You all ready to talk about the vaccines yet? Last time I was here I was told that skipping the shot(s) was irrational because the effects of COVID would be worse than any potential side-effects.
C) Card Game: Predictably Irrational - Feel free to bring your favorite games or distractions.
D) Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are easily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
E) Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected or that changed your perspective on the universe.
F) Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
Just thought to drop this somewhere public in case this something anyone cares about, but since substack displays archived post in a somewhat circuitous way I made a collection of ACX posts in chronological order a little while back: https://scpantera.substack.com/p/astral-codex-ten-posts-in-chronological
I haven't bothered to update it since posting yet and Scott turned on the Previous/Next post buttons shortly after I posted it so it kinda lost some utility but there ya go.
This is way more convenient than anything that Substack offers!
If you decide to update it, I have a suggestion: start lines with an emoji depending on the article type; for example 🎤 for open threads, 📚 for book reviews, 🐉 for fiction (just the first things that came to my mind). Will make it easier to find stuff.
From CNN: "42% of CEOs say AI could destroy humanity in five to ten years"
"Sonnenfeld said the survey included responses from 119 CEOs from a cross-section of business, including Walmart CEO Doug McMillion, Coca-Cola CEO James Quincy, the leaders of IT companies like Xerox and Zoom as well as CEOs from pharmaceutical, media and manufacturing."
Looks like there is a "fire alarm for AI" after all. Of course, no "orderly exit from the building" is forthcoming even so, but it's been amusing to observe the progression of this meme from wacky obscure contrarian forums to the top of mainstream.
This is a total throwback to a discussion in an earlier open thread about penis stealing. I’ve been pondering it. I am convinced what they really meant was not that that their organs disappeared from between their legs, but that they were suddenly unable to have an erection which is effectively stealing your penis also makes a lot more sense
That would seem like an overreaction. "Hey, I suddenly lost the ability to have erection in public, and I think this person is responsible; kill him!" "Damn, me too! Careful, everyone!"
Who said in public? I reckon they just claimed it was the truth .Were they required to show the blank space between their legs before further action was taken? Heh. I jest
Most articles avoid mentioning the gender of the "thieves/witches/sorcerers"; some mention men; some mention women. Occasionally people accuse their food of making their penises (or nipples - there is also a women's version) disappear.
I don’t think so. I think most women know it’s pretty easy to steal a guys mojo. And then there’s the whole voodoo thing of stealing someone’s mojo I don’t see how that is more weird than the idea that somebody magically makes your penis fall off and there’s quite a lot of literature around it. I don’t find it very hard to believe. All kinds of strange, emotional dislocations can affect a man’s ability to get it up, and when you affect a man’s ability to get it up, he’s definitely lost something. What better than to blame a witch who’s giving you the evil eye i.e. make your dick shrink
Hey everyone, there was a website I've seen a few people mention here that I've lost URL to. It's all about health conditions and how to address them in layman's terms. This is a very vague description, but I think it was ran by someone in the rational adjacent community. It is not WebMD or any of the websites that show up when you google anything health related. If anyone knows what I'm talking about, thank you in advance.
I'm a fan of painscience.com. Not sure if this is what you're talking about, but I found it very useful for no-nonsense evidence-based reviews of various kinds of chronic pains and aches.
Hi! Thanks everyone who responded to my questions about marriage! Now that I think I have a framework for solving that, I am wondering how to systematically attack depression.
I kind of feel like I am dreaming all the time even though I’m awake, and I cannot conceptualize that the future will be better than the present, nor formulate a desire and enact it. It is sort of like my entire mind is just TV static and sometimes I drop into some kind of catatonia where my body refuses to move at all or I go very numb while driving and straddle for several seconds before my limbic system half-heartedly decides that because I would probably survive a crash at 25 miles per hour I should probably drive in the lane. What does it mean that there is no oversight over the universe and everyone’s suffering is totally arbitrary and basically unbounded? What do you do if you do not think there is intelligent design beyond optimization algorithms and non-existence is your most preferred state?
How does this usually get solved? What does it mean to have a positive outlook on your own future and how do you acquire this? I think the Richard Dawkins atheists have some kind of answer to this, but it requires you to espouse their value system which is not really possible after you think about the implications of the science they’re talking about for five minutes. I think a better mode of relation is possible, but those people are deluded, and I am wondering if anyone who’s followed their road of insight past the depression has a nicer system. I think Joscha Bach has some ideas about this but he doesn’t seemed to have totally solved the depression bit. I think Sarah Perry solved this by quitting carbs.
I think the most important part is to keep remembering that what you feel is *chemistry* of your body, which is a separate issue from whether there is an intelligent designer in the universe.
I mean, if you accidentally broke your leg, you wouldn't assume that the pain you feel is actually about e.g. the war in Ukraine. You would clearly see those two as separate things. In exactly the same sense, your depression, and metaphysical questions about the universe, are two separate things. Change the chemistry, and the universe becomes your enjoyable playground.
> What does it mean to have a positive outlook on your own future and how do you acquire this?
Your body chemistry makes you happy, and then you rationalize the feeling.
(Predictable reaction of a depressed person: "But isn't that *fake* happiness? I would rather suffer pointlessly than enjoy fake happiness." Well, your sadness is fake exactly the same, and yet you have no problem indulging in it, and searching for philosophical justifications of it. Somehow sadness feels higher-status than happiness; but that is just the depression talking.)
During summer, spend a lot of time outside in the sun. During winter, install stronger lights at your home. Exercise regularly. Listen to the kinds of music that give you energy. Meet non-depressed friends.
My partner wants to start a new career. She's currently a lecturer + atmospheric modeller at the University of Cambridge, UK. Her education is all in physical geography, though she's published on bayesian modelling so obviously numerate. She can code but she doesn't want to be a full-time coder, though some coding would be fine.
What industry needs enough people like this that they'd consider hiring someone with her background? What terms should she use in a search?
Huge variety of projects and needs. Many large firms are hyped up on Generative AI (rightfully so) and seeking to remain competitive and relevant. others help clients defend or litigate using data
"A Pentagon whistleblower has claimed the Vatican is aware of the existence of non-human intelligences and helped the US retrieve a downed UFO from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini at the end of the Second World War.
David Grusch, 36, served 14 years in the Air Force and is a decorated Afghanistan combat officer who worked for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).
His role was to act as the NRO's representative when dealing with the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. The task force was specifically set up to investigate UFOs.
He has spoken out to say the US has run a top secret UFO retrieval program for decades and claimed the 'Vatican was involved' in the first ever UFO crash.
Grusch said the first recovery of a UFO was in Magenta, Italy in 1933 and it was held by Mussolini's Italian government until 1944-1945 when Pope Pius XII tipped America off about it."
Yes! It wouldn't be a world-spanning decades-long conspiracy without us Papists getting involved, now would it? 😁
I have no idea if this is the same UFO guy who was recently in the news but the levels are getting too confusing for me: are we on truth-disinformation-counter-truth-deliberate distraction-UFOs are real-that's what the Deep State wants you to think Level 99 now or what?
EDIT: Oh, I love this bit:
"Dailymail.com has contacted the Vatican for comment. "
I wonder what unfortunate son-of-a-gun in which Dicastery is going to have *that* one slung across the desk? 😁
It all makes sense. Jesus was a space alien, the first scout on Earth. The rest of the Zorblaxian fleet (including the second clone of Jesus) is arriving soon. The Catholic church was tasked with maximizing human population, because after the long travel Zorblaxians will be really hungry.
Sounds like the whistleblower all the conspiracy "skeptics" were waiting for! Now they have to believe in aliens. Remember, the whole argument against conspiracies was "these institutions aren't nearly competent enough to hide a conspiracy, they wouldn't be able to keep them secret for that long. Someone would tell eventually."
Well, someone told. Welcome the aliens!
No, seriously though, who am I kidding, it's not like this guy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haim_Eshed) changed anyone's mind either, even though he's precisely the person who would know if this was really happening. The "skeptics" would continue to shout "no evidence!!!", their precious mantra, even as they were beamed up by the LGM. There's no level of cognitive dissonance they won't tolerate, as long as they can continue to lick the boots of those in power.
> He also stated that US president Donald Trump was aware of this and was "on the verge" of informing everyone of their existence, but was stopped by the "Galactic Federation", who wished to prevent mass hysteria.
Yeah, mostly it makes me wonder, how much of the current UFO stuff is coming from this one guy, David Grusch?
> I wonder what unfortunate son-of-a-gun in which Dicastery is going to have that one slung across the desk?
I'm hoping for a snarky answer in which angels count as UFOs, and God counts as an "extra-terrestrial intelligence". Maybe implying an equivalence between this guy and Jacob:
Would that be metonymy or synecdoche? The score is related to the roll, but also the score is a part of the result which is often referred to as a roll...
There are running shoes with some cushioning, some with lots of cushioning, and some with none at all (e.g. barefoot shoes, sandals). Does anyone know of any good scientific evidence that any of these different types of shoes are effective at preventing injury in runners?
I think running in general is very individual based on biomechanics. Some people are more built for it than others. This also extends to choice of shoes. I've heard that a lot of people get knee issues with more cushioned shoes that subside after going to minimalist shoes. I'm a bit the opposite. I like a toe to heel rise, commonly found in cushioned shoes, because otherwise my achilles tendons take more of a beating.
I think the scientific evidence in the field seems weak because it's so hard to control for other variables, as other commenters mentioned, but I'm not an expert.
My running path was cushioned -> lightly-cushioned -> dabbling with barefoot -> back to lightly-cushioned.
Would say overtraining is the real injury-maker. The key for me was crosstraining with swimming and weights, instead of getting fixated on pure running.
Lots of good answers already. My personal take here is that doing some barefoot or near barefoot running is good. It can probably help running form and strengthen the plantar fascia, et cetera.
But for most of us, especially those not young / light / highly experienced, barefoot running should be limited to a few sprints across a grassy field. (Relatively high intensity, but low volume.) I can't run on paved surfaces without mid-to heavy cushioned shoes, or I start getting injured.
I'm not citing any of this, but generally speaking low-ish volumes of mid-high intensity strength training is effective for injury prevention, and that's the basic concept being mimicked here.
The TLDR is that there's moderate evidence that barefoot/minimalist runners tend to favor a measurably different running pattern from runners wearing traditional running shoes, but there's nowhere near enough evidence available to draw meaningful conclusions about injury risk or running performance.
That's nine years old, though, so newer studies may have overtaken it.
It's more-or-less impossible to control other variables accurately-enough to have anything approaching a real study. I'm sure someone has tried. The safest shoe is going to be the one that the individual will wear in the safest way realistically possible for that individual. I know that's a cop-out, but it's really unfortunately the case. It's not like squatting 3 plates, where it's just obviously true that being barefoot is the best choice: there's no chance that you'll be performing that movement on an a variety of uneven surfaces over a thousand times in the span of an hour. If nobody ran anywhere except on perfectly flat tracks of uncompacted HOA-approved lawn turf at low ambient humidity, and never did so without having spent years learning to run and walk barefoot properly, and also were only ever doing zone-2 run/walks or all-out sprints, there'd be a ton of science showing that the closer you are to barefoot while running the safer you are.
Also let's be honest -- the runner version of the "swimmer's body" fallacy probably causes a majority of normal running injuries. So many people you see out there pounding the pavement, visibly in zone 3 would be better off swinging a kettlebell or going for a nice hike.
I hadn't heard of the "swimmer's body" fallacy before, so I looked it up. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
For those others reading it who also haven't heard of it, it's closely related to the "wet streets cause rain" fallacy (i.e. getting case and effect backwards). Specifically, the"swimmer's body" fallacy is mistaking a selection factor for an effect. The observation is that high-level competitive swimmers (almost?) always have lean bodies with very well-defined muscle, from which it's tempting to conclude that swimming as exercise will get you a body like that. But the actual reason is that you need that physique (in addition to high levels of talent and skill) to be able to compete at high levels of swimming: that's the body type that's capable of having the highest ratio of whole-body strength to weight. You'll see very similar body types at the high levels of other activities that require a very high strength-to-weight ratio, such as dance (especially ballet), sprinting, gymnastics, and the lighter weight classes of stuff like powerlifting, boxing, and greco-roman wresting.
Yes exactly. If running were magically capable of giving a person a Kenyan's body, the world would be a very different place and there'd be a lot more competition around the 2-hour mark for marathons.
Not conclusive, but suggestive, at least. I run in barefoot running shoes because I've found it helps reduce hip/glute pain I have (as a result of my ankylosing spondylitis). Like most athletic activities, it's probably just a "try everything out and see what works best for you" kind of thing. Most running injuries (regardless of form) are from pushing too hard and not enough recovery time.
Meanwhile, I like the Hoka super cushioned ones because they help me with knee pain compared to “standard” running shoes. Best bet is to try several types and pick for yourself, it’s highly personal.
If you're on pavement and paying attention, you can see and avoid objects large enough to be a problem, though you might have to stop and pick something smaller out of your foot every now and then. I used to live next to a frat house where they threw glass bottles onto the sidewalk, and for reasons I do not remember I sometimes walked through there barefoot.
In May, a lawyer who was defending their client in a lawsuit against Columbia's biggest airline, Avianca, submitted a legal filing before a court in Manhattan, New York, that listed several previous cases as support for their main argument to continue the lawsuit.
But when the court reviewed the lawyer's citations, it found something curious: Several were entirely fabricated.
The lawyer in question had gotten the help of another attorney who, in scrounging around for legal precedent to cite, utilized the "services" of ChatGPT.
ChatGPT was wrong. So why do so many people believe it's always right?
Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Malwarebytes security evangelist Mark Stockley and Malwarebytes Labs editor-in-chief Anna Brading to discuss the potential consequences of companies and individuals embracing natural language processing tools—like ChatGPT and Google's Bard—as arbiters of truth. Far from being understood simply as chatbots that can produce remarkable mimicries of human speech and dialogue, these tools are becoming sources of truth for countless individuals, while also gaining attraction amongst companies that see artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLM) as the future, no matter what industry they operate in.
The future could look eerily similar to an earlier change in translation services, said Stockley, who witnessed the rapid displacement of human workers in favor of basic AI tools. The tools were far, far cheaper, but the quality of the translations—of the truth, Stockley said—was worse.
"That is an example of exactly this technology coming in and being treated as the arbiter of truth in the sense that there is a cost to how much truth we want."
The Achilles Heel of the project(s) is exposed when we consider that AI will happily give us a well-reasoned argument -- using data it fabricated. Hell, we do that.
As usual in such matters, I'd like to point out that ChatGPT did not lie to these lawyers. It's as incapable of lying as it is of telling the truth. They lied to themselves. They performed the equivalent of rolling 10d10 to look up random words in a legal dictionary then paying a random third-world teenager to string them together; then submitted the result as an official legal brief. What were they expecting to happen ? Accolades ?
Of note, they lied to the court about a vacation, ignored ChatGPT telling them it couldn't offer legal advice, and didn't know what the lookup tables numbers of the cases meant.
Also they weren't 'defending' their client against the airline, they were trying to sue the airline after the window for suit had expired, and were responding to the airline's motion to dismiss.
Hiring opportunity from the Alignment Research Center --
ARC is hiring theoretical researchers:
"ARC is based in Berkeley, California, and we would prefer people who can work full-time from our office, but we are open to discussing remote or part-time arrangements in some circumstances. We can sponsor visas and are H-1B cap-exempt."
"...we have more of a need for people with a strong theoretical background (in math, physics or computer science, for example), but we remain open to anyone who is excited about getting involved in AI alignment, even if they do not have an existing research record.""
"Our current interview process involves:
3-hour take-home test involving math and computer science puzzles
30-minute non-technical phone call
1-day onsite interview
We will compensate candidates for their time when this is logistically possible.
We will keep applications open until at least the end of August 2023, and will aim to get a final decision back within 6 weeks of receiving an application."
"Salaries are in the $150k–400k range for most people depending on experience."
Anyone have any beliefs which they know are ill-founded and irrational but are tempted or half inclined to accept all the same? With me it is a feeling that the more skint I feel the more likely I am to win the lottery with the weekly fiver I spend on it. I know it is an absurd idea, and common sense and experience says it is nonsense, but there we are.
I'm not a gambler, besides a small amount spent on the lottery. But sometimes I wonder if chronic gamblers aren't driven at least in part by the same irrational belief that as their funds decrease their chances of a win rise, in some form of natural justice, even though each bet has no causal relation to the bettor's remaining funds, if any, nor any "memory" of previous bets (except maybe in some card games where a pack of cards is dwindling).
In the final week before the 2016 election, I was anxiously checking 538 (which had Trump with a significant chance of winning) and the Princeton Election Consortium, which had Clinton at >99% to win. I knew that the PEC's justifications for their model made absolutely no sense, but I still kept checking it and ignoring 538 just because it was the only way I could sleep at night (metaphorically).
Most of us have this relationship with basic egalitarianism -- we all know that humans aren't equal (individually, in aggregate, or really at all) but we pretend because it is important to do so. Slavoj Zizek, for instance, lauds this as the best/highest kind of ideology. Those who claim to reject it in favor of something more Nietzschean in tone usually are just adding a layer of pretense, not subtracting one.
Egalitarianism comes out of the Christian idea that, while all men are clearly not equal in talent, wealth, character, strength, etc., they are nonetheless equal in *moral* value because they are all loved by God. This is sensible, provided you are a Christian. If there is no God, however, or if there is a God but he does not love all humans, then egalitarianism doesn't follow.
In our post-Christian society we find that most people inherit egalitarianism from their Christian ancestors, but lack a logical foundation for believing it. Yet, we in the West find that egalitarianism works very well. It is an heirloom that we have a strong sentimental attachment to, and it seems to work well. So most people don't try to rock the boat.
I have to object strongly to both this and the parent post. The parent post talks of equality but should be talking about moral equality specifically. But moral equality is obvious and not in need of justification to this atheist. That’s a truth I can hold to be self-evident. If I need to justify it, I would perhaps point to the veil of ignorance thought experiment, but I don’t feel any compulsion to do so. People often naturally extend it (more weakly) to animals too, even Christians despite that not being a tenant of Christianity. I attest that the relationship is actually opposite to what you state: that egalitarianism is a justification for Christianity not the other way around. No religion that didn’t have that belief could possibly be true.
Finally, it’s not an example of the thing discussed here at all. There is no way to falsify the belief “all humans are morally equal”.
>People often naturally extend it (more weakly) to animals too
Almost no one, except perhaps the most militant of vegans, extends equal moral worth to animals. Most people extend some level of moral worth to animals but it certainly isn't equal.
I would go on to further claim that the unequal moral worth of animals, with whom humans share common ancestors, is an excellent crituque of your statement that the equality of moral worth amongst humans is "obvious".
If modern humans do not have the same moral worth as modern monkeys depsite sharing a common ancestor that necessarily means that at some or many points in history an animal had different moral worth than its parents. So heres the situation: across the history of earth beings have evolved and through the course of their evolution animals have gained different amounts of moral worth and yet somehow every single being on the face of the earth today that can be classified as a human, despite great variation in traits amongst such beings, has exactly the same moral worth. That doesn't sound like the kind of statement that is "obviously true" if anything it sounds much closer to a statement which is obviously false.
Now perhaps we can retain moral equality as a useful fiction that facilitates cooperation even if it is not precisely correct. Or if we are really intent on believing on equality we can take true equality in the modern world as a pure moral axiom and accept that this must entail some counterintuitive valuations somewhere in evolutionary history.
But to claim that moral equality is merely "obvious" is both arrogant and poorly thought out.
There’s interesting questions about whether I should extend equal moral weight to various non-human entities (an intelligent extraterrestrial? an AI? potential future people?), but that in no way makes it at all challenging to place equal moral weight on all living humans.
"It is not at all challenging to do something" and "it is obviously correct to do that thing" you initially claimed something much stronger than you are defending here.
Moral equality is not as obvious as you think: it is an axiom taken on faith. Before Christianity, where are the egalitarian societies? Even after Christianity began it took hundreds of years for the West to really grok the idea that all people are morally equal, to realize the implications. Now we're coasting on cultural inertia.
Sometimes I wish we could grab a Roman circa 100 BC, or a Germanic tribesman circa 100 AD, or a Viking circa 800 AD, and ask them a few questions. We are so used to Christianized thought that it can be hard to image people who had a pre-Christian perspective. Try asking an Athenian about the veil of ignorance. "What kind of society would you want if you didn't know who you would be in it?" "The one I live in now." "But what if you were born a slave?" "Then I would be a slave. 'That some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.' If I was born with a slave nature, it is right I should be a slave to my betters."
The historical details are irrelevant. Lots of ideas took a long time to be formed, but once they have been formulated are completely obvious. Most of mathematics is this way: consider the number zero for example. I don’t have to be Hindu to know that zero is a correct and useful concept.
I think the idea of equality was a *gradual* process; expanding the circle of "equals". At the beginning of this process is chimpanzee politics, where the alpha male can be overthrown by a coalition of other males. At the end... perhaps one day the borders will be abolished, and humans will be treated as equals regardless of their country of birth.
After Christianity, where are the egalitarian societies for most of the next two millenia?
Egalitarianism is a modern idea that grew out of the Enlightenment in the past few centuries. It's fair to say that it evolved in historically Christian parts of the world, but it's also true that it has its roots in a movement closely tied to the decline of Christianity, not in Christianity itself.
Thank you for saying so. Given that Slavoj Zizek deliberately calls himself a Christian Atheist for this reason (and praises Protestantism for making atheism possible), I can't disagree. I will note that some will claim a movement in the direction of egalitarianism elsewhere and before Christianity, but I attach no particular importance to the claims.
However, it is worth pointing out that there is a logical framework for egalitarianism as an ideology even post-Christianity. It's a fun inversion of the old reason-leading-to-faith metaphor that Christian apologists used in days gone by: the scaffolding. You build a scaffolding and then build a church, which once solid no longer needs the scaffolding. In the original sense, reason is the scaffolding, faith the church. As far as egalitarianism is concerned, we've built up a vast architecture, a temple dedicated to it and even if the scaffolding of the original Christanity falls away the structure will remain. For instance, some Greek once thanked the gods that he was born male, free, and Athenian. A nice thought, but we now instead are accustomed to invert this with veil-of-ignorance thought experiments such as: imagine you're about to be born and have no idea what kind of person you'll be born as. Design the society you want (or solve the trolley problem, or whatever).
"Given that Slavoj Zizek deliberately calls himself a Christian Atheist for this reason (and praises Protestantism for making atheism possible)"
Right, I need some clarification here. My impression is that this guy likes being a gadfly and will put out provocative statements, but is he saying that under Catholicism/Orthodoxy atheism was impossible - why? Possible reasons below:
(1) Both churches too strong and intertwined with state, making prosecution of heresy/atheism feasible so even if you were an atheist, you outwardly conformed and never told anyone openly you didn't believe in all that shit?
(2) Protestantism, despite early efforts at heresy-hunting and conformity of belief themselves, suffered from the problem right from the beginning that the major reformers had widely differing views. So if you didn't agree with the Lutheran/Calvinist/Whatever doctrine on A, B or C, you could move to a different denomination/church or even set up your own one.
(3) Keep doing this for a couple of centuries, eventually everyone is tired of fighting doctrinal wars inside their breakaway churches and literal wars outside between denominations, so agree to disagree. You're a Christian if you say you are. Mainstream churches become more liberal over time (even if there are occasional bumps in the road, e.g. Anglicanism and the Tractarian Movement and the reaction to No-Popery Here) and eventually just decline softly into "everyone should be nice because niceness is nice, we're ethical not moral, the only sin is selfishness and racism and pollution and whatever the Zeitgeist says is bad".
(4) You can therefore be functionally an atheist and only very technically a Christian and still be a fully-paid up Protestant. Protestantism broke the unity and power of the church and put the authority into the hands of the individual as to what they did or did not believe.
The argument, as I understand it, is that first the Western Church (as opposed to Orthodoxy) made faith a discursive thing -- a consent with the will to a proposition held in the intellect. Before this, the argument goes, it was more about living in such a way as to remain in communion with one's bishop (the Orthodox would say they're still this way, or at least Nassim Taleb would; he makes this argument too). Once this happened, it was only a matter of time before something (Protestantism) separated what little the christian still does (sacrament/ritual) from what he says/thinks (words in his mouth/mind). Thus, the theory goes, only once one has fully reduced God to words in one's mind can one say "eh yeah no thanks actually". Further (again according to this theory -- I'm not claiming any of this myself), a good Orthodox fellow can live his whole life keeping the fasts, attending the rituals, practicing the virtues without any specific thinking about whether or not 'God' is 'real'.
"a good Orthodox fellow can live his whole life keeping the fasts, attending the rituals, practicing the virtues without any specific thinking about whether or not 'God' is 'real'"
I have seen this philosophy professed by liberal Christians; that what matters is not orthodoxy but orthopraxy. So long as everyone says the same prayers or the clergy dress in the proper vestments, it doesn't matter if you're crossing your fingers as you say the Creed or if the clergy person is a trans lesbian in a domestic partnership with 'her' pregnant 'wife'.
The problem there is that this rapidly turns into a two-tier faith, where the educated have a subtle and indeed rationalised away belief in belief, while the ordinary people have a folk religion where they don't know what the tenets of the faith are and their practices are next door to superstition and magic. Leave the understanding of what the belief is up to the clergy and the monastics because it's none of your affair, and you may get zealous monks on Mount Athos - or you may get Bishop Spong.
And then we get the usual attacks by freethinkers that it's all superstition and it's down to the clergy being power-seeking and imposing on the credulous, ignorant laity by terrorising them with the fear of Hell, and that nobody understands what they are gabbling in their prayers so they should just dump religion altogether and believe in science instead.
Oh, that was only the atheist-downstream-from-Protestantism bit. The reason he's Christian is he says that it is irreplacably profound when God dies to Himself on the cross, when even God becomes an atheist: "My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?" That is, only Christianity places the dividing line right through God himself: no longer a distant despot but one who doubts and suffers. This suffering atheist god is 'true', for Zizek, despite not being 'real'.
I've read with compulsive gambling, at a deep level those people actually want to lose - they have a life view that the universe is out to get them and losing confirms that. At a more generic level people like consistency more than their conscious goals? So I think your mention of natural justice is hitting on something but sadly they already view themselves as condemned men.
It's a hard one to have intuition about. I've gambled extensively, ultimately profitably but the journey has certainly involved losses at points, emotions rather than actions have definitely moved outside my control but it still leaves my explanation above feeling very alien.
I can speak to the market/counterparty/universe becomes your enemy and you feel it "owes" you - again back to natural justice. So for me the irrational belief is thinking the owing will translate into a win. When you feel close to broke, do you generally hold that the world has done you over a bit - and are thus owed some recompense?
"want" and "lose" are complex concepts for the compulsive gambler. They're addicted to the near-miss (which some studies show they experience the way the non-addicted experience winning), almost certainly consciously want to win, and if we're not refusing to admit that pepole do things unconsciously also are likely engaging in self-harm.
I know intellectually that as long as you have the ability to service the debt and you're earning a return that exceeds the interest, debt is good. But my animal brain insists that debt-free is the only way to be.
I paid off a high rate mortgage a decade ahead of time just because it felt good. The stupid part was having opted for a 15 year note instead of a 30 year note, because 30 years just seemed like an unimaginably long time. With the lower monthly payment, I could have paid it off even faster.
With the whole "return that exceeds the interest" bit, to even get to that point needs someone to have given you a low interest rate debt in the first place, and/or for that high return to have an embedded risk.
Most forms of the "have the ability to service the debt and get more returns elsewhere" plan do have extra risks that are easy to miss when thinking about it explicitly, but that the animal brain expects to exist anyway.
After seeing things like the 2008 financial crash and COVID, I'm personally trying to be more aware of the big picture risks in general.
I get to visit Berkeley this month. Anything there you think would be especially interesting to an average ACX reader, like meetups or something? I'm mainly interested in computer/tech stuff. Also I'm a foreigner so it doesn't have to be unique to Berkeley, stuff that are considered generic in US are fine as well.
TIL about the Bielefield conspiracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_conspiracy) - a German internet meme about a German city not existing. You ask someone if they've ever been there or knows anyone who has, and if they say "yes", then clearly they're in on the conspiracy (or were duped themselves), and if they say "no", well... QED.
The town 'resolved' this in 2019 by offering a million Euro bounty for proof of its non-existence then when nobody claimed the bounty, they decided that since there's No Evidence for their non-existence, they must exist after all. (And then they dropped a rock with a QR code into the park to commemorate it)
... I can't tell if all those logical fallacies cancel out into good logic or not.
As someone from a country with a popular "It does not exist!" meme (ie. Finland), I can only hazard a guess to how tired anyone from Bielefeld must be about hearing this stupid pseudo-joke.
It would seem to be triviaully easy (though not necessarily cheap or quick, depending on where you start) to test by going to the location marked on the map and checking whether there's a city there. At that point, you either see a city or you get inducted into the conspiracy yourself.
It's also possible, I suppose, that the conspiracy has gone so far as to construct a bunch of buildings in the middle of the countryside and persuade three hundred thousand people to live there.
> Description: SCP-4006 is a probabilistic anomaly affecting the state of Massachusetts, USA. SCP-4006 works to perpetuate the idea that Massachusetts is a populated state with a government, infrastructure, economy, various population centers, et cetera. Due to this, the true nature of Massachusetts is entirely unknown to the public;
> Massachusetts has no history of human occupation.
I am wondering if there is something like an anti- placebo effect. If you are extremely pessimistic about recovering, you may not feel any improvements to your health even though the medicines are working. Clinical trials account for placebo effects but there is no way to account for the reverse
Also has there been any research on placebo effects like are there a small set of people who are more prone to placebo effects irrespective of disease, are highly optimistic.
Isn't letting yourself fall asleep a pretty good example of this? There are some times after a head injury or the like where a hospital won't let you fall asleep, because you can slip into a coma. So, assumedly if you were on your own and thought you were going to die, you might let yourself drift off, rather than focus on staying awake.
I get that this is to some degree a treatment choice thing, but it's pretty well documented that stress/depression lead you to die a lot more easily; spouses usually die pretty close together in time. Seems like this would be the case if you don't think that you'll recover.
I think that the don't-sleep-after-a-head-injury idea is a myth (pretty sure anyway), and the reason it's done at hospitals is so they can monitor you and know asap if you suddenly experience worse symptoms.
Plus it never made sense to me why sleeping would cause brain damage to get worse.
There are assessments out there for suggestibility (part of assessing someone for success under hypnosis). I wonder if those have been used to predict placebo outcomes. Optimism is somewhat different from suggestibility I'd say but maybe there's overlap.
Reading that it seems like nocebo is just the normal placebo effect except for side effects. Is there an effect where pessimism causes a drug to have no effect?
Well, then I guess the question is - how would they distinguish that from the drug actually being ineffective?
I don't think you're right about the distinction you're trying to make, though - in practice, I bet doctors will call it a nocebo effect.
Looking at the nocebo wikipedia article, I don't think it's actually that good; it goes into minutiae too early.
But you can see this statement:
"In the narrowest sense, a nocebo response occurs when a drug-trial subject's symptoms are worsened by the administration of an inert, sham, or dummy (simulator) treatment..."
I don't see why you'd withhold the term for the case where the drug was medically effective and where a nocebo effect applied, reducing the patient's evaluation of their health - but didn't quite flip the sign to negative.
I'm very interested in doing the digital nomad thing, but I'm concerned about finding an online job because my skills may be difficult to convey to an employer, and I feel there are a lot of people to compete with who also want these limited online jobs. I have a tested IQ of roughly 150 and I have been paid, respectively, something like 30 an hour to write and between 10-100 an hour to paint. I'm in something like the umpteenth percentile of creative output and skill in multiple domains, but all those markets are contracting with AI and they're not reliable enough to give me peace of mind long-term. They're more like windfalls. I have most of a generic business degree completed now, which inclines me also toward the middle-income HR type fields where layoffs are happening in online roles.
My questions are A) does anyone have experience with a similar situation, or just digital nomadism broadly (I'd love to hear your thoughts even if you don't,) and B) does anybody want to hire a digital assistant who can write you a novel and paint your portrait, lol. Maybe C) should I just drop everything and do a coding bootcamp. I have the cash.
On the subject of coding bootcamps, when I have had the chance to interview people who are fresh out of coding bootcamps, I have found such people to generally be very junior sorts of coders. (except in the case of people who were -instructors- at the bootcamp).
Given how much AI is likely to be able to reform how coding works, I wouldn't assume that particular career path is more resistant to change than the art and hr paths (potentially in higher demand). You might find yourself wanting to learn a form of combined code + prompt engineering that is so new that most bootcamps don't have an understanding of it.
Finishing your generic business degree out is probably worth the time since for all that your skills are "hard to explain to potential employers", you can at a minimum wave the degree at them to get your foot into the interview room.
Think quite a lot about what electives you take, those may end up pulling more practical weight in your life than the actual centerline of the business degree.
Some days I seriously think about taking the bit of cash I have from my last book windfall, dropping out, and moving to the middle of nowhere to eke out the next four years doing creative work. But doing the whole starving artist thing is not very appealing, especially when you have a respectable middle-class family that will think you've gone insane. If I can scale my income before I finish college and need to get a real job, then I'll do that. But most days I doubt.
heh yeah, going more conventional under family pressure, making oneself miserable until eventually working up the courage to get rid of the shackles is an archetype (last I've heard the story is Simu Liu's autobio).
finishing college maybe worth it still if unexciting, isn't it pretty chill anyway.
if you can find some artist community can probably get good personal stories about getting over family expectations and insecurity and all those typical issues.
hmm actly, recently met an english lit grad who probably mostly wants to create, taught himself coding, worked for some crypto trading sh*t, probably made a bit of money, now developing his game as his novel proved too hard to get people to read. maybe I should connect you guys.
Yeah I'd definitely be open to meeting this person. I followed you on Twitter under a similar name btw, so you should see that. I am aware of this archetype you mention, but of course nothing is ever as conceptually pure in reality. My family aren't so much the antagonists of the dynamic so framed, more the resting point and renewer of my own neuroticism about pursuing talents being potentially less rewarding than a stabler, normal life. Romanticism can lead a person astray more often than not, and one should be exceedingly certain if they're going to buck the normal path. Especially in such a potentially potential-destroying way. You choose certain aspects of yourself always at the cost of others.
What about using your eye for design and aesthetics in a role as a craftsman of some sort, or something like remodeling, interior designn, gardening, carpentry, or even general contracting? In my experience, there are many rich people who are constantly rebuilding and renovating their properties, and are _very_ finicky and constantly complain they can't depend on anyone to "do it right".
These people I suspect will pay handsomely for someone a bit - this is not PC but whtaevs - more 'like' them than most ppl in the construction trade. In essence, you become a translator between two cultures that you understand.
Just a thought, this is how many of my peer group have organized their lives to make a living but also have some time/money left over for individual pursuits (playing music, writing, painting, acting etc)
Hmm I guess I failed to address the "remote" part. There are analogues, but as you say there is a lot of competition.
Wherever you are at the moment though, I hypothesize there will be finicky rich people obsessively remodeling their bathrooms. And frankly, once you're done it may be best to get to somewhere else as customers can become impossible to handle.
country to popular belief, programming isnt somehow good at hiring
It *should be* but they fundamentally still do sociable personality/con artist bait interviews resume with fake promises, processes that filter people out before a technical interview with someone (they hope) knows anything about programming.
You have to make it past the hr department before talking to a lead programmer so the same difficulty you have there will likely carry over.
if you mean lgbtqai+bffbbqjill move to silicon valley and yourll probably be better then anywhere else
If your say, even mildly conservative that be a terrible idea
I'm not aware of any part of society that is managing real (ie not skin deep) diversity, I know no one who has solved hiring, I know no one who has solved education beyond a terrible good hearts law of signaling your were raised middle class and did years of nonsense.
Programming could be doing automated leet code as their layer 1 filter and maybe that would actually be slightly better; but no they dont at least not for the jobs I apply for, and for all I know that would only slightly improve the filtering process for me but not get better overall results because its not a trivial issue to have middle managers pick people who dont fit into nice boxes.
In utah, theres a major bias for workplaces to pick from one university, because well for the insufferable puritanical types of mormons they probably went to byu then quickly found a job, from someone they went to church with at the chruchs near byu. Then theres the other mostly mormon but tolerate ones colleges for more tolerant workplaces, and then theres factory's that are 80% immigrants that are vaguely catholic and your more empoyable if you speak spanish. I made the unfortunate choice to be an atheist and drop out of college, opps.
These mechanisms are everywhere and its just hard and society probably wasn't very good at it even pre cancel culture and trump. If you walk to far off your garden path your going to have a hard time; if you dont believe that you probably naturally fit inside your box and cleanly delivered yourself neatly packaged for hr and you got thru an interview process all nice and easy.
weirdness meant on the spectrum, or very low social skills/adjustedness. the normal rat meetup kinda weirdness. plus a range of other unconventional attributes, from clothing and hair colors to being trans.
tech is imo unique among reasonably iq-utilizing and well-paying jobs in tolerating all that stuff (as guess it's pretty unique in work process being to a large extent between the human and the computer). medicine/law/finance/professional services all put much more emphasis on being a normie, and that might be it for reasonably iq-utilizing and well-paying things which aren't completely unique.
I've seen some weird people doing blue collar stuff, again sounds about right re being much less people-focused than most careers.
You all ready to talk about the vaccines yet? Last time I was here I was told that skipping the shot(s) was irrational because the effects of COVID would be worse than any potential side-effects.
LW/ACX Saturday (6/17/23) Effective Woo and the Insignificance of Statistics
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 30th Orange County ACX/LW meetup, happening this Saturday and most Saturdays thereafter.
Host: Michael Michalchik
Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com (For questions or requests)
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, CA 92660
Date: Saturday, June 17, 2023
Time: 2 PM
Conversation Starters:
Text: Are Woo Non-Responders Defective? - by Scott Alexander Audio: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sscpodcast/Are_Woo_Non-Responders_Defective.mp3?dest-id=586545
Text: All Medications Are Insignificant In The Eyes Of God And Traditional Effect Size Criteria Audio: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sscpodcast/Are_Woo_Non-Responders_Defective.mp3?dest-id=586545
Follow Up: Attempts To Put Statistics In Context, Put Into Context Audio: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sscpodcast/Attempts_To_Put_Statistics_In_Context_Put_Into_Context.mp3?dest-id=586545
C) Card Game: Predictably Irrational - Feel free to bring your favorite games or distractions.
D) Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are easily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
E) Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected or that changed your perspective on the universe.
F) Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
Just thought to drop this somewhere public in case this something anyone cares about, but since substack displays archived post in a somewhat circuitous way I made a collection of ACX posts in chronological order a little while back: https://scpantera.substack.com/p/astral-codex-ten-posts-in-chronological
I haven't bothered to update it since posting yet and Scott turned on the Previous/Next post buttons shortly after I posted it so it kinda lost some utility but there ya go.
This is way more convenient than anything that Substack offers!
If you decide to update it, I have a suggestion: start lines with an emoji depending on the article type; for example 🎤 for open threads, 📚 for book reviews, 🐉 for fiction (just the first things that came to my mind). Will make it easier to find stuff.
That's probably pretty doable when I get around to it, will add a little color even.
From CNN: "42% of CEOs say AI could destroy humanity in five to ten years"
"Sonnenfeld said the survey included responses from 119 CEOs from a cross-section of business, including Walmart CEO Doug McMillion, Coca-Cola CEO James Quincy, the leaders of IT companies like Xerox and Zoom as well as CEOs from pharmaceutical, media and manufacturing."
Looks like there is a "fire alarm for AI" after all. Of course, no "orderly exit from the building" is forthcoming even so, but it's been amusing to observe the progression of this meme from wacky obscure contrarian forums to the top of mainstream.
This is a total throwback to a discussion in an earlier open thread about penis stealing. I’ve been pondering it. I am convinced what they really meant was not that that their organs disappeared from between their legs, but that they were suddenly unable to have an erection which is effectively stealing your penis also makes a lot more sense
That would seem like an overreaction. "Hey, I suddenly lost the ability to have erection in public, and I think this person is responsible; kill him!" "Damn, me too! Careful, everyone!"
Who said in public? I reckon they just claimed it was the truth .Were they required to show the blank space between their legs before further action was taken? Heh. I jest
> kill him!
I’m not an expert, but my impression is, it was usually “kill her!”
Most articles avoid mentioning the gender of the "thieves/witches/sorcerers"; some mention men; some mention women. Occasionally people accuse their food of making their penises (or nipples - there is also a women's version) disappear.
Nipples? The plot thickens Watson
I still think its about erections. Nipples and penises. They both come from the heart.
I don’t think so. I think most women know it’s pretty easy to steal a guys mojo. And then there’s the whole voodoo thing of stealing someone’s mojo I don’t see how that is more weird than the idea that somebody magically makes your penis fall off and there’s quite a lot of literature around it. I don’t find it very hard to believe. All kinds of strange, emotional dislocations can affect a man’s ability to get it up, and when you affect a man’s ability to get it up, he’s definitely lost something. What better than to blame a witch who’s giving you the evil eye i.e. make your dick shrink
Hey everyone, there was a website I've seen a few people mention here that I've lost URL to. It's all about health conditions and how to address them in layman's terms. This is a very vague description, but I think it was ran by someone in the rational adjacent community. It is not WebMD or any of the websites that show up when you google anything health related. If anyone knows what I'm talking about, thank you in advance.
I'm a fan of painscience.com. Not sure if this is what you're talking about, but I found it very useful for no-nonsense evidence-based reviews of various kinds of chronic pains and aches.
Yes, this is exactly it. I forgot it was pain related, not just health. Thank you!
Hi! Thanks everyone who responded to my questions about marriage! Now that I think I have a framework for solving that, I am wondering how to systematically attack depression.
I kind of feel like I am dreaming all the time even though I’m awake, and I cannot conceptualize that the future will be better than the present, nor formulate a desire and enact it. It is sort of like my entire mind is just TV static and sometimes I drop into some kind of catatonia where my body refuses to move at all or I go very numb while driving and straddle for several seconds before my limbic system half-heartedly decides that because I would probably survive a crash at 25 miles per hour I should probably drive in the lane. What does it mean that there is no oversight over the universe and everyone’s suffering is totally arbitrary and basically unbounded? What do you do if you do not think there is intelligent design beyond optimization algorithms and non-existence is your most preferred state?
How does this usually get solved? What does it mean to have a positive outlook on your own future and how do you acquire this? I think the Richard Dawkins atheists have some kind of answer to this, but it requires you to espouse their value system which is not really possible after you think about the implications of the science they’re talking about for five minutes. I think a better mode of relation is possible, but those people are deluded, and I am wondering if anyone who’s followed their road of insight past the depression has a nicer system. I think Joscha Bach has some ideas about this but he doesn’t seemed to have totally solved the depression bit. I think Sarah Perry solved this by quitting carbs.
I think the most important part is to keep remembering that what you feel is *chemistry* of your body, which is a separate issue from whether there is an intelligent designer in the universe.
I mean, if you accidentally broke your leg, you wouldn't assume that the pain you feel is actually about e.g. the war in Ukraine. You would clearly see those two as separate things. In exactly the same sense, your depression, and metaphysical questions about the universe, are two separate things. Change the chemistry, and the universe becomes your enjoyable playground.
> What does it mean to have a positive outlook on your own future and how do you acquire this?
Your body chemistry makes you happy, and then you rationalize the feeling.
(Predictable reaction of a depressed person: "But isn't that *fake* happiness? I would rather suffer pointlessly than enjoy fake happiness." Well, your sadness is fake exactly the same, and yet you have no problem indulging in it, and searching for philosophical justifications of it. Somehow sadness feels higher-status than happiness; but that is just the depression talking.)
During summer, spend a lot of time outside in the sun. During winter, install stronger lights at your home. Exercise regularly. Listen to the kinds of music that give you energy. Meet non-depressed friends.
>nor formulate a desire and enact it.
Have someone else formulate it. One of my many "one of these days" projects is to write a mimicry of one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/millers-prologue-and-tale). And you can too!
>What do you do if you do not think there is intelligent design beyond optimization algorithms
What would it look like if there were? Make it look like that.
My partner wants to start a new career. She's currently a lecturer + atmospheric modeller at the University of Cambridge, UK. Her education is all in physical geography, though she's published on bayesian modelling so obviously numerate. She can code but she doesn't want to be a full-time coder, though some coding would be fine.
What industry needs enough people like this that they'd consider hiring someone with her background? What terms should she use in a search?
Data science roles would likely be highly suitable. who you know, not what you know applies as always to find good openings.
Would encourage to look at legal industry as many law firms are desperately trying to spin up DS teams currently.
Could you say more about data science for law firms? I hadn't heard that before.
Huge variety of projects and needs. Many large firms are hyped up on Generative AI (rightfully so) and seeking to remain competitive and relevant. others help clients defend or litigate using data
Okay, I know it's the "Daily Mail" but bear with me, this one is too good to pass up.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12189773/Pentagon-whistleblower-says-Vatican-aware-existence-non-human-intelligences.html
"A Pentagon whistleblower has claimed the Vatican is aware of the existence of non-human intelligences and helped the US retrieve a downed UFO from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini at the end of the Second World War.
David Grusch, 36, served 14 years in the Air Force and is a decorated Afghanistan combat officer who worked for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).
His role was to act as the NRO's representative when dealing with the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. The task force was specifically set up to investigate UFOs.
He has spoken out to say the US has run a top secret UFO retrieval program for decades and claimed the 'Vatican was involved' in the first ever UFO crash.
Grusch said the first recovery of a UFO was in Magenta, Italy in 1933 and it was held by Mussolini's Italian government until 1944-1945 when Pope Pius XII tipped America off about it."
Yes! It wouldn't be a world-spanning decades-long conspiracy without us Papists getting involved, now would it? 😁
I have no idea if this is the same UFO guy who was recently in the news but the levels are getting too confusing for me: are we on truth-disinformation-counter-truth-deliberate distraction-UFOs are real-that's what the Deep State wants you to think Level 99 now or what?
EDIT: Oh, I love this bit:
"Dailymail.com has contacted the Vatican for comment. "
I wonder what unfortunate son-of-a-gun in which Dicastery is going to have *that* one slung across the desk? 😁
It all makes sense. Jesus was a space alien, the first scout on Earth. The rest of the Zorblaxian fleet (including the second clone of Jesus) is arriving soon. The Catholic church was tasked with maximizing human population, because after the long travel Zorblaxians will be really hungry.
That explains everything! 😁
Sounds like the whistleblower all the conspiracy "skeptics" were waiting for! Now they have to believe in aliens. Remember, the whole argument against conspiracies was "these institutions aren't nearly competent enough to hide a conspiracy, they wouldn't be able to keep them secret for that long. Someone would tell eventually."
Well, someone told. Welcome the aliens!
No, seriously though, who am I kidding, it's not like this guy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haim_Eshed) changed anyone's mind either, even though he's precisely the person who would know if this was really happening. The "skeptics" would continue to shout "no evidence!!!", their precious mantra, even as they were beamed up by the LGM. There's no level of cognitive dissonance they won't tolerate, as long as they can continue to lick the boots of those in power.
From the article you linked:
> He also stated that US president Donald Trump was aware of this and was "on the verge" of informing everyone of their existence, but was stopped by the "Galactic Federation", who wished to prevent mass hysteria.
Since when has Trump ever kept his mouth shut?
Yeah, mostly it makes me wonder, how much of the current UFO stuff is coming from this one guy, David Grusch?
> I wonder what unfortunate son-of-a-gun in which Dicastery is going to have that one slung across the desk?
I'm hoping for a snarky answer in which angels count as UFOs, and God counts as an "extra-terrestrial intelligence". Maybe implying an equivalence between this guy and Jacob:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXw6hC7hxBA
(This is my favorite Star Trek intro, in that it reliably puts a huge grin on my face.)
Max Miller has another fun history/cooking episode up:
The 1853 Dinner In A Dinosaur
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zphAG_iBWR0
No one can utter the words "Reptilian Repast" with quite the same level of gravitas as Max Miller can.
He has a very high charisma roll.
Technically it's a score or just 'high charisma', means he makes the rolls more often...
The score is traditionally determined by a roll.
Would that be metonymy or synecdoche? The score is related to the roll, but also the score is a part of the result which is often referred to as a roll...
Thanks Melvin. Will check it out.
Was this supposed to be a reply?
There are running shoes with some cushioning, some with lots of cushioning, and some with none at all (e.g. barefoot shoes, sandals). Does anyone know of any good scientific evidence that any of these different types of shoes are effective at preventing injury in runners?
I think running in general is very individual based on biomechanics. Some people are more built for it than others. This also extends to choice of shoes. I've heard that a lot of people get knee issues with more cushioned shoes that subside after going to minimalist shoes. I'm a bit the opposite. I like a toe to heel rise, commonly found in cushioned shoes, because otherwise my achilles tendons take more of a beating.
I think the scientific evidence in the field seems weak because it's so hard to control for other variables, as other commenters mentioned, but I'm not an expert.
barefoot: better for strengthening your feet and somewhat reducing impact compared to lightly cushioned if you can manage to not heel strike.
cushioned: better for your knees.
But there's no way you won't fuck up your joints without cushioning if you intend to run something like >3 hours a week.
My running path was cushioned -> lightly-cushioned -> dabbling with barefoot -> back to lightly-cushioned.
Would say overtraining is the real injury-maker. The key for me was crosstraining with swimming and weights, instead of getting fixated on pure running.
Same here. Repetitive motion injuries take forever to heal, so avoiding them by varying your routine is key.
Lots of good answers already. My personal take here is that doing some barefoot or near barefoot running is good. It can probably help running form and strengthen the plantar fascia, et cetera.
But for most of us, especially those not young / light / highly experienced, barefoot running should be limited to a few sprints across a grassy field. (Relatively high intensity, but low volume.) I can't run on paved surfaces without mid-to heavy cushioned shoes, or I start getting injured.
I'm not citing any of this, but generally speaking low-ish volumes of mid-high intensity strength training is effective for injury prevention, and that's the basic concept being mimicked here.
Here's a 2014 survey paper on running barefoot or in minimalist shoes:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4212355/
The TLDR is that there's moderate evidence that barefoot/minimalist runners tend to favor a measurably different running pattern from runners wearing traditional running shoes, but there's nowhere near enough evidence available to draw meaningful conclusions about injury risk or running performance.
That's nine years old, though, so newer studies may have overtaken it.
It's more-or-less impossible to control other variables accurately-enough to have anything approaching a real study. I'm sure someone has tried. The safest shoe is going to be the one that the individual will wear in the safest way realistically possible for that individual. I know that's a cop-out, but it's really unfortunately the case. It's not like squatting 3 plates, where it's just obviously true that being barefoot is the best choice: there's no chance that you'll be performing that movement on an a variety of uneven surfaces over a thousand times in the span of an hour. If nobody ran anywhere except on perfectly flat tracks of uncompacted HOA-approved lawn turf at low ambient humidity, and never did so without having spent years learning to run and walk barefoot properly, and also were only ever doing zone-2 run/walks or all-out sprints, there'd be a ton of science showing that the closer you are to barefoot while running the safer you are.
Also let's be honest -- the runner version of the "swimmer's body" fallacy probably causes a majority of normal running injuries. So many people you see out there pounding the pavement, visibly in zone 3 would be better off swinging a kettlebell or going for a nice hike.
I hadn't heard of the "swimmer's body" fallacy before, so I looked it up. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
For those others reading it who also haven't heard of it, it's closely related to the "wet streets cause rain" fallacy (i.e. getting case and effect backwards). Specifically, the"swimmer's body" fallacy is mistaking a selection factor for an effect. The observation is that high-level competitive swimmers (almost?) always have lean bodies with very well-defined muscle, from which it's tempting to conclude that swimming as exercise will get you a body like that. But the actual reason is that you need that physique (in addition to high levels of talent and skill) to be able to compete at high levels of swimming: that's the body type that's capable of having the highest ratio of whole-body strength to weight. You'll see very similar body types at the high levels of other activities that require a very high strength-to-weight ratio, such as dance (especially ballet), sprinting, gymnastics, and the lighter weight classes of stuff like powerlifting, boxing, and greco-roman wresting.
Yes exactly. If running were magically capable of giving a person a Kenyan's body, the world would be a very different place and there'd be a lot more competition around the 2-hour mark for marathons.
Googling brought up two reviews that compared barefoot with normal running and found no difference in injury rates:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-019-01238-y
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27801744/
Not conclusive, but suggestive, at least. I run in barefoot running shoes because I've found it helps reduce hip/glute pain I have (as a result of my ankylosing spondylitis). Like most athletic activities, it's probably just a "try everything out and see what works best for you" kind of thing. Most running injuries (regardless of form) are from pushing too hard and not enough recovery time.
Meanwhile, I like the Hoka super cushioned ones because they help me with knee pain compared to “standard” running shoes. Best bet is to try several types and pick for yourself, it’s highly personal.
What about the whole "ow, I stepped on something sharp" class of injury?
If you're on pavement and paying attention, you can see and avoid objects large enough to be a problem, though you might have to stop and pick something smaller out of your foot every now and then. I used to live next to a frat house where they threw glass bottles onto the sidewalk, and for reasons I do not remember I sometimes walked through there barefoot.
don't jog through construction sites
Podcast about AI (note: I have not listened to this so I don't know if it's good, bad or indifferent):
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/podcast/2023/06/trusting-ai-not-to-lie-lock-and-code-s04e12
"Trusting AI not to lie: The cost of truth
In May, a lawyer who was defending their client in a lawsuit against Columbia's biggest airline, Avianca, submitted a legal filing before a court in Manhattan, New York, that listed several previous cases as support for their main argument to continue the lawsuit.
But when the court reviewed the lawyer's citations, it found something curious: Several were entirely fabricated.
The lawyer in question had gotten the help of another attorney who, in scrounging around for legal precedent to cite, utilized the "services" of ChatGPT.
ChatGPT was wrong. So why do so many people believe it's always right?
Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Malwarebytes security evangelist Mark Stockley and Malwarebytes Labs editor-in-chief Anna Brading to discuss the potential consequences of companies and individuals embracing natural language processing tools—like ChatGPT and Google's Bard—as arbiters of truth. Far from being understood simply as chatbots that can produce remarkable mimicries of human speech and dialogue, these tools are becoming sources of truth for countless individuals, while also gaining attraction amongst companies that see artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLM) as the future, no matter what industry they operate in.
The future could look eerily similar to an earlier change in translation services, said Stockley, who witnessed the rapid displacement of human workers in favor of basic AI tools. The tools were far, far cheaper, but the quality of the translations—of the truth, Stockley said—was worse.
"That is an example of exactly this technology coming in and being treated as the arbiter of truth in the sense that there is a cost to how much truth we want."
The Achilles Heel of the project(s) is exposed when we consider that AI will happily give us a well-reasoned argument -- using data it fabricated. Hell, we do that.
As usual in such matters, I'd like to point out that ChatGPT did not lie to these lawyers. It's as incapable of lying as it is of telling the truth. They lied to themselves. They performed the equivalent of rolling 10d10 to look up random words in a legal dictionary then paying a random third-world teenager to string them together; then submitted the result as an official legal brief. What were they expecting to happen ? Accolades ?
Nice turn of phrase.
LegalEagle made a video on those lawyers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqSYljRYDEM
Of note, they lied to the court about a vacation, ignored ChatGPT telling them it couldn't offer legal advice, and didn't know what the lookup tables numbers of the cases meant.
Also they weren't 'defending' their client against the airline, they were trying to sue the airline after the window for suit had expired, and were responding to the airline's motion to dismiss.
LOL....so some real legal eagles there, is what you're saying?
Hiring opportunity from the Alignment Research Center --
ARC is hiring theoretical researchers:
"ARC is based in Berkeley, California, and we would prefer people who can work full-time from our office, but we are open to discussing remote or part-time arrangements in some circumstances. We can sponsor visas and are H-1B cap-exempt."
"...we have more of a need for people with a strong theoretical background (in math, physics or computer science, for example), but we remain open to anyone who is excited about getting involved in AI alignment, even if they do not have an existing research record.""
"Our current interview process involves:
3-hour take-home test involving math and computer science puzzles
30-minute non-technical phone call
1-day onsite interview
We will compensate candidates for their time when this is logistically possible.
We will keep applications open until at least the end of August 2023, and will aim to get a final decision back within 6 weeks of receiving an application."
"Salaries are in the $150k–400k range for most people depending on experience."
https://jobs.lever.co/alignment.org/617488b1-d742-4990-a037-b7f0e2ba68c9/apply
https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/d99ikjqdxpMiAFnch/arc-is-hiring-theoretical-researchers-1
Anyone have any beliefs which they know are ill-founded and irrational but are tempted or half inclined to accept all the same? With me it is a feeling that the more skint I feel the more likely I am to win the lottery with the weekly fiver I spend on it. I know it is an absurd idea, and common sense and experience says it is nonsense, but there we are.
I'm not a gambler, besides a small amount spent on the lottery. But sometimes I wonder if chronic gamblers aren't driven at least in part by the same irrational belief that as their funds decrease their chances of a win rise, in some form of natural justice, even though each bet has no causal relation to the bettor's remaining funds, if any, nor any "memory" of previous bets (except maybe in some card games where a pack of cards is dwindling).
I think the word you're looking for is "alief."
In the final week before the 2016 election, I was anxiously checking 538 (which had Trump with a significant chance of winning) and the Princeton Election Consortium, which had Clinton at >99% to win. I knew that the PEC's justifications for their model made absolutely no sense, but I still kept checking it and ignoring 538 just because it was the only way I could sleep at night (metaphorically).
Most of us have this relationship with basic egalitarianism -- we all know that humans aren't equal (individually, in aggregate, or really at all) but we pretend because it is important to do so. Slavoj Zizek, for instance, lauds this as the best/highest kind of ideology. Those who claim to reject it in favor of something more Nietzschean in tone usually are just adding a layer of pretense, not subtracting one.
Egalitarianism comes out of the Christian idea that, while all men are clearly not equal in talent, wealth, character, strength, etc., they are nonetheless equal in *moral* value because they are all loved by God. This is sensible, provided you are a Christian. If there is no God, however, or if there is a God but he does not love all humans, then egalitarianism doesn't follow.
In our post-Christian society we find that most people inherit egalitarianism from their Christian ancestors, but lack a logical foundation for believing it. Yet, we in the West find that egalitarianism works very well. It is an heirloom that we have a strong sentimental attachment to, and it seems to work well. So most people don't try to rock the boat.
In other words, it's an excellent example.
I have to object strongly to both this and the parent post. The parent post talks of equality but should be talking about moral equality specifically. But moral equality is obvious and not in need of justification to this atheist. That’s a truth I can hold to be self-evident. If I need to justify it, I would perhaps point to the veil of ignorance thought experiment, but I don’t feel any compulsion to do so. People often naturally extend it (more weakly) to animals too, even Christians despite that not being a tenant of Christianity. I attest that the relationship is actually opposite to what you state: that egalitarianism is a justification for Christianity not the other way around. No religion that didn’t have that belief could possibly be true.
Finally, it’s not an example of the thing discussed here at all. There is no way to falsify the belief “all humans are morally equal”.
>People often naturally extend it (more weakly) to animals too
Almost no one, except perhaps the most militant of vegans, extends equal moral worth to animals. Most people extend some level of moral worth to animals but it certainly isn't equal.
I would go on to further claim that the unequal moral worth of animals, with whom humans share common ancestors, is an excellent crituque of your statement that the equality of moral worth amongst humans is "obvious".
If modern humans do not have the same moral worth as modern monkeys depsite sharing a common ancestor that necessarily means that at some or many points in history an animal had different moral worth than its parents. So heres the situation: across the history of earth beings have evolved and through the course of their evolution animals have gained different amounts of moral worth and yet somehow every single being on the face of the earth today that can be classified as a human, despite great variation in traits amongst such beings, has exactly the same moral worth. That doesn't sound like the kind of statement that is "obviously true" if anything it sounds much closer to a statement which is obviously false.
Now perhaps we can retain moral equality as a useful fiction that facilitates cooperation even if it is not precisely correct. Or if we are really intent on believing on equality we can take true equality in the modern world as a pure moral axiom and accept that this must entail some counterintuitive valuations somewhere in evolutionary history.
But to claim that moral equality is merely "obvious" is both arrogant and poorly thought out.
There’s interesting questions about whether I should extend equal moral weight to various non-human entities (an intelligent extraterrestrial? an AI? potential future people?), but that in no way makes it at all challenging to place equal moral weight on all living humans.
There is a huge difference between
"It is not at all challenging to do something" and "it is obviously correct to do that thing" you initially claimed something much stronger than you are defending here.
Moral equality is not as obvious as you think: it is an axiom taken on faith. Before Christianity, where are the egalitarian societies? Even after Christianity began it took hundreds of years for the West to really grok the idea that all people are morally equal, to realize the implications. Now we're coasting on cultural inertia.
Sometimes I wish we could grab a Roman circa 100 BC, or a Germanic tribesman circa 100 AD, or a Viking circa 800 AD, and ask them a few questions. We are so used to Christianized thought that it can be hard to image people who had a pre-Christian perspective. Try asking an Athenian about the veil of ignorance. "What kind of society would you want if you didn't know who you would be in it?" "The one I live in now." "But what if you were born a slave?" "Then I would be a slave. 'That some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.' If I was born with a slave nature, it is right I should be a slave to my betters."
http://www.wright.edu/~christopher.oldstone-moore/Aristotleslavery.htm
The historical details are irrelevant. Lots of ideas took a long time to be formed, but once they have been formulated are completely obvious. Most of mathematics is this way: consider the number zero for example. I don’t have to be Hindu to know that zero is a correct and useful concept.
I think the idea of equality was a *gradual* process; expanding the circle of "equals". At the beginning of this process is chimpanzee politics, where the alpha male can be overthrown by a coalition of other males. At the end... perhaps one day the borders will be abolished, and humans will be treated as equals regardless of their country of birth.
After Christianity, where are the egalitarian societies for most of the next two millenia?
Egalitarianism is a modern idea that grew out of the Enlightenment in the past few centuries. It's fair to say that it evolved in historically Christian parts of the world, but it's also true that it has its roots in a movement closely tied to the decline of Christianity, not in Christianity itself.
Thank you for saying so. Given that Slavoj Zizek deliberately calls himself a Christian Atheist for this reason (and praises Protestantism for making atheism possible), I can't disagree. I will note that some will claim a movement in the direction of egalitarianism elsewhere and before Christianity, but I attach no particular importance to the claims.
However, it is worth pointing out that there is a logical framework for egalitarianism as an ideology even post-Christianity. It's a fun inversion of the old reason-leading-to-faith metaphor that Christian apologists used in days gone by: the scaffolding. You build a scaffolding and then build a church, which once solid no longer needs the scaffolding. In the original sense, reason is the scaffolding, faith the church. As far as egalitarianism is concerned, we've built up a vast architecture, a temple dedicated to it and even if the scaffolding of the original Christanity falls away the structure will remain. For instance, some Greek once thanked the gods that he was born male, free, and Athenian. A nice thought, but we now instead are accustomed to invert this with veil-of-ignorance thought experiments such as: imagine you're about to be born and have no idea what kind of person you'll be born as. Design the society you want (or solve the trolley problem, or whatever).
"Given that Slavoj Zizek deliberately calls himself a Christian Atheist for this reason (and praises Protestantism for making atheism possible)"
Right, I need some clarification here. My impression is that this guy likes being a gadfly and will put out provocative statements, but is he saying that under Catholicism/Orthodoxy atheism was impossible - why? Possible reasons below:
(1) Both churches too strong and intertwined with state, making prosecution of heresy/atheism feasible so even if you were an atheist, you outwardly conformed and never told anyone openly you didn't believe in all that shit?
(2) Protestantism, despite early efforts at heresy-hunting and conformity of belief themselves, suffered from the problem right from the beginning that the major reformers had widely differing views. So if you didn't agree with the Lutheran/Calvinist/Whatever doctrine on A, B or C, you could move to a different denomination/church or even set up your own one.
(3) Keep doing this for a couple of centuries, eventually everyone is tired of fighting doctrinal wars inside their breakaway churches and literal wars outside between denominations, so agree to disagree. You're a Christian if you say you are. Mainstream churches become more liberal over time (even if there are occasional bumps in the road, e.g. Anglicanism and the Tractarian Movement and the reaction to No-Popery Here) and eventually just decline softly into "everyone should be nice because niceness is nice, we're ethical not moral, the only sin is selfishness and racism and pollution and whatever the Zeitgeist says is bad".
(4) You can therefore be functionally an atheist and only very technically a Christian and still be a fully-paid up Protestant. Protestantism broke the unity and power of the church and put the authority into the hands of the individual as to what they did or did not believe.
Heck, you can even be clergy and an atheist!
https://owlcation.com/humanities/Atheists-in-the-Pulpit-Non-Believers-in-the-Clergy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clergy_Project
The argument, as I understand it, is that first the Western Church (as opposed to Orthodoxy) made faith a discursive thing -- a consent with the will to a proposition held in the intellect. Before this, the argument goes, it was more about living in such a way as to remain in communion with one's bishop (the Orthodox would say they're still this way, or at least Nassim Taleb would; he makes this argument too). Once this happened, it was only a matter of time before something (Protestantism) separated what little the christian still does (sacrament/ritual) from what he says/thinks (words in his mouth/mind). Thus, the theory goes, only once one has fully reduced God to words in one's mind can one say "eh yeah no thanks actually". Further (again according to this theory -- I'm not claiming any of this myself), a good Orthodox fellow can live his whole life keeping the fasts, attending the rituals, practicing the virtues without any specific thinking about whether or not 'God' is 'real'.
"a good Orthodox fellow can live his whole life keeping the fasts, attending the rituals, practicing the virtues without any specific thinking about whether or not 'God' is 'real'"
I have seen this philosophy professed by liberal Christians; that what matters is not orthodoxy but orthopraxy. So long as everyone says the same prayers or the clergy dress in the proper vestments, it doesn't matter if you're crossing your fingers as you say the Creed or if the clergy person is a trans lesbian in a domestic partnership with 'her' pregnant 'wife'.
The problem there is that this rapidly turns into a two-tier faith, where the educated have a subtle and indeed rationalised away belief in belief, while the ordinary people have a folk religion where they don't know what the tenets of the faith are and their practices are next door to superstition and magic. Leave the understanding of what the belief is up to the clergy and the monastics because it's none of your affair, and you may get zealous monks on Mount Athos - or you may get Bishop Spong.
And then we get the usual attacks by freethinkers that it's all superstition and it's down to the clergy being power-seeking and imposing on the credulous, ignorant laity by terrorising them with the fear of Hell, and that nobody understands what they are gabbling in their prayers so they should just dump religion altogether and believe in science instead.
Oh, that was only the atheist-downstream-from-Protestantism bit. The reason he's Christian is he says that it is irreplacably profound when God dies to Himself on the cross, when even God becomes an atheist: "My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?" That is, only Christianity places the dividing line right through God himself: no longer a distant despot but one who doubts and suffers. This suffering atheist god is 'true', for Zizek, despite not being 'real'.
> even if the scaffolding of the original Christanity falls away the structure will remain.
I want this to be true, I hope that this is true, but I don't see much evidence that this is true.
I've read with compulsive gambling, at a deep level those people actually want to lose - they have a life view that the universe is out to get them and losing confirms that. At a more generic level people like consistency more than their conscious goals? So I think your mention of natural justice is hitting on something but sadly they already view themselves as condemned men.
It's a hard one to have intuition about. I've gambled extensively, ultimately profitably but the journey has certainly involved losses at points, emotions rather than actions have definitely moved outside my control but it still leaves my explanation above feeling very alien.
I can speak to the market/counterparty/universe becomes your enemy and you feel it "owes" you - again back to natural justice. So for me the irrational belief is thinking the owing will translate into a win. When you feel close to broke, do you generally hold that the world has done you over a bit - and are thus owed some recompense?
"want" and "lose" are complex concepts for the compulsive gambler. They're addicted to the near-miss (which some studies show they experience the way the non-addicted experience winning), almost certainly consciously want to win, and if we're not refusing to admit that pepole do things unconsciously also are likely engaging in self-harm.
Status quo bias. I keep stuff I'd never take if it was offered to me for free.
That it's financially sensible to have no debt.
I know intellectually that as long as you have the ability to service the debt and you're earning a return that exceeds the interest, debt is good. But my animal brain insists that debt-free is the only way to be.
Yeah I paid off a very low rate mortgage a decade ahead of time just because it felt good. I knew it was stupid.
I paid off a high rate mortgage a decade ahead of time just because it felt good. The stupid part was having opted for a 15 year note instead of a 30 year note, because 30 years just seemed like an unimaginably long time. With the lower monthly payment, I could have paid it off even faster.
With the whole "return that exceeds the interest" bit, to even get to that point needs someone to have given you a low interest rate debt in the first place, and/or for that high return to have an embedded risk.
Most forms of the "have the ability to service the debt and get more returns elsewhere" plan do have extra risks that are easy to miss when thinking about it explicitly, but that the animal brain expects to exist anyway.
After seeing things like the 2008 financial crash and COVID, I'm personally trying to be more aware of the big picture risks in general.
I mean, yes, but I think you’re overestimating how hard it is to fulfil those conditions.
The average home loan is a very good financial decision for the borrower, even taking tail risk scenarios into account.
Especially as the risks are correlated. You may lose your job (and thus ability to service the debt) at the same time your stocks tank.
Yep, that's a good one. Obviously it depends how "productive" the money borrowed will be.
Philosopher Sir Francis Bacon said "Give money wings, and it will likely fly back with more!"
I get to visit Berkeley this month. Anything there you think would be especially interesting to an average ACX reader, like meetups or something? I'm mainly interested in computer/tech stuff. Also I'm a foreigner so it doesn't have to be unique to Berkeley, stuff that are considered generic in US are fine as well.
There's a computer history museum in the south bay you might find interesting. Berkeley itself has nice hiking and restaurants of various kinds.
Bay area LW meetup has a Google group, which seems like a better-targeted place to put this question
TIL about the Bielefield conspiracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_conspiracy) - a German internet meme about a German city not existing. You ask someone if they've ever been there or knows anyone who has, and if they say "yes", then clearly they're in on the conspiracy (or were duped themselves), and if they say "no", well... QED.
The town 'resolved' this in 2019 by offering a million Euro bounty for proof of its non-existence then when nobody claimed the bounty, they decided that since there's No Evidence for their non-existence, they must exist after all. (And then they dropped a rock with a QR code into the park to commemorate it)
... I can't tell if all those logical fallacies cancel out into good logic or not.
Whoa, I think I've seen an homage to that in a video game.
As someone from a country with a popular "It does not exist!" meme (ie. Finland), I can only hazard a guess to how tired anyone from Bielefeld must be about hearing this stupid pseudo-joke.
People who play hockey know you exist!
LOL, who would be so stupid to try to get a bounty from a non-existent city?
what's next, trying to win a rock-climbing competition organized by Bigfoot? if you don't participate, it means that Bigfoot wins!
It would seem to be triviaully easy (though not necessarily cheap or quick, depending on where you start) to test by going to the location marked on the map and checking whether there's a city there. At that point, you either see a city or you get inducted into the conspiracy yourself.
It's also possible, I suppose, that the conspiracy has gone so far as to construct a bunch of buildings in the middle of the countryside and persuade three hundred thousand people to live there.
In every successful conspiracy there comes a point where the cover-up becomes so detailed and elaborate that it ceases to be a conspiracy.
See also: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-4006
> Description: SCP-4006 is a probabilistic anomaly affecting the state of Massachusetts, USA. SCP-4006 works to perpetuate the idea that Massachusetts is a populated state with a government, infrastructure, economy, various population centers, et cetera. Due to this, the true nature of Massachusetts is entirely unknown to the public;
> Massachusetts has no history of human occupation.
Now you're getting me wondering how -few- people one would need to pretend you have 300,000 actually there.
See, you're clearly in on the conspiracy. That's exactly how THEY want you to think.
I am wondering if there is something like an anti- placebo effect. If you are extremely pessimistic about recovering, you may not feel any improvements to your health even though the medicines are working. Clinical trials account for placebo effects but there is no way to account for the reverse
Also has there been any research on placebo effects like are there a small set of people who are more prone to placebo effects irrespective of disease, are highly optimistic.
Isn't letting yourself fall asleep a pretty good example of this? There are some times after a head injury or the like where a hospital won't let you fall asleep, because you can slip into a coma. So, assumedly if you were on your own and thought you were going to die, you might let yourself drift off, rather than focus on staying awake.
I get that this is to some degree a treatment choice thing, but it's pretty well documented that stress/depression lead you to die a lot more easily; spouses usually die pretty close together in time. Seems like this would be the case if you don't think that you'll recover.
I think that the don't-sleep-after-a-head-injury idea is a myth (pretty sure anyway), and the reason it's done at hospitals is so they can monitor you and know asap if you suddenly experience worse symptoms.
Plus it never made sense to me why sleeping would cause brain damage to get worse.
There are assessments out there for suggestibility (part of assessing someone for success under hypnosis). I wonder if those have been used to predict placebo outcomes. Optimism is somewhat different from suggestibility I'd say but maybe there's overlap.
Yes, it's called the nocebo effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo
Reading that it seems like nocebo is just the normal placebo effect except for side effects. Is there an effect where pessimism causes a drug to have no effect?
Well, then I guess the question is - how would they distinguish that from the drug actually being ineffective?
I don't think you're right about the distinction you're trying to make, though - in practice, I bet doctors will call it a nocebo effect.
Looking at the nocebo wikipedia article, I don't think it's actually that good; it goes into minutiae too early.
But you can see this statement:
"In the narrowest sense, a nocebo response occurs when a drug-trial subject's symptoms are worsened by the administration of an inert, sham, or dummy (simulator) treatment..."
I don't see why you'd withhold the term for the case where the drug was medically effective and where a nocebo effect applied, reducing the patient's evaluation of their health - but didn't quite flip the sign to negative.
I'm very interested in doing the digital nomad thing, but I'm concerned about finding an online job because my skills may be difficult to convey to an employer, and I feel there are a lot of people to compete with who also want these limited online jobs. I have a tested IQ of roughly 150 and I have been paid, respectively, something like 30 an hour to write and between 10-100 an hour to paint. I'm in something like the umpteenth percentile of creative output and skill in multiple domains, but all those markets are contracting with AI and they're not reliable enough to give me peace of mind long-term. They're more like windfalls. I have most of a generic business degree completed now, which inclines me also toward the middle-income HR type fields where layoffs are happening in online roles.
My questions are A) does anyone have experience with a similar situation, or just digital nomadism broadly (I'd love to hear your thoughts even if you don't,) and B) does anybody want to hire a digital assistant who can write you a novel and paint your portrait, lol. Maybe C) should I just drop everything and do a coding bootcamp. I have the cash.
On the subject of coding bootcamps, when I have had the chance to interview people who are fresh out of coding bootcamps, I have found such people to generally be very junior sorts of coders. (except in the case of people who were -instructors- at the bootcamp).
Given how much AI is likely to be able to reform how coding works, I wouldn't assume that particular career path is more resistant to change than the art and hr paths (potentially in higher demand). You might find yourself wanting to learn a form of combined code + prompt engineering that is so new that most bootcamps don't have an understanding of it.
Finishing your generic business degree out is probably worth the time since for all that your skills are "hard to explain to potential employers", you can at a minimum wave the degree at them to get your foot into the interview room.
Think quite a lot about what electives you take, those may end up pulling more practical weight in your life than the actual centerline of the business degree.
digital nomads I've met/heard about either work in tech or reached something sustainable in creative endeavors.
do you really need peace of mind long-term? seems to go against pursuing unconventional/creative career as you seem interested in.
Some days I seriously think about taking the bit of cash I have from my last book windfall, dropping out, and moving to the middle of nowhere to eke out the next four years doing creative work. But doing the whole starving artist thing is not very appealing, especially when you have a respectable middle-class family that will think you've gone insane. If I can scale my income before I finish college and need to get a real job, then I'll do that. But most days I doubt.
heh yeah, going more conventional under family pressure, making oneself miserable until eventually working up the courage to get rid of the shackles is an archetype (last I've heard the story is Simu Liu's autobio).
finishing college maybe worth it still if unexciting, isn't it pretty chill anyway.
if you can find some artist community can probably get good personal stories about getting over family expectations and insecurity and all those typical issues.
hmm actly, recently met an english lit grad who probably mostly wants to create, taught himself coding, worked for some crypto trading sh*t, probably made a bit of money, now developing his game as his novel proved too hard to get people to read. maybe I should connect you guys.
Yeah I'd definitely be open to meeting this person. I followed you on Twitter under a similar name btw, so you should see that. I am aware of this archetype you mention, but of course nothing is ever as conceptually pure in reality. My family aren't so much the antagonists of the dynamic so framed, more the resting point and renewer of my own neuroticism about pursuing talents being potentially less rewarding than a stabler, normal life. Romanticism can lead a person astray more often than not, and one should be exceedingly certain if they're going to buck the normal path. Especially in such a potentially potential-destroying way. You choose certain aspects of yourself always at the cost of others.
oh hey, where do we find your content?
don't see anything on substack.
curious to hear what you've been trying. you can reach me at
https://twitter.com/love_of_reason
(and further social links in the description there)
I'll reach out to you on twitter for my art account, and my books can be found by googling my handle.
What about using your eye for design and aesthetics in a role as a craftsman of some sort, or something like remodeling, interior designn, gardening, carpentry, or even general contracting? In my experience, there are many rich people who are constantly rebuilding and renovating their properties, and are _very_ finicky and constantly complain they can't depend on anyone to "do it right".
These people I suspect will pay handsomely for someone a bit - this is not PC but whtaevs - more 'like' them than most ppl in the construction trade. In essence, you become a translator between two cultures that you understand.
Just a thought, this is how many of my peer group have organized their lives to make a living but also have some time/money left over for individual pursuits (playing music, writing, painting, acting etc)
Hmm I guess I failed to address the "remote" part. There are analogues, but as you say there is a lot of competition.
Wherever you are at the moment though, I hypothesize there will be finicky rich people obsessively remodeling their bathrooms. And frankly, once you're done it may be best to get to somewhere else as customers can become impossible to handle.
hard no to C
country to popular belief, programming isnt somehow good at hiring
It *should be* but they fundamentally still do sociable personality/con artist bait interviews resume with fake promises, processes that filter people out before a technical interview with someone (they hope) knows anything about programming.
You have to make it past the hr department before talking to a lead programmer so the same difficulty you have there will likely carry over.
are you serious?!
imo tech industry is a singular reasonably well-paying reasonably in-demand industry that can tolerate quite a ton of human weirdness.
if you're hanging out anywhere near rationalist communities you have seen a lot of damn weird people who manage to hold a programmer job.
some IT roles could be similar, though further away from remote and further away from well-paying.
what roles do you have in mind that are more tolerant to weirdness and make use of the guy's intelligence?
define weirdness
if you mean lgbtqai+bffbbqjill move to silicon valley and yourll probably be better then anywhere else
If your say, even mildly conservative that be a terrible idea
I'm not aware of any part of society that is managing real (ie not skin deep) diversity, I know no one who has solved hiring, I know no one who has solved education beyond a terrible good hearts law of signaling your were raised middle class and did years of nonsense.
Programming could be doing automated leet code as their layer 1 filter and maybe that would actually be slightly better; but no they dont at least not for the jobs I apply for, and for all I know that would only slightly improve the filtering process for me but not get better overall results because its not a trivial issue to have middle managers pick people who dont fit into nice boxes.
In utah, theres a major bias for workplaces to pick from one university, because well for the insufferable puritanical types of mormons they probably went to byu then quickly found a job, from someone they went to church with at the chruchs near byu. Then theres the other mostly mormon but tolerate ones colleges for more tolerant workplaces, and then theres factory's that are 80% immigrants that are vaguely catholic and your more empoyable if you speak spanish. I made the unfortunate choice to be an atheist and drop out of college, opps.
These mechanisms are everywhere and its just hard and society probably wasn't very good at it even pre cancel culture and trump. If you walk to far off your garden path your going to have a hard time; if you dont believe that you probably naturally fit inside your box and cleanly delivered yourself neatly packaged for hr and you got thru an interview process all nice and easy.
weirdness meant on the spectrum, or very low social skills/adjustedness. the normal rat meetup kinda weirdness. plus a range of other unconventional attributes, from clothing and hair colors to being trans.
tech is imo unique among reasonably iq-utilizing and well-paying jobs in tolerating all that stuff (as guess it's pretty unique in work process being to a large extent between the human and the computer). medicine/law/finance/professional services all put much more emphasis on being a normie, and that might be it for reasonably iq-utilizing and well-paying things which aren't completely unique.
I've seen some weird people doing blue collar stuff, again sounds about right re being much less people-focused than most careers.