostly available on a free subscription.
Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich is good, although it's such a fast moving field that it's probably already quite out of date... I would look at Razib's recent book recommendations posts for something more current.
Thanks for the suggestions, I’ll check them out!
I started this mini project for Berlin: salary trends survey. Anonymous and open-source. If aynone can help with spreading the news or wants to help, please do ✌️ https://github.com/realaisles/BerlinSalaryTrends
Sounds interesting, but I'm surprised such a thing doesn't exist yet. Are you sure?
There are plenty of centralised sources of information (glassdoor, kununu), but they include a lot of noise and questionable data. Afaik there is nothing similar existing besides some tries in the past.
How did Avatar make so much money? It has nice animated blue aliens, and isn't really bad, but also isn't exceptionally good. IMDB gives it 8/10.
It is exceptionally good for the time. That's the first movie that could leverage both computer graphics and 3D. And compared to all the 3D movies that came after it, it's the only one where the director really framed his shots to support 3D, instead of using 3D as a gadget.
For what it's worth, that's the only movie that I saw twice in a cinema, instead of waiting for a DVD release that would have been 2D only – that certainly helped with the revenue !
I'll be one of the Cameron defenders here. For rough purposes, compare him with Michael Bay, another director of blockbuster action films who consistently get megabucks to spend. Watch just about any Bay film, in a theater if you can manage it, and then watch just about any Cameron film. I think you will likely notice a level of production values in Cameron's films that you won't see in Bay's. Bay has one advantage AFAIK, and that's a greater level of integration into the US Armed Forces, because he tries to make them look good. So he'll get all the hardware shots he wants. Cameron will get slightly less.
Meanwhile, Cameron pays more attention to plot detail in an action sequence - this guy has to get over There to grab that Thing so he can then get over Here to use it. Bay will put something into an action sequence because it looks Cool, and then he'll put another, and another. Cameron will put something Cool in, and then build around it so it makes sense. I remember him coaching a visual effects person to fix that iceberg in _Titanic_ so that it would make the navigator want to turn left. Slope it, add an extra peak, etc.; "hard starboard!" (and reverse engines) was required to make sense given what the First Officer saw. so Cameron needed to look at that iceberg and think exactly that, so that the audience would see it and think that as well.
Watching _The Abyss_, _Aliens_, and _Terminator 2_, I got the sense that there was work put in to make the story make more sense than usual Hollywood action fare. Sometimes it would look dumb at first, and then I'd learn Cameron thought of it, shot a scene, and the scene was cut for length (like when they reset the T-800's chip halfway through _Judgement Day_).
And then there's the technical aspect. Cameron now has a signature move of filming visual effects not seen before. He wasn't the only one (Zemeckis is another), but all in all, I always ended up enjoying my time at a Cameron film, and enjoying thinking back on it. That's what it's about.
Yeah, this. "Avatar" may have been "Dances With Wolves in Space", but it was very well done, in the way that the Star Wars sequels weren't.
Are you including other sources of income? DVDS, iTunes, streaming etc?
I think the vagueness is a feature not a bug. It comes in very handy when you’re negotiating points or royalties.
Box office is a measure of how much customers pay, but it doesn't all go to the producers, much of it goes to the theatres. So a movie can make a box office twice its budget and still lose money, while a different movie whose box office is less than its budget can still make money later if it sells a lot of DVDs.
I have at least three long comments completely blown away in the last week. Perhaps I made the mistake you pointed out here also, I don’t get emails to notify me when my comments are responded to anymore. I’ve gone through all my settings a few times but I can’t see that I’ve done anything wrong.
Don't know if there's a way to access your own comment (always copy your posts before posting), but since it was a reply it's possible the original is in the other person's email chain. I don't actually know if editing these changes anything there.
EDIT: test test I'm the best. Is this in email?
I think I've occasionally seen old versions of my comments. Though nowadays, it just doesn't show me my own comments at all once I've edited them (until I refresh and scroll back down). Substack's UI is *really* awful.
Though IMO my biggest complaint about Substack is the inability to see parent comments, which makes email notifications near useless. You get a link to the reply someone made, but it only shows *that particular comment*, so there's no way to even know what they were replying to or what the context was!
Just agreeing with these comments about Substack's UI, sheesh.
Oh, it is terrible. But it wasn't intended to cope with the likes of us; I do think they modelled it on Twitter, where we the subscribers would be expected to just go "Wow, so wonderful post! Take my subscription money and slice off a percentage for Substack!" while the authors did the heavy lifting in writing.
This is why they're still trying to get everyone to start up their own Substack and bring along readers (and hopefully turn those into subscribers). NO SUBSTACK, YOU WILL JUST HAVE TO EXPAND THE COMMENTS LIMIT, I WILL NOT WRITE MY OWN BLOG POSTS.
They try to silence me, but it won't work! If I have to write a thread of four chapter-length comments to develop my point, then that's what I'll do! ✒
Seems like a real long shot that this is legit. In keeping with the obsessive quantifying of these things, I’d assign it a likelihood of a between 0 and 1 percent of being true. Somewhere on the low end of that range I suppose.
But if it were true, it would change everything. Culture wars? Who cares about that nonsense. Religion? I guess we are going to have to rethink some of this stuff. This national power might surpass that national power? Ha! Small potatoes.
>Culture wars? Who cares about that nonsense.
The existence of aliens will make winning the culture war even more vital. The aliens are obviously much smarter than we are, because check out the starships the size of small moons, so they'll *know* that our side was right all along about the culture war. If they see our world ruled or even grossly contaminated by the other side's pernicious lies, the best we can hope for is that they'll quarantine us. More likely they'll go full "Day the Earth Stood Still".
And I'm not sure I'm joking about this. A very large fraction of SFnal aliens exist primarily to explain that the author's most important sociopolitical views are obviously correct and pass harsh judgement on the fools who believe otherwise.
And there's the aliens who introduce enough stress to cause all incorrect Earth cultures to collapse under their own internal contradictions.
And the aliens who plan to do unto us as we've done unto ourselves many times before, such that at best we're pulling Scooby-Doo villain tricks on the first wave of conquistadors.
I’m more optimistic. I’m thinking actually contact with a completely different form of life would trigger a transcendence in enough people to realize that we as fellow humans have much more in common than the tribal beliefs that keep us at each other’s throats.
One doesn’t have to pull back very much to realize that the things that make us hot under the collar are actually pretty darn trivial.
In my hopeful fever dream it would be like the end of a stage play. After the final act the curtain would rise and show the cast holding hands and taking a final bow. The conflict and strife that drove the narrative is seen for what it is. All a pointless squabble over nothing.
Yeah but no one wanted to listen to Michael Rennie, remember? The big message was “you all need to get your act together or we’ll be back “
It’s the ultimate “why can’t we all get along?” lament.
The sorrow of being appalled by our own behavior and realizing we can’t seem to help ourselves.
This is a great paradox; the love of science fiction aliens bringing us up a notch in the world, or uniting humanity in common purpose to repel the invaders, juxtaposed with our fear of the alien that we are currently creating for ourselves (ai). There’s an opportunity there..Gort! Come back!
>Yeah but no one wanted to listen to Michael Rennie, remember?
None of the government or military people wanted to listen. But Helen and Bobby and Dr. Barnhardt did. More importantly, Robert Wise and Edmund North wanted to listen to Klaatu, and wanted the rest of us to listen to him as well. That's the point - the government and military people of the real world are fundamentally wrong, and we need a wise alien to teach us that. An alien who will spend most of the movie in a tragic conflict with all the stupid wrong military and government people, because how else will we know how wrong they are, but will have a few supportive viewpoint characters for the audience to identify with.
Yeah, I think that's what I love about the idea of aliens. It's a reboot.
This.
There's a big 'so what?' I feel I always have to ask whenever the topic of hiding alien contact comes up. Supposedly the US government has known about extraterrestrials for over half a century, but in that time they've done absolutely nothing with that vast and terrible knowledge. They've sat on that secret like a dragon and have done no research, made no preparations for contact, not even funded NASA properly. The proof of visitors from beyond the stars never had any impact, be it scientific, diplomatic or political. It strains credulity beyond belief that a world where aliens had been proven to both exist and have visited our planet would look exactly like a world where there was no proof they existed at all.
I've no doubt the US government has put out this rumor as a way to try and sow FUD in the minds of potential adversaries, such as Russia and China, as they must have done in the 1950s with all that Roswell rubbish that some misguided kooks obsess over to this day!
Intelligent aliens almost certainly exist, or have done, somewhere in the galaxy or the universe. But the idea they would be scooting around Earth in flying saucers, occasionally being spotted, and sometimes crashing, is too ludicrously infantile to contemplate!
What is the twitcher's rule number one? Answer, don't let the birds know you are watching them! Even if aliens were in the Solar System quietly observing us (which is not beyond the bounds of possibility), there is no way we would know or detect them unless they chose to make their presence known.
And to anyone watching those ridiculous UFO programs, and wondering if any of it could really be true, I suggest you remind yourself that the people who make them and those who appear on them must all be paid. The conclusion should be obvious.
I am instantly hyper-skeptical of alien sightings, etc., but in my heart I *crave* aliens. I'm extra- vigilant and hostile about fake aliens because I'm mortified by the idea of my craving for real aliens leading me into buying into bullshit. Others -- do you crave aliens? And if you do, why do you?
Because reality is very boring and kind of underwhelming. Maybe that is just my tendency towards depression but, aliens would open up a lot of room for wonder in my model of reality (and plenty of terror)
I'd give 10:1 odds in a cash money bet we won't find aliens in my lifetime though
How would you cash out on such a bet, though?
I have wanted to talk to animals. I guess this is the more prosaic version of SETI. To me the aliens are here on earth, tantalizingly out of reach.
I've had the thought that a fascinating use of advanced tech someday would be to allow us to have some sort of a mind link with animals of our choice & experience what they experience.
I crave it in the sense that I crave knowledge about the universe, and the existence of aliens would provide a huge boost to our knowledge of the universe. People sometimes ask questions like "was/is democracy inevitable," having a whole 'nother intelligent civilization to study would help answer those questions.
I don't crave it in the sense that I would also be scared of being an ant in the eyes of a much more powerful alien entity. The alien UFO believers don't seem to have that fear, which makes me wonder how much of theirs is real belief, rather than belief in belief.
This leads me to update my probability of alien visitation from very low to still very low. The argument that "conspiracy X doesn't make sense because someone on the inside would have blown the whistle by now" doesn't apply.
Totally agree with you (and Stephen Hawking) that fearing aliens makes excellent sense. We might like look like dandelions to them -- too dumb to be even a conscious being in their take on the cosmos. Or like sushi. Or, if they are very small, hungry and smart, like the poor Australian megafauna. It would be delightful if they were brilliant and kind and willing to answer our questions about the universe -- like the species who watched over us through our transition in Childhood's End -- but I wouldn't count on it.
But Gunflint, above, put his finger on what really thrills me about aliens. Hadn't realized it til I read his post: "But if it were true, it would change everything. Culture wars? Who cares about that nonsense. Religion? I guess we are going to have to rethink some of this stuff. This national power might surpass that national power? Ha! Small potatoes." What thrills me about the arrival of aliens is that it would make the whole world reboot. It's really the shock to the system, the reboot, that I crave -- not the alien visit itself.
But let's not forget that the more advanced an alien civilization is, the more boring and predictable they must find the inanimate universe. There are only so many salient features of a dust cloud, or an exploding star, or even a black hole presumably.
So even if they are cold fish, totally lacking in empathy, I suspect they would be very interested in animal life anywhere, and keen to preserve and protect it if only for their own benefit as observers, because this best embodies nature's novelty and variety.
Maybe we will look very appealing to them, like sugar gliders and marmosets do to us. Might be an interesting life to be an advanced alien’s beloved pet. On the other hand, maybe they’re into alien equivalents of the British royals’ boredom-relievers: fox hunting and stalking.
Have you read any early Tiptree? If not, I'd recommend finding a copy of "Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home", his first short story collection. I think you might really enjoy it. :-)
You might enjoy watching Starship Troopers.
I think the idea of actual (extraterrestrial) aliens is fascinating, and of such low probability as to be not worth considering. I have a friend who has asked me if I think there is life elsewhere in the universe, and I answer basically yes, but the universe is a big place, and life is likely a lucky accident rare enough possibly not even to occur elsewhere in this galaxy.
It's healthy you are skeptical, but I'm not sure about a craving for something difficult to impossible to get. Suppose one had a craving for chocolate, but chocolate was $10,000 per ounce? Some people might have that craving and never be able to satisfy it, and lower life satisfaction.
This is a kinda funny comment on a post where most of the links are to people getting banned for being obnoxious :D