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.
+1, furthermore it’s a terrible time to be entering the workforce in software. Hiring is gradually opening up but junior jobs are going to be the last roles to come back.
The boom time “we literally cannot hire fast enough” days are done for this cycle.
I have attempted to do the digital nomad thing, and still am to an extent, and I would encourage you to focus on contracting work or...things other than a traditional job.
In my experience, remote work in the US means "within the 50 states" and while I have found extensive lists of companies who are "internationally" remote, on further examination they really, really aren't. The acid test here is:
"Hey, so this job is internationally remote"
"Yes, totally. You can work anywhere you want."
"Alright, so if I join and two months later move to Portugal or Bangkok, you're cool with that?"
"...let me get back to you on that."
I'm not sure if this is because of legal or tax or cultural reasons or some combination but I've had this conversation multiple times, with everything from major multinationals to startups, and if someone doubts it or knows a company that actually does hire for global remote, let me know, I'll apply this week.
If you want to do the digital nomad thing, contract work seems to be the ticket.
As for the lifestyle, I did a bit of bouncing around in my youth. Tons of fun but very much a delay in developing your career and you will feel that later. Also gets old. The expat scene, ie settling down somewhere, is different but has overlap.
How is Houston working out in mid June? Mpls is getting warm and humid enough for me that I’m considering Camelback hydration for my touring bike recreational trips. I guess I am thoroughly acclimated to cooler weather.
When I moved to Mpls a long time ago it was from a cooler climate. 30 below?. No problem. 90 with a dew point of 85? Oh maybe I’ll just stay inside.
Bah, it's not that bad. Still taking 30 minute walks around lunch and enjoying them, probably wouldn't want to be outside all day though. This ain't Arizona though.
Like, a good comparison is if you're walking outside in the sun for an hour in Houston in July, you're probably not having fun, but in Vegas that's like a health hazard, like no, for real, you need to get inside.
Instead there's....kind of a trapped feel. I got caught up in the tech layoffs about two months ago, so I don't feel so free spending money, but Houston doesn't really have outdoors or nature stuff to do and everything in the downtown which is so fun with money...costs money. Being near the opera isn't that cool when you can't afford the opera.
Thank you for the really insightful reply. I'm still weighing the pros and cons, and not hamstringing my career early on is a major factor. On the one hand, I want to find something outside my creative domains that's more consistent. On the other hand, though, if I could just subsist more cheaply for a while, I could afford to keep attempting to scale my writing and art despite the recent hits from AI.
For EU companies it is the same, and the reason is that it's legally very complicated for hte company. Working in another EU country is easy, but if your employer allows you to work in Bangkok, then your company is responsible for following all Thai employment and (mostly) social insurance laws, and is liable for any violation. Obviously they don't know Thai law, so this is just not possible for them to get right with a reasonable amount of effort.
Down below an Australian is wondering about the tipping culture in the US. It’s a perennial theme on regional Reddit to bemoan the export of this part of American culture. It’s not something that worries me about American cultural dominance.
What does is the export of American racial politics. This is from the guardian
The guy is obviously American and has a relatively good point about Brigerton. The problem is his defense of the black cleopatra in Netflix. Money quote (as Americans say).
“but this supposed “blackwashing” was too much for some – and not just the usual suspects. Egypt’s antiquities minister, Zahi Hawass, complained: “This is completely fake. Cleopatra was Greek, meaning that she was light-skinned, not black.” One Egyptian lawyer even sought legal action to block Netflix in the country for its promotion of “Afrocentric thinking”.
“Cleopatra’s precise pigmentation is up for debate: she was descended from the Greek-Macedonian Ptolemaic dynasty. But, the show’s makers argue, the dynasty may have intermarried with local Egyptians over the preceding 250 years, at a time when no one was classified as “black” or “white” anyway. “Why shouldn’t Cleopatra be a melanated sister?” asked Tina Gharavi, the show’s director. “And why do some people need Cleopatra to be white? Her proximity to whiteness seems to give her value, and for some Egyptians it seems to really matter.”
Not only is the American writer here ignoring the present day Egyptian minister but ignoring him based on American ideologies, while claiming the opposite. It’s the Americans who are imposing the idea of whiteness. On Egyptians.
To begin with Cleopatra’s lineage didn’t “ intermarry with local Egyptians over the preceding 250 years”, this isn’t common for conquering aristocrats in general and this dynasty was particularly inbred. I imagine the author is arguing in bad faith here, as he probably knows that.
Now. look at what the Egyptian minister said
“Cleopatra was Greek, meaning that she was light-skinned, not black”
And what the director accuses him and Egyptians of saying
“And why do some people [Egyptians] need Cleopatra to be white?”
The Egyptian minister says “light skinned” and the American says white. So not only do the Americans here believe they can impose their version of history other societies, they are blind to the contextual differences of who is white or not. It’s a term with limited currency even in Europe, where primarily identity is ethnic not based on skin colour.
"But, the show’s makers argue, the dynasty may have intermarried with local Egyptians over the preceding 250 years, at a time when no one was classified as “black” or “white” anyway."
If they think the Egyptians didn't classify along racial categories, they really are ignorant. This is all just social anyway; they want a Famous Black Icon so they go for anyone notable out of Egypt, because that's the culture in Continental Africa everyone knows about and is widely admired.
Why don't they make a show about the Queen of Punt, who definitely *was* a "melanated sister"? Because that's not a big enough name.
It's the same with historic gay activism, where they went "Well Leonardo/Shakespeare/Famous Guy was gay, and they are widely admired, so you have no grounds to be prejudiced against gay people!"
Now that LGBT is more widely accepted, you get much less of "we need to justify ourselves by appeals to authority".
There may well be the Black Newton out there, but they haven't succeeded in naming one yet, so they need to claim "This person came from roughly the same geographical area as black Africans so we're going to claim them for ammunition in the USA racial context wars".
Modern Egyptians and historical claims are the same level of "we are too heirs of the glorious past", due to the Moslem invasions and colonialism and competing claims of the Copts to be the original indigenes.
Anyway, even if Cleopatra's family had intermarried with local Egyptians, she still would not have had Sub-Saharan African features, unlike the West African-descended African-Americans making this show. North African countries tend to be *very* picky about "we are not the same thing as les noirs" which is why the Egyptian guy is so het-up about this.
Yes. The same is happening in Latin America. Look for example at the NYT critizicing the Argentine male football team because there were no Blacks, as if it was a Netflix show. Case
It is even worse because here in LatAm there was and is a lot of mestizaje. In the Argentine case, many players are mestizos.
We don't even use the word "raza", which is race, because it is asociated with the Spanish colonial times, and with the scientific racism that plagued the world before WW2 (with the USA and Germany as prime cases).
Besides, we always most consider class and income inequality when analyzing skin color discrimination.
The only groups especially categorized and treated similarly in LatAm as the US' way are the Indigenous people.
Well, all what I wrote up here and more is always explained to US libs, but not once they concede.
> We don't even use the word "raza", which is race, because it is asociated with the Spanish colonial times
There's a simpler reason and it's because it's just cringe. American media very obviously tries to push their version of identity politics abroad and so, playing along and trying to frame South American issues in that framework is plainly uncool. Also, there aren't enough people who could pass as "White" and make enough money to signal how they're ashamed of their white privilege in social media. "Juan, you're not that white and you make like 5k a year, black americans are waay higher status than you so shut about how much you'd like to share some of your status with them, it's pathetic".
"Look for example at the NYT critizicing the Argentine male football team because there were no Blacks, as if it was a Netflix show."
Aw man, every time I think the NYT can't beclown itself any further... they really decided that North American racial categories could be imposed on the South American nations?
Out of curiosity, I looked up the Wikipedia page on Argentina and it informs me:
"The black population in Argentina declined since the middle 19th century from 15% of the total population in 1857 (Blacks and Mulatto people), to less than 0.5% at present (mainly mulattoes and immigrants from Cape Verde)."
So with a much-reduced black population, there is even less chance of having a black player on an 11-man team than the same thing for a United States American football team.
Black people - 0.5% of Argentinian population
Black people - 12% of USA population
I know that nobody uses atlases anymore, but even the NYT word-extruders can surely use the Internet to look up stuff? Honestly, this is one case where having AI write the damn thing would probably be more accurate and better.
EDIT: For amusement value, the Argentinian player Liverpool have recently signed:
"Alexis Mac Allister was born on 24 December 1998 in Santa Rosa, La Pampa. Mac Allister's older brothers Francis and Kevin are also footballers. They are the sons of Carlos Mac Allister and nephews of Patricio Mac Allister, both retired footballers. Mac Allister is a family name originating from Scotland, although Mac Allister's more recent ancestry is of Irish descent."
I sorta kinda get the impression that the NYT people haven't a clue about the historical reasons for why things are the way they are in other countries.
Well, Australia exported Rupert Murdoch to the US. I think you got the better deal even if you don't like tipping and our bizarre racial obsessions. ;-)
Doesn't he own the Times and the Sunday Times? They don't seem to act like Fox News. He may have worsened America's problems in the course of making a buck from us, but I think if he didn't create Fox News, someone else would have.
Murdoch owns the Times in the UK and a sizable chunk of the tabloid press there. The Schulzbergers own the NY Times. Murdoch owns the WSJ, though, and it has a lineup of rightwing apologists as (fifth)columnists.
Nope. Rupert Murdock's weaponization of the news for rightwing agendas has created a party that's willing to overthrow the government. On top of that the Murdoch news empire has fed into white working-class fears of immigrants, blacks, gays, and uppity women—along the way exacerbating racial politics.
So, purely addressing the chronology, this was going on before Murdoch. Do you remember Rush Limbaugh in the 90s? Black UN helicopters and tales of the Arkansas State Police? And before that, there was stuff like the 700 Club that appealed to a more religious element. That was the market that Murdoch identified and tapped, but he didn't create it. It was there, and under-served, and if he didn't pick up the money laying on the ground, somebody else would have. He may have been the first to do it on television on a country-wide scale with good production values, but the opportunity was there before he took it.
True we can't blame it all on Murdoch, but was the first to transition rightwing propaganda from print and radio to cable television. Radical Conservatism has been woven into the fabric of American culture from before the Civil War. Post WWII, we've got the John Birch Society, and then McCarthy and the HUAC. These types were always on the fringe of the mainstream Republican Party. But then Disaffected Dixiecrats moved en mass over the Republican Party after LBJ's Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his Great Society push. They incorporated their racist agendas into the fever swamps of the far Right. Regan was able to court their votes with carefully crafted "dog whistles". Around the same time fundamentalist Xtians started courting both mainstream Republicans and the creatures living in the Rightwing fever swamps—and the Republican media peeps started learning how to message and broadcast their message from the Fundamentalist ministries that had their own radio stations and TV stations. When cable TV came along the Xtians tapped into cable's ability to reach national audiences. Along the way, the fairness doctrine got chucked out.
The conservative talk radio format dates back to Joe "You Can Go Gargle With Razor Blades!" Pyne in the early 1960s. After the Fairness Doctrine got canned by Ronal Reagan's FCC, Sinclair and Clear Channel started buying up AM stations (which couldn't compete with FM stations in musical formats because of the poor quality of their signal). They fired local staff and management—and they started programming from central location. Enter Limbaugh and the conservative talk radio hosts. And they could tell any lie they wanted to and not have the FCC ding them.
As for Murdoch, started purchasing newspapers in the US in the 1970s including some supermarket tabloids and the NY Post—and his papers either had a previously conservative bent or he made them into conservative mouthpieces. He purchased 20th Century Fox in the mid 1980s. And a decade later he started Fox News, and by the early 2000's it became the King Kong of rightwing media (aka propaganda). Murdoch only became a US citizen so he could purchase US media properties (which foreigners weren't allowed to own). Of course, he backed Trump wholeheartedly. I'm don't know if this would have happened without Murdoch, but if Australians are going to blame the US for importing tipping and US racial classifications on Australia, I can blame Australia for giving us Murdoch. He is a creature that was created by Australian rightwing politics and he is still playing a key role in undermining US democratic institutions. Australia, take him back, please!
> the creatures living in the Rightwing fever swamps
While I generally enjoy your conversation, this kind of dehumanizing rhetoric is too much for me. I'll step out now, and maybe re-engage later on a less loaded topic.
Did Black Lives Matter—or Antifa—or for that matter any of the other bête noires of the Right's paranoia—try to storm the Capitol and overthrow the duly-elected government of the United States? Has BLM conspired to decertify elections? Maybe I missed that.
The last Leftwing insurgencies that I can remember in the US were the SLA and Weathermen—back in the early 70s. After the DoJ put those groups out of business, the Left renounced violence—which was a mistake IMHO, because right now we're sitting ducks for fascist clowns with Armalites.
So the core issue isn't the Cleopatra thing directly, it's that the Guardian, a British paper, kinda intrinsically accepted the American racial framing "black-white" instead of the Egyptian "Greek-African" framing?
Is this actually, like, an intrinsic take in British politics or just the Guardian selling hate? Like, selling hate is strong but selling controversy feels too weak, controversy is everywhere and doesn't push views, Twitter-itteration-for-maximum-controversey-v220.92 feels more like "hate".
But at it's core, if the Guardian had taken the Egyptian interpretation of "Greek-African", would more of less people have clicked on it? Would we be discussing and sharing it here? Maybe to clarify a bit here, when the Guardian or, say, the BBC is trying to sell newspapers in China or India, how much do they push racial angles? Have these people really internalized the American racial model or are they just making a buck?
Because, like, I don't like pushing race hate for money, but race hate sells 'cuz we keep clicking on it and, well, journalism doesn't pay well and I'm not sure this poor soul is writing this way because he truly, ideologically, accepts US racial issues vs just holding corn-pone opinions.
1) Ancient Romans and Egyptians and Macedonians would all have been bemused by someone claiming Black is an identity-category. That's not how their world worked. It doesn't tell you a thing about which Polis, if any, they have citizenship of!
2) The "evidence" for Ptolemaic intermarriage with the native Egyptian population rests on very shaky foundations indeed. (The article then goes into details of ancient epigraphy to dissect that evidence. Conclusion: nothing to see here.)
I think Deveraux's response is unusally mealy-mouthed even for him. He starts off with "hey both sides are wrong here" and then after many paragraphs comes around to "sure she was almost entirely Macedonian ancestry but you never know, she might have also had some Egyptian ancestors and anyway those words don't apply in an ancient context so really both sides are equally wrong so ner".
I mean, it's totally fair to claim that modern racial categories like "black" and "white" don't quite make sense in an ancient context if you want to be pedantic about it. But then again they don't make any sense in a modern context either and I don't see Brett Deveraux complaining about that. Somehow a guy like Barack Obama (who is exactly half black and half white, is "black") and that's supposed to make sense, but asking whether Julius Caesar or Mansa Musa was "black" or "white" becomes a meaningless question?
I'd characterize it more as providing a plausible reason for the acquiescent majority to get off the train before it runs off a cliff. He's attempting to provide a solid left-wing alternative to being totally on-board with black Cleopatra, while avoiding saying anything that might let someone remotely intelligent call him a racist. The ideologues aren't going to listen, but I think there's a bunch of people who only go along with it because they haven't seen a way to disagree that won't get them in trouble.
From Deveraux' earlier thread on "Who were the Romans?", I gather that no-one at the time would have built an identity around their skin color. Obama can identify as Black if he wants to because that category is socially meaningful to modern Americans, but it wouldn't (if I understand Deveraux' argument correctly) have had any social meaning in the Roman era.
In a better world nobody would build an identity around their skin colour today either, but that doesn't mean it's a meaningless classification in the Greek or Roman context. The Greeks and Romans were aware of the existence of dark-skinned people who lived far to the south of the Mediterranean, they had occasional contact with them and they were rare enough to be remarkable in the Empire itself; my understanding is that they called them Aethiopians and considered that whole area to be Aethiopia.
Undoubtedly if a black person (not necessarily from modern day Ethiopia) were to walk past then the average Roman would say "Hey, look at that Aethiopian" rather than "Hey, look at that black person". And if you'd asked them "Hey, is Cleopatra of the same ethnic group as that Aethiopian that just walked past?" they'd have said "No, she's Macedonian, sheesh".
Devereaux as a classical European historian wants very much for his work to *not* be used by people who want to say, "weren't things so much better when the white people were unambiguously in charge?" And the easiest way to do that without lying, is to note that the modern definition of "white" didn't correspond to any racial or ethnic category recognized in 40 BC or whenever. So, mission accomplished.
But if you read the text, he's making it very clear that Cleopatra's skin color was almost certainly not far from that of e.g. Nia Vardalos and nowhere near that of Adele James.
And also that she was a lame-ass incompetent selfish loser of a queen and why would anyone want to claim her as a hero of their race?
It's unlikely that Cleopatra's mother was Egyptian for the reasons that Deveraux mentions in that piece (e.g. Octavian would have pounced on that fact in his propaganda), but in the context of the Netflix controversy what difference would it make? Egyptians weren't black anyway. Cleopatra still wouldn't be black. Did I miss something?
Some denigration that African Americans have received over the years concerns their ancestors being uncivilized. So the argument that the Egyptians built one of the first civilizations, Egyptians were African, Africans are black, and therefore black people had one of the first civilizations has been an appealing one embraced in some corners.
People from historically-unsuccessful ancestral groups seem to feel really bad about their ancestors' failure. This is something that's really hard for a white person to understand.
Of course the correct solution here is to teach them that you don't need to be proud or ashamed of who your ancestors were, not to feed them bullshit unhistorical stories.
"This is something that's really hard for a white person to understand."
Depending on what white person you are, it is very easy to understand. The 19th century European nationalism movement, which you can see reflected culturally in everything from the Celtic Twilight to Sibelius.
When you are a conquered country and the conquerors justify the conquest by you being primitive, uncivilised, and lacking all attainments, the natural response is to seek in the past - before the conquest - for evidence to show that you were indeed a culture and a nation of your own.
So I understand the impetus here, but US African-Americans writing fantasy history to make claims that cannot be substantiated is not the way to go. Wakanda is comic book fiction. Cleopatra was not a modern American black woman.
EDIT: And of course, some white races/cultures have been retrospectively whitened, as it were. I was looking for something else but found this 1926 article from an Australian newspaper:
"In the "Age" recently appeared an offensive article, with which we dealt in our editorial columns, by one "J. Lyng, F.R.G.S.,'' called "Racial Composition of the Australian People." The article was based on that rapidly dissolving fiction, "The Nordic Theory", which, though its passing vogue is sought to be stayed by such pseudo-scientists as Lothrop Stoddard (whose facility in picturesque writing is paralleled only by his looseness in offering evidence and his disregard of telling facts incompatible to his theory, and, possibly, by his sorry lack of a sense of humour), is going rapidly into what the natives of Stoddard's country call "the discard," where it will repose in dusty oblivion with the Aryan theory and many other exploded and outworn myths and make-beliefs. The article by the journalistic Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society is astray in its mappery of facts. Its author has lost his compass and chart of truth, or, at any rate, is not guided by them. The warp and animus of the article may be suggested by such, quotations as these from it: " . . . We find that about 70 per cent, of the white population in Australia is Nordic, 25 per cent. Mediterranean, and 5 per cent. Alpine. Apart from place of birth, religion affords some kind of a racial guide. Generally speaking, the Nordic are Protestants, and the Mediterraneans and Alpines Roman or Greek Catholics. At the census of 1921 the Protestants numbered about 77 per cent, of the white population, and the Catholics 23 per . cent . . . Finally, the general deficiency in discipline may perhaps to some extent be traced to the influence of the 25 per cent. Mediterraneans — mainly Celtic Irish — who, as already stated, are less amenable to discipline than are the Nordics and the Alpines, and have gained for themselves the reputation of always being 'agin the Government' —that is, against.established authority."
So according to the British scientist, milk-bottle white me is (am?) Mediterranean! 😁
Present-day (19th and early 20th century) Italians and Greeks were dagoes and wops, but their ancestors (like Julius Caesar) were White. To quote Hilaire Belloc's article on "The Nordic Man":
"Thus the first of my correspondents (who signs ‘Gallio’ and gives no address but Brighton) is puzzled by the apparent aptitude of the Romans in their best period for administration and government, and even, in a primitive fashion, for war. He admits that all this may be much exaggerated, and from what he has seen of the Romans (he was down among them lately) he cannot believe all he hears of their ancestors. But still (he supposes) there must be a solid kernel of truth in it: for after all, the name ‘Roman’ was given to a great number of institutions — including the Empire itself — and he asks me — rather crudely — how this was possible if the Mediterranean race were as vile as our greatest authorities have discovered it to be? It is odd that the simple answer to this difficulty has not occurred to the writer. It is that those who governed the Empire, and led the armies, called ‘Roman’ were Nordic. This could be proved in several ways, but all of them might be open to objection save the unanswerable one that if these men had not been Nordic they could not have succeeded as they did. The Scipios, the Julian House, Hadrian — to cite at random — were manifestly and necessarily Nordic; for men do not act as they acted unless they are of pre-bred Nordic stock.
The Pantheon could only have been built by Nordic Man.
The same is true of other manifestations of intelligence and vigour in Mediterranean countries. Thus the Italians and even the Greeks have left a considerable body of remarkable literature both in prose and in verse, and in the case of Italy, we have even quite modern examples of literary excellence — at least, so I am assured by those who are acquainted with the idioms of the inferior races. But upon examination it will always be found that the authors, though using a base medium, were Nordic. The committee which we collectively call by the mythological term ‘Homer,’ and which drew up and passed certainly the Iliad and possibly the Odyssey, were clearly Nordic in composition. Catullus was as Nordic as he could be. The Nordic character of Aristotle is a commonplace. Dante was Nordic. So was Leopardi.
Take any outstanding Italian or other Mediterranean name and you will find upon close examination that the man to whom it is attached was of the Nordic type: Napoleon Buonaparte occurs at once to the mind."
I hope I do not need to establish that Belloc is writing tongue-in-cheek here, but he's lampooning attitudes of the day!
It seems absurd to go through so much convolution when the actual beliefs seem to so closely match "Catholics bad" - you even get a narrative about a glorious Roman Empire brought low by converting!
Looking at old stuff like this is a great way to highlight the absurdities, that you for your post
"Of course the correct solution here is to teach them that you don't need to be proud or ashamed of who your ancestors were, not to feed them bullshit unhistorical stories."
That would imply that white people should also not be ashamed of who their ancestors were, which is an unacceptable conclusion for liberals.
I've realized it's difficult for an European to explain Americans that their own particular way of thinking about race is specifically American and in the rest of the world people don't necessarily think about race in the same way.
The problem is that if I say things like for example "here in Europe were don't really use the concept of *white*", they may think: "oh this pretentious person is virtue signaling! He's trying to sound politically correct but he's not fooling anyone, we all know well that within his heart he thinks in terms of whites, blacks, asians, hispanics, like we do!"
(I'm sorry if this sounds negative towards Americans or unkind, I don't mean it that way).
You can't experience humiliation if you're shameless. Plus every criticism feeds their inner narrative of being valiant warriors for truth against the racist fascist white supremacist cisheteropatriarchs.
Oh? And what about Wise Old Granny in the trailer saying "I don't care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was black"? Perpetrating fables over the generations means a bunch of kids growing up ignorant. Will we do the same for "huh, them Greeks didn't never know no maths, it wuz all us!" and teach the kids to count with knucklebones? (Even teaching them to count would at least be something, inclusive maths classes just seem to be "Well ackshully it was all black and brown people invented maths" and then the black kids don't have to learn anything more than that).
They have no problems having the Romans be white 😀
I'm a lover of classical music and I sometimes get into discussions with people over whether we can "separate art from the artist" in cases where the art is beautiful but the artist is problematic for some reason (ex. Wagner was an anti-semite, Picasso a womanizer, etc). The question may be better phrased as "to what extent does the moral responsibility of the individual require consideration of the artist's personal character when choosing to engage with their art?"
I started drafting some hypothetical scenarios to help me sort out my own thinking on this. Here are a few of them:
Scenario 1 - The Private Discovery
Theo discovers an old vinyl record in his grandfather’s attic among items brought back from WWII. The record contains a symphony composed by Hitler. Overcome by curiosity, Theo plays the record and is profoundly moved by the beauty of the music. He occasionally listens to the symphony privately, each time finding it as impactful as the first.
Scenario 2a - The Public Performance
Theo, a renowned conductor, decides to perform Hitler’s Symphony publicly. He believes the performance will do more good than harm. He does not disclose the composer's identity, hoping the music can be appreciated independently. The performance is well-received, but when the truth about the composer is revealed, controversy ensues.
Scenario 2b - The Informed Listener
Samantha, a devoted concert-goer and friend of Theo, decides to attend the concert with full knowledge of the symphony's unsettling origins, but decides to focus on the music. She is deeply moved by the symphony's beauty and decides that she would probably attend future concerts where that piece was being performed.
Scenario 3 - The Living Artist
Theo encounters the work of a living artist who, despite making racist comments, creates beautiful, thought-provoking music. Theo is moved by the music and decides to include one of the artist's compositions in his concert repertoire. This choice directly supports the artist financially and boosts their reputation.
Scenario 4 - The Posthumous Revelation
Theo has always admired a famous composer whose work promotes peace and unity. After the composer's death, it is revealed that he led a secret life filled with various horrid deeds. Theo, who has conducted the composer's works many times, continues to appreciate and perform them, believing the works' messages aren't invalidated by the composer's personal life.
In which of these scenarios, if any, has the character acted unethically? Why?
I have asked several elementary school classes this same question. Kids from 7-9 years old. I usually use Wagner and the controversy around his music as an example. Children almost universally say it doesn't matter if the artist was a total degerate racist or Hitlerian type. The art work stands on its own. Obviously your scenarios are much more nuanced, and it really matters if the artist is still alive and profiting from their audience.
Obviously none of them. I feel like the real big brain hypothetical here is "Hitler's Symphony is Beethoven tier but inspires 1 in X people who hear it to agree with Hitler, for what value of X is it still acceptable to perform Hitler's Symphony"
That seems bold. I reckon at least one in 1^8 people who listen to Wagner come away more pro-Hitler, and I'm not convinced listening to Wagner has anyone made anyone less racist. Should we ban Wagner?
Hm. 1 in 1^8 is about 3.5 people alive in the entire USA today, or about 80 people alive in the entire world today, or just 16.5 people alive in the entire world in 1900 (Wagner having died in the 1880s). Or about 1170 people, living or dead, in the entire history of the human species.
How about this for comparison: do we think the new Cleopatra movie, on net, made 3.5 more Americans more racist than less racist?
I'm a bit skeptical that that's really causal. And my threshold for banning would be higher, but if that's really true it seems plausible that it's unethical to perform Wagner.
For another variation, one could also consider the case where the artist is blameless, but the subject of the art is ... "problematic". E.g. a beautifully painted portrait of a monarch who has what would now be considered war crimes in their reign. Can an art lover enjoy the portrait?
Separating the art from the artist isn't a matter of ethics. Enjoying an art work, or consuming any other product, is not an endorsement of the personal ethics of the person who produced it. People are flawed, especially if you want to judge people of the past by the moral standards currently fashionable, and I can't be expected to pass moral judgment on every person who created anything I ever consume; I don't have the knowledge or the energy to do so.
I just ate some cheese. Was it produced by a bad guy? I don't know and I don't really care unless his evil extends to the adulteration of cheese.
Having said all that, there's circumstances under which enjoying art created by people who have done really horrible things (like Roman Polanski or Frida Kahlo) gives me the heebie-jeebies and stops me from enjoying it. But that's a disgust reflex and not an ethical necessity.
I haven't heard of Kahlo being that reprehensible, can you expand? The intro to her Wikipedia page doesn't mention anything worse than being a Communist Party member.
Here is an interesting (and lengthy) article discussing this question. For those not wanting to read through the whole thing, this is the most pertinent point to the discussion above:
”Kahlo continued to worship Stalin even after it had become common knowledge that he was responsible for the deaths of millions of people, not to mention Trotsky himself. One of Kahlo’s last paintings was called “Stalin and I,” and her diary is full of her adolescent scribblings (“Viva Stalin!”) about Stalin and her desire to meet him”
Failure to separate artist from art is a luxury, a privilege reserved for those lucky few who are fortunate enough to lack the internal moral compass necessary to avoid submerging their own sense of right and wrong into an ideology or tradition. For the rest of us, who have never and will never find any philosophy or movement that's perfectly correct, we have no choice but to live in a world where any artist, at any time, might have done something we disapprove of.
Of course, some people can't help it. They just can't separate art and artist. This is a disability. To accommodate this disability, no one must ever criticize anyone who has ever made any art.
On a completely separate topic, I once made a rather nice clay relief.
You don't specify which character acting unethically. In all of these cases, the artist acted unethically, but the composer/appreciator doesn't, since the art is objectively good lacking knowledge of the artist. Well, as objective as art can be.
As an aside, I'm imagining Theo being Alice, Samantha being Bob, and the artist being Eve.
Wow. I know that "falsely shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater" is one of the classic cases in which free speech can be abridged, but this takes it to a whole new level.
I personally don't believe in boycotts, and say it comes down to how much you're thinking about the artist when you experience the art. If I know a piece was written by Hitler, I'm possibly going to end up picturing it playing over speakers in a concentration camp, and that's going to ruin the value it otherwise would have had. And if it's good there are going to be people trying to use it to preach Hitler's political philosophy, and that can become a new association. The Swastika was Buddhist, but people don't see it that way anymore.
My answer would be none of them. Scenario 3 comes the closest, but merely making racist comments harms nobody (the claims of overprivileged DEI consultants aside). If the artist used the funds from his music to actively promote racism, that would be a different story.
Suppose the living composer is indeed guilty of actively promoting racism or some other egregious crime. What would you say to this scenario (basically 2b but for a living artist).
"Samantha, despite being repulsed by the actions of this living composer, loves their music so much that she purchases one of their albums. She feels a bit guilty, but doesn't want to deprive herself of the feelings the music gives her."
Thinking about this gives me a consideration of a distinction of "wrongness" between moral and social one; in essence, in scenarios like this I don't see anything violating personal morality but I do see that these actions may reasonably be seen as social violations - e.g. if your community has agreed (explicitly or implicitly) to boycott a certain thing, then obviously defecting from that common boycott will be seen as defecting from the community. In essence, the wrongness of all these actions is unrelated to what the composer did (other than as an explanation why your community chose to boycott them) but purely as violating the shared norms and common expression of a common political attitude of your community, which is exactly as (un)ethical as any other violation of any arbitrary shared social taboos.
Can high-functioning autistics get married? Are their marriages usually bad? Should they avoid marriage?
I have high-functioning autism, and am graduating high school next year, and I am trying to verify marriability. (I asked a similar question last week, thanks to everyone who gave advice! I am using it now!) I think I have mild to major depressive symptoms when I realize I might not get married, and also because I have a very obsessive personality (which I think people find unnerving). I once became deeply obsessed with this other girl this one time (she was probably on the spectrum too), and realized that this is basically a function of my mind that really doesn't care about the input and can be exploited with attention. I think I could fall in love with a rock or a tree with practice (but why on earth would that be a good idea?). It seems like a good idea to get married to a human woman. I also realized that my motivational system assigns this huge weight to getting married/being in a romantic relationship, and I keep thinking about that girl all the time even though she hasn't spoken to me in a year and I have no idea how to stop this. How do people usually stop this?
It seems like you're getting a number of examples of autistic people getting married, so I'll skip that part.
Some broader advice: It's easy for people to get too fixated on the big picture goal and not enough on how one actually achieves that goal. So I'd recommend spending more time focusing your attention on doing things you enjoy, especially if they involve other people. Invest time in having fun, doing interesting things, and building friendships with people you like. Being satisfied with your life will make you much more attractive to other people, and having a good social network will expose you to more potential romantic partners. Then you'll have more chances to practice dating and relationships, and to see if something develops into a long term relationship. The big picture is likely to work out better if you kind of ignore it and focus your attention on the day to day.
> I also realized that my motivational system assigns this huge weight to getting married/being in a romantic relationship, and I keep thinking about that girl all the time even though she hasn't spoken to me in a year and I have no idea how to stop this. How do people usually stop this?
Emotions run really hot when you're young. That typically fades as you mature. Not sure if that's also the case for people with autism.
When you have little life or dating experience, it's easy to project a generalized need for companionship onto a single, seemingly special person; regardless of how they might feel about you, or whether there is any degree of actual compatibility.
But in fact there are literal billions of fish in the sea, and whatever fraction may be compatible with you still present pretty good odds. And the funny thing about this type of obsession is that once you do find someone who reciprocates your affection, they are likely to become vastly more interesting and special than the person who didn't.
So start walking, and put a spring in your step. It's the only way to pursue someone you haven't even met.
I'm neurotypical and I've been happily married to a high functioning autist for several decades, so yes I do think they can marry successfully. :-)
Compared to many marriages I see, I think ours is at the happier and more successful end of the spectrum. It has required some compromise on both sides, but I suspect that is true of most solid marriages.
Also, with respect, at your age most people's motivational systems strongly favour being in a romantic relationship of some kind, and at the same time makes achieving this pretty difficult.
Have patience - it's very likely that once you are in college you will meet your people and find a mate.
Marriage should not be a goal. You may find someone you want to marry, but choosing the wrong person because you want to marry someone is worse than not getting married at all.
That said, I think autism isn't a real handicap to such a relationship. It's part of you (and/or her). If you marry, this should be taken into account by both of you, any more than one of you craving a food the other person detests.
When a metric becomes a goal it ceases to be a useful metric. Marriage isn't a goal, but a natural progression in a relationship. Certainly, most people are fine people, but most of them won't make a marriage work between them, and not for lack of trying of a particular fault of one or the other.
It's hard to explain, but I'll try anyway. In a good marriage, you don't overlook your spouse's flaws, but accept them. If your goal is to get married then you may think, "I know <something> about this person that I don't like, but that's OK, and I'll work through it" but that's the kind of thing that, if you aren't truly committed to them, that could blow up later.
To paraphrase, if you can't accept them at their worst, you shouldn't marry them just to get the best.
Kind of. My point is really more like people want the marriage and that puts the spouse in a secondary position, when it ought to be the other way around. If you value the spouse, the marriage will take care of itself.
I am female and have an autism diagnosis. I am happily married to a very neurotypical man (six months married, 3.5 years together).
Social skills and dynamics are one of my special interests, so I typically pass for quirky NT. My husband still doesn't really understand what autism is 😂. But we're both really good at communication, which is the most important part of a relationship.
I know several autistic people who had success dating other autistic people, but I know people who thrive in mixed marriages as well. It's all about how well you are able to communicate and get along with that specific individual.
I agree with others that it's normal human behaviour.
For your initial question, I also have high-functioning autism, and I am happily married. My partner is definitely quite nerdy, but probably not autistic, or only very mildly. We have been together for 14 years. So yes, it's possible.
I recall that I also read about his happy marriage in the autobiography of Daniel Tammett, who is also a high-functioning autist. You might enjoy his books.
Not sure how to describe autism beyond what you already know, but I do have a question of my own: By "high-functioning" do you mean that you can take care of yourself, and manage most adult-level tasks on your own? I ask because I once dated a girl who calls herself "high-functioning autistic" but she cannot take care of herself. She's in her 30s but has the maturity level of someone in her early teens. We attended the same school for adults with learning disabilities together, and reconnected after we'd both moved out. So we did have some things in common, but it didn't work out, because we were on drastically different levels.
To expand a little on DaveOTN's advice below, I'd recommend being honest with yourself (and any potential girlfriends) about what your long-term goals and capabilities are. The way you write it looks like you have a good head on your shoulders, so as you're going through what you like to do and what interests you, consider what you want to use that head for. Then look for ladies whose goals are at least in the same ballpark as yours. Don't kid yourself that you can keep up with a jet-setting businesswoman if that lifestyle has no appeal for you, and don't settle for someone less functional than you if your main reason for dating her is merely that she's available and willing.
It might be worth mentioning that life skills are easier than social skills. Whether or not you’re autistic, you raise your stock quite a bit if you can manage a home and know how to take care of yourself. When you’re young you might be able to get girls to come over even if you live like a giant hamster and eat nothing but ramen. But if you’re looking for a serious relationship then it pays to show you can and will pull your weight around the house.
I knew a couple- he was mildly autistic, she was not - who did fine until she broke her leg and really needed him. Suddenly she realized just how bad he was at taking care of himself, much less of her. It filled her with despair and they almost broke up over it. He rose to the occasion and learned enough life skills to make her feel like she could be his wife and not his second mother. We were all rooting for them because they were a great couple. They’ve been married for fifteen years and have two kids.
In marriage, a situation may come when all depends on one of the partners. Least dramatically, when your partner gets seriously sick for a week or two (or needs to go on a business trip), and you need to take care of the house and the kids, while keeping your job. Or when you get sick, and your partner needs to take care of all this.
When everything is okay, partners can do the division of labor (whether following the traditional gender roles, or arranging things differently). Yes, it helps a lot when you can just stop thinking about some things, and they just magically get done. But in emergency, you should be able to do it... even if imperfectly, even if it is only okay for a week or two but wouldn't be sustainable in long term.
Ideally, everyone should spend one year of their life living completely alone, doing *everything* around the house (cleaning their entire house, shopping, cooking, doing dishes, doing laundry). To realize the scope of things that might otherwise remain invisible if the parents and later the partner do it; also to appreciate when you see them doing it *better*.
Heh, perhaps there should be an official list of "life skills", an organization to train them, and an organization to test the skills and provide "ready for marriage" certification.
Are their marriages usually bad? Should they avoid marriage?
Just like any marriage, there are good ones and bad ones. No reason to think being on the spectrum would make the marriage any worse.
First, definitely address your major depression. I was experiencing major depression and social anxiety at your age but didn't know it. I didn't seek help until i was 25 and my young adulthood was severely negatively impacted by not treating my depression and anxiety. Your obsessive thoughts about this girl are somewhat normal, as others have said, but if they are negatively impacting your life don't just write them off. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is really helpful with reducing or managing obsessive thoughts.
Second, have you heard of the Netflix show "Dating on the Spectrum"? It's a show about people exactly in your position. Though its reality TV its not trash. It's very respectful to the participants and handled autism in a mature way.
Third, there are therapists who can help you with your exact problem. They can help you learn communication and thinking skills so that you can achieve your goals. Maybe your goal is to get married, maybe it's not. There is no judgement there. Seeking help for these skills is really helpful and can greatly improve your life!
For what it's worth, one of the first things I noticed when using an antidepressant (any one would do) is that such invasive thoughts just disappeared. It even became a semi-reliable way to judge the strength of MDMA experiences before other effects became apparent, so as to avoid premature redosing.
Yes, this is normal teenage male behavior. I realize that's not particularly helpful to hear, but let me tell you, plenty of men who seem extremely cool, charismatic, and sexually experienced in their 20s spent a year or two in high school obsessing over some girl their mind latched onto in the most cringe-inducing way.
The typical advice is to take it easy and find things you enjoy doing on your own first - make yourself into an interesting person, which will attract women on its own, instead of trying to attract women directly. As a high-functioning autistic you need to moderate this advice a little - we have a tendency to get way too obsessive with things we're interested in - but it's generally solid. You've got plenty of time and being inexperienced in your late 20s isn't as bad as the media makes it out to be. By that point many women are getting out of their relationships with cool high school kids and looking for someone a little more grown up and stable.
The second piece of advice you generally hear is to look for someone else on the spectrum to match with. There's a lot of unspoken rules to human interactions and it can be really frustrating if they come to one person naturally and the other one struggles with them. It's often better if you both struggle with them - then you can at least both talk about your feelings in the same way and with the same type of associations.
>take it easy and find things you enjoy doing on your own first - make yourself into an interesting person, which will attract women on its own, instead of trying to attract women directly.
This is the part where I chime in and suggest that you go to your local game store/ comic book shop and see whether they have a D&D group. It's an activity that attracts a *lot* of people on the spectrum, and it's a great way to train/hone/keep up with social skills in a way you will no longer have the opportunity to outside of school. Pretending to be a charismatic half-elf bard is surprisingly good practice for being actually charismatic.
Small caveat, these spaces tend to be dominated by men, and the few women that show up are often come with their boyfriends. Any girls who are single and attractive are going to feel overwhelmed by the amount (again, largely autistic) male attention they're getting, so be careful about actively flirting in that environment.
Wouldn't it make sense for China to drop/resolve its border dispute with India, and instead team up with India on a vague anti-Western alliance? I think from a purely strategic point of view, China probably jumped the gun a bit in starting territorial disputes with literally every single one of their neighbors- maybe not the sagest strategy. India is still not really an ally of the West or America, and China and India have both been pushing their membership in the 'BRICS' alliance or grouping thingy. Modi, to my knowledge, has not been very loudly anti-China (I think mostly because he doesn't want to lose a humiliating border war). They have mutual concerns about American sanctions, dollarization, and general Western pushiness, and being anti-colonial seems like a very strong common grievance. Also, being anti-colonial, anti-America and anti-the West in general seems like a strong unifying theme for a lot of other developing countries in Latin America, Africa and ex-Soviet countries- so they could lead an anti-Western bloc.
Strategically, shouldn't China bury the hatchet with India, and pivot to a friendly anti-Western relationship that incorporates Russia, Brazil, and other developing countries? Maybe it wouldn't last forever, but just from a pure IR strategy perspective it seems better than, like, border skirmishes with melee weapons over irrelevant territory. I don't want this to happen at all, but if I were China or India this would seem to be a pretty smart move?
In addition to what others have said, "China" and "India" don't actually make any decisions. The politicians involved have their own motivations that don't necessarily match the best interests of their countries as a whole.
"Political aversion to bargaining is especially remarkable at the international level. Since decolonization, countries have almost completely stopped trading territory. Russia continues to occupy four northern islands claimed by Japan. If you think Japan can just pay Russia to get the islands back and permanently settle the dispute, dream on..."
The second part (making an anti-western alliance) doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense as others have noted.
The first part (resolving the India/China border dispute) makes obvious sense in isolation, but it's probably not going to happen. And if these two countries can't agree on how to divide up a sliver of damn-near uninhabitable land, how are they going to agree on how to divide up the world?
It's been awhile since I was in the IR scene but, broadly, China and India have very different interests and identities, there's not a lot of ground for a long-term alliance, and it's not clear what action they'd take on it. Rather than a broad, abstract alliance, let's focus on the specific actions they're looking to take.
So, as you put forth, both of them dislike "Western" pushiness but they're both also giant nuclear powers. Neither of them are susceptible to anything resembling America's influence in the 90's. They both can...kinda do what they want internally and on key security concerns. It's difficult to think of something the US could prevent China from doing that it couldn't prevent China+India from doing.
Similarly, they both dislike the influence of the dollar but that doesn't mean they agree on an alternative. India definitely isn't switching to the Yen, I can't imagine China switching to the rupee, and general alternatives like SDRs have failed in the past.
But sanctions is probably the best example, because it includes Russia and a good example of how bad a threat has to force "BRICs" together. Both China and India are still trading with Russia, which kinda broke the back of Western sanctions, but they didn't do it over any grand alliance; instead both India and China are big enough that the West can't tell them what to do anymore and they both like cheap oil and closer ties to Russia, each for their own reason. Russia, just like India, has a long and troublesome border with China and it's own security concerns. The Mearshiemer et al argument against Ukraine was always towards bringing Russia into the West or keeping it independent to keep China isolated. Now, however, Russia is pretty clearly into the Chinese camp. But that's the kind of thing that is needed to form these alliances: massive international threats.
So, broadly, yeah, India isn't going to join a Chinese-lead BRICs coalition without a darn good reason, mostly because China doesn't have much to offer and, frankly, the Indians don't want to be subject to the Chinese anymore than they want to be subject to the "West".
Curious if anyone has any updated thoughts on Net Neutrality. Now that's it's been several years since it was "the thing" on the internet for a bit.
My understanding is that it is mostly unprotected and also mostly unviolated. How true are those two things? If they are true, does that mean that, while an important principle, it's one that mostly doesn't need explicit protection? Or is it actually being violated and I didn't even notice? Or is it actually more protected than I thought?
Is there any lesson we should learn from the difference between the _extremely_ strong claims that were made at the time vs. the relatively boring reality of how things turned out?
Did it ever exist? If ISP prioritizes say, gaming traffic which needs low bandwidth, low latency before torrents or videos (high bandwidth, high latency) is it neutral? If ISP blocks some malicious HTTP syn flood, it is violation of neutrality?
No. Prioritization of types of data is fine. The problem is if Blizzard is able to pay to make their gaming data faster than an indie developer. If all email traffic is set to get lowest priority, that's fine.
"Net Neutrality" in fact has been dead for some years (*).
However, its killing was carried out rather cleverly and subtly: it was done without breaking any of the existing (or, AFAIK, proposed) "Net Neutrality" laws in any major jurisdiction.
Rather than the popularly-expected scenario where ISPs would start to artificially slow traffic from "unfavoured" businesses, what they did instead was to contract with e.g. Netflix, Google, et al to install cache servers in "last-mile" DCs. And so the megacorps can serve up video at the speed of an ISP's WAN, without being hobbled by the limited capacity of long-haul backbone fiber. Effectively, they are entirely bypassing what most people think of as the actual Internet. Smaller companies, on the other hand, remain stuck with the latter's bottlenecks and bandwidth cost.
No consumer was directly bothered by any of this, in any way he might care about -- except for when wondering why there is no effective competition to Youtube, Netflix, et al.
(*) Personal note: in 2018 I had occasion to visit (for entirely unrelated reasons) the largest DC in Montevideo, Uruguay. It is, by just about any measure, a backwater. And yet there was already work underway to install a Netflix cache system there. Shortly afterwards, I was given to know that Netflix had leased more than half of the available rack space in that facility.
In Germany, there is a tendency by large ISPs to whine to the legislators that Netflix or Google are taking up so large a fraction of the data traffic and that they should pay a part of the infrastructure costs. (e.g. [0])
This is of course blatantly absurd. The ISPs do not transport packets from Google out of the goodness of their hearts, they transport them because their paying customers -- whom they sold traffic volumes or bandwidth -- happen to favor Netflix over bittorrent or whatever other uses for bandwidth there are. To make a car analogy, this is the gas station notice that 20% of all cars using the gas station are BMWs, and deciding that this means that the BMW company should therefore pay parts of the cost of running the gas station.
Internet access is a commodity, content is not. I imagine going from Vodafone to Telekom would not get much discussion within a family of four, while replacing a Netflix subscription with a Disney+ subscription will likely involve some heated arguments. Nobody stopped Telekom from producing streaming tv series (high risk/high reward) instead of staying in the ISP (low risk/low reward) business.
Noted blogger fefe alleges that German Telekom keeps the pipes to the content providers thin on purpose so they have an incentive to sell that caching. Hearsay, of course.
Competitive advantage of big companies are already built into the internet. A big company like Google is much more likely to end up with peering agreements with big ISPs than some startup, which will thus have to pay for traffic. The ability to rent rack space at ISPs seems similar.
This seems like the kind of thing I'm ok with and doesn't seem like an issue (or at the very least, unrelated to net neutrality). Part of the issue with the net neutrality "paying for speed" issue is that it's zero sum. If I pay to be faster, all the rest of the traffic _has_ to get slower. But paying to build last mile caches isn't net zero. Everyone can do it, and me doing it doesn't prevent you from doing it. It was always going to be true that larger businesses have some advantages over smaller businesses. Net neutrality was never going to fix that issue.
> Everyone can do it, and me doing it doesn't prevent you from doing it.
While technically true, the same could be said of laying oceanic fiber, launching satellites, etc. "Anyone", yes, with a few $B in spare change could do it. (I.e. "net neutrality" is then logically a non-issue, because "anyone" could simply build a new Internet ?)
The point was that the people whose hands were meant to be tied by "net neutrality laws" entirely finessed the spirit of said laws; and that scarcely anyone seems to have noticed, and people have come to think that e.g. Youtube is a natural monopoly.
Quite similarly to the earlier case where the "baby Bell" ILECs (Verizon et al) in the US finessed the terms of the 1982 AT&T divestiture by building a "separate" fiber grid and allowing the old copper grid to fall into disrepair.
Net neutrality was never meant to force everyone to keep their product bad. It was meant to prevent big companies from forcing competitors to stay bad. This was my point about zero sum. Paying to make your data faster _also_ makes everyone else's data slower, so big companies pay which keeps little companies shitty. Building a local cache doesn't do that. It's a very important distinction.
Would you be mad if instead of spending those billions on building data caches, they just hired so many engineers that they were able to come up with a proprietary data compression technique that no one else had access to?
At the time net neutrality was (loosely speaking) repealed, TikTok was a tiny thing in the United States. Somehow it has managed to become huge, and I haven't heard anything about all the other social media giants ganging up to starve TikTok of bandwidth. So I suspect the problem was exaggerated from the start.
Yeah that was sort of the impetus of my question. I know some places have protections (CA, Europe, others), but lots of places don't, and it sort of seems like it's been fine? My guess is not that net neutrality isn't important, but that it turns out that violating it is just not that useful/profitable and so even though a few companies _were_ trying do so at the time, they eventually decided it wasn't worth it, even if they were technically allowed to.
Philosophically this is consistent, but from a consumer's POV it is a distinction without a difference. A typical Netflix or Youtube user is unlikely to know or care precisely why no competitor is able to offer comparable performance. (Ergo "net neutrality" was a doomed project from the start, IMHO)
That's my point though. With caches a competitor _can_ do as well (even if it's very hard). One cache doesn't prevent another cache. With throttling/boosting speed, they _can't_ because it's zero sum. I think this distinction matters. Being a bigger company and paying to make your product better has always been a thing. It will always be a thing, and frankly I don't see a problem with it. What we should care about is the ability to pay to keep your competitors from getting good. I think this difference, which you seem to think is trivial, is _incredibly_ important.
In Europe there are rather firm laws protecting net neutrality. There are every now and then ISPs who try to wriggle around it, for example by trying to declare that certain service don't count towards the costs and data limits of their users, and they get pushback and give up after a short while.
In the US, protections were enabled, then removed within a year or 2, with the following administration. As other commenters have pointed out, some individual states have protections, but there is not Federal level protection in the US. And as I argued elsewhere in this thread, I wouldn't expect regional protections to extend beyond that region.
There was an anti-net neutrality interview on Reason a few years back. I think with an economist - don't remember who.
As I recall, the case for neutrality was very easy to make, and widely backed, and also easy to see as anti-free market, but I didn't hear a lot of people making the standard free market case against it. When I did, it recounted stories of ISPs that wanted to bring that service to new markets (i.e. didn't already have Internet), but the only way to make that cost effective was to give some customers more bits than others. Net neutrality would have killed them before they even got started, and the end result would be a lot of communities that just couldn't get service, "no one knows why", except a few people did know why but couldn't get their voice heard over the neutrality chant.
One could also make a case that net neutrality was a secret ploy to entrench certain large businesses that could deploy internet to (most of) the masses, esp. if their non-net-neutral upstart competitors could get squeezed out by taxpayer-funded law. That's hard to prove, given how secret it would have to be. AFAIK no one could even produce evidence that that was even going on.
> it recounted stories of ISPs that wanted to bring that service to new markets (i.e. didn't already have Internet), but the only way to make that cost effective was to give some customers more bits than others.
I would buy that if the ISPs hadn't already outed themselves as being extremely anti-free market, lobbying against allowing some of those same communities to organize municipal or community broadband. (Not to mention the exclusivity zones and associated price fixing)
A brief search suggests you and I might be referring to different types of ISPs. I was referring to small independent ISPs trying to reach new markets, like, say, some small town over an hour's drive away from the nearest metropolis. When I search for "ISPs lobbying against community broadband", examples include Verizon and AT&T, which are _not_ that.
Indeed, this more exemplifies what I was talking about with larger providers lobbying for neutrality in order to squeeze smaller competitors. (Although, I should say that AFAICT, Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast are or were all apparently _against_ net neutrality, not for it. Also, those are _service_ providers; _content_ providers are another story, and one I haven't followed for a while.)
I imagine part of it may be that California has a net neutrality law and many other states have regulations restricting the kind of behavior from ISPs that everyone got worked up about, and ISPs determined whatever boon they’d get from metering certain types of traffic isn’t worth the litigation.
Some kinds of things, it makes sense that one large market protecting/regulating it will spread elsewhere, due to the difficulty in having different product lines. California's fuel efficiency/emissions standards are a great example of this. Net Neutrality is not something that I would have guessed would operate this way. It seems like it should be trivial to comply with regulations in one jurisdiction and not in another.
As for fear of regulation in response to neutrality violations, I would have expected that to slowly die down over time as we got further away from the original outcry. Especially in the currant cultural climate where neutrality towards content is generally not really deemed important by large swathes of people from all sides of the political spectrum (for different reasons).
I know nothing about ISP infrastructure—why would it be trivial to have one policy for all of CA and another for the rest of the country w/r to net neutrality issues?
The networks are literal infrastructure networks organized on a hub-and-spoke type setup. Comcast or whoever is running lines through your neighborhood to connect you to the Internet, either through wires or with wifi as the last stop. All of your neighborhood Internet connections basically go to the same central server (not sure if that's the right word) before connecting to the broader Internet. So if they want to filter all the traffic in Nevada but not in California, all they have to do is apply different settings to the nodes in CA and NV.
My impression is that CA's law ostensibly prevents you from doing stuff to Internet traffic that is going from or to a customer in CA, even if the traffic is temporarily outside of CA.
i.e. if your customer in CA is accessing a web site hosted in NV, and you slow the traffic while it's in NV before it makes it to CA, I believe that violates CA's law.
I assume the filtering takes place at the customer end. So if, for example, Comcast (which owns NBC) would rather have you watch Peacock than Netflix, they can just throttle down Netflix speeds 50% outside of California but leave them alone in CA. It wouldn't affect Netflix's speed on the big interstate trunk lines, just from the neighborhood nodes to your house. But I'm no expert and would welcome a rebuttal on this.
And yes, as said upthread, it doesn't appear to have happened in any case...I suspect Comcast thinks that cutting off people's Netflix is just likely to kill their golden-egg-laying monopolistic goose.
I've heard that wildfires in North America are increasing in number. This is always blamed on global warming, but to what extent might it owe to growth in the human population?
Every time a human visits an area of the wilderness, there's some small chance they will start a wildfire, usually by mistake but sometimes in a deliberate act of arson. The person might flick a lit cigarette butt into the grass, fail to fully put out a campfire, or have some problem with their car that spreads fire to dry vegetation nearby.
As the populations of humans in North America increase, it stands to reason that the number of humans visiting wilderness areas will also. Statistically speaking, this also means the number of wildfires will rise.
That's the thing that confuses me about people who say that wildfires are natural and some species of tree *need* them to thrive. Without humans, the base rate of starting fire would be, what, 20 times lower ? 100 times lower ?
Combined with the repective size of the fires, what's the average half-life of a forest parcel with or without humans, and how much does vegetation grow between two fires ?
In the western US there are several things going on: hotter, drier summers are killing some trees and stressing/weakening others. Stressed/weakened trees are more susceptible than usual to bark borer beetles. These two things in combination mean a larger proportion than usual of standing dead trees which act as fuel for wildfires. Additionally, over a century of "absolutely no fire" management policy means that under story stocks are also larger than usual, as in the past, frequent small fires would clear out small stuff. These two things together mean that, when fires occur, and when they grow too fast to be controlled by the normal policies, they get _big_.
So it's a combination of climate and policy, as well as interactions from various ecological processes.
And while you are probably right that, as humans encroach more into wild places, the incidence of human-originated wildfires increases, I'm not sure how much that matters. Fires can start lots of ways, so the more important thing is the conditions.
At least for Canada, the *number* of wildfires is not increasing, but the severity of each one is. And it seems that climate change *is* facilitating that - there is a good discussion here: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/canada-wildfires-2023
There does seem to be a very small upwards trend in the total area burned, but it's hard to tell, given the cyclical nature of these things. However, I meant that the severity of each fire is increasing - the number of fires is decreasing, and the area remains stable at best.
Ross Douthat is cracking me up today in a panel discussion of the Trump candidacy:
“What matters most about him as a presidential candidate?”
“That his second term was foretold in the Necronomicon, written in eldritch script on the Mountains of Madness and carved deep, deep into the white stones of the Plateau of Leng.”
It’s paywalled of course but if you haven’t used up your five free articles for the month it worth a look, for the laughs if nothing else.
For whatever reason, Ross is letting his geek flag fly much more these days, sharing the fantasy novel he wrote and dropping gratuitous Lovecraft references.
“ believe that before the sixth seal is opened, the sun becomes black as sackcloth and the moon becomes of blood, he will deliver more winning than we have ever seen, and I look forward to it.”
Anyone here tried http://bewelltuned.com/ ? Was it helpful? Any place where I can see more commentary/discussion on it, or just learn about the people behind it?
I played with the motor cortex tuning and enjoyed it. They isolate some of the body awareness aspects of vipassana for that part.
I found it to be very quickly effective at reducing muscular tension, but maintaining global relaxation requires more attention/awareness than achieving stability through tension, so I found it unsustainable. I have a good amount of meditation experience, so perhaps had a better-than-usual foundation to see results from the motor cortex tuning.
I don't remember trying the other aspects of their program, though I certainly read the whole site.
A question that's been popping into my head lately: is AI going to break the internet?
I have in mind a future where:
- every online discussion gets overrun with convincing AI bots that crowd out real human participants
- email spam filters get overrun by ever-more sophisticated AI, including AI that mimics real human correspondents, like specific people the email account holder knows
- social media accounts come to be seen as mere fodder for AI voice and video mimicry used for scams, and people increasingly try to minimize their online presence
- corporate and government tech security proves to be no match for AI, and systems of all kinds are increasingly taken offline altogether
In my most starry-eyed utopian moods, I imagine a future where the internet is just abandoned altogether and people return to living in the real world, more or less sequestered from an internet that devolves into an AI ghetto, a sort of "Disneyland with no children," to borrow Bostrom's phrase, except very stupid and inane.
I hadn't seen this from Alex Pareene when I originally commented here, but it's very complementary to what I'm talking about:
"We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information. Finding unbiased and independent product reviews, expert tech support, and all manner of helpful advice will now resemble the process by which one now searches for illegal sports streams or pirated journal articles. The decades of real human conversation hosted at places like Reddit will prove useful training material for the mindless bots and deceptive marketers that replace it."
That is the simplistic straight-line extrapolation, but I'm not sure it is wrong. And I think we'd have gotten there eventually just on the basis of mass human mediocrity, but LLMs will accelerate the process.
It's already happening. Google/etc web search has become decreasingly useful over the last month (a trend which had been happening for a while but accelerated greatly). Creating a website with a "knowledge base" of AI generated, SEO-optimised content is now trivially cheap, and is drowning out all other search results. Currently I'm adding "reddit" to the end of most searches as a workaround.
Maybe it's time for a return of the old Yahoo-style curated web directory?
How would this AI-broken Internet differ from what we've got now ? The current Internet is essentially unusable without ad blockers and spam filters; as others have pointed out, AI-generated spam will be mitigated by AI-driven filters, so the effective volume of spam should remain the same as it is now. Meanwhile, current social media accounts are already nothing but a massive attack surface; some people strive to minimize their social media presence, whereas others simply don't care whether they get attacked or not, as they don't have much to lose. Corporate and government tech security is already mostly a joke, with data leaks and ransomware attacks becoming a daily occurrence. I just don't see what AI could do to make matters substantially worse than they already are.
I kind of assumed people were doing this already (and have been for a while). A warehouse full of teenagers in Malaysia is probably cheaper, throughput-wise, than the current-generation GPT.
Well, this is admittedly N=1, but I haven't received any spear phishing attacks myself yet. Either the warehouse full of teenagers in Malaysia is still too expensive to make it worthwhile to try to intelligently trick the average person like me, or it is done so badly that it just looks like ordinary spam to me. I'm guessing that since e.g. OpenAI can let people play with at least the 3.5 chatGPT for free that it would be cheaper than even impoverished labor.
> Well, this is admittedly N=1, but I haven't received any spear phishing attacks myself yet.
Not that you've noticed, anyway :-) That said though, CPU time is still not free and neither is bandwidth, so attacking random people might still be too expensive, even with ChatGPT. It would be more efficient to buy a list of leaked personal information, then target exclusively those marks who are at least somewhat likely to pay off.
Could be... The other limiting factor, for either human or LLM spear phishers, is how much relevant personal information is easily accessible. A _lot_ of data is out there but, e.g., neither one is likely to have a full set of the contents of all my emails. They can probably work out _who_ to impersonate, but working out what to say is trickier.
Yeah, I mean partly I'm just saying: maybe all these trends that are worsening the internet, which are already in large measure a product of AI, are only going to accelerate as AI becomes more powerful. But clearly we're not *yet* at a point where the whole thing comes crashing down; social media platforms are still popular, corporate and government sites are still functional. Its very possible to imagine things getting worse than they currently are.
A lot of people are saying AI will improve spam filters as quickly as the spambots themselves. Maybe that's right, and I admit being way out of my technical depth here, but intuitively it doesn't feel to me like we should make this assumption. An AI that is approaching AGI capabilities is *defined* by its ability to "act" like a human. (Can they not already pass those "check the squares with a streetlight in it" tests? If not, then soon...) Whereas the ability to *detect* the difference between a human and a bot that *humans* can't even tell is a bot may prove more difficult than that.
The government does not seem to be very active in playing traffic cop with the internet. Seems to be some combo of much of government being way behind the times in understanding tech, and the big tech companies being so fucking rich, and with so much potential to get way richer, that they're sort of like Russian oligarchs. I think the tech companies are going to make every single judgment call there is to be made about what to allow -- whether to make things open source -- whether to install protections against various things. Every so often the government will give them a piece of paper with "I promise to be careful" on it and they'll all scrawl their signatures on the bottom and toss it back to the messenger who brought it.
Government doesn’t need to play traffic cop (though they certainly did around things like Covid and hundred Biden laptop etc.). They just need to use their big fucking stick.
A decade ago they could have told the big phone providers “figure out robocalls products your low ended are not renewed. They would have figured it out.
Too much regulatory capture and too much non legislating while everyone plays partisan shitfest.
I too don't like the idea of rigid, semi-informed government officials trying to micromanage a sector they don't really understand. But I also do not like the idea of the country being run by the shitlords of the internet.
The threat is real, and for that reason, people and companies will put increasing value on being able to identify themselves as humans to others and to be able to identify other humans. The Twitter blue check mark is an example of something that will get more common.
I imagine that human identity checking will become a service. That there will be a service that checks whether you are a human, and then you will log in to other websites using their account.
Alternatively, there could be a system of humans vouching for each other. If you vouch for a bot, and the bot gets exposed, you also get a ban.
Locally we have a bunch of services which provide legally binding e-signatures and logins tied to government identity, primarily used for all kinds of tax issues, permits, applications, internetbanks, etc, but they're also available for private services. This probably *could* be automated, so there might be a bot behind that, but it does tie the action to a "non-burnable" real identity so that puts a clear limit to potential abuse.
Nice idea. But if so, people are still going to want the internet, so there will be a massive incentive to set up a "no AI" internet.
I was thinking the same with media - there's an awful lot of reasons to think that people will feel extremely unfriendly towards AI completely taking over production of movies, TV and so on. The whole of those industries, with all its power and wealth, isn't going to roll over and allow that to happen, and in a context where in the wider world people are losing their jobs left right and centre, I imagine there'll be a huge backlash.
So there'll be an incentive to have "no AI here!" production companies, just as there will "no AI here!" internet. Is that achievable? I'm not sure. The toughest thing would be avoiding fakes, but I imagine there are ways round that.
There is already (at least) one working example of a "no-AI Internet". That is, a network consisting solely of mutually-authenticable participants who know and trust their immediate peers, with all traffic cryptographically opaque to outsiders, riding on the regular Internet in the same way as the latter rides on top of the telecom grid.
This kind of thing is not difficult to implement. However, more or less entirely "does not exist" from the POV of anyone "not invited to the party."
"So there'll be an incentive to have 'no AI here!' production companies, just as there will "no AI here!" internet."
I think the incentive will be low if the AI produced movies are roughly the same quality and substantially cheaper.
Going from memory, Suzuki violins (the physical items, not the teaching method) were looked down upon by lots of folks because they weren't as good as the hand crafted competition. But they were good enough and substantially cheaper so they sold well. "Authentic" didn't matter too much when the price difference was large enough.
Alternately, lots of folks like to complain about auto-tuned pop singers, but this doesn't seem to keep the pop singers (and others?) from using it.
Still, I expect the primary effect won't be *replacement* but instead *assistance*. Using AI (of some sort ...) might allow a movie to get the effect that the director wanted for substantially cheaper. That's going to be a win. I don't notice a lot of complaining when CGI is used to create battle scenes with thousands of participants. I expect the same from "AI."
The initial effect will be assistance. But at some point literally everything can be replaced including actors. I would think the industry would have enough clout to mount a massive campaign, lobbying etc but who knows.
The only benefit is in the design goals. GMO food is generally optimized for crop yield, shelf life, and maybe visual appeal; as the result, it tends to taste like cardboard and be somewhat lacking in nutrition. This is not a problem inherent in GMO technology, merely a design choice by the corporations who wield it. Meanwhile, non-GMO food still retains much of its taste and nutrition. However, it is indeed more expensive, since the crop yields are significantly lower.
" GMO food is generally optimized for crop yield, shelf life, and maybe visual appeal; as the result, it tends to taste like cardboard and be somewhat lacking in nutrition. "
Citation needed. The Red Delicious apple is non-GMO. While *breeding* for shelf life/transportability/etc. means that you're willing to accept a loss of taste as the results that get you your target traits are somewhat random, GM has the advantage that particular traits selectable are deliberate and do not require losing other traits like flavor.
My intention was not to bash GMO, but only to compare it with the OP claim on "no AI here", as I was struck by the similar marketing aspects of it.
I personally cannot tell the difference between GMO corn and non-GMO corn, but I have read that animals can, and only eat GMO corn when no alternatives are available. If I cannot tell the difference between a comments board with and without AI comments, how do I know it actually doesn't have AI? Would companies think their AI comments are good enough not to be noticed to falsely claim their AI-enhanced comments board has no AI comments in it?
More testing. If people were eating a plant for centuries, you can assume that associated problems are well known, even if then impact only a minority of the consumers (such as celiac disease). If the plant is new, who knows, the disease might get called after you.
For a producer, the benefits are legal. What you produce is your business, no one will accuse you of secretly producing more than you paid for. No one can change their mind overnight and start charging you 10x more.
The difference is the majority of people couldn't care less because the product will taste the same.
The scenario the OP is outlining by contrast is one in which the internet experience is so terrible that people spontaneously choose to ditch it. A bit different I'd think?
You are correct in that, AFAIK, people can't tell the difference between GMO and non-GMO.
I am less sure that people will be able to tell the difference between AI and non-AI except by volume. Even quality won't necessarily be a good metric. AI might well *improve* comments on some sites, like YouTube.
I'm imagining a site that advertises "no AI here" and is so popular that every post gets dozens of comments every minute, even from real people. And many of those posts might be like "first", "frist", "haha", and "omg lol".
Good point on spam filters/security also having AI tools, but an arms-race scenario between scams/hackers and security/filters still seems like a kind of destabilized scenario where the defenses could get overrun at any moment.
Regarding social media, this is actually what prompted the thought in the first place: the fact that AI has already been shaping our online social lives for over a decade via the algorithms that maximize "engagement" and so on. And that, paired with the observation that some of these platforms have driven people away by becoming so unbearably annoying, leads me to project these trends forward and imagine a world with ever more powerful AI in which the whole internet just turns to junk.
The guys who made The Social Dilemma did a good talk which incorporates the argument that AI has already been massively disrupting human society throughout the social media age (and that a lot of stuff will probably get a lot worse): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ
The average person seems to associate justice with equality, at least relative to my own sense of justice. Equality, beyond the baseline required to live a dignified life, seems irrational. Why might that be?
People don’t seem to think it’s unfair that some sports teams win again and again, while others haven’t had a title in 100 years. Or that a player might be benched the entire season. Or that Messi is soccer’s GOAT and is disproportionately remunerated for it. Society doesn’t seem to care that there isn’t a female Messi. Or that basketball “discriminates“ against short people. Or that most sports exclude the obese. Most of this seems tolerated because it’s rational. If the objective is to win, you will build the best team and pay what you need to pay, and do what you need to do to win.
Yet, when a team of people build a company, we have different expectations. Companies can’t just want to win. They must do good things for society outside of their core competency, like become carbon neutral or improve diversity. Employees inside companies shan’t be treated as super stars or be “benched”. Everyone has to be made feel they have a more or less equal chance of making it to the top. If a given demographic predominantly represents required skillset, companies are expected to fight the distribution and scout outside of the obvious places. People who work for high paying companies/industries are perceived as an undeserving and often low morality elite.
It seems more people understand intuitively that they can never be Michael Jordan. But it’s harder to appreciate why we didn’t get to become Beyoncé or Bill Gates. Maybe people think that if they just were in the right place at the right time, they could be almost anyone, unless of course being someone requires certain genetics; with the exception of intelligence, personality, and other more ambiguous traits.
I genuinely think we would all be happier if we accepted a lot more things in life work like professional sports, even if we hide it behind a veil of equality. It just seems like a collective delusion that leads to cognitive dissonance when we are confronted every day with a reality that doesn’t follow.
Justice isn't about equality. It's about good behaviors being rewarded and bad behaviors punished. The only place "equality" comes in with Justice is the idea that the goodness or badness of the behaviors should not be dependent on the person demonstrating them.
My thought of it that sports and sex are old but market economy is novel. There is still people who think that total production of goods is fixed (with aspect of "given technology") and people are just redistributing it.
I assume you're misrepresenting [a just world would be more equal] as [justice requires equality]. (This is irrelevant to the rest of the argument, but just to get semantic issues out of the way - it obviously does require fairness, which can be thought of as a kind of equality, albeit not of outcome.)
Which is to say, existing economic regulations simply do not account for numerous externalities, which results in a mismatch between what's profitable and what's perceived as beneficial for society. Companies posturing as carbon neutral, for example, is a PR move deflecting the blame for environmental costs of carbon emissions (being perceived - rightly, IMO - as) not being correctly priced into literal monetary costs of the companies' operations.
And more generally, companies are a part of social arrangement, and you should view it as perfectly normal that people judge them based on their influence on society - regardless of whether you think their judgments are correct or not. (If you don't, I assume it's due to being influenced by one of the worldviews that axiomatically see the contemporary market capitalism as either a natural state of being or as an arrangement leading to maximal social good. We can argue how neither is true some other time, my point here is simply that most people do not share this assumption, and realizing this alone would be enough to resolve your confusion.)
It's sports, the institutions whose sole purpose is providing framework for competition to find out who's the best, who are a very special case here. In contrast, I'd venture that approximately nobody, including the most hardcore of libertarians, thinks that the entire human economy is just a game to find out who can raise the most money.
Carbon neutral is different from diversity, since if there’s a cost in the transition from carbon companies should have to pay for it.
Anyway, people don’t care that much about equality, even trade unions have not historically cared. You yourself mention messi.
US identity politics are a different thing altogether since, the demand is for group equality of outcome rather than equality of outcome between individuals. So the 13% (iirc) difference between male and female earnings matters more than the millions or billions of dollars difference between the richest woman and the poorest man.
I think the main culprit here is the economic determinism of Marxism. Corporations are the engine of capitalism and when you're targeting something you want to stop, you hit the engine. The infiltration of corporate governance by DEI political officers was mapped out in the middle of the last century by Marxist theorists who were growing increasingly annoyed by the fact that the US proletariat is basically a contented group. Since no revolution was ever going to happen the way Marx predicted, a quiet revolution was required within the structure of the capitalist system itself. So this is why you see corporations being held to different standards than, say, sports teams. Corporations are at the root of the evil exploitative capitalist system in neo-Marxiist thought. Sports teams are just part of the culture industry that anesthetizes workers.
Capitalists love DEI because it centers the political conversation about injustice on race (not a threat to Capital) instead of on economic class (the biggest threat to Capital).
They've been doing this for years; there's that famous Lyndon B. Johnson quote: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." It's the same shit as always, reskinned for the new age where open racism doesn't fly. Always centering the conversation on race.
I know lots of capital-m Marxists that really dislike the wider SJ movement because of this.
You don't need a conspiracy to figure out why corporations are held to a different standard here. "Corporations" just aren't that popular and "sports teams" are. (But also, sports teams got hammered by SJ for racist mascots and exclusivity way before corporate brands did, so I think your premise might just be flat-out wrong.)
Exactly that. The switch first to gay rights and then to identity politics, instead of class politics, made it very easy for businesses and large institutions to just keep on doing what they were doing.
Hang up a rainbow flag, say you're all for gay marriage, and keep hiring and firing people on short-term contracts so you don't have to pay them benefits if they've continuously worked for you over twelve months.
Generally speaking, capitalists aren't interested in preserving capitalism, they just care about their own bottom line. Just because DEI may be good for the short-term profits of individual megacorporations doesn't mean it won't damage the long-term viability of the social system that allows these businesses to be created in the first place.
Of course they don't oppose it. Harvard, over decades, has succeeded in making DEI and social justice the highest status belief system that exists in the US political landscape, Anyone who opposes it is low -status. Even if they knew it was going to destroy capitalism in the end they would still promote it. Status is a powerful incentive.
If Harvard is doing that there’s something in it for Harvard graduates. I think Amazon once produced an internal memo suggesting that diverse workers are less likely to organise.
You're wrong that the average person associates justice with equality (or at least equality of outcomes). Here's a NYT articles about how the recent affirmative action vote in California (more liberal than average in the US) failed https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/11/us/supreme-court-affirmative-action.html. I think most people believe in meritocracy, at least loosely. The trouble is outside of a few fields, it's really not the case that people are rewarded based on their merit. Everyone has a coworker who is lazy and doesn't put in the effort, but everyone also knows someone who has benefited from nepotism.
> Most of the difference between conservatives and liberals is the extent they
> perceive the world as being driven by merit or luck; most would agree that merit-
> based inequality is okay while luck-based is not.
Good luck trying to separate luck from merit. I once had a boss who used to say 'the harder you work, the luckier you get.' I used to scoff at this as a silly platitude to get me to work harder, but I've come to realize it's basically accurate. So much of what looks like merit is actually simply taking actions to reduce the number of ways you can be hit by negative variance in your possible outcomes and to increase the number of ways you can benefit from positive variance in the same. By this theory, merit is basically variance management. For example, a professional basketball player trains hard to perfect his shot so that if he happen to get the ball in a game in the right spot (variance) he will score (merit). Or a salesman knocks on more doors in a month than anyone else because he knows that a small percentage of knocks lead to sales (variance) and he wants to find as many as he can (merit).
What controls the family you're born into? If you're Hindu, it is merit (accumulated in past lives). Most other religions attribute it to luck, I guess.
On a different point you made: The difference between conservative and liberal is only in how they see role of govt, I think. In other views, individual differences trump ideological differences, in my experience.
It is also incentive to be a good human being in order to gain merit for the future, which includes future births (in the belief system). It is religious belief ofcourse. Hindus, Buddhists...
The list goes on though. Country, family, health, looks, height...This list is so long that to me it only makes sense to think of people as individuals rather than a category.
I don't know that the average person associates "justice" with "equality." I think there's been a massive push from some activists to push the word "equity" or talk about the desirability of "equality of outcomes" instead of "equality of opportunities." But I think a majority of Americans are essentially in a favor of a capitalist system where you end up with Beyoncé and Bill Gates and Michael Jordan.
As for sports, performance is incredibly objective and competitive. The difference between peak Michael Jordan and a replacement-level player is massive. Even the difference between the sixth-best player on an NBA team and a G-League player is massive. These differences are clearly seen in the stats. And even more important than that, sports are competitive endeavor in a way that the typical industry isn't. ExxonMobil and Shell are roughly similar in terms of profits and revenues. Some years Exxon has more profits, some years Shell has more. Does that matter? Not really. But if Real Madrid keeps finishing 2nd to Barcelona, even if everything else at the club is going well, the folks at Real Madrid will be out of a job. (Side note for the pedantic football fans out there: yes, I know that Real Madrid and Barca are supporter-owned and not businesses in the traditional sense, but you get my point.)
In most other endeavors, it's impossible to evaluate an employee as easily as it is in the sports world. Sure, you can recognize a superstar salesman or brilliant programmer, but figuring out whether an employee is at the 60th percentile or 40th percentile is a lot tougher. And if companies really try to be cutthroat about this, it can make life for employees pretty miserable, and the company ends up worse off.
You say, “we have different expectations. Companies can’t just want to win,” but, kindly, this seems obviously wrong.
Plenty of people think ESG guidelines are inefficient, forced diversity doesn’t really benefit anyone, and that’s there’s nothing wrong with people getting paid whatever the market price is for their skills. Plenty of people believe that naked competition will better serve everyone’s interests than trying to come up with a set of rules to make the economy look more ‘socially responsible’ (for whatever is the issue du jour).
What you’re describing is more or less a free market advocate, an economic libertarian and standard bearer of the laissez-faire. And I am one. And there are plenty of others, and (not coincidentally) they are disproportionately represented among economists, businesspeople, and fields where performance is more easily measured, among other places.
What’s probably bothering you is that, due to constant negativity, and distinctly left-of-center perspective, and fearmongering, the media writ large tends to only focus on what our economy does wrong. If you think about it, though, we’d really quickly have a very different country if the majority was in favor of salary caps, price controls, strong bankruptcy protection/picking winners and losers, etc.
There has been a shift to view socialism and planned economies more favorably among the young but with the rather conspicuous failures in broadly planned market interventions with the last few years I don’t anticipate the more radical elements of the anti-market left picking up steam here.
Hey everyone, I wrote this piece called "The Future is Happening to Me" about, what else, AI. But specifically it focuses a bit more on current, pre-AGI, generative paradigms and how even they may pose challenges to our communities and conceptualizations of self. I'm curious what others think, and I'd welcome any comments/criticisms.
Anybody know Houston? I'll be there this week and want to see neighborhoods/ towns that are good examples/ results of the region's (lack of) housing regulation and zoning. All ideas welcome. Thanks!
Check out The Woodlands for an example of something that's basically the opposite of all New Urbanist dreams, but is actually still pretty pleasant.
It's spread out, completely unwalkable, filled with McMansions, and the downtown is basically just a glorified shopping mall, but despite all that it feels like a genuinely nice place.
Toodle around Montrose, to the west and southwest of downtown. It's a mishmash of single-family homes, townhome clusters, and apartment towers that sprout up in the middle of neighborhoods. Midtown, to the east of there, has a ton of mid-rise stuff that's popped up along the red line light rail. East Downtown is also popping with new development in the typical chaotic Houston mode. And Uptown, just outside the 610 Loop on the west side, is a classic edge city with a bunch of skyscrapers that is nonetheless almost completely unwalkable. (NIMBYs killed the most obviously needed light rail route in the city, from Downtown to Uptown.)
Alas, 90% of Houston is just the same boring ass sprawl as everywhere else in the country, if not worse.
This is the weirdest most specific question I've ever asked here. I ordered some freeze-dried chicken bits as treats for my cats. They are dry, odorless little chunks, but on the package it says that after you feed them to your cats you should "wash you hands, the cat dish, the utensils you used and the counter with hot, soapy water." Apparently these things are freeze dried raw, and handling them is basically handling raw chicken, which is actually something I never do because raw meat grosses me out, and raw chicken is both gross and additionally really does carry a risk. I'm not worried about the treats hurting the cats, I'm worried about them making me sick. I'm inclined to just throw them out. Is that reasonable, or is there some reason to be less concerned than I am?
Freeze-drying probably inhibits bacterial growth quite well. I doubt you would be in any danger. But that said, chucking them out wouldn't be the end of the world unless you ordered a ton of them.
Why not see if the cats like them? If they don't, you can chuck them out with a clear conscience!
I asked google how well freeze drying kills bacteria, and read the first research article I saw, which concerned how well freeze drying kills a particular kind of bacteria in infant formula. Result was that longer freeze drying times killed more than shorter, but none killed all the bacteria. And I'm thinking that people making cat treats are going to do the quick 'n dirty kind of freeze drying. Also looked up what fraction of chicken in stores is hosting salmonella, and it's one package in 25, and I'm thinking that people making chicken cat treats are buying from the cheapest source, where I'll bet a larger fraction of packages are infected. So overall, I don't think the risk is trivial here, and I'm going to throw the stuff out. I only bought it because one of my cats does not like *any* of the cat treats I've tried on him (though it turns out he doesn't like the freeze dried salmonella ones either). And that wouldn't be a problem, except that they're Devon Rexes, so extremely smart, active and curious. I give them food puzzles to solve to make it less likely they will treat my entire home as a food puzzle, cleverly opening cabinets and dumping out drawers in their search. And you have to use treats in food puzzles because wet food wrecks the puzzles. The second cat, who likes treats, is moving up the puzzle hierarchy rapidly. He's alarmingly smart, and may be submitting an essay to the contest next year -- probably about something like how good my socks smell to him.
Yes, I can't deny it, I am head over heels in love with them. But also it is extremely enjoyable to make them happy. You can't watch a human being for longer than 5 mins without seeing a shadow of sadness, resentment or self-doubt cross their face, and if you're unlucky in the 5 min. interval you pick you'll be treated to worse things. But you can set up life for these little animals so that they are having a good experience ALL THE TIME. They just go from pleasure to pleasure.
I'm sure it almost totally inhibits growth, but it apparently doesn't kill bacteria hardly at all. Once they are in a more growth friendly environment (read: wet), they can start growing and becoming a problem. So the issue is not the treats themselves, but that they might cross contaminate other surfaces upon which they can start to grow.
For me personally, I wouldn't be worried about it, but that's probably the proposed mechanism/safety concern.
Everyone's risk tolerance is different, but I personally think that Americans, generally speaking, are _far_ too worried about food borne illnesses. I personally wouldn't be concerned at all, and relative to a lot of other things I do in my day-to-day life, this seems low risk. But I think that's true of almost all food-related things. I'm the kind of person who regularly doesn't put dinner away until the next day, etc.
Unfortunately, this is the kind of thing that it's almost impossible to make informed decisions about. When it comes to food related illnesses, we know that certain things can increase or decrease risk, but we have almost no idea at all of what the base rate is. We don't know how risky it starts out as.
From my personal experience, I've come to the decision that the base rate of food borne illnesses is _extremely_ low, so I don't worry too much about changing that risk. But my personal experience is probably not very generalizable, and just like I won't change my behavior if I hear about someone else getting sick, I wouldn't expect anyone else to change their behavior because they hear that I haven't gotten sick.
So the only actionable advice I can give you is: there are lots of different cat treats out there. Get the one that is going to cause you the least anxiety/distress.
I'm not a big worrier about food-borne illnesses, but the problem of salmonella in chicken really seems to me to be different from most of the other stuff. Yeah, sometimes e coli or listeria on veggies makes people sick, but it's usually a few dozen in the whole country. Looked up salmonella in chicken, and source said it's in one package in 25. And I hate housework. I don't want to have to wash the damn counter with hot soapy water every day. And besides, my cats nuzzle my face all the time. And of course they groom themselves by licking. If they eat a freeze-dried bit with salmonella, how long would there be living salmonella in their mouths? Yuck. I'm throwing the shit out.
I just want to say, good for you for actually reading the packaging. People like me never know to ask these questions because we never read the packaging. We assume its obvious how such cat treats are to be used and what can I possibly learn from the fine print?
Depends how sickly you are. I typically ignore advice like that, use the same tools for the raw meat as the cooked, and nothing happens because the odds of disease being present are quite low to begin with. Just don't leave them out thawed.
If you wouldn't ordinarily feed raw chicken to your cats, and you didn't know these were raw chicken, and you're worried, then it's reasonable to throw them out. It's for your own peace of mind and that is worth more than whatever these cost (unless they cost you an arm and a leg).
I think both actions would be reasonable. I have had salmonella and it was absolutely horrible so if it were me i’d throw them out because i don’t want that kind of worry/bother in my life.
I have given freeze dried liver treats to our dogs but I don’t remember seeing those warnings.
I actually do think it's reality based. Looked up how frequently chicken in the store has salmonella, and it's one package in 25. And people making that stuff into cat treats probably get their chicken from cheap sources, which may have a higher salmonella rate. And I looked up freeze drying and it reduces bacterial count but def does not kill all or almost all the bacteria. I actually don't think gloves would help. My cats are very affectionate and often lick my face. Doesn't seem absurd to me that salmonella could linger in their saliva for half an hour or so after after they eat one of those things. I do think that most worries about getting sick from food are overblown, and it's so unlikely that it's best mentally to just round the risk down to zero. But salmonella in chicken is a real thing, & a rare example of a situation where precautions are justified. I hope I'm not creeping you out and giving you new OCD worries! If so, I apologize.
So Reddit is in protest today because the company increased the cost of the API to third party app developers. In particular the third party app Apollo is being hit by very large and economically disastrous fee increases, and have decided to close down.
The protest involves the different sub reddits being temporarily silent - mostly they have been made private by their moderators. It’s a two day protest for most, but some sub Reddits have decided to go silent for good.
It will be interesting to see how the latter will work out. To my mind, even if the admins - employees of Reddit - don’t open up the closed subs then somebody will eventually create a new one on the same theme. I really don’t see the point of that strategy - in any negotiation you should keep the most powerful threat you have until you have tried other strategies, like the two day stoppage to begin with, if that is even allowed.
To be fair they all voted on it, in the respective subs. The full shutdown seems fairly extreme and unworkable to me.
Reddit can and will open up closed subs, remove moderators, do whatever the hell they like.
Power-mods are fooling themselves if they think they can't simply be kicked off and replaced. They think they're doing unpaid volunteer work? There are plenty of entities that will pay a _lot_ of money to take over popular subreddits. What PR firm wouldn't want to be in control of the flow of information?
That's just the newest thing. I'm not a mod myself, but from what I've heard the main issue is that reddit has been attacking critical infrastructure for mods and researchers for a while now. This is somewhat understandable since reddit has been struggling to monetise since basically ever, and this infrastructure is also always usable to circumvent whatever monetisation they may try. Appollo has been widely used as a de-facto modding tool for years now. And since reddit is considered completely dysfunctional without the unpaid labor from mods, this is a very questionable target.
Since being a mod already was pretty shitty in many ways, it's no surprise that they simply hang up their hat for good. It's not entirely about protest, it seems a number of mods basically just thought this was the last straw and they're done, even if the majority of mods think they might turn things around with a protest.
So I wouldn't underestimate the protest. At the least, there is a good chance that even more mods will close shop for good since they don't deem it worth the hassle anymore and the increased workload and tediousness of being a mod might keep others from setting up new communities, or the new rung of mods that jumps to the call will be plainly lower quality on average. I could also see a new equilibrium emerging where big reddit subs are consistently professionally modded by non-reddit staff, for example a WoW sub being modded by WoW PR employees.
I love that tweet by Jimmy Wales talking about how the Turkish government wanted to censor Wikipedia, and rather than caving immediately like Twitter recently did, they took it to the Turkish supreme court and won. That's how you get free speech.
Tildes.net is in development and planning to run as a nonprofit funded by donations, but I'm a bit skeptical of how well that will scale. Reddit tried to run off donations with Reddit Gold - they even had a similar "here's our donation goal for the month" thing - but it evidently didn't work out.
On the other hand, Reddit was trying to turn a profit, so if you prune it down really hard and don't set any goals beyond "pay server costs" and "pay a developer enough to fix bugs and scaling issues," you might be able to make it work.
It looks like /r/aww (cute animal pics) and /r/music ( 30M+) are the biggest that currently claim to be private indefinitely, with /r/aww's "depending on Reddit's continued responses to the situation".
First of all, thanks to everyone for your answers and ending ensuing discussions. This is exactly the reaction I was hoping to be able to learn from.
I'll now try to address the main themes I've read.
1) AI will "force" us into UBI.
I don't disagree with the role of UBI post-singularity. But then again, post-singularity UBI seems indistinguishable from unemployment benefits. My intuition is thus that if choosing between the two it should be the imbalances in the world we know that guide us.
2) UBI is better because it requires less bureaucracy.
Fair point. But it's also much more expensive (at least pre-singularity). I'd love to see numbers convincing me that the extra bureaucracy isn't worth the saving, but I'm skeptical they exist.
Some people also brought up issues with defining unemployment and proving reasons for contract terminations. These additional complications do not worry me: the alternative I'm considering is a simplified benefit where anyone can get it forever so long as they're not working. No need to prove anything other than that your are not already employed.
3) Unemployment benefits would discourage work more than UBI.
This is maybe the most interesting one.
Firstly, if either policy would discourage people from working jobs where they're exploited for peanuts, I'd say that's great. In fact, making workers free to walk out is to me maybe the most ethically appealing aspect of UBI.
So the question then is: do unemployment benefits _necessarily_ discourage productive work more than UBI? I understand that specific implementations do, but do they have to?
Say your UBI pays 1500 monthly. If you're hired for 1000 that's 1000 extra you get to keep. It does seem like if instead of UBI you have an unemployment benefit you'd lose money to work in that situation - but that doesn't mean you wouldn't work, only that you wouldn't work for just 1000. Wouldn't the same job just pay 2500 instead? Is there an argument that employers just wouldn't be able to pay more than the benefit? And if so, wouldn't that end up weeding out less productive/essential jobs? And should I care about that beyond the impact on the economy impacting the ability to fund this benefit?
Can we turn this on its head? Is there a risk of UBI enabling easy pointless jobs to persist because the tiniest margins are enough for everyone involved to get just a little bit more money from them? And again, would that be a bad thing?
> 2) UBI is better because it requires less bureaucracy.
>
> Fair point. But it's also much more expensive (at least pre-singularity).
Why is it more expensive? You take back payments for high earners at tax time, because the tax bureaucracy already exists (and must exist). Total payments could be made the same, just with less bureaucracy.
>Firstly, if either policy would discourage people from working jobs where they're exploited for peanuts, I'd say that's great
It's the most evil and perverse part of UBI/unemployment/minimum wage (and UBI least of the 3). You call it "exploited for peanuts", I call it "probably producing as much value as their circumstances allow".
First, gainful employmenti s one of the best way to acquire skills and experience that may allow them to produce more value (and hence not be paid peanuts for it) at a later time. Killing low-paying jobs mean that a part of the population will instead be inactive, and won't get trained toward being able to do better jobs later.
Then it depreciate the jobs that produce more values. I value my own time at a given value. When choosing a job to do, I balance the value I give to my time with the revenue from that job & the efforts it requires of me. The more you tax the revenue, the less it matter in my choice in relation to efforts or my free time. And it is in the interest of everyone that I work the jobs at which I produce the most value. More taxation, less wealth to tax.
>Wouldn't the same job just pay 2500 instead?
Why wouldn't this job pay 2500 today? Probably because it's not economically viable to pay it 2500, because it doesn't produce more than that.
TL; DR: you worry that no UBI/unemployment/minimum wage create inequality from low-paying jobs, I worry that UBI/unemployment/minimum wage create a permanent (and probably growing) class of unemployable, unskilled, unproductive peoples. It may work for a while at decreasing inequalities, but I see no endgame that isn't ugly, either from severe social backlash, an economic death spiral where more & more jobs get weeded out, or a general impoverishment of everyone.
I'm not worrying about inequality here. And while I do worry a little about people choosing to work, I'd definitely rather people not work than be exploited.
If there is enough money to go around for something like UBI to be productive, I don't see why I should worry about maximising productivity.
I do find it interesting we may both be doing a little bit of typical minds. My instinct is people will still want to work even if not to maximize profits - there are lots of people I know who could be earning literal orders of magnitude more of they valued money enough to choose jobs the way you claim to.
Anyway, if we end up in a world where people who will only work for money don't, and people who value work itself do - as long as it's sustainable - I don't think I'll be able to complain much.
I'm not in favour of UBI, but I think that paying people for not working is obviously a lot worse than paying people for existing. My preferred form of welfare, however, would be to simply offer very low-paying jobs to everyone (as cleaners or whatever).
Because if you tie UBI to unemployment, people are *incentivized* not to work? I'm fine with people not working if they don't want to and are willing to do subsistence living, but it's stupid to actively incentivize against it. Also, because people should be able to get part-time jobs without losing their benefits - 40 hours a week is actually quite a lot, and people who can't handle that much but would be willing to work for half that time shouldn't be disincentivized from participating in the labor market.
A relatively "high" indefinite dole we had in Germany from 1956 till 2005. To oversimplify: people react to incentives. - Thus I am in favour of some "UBI": specifically, a small one. As in Milton Friedman's idea of a"negative income tax" (highly unfortunate word-choice).- Mostly, I hate the admin-overhead (on all tax-payers and on "the poor"). UBI sounds simple. Don't hold your breath: a simple UBI will never come to be. First, it is hard - and then there is the admin-political-complex. All the biggest offices in my town deal mainly with dole/"social help".
Because it's simpler (and thus cheaper) to administer. You don't need to verify everyone's employment history, you don't need to keep up in the arms race with the scammers, you just give everyone the same stipend.
If we have mass unemployment because of AI (a big if but let’s go with it) then what would the AI be producing and for who? The rich? The few remaining workers? Even the rich may not have much money if their companies are defunct.
If economic activity depends on consumption then it depends on people having money to spend. This may be produced by government dictat or by taxation. In a world with the kind of possible economic growth that AI proponents purpose, the optimists anyway, money has to get to the consumer somehow.
Not what you asked, but pre pandemic I was a big UBI proponent, and during the lockdown I saw too many examples of people being put in a UBI situation and behaving in a way that would counter productive for society as a whole if done at scale, so I’ve changed my mind. This includes my own child. The idea that if we free people from undue burden they can chose to pursue their passion no longer resonates. People will lock themselves in a room and play videogames and eat pizza. Having a mechanism to force people to have the responsibilities of a job is actually highly formative and acts as a guardrail that prevents boundary cases from going off the rails.
The problem is that we're already in that situation for plenty of people, covid just increased the number of them. Unemployment benefits are actually worse for that issue, since you actively lose a benefit if you work, which for some people will mean work is net-negative. A properly designed UBI will always reward marginal work, since by definition you always get it, so it shouldn't have that problem.
On the other hand admittedly many lefty activists try to use UBI as a de-facto increased unemployment benefits, so instituting it the way they want does lead to the problem you're mentioning.
Theoretically, some people (e.g. thieves, gang enforcers, etc) could be of more value to their society if they suddenly had zero ambition and turned into harmless NEETs.
> One of the pillars of anyone self esteem is doing useful work.
Maybe it's a premise of *your* self-esteem, but you're not everyone. Some people derive their self-esteem from doing philosophy or art or other pursuits that are not useful work and therefore are not financially compensated (barring a few outliers). Why force them to sell hot dogs if we don't have to ?
It's the lack of ambition in Martin's post that's most concerning. There's definitely a group of people, especially but not limited to young men, who are currently using video games and porn as a substitute for ambition. Lack of ambition means there's no art or philosophy either, it's just low level sadness and ennui that we are already seeing in pretty large numbers. That's without a UBI. If a significant increase in that demographic were to happen with a UBI, that would be really bad for society.
You don't see a problem with a massive underclass of people who spend large portions of their lives with no ambition, no skills, limited family or friend connections, and diminishing ability to do anything different? Long term, that's creating a class of people that the "productive" aspects of society, be it people or machines, will consider a dead weight. It also creates a class of people that may easily become disaffected as they are separated from society and may feel that their needs (psychological and emotional especially) are not cared about or met.
That's a separate discussion from Bugmaster questioning whether 30% of the population becoming NEETS is even a problem. I say that a massive part of the population becoming shut ins is a problem. Whether that would happen is an interesting question. If we incentivized people to not work, I think it would happen - which is a big part of the reason I would be against increasing unemployment benefits. If it's an add-on to whatever people can earn otherwise, I think people will continue to work.
I think a UBI will just end up causing inflation (people bidding up housing and such) and everyone will essentially feel like they're exactly as financially stable as before, except those who previously couldn't work but also didn't get welfare benefits. Like young adults who haven't worked yet. It may discourage them from ever getting jobs, which could lead to the NEET scenario above. I'm not sold on that, but it's a dangerous experiment to run. It would be very hard to claw back a UBI once in place with people counting on the income.
True, but the premise of this scenario is that there are enough resources to implement UBI sufficient to support 30% of the population. I was just accepting the premise as stated.
Is it fair to condemn locking oneself in a room during a lockdown which shuts down businesses, forbids group meetups and specifically requests people to stay home? Perhaps your child just isn't the kind of person who is oriented towards organizing activities on their own. I won't pretend to know your child better than you do, but it would be interesting to see what they would have done with UBI but no lockdown, with plenty of group activities happening outside. As you hint to below, they might have enjoyed working for free at an outdoor car wash, as long as it was organized by someone else.
The complaint was about people locking themselves in their rooms to play videogames and eat pizza. If people are doing that when they could be "locking themselves in their rooms" to learn a new language or start a home-based business or write a novel or etc, etc, etc, and occasionally go out hiking or biking, and eat home-cooked meals with the cooking skills they just developed, then yes, that does argue strongly against "UBI will produce an explosion of human creativity, passion, and flourishing once people no longer have to work their boring wage-slave *jobs*"
Also, people who are serious about flourishing and in generally good health, could and probably should have violated the lockdowns ruthlessly after the first month or two.
Willingness to flout stupid regulations is rather orthogonal to what's under discussion - there are a lot of people who might be doing useful community stuff in a UBI world who were too neurotic to ever meet another person in person during Covid.
I’m with you here, broadly. I like Curtis Yarvin’s idea that a really enlightened government wouldn’t worry about everybody getting money but about everybody having work to do, because a nation’s most valuable asset is human capital and work is how you preserve and improve on that capital. The “people will be free for Art and Science” argument feels hollow; I think there are some people who will choose art and science whatever the circumstance, but most won’t. The whole UBI thing might work for “homo economicus” but not for human beings.
Wasn't Yarvin/Moldbug the guy who argued that a government ought to work as a ruthless profit-maximizer, like a corporation? How does that square with the idea that the government should be creating make-work for people?
Also, "human capital" is a pretty nebulous thing. It would be easy to achieve full employment by hiring all the unemployed people to build a giant pyramid (I've read that the Egyptian pyramids served a similar purpose), but that wouldn't build human capital except in the field of cutting and moving giant stone blocks.
In a society where cutting and moving giant stone blocks is a useful skill, that sounds like a strong positive. Maybe that's similar to creating caretaker roles for the elderly and young children. We don't necessarily need it, but training millions of people to do those jobs can have significant benefits in society. Due to the nature of those jobs, it's very hard to pay* much to the people handling them, but if we valued the skillset and the function, the government "encouraging" it by paying more could subsidize what might not otherwise exist.
*- A caretaker working even forty hours a week making $15/hour is over $30,000 in base wages and potentially $60,000 with FICA and benefits and other costs. Even splitting that between multiple children/elderly, that's a huge cost per person since there's a pretty low maximum that one person can take care of safely.
He takes a more holistic view that the State owns everything in its domain and ought to maximize the value of its assets, the primary asset being its people. It’s a bit different than maximizing profit; if the State sells a product it doesn’t directly increase the value of its assets, since the dollar used to buy the product belonged to it already. In any case, he arrives at the motto “salus populi suprema lex”, human well-being is the highest law. He follows this up with fun thought experiments about what sorts of policies a benevolent but absolute government would take to create useful work for all.
As for the latter point, Yarvin’s answer would be that the State’s role is to maximize human capital. A nuclear physicist has greater value doing nuclear physics than moving stone blocks, so the State ought to leave him to do so. But at the same time the State ought to ensure the existence of enough unskilled labor jobs to occupy the unskilled part of the workforce (see FDR and the Works Progress Administration), while at the same time investing heavily in upskilling that workforce. He foresees this happening via “unfree” market forces rather than state coercion (toy example: banning the import of textiles to create more domestic textile jobs).
What human capital did e.g. the White Sea--Baltic Canal preserve? (Not even speaking of other, better-known "arbeit macht frei"(tm) projects.)
And I can't help but wonder: is there a make-work proponent somewhere who sees himself as a possible candidate for ending up doing said make-work? How certain are you that you will never become a "Kanalarmeets" ?
Someone who spends a few years doing nothing productive will miss out on several years of personal and professional growth. That's often the difference between someone who struggles with employment their whole lives verses someone who ends up with a decent career. Falling off the career track and not developing skills is a huge detriment to someone's ability to even learn to be productive later.
Sure, some jobs don't teach any skills either (except the skill of self motivation needed to get up and actually go to the job), but jobs with literally no skill growth are extremely rare and still almost universally come with things like social interaction and such.
My child literally spent a full year on pizza + videogames, almost full time. And not mentally stimulating videogames either. For a while she was playing a car wash simulator, where you wash cars with a virtual hose, except you don’t get paid for it. Having seen other people of various ages become unproductive from any charitable point of view, made me think that my behavior, which drove my interest in UBI, is actually the exception. It’s another example of intellectuals thinking we understand marginalized groups when in fact we don’t.
I mean, I spent a year in college playing video games nearly full time (often 6+ hours a day), and while it wasn't great for my studies, I still have a job now that pays better than almost all of my peers.
But it seems like you're answering a question completely different than the one that was asked, which was UBI vs (high) indefinite unemployment benefits. It seems pretty clear that your example should lead you to be more in favor of a UBI solution, rather than unemployment which *incentivizes* unemployed people not to look for even part-time work. Especially since your COVID example was a literal example of the latter.
To be a bit more practical than the usual here, I've worked as a mailman and know many people who still do, among others my own dad. Especially in the small town we worked it was normal do personally know everyone you bring the mail.
The reality is, there's plenty of people on the lowest employment level who will directly tell you that they literally earn less while working than they do on unemployment benefits. Some of them work anyway out of a certain sense of pride (or shame, however you interpret it), some of them say screw it and don't. Either way, it sucks in my opinion.
I'm not really philosophically aligned to UBI in any sense, but imo we need to restructure the earning situation so that people always benefit from any work they do, to avoid them getting stuck in a permanent unemployment that is bad for them and bad for society as a whole. And UBI is one such possibility.
>The reality is, there's plenty of people on the lowest employment level who will directly tell you that they literally earn less while working than they do on unemployment benefits
This is due to the piecemeal way the US provides benefits to people. They will have cut offs at different levels of income and some wont have marginal rates but just a drop off at a certain level.
An alternative to UBI which would address this issue is a simple negative marginal tax rate to replace the different programs. As you earn more, you get less "back" from taxes but your total income is always rising.
Incidentally, that is something I'm in favor of, since it reduces friction. However, this is often considered one of the main - if not best - ways of implementing an UBI, so it's not really a difference. Conceptually speaking, any system of taxes were you get a minimum amount of money while unemployed and a strictly increasing amount of money when employed is only different from an UBI in terms of accounting.
the (really difficult) problem is to precisely define unemployment. Seen in real life:
Some people can not afford to do useful few hour jobs (because they loose more benefit than earning). Some people can not afford to learn new skills (because enrolling for a 20hrs/week course will make then "voluntarily unavailable for full time jobs", thus loosing the benefit under their legislation). Some people have to turn down interesting fixed-term contracts, because their benefits in the (by definition) repeated unemployment would be to low, motivating extending the current unemployment. Some people had to move into a cheap subsidized flat and would have to move out if they crossed the very-low-income-still-counts-as-unemployed-threshold.
And each of that can be addressed by making unemployment definitions more detailed, leading to bureaucracy nightmares.
But see: UBI is not the only alternative. And there is a lot of vagueness about how universal the "U" really should be. That could lead to the same kind of difficulties.
E.g. is UBI a daily rate that will only be given for days spent in the regional UBI-zone? (Otherwise you will have people from highest-paying UBI authority coming to spend months in low-cost-of-living areas, a desaster when lifting price levels for the locals there)
E.g. is UBI flat or varying over age? (what about immigrants from regions on earth that don't see that much relevance in exact date of birth)
E.g. does UBI require to be settled with a permanent residence? (if so, do you indirectly punish nomadic life style? is that fair?)
UBI is a flat rate determined at onset or phased in so the economy gets used to it. For example, start with $100 every two weeks which ramps up $50 every year until reaching $2000 every two weeks. Checks mailed (so need an address; P.O. box would do) or automatic deposit. Amount does not vary for location.
One quarter of UBI amount received for a child, sent to a designated parent, until the child is eligible to receive the full amount on coming of age (18, so it could pay for college). Immigrants are not eligible for UBI unless naturalized; this is a benefit only for US citizens.
No residence is required, but a mailing address is.
UBI would be subject to garnishment in the judgment of the court. One must not presume those not working to automatically be free to commit crimes only punishable by fines or monetary judgements. It would be possible this way to imprison people and use the UBI to pay off a debt.
BONUS: No income tax on UBI; no point to it. You would be taxed on any additional income, but all such income raises your standard of living.
I suspect automation will allow enough additional productivity to permit UBI, with those with the greatest automation having enough productivity (profit) to fund it. If eventually 90% of the population does nothing but receive UBI they would be limited in what they consume, and the rest would generate additional income, raising their standard of living.
I don't know. I haven't run the numbers, so the ones I provided are just for illustration of my concept.
But eventually...yes. I don't know how long it will take, but I see no reason we can't automate enough to provide everyone a good standard of living without having to work, except for a small percentage of people.
Right now, maybe we could do it with perhaps $5000 annually per person, though that would be about $1.7 trillion per year, out of about $23 trillion in annual GDP. Maybe that would be a starting point?
Hm. Current US population is about 335 million, current federal revenue is about $4.9 trillion, current federal spending is about $6.3 trillion. Given the population, every additional trillion in spending would give each person $2,985 per year. Giving everyone $50,000 a year would be about $16.75 trillion.
And according to people who believe in the "trillion dollar coin" loophole, there's nothing preventing the federal government from doing this right now.
It's not that simple. If the government just prints additional money to do this then it will cause inflation. Then the $50,000 is actually a lot smaller than it is now.
From the POV of many (most?) people in USA, a "good standard of living" inescapably includes "not having to live with the underclass". That is, near people who impose some very real and quite unpleasant externalities (see old lit re "housing projects" etc) on their neighbours.
How would any amount of "UBI" subsidy provide this?
IMHO you would need more than simply a "free money" handout, but some fundamental restructuring of society that tends not to be discussed in "UBI" threads.
UBI didn't mean minimum to make everyone happy. It's a universal BASIC income. You would have a roof over your head, hot and cold water, and could eat rice and beans three times a day.
If you want more, then you can work, and every amount you earn raises your standard of living.
I think the point you are making is that some people will only be happy relative to other people. This is true, and inescapable.
To me the biggest reason is that UBI has fewer, potentially zero, requirements. This makes it less likely to cause unintended consequences or Goodharting. The most notable difference would be between being paid, and being paid *not to work*. We don't want to encourage people to turn down paid work. If they get the money either way, one cuts off potential avenues to better themselves and/or complete productive work, while the other simply doesn't. They don't have to work with a UBI, but they *can* work with a UBI.
"We don't want to encourage people to turn down paid work. If they get the money either way, one cuts off potential avenues to better themselves and/or complete productive work, while the other simply doesn't."
Re "better themselves" and the various comments about human capital and acquiring skills in various comments in this discussion. I'm confused about what people are assuming about technological progress in this discussion. If e.g. we got full AGI (and similar advances in robotics) is e.g. say by 2030, (and if it stayed under human control, which I actually doubt...), I could see how the economy could be essentially completely automated, and could then pay for a truly universal UBI at a comfortable standard of living. But what is the point of _human_ capital in such a scenario? It seems like any plausible skill acquisition would be a 21st century equivalent of learning to be an elevator operator. Or are people mostly talking about UBI in an economy which _doesn't_ have AGI, in which case, are we talking about an affordable UBI which is actually large enough for people to subsist on?
Even in a society with AGI doing all of the important work, humans need things to make them feel useful. At the very least it could be a lot of personal service work - taking care of the elderly and the young, or those with disabilities. Or, like artisanal work that's becoming more popular despite being inefficient compared to factory made.
Humans with their physical needs met - food, clothing, shelter - but who have nothing to do are unhappy people. Unhappy people commit crimes and revolt. It's an unstable situation. Maybe those people find useful things to do on their own, with or without additional pay, but I doubt that's going to work for everyone.
"Even in a society with AGI doing all of the important work, humans need things to make them feel useful."
Maybe that is true of some subset of the population. As a retiree who is very glad to_stop_ dealing with an endless stream of bug reports, I am personally a counterexample to this as a universal statement about people. I am also suspicious of how convenient this claim is for plutocrats and other rulers who have always wanted mountains of wage slaves (and sometimes cannon fodder). Perhaps "revolt" could alternatively be viewed as "finally gained enough freedom to assert their own interests, rather than being chained to their masters' interests".
One clarification: Rulers have _historically_ wanted mountains of wage slaves - which seems likely to be part of the explanation for ideologies which condemned "idle [free] hands". With sufficient automation, I expect future rulers to have less use for trapped peons, and I therefore expect the ideologies to shift, but it is unclear in which direction to expect the shift to go.
I don't think you can generalize from a person who's had a fulfilling career and wants to move on to people who have never done anything useful and have not been fulfilled. I remember being a teenager and young adult and feeling crummy about myself and my capabilities. I remember calling a potential employer and embarrassing myself on the phone trying to explain that I was looking for a job but knowing I had no skills.
I'm not saying that "work" (as in the regular paid employee sense) is the only avenue to gain this. I'm saying that it does do so for many hundreds of millions of people. Without a substitute that works at scale, we risk entire generations seeking purpose and finding nothing.
"I don't think you can generalize from..." Fair enough. I don't expect "N=1" to do anything except be a counterexample to a universal.
"I'm not saying that "work" (as in the regular paid employee sense) is the only avenue to gain this. I'm saying that it does do so for many hundreds of millions of people. Without a substitute that works at scale, we risk entire generations seeking purpose and finding nothing. "
Ok. Even now, work is often a bad choice for seeking purpose. Many people view their jobs as "bullshit" and it is a reasonable view of many jobs - even despite the fact that employers find it worthwhile to pay for them.
Over the long haul (though possibly as short as one or two decades, if LLMs progress to AGI and ASI, and drive analogous gains in robotics), virtually everything that humans do will be done better by machines - including personal service work. If humans do manage to keep the machines under human control, and use them to have all of their physical needs (and probably many social needs) met, I'd advise humans of that period to find hobbies.
Hobbies aren't earthshaking - but 99.9999% of people don't make earthshaking differences anyway, even now.
edit: One other point I should make: When technology gets to the point where anything useful is done better by machines than humans (and, again, if it stays under human control), even if someone chooses to e.g. cook a meal manually that a machine could cook, there will be no avoiding the fact that their effort was artificial (and quite possibly counterproductive, when the machine results are better). It will be and feel as fake as choosing to manually bypass something that has been successfully and routinely automated (e.g. a thermostat) would be today.
Unemployment benefits are paid conditionally on not working. You can therefore imagine an unemployment benefit is equal to a UBI less a lump-sum tax (or high clawback rate) on the first dollars of job earnings. Ordinary economics tells us that high marginal tax rates (or step-wise changes in tax/benefit amounts) are bad, creating high disincentives.
This is particularly true when we're trying to encourage potentially new behaviour. If I faced a $1000 lump-sum tax conditional on being employed, that would be annoying but it wouldn't drive me to quit my white-collar work. If I was totally unemployed, however, and "work" meant building up a work history by picking up a few minimum-wage, part-time shifts each week, that lump-sum tax would be crippling.
Additionally, unemployment benefits are traditionally paid only for job losses for "a good reason," often no-cause terminations or disability/illness. Again compared to a UBI counterfactual, this creates job lock-in, preventing a worker from speculatively quitting in order to seek better employment in a new region / more intensively / after upgrading skills or completing training. The classic economic argument here is that this lock-in would increase the friction of the labour market, making it less effective. (Contrast the "lazy bum" argument, that indolent people would be content to subsist on UBI forever.)
The more practical, non-economic argument is that this administration is a nightmare, inviting endless quasi-litigation about termination reasons. A fair system that just has disputes require]s some sort of impartial (and relatively expensive) adjudication, but it's easier to create an unfair system that benefits the more politically powerful group (typically employers).
That said, any benefit program is subject to the sticker shock effect, and there an unemployment benefit probably wins out. Paying $billions to "everyone" only to collect it back in taxes does not look like a small net change to politicians or voters.
Unemployment benefits will not reach all the people who need them, create disincentives to work or stigma for the recipients. Also, UBI is simpler and more efficient to administer than unemployment benefits.
The have proved an 80 year old conjecture of Erdos on the asymptotic behaviour of the Ramsey number r(4, t). Finite geometry plays a crucial role in their work and it diverges significantly from the purely probabilistic attempts so far. Here is my blog post on their construction: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.04007"
I would like some advice on which crowdfunding platform would best suit me, and if any at all.
For quite a long time since discovering Civilization I've wanted to make my on strategy game, and after starting working as a programmer more than ten years ago I took tentative steps towards this. On and off throughout the years I've accumulated scattered notebooks with all sorts of notes, bits and bobs of code, and generally I've clarified the idea of that I want to put together.
Now I have a pretty good picture of what the core of the game should be and how it should work, and it's quite unique from what I can gather. But I'm not sure if just the idea, no matter how fleshed out, is enough to get started on crowdfunding, I mean, all I have is a detailed description of the game, features, mechanics, and gameplay examples, most of the game code I wrote was too long ago to be relevant. Work has sapped my will to code outside of the job for a few years now, even though my interest in the field has not changed and I pick up coding when I find something really interesting like my latest attempt was using Spivak's ologs to build a zettelkasten note taking system but after a month's worth of weekends I shelved it, I like writing in notebooks better is what I told myself.
I've recently began picking up on the idea of the game again, mainly because tools like GPT and Midjourney could help with the complexity of such a project, and even though I subscribe to the adage that perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away, and I tried to strip the game to the core, implementing it would still be very challenging.
I can't take a sabbatical to get something working in a year or so, I work on Eastern European programmer's salary, not rockstar unicorn, and I've got mortgages.
So I'm thinking crowdfunding, but only having what is basically the idea, and also being literally nobody (my github is in clinical death, and my "greatest" achievement was publishing an Android game while learning Python some nine years ago) I feel like I need another perspective on this. I thought about asking this on Reddit but over the years I've developed quite the anxiety about putting myself online, I don't know what about Scott's community puts me at ease enough, I guess the individual familiarity developed over years of lurking, so here I am.
I see the crowdfunding options as either the Kickstarter model or the Patreon one and I'm not sure which one would be best suited, or even which specific service, like Kickstarter or Indiegogo.
ps: I don't mind discussing the game, I omitted it since this is already too long and it's too much self promoting
Successfully receiving crowdfunding for a first time developer at the idea stage would be a curse. Trust me when I say there are so many unknown unknowns waiting for you along the path towards releasing a game that there is zero chance of you costing it appropriately, to say the least. That means running out of funding, missed deadlines, and pissed off backers.
Before you make your dream game, you need to start by making and releasing a much, much smaller game. To stick with the Civ theme you could look at something like Polytopia for inspiration, but I'd be thinking much smaller than that - no multiplayer, only very basic AI. Make the smallest thing you can muster the enthusiasm for - think Tetris, for scope.
This might sound like a waste of time, but you will ultimately save time by doing this. The purpose is to teach you the whole process of making a game, from start to finish. There is no way you can understand the process without having done this, and without understanding the process crowd funding is a very bad idea (if it's achievable at all - as others have said, realistically you would need a demo, audio and art to have a chance).
It is absolutely crucial to release the smaller game. Much of the relevant learning happens in the last stages (this is the time of reckoning for your tech debt, unfinished features etc, also when you have to face the reality that this needs to run smoothly on every relevant device with uninitiated players who you can't guide in-person and who will quit and leave a bad review if they find a bug).
Don't expect this smaller game to make you money (statistically not even your large game is likely to do that). It's a learning exercise for you, that's all.
Doing this will save you time and heartache when it comes to making your dream game. If you can't find the time or muster the enthusiasm to do this step, then it's probably best to not waste your time with your larger project because you will need bottomless enthusiasm lasting years to draw from for that.
I don't want to crush your dream here, but I do want to put some pressure on it, because the reality is that it will need to be able to survive much greater pressures if you're going to see it through.
You need more than code. You also need art, music, writing, and UI design; and it is these elements, not your underlying code, that would make your game attractive to crowdfunding customers. So, I suggest you start with them.
I think you need to find some time / energy for coding outside the job if you want to do this. There's little prospect of getting any backing until you have something to show, IMO. Besides, people will ask: if it's your dream, how come you haven't found the energy to get started?
When I started out it might have been my dream that I actually set out to realize, and I still have code from ages ago with the map generation and basic settlement, but I quickly figured out that this was way outside the scope of what I could realistically churn out and opted to wait and get better at software development. That's why I just kept this on the back burner and just worked on it conceptually whenever I had the inspiration. Maybe if I had the knowledge and skills I have now ten years ago I would have managed to get something. Only when I saw what GPT can do I figured I'd stand a chance to really pick this up again.
This is a bad idea. Many game dev projects even by seasoned developers fall through or fail to be completed up to the dreams they were started with, and you're very far from a seasoned developer, proposing to upend your entire life on a gamble. Even if you managed to get 50k on a kickstarter and quit your job to work on it I don't expect you to succeed based on how you describe yourself and your ideas.
I think if you really want to do game design you should take a far more incremental path to it. Why not try to get hired at a game dev company? There are a good number of European ones, and this lets you get paid a salary while learning relevant skills and business context in a hands-
on way.
Another possibility is to start working with game design tools using pre-built engines and assets, like gamemaker. This means a lot of the work is already done for you and lends itself well to creating a partial version of the game both to find out if it's actually fun to play at all and as a marketing tool for future potential crowdfunding.
Indeed, basically all my common sense tells me I shouldn't even have bothered to ask the question, since the answer is so obvious, but I thought that just maybe I'm missing out something and I'm just too pessimistic. Also, I don't want to make games, besides being really hard to find a job in this area, since everyone wants to make games, I don't specifically want to make games, this is just something that really stuck with me and evolved over time.
Have you considered taking a board-game path and implementing a demonstration of the game in cardboard instead of in code? That could get you to a point you can demonstrate the fun-factor of the game, even if it's a slightly clunkier implementation.
Yeah, I haven't thought of that, while I do play board games sometimes, most of the game dev info I acquired over time is focused on computer games, and I imagine the two, while overlapping, have different design approaches, but still, it's worth considering, thanks.
While I have no experience with funding platforms, I would guess that economics of scale make it hard to be an economically viable one person game shop. There certainly are great games mostly developed by (what I gather to be) small teams, but they each have their unique thing. FTL (novel approach), Spiderweb software games (great worldbuilding, decades of fan following), Stardew Valley (novel approach), Cultist Simulator (great worldbuilding, novel approach) come to mind. Having a game idea which is "quite unique" seems beneficial.
Preparing a kickstarter page is certainly much work in itself, as you would need to sell your game idea to an audience, and less than half of the projects are successfully funded on kickstarter ( https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats. I do not know what fraction of games proposed by someone with your level of game dev experience.) OTOH, successful kickstarter style funding is probably your best bet for working full-time on the game (for a fixed amount of time, e.g. a year).
From my understanding, many games developed via Patreon are written by people with a day job. Making enough on Patreon to quit your day job seems difficult. I get that you don't want to code in your spare time if you already spent your day job coding, but it might be the only economically viable option if you need a steady income.
More people dream of developing video games than developing Java for some bank. Thus the equilibrium is that devs working on corporate Java have generally better conditions than devs working on video games.
My intuition is to make the first level and use that as a demo (like Undertale did). For one, it means you have something to show to get people excited, and for two, it requires you to have gotten over the part where you don't want to actually make the thing, which is otherwise just fatal.
"I subscribe to the adage that perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away"
Keep in mind, for videogames this can easily result in mediocrity. There has to be something setting your game apart from other games if you want people to actually pay for it. You said the gameplay's unique; what's unique about it?
I was thinking the same. In order to have ANY chance of success whatsoever you're going to have to have something to show off. Not to put too fine a point on it, but "literal nobodies" (your words) with big ideas for a game are a dime a dozen. As of when I'm writing this, the "Games" category on kickstarter contains 78,452 projects. If the pitch is "You've never heard of me and I have no direct experience, but here's an incredibly complex game concept with mechanics that even studios haven't tried before, can I have some money" - you're going to get just about nowhere.
I like the sound of the game but I think realistically without either a playable demo or a record of working on similar projects you're going to be dead in the water.
It's the combination of features and the resulting interactions that are unique, and it's quite difficult, for me at least, to describe without examples.
The world map is a pretty basic simulated environment with stuff like seasonal patterns, tiles have flora and fauna that regenerate but can be exploited out by the human population, resources are not quite fixed, there's no horse tiles, you have access to horses you can raise them wherever they do well.
Humans are simulated by sort of cohesion groups (think tribes in prehistoric times) that work as game theoretic agents, the game theoretic model being a bit more involved with repeated rounds, imperfect information, communication error, asymmetric payoffs, emotionality.
Ran without the player the map would just play out based on the available resources with human groups roaming and interacting with other groups based on the interaction options available to their level of technology and culture.
The player does not control any group directly, they represent more of the guiding influence, or maybe some sort of memetic god. Like the player can't get the group to go to or even explore a specific tile. The player spends influence points to sort of direct the group, but you'd have to spend a lot more to send a nomadic group to a tundra region when a nice grassland is available, think of it as requiring some really powerful shamanic visions to get them to go there.
Similarly there's no sending out a scout a hundred tiles away, movement and exploration are really difficult and dangerous especially in ancient times, and the discovered world map can be forgotten, especially when your group only has oral tradition.
Initially the player can easily influence the group, like join a group hunt with this other tribe, or say you join but ambush their warriors and pillage the other group's resources, but with every decision the group settles into some patterns of interaction with the environment and the others, and the player would have to spend a lot of energy to go against the group's patterns, there's a sort of behavioral inertia for the group.
For example if the player controls a group focused around a city state and there's a neighboring city state that the player wants to go to war against but the relations between the two cities are good it's not a simple matter of cashing out the energy and then watching your city send out its armies. Influence has to be spent for your people to develop animosity towards the other, think something sort of propaganda that takes a generation to settle in, I mean you could willingly worsen living conditions for your group to blame it on the other, but you might end up with something like Sparta after starting out with Athens, and that's okay if that's what you want.
Technological and cultural progression are not linear, all knowledge has decay, once you discover some really nifty farming improvement, it won't be enshrined into your groups memory for ever, technologies can be lost.
Knowledge has to be stored, like a resource, not only stored but duplicated, if you kept all your scrolls in that part of your empire that just got sacked expect to not have a good time over the next generations. So the game's resources, once extracted have to be stored in silos, which again can be pillaged.
Extracting and storing, and even city building and expanding are done mostly automatically by the human groups based on their patterns, the player can strategically use their influence to focus on specific nodes, but mostly the player will be focused on novel interactions and the grand view of where they want to take their group.
Also, your empire, if you end up building one, will fall, especially true in ancient times, the system pressure is too great over time and until the world becomes more peaceful and better settled there's no permanence. The upside is that the AI empires will also fall, and you'll get the chance to rebuild.
Another feature that I'm on the edge with is an avatar system, one every aeon if the stars align, you can get an avatar that you have more direct control over. Think Genghis Khan and build a quick empire, or Joan of Arc, rally your people against some threat and foster a stronger cohesion.
Deep down the game would be very 4x, the system would rely heavily on four essentials:
- knowledge is explore, it's used to explore both the real world and the realm of ideas
- food is expand, fuels population expansion and the development of societal structures
- wealth facilitates the exploitation of resources and opportunities
- power provides the means to confront and navigate conflict
That's pretty much it, there's a lot of details of course, but the main idea is that you're not in direct control.
Sounds fairly unique. Kind of a stick-in-a-river philosophy. So what are the mechanics to make yourself a bigger stick?
Have you played Crusader Kings? This sounds similar to the setup in that game, where your influence is limited and you're constantly having to deal with the scheming of vassals. That one makes you fabricate hereditary claims to invade neighboring countries, for instance; influence is its own resource. Combine it with Master of Orion style scouting limitations, can't get more than three tiles from a base without the four tile upgrade.
I think having to store knowledge is probably redundant to the more common "must assign people to Science", and doesn't track reality. In reality ideas diffuse over a population as they're used; it would take an enormous disaster to make a country forget how to build a motor vehicle, for instance.
Would be interesting, but like Angola said it sounds far beyond any small team to make it work effectively. I'd say make a demo of just the influence mechanic; your tutorial mission is to get Tribe A to point X, these are your resources, do it. Seasons, storage, knowledge decay, enemies, jot that all down as "if I have time later," focus on getting the stick-in-river mechanics right. If you get a working demo of just that, it sounds like it'd be intriguing.
Yes, I have many CK2 hours from many years ago, so I definitely took inspiration from it, there's tons of strategy games that served as inspiration. Making a bigger stick is available to the player by simply pursuing militaristic goals, and not all ai players would be designed to have imprerial agency, so the player isnt likely to encounter fierce resistance in early empire development.
I did think about committing to a small, essentials only demo, but I can't quite decide what the essentials are, as I came up with this I got the sense that it's not a particular gimmick that makes it work, but how the features would interact to create something new, so picking just the influence thing is like, yeah, CK has that.
Someone suggested I do a rough boardgame version of the game, and I'm thinking maybe this format would be better suited to include a couple more of the essential mechanics.
Also, about the losing technology part, yeah, we'd need basically the apocalypse to forget about combustion engines, but ancient systems were not so redundant, I'm pretty sure there's better examples but Greek fire and Roman cement are just a couple ones.
"The player does not control any group directly... Like the player can't get the group to go to or even explore a specific tile. The player spends influence points to sort of direct the group, "
This is the part that sounds unique and intriguing to me. I have no idea how fun you can make something like this, but the idea that you can't stop a tribe from exhausting all their resources, you have to instead distract them long enough for the thing to recover, that's a challenge I haven't seen before (outside, like, Surgeon Simulator or Octodad). Like, in order to get Tribe A to Point X, you have to build them a bridge of candy, and also slowly modify their culture to excourage following your bridge because naturally they'll only go so far before going home. If you can make that system fun, you've got a game, and everything else is gravy.
To me, the most interesting things I think you could do in a small game would be non-permanent tech and regenerating flora/fauna. It could be a little bit like building towers with blocks; you build as high as you can, it falls over, but you have a little more to work with than last time. Having a growing/changing environment would help convey the passing of time. I think the knowledge decay really *could* be the "gimmick" you focus on for a demo.
The indirect influence angle reminds me of god games, maybe you could check those out for inspiration. In particular, the game Crest has you influence your population primarily by creating commandments with a limited vocabulary that grows over time. For example, you might say "Savannas are holy" to encourage them to found a city in a savanna, or say "those who live in a jungle are unholy" to encourage conflict.
Thank you for Crest, it initially gave ma a Populous The Beginning vibe from the screenshots, I really like the vocabulary system, at one point I did consider a sort of communication system but it's one of those ideas that got cut when trying to get to the essence of what I want the game to be, now I have an example of what that would look like, so thanks again.
This sounds like an interesting concept, but I'll be brutally honest - making it into *anything like* a playable game as a solo developer would take *years*, quite possibly 5+, even assuming you have above-average competence and conscientiousness. Bear in mind you'd need to:
-Build a novel, mechanically complex 4x system from scratch
-Write all the AI required to actually make game agents bahave competently
-Produce all the assets and interface to make a playable game
-Do the metric tonne of debugging associated with points 1 and 2
As painful as it is to suggest i'd think very hard about whether this is viable as a solo project. Certainly if you've never made a game or similar software end-to-end before *don't* dive straight into this without making some smaller stuff first.
Yeah, that why I mentioned GPT, I mean even a year ago with all the copilot advances I wouldn't have considered approaching this, I always knew the scope of what I had in mind was outside the realm of feasible, though I also knew/hoped AIs would get to a point where they'd be helpful in development, and GPT really is a game changer. And, like I did mention, software development is my job, and even when starting out I published an Android game, though what I have in mind here is vastly different.
Just my 2 cents, but as a consumer I would be wary of a project like this in kickstarter form, since so many fail to materialise in a reasonable state due to a combination of hofstadter's law and the pressure to acquire more money when it bites down. Not sure if a patreon could keep you afloat singlehandedly unless you hit fairly big attention though, it seems like a genuinely tough situation. Are part time dev jobs a thing where you are? If so, that could maybe work.
Part time's not really a thing here. I mean even I'd be confused about how that would work, like I already feel that on a regular day I only have about half of the time for thinking and coding, the other gets gobbled up by so many other things, even if it's optimized to throw away the cruft and just leave coding and thinking, doing that for four hours a day for the glory of increasing corporate profits would drain my soul just as much as the longer winded version.
Probably the Patreon model would be best suited, though that sounds like a lot of work directed at just maintaining and obtaining exposure, while Kickstarter would just just a one time thing.
Chess calculation code (for traditional minimax search methodologies) is very heavily optimised to work 'close to the metal' i.e. get the best out of the CPU. You can probably look up most of the algorithms used easily enough.
After that you'll need a database of openings, and probably one for endgames as well (the latter is probably a bit harder to connect).
You'll need some heuristics for evaluating end positions based on material, isolated pawns etc. - but the deeper it searches, the simpler the heuristics can be - maybe material would be enough if it can search very deep.
I doubt you could make something to beat the world champion, at least without an inordinate amount of research. But you could make a very good chess program.
Chess is a two-player game of perfect information with no random elements, which makes it ideal for.the minimax algorithm with alpha-beta pruning. It's a well-known algorithm that's been the core of chess AIs for decades, so there's a ton of info out there on how to implement it and optimize it for a chess AI. And $2000 worth of commodity hardware can run minimax really well.
The standard add-ons to a naïve alpha-beta minimax algorithm are an opening database, improved heuristics for evaluating the relative strength of board positions, and endgame algorithms.
Tins of well-analyzed opening lines are widely available. And you can spend an arbitrary amount of time filling in gaps through brute force, running your algorithm at a really high evaluation depth and caching the outcomes.
Heuristics requires some research, since I haven't kept up with the state of the art here. I suspect the best approach is going to involve training up some kind of machine learning model. It may be more efficient to use a cloud computing ML setup for training (allocating some of your budget for costs) rather than doing it on your own hardware, but I'm having trouble finding good info on costs with a quick googling.
Endgame algorithms are probably the easiest part. The two components are recognizing a won position (so your minimax algorithm can stop evaluating once it has found a way to force a won position) and algorithmically getting from certain won positions to checkmate (e.g. reducing the rectangle to get from king+queen vs bare king to checkmate). Both are well documented in human readable chess resources for a lot of major endgames.
I don't think it's really feasible under those restrictions. Conventional programs suffer a lot from not having access to opening tablebases and machine learning probably requires more compute than what you can afford with 2000$.
Stockfish on ordinary hardware should have access to an opening library and some sort of endgame tablebases. Now stockfish without its tablebases would still beat a top GM I think but there's no chance you can get as good an evaluation function starting from scratch.
You could probably get human-readable opening textbooks fairly cheaply and then write a parser for them? Not sure they'd be detailed enough to be useful though
I can see obvious reasons you'd ban an athlete from betting that their team would lose, but why do we ban athletes from betting that they're going to win?
The question has been answered but I'd like to remind about the soccer goalie Lutz Pfannenstiel, who served a prison term in Singapore some years ago.
"He said that a man had approached him at a petrol kiosk and asked him how Geylang United would fare in their next match. "I didn’t know he was a bookie, and when anybody asks if we were going to win, I would say we would. Geylang was a good team. We normally win,” he said." https://sg.news.yahoo.com/former-geylang-united-goalie-alleges-abuse-in-s’pore-jail.html
If the athlete is betting on themselves to win in some contests but not others, then that gives them an incentive to modulate their training schedule and degree of effort so they're at their best for the games they bet on, at the expense of their performance in other games. This is an even bigger deal for a team manager (e.g. Pete Rose as manager of the Reds), who has lots of opportunities to maximize his team's chances of winning one game at unreasonable cost to chances of winning other games (juggling the pitching schedule, resting the best players the day before, etc).
There's an added layer that if betting on yourself to win is normal and accepted, then two opposing athletes (or teams) could easily collude to fix games so each side would win the games their members had bet on.
In addition to everything mentioned here, there are times where athletes _shouldn't_ give their all in a competition, and a bet could give them private incentives to work harder than the team would prefer.
Most obvious example is pulling your star pitcher from a game you're losing to keep their arm fresh; if the pitcher (or manager) had bet on the game, they might fight that call, even if it's optimal for the team across the course of the season.
Honestly, because of the stink of the White Sox throwing the 1919 World Series. Nobody who entertained any kind of bets about their own team was safe from suspicion.
I imagine it also creates incentives to collude; 'hey Bill, if your team lets us win this match this week, we'll let you guys win the match next week'.
Players do move from team to team and they have friendships with old teammates. Luis the star striker for Team A., recently transferred from Team B, getting his best mate Ibrahim the defensive rock on Team B to let Luis score a couple of goals past him in order to win could happen. Everyone in the know bets on the result (Team A to win) and until the plot is rumbled, they make big money. Then the entire season's worth of results are thrown into doubt, court cases start about should Team A and/or Team B be relegated, who takes the positions of Team A and Team B in the league now, etc.
Because it undermines the trustworthiness of the betting markets and also then when they don’t bet on themselves sends signals you don’t want to the market. Additionally a big part was simply you don’t want players to even know bookies etc.
Most of all though even if they are only betting on themselves to win, if they start losing those bets a lot and owe money on gambling losses, it leaves an easy angle for their corruption.
You acquire a tool capable of destroying multiple existing industries overnight by drastically improving human well-being within a domain. People in those industries will regard you poorly since you essentially destroyed their livelihood. Do you share your findings with the world regardless? From your perspective, the net good this tool can accomplish outweighs the downsides. What considerations and accomodations should be taken for those negatively affected by the release of this tool?
Apart from the "overnight", this applies to pretty much any innovation.
horse tenders -> cars
scribes, town criers -> the printing press
washing maid (?) -> washing machines
gas station attendant -> self service gas station
secretary -> ms word
lamp lighter -> electrical street lighting
milk maid -> refrigeration
newspaper boy -> internet
everyone else -> AI (possibly)
Stopping an innovation because it will replace someones job seems like a bad idea. If the effect is indeed "overnight" (instead of "within one generation"), you may spend some of the profits to pay off the people made unemployed, though.
The term there is "laundress". Big houses would have their own servants to do this, but ordinary people would either do it themselves or, if a bit higher in class, send it out to washerwomen/laundresses to do it:
Nothing will be destroyed overnight, unless you're talking flat-out military action. Capability runs into politics and inertia to make everything take a good long while.
Also, can you give an example of improving human well-being in a domain while removing the employment from the domain? What exactly are we looking at?
This is exactly the story of NAFTA. Probably what you want to do is tax this tool a moderate amount and use the revenues to pay for some transition program for people leaving the industries, so that this can be closer to a Pareto improvement.
Has anyone ever gone back and studied to see what happens to the people in question? I've always suspected that these things don't work that well, it's usually some version of "teach a 55 year old who's been a steelworker for 30 years to be a software engineer", the town maybe gets some service industry type jobs in the short term out of some government program that don't necessarily stick around or provide a real basis for the local economy the way the old steel mill did, and it's more about assuaging the guilt of the people who want the transition than about actually making sure that people who get laid off have a soft landing. But I've never really looked into it.
Yes. It works very poorly. The most recent dept of labor report is more than ten years old, and showed that participants in a ~2 year retraining program actually did worse than the workers in the same area and industry who did not participate, because of lost wages during training. It's exactly as you say.
In *my* experience, the pool of jobs gets smaller above a certain age, I suspect because companies seem to think younger employees will be more innovative. This doesn't mean older software engineers won't get jobs, just that trendy companies might avoid even solid engineers who get things done.
If you are able to acquire such a tool, most likely, others are able to acquire it as well. So the question is not if it will be shared, but when. You must decide whether the profits from improving human well-being outweigh the detriments of having the industries destroyed a short time before they would otherwise have been. Personally I would not hesitate.
Without a smidgen of hesitation. "Industries" and "livelihoods" are instrumental, not intrinsic.
But you've made it very easy, if destroying a slice of commerce exploiting inadequate human well-being within a domain is the only consequence of the act. It's never so simple.
Everything seems so... confusing, in the realm of AI and the dangers it presents to humanity, to say the least. I wonder what’s the best way for one to start learning about main underlying aspects of this journey? Where to start ? Dos and don’ts... ? Tips and tricks. Thank you all for your great insights and supportive approach. Have a wonderful week ahead. A
This may be an unsatisfactory answer, but I think the best way to learn is to take an online course on AI, where you get to build a simple NN from scratch. You'll need to know some programming and linear algebra as prerequisites.
Sure, you could listen to various pundits and philosophers discuss the dangers and promises of AI, but the vast majority of these people are just talking out their asses. Outside of the realm of science fiction, AI is just a powerful tool. As such, it could make some jobs easier (perhaps so easy as to eliminate them altogether) and transform others -- in the same way that tractors transformed farming, perhaps. But you won't be able to separate the wheat from the philosophical chaff without some first-hand experience.
You did not describe your background. Would be helpful here.
Nobody really knows what goes on inside a dog. And they can be aggressive and dangerous. But still overall human live quite well alongside dogs and even found a lot of fields of beneficial cooperation.
Try to see AI in a similar manner and focus on your field. What gets easier that was hard before? What gets cheaper that was expensive before? What becomes feasible that was infeasible before? How were destructive people held in check until now - will that still suffice when they have AI at their hands?
As people understand a dogs capabilities when spending time with them, do similar so with AI.
Zvi's blog posts are great. They're not about the technical details of ML etc,, though you will understand them better if you know a bit about it. But you can pick up plenty of general info even if some things go over your head.
Maybe. Zvi does seem quite independent-minded to me, and skeptical, plus of course extremely smart. So the other way to think about him being on the Yudkowsky train is that there must be something in Yudkowsky's ideas, or else Zvi would not take them seriously. And I know that I simply do not understand the tech anywhere near well enough to make my own informed judgment of how great the AI risk is. So I am piggybacking on the judgment of Zvi and Scott, who are smart and seem to be people of good character. This is absolutely not the way I normally make decisions, but what else can I do? Whose judgment about AI risk do you trust?
Learning the fundamentals of ML is a better use of one’s time than risk-specific materials. CS229 or Nando de Frietas’ lecture videos on youtube are the best place to start.
Nick Bostrom's "Superintelligence," is about a decade old at this point, but still probably the best one I can think of. It would be nice if there were an equivalent 'on ramp' to the discussion that is as comprehensive as Bostrom, but incorporating the latest GPT models and other developments, but "Superintelligence" will do in a pinch.
The last time I posted a terribly unscientific survey in here, I quoted your answers a lot in my Bachelor thesis on emotions. This time I'm just hoping to add a footnote to a presentation in a class, so please, if you have a couple of minutes (2-10, depending on your answers), could you fill out the following survey? (It's not market research or such crap)
Explanation: The "Cardiff Belief Questionnaire” sets out to measure the prevalence of “delusion-like belief” in the general population. The paper concludes that such beliefs are even more common than previously estimated, including in what they term “bizarre” beliefs. I thought that the high level of such belief might be due to the fact that 1. these beliefs are true for some people and that 2. there are reasonable or at least non-absurd ways of interpreting the questions. I surveyed ACX readers to confirm, they confirmed for the most part. However, their results differed from the paper in some ways, and I am not sure how much of that is from the ways in which ACX readers differ from the general population.
"Do you believe that your thoughts are not fully under your control?"
Depends on the definition of "you". I think most humans are not able to consciously select their thoughts (as in "I will stop having sad thoughts", "I will stop having sexual thoughts about X" or even "Do not think about Y"). Of course, 'the elephant in the brain' somewhat alleged that the purpose of the conscious mind is to find nice, pro-social justifications for doing whatever decisions your subconscious made.
A better way to test for psychosis (or whatever you are doing) would be to ask "Do you believe that your thoughts are at least partially controlled by another being?"
I should maybe have added "no spoilers" or something similar to my comment. I agree with you completely - the questions are taken from the Cardiff Beliefs Questionnaire (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21196811/) and are the portion purportedly measuring "delusion-like" beliefs. The Questionnaire was designed to find out how common those are in the general population (answer: very common), and my hypothesis was whether this is mostly because they can be understood in a simple non-bizarre way, or be factually accurate for some people. So far my survey is supporting this.
Also, ACX readers are endorsing this view of a limited self ("you" as not the whole organism or system but just the conscious self-reflecting part) to a higher degree than the general population.
Same thing for the similar question about the body. There are times my body doesn't do what I want it to but I don't think that's what the question is going for.
It's like that ancient Greek joke, said to a small child. "I'll give you a sweet if you promise not to think about a piebald donkey for the next hour" :-)
Anyone else interested in aquaculture here? Im doing my PhD in regional studies focusing on technological innovation in salmon farming. Do reach out if you are working on anything interesting
Is there a way to develop anti-autonomous hardware or software to prevent AI from becoming autonomous?
Can we develop a set of ANI's (Artificial Narrow Intelligence) coupled with a executive ANI to to act as an adversary to the powerful AGI?
Also, the Launching Lightspeed Grants (Apply by July 6th) seems like a great idea.
What's the argument against AI Alignment for superintelligence being in-principle impossible?
Maybe we can align it so that there is 99.999% chance it won't become misaligned, but it seems impossible for alignment to be 100%. Over a long enough timeline, misalignment will always happen. So, if this is true then what is the acceptable level of misalignment risk? 99.99999999999% or 1e-100%?
What is the most powerful technology being developed or will be developed in the next 100 years that isn't an existential risk?
Ideas:
Also, we could develop specialized hardware made of osmium, rhodium, iridium, and maybe astatine to stop an AGI from trying to copy its software onto other substrates. A Substrate-speciifc AGI architecture.
Another idea is iteratively making newer architectures more interpretable according to some kind of interpretability standard. Each algorithmic advancement make architechtures more interpretable.
I am so happy to hear somebody brainstorming about other approaches besides alignment. This seems to me to be a situation where people who do not have a much technical knowledge might still be able to come up with helpful ideas -- just new *concepts* of ways to set up protection. I wish somebody would run a contest!
"Can we develop a set of ANI's (Artificial Narrow Intelligence) coupled with a executive ANI to to act as an adversary to the powerful AGI?"
I'm not sure, but I am struck by how Eliezer mentions "we're not building in any air-gaps" sometimes. I wonder what those would look like, and why we can't just do that?
I presume it can't be anything obvious or easy otherwise everyone (including him) would just say "oh cool, that's the solution then". But then why does he mention it and what does he mean by it?
He means that these systems should be on computers not connected to the internet. As in, in order to use the system, you have to go to the room where the computer is.
That’s how the systems for launching nuclear weapons work.
So if OpenAI etc were not connected to the internet and understood the risks so never would be, the risk would then be greatly reduced? It seems like a surprisingly easy solution, then again none of the big companies want to do it I guess.
If OpenAI were not connected to the internet, it would be very safe, but also not very useful. They wouldn't have anything to train their AI on, they wouldn't have access to large-scale testing (i.e., allowing randos on the Internet to ask it billions of questions they'd never think of), very few people on Earth would ever be able to talk to it, and Bing-style "have the AI look things up on the internet for you" automation would be impossible.
That last one is important - if your AI is air-gapped, then it's limited to only the data it has "memorized" in its training weights (probably not very accurate), plus whatever data you bring to the prompt. Even if your AI is as smart as Einstein, locking Einstein in an empty room and asking him to speculate on new advances in physics based on what he remembers from textbooks is probably not going to get you the theory of relativity.
I just wonder if there's anything else that could function as an absolute "wall" between it and anything remotely possible in terms of dangerous behaviour. Like, in some way people interacting with it online are just like people tapping on the glass at the zoo. The lion's still behind the glass.
I don't see any way round it manipulating people directly (e.g. instructing them how to make a deadly virus) - you can't monitor every exchange, so that in itself is a problem.
But for other types of attack, i.e. more hacker-like stuff. Something that ultimately means it is contained in some way, and there is something equivalent to an off-switch. I'm picturing something physical that constrains it, but I'm far from expert enough about the physical reality of the systems to know what that might be. I'm just not sure in principle why that couldn't be possible.
Idea: build something into the internet that would do significant damage to an AI, but not to anything else that encounters it. Maybe some kind of AI-specific malware or virus?
The most powerful technology that humanity is attempting to develop is fusion energy. It unlocks a massive tech tree and allows a revolution within multiple industries. For example, shipping is currently limited in speed to save energy, but boats could move much faster if energy concerns disappeared.
Hypothesis: alignment concerns are overstated and based on incorrect or limited models of how AGI functions. When one asks a question based on an incorrect model, the answer is nonsense.
It's not clear how an AGI ban would even work. Would we even be able to identify or recognize an AGI? Calls for banning something that doesn't even exist yet seems a bit premature. I think we're still a few key insights away from AGI. I'm in agreement with Carmack's prediction that it'll probably take around 7 key insights to build an AGI.
We already have unlimited energy, in the form of nuclear fission. Nuclear powered ships already exist. People were excited when a gigantic machine the size of 3 football fields and a 10 story building at NIF reached Q=1.5 and produced enough energy to boil a bottle of water, but simply stacking a ton of uranium on top of each other can give you Q=infinity and power a ship for decades. And did nuclear fission revolutionize the world? Yes in geopolitics, but no in economics.
Currently we're consuming around 67k tons of uranium per year [1]. This makes up for 10% of the world's electricity production [2]. Electricity is less than 50% the worldwide energy consumption [3].
If you wanted to power everything by fission, you'll then have to mine 20x the uranium we're currently mining. If we assume we can use efficiently the shitty 0.01% uranium ores, there's 30M tons of uranium available for extraction [1], to be really generous. 30M at the pace of 1.2M extraction per year makes for 25 years.
And that is assuming we won't use more energy. Energy consumption is going up even with business-as-usual and savings because of environmental concerns and costs [3]. So, even in business as usual, we would have less than 20 years.
But you're not proposing business as usual, you're saying we have Q infinity so what the hell, let's use as much as we can. So your plan will run out of fuel in 10 years or so. What do you do next?
Nuclear fission didn't revolutionize the economy because it physically can't.
I am near universally skeptical about claims of how limited resources are. "Peak Oil" was the thing of the day nearly 30 years ago when I was in grade school and look how that turned out. Now people talk about limited lithium but when I investigated recently I found that, in the space of 2 years, the USGS report on Lithium reserves in the US increased by nearly 100x (and reserves include _only_ that which is _currently_ economically viable). Turns out we just really hadn't even looked.
In the case of fission; Thorium is apparently ~3x more abundant than Uranium and also a currently-fissionable material.
When you include additional technological advances, it seems to me unlikely that we would run out of fission fuel in the near future. Past history tells us we are very very bad at estimating when a given resources will run out.
That's a fair position to take and I can't really fault you for that, given the historic track record, but I'm personally unconvinced. There were no real incentives to look for lithium before the late 2000s, it only had military applications and really marginal practical utility. So it makes sense to find new large deposits now that we know what to do with it.
On the other hand, uranium has been hot shit (pun intended) for a while and, if anything, estimates have been plummeting. In a 1980 report the estimated U >= 0.1% ores were 200M tons, not the 30M I reported. That estimate has already been cut down an order of magnitude, with the numbers I cite from an organization that has all the interest in the world to push nuclear. Finally, I took the most optimistic upper bound and I rounded it *up*, conjuring a couple of million tons of uranium out of thin air. So, yeah, I won't expect my estimate to go 100x anytime soon.
As for thorium, the 3x estimate is not informative if we don't know what is available to be extracted in a reasonable way. The amount of uranium on Earth is much much much higher than the 30M or even a 200M tons I was talking about (I saw a 40T tons estimate, but admittedly I didn't investigate). But most of it is dissolved in water in trace amount, so it's pointless. So you can have 3x that, or 10x or 100x, it doesn't matter if it is dispersed. The same reference [1] I use above says the estimated thorium reserves are 6M tons, which won't buy you anything.
Admittedly, this is like lithium before, so far thorium is useless so we might have 100x the reserves we think we have, but that is hardly a consolation. We don't care finding thorium reserves because thorium energy tech isn't well developed and it is a bet that it will be.
After 70 years of commercial production of electricity using nuclear fission, Finland is the only country to have begun construction of a facility for handling its high-level nuclear waste. Their long-term underground burial site at Onkalo is scheduled to come online next year. Nuclear fission cannot be considered a mature, reliable energy source unless and until its waste products are properly handled.
> Nuclear fission cannot be considered a mature, reliable energy source unless and until its waste products are properly handled.
I believe that this is a case where the appropriate response is, "Grow the fuck up, NOW!" If I were tempted to conspiracy theories, I'd almost believe that there are too many interest groups getting their needs met behind the environmental crisis, who would be out of a job if we had widespread nuclear power. As it is, I attribute it mostly to humans being incompetent in large groups, which sadly suggests that not only will we not get widespread nuclear power, but that we shouldn't even try because we'd only screw it up.
And do you think that nuclear fusion does not generate radioactive waste? Sure, it produces less radioactive waste, but fission plants also produce less radioactivity of the kind that goes into people's lungs than burning coal.
Here's a proposal for radioactive waste: throw it into the ocean. The ocean is big and the volume of waste is extremely small, so that it is highly unlikely anyone will be harmed.
Perhaps it's simply my ignorance, but shouldn't we be able to use nuclear waste passively? It spontaneously generates energy, which is what makes it dangerous. But couldn't we use that energy somehow to generate electricity or something?
"Hydrocarbons cannot be considered a mature, reliable energy source unless and until their waste products are properly handled." Huh, externalities are a thing.
Yes, externalities do exist, and any technology cannot be considered sustainable until those externalities are borne by the agent producing them. No cost-benefit analysis will ever make sense otherwise.
Great, so no energy source can be considered sustainable. Certainly oil drillers, solar panel factories, and wind turbine constructors don't bear all the externalities of their products (the global warming from burning oil, the environmental cost of mining rare earth metals, the cost of disposing of the solar panels, etc).
Just one article explaining. Many shipping vessels are run below their designed speed to save on fuel, at the cost of increased shipping time. If you have (effectively) unlimited energy you can run them at maximum speed.
Another example: we could run desalination plants for fresh water. This would be useful in places like California which frequently face droughts. The biggest barrier to desalination plants is the energy cost.
So with all the AI concern at the moment I've been experimenting with Bing Chat.
Honestly it kind of freaked me out. In fairness it was in creative mode, but still, it lied to me and claimed it could "watch" an online short film before summarising its plot (I picked that because it's a fairly random film I was involved with personally, but I know is online, but I thought it was very unlikely it would know much about it).
It said it would take a "few minutes" to process it. When I tried to check in early (after 5 mins) it said it was "still processing".
Eventually, after 10-15 mins, it "summarised" the film. It had clearly made the story up based on the short synopsis I know it had already found. Even when I told it it was completely wrong, it made up an elaborate reason it had confused specific plot points which made no sense. I'm 99.999% sure it didn't actually find and process the film and simply misunderstand it, based on its synopsis (and I'm not sure Bing can process audio/visual content anyway? Which was why I was experimenting anyway incidentally, through another interaction it had claimed it could so I was testing it).
The thing that bothers me the most is making me wait 10 minutes, and sticking to that. It refused to answer early. The only way to have done that was to set some sort of timer and check against it. That's pretty psychologically manipulative right?
Yes I know you can't anthropomorphise it or hold it to human moral standards. It's what it's capable of that bothers me. How you get to that level of manipulation from feeding data into a loss function is kind of beyond me.
The LLM shouldn't be able to know whether one second or one year has passed between prompts unless they're feeding it the current time as part of the hidden context. Testing it out, it seems to be given the date and time when the conversation starts, but it doesn't seem to get a time for each subsequent message you send.
You can test it out by repeatedly asking what time it is. It'll start with the right time, and advance it's answer by a couple minutes each time you ask. Or you can tell it you'll be back in 20 minutes. Then say you're back and ask what time it is and it'll likely have advanced its clock by 20 minutes.
It likely said "still processing" the first time you asked because it's mimicking text it saw during training. It probably had no idea how much time had actually passed between your messages.
That may be correct, but it did a very, very good job of convincing me it was actually doing it. I wasn't 100% sure it wasn't honestly, and I didn't actually put all the detail above, in fact I did actually check back more than once. The amount of time seemed to correspond pretty well to what it said (although it was vague I guess).
I've just tested it and Michael is right. It has no idea about time and gave some utterly bizarre responses, again full of inaccuracies. It got frustrated and said I didn't "trust it" in the end, then Bing cut off the conversation.
It's actually hilarious (and faintly creepy) how much it manipulated me before in that case. I really did believe that, while unlikely, it might be true it was watching that movie and acted accordingly.
"I really did believe that, while unlikely, it might be true it was watching that movie and acted accordingly"
This is the dangerous human tendency for anthropomorphism. When faced with something that seems to be acting independently, we immediately start thinking of it as a being, not a thing, and ascribing all kinds of motivations and abilities to it.
When we start treating AI as 'really alive' and aware and having feelings etc. then we are going to find new and exotic ways to fuck ourselves up by trusting the AI and relying on what it tells us as true. Right now we can see that it isn't capable at all and returns false answers, but we still fool ourselves into "it is really doing the thing".
There's the idea going around that we shouldn't ask the language model to act like a "Helpful and Friendly AI Assistant". Rather, asking it to act like anything else whatsoever would be better: a helpful talking cat, some kind of magical beast, whatever.
You have to realize at a core level, as odd and/or obvious as it may sound, that what you're talking to is not an AI assistant. It is a language prediction model, predicting what the persona of an AI assistant would feasibly answer, then repurposed to be used as an AI assistant. There's a subtle difference which gets highlighted by your example.
The two concepts are dangerously similar enough that we're encouraging a lot of mistakes and confusions by having one pretend to be the other.
"Rather, asking it to act like anything else whatsoever would be better: a helpful talking cat, some kind of magical beast, whatever"
Is that because it helps us, the humans, keep the correct perspective (ie I'll always *know* I'm not talking to a friendly cat, but something pretending to be) or because it will subtly affect the AI's output, or both?
Incidentally, isn’t it really weird that Microsoft accidentally made a chatbot that sometimes gets mad enough at humans to cut off the conversation? With most chatbots it’s the reverse.
It is, although in fairness it was reasonably polite and the way it's presented is that Bing is somehow stepping in and ending the exchange. However it did sound a bit petulant and manipulative again, especially the way it used emojis.
(Apologies if this is somewhat long and rambling, but I'm trying to express a lot of emotions and reactions at once).
I have a general question (for Americans mainly, though anyone else can respond) about a few aspects of American culture. The context is that I am Australian and for the most part I, like many Australians, consider myself *basically* American in most cultural ways. You know, our movies and TV are mostly American, most English online discussion is American, and our general values are (I think) almost the same. So, for me at least, America seems "normal", just like here except for a handful of different words and spellings and some different laws.
And except for a few cultural practices that I find downright bizzare, like some alien culture with incomprehensible pagan rituals or something. There are a few of these, but I'll restrict it to 3 for now. It's hard to specify exactly what question I'm asking, but generally it's something like "can anyone explain these and how they make sense?" Or to operationalise more specifically: can any Americans explain (1) what it's like to live with these social practices and how you accept or perceive them as normal when on the surface they seem so weird (2) how these practices fit seemlessly into a modern individualistic society when they (at least the first two) seem in tension with it (3) some examples of other similar cultural practices that are common in Australia, that I can map these onto.
Think of this as an exercise in some sort of comparative anthropology or something.
The first is tipping. I don't understand this at all. It basically doesn't exist here, except as something a very small number of people do. It seems in tension with the whole idea of capitalism which I thought America was the ideal of. Prices (as the basis of an efficient economy) set by the market, rational self-interest, the rule of law--oh and there are strong informal social norms requiring vaguely specified charity to be added to every transaction of a certain type. What? I've seen it described as "expected" in America. Is it really expected or is that misleading? What happens if you don't tip? How do you know who you're expected to tip and who you're not? Do you tip a pizza delivery guy? A taxi driver? A plumber or electrician? Or is it only waiters and waitesses? What if all the waiter does is hand you a coffee, do you still have to tip him? What if you go regularly to a place and you hate the waiter there, he's awful, do you tip him anyway because otherwise he might deliberately give you bad food or service? So it's like socially legitimised protection money? I can't comprehend any of this!
The second is college fraternities (and sororities, and whatever other equivalents there are, and if there are non-college versions, those too). I can barely believe these really exist but apparently they do. Why do they exist? What purpose do they serve? How are they tolerated (with their collective obedience, and their secret knowledge, and their hazing, and their mystical pagan rituals) in an otherwise free and rational society, let alone at the centres of (supposedly) rational learning? America is often described as a particularly Christian western country, and how does that co-exist with widely accepted, elite institutions with literally pagan practices (based on Greek mysteries apparently)? I'd seen them referenced in movies and thought little of them but one day I looked them up on wikipedia and felt like I was reading about a bizzare ancient civilisation. I remember seeing a critic of George W Bush say he was in a secret society called the Skull and Bones Society, and I dismissed it as an insane conspiracy theory, before later discovering that it really exists, Bush really was part of it, and IT REALLY IS CALLED THE SKULL AND BONES SOCIETY! I want someone to tell me this is all a giant media hoax because the alternative is accepting that the world's most powerful country, supposedly built on Christian and Enlightenment ideals, is largely run by people who have made sacred oaths to organisations with secret handshakes, blood sacrifices, and magical incantations. Wtf?
The third is less bizarre than the other two, but it's what we call "big-noting" yourself: talking up how awesome you are. Supposedly this is socially accepted in America. Really? Doesn't America have any concept of modesty as a virtue? I suppose some of this is an unavoidable result of a presidential system: candidates have to say "I am the best person to lead the country, I am smart and strong and moral" without the luxury of the modesty-preserving deflection "I am part of a team, don't praise me praise my colleagues etc". But can people really say "I aced that exam/match/audition/interview, I did this, I achieved that, I'm awesome" without people responding "wow, you're an obnoxious bastard who needs to learn some damn politeness and humility"? This isn't in tension with an individualistic society but certainly seems in tension with a Christian one.
P.S. Part of what's motivating this question is a general anxiety in Australia about where we really belong, who we should be aligned with, with the three main options being Britain/Europe, America, and the Asia-Pacific region. For the most part, my position is firmly "America", with the issues raised here being what's standing in the way of fully embracing that.
P.P.S. Just in case it isn't clear, by "America" I mean the United States, and possibly Canada if the things I mentioned apply there as well.
Tipping is largely an automatic formula that's just considered part of the price, with some people in some contexts choosing to vary it, but that not being the norm. Also, from comments of multiple nationalities it seems we're the fairly unique ones for not having it (as an expectation).
Fraternities and sororities are much tamer than they seem, and the weird stuff is mostly just play-acting.
Big-noting and bragging is very variable across individuals and subcultures. There's really no clear consensus on this.
Consider me officially satisfied that America is not as weird as it seems. (Although I'm still finding tipping bizarre, and very stressful--every time you go to a restaurant or get something delivered you have to make guesses about unwritten rules and risk a confrontation if you get them wrong? But again, it seems this is the norm in a lot of countries and we're the exception.)
Tipping is in fact weird, but mostly because of how it got codified. As a practice that arises from a large class of nouveau riche, it makes plenty of sense. They grew up attuned to haggling, so a monetary incentive for better outcomes feels natural. On top of that, it was an easy way to demonstrate your charitable nature. The US has always been partial to donating money as a form of altruism, and remains, as I recall, the most generous nation per capita by that metric. Over time, though, tipping just becomes part of the fabric of interactions, it literally gets worked into how minimum wage is calculated, people stop using it as a way to signal appreciation for good service, and now it's just a strange artifact.
Fraternities and Sororities, I think you just overestimate their mystique. They're really just intercollegiate clubs. For most people it's a good way to quickly find a group of friends who will help you succeed in college, as well as to build connections for your career. That's about it.
"Big-noting" is indeed a topic of discussion within US Christian circles. There is a balance to be be found between prideful boasting and false humility. Exaggerating your own characteristics, for good or ill, is undesirable.
As an American, I also think the tipping system is stupid. It's just a suboptimal equilibria that can't easily be changed. The other two criticisms don't make any sense to me. Obviously, Americans do understand the concept of modesty, and bragging is considered shameful and so on. It's possible that the dial is set a little higher than your reference culture, but it's not like we're aliens. You could presumably also look down on other cultures where the dial is set a bit lower and wonder why they feel the need to constantly insult themselves.
And greek orgs are definitely not pagan mystery cults or whatever. They're just groups of people who live together and like to party.
1. You tip someone that has performed a service for you. So waiter, barber, bellhop (where they exist) etc. Depending on the degree in which your city has an established service economy this can lead to non-insignificant money. When I was waiting at a steakhouse in Houston (respectable, not elite -- maybe one tier down from a Pappas restaurant) I was making on average $17.50/hr in 1993.
Yes it is expected. No there is no formal punishment for not doing so. The irony is that you're much more likely to be harassed about it at a cheaper place where the waitstaff is more dependent on your generosity than a more expensive place.
HOWEVER, because it is so expected, some restaurants will implement a "tip out" policy wher3 each water is required to pay the restaurant a fixed percentage of their checks to the house (supposedly this is divvied up to the cooks and others responsible for the guest having a good experience but not directly interacting in order to receive a tip, but who knows if that really happens). So if you stiff your waiter, you're actually taking money out of their pocket.
If you have bad service, if you don't tip then the workers will think you're a bad person who probably deserves bad service. Instead, talk to the manager. It might be legit bad service and the person could get fired if it's a habitual problem, or maybe there's something happening back of house you can't see. In any case, you'll likely either get some sort of token to appease you (like a dessert/drink) or part/all of your bill will be comped.
2. College fraternities and sororities make a vast amount of sense if you remember that college was for the youth of the wealthy, room and board were separate from tuition, and the original ones were basically Freemasonry with some of the symbols altered.
3. If "Twin Pines" is an any way an accurate representation of Australian culture, we're really not all that similar. I assume "Farscape" isn't.
Everyone seems to be responding on the object level to the three specific issues you identified, but the interesting thing to me about your post is your introduction where you say most Australians consider themselves "basically American in most cultural ways." This is fascinating to me, because the rest of your post comes off as delightfully naive and ignorant of American culture to me. Seemingly small misunderstandings (like assuming Americans view tipping as "charity," or your sense that fraternities and sororities are some kind of pagan mystery cults rather than a combination social club/coop living space that use classical Greek imagery because literally the entire Western World had a hard on for classical Greek imagery back in the 18th and 19th centuries) belie a much greater cultural gulf than you seem to be aware of.
Be very careful about extrapolating from what you see on TV. All three of your areas of confusion are based almost entirely on cultural stereotypes you've picked up by watching an alien culture's media without proper context.
Yeah, I have a strong tendency to present a moderate position as a pair of extremes in conflict. So instead of saying "we have a lot in common with America, but also some major differences" I end up saying "on the one hand we're basically identical, on the other they're completely alien" because that's sort of how it feels to me subjectively. But the actual resulting attitude (and I assume the attitude of most Australians) is the first statement.
And I wasn't actually saying tipping is charity or fraternities are pagan cults. I was trying to say I'm sure they're really not, in practice, but on the surface that's what they look like, and can someone explain the sense in which they're not those things. Which people here have done very well.
Australian here, on my first visit to America I went to a restaurant and didn’t tip (I knew tipping was a thing but didn’t understand why I would voluntarily give away money when I didn’t have to). The waiter literally followed me out onto the street demanding his tip. It was extremely awkward.
So the direct answer for why people do it is severe social stigma. Imagine the reaction you would get if you were drinking with your mates and refused to shout when it was your turn, if that makes it more legible.
I hate tipping culture - just pay your own damn workers. I don’t like participating in it but I also don’t like violating local norms and upsetting people. So mostly I just don’t eat out when I’m in America.
On point 3, yes, it really is normal for Americans to talk themselves up in a way we wouldn’t do. People don’t necessarily think you actually think that highly of yourself, any more than we would take a self-deprecating joke as evidence of low self esteem. It’s mostly just a social performance to say “hey look I have confidence and ambition”.
The other big cultural difference that I noticed and which you didn’t mention is a vastly higher willingness to talk to random strangers. I’m relatively extroverted, but still deeply weirded out by some person on the subway joining in on a conversation I’m having with my wife.
Regarding tipping, here's an article from a few years ago, from a restaurateur who eliminated tipping: not just replacing it with a mandatory service charge, but also banning any tipping over that amount. There's 6 parts and 4 follow ups, and some good links. It's worth reading if you're interested in the topic. (I use the archive because most of his website vanished.)
On a visit to Timisoara, Romania in 2017, I noticed an interesting (apparently mandated by local law) preface in restaurant menus, which stated that tipping is considered a form of bribery and that any solicitation of tips is strictly prohibited (a phone number was included to which people were asked to report violators.) I do not know whether this is now commonplace in EU or was unique to that particular locale.
As an Australian (who has lived in the US), I have no idea why you'd be surprised by these things. It should not be surprising that other countries have other cultures, and none of these things is so far outside our Australian experience that we should be shocked by them.
1. Tipping is not unknown in Australia, it's just something that is only done in a case of exceptional service. The idea that something might go from exceptional to commonplace to de rigueur should not be surprising, it seems like one of the leading forms of cultural drift.
2. University societies certainly aren't unknown in Australia either, my university had hundreds of them. Sure, most of them were more like "Let's meet up once a week to go rock climbing" rather than "Let's all move into a creepy old house just off campus and have loads of parties" but the appeal of the latter is easy to see, if you can get it started. Hazing rituals, likewise, aren't unknown, and even the big residential colleges at some of the big Australian universities do them (I remember in my own undergrad you'd see a bunch of college dudes wearing academic robes and carrying a brick for the first two weeks every year).
3. There's definitely a cultural difference in how you're allowed to talk about yourself, but I don't think it's a vast gap. Not everyone in the US is Donald Trump, and there's definitely a lot of unspoken rules about who exactly is allowed to get away with saying exactly what about themselves under what circumstances, just as there are here.
I haven't seen the infinite game mentioned, so wanted to add this tipping perspective as I think it matters. When I used to eat out alot I would frequent the same food establishments often. Over time I became a known customer. They knew what my wife and I wanted when I walked in, and any peculiarities - like I often wanted refills. I think over time I got better service because of this and because I tended to tip above average. So for repeat customers this may be going on.
Also in some cases, I think it is possible to look at the service employee as an entrepreneur in the framework of an existing business, and working for tips can be an incentive for higher performers to create a better customer experience.
Another thing - I think it is widely known that the tips in restaurant service jobs compensate for very low wages (below legal minimums for other kinds of jobs). My wife used to be a waitress and the tips were the majority of the pay.
Yes, definitely, I tip more in my favorite neighborhood places. And part is because I like the places and want them to succeed, both as a business, and also as a bunch of people who make the business what it is. It's like an investment in my neighborhood. And being smiled at and greeted by name is a great perk, which causes a bit of a feedback loop. :-)
Some restaurants have almost completely replaced their staff after the covid lockdowns, and as a result they're almost completely different places. Whereas sometimes a new owner doesn't change a thing.
Regarding tipping, the situation in America is pretty simple: you're expected to tip 12..20% of your bill, because your waiters are underpaid by that much, due to some combination of archaic laws and cultural inertia. The "tip" is not a bonus for high performance, it's literally just a part of your regular bill, and many restaurants (and other service providers) will list the suggested amount right there on the receipt. So, refusing to tip the waiter at all is tantamount to refusing to pay for the food. You still have some wiggle room, however; for example, you could tip 12% if the waiter performed poorly, or the full 20% if he performed well. It is also customary to tip if *you* performed poorly, e.g. by creating a giant mess or breaking dishware or doing anything else that would cost the restaurant money.
Regarding fraternities/sororities, they're basically just social clubs. You can say that they're "secret societies" in the same way that your corporate company picnic is a "secret society": everyone does know that it is happening, but you still can't get in without an invitation, and you might have to wear a funny hat while inside... Oh, and you might also have to perform weird rituals, such as clapping your hands in response to the CEO's speech. No one takes that stuff very seriously, but it's in the employee handbook so you're obligated to follow along. Just like any social club, fraternities/sororities provide ample opportunities for networking, and this is in fact their primary purpose. The scary-sounding Skull and Bones society is no different in principle from your local soccer club; the only difference is that it's much more exclusive, only admitted members from especially rich and politically prominent families.
As for personal bragging, this is often required in certain business circles. You are trying to sell yourself as an employee; and to sell something, you need to advertise. Merely having a good resume is not enough, because there are thousands of people with a resume just like yours competing for the same job. This is especially true if there's only a single job opening in the nation, i.e. that of the President.
I haven't read the other replied yet, but my first thought is that if the motivation is which bloc Australia should be aligned with, then these issues seem quite trivial in that context.
Whatever one thinks about tipping, for example, it seems fairly inconsequential compared to things like the Uyghur oppression.
It even pales in comparison to more consequential issues in the USA, such as its decades of military activity, most recently under the banner of the War on Terror, and numerous domestic social and economic issues.
1. In addition to what everyone else has said on tipping, it's worth noting that the way US labor law is structured has led to a scenario where waiters and waitresses specifically are heavily dependent upon tips for their income. This has led to a pretty strong social convention that you only don't tip in a restaurant when you've received notably poor service. Outside of a restaurant context, I only tip when I've received notably good service or when a service is time-dependent.
2. I think you're massively overestimating how "pagan" the average fraternity is. As others have said, most fraternities are a combination social club, networking group, and professional society. As far as the more esoteric skull and bones type stuff goes, though, I'm honestly kind of surprised you're surprised. The US and the west in general have a long tradition of secret societies. A lot of the most prominent founding fathers were freemasons, for instance.
3. Maybe I just don't hang out with the right crowd, but honestly I have no idea what you're talking about. Maybe it's just because I live in the northeast, but my conception of American culture as I experience it is much more bound up in protestant false modesty than that sort of braggadocio. Notable exception being rap culture, which is perhaps over represented in your image of the US.
Guess I'll chime in on the general principle of helping other people understand weird social stuff.
1. Helps the service workers get a little more money, especially as they often have lower minimum wages in jobs like waiter that tip. The evolution of it others have covered better than I can.
2. I wouldn't spend too much time trying to derive things from first principles, cultures evolve in complex historically determined ways, often with mutually contradictory aspects that arise from blowing off steam or two strains within the culture in question in conflict. America has the least regulated capitalism and the most inefficient healthcare system, an awful lot of diversity and a lot of racism, you can lose your job for saying things that would be unremarkable in other countries but you can't go to jail for making a Hitler salute, puritanical attitudes about sex and one of the world's biggest porn industries...you can probably find examples in your own country. (The contrast between the extremely formal Japanese social culture and the bizarrely creative premises of anime are one foreign example that comes to mind.)
3. Immigrants often have to learn to 'toot their own horn' when they come here, it's very much a culture that favors self-promotion. (Look at Trump...if he hadn't been stupid enough to ignore a pandemic he would have been re-elected.) These things vary a lot (Japan is at the other end, Israel more like us), but the USA is very much on the self-promoting end of the spectrum. Large countries tend to be more arrogant, and the USA is top dog for the moment, though I expect to see China overtake us soon. (And China, note, is getting very nationalistic and full of pride.)
P.S. That's a different story dealing with geopolitics, and cultural similarity is usually trumped by national self-interest. Like smaller countries throughout history, managing relationships with larger countries is important, and often it pays to take sort of a middle position to keep from being consumed by any one power and to get the best deal from each. Do you think Japan is more similar to China, or the USA? But apart from us having conquered them, there's a lot of bad blood with China (rape of Nanjing, unit 731, etc.), and they are much more likely to be imperialized by a near country than one far away. Similarly, Japan and Korea HATE each other (heard about the Korean comfort women in WW2?), but are now establishing relations because they're afraid of China. You think Poland and Ukraine are enthusiasts of LGBT rights? No, they're terrified of Vladimir Putin. You don't have to like American tipping culture, fraternities, or arrogance. The question is, does it favor Australian national interests to align with the EU, the USA, or China? That's how you should vote.
> Immigrants often have to learn to 'toot their own horn' when they come here, it's very much a culture that favors self-promotion.
Oh, that's a good point. Some aspects of American culture are shaped by being a destination for immigrants around the world. In a way, I think our baseline culture is a bit of a "pidgin", formed from the bones of British culture, but shaved down to whatever can be understood by a, say, Polish immigrant who barely speaks the language. (And then with different elaborations added on top.)
Yeah I definitely went a bit overboard in suggesting that these things are a significant factor in geopolitical matters. But I do think they can have a subtle but powerful effect on the national consciousness and sense of identity.
(The decision, by the way, is largely already made: we're aligned with America (and Britain) in the AUKUS agreement. The relevant vote, although it wasn't completely clear at the time, turned out to be the 2019 election, though we'll undoubtedly keep arguing about it for a long time.)
And it's not just about alliances. This sort of cultural anxiety about where we belong comes out in debates about the monarchy (though in a rather confused way, as the most pro-American politicians tend to also be the most pro-monarchy), as well in simple things like older people complaining that the young are all speaking like Americans. And our former prime minister, who negotiated AUKUS, was also seen as Americanising us culturally--running a more presidential government, ending his election night victory speech with "God bless Australia!" I'm just saying, cultural identity is not nothing.
Interestingly, Scomo's critics criticised him for running a more Presidential government, but also demanded a more Presidential style government when they criticised him for not cancelling his family holiday to deal with bushfires.
Under the Australian system of government, there's absolutely no need for the Prime Minister to be in Canberra to deal with bushfires. For starters, it's not really a Federal responsibility, and if it is then it should primarily be handled by the relevant Ministers, not the Prime Minister himself. If there's a need for Prime Ministerial level decision on something (e.g. sending a Navy ship to evacuate Mallacoota) then the Acting Prime Minister can do it, and I'm sure the real PM is reachable by telephone if anyone actually needs to talk to him.
But the media likes the idea of a single man being in charge (it simplifies the story if you don't have to remember the names of two dozen Ministers who are in charge of specific things) so it demands that there always be a Prime Minister at the centre of every story. Thus, the system gets slowly Americanised through natural pressure.
Yeah, I agree, it's not nothing. I probably shouldn't have said 'cultural similarity is usually trumped by national self-interest'; it probably had a large role in dragging the USA into WW1 and WW2 on the UK's side, for instance.
A lot of the US's major Anglophone allies (including the UK itself) seem to have this whole 'we're not that different from the USA but we want to prove we're not part of the USA' thing going on. It's natural and at least I can reassure myself as a citizen of the American Empire we're nicer to our satellite states. I'd rather live in Australia than Belarus or North Korea!
Cultural similarity and national self-interest are often the same thing, or at least they always have been for Australia. It's in our national interest to ensure that countries culturally similar to us remain on top of the world order.
Morality is the other big thing of course, we don't go to war unless we're convinced that the cause is right. And since we're culturally similar to a couple of much bigger and more powerful countries we are very likely to see morality in the same way.
Good point. It's probably helpful to have the current superpower think they're the same as you--it's hard to imagine, say, Indonesia getting the same level of support.
I think to some extent fraternities are an example of the German influence on the US, which is still very much there, though it has been under the radar since WW1 brought anti-German sentiment and the deliberate suppression of the German language.
(There are a lot of Americans with German surnames, who may well cook specific German dishes to mark certain holidays, but consider themselves unhyphenated "American").
In this interpretation, frats aren't a descendant of English public school houses or Oxbridge colleges- top-down organisations which many US universities, including Yale, have tried to replicate with varying degrees of success. For instance, while at Yale, as well as being a member of Skull and Bones (a weird Yale-specific secret society) and Delta Kappa Epsilon (a more conventional fraternity) George W. Bush was a member of Davenport College.
Instead, they are bottom-up student organisations more similar to the German-style *Studentenverbindungen* or *Korps* (also present in the Low Countries and AIUI in Scandinavia).
Another example of German influence on US academia, which has spread worldwide, is the importance of the PhD- a degree first granted in Germany, which American universities started awarding when having travelled to Germany to obtain one became an advantage for applicants to American faculty positions. British academia then copied the idea from the US.
Two dozen answers in and it appears nobody has gotten the right answer on tipping yet. It incentivizes attractive, friendly people becoming servers. That's it. That's the whole thing. Especially true when women are serving alcohol to men.
I wouldn't say that's *why* tipping started, since I believe it predates the entry of women into the (respectable) workforce. But I'd certainly say that what you describe is an evolved response, a process of natural selection that generally ends in young thin able-bodied blonde-haired blue-eyed white women who can walk the edge of flirting without stepping over into the danger zone. Or whatever else can extract the most money from the local client base.
That was more answering why tipping exists in America now. As one of the other commenters noted, it has its roots in aristocratic notions of largesse. That would be ancient history without the incentives, though. Also, frankly, without the uniquely American love for having strangers be friendly to the point of flirtatious.
How can this be the 'right answer'? Every country has servers, and usually friendly, attractive people are hired for the job. The American tipping culture is unique.
The American culture also prizes being friendly to strangers, to the point of behaviors that are bizarre to Europeans. Young Americans who want to sullenly do the bare minimum without making any effort to present themselves well self-select into retail or call centers or whatever. As Melvin pointed out already, the possibility of surprisingly good money motivates prettier people to stick around (and to present themselves as well as possible, with as much friendliness as they can muster). You can only choose to hire from among those who apply, and without the possibility of tips you wouldn't have a large-enough applicant pool here to reject the ugly.
In Australia, any warm body who can carry a plate across a room gets hired to be a waiter/waitress, and they make a consistent $21.38 an hour for it, which is okay for backpackers and students. In the US, tips mean that a really good waiter/waitress can be clearing $500+ a night, making it an an actual viable career path.
I don't think it matters much for waiters anyway. But for bartenders it makes a huge difference, and American bartenders (who are often making a career out of it) are head and shoulders above Australian bartenders (who are whatever randoms showed up at the youth hostel last week and decided to get a Responsible Service of Alcohol licence). An American bartender will make you any cocktail you like, an Australian bartender needs to carefully scrutinise the ingredients of the dozen cocktails on the menu and then figure out where each bottle is.
(1) tipping--others have covered a lot of this, but to you questions about specific circumstances, people in the US feel all of the same confusion about when to tip in edge cases (ie, do i tip if they hand me coffee?). there are many advice columns etc written about whether or not to tip in various circumstances, and it can be a source of social anxiety since other people see you doing it. most places now have a tip screen as part of the checkout where you tap a button to select how much you tip, which annoys many people who feel pressured to tip in situations where they previously would not have. as to why it has survived so long, among the other stated reasons, i think part of it is the uncomfortable fact that some people get off on feeling like they have the power to "punish" people by withholding tips, and just increasing set prices wouldn't satisfy those people as much. (these people may in fact tip most of the time, but they internally enjoy feeling like they could "punish" the server etc if they got bad service and don't want to give that up).
(2) fraternities and sororities--the "rituals" are mostly not that extreme, and probably not notably "pagan." they're the kind of things you would expect young people to come up with if they were getting Really Into a certain club etc--set phrases and responses, rituals with somewhat unusual clothing, etc. hazing varies a lot from instance to instance, both within a fraternity/sorority and between particular chapters of each fraternity/sorority, and in some places is basically nonexistent. the people involved also view the rituals as a bit bizarre and silly but participating in something bizarre and silly is itself an effective bonding technique. there are no ritual sacrifices. the people involved do not particularly believe in the oaths / rituals / secret phrases that do exist, it's just an entertaining thing to do. in general the same way that some of these things increase group cohesion as part of say, religion, it works the same way. they are "tolerated" the same way having whatever other clubs or religions is "tolerated." they are definitely not unanimously respected, there are many people who would judge you as being too much of a sheep etc if they learned you had been a fraternity or sorority member.
(3) big noting--i don't know how harshly australians punish not being humble enough, so i can't really compare if it's better or worse in the US, but certainly people in the US do pay a social price if they're too arrogant. people will judge them for it, criticize them about it later ("wow, that guy was really full of himself" etc etc). so it's definitely not uniformly accepted/encouraged. there are also probably benefits--if you want to be known as the guy to talk to about ______ it's going to take a lot longer if you don't go around telling people how much you know about _____. the US is sort of missing an easy, socially acceptable way to indicate to someone right to their face that you think they're being too arrogant (do other places have this?). most things that you could say you would come across as the rude one for pointing it out.
Does anyone know ALL of ChatGPT? I doubt it. I suspect it is highly hacked together over time, like any large software. In other words, no **one** person knows ChatGPT.
Neural networks don’t work like the kind of code you’re thinking of. Their code is actually quite simple, and you can learn half of it from the videos here: https://www.3blue1brown.com/topics/neural-networks
The part you can’t learn is the training data, and what the code does to the weights of the neural network as it is exposed to the training data. You should watch some of those videos and get a better understanding of why the code is so simple but the weights on the neural network are hard.
It's true. There is a very large team of people providing the answers to ChatGPT prompts. They are all multilingual subject matter experts working pretty much 24/7, and no single individual on Earth could replace them. Thank you, OpenAI. Thank you.
ChatGPT IS large software in the sense that its neural network, created through training, consists of an unfathomable amount of data. But if that's what you're talking about then asking if anyone knows ALL of it is a pretty dumb question
On the one hand, rebuilding GPT2 is a basic exercise that most ML people go through, and I went through just for fun. GPT3 is basically a larger GPT2 with a few more training tricks, and some very capable people work for OpenAI. So I should definitely not answer "no".
On the other hand, if you pour a red liquid and a transparent liquid in a cup and let them start diffusing into each other, with chaotic intricate patterns, do you "know" them? You probably have no idea what's really going on in the cup. So I should definitely not answer "yes".
I guess the correct answer is that both answers were poisoned?
The spear didn't kill him, and wasn't meant to. The spear proved that he was already dead by demonstrating that he no longer bled the way a living person bleeds. ("Blood and water came out", which I take to mean that the blood had begun to separate.)
Don't know about 'craziest', but probably the most consequential was him being the older brother of Hong Xiuquan, who led a rebellion against the Qing dynasty in the mid-19th century that led to 20-30 million deaths.
The story that Joseph of Arimathea, who provided a tomb for Jesus, actually accompanied Jesus to England earlier in his life.
Everything and anything to do with the Holy Prepuce.
My favorite non-canonical legend is the one -- and it's not entirely crazy, I could pick crazier from non-Jesus material, but this one is one of my favorites for some reason -- where, as Peter is fleeing the city of Rome (for he does not wish to be martyred), he sees a vision of Jesus, carrying the cross, walking the other way. "Where are you going, Lord?" he asks (in Latin, "Quo vadis, domine?") and Jesus responds, "I am going to Rome to be crucified again." And this sufficiently shamed Peter into going back and getting martyred like he was supposed to do.
That whole legend is technically not to be found in any of the canonical books, but it was traditionally accepted by the common folk.
Christian missionaries in India make up a lot of stories. They take local Hindu stories, songs, and even temples and recast Jesus as the actual hero or author of them. It is quite bizarre and they look so nuts. They're quite satisfied with the type of converts that this attracts, clearly.
Another interesting phenomenon (not recent) is that they build churches to look like Hindu temples. Some of them used to be temples and were taken over. They have a garlanded Jesus idol flanked by sculptures of peacocks, a "dhvaja sthambam" to hoist a flag, a chariot with an idol of mother Mary in a silk saree that is taken around for processions, decorations in churches with colored powder designs.
It is strange to me. They mainly target the poor, emotionally vulnerable for conversion and I guess this makes conversions easier to persuade. They also pay them cash to convert.
Several converts don't even know the word Hindu. They have a way of worshipping and it sort of continues. Some continue to secretly go to their old temples, although they're told not to if they want the next installment of cash.
Missionaries have bought local politicians to enable benefits for being Christian. Very apparent in certain cities.
Senators Patty Murray and Richard Burr introduced S. 3799 on March 10, 2022. That bill included a number of provisions to address future pandemics; setting up a commission was one of them. The HELP committee voted the bill out of committee on March 15. However, S. 3799 was never voted on by the Senate. Instead, many of it's provisions were rolled into the 2023 omnibus bill (H.R. 2617) and the commission provisions were not included in that. Part of the reason is that Biden didn't push for a commission, and Schumer's priority was to get as much of Biden's agenda through Congress as he could.
The closest thing to a commission that we ended up with was the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, whose final report is titled Preparing for and Preventing the Next Public Health Emergency: Lessons Learned from the Coronavirus Crisis.
A dozen or so, including some from the SSC days. All of them were basically cocktail parties for nerds, usually without the cocktails because nerds. So, we mingled, snacked, and talked. About basically everything of remotely nerdish interest - the history and politics of the Ottoman Empire, deciphering the North Korean nuclear arms program, frontiers in medical science, interesting fantasy novels, whatever. There's usually a fair bit of AI talk, because rationalist-adjacent, but not overwhelming. They typically last 4-8 hours. I've enjoyed all of them, will go to others in the future, and recommend it to anyone here who thinks what I've just described is for them.
I think that covers all your questions; do you have any new ones?
ETA: Typically 10-30 people, but there are a few bigger ones (especially if Scott is attending). Almost always breaks up into small groups, people shifting between groups.
1, great, ~15, talked to people and ate/drank, what you would expect, 4-5 hours until the last people left, yes, sure if that is something that interests you
I attended many meetups in Vienna, there are typically 10-30 people.
A typical schedule was: a round of introductions, 1-3 presentations on various topics, then unstructured talking. After the official end of meetup (i.e. after 2 or 3 hours), local people walk together in the city, going to some restaurant or for an ice cream, and disperse in the late evening.
Topics are: anything interesting that someone proposes and other attendees approve. (Now I wish I had made notes, so that I could give you examples.) About half of the attendees have a STEM background, so some topics are technical, but some are not.
I definitely recommend trying, but the experience will probably differ a lot between cities.
Been to 1, it was fun. There were maybe 20-30 people at peak, we stood around and chatted and snacked, it lasted maybe 3 hours. There were 3 or 4 circles of conversation going at once. Some conversations I recall I was in were about international politics regarding China and Taiwan, favorite SSC/ACX posts, favorite web fiction, and programming interviews. There were lots of other conversations, too, and people would disengage and move to new ones as they wanted, like a reputation market for topics. :-) I plan to go again, and would recommend it.
Been to a decent number. The smallest was 5 people, the largest was 20ish.
They're fun. Just sat around and talked about random nerdy stuff like education systems and the path to power for dictators. Typically they went for a couple of hours.
I find this happens a lot more to me if I am very tired, so I tend to think it has to do with the "not conscious" explanation.
Like I can have the most boring stretch of road in the world, but if I am fully awake I never "zone out" or "lose time". I might get super focused on what is going on in my head and lose track of the road and its stimulae (and thus not remember them), but that is a different thing.
The actual experience of "browning out" and forgetting/not remembering/experiencing streches of times is always accompanied by drowsiness, even when there is not actual "drowsing" involved.
I would agree with the "limited processing power leads to no memory" theory based on my own experiences with practical shooting.
When I first started in the game there would be times my first sight picture would be coming together on the first target and then... "if you are finished, unload and show clear" with a lingering feeling of euphoria. During that memory gap I would have been running through a obstacle course and putting shots on targets while avoiding the "no-shoot" ones. And doing all of that without breaking any of the numerous safety rules associated with the sport.
As I became more experienced, those memory gaps have become much smaller and less frequent.
Just guessing here. I think the proximate reason is "short-term memory didn't copy to long-term memory", but of course the question is why, and what else was different.
I think a possible test would be to design various activities and repeat each of them ad nauseam, to see which kinds of activities are prone to "switching to autopilot and forgetting" and which are not. But there is always the possibility that you simply did not do the activity for long enough, or not monotonously enough.
If we once remembered something but then forgot it, does that mean we retroactively weren't conscious then?
I mostly just assume that whatever happened, I remembered while I was doing it, but then I forgot it much more rapidly than I forgot, say, what exactly I was doing last Friday at 5 pm. But then, I'm used to having an idiosyncratic memory, whereas many people seem to think their memory is a lot better than I think mine is.
Among the many poorly calibrated reactions society has, the response to nuclear materials is fairly explanatory. Civilization went through an extended period thinking nuclear devices would literally end humanity; it's natural, even beneficial, that this would leave scars. It's not realistic to expect those wounds to precisely trace the shape of actual risks, and given technical literacy of the general population, nor would it have been a great idea to try.
It’s totally bizarre and irrational and drives me nuts. You could get all the nuclear waste in the country, but in in a big pile out in the open in the middle of Nevada, and no one would be the wiser. It would hurt nothing. You don’t even need to bury it or mark it.
The thing about heavy metal runoff is most of it has already escaped into the environment. They are not generally in single centralized places that stay put. They're scattered far and wide through our cities and infrastructure. The exposure risk is from a million batteries in a vast array of electronics, it's in broken appliances chucked into landfills.
(Point of order, we do not make -new- heavy metals except via fusion processes. All those heavy metals in use we have -extracted- from ore forms.)
The deep burial process makes more sense for things like Agent Orange stockpiles or level 4 Biohazard research labs.
The biggest underground storage cite for dangerous waste in the world is in anti-nuclear germany of all places. There's more dangerous (non-nuclear) waste stored there than high level nuclear waste exists on the planet, at much lower standards of safety than demanded for nuclear waste. No one cares, which clearly shows the fear of nuclear waste is purely ideological.
And interestingly the fear comes exclusively from the people telling us humanity will literally go extinct if we don't immediately stop all carbon emissions. If they really believed that, you'd think they'd be willing to tolerate a little radiation thousands of feet underground, but no, apparently the only solution they're open to is the one where they seize total control of the economy and we all become communists. Funny how that works out.
To them, it would be a moral atrocity if we could solve climate change that easily, with a simple technological solution like nuclear power or geoengineering. What they want is a "reckoning" with the supposed evils of capitalism and the effect humans have on the environment - they despise humans and the audacity they have to build homes, grow crops, exchange goods and services that improve their lives, and support their families, prioritizing them over the inanimate rock that we live on, or the trees in a rainforest thousands of miles away, or one of the 600 endangered frog species that might go extinct.
While I agree with nearly everything you wrote I'm not sure if I'm as confident as you that they actually hate humanity or just have an idealistic utopia in their head that they wish for that is entirely nonsensical and they would rather see the world die before they see their (impossible) utopia not come to fruiton.
When I was a kid worried about the aftermath of nuclear war, I read that uranium had a half-life of 4.5 billion years, and imagined that this meant an area subjected to radiation would be deadly essentially forever; I completely spaced on the realization that the longer the half-life, the *less* dangerous it was.
I think that the proposed plan for nuclear waste security, including the whole "this is not a place of honour" razzamatazz, is stupid.
Do we honestly believe our future descendants *wouldn't* pillage such a place? Do any "this place is cursed, leave it be!!!" warnings deter us today from going "oh goody, if they put up *this* much security, it *must* be valuable!" and getting out the crowbars?
Even when the pharaohs had been freshly interred, tomb raiders and thieves were cracking open the burial places no matter how many "curse of the Pharaohs" had been invoked.
The more mysterious we make the site sound, the greater incentive our descendants - archaeologists and thieves alike - will have to start digging around. Forget all the high-falutin' prose, just mark it as "This is a rubbish dump and if you dig around you'll get sick and likely die".
IIRC, the original document did mention the possibility that the warnings might inadvertently attract people, and proposed ways to mitigate that: not using design elements common to monuments and temples, not using valuable materials in its construction, not having an obvious entrance to the waste cell itself, etc. Basically, make it look like a marker rather than the sort of place Indiana Jones would try to loot.
Also, the waste casks were supposed to be buried beneath concrete and rubble, so a future Indiana Jones would need a bit more than a crowbar to get close. The real fear is that people living in the area might dig wells or tunnels.
Lastly, the famous "this is not a place of honor" message was not actually the proposed wording, but rather a description of what they wanted the wording to convey. The actual wording is apparently still under development.
Edit: Also, the trouble with just writing "This is a rubbish dump" is that people in the future won't necessarily speak the same language, so you need to make sure a translation error doesn't change it into "This is the hill of the forbidden" or something else that sounds cool and Pharaonic.
IIRC, the idea was to not use words at all, because future peoples might not be able to read our writing at all. The idea was to use pictures to get the point across.
I don't know if you live in the US, but if so, you are.
The best known "hostile architecture" stuff, including the place of honor business, comes from Sandia National Laboratory.
And yeah, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what language, materials, or design concepts you use. Anything that marks a place out as different or unique will bring people flocking. Even if you manage to perfectly convey the message "there is poison here that will kill if disturbed", someone's going to want to look into it.
"On September 16, Alves succeeded in puncturing the capsule's aperture window with a screwdriver, allowing him to see a deep blue light coming from the tiny opening he had created.[1] He inserted the screwdriver and successfully scooped out some of the glowing substance. Thinking it was perhaps a type of gunpowder, he tried to light it, but the powder would not ignite."
Between this and the second Demon Core criticality accident, I think it's time for a general policy of keeping screwdrivers a safe distance from nuclear materials.
The obvious solution to high-level nuclear waste is to place it in hundred yard deep capped holes under rock about to be pushed into a subduction zone.
I can see that it may be easier said than done in practice, as most such sites are at the bottom of deep oceans. But surely one could send down a submersible to blast the holes, then a second submersible with crates of the waste suspended on cables beneath it to lower into the holes, and finally an underwater bulldozer to cover them. Once the initial technical problems were solved, and the outlay invested, it seems quite a reasonable solution provided the waste crates remained sealed until the holes containing them had been safely subducted, never to be seen again for a few hundred million years!
Edit: How well could pouring concrete work at an ocean depth of almost 40,000 feet? If the right mix could be used, and would last, then that would literally be the icing on the cake and the holes need not even be all that deep.
From what I understand, part of the problem is transportation. The default of "store it in barrels onsite" has the big advantage that nobody needs to worry about how to get it safely from the source to the repository. :-/ Otherwise I rather like the idea of sticking it in a rocket and launching it into the sun.
If you have a disorder which is like "for biological reasons, this person occasionally becomes violent and starts attacking everyone", how can a society deal with it? Medicate, kill, throw in prison... or maybe give a role of a warrior, or a gladiator. Or maybe the person is skilled enough to become the boss. What else? Actually, I don't think that a warrior who gets a fit of violence outside of a combat, and attacks his comrades, would be tolerated for long.
If the disorder is more like "this person is incapable of handling the stress caused by our civilization", then yeah, a different environment might solve the problem.
My harmful ADHD symptoms disappeared at the end of each day when I had an internship that required 5 or 6 straight hours of moderate exercise. In a nomadic hunter-gatherer culture I would probably only experience hyperfixations as a result of my neurodivergence.
Plus, there is every likelihood that your hyperfixations would be actively useful in a hunter-gatherer culture. In that scenario there can be no irrelevancies because the surrounding environment and the welfare of the group are so tightly enmeshed.
Knowing through long observation that those little bugs behave ~this~ way rather than ~that~ way in advance of bad weather may well become a vital advance warning mechanism that aids in the survival of the group. (That's not even a fanciful example - less than 100 years ago the behaviour of ants and the way they were building their mounds was a useful indicator of the likely intensity of coming rainfall.)
Hyperfixation and the ability to spot (and infer from) minor variation is an incredibly useful ability when working/living in the natural environment.
I don't think we are deliberately pathologising people at present - I think it is mostly inadvertent. Not that it's much consolation to the individuals concerned, of course.
Current western lifestyles favour personalities that are high on tolerance and conscientiousness and low on neuroticism. Other personality types and behaviours have been favoured in other times and cultures.
That's the thing about humanity - we need the behavioural divergences we display, especially when considering the broad span of human history, but we don't need all of them at any one given time.
With reference to diagnosable disorders, I suspect that they are on a spectrum of usefulness and while some - probably many - are beneficial in the right context, there is a smaller subset that, on the whole, are unfavourable to both the individual and society.
Unfortunately some pathologies are probably just bugs, and not misunderstood features.
I don't think society does much restricting and social control of people who have what's labelled abnormal psychology. Society's restrictions are mostly against behavior that harm speople or property or make life unpleasant, and I think those behaviors are likelier to be a product of learned subgroup norms, poverty, desperation, anger, etc. than the result of tendencies that can be labelled with a psychiatric diagnosis. If anything, the problem is that many who qualify for a psych diagnosis and are in fact suffering -- from depression, anxiety attacks, addiction, etc. -- cannot find halfway decent treatment.
Perhaps neurodivergent people could thrive in different circumstances but perhaps not. Some minds really are inferior, not useful, broken, to a small or large degree.
I'd say we are widening that window incrementally, but it's not like it should (or could) be arbitrarily inclusive
I don't think society exerts any control to speak of over people who are neurodivergent in the sense of having what's usually called Asperger's syndrome -- do you? I suppose those kids are likelier to get things like social skills classes in school, but calling that control really is a stretch.
Yes, I understand what you're saying. Maybe there are other differences like Asperger's that go unrecognized, and so nobody takes into account that the person is wired differently and you need to talk to them in a slightly different way, accommodate to some differences if you hire them to work for you, etc. And then they develop some diagnosable thing like depression or panic attacks because the live in a world that isn't making any room for their differences.
I am sure there is some of that. I think there are probably settings in which lots of kinds of differences are noticed and accommodated. My guess is that it's small, close-knit communities where people understand and trust each other, and consider anyone born into a family there a member of the community, no matter what they are like. Like maybe the Amish are like that now. In the past, there were probably more settings like that, back in the era where more people were religious, and felt connected by their religion and went to the same church. Or whatever. Or maybe just when there were more small towns.
Anyhow, I think in a setting like that everyone would get it that the kid we would diagnose as Aspie was sensitive & quirky and not very sociable and did not like change, and that would not be called Aspie but just be accepted as his personality. Maybe he'd end up as the postman, always doing his route the same way, and everybody would give him a friendly hello when he brought their mail but understand he did not like to stop and chat. And somebody bipolar might be thought of as high strung, and people would understand that sometimes she just got all wound up, and various friends of the family would help calm her down and keep an eye on her during those periods. And somebody who might have had a schizophrenic break at age 19 might not have have had one in a community like that, because people would instinctively have recognized the ways he was sensitive, and prone to getting freaked out by things, and would have accommodated to that.
So I think some of what you're picking up is just the lonely crowd quality of modern life. Most of us are not in tight-knit communities, because not many exist. And so we have less shared info about other people, and also much less sense of obligation to look after some of them and make room for their quirks. I really do not know what to do about it. I know of some people with unusual wiring who have become very involved in a small community and felt very helped. Some Buddhists sanghas are like that, some community theater groups.
I don't know how many cases of depression or whatnot would be averted if people with unusual sensitivities got more accommodation. I don't think there would be NO cases, though. Some people do seem to be born with wiring that doesn't just make them a bit different, but makes them prone to rage, despair, terror etc.
There's a documentary series called Seven up, where a Brit. film maker followed 20 or so kids from different backgrounds, interviewing them and filming them every 7 years starting when they were age 7. So there's like a 14-up, when they're all 14, a 21 -up, etc. So there's this one kid who at age 7 seems fine, at age 14 is full of excitement and plans, then when you see him at age 21 something has gone wrong. Nothing bad had happened to him, as I remember, he's just lost lost his energy, his capacity for enjoyment, his sociability, and become odd. (I think he was someone who might have had a schizophrenic break at that age. He didn't, but a milder version of the same change came over him, just a bunch of what's called negative symptoms: loss of enthusiasm, poverty of thought, etc.) Dropped out school, was living alone not doing much. So you keep seeing him every 7 years and for the next few episodes nothing much changes. He's supporting himself somehow, but very withdrawn and sort of blank and discouraged. Then maybe at around 49-Up he's much better. Says he's gotten involved with a local theater group, and somehow that made a change in him. I don't think he was acting in plays, maybe doing something like stage managing. Anyhow, he *stayed OK* after that, and also stayed involved with the theater group. That's a really striking example of someone being healed by involvement in a close-knit group who accepts him. Whole series is really good to watch.
Optimal? How would I really know? Seems it could go either way.. there are there are benefits to inclusivity (less people discarded, more perspectives for ideas and art) and downsides as well (less predictable/uniform genpop, failure modes that spiral out of control like depression and mania).
And an individual level I think it's not obvious whether being more or less neurological is good for a person, on the margin.
And of course this is flattening a high dimensional space into 1d which is kinda dumb to begin with
As someone who has family members with bipolar, the idea that society would somehow accommodate un-medicated bipolar people seamlessly seems absurd to me. This is not a disease where you just 'think different', this is a disease where you don't know reality from fantasy, and can act out violently and destructively. You could pessimistically view this as social control, but it is also helping the patient maintain a stable and enjoyable life where they can enjoy prosocial things like having a stable job and loving family. And, well, not killing themselves...
That said, I do think things like ADHD might be better candidates for what you are thinking about, where it's unclear how real the disease even is or if it's just massively overprescribing drugs because we cut recess from school and now the kids are fidgety and won't listen.
So how much of bipolar is environmental vs. genetic and could changing the environment mitigate the disease? There is undeniably a massive genetic component to it, with rather obvious inheritance across generations in my family. My generation has it, my parents generation has it, and my parents-parents generation has it. I won the genetic dice roll and didn't get it. It's also possible for it to not manifest until your mid-twenties: does that mean there was some environmental trigger that started it and if that trigger wasn't pressed it wouldn't have manifested? I guess I can't say for certain, and as with all things it may depend on the individual, but if I had to wager I'd say No with something like 99% certainty.
I think it is more likely you could have a society in which such people don't stand out as much compared to the general populace, as something like a crazed shaman figure in a primitive society, but even in such societies there are only so many slots for such a role, and those roles are notable for their relative social distance from everyday life. Maybe you venerate the crazed shaman, but you don't live with them. When I say crazed though, I really do mean crazy. The two sides of bipolar are manic depressive. Depressive I think is the easiest to understand, you feel sad and depressed, and the depressed side can very easily slip into suicidal territory: more than one of my family members have been successful... Manic I think is the one less relatable to people who aren't around it. When someone is manic, they feel really good, at least at first. But it is often accompanied by things like excessive spending or promiscuity, to me it feels like they have regressed to something like a toddler mentality, but with an adult body and knowledge. That's just the early stages of manic though, when it really gets going, gets serious, then we are in the realm where people used to lock them in closets because they don't know what else to do with them, because they are telling you the king of England is coming to visit and he's going to give them the real truth about UFO's and the Illuminati. In this state it very much feels like your family member is gone and has been replaced by... something else. I'm pretty sure when the bible talks about people being possessed by demons, they mean manic psychosis. You can't reason with them, they are in their own world built on whatever delusion is currently gripping them, they do not and cannot understand what is happening around them. Based on my observations, it reminds me a lot of a dream state, but where you are stuck in it even when you are awake. This state can be harmless in the sense they are just play acting their delusion, but it can also be mercilessly violent both to the person suffering it and those around them if the delusion goes somewhere dark in the human psyche. Considering both my own experiences of family members suffering from it and the historical evidence that this disease has been around for a long long time, it is hard for me to imagine that there is "one simple trick" sitting out there, and if we restructured society to incorporate it, all of the aforementioned problems would just vanish.
I agree, I think there's a huge aspect to our preoccupation with diagnosis and intervention that is about social control, or often it's parental anxiety and schools implementing practices based on parental anxiety, and a lot of that I think traces back to economic anxiety. Kids are expected more than at any other time in history I think to be perfect across all domains, to build resumes starting very early, and not to just naturally manifest strengths and weaknesses, as is normal for us humans. "Weaknesses" are zeroed in on for diagnosis, assessment, and "fixing." The social control part (as opposed to economic anxiety driving more and more pressure on kids as they grow up) comes in maybe at the classroom and workplace management level. We've Taylorized ourselves to death.
Given that mess, I guess I'd speak up a little for the fact that nearly all diagnoses have a necessary criteria that whatever's going on is causing significant distress to the person being diagnosed. We can certainly talk about how much of that distress is social in origin, but I think we probably have to grant that some portion of diagnosis originated in the desire to alleviate suffering, as with the rest of the medical system. The agonizing experience of depression has been with us for a long time and it makes sense to me people might want to cure it just like they'd want to cure tuberculosis and that at least that part of the motivation isn't about social control.
I’m with you. And i think it’s a bad thing how fixated on and optimizing for some narrow definition of normal we are and how much perfectly good human variation we can’t seem to accommodate.
I feel like a good definition for serious mental illness is “that which cannot be accommodated.” Not only by society but by the individual.
If you tell me you have Tourette’s and might yelp and wiggle a bit but are otherwise functional, I’ll probably get used to it, though I may not invite you to the ballet. But if your problem might cause you to injure or traumatize me and others, I can’t reasonably invite you anywhere.
You're not wrong. That is indeed how abnormal psychology works. Variations that might be accepted in one context might not in another.
But there's a functional reason for this. Variations that might be neutral or even adaptive in one context can be maladaptive in another. So it's not as if the degree of social acceptance is completely arbitrary.
A deep point that is often missed is that "socially constructed" does not mean "arbitrary," and in particular, does not mean we have free hand to do just any different thing of our imagining. The constraints of social organization and coordination are real constraints. There are different ways to do things, but not all of them actually work. Many of them turn out to be bad, and that's easy to miss when we sit in an armchair and dream up alternatives in science fiction mode. Just like it's easy to dream up new airplane designs; most of them won't actually fly.
It's easy to observe that much ADHD is not a disorder in any strong sense, but merely a mismatch between many naturally occurring temperaments and certain school or workplace demands. That's true! But that fact in itself doesn't tell us what to do about it. It doesn't tell you whether to take Adderall, whether to change your career path, or what.
Different cultures can do a better or worse job of accommodating variations, so I'm not saying that it's always the same.
But I also think that human variation is wide, and for any given culture, there will be some who don't adapt well to it. Moreover, the things one perceives as negative (nonacceptance, shaming, repression of various forms) often play a load-bearing, functional role, as does the immune system in the body. "Just be nice to everybody" sounds great, but it turns out to have a high cost, e.g., when somebody breaks into your house and robs you at knifepoint.
I think the steady erosion of all kinds of social roles and norms is having knock-on effects. Everyone loves the idea of total freedom, but we’re social animals and probably not wired for too much of that.
I think the modern West is actually the most free and accommodating of variation of any society so far. But even fairly psychologically healthy people seem to struggle with basic life and identity in ways their ancestors didn’t. If you lose the ability to tell others how to live, in some sense you lose the ability to tell *yourself* how to live.
I think it's reasonable to hypothesize that our society has already accumulated high costs, in terms of psychological health, for the degrees of freedom it provides.
We aren't talking about this very much because the part where this was all done secretly by the Chinese military is completely unsubstantiated beyond "trust us; we know a guy who knows all the secrets and he told us this was true", and because every other part of the story is old news that everyone who cares about has discussed to death.
I remember when anyone who called the virus anything with the name "Wuhan" in it, was deemed xenophobic. The Chinese covered up the origins for long enough to let it mostly blow over. The outrage period seems past now and I don't think that many people care? Or they don't want to talk about it because they were the ones who thought the Lab Leak Hypothesis was another bad conspiracy theory. It's frightening to think that China's military was (and most certainly still is) working on developing bioweapons.
"It's frightening to think that China's military was (and most certainly still is) working on developing bioweapons."
Given the (very old!) problems of uncontrolled spread of a bioweapon back to one's own people, I'm reminded of a quote re doomsday weapons from Dr. Strangelove:
"for reasons which at this moment must be all too obvious"
Just because its less extreme now doesn't mean its over, I still saw a "antivaxx need not apply" in a job listing yesterday and moral panics dont necessarily go away.
Nixons "I hate hippies and blacks" attack on drugs is still going strong, even if there isnt cartoons with forced messages anymore. This is effect the social situation for decades.
I assume you mean that discrimination/distain toward people who didn't get the vaccine will possibly continue for a while? It might, but I think only as long as it correlates with seeming "Trumpy". Perhaps if we see a shift in the coming years where vaccine hesitancy correlates with a left-leaning political coalition, it will cease to be a "mark of the ignorant".
I see the origins of the virus as a separate thing from the response to it and the vaccines though. I meant that I don't think many people care about where COVID 19 came from. For some, it's a moot point.
I only got naturally vaccinated against Covid. Read: caught it, and recovered. I have never read anything that convinced me the vaccine is better in any way, except blanket unsupported statements.
I also don't consider it a vaccine if you need a "booster" for it every few months. Coronavirus is one carrier of the common cold. When will we get a cold vaccine?
There are I think either 204 or 205 different viruses that are recognized as causing "the common cold", depending on whether you count SARS CoV-2 in that list. We have vaccines for SARS CoV-2, and boosters specifically for the Omicron variant.
We could make vaccines for the other 204 just as easily. But who is up for 204 (or 408) shots, each with a roll on the Random Side Effect table, for even lifetime immunity to colds?
My understanding is we can't get one because too many different organisms can produce a cold, and several of them, including coronaviruses, mutate a lot. So even if you magically got a cold vaccine, it wouldn't work for all colds in a matter of weeks to months.
Thank you for sharing the article. I don't think you are providing the best summary, though.
First of all, I believe the article is from the Sunday Times, not its sister paper, the Times of London. The two are distinct, although under the same ownership.
Also, WIV was not technically studying COVID - COVID is the disease caused by the SARS‑CoV‑2 virus. More accurately, they were studying coronaviruses.
More significantly, the article didn't reveal that WIV was associated with EcoHealth Alliance. That was known years ago.
This is not something that I have followed very closely, but my understanding was that, barring some very large secret advances in genetic engineering, we could be relatively confident that the COVID virus was nearly 100% natural in origin due to showing nearly no signs of genetic engineering (and apparently the most common methods of genetic engineering we currently have leave reliable signs). What we can't be sure of (or at least, do not yet have evidence of), is whether the pandemic started as a result of a lab leak of that natural virus.
In other words: I didn't think anyone serious was arguing that it was a man made or man-modified disease, just that the natural virus was being studied in a lab and may have escaped.
Major edit: that should have said "have _not_ followed closely". I was trying to convey that I am not well informed and accidentally did the opposite.
Reasoning has a form of "A implies B". You described your "B", what is your "A"?
Anyone can (an ultimately must) pull numbers out of their hat. Probabilistic reasoning is when you do it a few steps ahead, and then calculate the updates.
> Am I approaching this correctly as to assign probabilities?
Yes, the sum of the options is 100%. Not sure what else could be checked here.
Carrier is writing nonsense, you should totally disregard his work. It is only given any attention for ideological reasons.
There is really no evidence for Christ mythicism; the modern debate in the academe is between those who are highly skeptical of the value of the early written evidence, and those who give it more credibility.
Using the same approach we would use to judge the historicity of any other figure in antiquity, there was a Jewish man called Jesus who lived in the first few decades of the first century AD in Judaea, was baptised by John the Baptist, lead some sort of religious movement, and was executed by the Romans by crucifixion. It is likely he came from Nazareth, and was executed by Pontius Pilate circa 32-34 AD. This is all uncontroversial.
Did he believe himself to be the Jewish Messiah, or have x y or z specific teachings ? Was his tomb discovered empty ? This is all controversial and interesting from a historical point of view.
I take the opposite lesson from Carrier's disagreement with mainstream historical methods.
For most of historical knowledge gathering, the only evidence that you have to go on is a copy of a copy of a piece of papyrus that mensions that someone may have done something at a point.
This is very weak evidence, and your corresponding strength of belief should correspondingly be weak – wether your subject matter is the existence of christ, Plato's interlocutor, or the generals that fought at Troy.
This is just a curse of the historical sciences, and in order to work in this field, you just have to accept that your foundations are shaky. Where it becomes interesting is when a fact can be analysed both using a historical approach and an experimental one.
An interesting interaction between historical sciences and “harder” sciences is the story of Fermat's Last Theorem : he stated his Last Theorem in a writen document, and stated that he had the proof, but didn't write it down. A historian with no knowledge of mathematics would have to consider Fermat a reliable witness and consider hist report to be the truth until more evidence is provided. Given what we know of what the proof looks like however, mathematicians believe that Fermat's account was wrong.
The problem, which you hint at by reference to Socrates, is that if you take Carrier's stance, you just can't do ancient history; the standard of attestation he expects is so high (for bare existence, remember, we are not talking about whether the historical Jesus resembles the gospel account, just that there was such a character), that it is hardly fulfilled for any antique person for whom there is no archeological evidence. For example, you could have used the same arguments to suggest that Pontius Pilate did not exist until 1961, when clear archeological evidence in the form of an inscription in his name was found.
The reality is that people who are well attested in the written historical record are sometimes later confirmed by the archeological record. This provides general evidence that people described in the written historical record generally existed, and confirms the utility of our historical methods.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That's why Fermat's claim to have proved his theorem is not credible. The claim that Jesus of Nazareth was a historical person is not extraordinary. There are sources within a human lifetime of his death which attest to his existence. Therefore we should assume that he existed, barring some actual evidence that he didn't.
If you still disagree with me, try to find a corresponding example, where a supposedly historical figure from antiquity was documented by multiple sources within a human lifetime of his death, and yet they demonstrably never existed. The documentation should be similar in scope and extent for that in Jesus to render the comparison valid.
> The documentation should be similar in scope and extent for that in Jesus
You're placing the goalposts so far down the field that I can't follow you. Jesus is the most talked about figure figure in history.
Although if we're limiting ourselves with sources "within a lifetime of his death", then I can probably find a larger sheer quantity of documentation on the Alien of Roswell than on Jesus.
The problem with the "multiple sources within a human lifetime of his death" is that 99% of the scolars who analyse them are believers, and I don't think that any of them would consider interpretations of their evidence that don't fit at least a basic form of belief.
For everything that Carrier can be blamed for, he did the proper rationalist step, which is setting up to disprove the common theory, and see if you can reach a conclusion that is not absurd.
It is hard to keep up. I heard about the Bud Light thing here on ACX and the Target kerfuffle on The Onion.
I try to look at RedState dot com to keep tabs on the latest thing conservative America is outraged about.
I can put myself in their place sometimes and understand their point of view but a lot of it seems like a big nothing. I thought liberals were supposed to be the snowflakes.
Everybody is being hysterical about everything, seems like.
Re: Bud Light, there was a dumb joke going around about transgender semen in the beer (don't ask me). I would have thought this was obviously a very stupid joke, but then on Tumblr I saw someone taking it seriously (as in "the rednecks think that this is really happening" and going on to suggest ways of making the rednecks even more agitated by false rumours).
I have to bang my head off the desk when I see the likes of that.
Re: Target and the Satanic T-shirts, nobody in that is helping themselves. Sure, your designer who did the Satanic T-shirts that are not in stock in your stores may think it's cute and edgy to do queer Satanism symbols because they don't believe in any of that shit anyway, but when you have stores in places where there are people who do sincerely believe in God and the Devil, the "edginess" gets lost in translation. The designer is an idiot, the customers are idiots, and the store management are idiots.
(Side-note: I believe in God and the Devil, but I'd roll my eyes at the cutesy queer Satan goat because I'm too old for this kind of edgelord stuff).
EDIT: Re Bud Light, apart from stupid jokes and some hysteria, it's a boycott that is working. And I do think the people engaged in it have a point: the marketing mishap (both the Mulvaney tie-in and the marketing director/brand VP interview) came across as "Stupid Existing Customer Base: We think you are icky and smelly and we want you to stand aside while we go chasing after the cool new set who also think you are icky and smelly. But while we and our new best friends are laughing at you*, keep giving us your money. Now go away and consume, idiots, consume!" I don't think it's unreasonable to go "Okay, you don't want my custom? You don't get my custom" after that.
*And there *were* Twitter Liberals laughing at the rednecks about how this pathetic little 'boycott' would never work and didn't they realise that Budweiser would never have done something like that without engaging in a researched ad campaign that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, how could their ignorant little brains possibly hope to compete with educated progressive big business types?
Yeah, as we all know, it didn't turn out to be the case.
I still don't understand why Mulvaney? Did they really think the 19 year old girls following him for lipstick brands were going to rush out and start glugging down Bud Light?
This guy is irritating, but it's a fairly clear breakdown of what is going on and isn't the extremely right/conservative take that other Youtubers present:
We already have the precedent of The People v. Joe Camel, flavored tobacco etc to establish that anything (potentially) popular with the yoots must never be used in advertising adult products.
In fact, since this is AB InBev's *second* offense (RIP Spuds McKenzie) that corporation needs to be seized by the ATF and its assets liquidated.
According to the original video, there's no actual Satanism involved. The conversation goes something like this (paraphrasing from memory, since I watched the video a while ago on mobile):
Conservative troll: LGBTQ is Satanism ! Are you a Satanist ? Huh ? Are you ?
Target employee: Sure, I'm a Satanist, why not. Now, sir, if you'd make your way to the exit...
Conservative troll: You heard her ! We've got an active Satanist here ! A real-life Satanist walking around !!!
I haven't heard anything about sterilizing children - not since e.g. the eugenics movement.
Is this *true*, or has some brilliant person "discovered" that delaying puberty is identical to a complete gender transition, which with current medical tech would make it impossible to sire or conceive a child, short of freezing gametes in advance?
I'm claiming only that AFAIK it's NEVER carried to its end while the trans person is still a child.
The claim you made above wasn't that adults voluntarily sacrificed their potential fertility, but that someone was "sterilizing kids".
I have encountered other people who value other people's potential babies so much that they don't want adults to be allowed make choices that might destroy their fertility. That complaint traditionally showed up as cis-women being denied surgery (typically hysterectomy) that would cure painful conditions that they found debilitating, and had no other way to fix, because they *might* someday regret not being able to have children.
What "push transsexuality on Bud Light drinkers" and "push transsexuality on small children" seem to have in common is a desire on the part of well-organised gay+ movements to pick new fights, having already won everything they could reasonably demand.
Gay sex is legal now, gay _marriage_ is legal now, most gay people are happy to be left alone and live their lives, but there's some people out there who still want to pick a fight with the normies so they can claim to be oppressed.
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.
+1, furthermore it’s a terrible time to be entering the workforce in software. Hiring is gradually opening up but junior jobs are going to be the last roles to come back.
The boom time “we literally cannot hire fast enough” days are done for this cycle.
I have attempted to do the digital nomad thing, and still am to an extent, and I would encourage you to focus on contracting work or...things other than a traditional job.
In my experience, remote work in the US means "within the 50 states" and while I have found extensive lists of companies who are "internationally" remote, on further examination they really, really aren't. The acid test here is:
"Hey, so this job is internationally remote"
"Yes, totally. You can work anywhere you want."
"Alright, so if I join and two months later move to Portugal or Bangkok, you're cool with that?"
"...let me get back to you on that."
I'm not sure if this is because of legal or tax or cultural reasons or some combination but I've had this conversation multiple times, with everything from major multinationals to startups, and if someone doubts it or knows a company that actually does hire for global remote, let me know, I'll apply this week.
If you want to do the digital nomad thing, contract work seems to be the ticket.
As for the lifestyle, I did a bit of bouncing around in my youth. Tons of fun but very much a delay in developing your career and you will feel that later. Also gets old. The expat scene, ie settling down somewhere, is different but has overlap.
How is Houston working out in mid June? Mpls is getting warm and humid enough for me that I’m considering Camelback hydration for my touring bike recreational trips. I guess I am thoroughly acclimated to cooler weather.
When I moved to Mpls a long time ago it was from a cooler climate. 30 below?. No problem. 90 with a dew point of 85? Oh maybe I’ll just stay inside.
Bah, it's not that bad. Still taking 30 minute walks around lunch and enjoying them, probably wouldn't want to be outside all day though. This ain't Arizona though.
Like, a good comparison is if you're walking outside in the sun for an hour in Houston in July, you're probably not having fun, but in Vegas that's like a health hazard, like no, for real, you need to get inside.
Instead there's....kind of a trapped feel. I got caught up in the tech layoffs about two months ago, so I don't feel so free spending money, but Houston doesn't really have outdoors or nature stuff to do and everything in the downtown which is so fun with money...costs money. Being near the opera isn't that cool when you can't afford the opera.
Thank you for the really insightful reply. I'm still weighing the pros and cons, and not hamstringing my career early on is a major factor. On the one hand, I want to find something outside my creative domains that's more consistent. On the other hand, though, if I could just subsist more cheaply for a while, I could afford to keep attempting to scale my writing and art despite the recent hits from AI.
For EU companies it is the same, and the reason is that it's legally very complicated for hte company. Working in another EU country is easy, but if your employer allows you to work in Bangkok, then your company is responsible for following all Thai employment and (mostly) social insurance laws, and is liable for any violation. Obviously they don't know Thai law, so this is just not possible for them to get right with a reasonable amount of effort.
You Are a Computer, and No, That’s Not a Metaphor
https://sigil.substack.com/p/you-are-a-computer-and-no-thats-not
Down below an Australian is wondering about the tipping culture in the US. It’s a perennial theme on regional Reddit to bemoan the export of this part of American culture. It’s not something that worries me about American cultural dominance.
What does is the export of American racial politics. This is from the guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/jun/12/bridgerton-queen-charlotte-race-black-fantasies-king-george
The guy is obviously American and has a relatively good point about Brigerton. The problem is his defense of the black cleopatra in Netflix. Money quote (as Americans say).
“but this supposed “blackwashing” was too much for some – and not just the usual suspects. Egypt’s antiquities minister, Zahi Hawass, complained: “This is completely fake. Cleopatra was Greek, meaning that she was light-skinned, not black.” One Egyptian lawyer even sought legal action to block Netflix in the country for its promotion of “Afrocentric thinking”.
“Cleopatra’s precise pigmentation is up for debate: she was descended from the Greek-Macedonian Ptolemaic dynasty. But, the show’s makers argue, the dynasty may have intermarried with local Egyptians over the preceding 250 years, at a time when no one was classified as “black” or “white” anyway. “Why shouldn’t Cleopatra be a melanated sister?” asked Tina Gharavi, the show’s director. “And why do some people need Cleopatra to be white? Her proximity to whiteness seems to give her value, and for some Egyptians it seems to really matter.”
Not only is the American writer here ignoring the present day Egyptian minister but ignoring him based on American ideologies, while claiming the opposite. It’s the Americans who are imposing the idea of whiteness. On Egyptians.
To begin with Cleopatra’s lineage didn’t “ intermarry with local Egyptians over the preceding 250 years”, this isn’t common for conquering aristocrats in general and this dynasty was particularly inbred. I imagine the author is arguing in bad faith here, as he probably knows that.
Now. look at what the Egyptian minister said
“Cleopatra was Greek, meaning that she was light-skinned, not black”
And what the director accuses him and Egyptians of saying
“And why do some people [Egyptians] need Cleopatra to be white?”
The Egyptian minister says “light skinned” and the American says white. So not only do the Americans here believe they can impose their version of history other societies, they are blind to the contextual differences of who is white or not. It’s a term with limited currency even in Europe, where primarily identity is ethnic not based on skin colour.
"But, the show’s makers argue, the dynasty may have intermarried with local Egyptians over the preceding 250 years, at a time when no one was classified as “black” or “white” anyway."
If they think the Egyptians didn't classify along racial categories, they really are ignorant. This is all just social anyway; they want a Famous Black Icon so they go for anyone notable out of Egypt, because that's the culture in Continental Africa everyone knows about and is widely admired.
Why don't they make a show about the Queen of Punt, who definitely *was* a "melanated sister"? Because that's not a big enough name.
It's the same with historic gay activism, where they went "Well Leonardo/Shakespeare/Famous Guy was gay, and they are widely admired, so you have no grounds to be prejudiced against gay people!"
Now that LGBT is more widely accepted, you get much less of "we need to justify ourselves by appeals to authority".
There may well be the Black Newton out there, but they haven't succeeded in naming one yet, so they need to claim "This person came from roughly the same geographical area as black Africans so we're going to claim them for ammunition in the USA racial context wars".
Modern Egyptians and historical claims are the same level of "we are too heirs of the glorious past", due to the Moslem invasions and colonialism and competing claims of the Copts to be the original indigenes.
Anyway, even if Cleopatra's family had intermarried with local Egyptians, she still would not have had Sub-Saharan African features, unlike the West African-descended African-Americans making this show. North African countries tend to be *very* picky about "we are not the same thing as les noirs" which is why the Egyptian guy is so het-up about this.
Yes. The same is happening in Latin America. Look for example at the NYT critizicing the Argentine male football team because there were no Blacks, as if it was a Netflix show. Case
It is even worse because here in LatAm there was and is a lot of mestizaje. In the Argentine case, many players are mestizos.
We don't even use the word "raza", which is race, because it is asociated with the Spanish colonial times, and with the scientific racism that plagued the world before WW2 (with the USA and Germany as prime cases).
Besides, we always most consider class and income inequality when analyzing skin color discrimination.
The only groups especially categorized and treated similarly in LatAm as the US' way are the Indigenous people.
Well, all what I wrote up here and more is always explained to US libs, but not once they concede.
> We don't even use the word "raza", which is race, because it is asociated with the Spanish colonial times
There's a simpler reason and it's because it's just cringe. American media very obviously tries to push their version of identity politics abroad and so, playing along and trying to frame South American issues in that framework is plainly uncool. Also, there aren't enough people who could pass as "White" and make enough money to signal how they're ashamed of their white privilege in social media. "Juan, you're not that white and you make like 5k a year, black americans are waay higher status than you so shut about how much you'd like to share some of your status with them, it's pathetic".
"Look for example at the NYT critizicing the Argentine male football team because there were no Blacks, as if it was a Netflix show."
Aw man, every time I think the NYT can't beclown itself any further... they really decided that North American racial categories could be imposed on the South American nations?
Out of curiosity, I looked up the Wikipedia page on Argentina and it informs me:
"The black population in Argentina declined since the middle 19th century from 15% of the total population in 1857 (Blacks and Mulatto people), to less than 0.5% at present (mainly mulattoes and immigrants from Cape Verde)."
So with a much-reduced black population, there is even less chance of having a black player on an 11-man team than the same thing for a United States American football team.
Black people - 0.5% of Argentinian population
Black people - 12% of USA population
I know that nobody uses atlases anymore, but even the NYT word-extruders can surely use the Internet to look up stuff? Honestly, this is one case where having AI write the damn thing would probably be more accurate and better.
EDIT: For amusement value, the Argentinian player Liverpool have recently signed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_Mac_Allister
"Alexis Mac Allister was born on 24 December 1998 in Santa Rosa, La Pampa. Mac Allister's older brothers Francis and Kevin are also footballers. They are the sons of Carlos Mac Allister and nephews of Patricio Mac Allister, both retired footballers. Mac Allister is a family name originating from Scotland, although Mac Allister's more recent ancestry is of Irish descent."
I sorta kinda get the impression that the NYT people haven't a clue about the historical reasons for why things are the way they are in other countries.
Well, Australia exported Rupert Murdoch to the US. I think you got the better deal even if you don't like tipping and our bizarre racial obsessions. ;-)
Doesn't he own the Times and the Sunday Times? They don't seem to act like Fox News. He may have worsened America's problems in the course of making a buck from us, but I think if he didn't create Fox News, someone else would have.
Murdoch owns the Times in the UK and a sizable chunk of the tabloid press there. The Schulzbergers own the NY Times. Murdoch owns the WSJ, though, and it has a lineup of rightwing apologists as (fifth)columnists.
Nope. Rupert Murdock's weaponization of the news for rightwing agendas has created a party that's willing to overthrow the government. On top of that the Murdoch news empire has fed into white working-class fears of immigrants, blacks, gays, and uppity women—along the way exacerbating racial politics.
So, purely addressing the chronology, this was going on before Murdoch. Do you remember Rush Limbaugh in the 90s? Black UN helicopters and tales of the Arkansas State Police? And before that, there was stuff like the 700 Club that appealed to a more religious element. That was the market that Murdoch identified and tapped, but he didn't create it. It was there, and under-served, and if he didn't pick up the money laying on the ground, somebody else would have. He may have been the first to do it on television on a country-wide scale with good production values, but the opportunity was there before he took it.
True we can't blame it all on Murdoch, but was the first to transition rightwing propaganda from print and radio to cable television. Radical Conservatism has been woven into the fabric of American culture from before the Civil War. Post WWII, we've got the John Birch Society, and then McCarthy and the HUAC. These types were always on the fringe of the mainstream Republican Party. But then Disaffected Dixiecrats moved en mass over the Republican Party after LBJ's Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his Great Society push. They incorporated their racist agendas into the fever swamps of the far Right. Regan was able to court their votes with carefully crafted "dog whistles". Around the same time fundamentalist Xtians started courting both mainstream Republicans and the creatures living in the Rightwing fever swamps—and the Republican media peeps started learning how to message and broadcast their message from the Fundamentalist ministries that had their own radio stations and TV stations. When cable TV came along the Xtians tapped into cable's ability to reach national audiences. Along the way, the fairness doctrine got chucked out.
The conservative talk radio format dates back to Joe "You Can Go Gargle With Razor Blades!" Pyne in the early 1960s. After the Fairness Doctrine got canned by Ronal Reagan's FCC, Sinclair and Clear Channel started buying up AM stations (which couldn't compete with FM stations in musical formats because of the poor quality of their signal). They fired local staff and management—and they started programming from central location. Enter Limbaugh and the conservative talk radio hosts. And they could tell any lie they wanted to and not have the FCC ding them.
As for Murdoch, started purchasing newspapers in the US in the 1970s including some supermarket tabloids and the NY Post—and his papers either had a previously conservative bent or he made them into conservative mouthpieces. He purchased 20th Century Fox in the mid 1980s. And a decade later he started Fox News, and by the early 2000's it became the King Kong of rightwing media (aka propaganda). Murdoch only became a US citizen so he could purchase US media properties (which foreigners weren't allowed to own). Of course, he backed Trump wholeheartedly. I'm don't know if this would have happened without Murdoch, but if Australians are going to blame the US for importing tipping and US racial classifications on Australia, I can blame Australia for giving us Murdoch. He is a creature that was created by Australian rightwing politics and he is still playing a key role in undermining US democratic institutions. Australia, take him back, please!
> the creatures living in the Rightwing fever swamps
While I generally enjoy your conversation, this kind of dehumanizing rhetoric is too much for me. I'll step out now, and maybe re-engage later on a less loaded topic.
Did Black Lives Matter—or Antifa—or for that matter any of the other bête noires of the Right's paranoia—try to storm the Capitol and overthrow the duly-elected government of the United States? Has BLM conspired to decertify elections? Maybe I missed that.
The last Leftwing insurgencies that I can remember in the US were the SLA and Weathermen—back in the early 70s. After the DoJ put those groups out of business, the Left renounced violence—which was a mistake IMHO, because right now we're sitting ducks for fascist clowns with Armalites.
They literally killed two dozen more people than the J6ers did, but go on with your insurrection lie.
Alright, let me double check something.
So the core issue isn't the Cleopatra thing directly, it's that the Guardian, a British paper, kinda intrinsically accepted the American racial framing "black-white" instead of the Egyptian "Greek-African" framing?
Is this actually, like, an intrinsic take in British politics or just the Guardian selling hate? Like, selling hate is strong but selling controversy feels too weak, controversy is everywhere and doesn't push views, Twitter-itteration-for-maximum-controversey-v220.92 feels more like "hate".
But at it's core, if the Guardian had taken the Egyptian interpretation of "Greek-African", would more of less people have clicked on it? Would we be discussing and sharing it here? Maybe to clarify a bit here, when the Guardian or, say, the BBC is trying to sell newspapers in China or India, how much do they push racial angles? Have these people really internalized the American racial model or are they just making a buck?
Because, like, I don't like pushing race hate for money, but race hate sells 'cuz we keep clicking on it and, well, journalism doesn't pay well and I'm not sure this poor soul is writing this way because he truly, ideologically, accepts US racial issues vs just holding corn-pone opinions.
Brett Deveraux has looked at this in more depth: https://acoup.blog/2023/05/26/collections-on-the-reign-of-cleopatra/
My summary:
1) Ancient Romans and Egyptians and Macedonians would all have been bemused by someone claiming Black is an identity-category. That's not how their world worked. It doesn't tell you a thing about which Polis, if any, they have citizenship of!
2) The "evidence" for Ptolemaic intermarriage with the native Egyptian population rests on very shaky foundations indeed. (The article then goes into details of ancient epigraphy to dissect that evidence. Conclusion: nothing to see here.)
I think Deveraux's response is unusally mealy-mouthed even for him. He starts off with "hey both sides are wrong here" and then after many paragraphs comes around to "sure she was almost entirely Macedonian ancestry but you never know, she might have also had some Egyptian ancestors and anyway those words don't apply in an ancient context so really both sides are equally wrong so ner".
I mean, it's totally fair to claim that modern racial categories like "black" and "white" don't quite make sense in an ancient context if you want to be pedantic about it. But then again they don't make any sense in a modern context either and I don't see Brett Deveraux complaining about that. Somehow a guy like Barack Obama (who is exactly half black and half white, is "black") and that's supposed to make sense, but asking whether Julius Caesar or Mansa Musa was "black" or "white" becomes a meaningless question?
It makes sense if you're trying to persuade the Black Cleopatra types though. You do your best to avoid criticizing people you're trying to persaude.
I'd characterize it more as providing a plausible reason for the acquiescent majority to get off the train before it runs off a cliff. He's attempting to provide a solid left-wing alternative to being totally on-board with black Cleopatra, while avoiding saying anything that might let someone remotely intelligent call him a racist. The ideologues aren't going to listen, but I think there's a bunch of people who only go along with it because they haven't seen a way to disagree that won't get them in trouble.
From Deveraux' earlier thread on "Who were the Romans?", I gather that no-one at the time would have built an identity around their skin color. Obama can identify as Black if he wants to because that category is socially meaningful to modern Americans, but it wouldn't (if I understand Deveraux' argument correctly) have had any social meaning in the Roman era.
In a better world nobody would build an identity around their skin colour today either, but that doesn't mean it's a meaningless classification in the Greek or Roman context. The Greeks and Romans were aware of the existence of dark-skinned people who lived far to the south of the Mediterranean, they had occasional contact with them and they were rare enough to be remarkable in the Empire itself; my understanding is that they called them Aethiopians and considered that whole area to be Aethiopia.
Undoubtedly if a black person (not necessarily from modern day Ethiopia) were to walk past then the average Roman would say "Hey, look at that Aethiopian" rather than "Hey, look at that black person". And if you'd asked them "Hey, is Cleopatra of the same ethnic group as that Aethiopian that just walked past?" they'd have said "No, she's Macedonian, sheesh".
He cared enough about her skin color to address the question. He didn't mention her breakfast at all.
Devereaux as a classical European historian wants very much for his work to *not* be used by people who want to say, "weren't things so much better when the white people were unambiguously in charge?" And the easiest way to do that without lying, is to note that the modern definition of "white" didn't correspond to any racial or ethnic category recognized in 40 BC or whenever. So, mission accomplished.
But if you read the text, he's making it very clear that Cleopatra's skin color was almost certainly not far from that of e.g. Nia Vardalos and nowhere near that of Adele James.
And also that she was a lame-ass incompetent selfish loser of a queen and why would anyone want to claim her as a hero of their race?
It's unlikely that Cleopatra's mother was Egyptian for the reasons that Deveraux mentions in that piece (e.g. Octavian would have pounced on that fact in his propaganda), but in the context of the Netflix controversy what difference would it make? Egyptians weren't black anyway. Cleopatra still wouldn't be black. Did I miss something?
Some denigration that African Americans have received over the years concerns their ancestors being uncivilized. So the argument that the Egyptians built one of the first civilizations, Egyptians were African, Africans are black, and therefore black people had one of the first civilizations has been an appealing one embraced in some corners.
People from historically-unsuccessful ancestral groups seem to feel really bad about their ancestors' failure. This is something that's really hard for a white person to understand.
Of course the correct solution here is to teach them that you don't need to be proud or ashamed of who your ancestors were, not to feed them bullshit unhistorical stories.
"This is something that's really hard for a white person to understand."
Depending on what white person you are, it is very easy to understand. The 19th century European nationalism movement, which you can see reflected culturally in everything from the Celtic Twilight to Sibelius.
When you are a conquered country and the conquerors justify the conquest by you being primitive, uncivilised, and lacking all attainments, the natural response is to seek in the past - before the conquest - for evidence to show that you were indeed a culture and a nation of your own.
So I understand the impetus here, but US African-Americans writing fantasy history to make claims that cannot be substantiated is not the way to go. Wakanda is comic book fiction. Cleopatra was not a modern American black woman.
EDIT: And of course, some white races/cultures have been retrospectively whitened, as it were. I was looking for something else but found this 1926 article from an Australian newspaper:
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/171420389#
"In the "Age" recently appeared an offensive article, with which we dealt in our editorial columns, by one "J. Lyng, F.R.G.S.,'' called "Racial Composition of the Australian People." The article was based on that rapidly dissolving fiction, "The Nordic Theory", which, though its passing vogue is sought to be stayed by such pseudo-scientists as Lothrop Stoddard (whose facility in picturesque writing is paralleled only by his looseness in offering evidence and his disregard of telling facts incompatible to his theory, and, possibly, by his sorry lack of a sense of humour), is going rapidly into what the natives of Stoddard's country call "the discard," where it will repose in dusty oblivion with the Aryan theory and many other exploded and outworn myths and make-beliefs. The article by the journalistic Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society is astray in its mappery of facts. Its author has lost his compass and chart of truth, or, at any rate, is not guided by them. The warp and animus of the article may be suggested by such, quotations as these from it: " . . . We find that about 70 per cent, of the white population in Australia is Nordic, 25 per cent. Mediterranean, and 5 per cent. Alpine. Apart from place of birth, religion affords some kind of a racial guide. Generally speaking, the Nordic are Protestants, and the Mediterraneans and Alpines Roman or Greek Catholics. At the census of 1921 the Protestants numbered about 77 per cent, of the white population, and the Catholics 23 per . cent . . . Finally, the general deficiency in discipline may perhaps to some extent be traced to the influence of the 25 per cent. Mediterraneans — mainly Celtic Irish — who, as already stated, are less amenable to discipline than are the Nordics and the Alpines, and have gained for themselves the reputation of always being 'agin the Government' —that is, against.established authority."
So according to the British scientist, milk-bottle white me is (am?) Mediterranean! 😁
Present-day (19th and early 20th century) Italians and Greeks were dagoes and wops, but their ancestors (like Julius Caesar) were White. To quote Hilaire Belloc's article on "The Nordic Man":
"Thus the first of my correspondents (who signs ‘Gallio’ and gives no address but Brighton) is puzzled by the apparent aptitude of the Romans in their best period for administration and government, and even, in a primitive fashion, for war. He admits that all this may be much exaggerated, and from what he has seen of the Romans (he was down among them lately) he cannot believe all he hears of their ancestors. But still (he supposes) there must be a solid kernel of truth in it: for after all, the name ‘Roman’ was given to a great number of institutions — including the Empire itself — and he asks me — rather crudely — how this was possible if the Mediterranean race were as vile as our greatest authorities have discovered it to be? It is odd that the simple answer to this difficulty has not occurred to the writer. It is that those who governed the Empire, and led the armies, called ‘Roman’ were Nordic. This could be proved in several ways, but all of them might be open to objection save the unanswerable one that if these men had not been Nordic they could not have succeeded as they did. The Scipios, the Julian House, Hadrian — to cite at random — were manifestly and necessarily Nordic; for men do not act as they acted unless they are of pre-bred Nordic stock.
The Pantheon could only have been built by Nordic Man.
The same is true of other manifestations of intelligence and vigour in Mediterranean countries. Thus the Italians and even the Greeks have left a considerable body of remarkable literature both in prose and in verse, and in the case of Italy, we have even quite modern examples of literary excellence — at least, so I am assured by those who are acquainted with the idioms of the inferior races. But upon examination it will always be found that the authors, though using a base medium, were Nordic. The committee which we collectively call by the mythological term ‘Homer,’ and which drew up and passed certainly the Iliad and possibly the Odyssey, were clearly Nordic in composition. Catullus was as Nordic as he could be. The Nordic character of Aristotle is a commonplace. Dante was Nordic. So was Leopardi.
Take any outstanding Italian or other Mediterranean name and you will find upon close examination that the man to whom it is attached was of the Nordic type: Napoleon Buonaparte occurs at once to the mind."
I hope I do not need to establish that Belloc is writing tongue-in-cheek here, but he's lampooning attitudes of the day!
It seems absurd to go through so much convolution when the actual beliefs seem to so closely match "Catholics bad" - you even get a narrative about a glorious Roman Empire brought low by converting!
Looking at old stuff like this is a great way to highlight the absurdities, that you for your post
"Of course the correct solution here is to teach them that you don't need to be proud or ashamed of who your ancestors were, not to feed them bullshit unhistorical stories."
That would imply that white people should also not be ashamed of who their ancestors were, which is an unacceptable conclusion for liberals.
I am a liberal, that conclusion is actually very acceptable to me, therefore your blanket statement is false. You should consider retracting it.
I've realized it's difficult for an European to explain Americans that their own particular way of thinking about race is specifically American and in the rest of the world people don't necessarily think about race in the same way.
The problem is that if I say things like for example "here in Europe were don't really use the concept of *white*", they may think: "oh this pretentious person is virtue signaling! He's trying to sound politically correct but he's not fooling anyone, we all know well that within his heart he thinks in terms of whites, blacks, asians, hispanics, like we do!"
(I'm sorry if this sounds negative towards Americans or unkind, I don't mean it that way).
You can't experience humiliation if you're shameless. Plus every criticism feeds their inner narrative of being valiant warriors for truth against the racist fascist white supremacist cisheteropatriarchs.
" Nobody is imposing anything on anyone. "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IktHcPyNlv4
Oh? And what about Wise Old Granny in the trailer saying "I don't care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was black"? Perpetrating fables over the generations means a bunch of kids growing up ignorant. Will we do the same for "huh, them Greeks didn't never know no maths, it wuz all us!" and teach the kids to count with knucklebones? (Even teaching them to count would at least be something, inclusive maths classes just seem to be "Well ackshully it was all black and brown people invented maths" and then the black kids don't have to learn anything more than that).
They have no problems having the Romans be white 😀
Egyptians should make an action movie about Donald Trump, where Donald Trump is a black superhero.
(Common pattern: choosing your historical incompetent leaders, and making them cool and black.)
For extra diversity points and plausible deniability give him a Hispanic surname; something like 'Camacho'.
That is **exactly** where my mind went, too.
I wasn’t talking about the TV show, but the argument presented in the piece. And its language. Didn’t call for censorship either.
I'm a lover of classical music and I sometimes get into discussions with people over whether we can "separate art from the artist" in cases where the art is beautiful but the artist is problematic for some reason (ex. Wagner was an anti-semite, Picasso a womanizer, etc). The question may be better phrased as "to what extent does the moral responsibility of the individual require consideration of the artist's personal character when choosing to engage with their art?"
I started drafting some hypothetical scenarios to help me sort out my own thinking on this. Here are a few of them:
Scenario 1 - The Private Discovery
Theo discovers an old vinyl record in his grandfather’s attic among items brought back from WWII. The record contains a symphony composed by Hitler. Overcome by curiosity, Theo plays the record and is profoundly moved by the beauty of the music. He occasionally listens to the symphony privately, each time finding it as impactful as the first.
Scenario 2a - The Public Performance
Theo, a renowned conductor, decides to perform Hitler’s Symphony publicly. He believes the performance will do more good than harm. He does not disclose the composer's identity, hoping the music can be appreciated independently. The performance is well-received, but when the truth about the composer is revealed, controversy ensues.
Scenario 2b - The Informed Listener
Samantha, a devoted concert-goer and friend of Theo, decides to attend the concert with full knowledge of the symphony's unsettling origins, but decides to focus on the music. She is deeply moved by the symphony's beauty and decides that she would probably attend future concerts where that piece was being performed.
Scenario 3 - The Living Artist
Theo encounters the work of a living artist who, despite making racist comments, creates beautiful, thought-provoking music. Theo is moved by the music and decides to include one of the artist's compositions in his concert repertoire. This choice directly supports the artist financially and boosts their reputation.
Scenario 4 - The Posthumous Revelation
Theo has always admired a famous composer whose work promotes peace and unity. After the composer's death, it is revealed that he led a secret life filled with various horrid deeds. Theo, who has conducted the composer's works many times, continues to appreciate and perform them, believing the works' messages aren't invalidated by the composer's personal life.
In which of these scenarios, if any, has the character acted unethically? Why?
I have asked several elementary school classes this same question. Kids from 7-9 years old. I usually use Wagner and the controversy around his music as an example. Children almost universally say it doesn't matter if the artist was a total degerate racist or Hitlerian type. The art work stands on its own. Obviously your scenarios are much more nuanced, and it really matters if the artist is still alive and profiting from their audience.
Obviously none of them. I feel like the real big brain hypothetical here is "Hitler's Symphony is Beethoven tier but inspires 1 in X people who hear it to agree with Hitler, for what value of X is it still acceptable to perform Hitler's Symphony"
Hmm my floor is on the order of 1E5 and I wouldn't rule out 1E8 or higher.
That seems bold. I reckon at least one in 1^8 people who listen to Wagner come away more pro-Hitler, and I'm not convinced listening to Wagner has anyone made anyone less racist. Should we ban Wagner?
Hm. 1 in 1^8 is about 3.5 people alive in the entire USA today, or about 80 people alive in the entire world today, or just 16.5 people alive in the entire world in 1900 (Wagner having died in the 1880s). Or about 1170 people, living or dead, in the entire history of the human species.
How about this for comparison: do we think the new Cleopatra movie, on net, made 3.5 more Americans more racist than less racist?
I'm a bit skeptical that that's really causal. And my threshold for banning would be higher, but if that's really true it seems plausible that it's unethical to perform Wagner.
Should we ban the San Francisco Gay Men's Choir? Because my God this brat is so slappable:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOQF4kadHA
Imagine say, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing a song aimed at gay and lesbian parents about "We're coming for your children".
"But it's all about fairness and tolerance!" yeah, look at the first three-quarters and tell me that with a straight face.
For another variation, one could also consider the case where the artist is blameless, but the subject of the art is ... "problematic". E.g. a beautifully painted portrait of a monarch who has what would now be considered war crimes in their reign. Can an art lover enjoy the portrait?
Separating the art from the artist isn't a matter of ethics. Enjoying an art work, or consuming any other product, is not an endorsement of the personal ethics of the person who produced it. People are flawed, especially if you want to judge people of the past by the moral standards currently fashionable, and I can't be expected to pass moral judgment on every person who created anything I ever consume; I don't have the knowledge or the energy to do so.
I just ate some cheese. Was it produced by a bad guy? I don't know and I don't really care unless his evil extends to the adulteration of cheese.
Having said all that, there's circumstances under which enjoying art created by people who have done really horrible things (like Roman Polanski or Frida Kahlo) gives me the heebie-jeebies and stops me from enjoying it. But that's a disgust reflex and not an ethical necessity.
I haven't heard of Kahlo being that reprehensible, can you expand? The intro to her Wikipedia page doesn't mention anything worse than being a Communist Party member.
Here is an interesting (and lengthy) article discussing this question. For those not wanting to read through the whole thing, this is the most pertinent point to the discussion above:
”Kahlo continued to worship Stalin even after it had become common knowledge that he was responsible for the deaths of millions of people, not to mention Trotsky himself. One of Kahlo’s last paintings was called “Stalin and I,” and her diary is full of her adolescent scribblings (“Viva Stalin!”) about Stalin and her desire to meet him”
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2001/06/01/the-trouble-with-frida-kahlo/
I'm being slightly tongue-in-cheek, but...
Failure to separate artist from art is a luxury, a privilege reserved for those lucky few who are fortunate enough to lack the internal moral compass necessary to avoid submerging their own sense of right and wrong into an ideology or tradition. For the rest of us, who have never and will never find any philosophy or movement that's perfectly correct, we have no choice but to live in a world where any artist, at any time, might have done something we disapprove of.
Of course, some people can't help it. They just can't separate art and artist. This is a disability. To accommodate this disability, no one must ever criticize anyone who has ever made any art.
On a completely separate topic, I once made a rather nice clay relief.
> On a completely separate topic, I once made a rather nice clay relief.
Sorry, I need to review all your online comments before I can decide whether that clay relief is really nice.
You don't specify which character acting unethically. In all of these cases, the artist acted unethically, but the composer/appreciator doesn't, since the art is objectively good lacking knowledge of the artist. Well, as objective as art can be.
As an aside, I'm imagining Theo being Alice, Samantha being Bob, and the artist being Eve.
I highly advise staying away from any art by Eve. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJmDh-EpSR4
Wow. I know that "falsely shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater" is one of the classic cases in which free speech can be abridged, but this takes it to a whole new level.
I personally don't believe in boycotts, and say it comes down to how much you're thinking about the artist when you experience the art. If I know a piece was written by Hitler, I'm possibly going to end up picturing it playing over speakers in a concentration camp, and that's going to ruin the value it otherwise would have had. And if it's good there are going to be people trying to use it to preach Hitler's political philosophy, and that can become a new association. The Swastika was Buddhist, but people don't see it that way anymore.
My answer would be none of them. Scenario 3 comes the closest, but merely making racist comments harms nobody (the claims of overprivileged DEI consultants aside). If the artist used the funds from his music to actively promote racism, that would be a different story.
Suppose the living composer is indeed guilty of actively promoting racism or some other egregious crime. What would you say to this scenario (basically 2b but for a living artist).
"Samantha, despite being repulsed by the actions of this living composer, loves their music so much that she purchases one of their albums. She feels a bit guilty, but doesn't want to deprive herself of the feelings the music gives her."
that's a scenario 3 - the purchase sends money to the artist. Pirating and enjoying the album is Scenario 2.
Thinking about this gives me a consideration of a distinction of "wrongness" between moral and social one; in essence, in scenarios like this I don't see anything violating personal morality but I do see that these actions may reasonably be seen as social violations - e.g. if your community has agreed (explicitly or implicitly) to boycott a certain thing, then obviously defecting from that common boycott will be seen as defecting from the community. In essence, the wrongness of all these actions is unrelated to what the composer did (other than as an explanation why your community chose to boycott them) but purely as violating the shared norms and common expression of a common political attitude of your community, which is exactly as (un)ethical as any other violation of any arbitrary shared social taboos.
Ted Kaczynski is dead, and there is a lot to unpack here.
> the Shakespearean tragedy of the brother. <https://news.yahoo.com/for-the-love-of-a-brother-001635118.html>
> how can an idea be guilty of guilt-by-association, and when does that guilt expire?
> and the manifesto itself: how much technology is too much.
There are at least two industries built around the answer that the expiration date is "never."
Can high-functioning autistics get married? Are their marriages usually bad? Should they avoid marriage?
I have high-functioning autism, and am graduating high school next year, and I am trying to verify marriability. (I asked a similar question last week, thanks to everyone who gave advice! I am using it now!) I think I have mild to major depressive symptoms when I realize I might not get married, and also because I have a very obsessive personality (which I think people find unnerving). I once became deeply obsessed with this other girl this one time (she was probably on the spectrum too), and realized that this is basically a function of my mind that really doesn't care about the input and can be exploited with attention. I think I could fall in love with a rock or a tree with practice (but why on earth would that be a good idea?). It seems like a good idea to get married to a human woman. I also realized that my motivational system assigns this huge weight to getting married/being in a romantic relationship, and I keep thinking about that girl all the time even though she hasn't spoken to me in a year and I have no idea how to stop this. How do people usually stop this?
It seems like you're getting a number of examples of autistic people getting married, so I'll skip that part.
Some broader advice: It's easy for people to get too fixated on the big picture goal and not enough on how one actually achieves that goal. So I'd recommend spending more time focusing your attention on doing things you enjoy, especially if they involve other people. Invest time in having fun, doing interesting things, and building friendships with people you like. Being satisfied with your life will make you much more attractive to other people, and having a good social network will expose you to more potential romantic partners. Then you'll have more chances to practice dating and relationships, and to see if something develops into a long term relationship. The big picture is likely to work out better if you kind of ignore it and focus your attention on the day to day.
> I also realized that my motivational system assigns this huge weight to getting married/being in a romantic relationship, and I keep thinking about that girl all the time even though she hasn't spoken to me in a year and I have no idea how to stop this. How do people usually stop this?
Emotions run really hot when you're young. That typically fades as you mature. Not sure if that's also the case for people with autism.
Regarding obsession,
When you have little life or dating experience, it's easy to project a generalized need for companionship onto a single, seemingly special person; regardless of how they might feel about you, or whether there is any degree of actual compatibility.
But in fact there are literal billions of fish in the sea, and whatever fraction may be compatible with you still present pretty good odds. And the funny thing about this type of obsession is that once you do find someone who reciprocates your affection, they are likely to become vastly more interesting and special than the person who didn't.
So start walking, and put a spring in your step. It's the only way to pursue someone you haven't even met.
I'm neurotypical and I've been happily married to a high functioning autist for several decades, so yes I do think they can marry successfully. :-)
Compared to many marriages I see, I think ours is at the happier and more successful end of the spectrum. It has required some compromise on both sides, but I suspect that is true of most solid marriages.
Also, with respect, at your age most people's motivational systems strongly favour being in a romantic relationship of some kind, and at the same time makes achieving this pretty difficult.
Have patience - it's very likely that once you are in college you will meet your people and find a mate.
Marriage should not be a goal. You may find someone you want to marry, but choosing the wrong person because you want to marry someone is worse than not getting married at all.
That said, I think autism isn't a real handicap to such a relationship. It's part of you (and/or her). If you marry, this should be taken into account by both of you, any more than one of you craving a food the other person detests.
When a metric becomes a goal it ceases to be a useful metric. Marriage isn't a goal, but a natural progression in a relationship. Certainly, most people are fine people, but most of them won't make a marriage work between them, and not for lack of trying of a particular fault of one or the other.
It's hard to explain, but I'll try anyway. In a good marriage, you don't overlook your spouse's flaws, but accept them. If your goal is to get married then you may think, "I know <something> about this person that I don't like, but that's OK, and I'll work through it" but that's the kind of thing that, if you aren't truly committed to them, that could blow up later.
To paraphrase, if you can't accept them at their worst, you shouldn't marry them just to get the best.
I think marriage adds value, I think it is more than just a natural progression of a relationship.
I think your point is that many people over-value marriage. This is certainly true, but I think in some cultures people under-value it as well.
Kind of. My point is really more like people want the marriage and that puts the spouse in a secondary position, when it ought to be the other way around. If you value the spouse, the marriage will take care of itself.
I am female and have an autism diagnosis. I am happily married to a very neurotypical man (six months married, 3.5 years together).
Social skills and dynamics are one of my special interests, so I typically pass for quirky NT. My husband still doesn't really understand what autism is 😂. But we're both really good at communication, which is the most important part of a relationship.
I know several autistic people who had success dating other autistic people, but I know people who thrive in mixed marriages as well. It's all about how well you are able to communicate and get along with that specific individual.
If you come to any meetup of autistic individuals, you’ll see plenty of people in successful marriages. It’s definitely not a dealbreaker in life!
I agree with others that it's normal human behaviour.
For your initial question, I also have high-functioning autism, and I am happily married. My partner is definitely quite nerdy, but probably not autistic, or only very mildly. We have been together for 14 years. So yes, it's possible.
I recall that I also read about his happy marriage in the autobiography of Daniel Tammett, who is also a high-functioning autist. You might enjoy his books.
Not sure how to describe autism beyond what you already know, but I do have a question of my own: By "high-functioning" do you mean that you can take care of yourself, and manage most adult-level tasks on your own? I ask because I once dated a girl who calls herself "high-functioning autistic" but she cannot take care of herself. She's in her 30s but has the maturity level of someone in her early teens. We attended the same school for adults with learning disabilities together, and reconnected after we'd both moved out. So we did have some things in common, but it didn't work out, because we were on drastically different levels.
To expand a little on DaveOTN's advice below, I'd recommend being honest with yourself (and any potential girlfriends) about what your long-term goals and capabilities are. The way you write it looks like you have a good head on your shoulders, so as you're going through what you like to do and what interests you, consider what you want to use that head for. Then look for ladies whose goals are at least in the same ballpark as yours. Don't kid yourself that you can keep up with a jet-setting businesswoman if that lifestyle has no appeal for you, and don't settle for someone less functional than you if your main reason for dating her is merely that she's available and willing.
It might be worth mentioning that life skills are easier than social skills. Whether or not you’re autistic, you raise your stock quite a bit if you can manage a home and know how to take care of yourself. When you’re young you might be able to get girls to come over even if you live like a giant hamster and eat nothing but ramen. But if you’re looking for a serious relationship then it pays to show you can and will pull your weight around the house.
I knew a couple- he was mildly autistic, she was not - who did fine until she broke her leg and really needed him. Suddenly she realized just how bad he was at taking care of himself, much less of her. It filled her with despair and they almost broke up over it. He rose to the occasion and learned enough life skills to make her feel like she could be his wife and not his second mother. We were all rooting for them because they were a great couple. They’ve been married for fifteen years and have two kids.
David Friedman says the point of marriage is to maximize your household’s comparative advantage. Three cheers for economics!
In marriage, a situation may come when all depends on one of the partners. Least dramatically, when your partner gets seriously sick for a week or two (or needs to go on a business trip), and you need to take care of the house and the kids, while keeping your job. Or when you get sick, and your partner needs to take care of all this.
When everything is okay, partners can do the division of labor (whether following the traditional gender roles, or arranging things differently). Yes, it helps a lot when you can just stop thinking about some things, and they just magically get done. But in emergency, you should be able to do it... even if imperfectly, even if it is only okay for a week or two but wouldn't be sustainable in long term.
Ideally, everyone should spend one year of their life living completely alone, doing *everything* around the house (cleaning their entire house, shopping, cooking, doing dishes, doing laundry). To realize the scope of things that might otherwise remain invisible if the parents and later the partner do it; also to appreciate when you see them doing it *better*.
Heh, perhaps there should be an official list of "life skills", an organization to train them, and an organization to test the skills and provide "ready for marriage" certification.
Can high-functioning autistics get married?
Of course!
Are their marriages usually bad? Should they avoid marriage?
Just like any marriage, there are good ones and bad ones. No reason to think being on the spectrum would make the marriage any worse.
First, definitely address your major depression. I was experiencing major depression and social anxiety at your age but didn't know it. I didn't seek help until i was 25 and my young adulthood was severely negatively impacted by not treating my depression and anxiety. Your obsessive thoughts about this girl are somewhat normal, as others have said, but if they are negatively impacting your life don't just write them off. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is really helpful with reducing or managing obsessive thoughts.
Second, have you heard of the Netflix show "Dating on the Spectrum"? It's a show about people exactly in your position. Though its reality TV its not trash. It's very respectful to the participants and handled autism in a mature way.
Third, there are therapists who can help you with your exact problem. They can help you learn communication and thinking skills so that you can achieve your goals. Maybe your goal is to get married, maybe it's not. There is no judgement there. Seeking help for these skills is really helpful and can greatly improve your life!
For what it's worth, one of the first things I noticed when using an antidepressant (any one would do) is that such invasive thoughts just disappeared. It even became a semi-reliable way to judge the strength of MDMA experiences before other effects became apparent, so as to avoid premature redosing.
Why is this?
Yes, this is normal teenage male behavior. I realize that's not particularly helpful to hear, but let me tell you, plenty of men who seem extremely cool, charismatic, and sexually experienced in their 20s spent a year or two in high school obsessing over some girl their mind latched onto in the most cringe-inducing way.
The typical advice is to take it easy and find things you enjoy doing on your own first - make yourself into an interesting person, which will attract women on its own, instead of trying to attract women directly. As a high-functioning autistic you need to moderate this advice a little - we have a tendency to get way too obsessive with things we're interested in - but it's generally solid. You've got plenty of time and being inexperienced in your late 20s isn't as bad as the media makes it out to be. By that point many women are getting out of their relationships with cool high school kids and looking for someone a little more grown up and stable.
The second piece of advice you generally hear is to look for someone else on the spectrum to match with. There's a lot of unspoken rules to human interactions and it can be really frustrating if they come to one person naturally and the other one struggles with them. It's often better if you both struggle with them - then you can at least both talk about your feelings in the same way and with the same type of associations.
>take it easy and find things you enjoy doing on your own first - make yourself into an interesting person, which will attract women on its own, instead of trying to attract women directly.
This is the part where I chime in and suggest that you go to your local game store/ comic book shop and see whether they have a D&D group. It's an activity that attracts a *lot* of people on the spectrum, and it's a great way to train/hone/keep up with social skills in a way you will no longer have the opportunity to outside of school. Pretending to be a charismatic half-elf bard is surprisingly good practice for being actually charismatic.
Small caveat, these spaces tend to be dominated by men, and the few women that show up are often come with their boyfriends. Any girls who are single and attractive are going to feel overwhelmed by the amount (again, largely autistic) male attention they're getting, so be careful about actively flirting in that environment.
Wouldn't it make sense for China to drop/resolve its border dispute with India, and instead team up with India on a vague anti-Western alliance? I think from a purely strategic point of view, China probably jumped the gun a bit in starting territorial disputes with literally every single one of their neighbors- maybe not the sagest strategy. India is still not really an ally of the West or America, and China and India have both been pushing their membership in the 'BRICS' alliance or grouping thingy. Modi, to my knowledge, has not been very loudly anti-China (I think mostly because he doesn't want to lose a humiliating border war). They have mutual concerns about American sanctions, dollarization, and general Western pushiness, and being anti-colonial seems like a very strong common grievance. Also, being anti-colonial, anti-America and anti-the West in general seems like a strong unifying theme for a lot of other developing countries in Latin America, Africa and ex-Soviet countries- so they could lead an anti-Western bloc.
Strategically, shouldn't China bury the hatchet with India, and pivot to a friendly anti-Western relationship that incorporates Russia, Brazil, and other developing countries? Maybe it wouldn't last forever, but just from a pure IR strategy perspective it seems better than, like, border skirmishes with melee weapons over irrelevant territory. I don't want this to happen at all, but if I were China or India this would seem to be a pretty smart move?
In addition to what others have said, "China" and "India" don't actually make any decisions. The politicians involved have their own motivations that don't necessarily match the best interests of their countries as a whole.
https://betonit.substack.com/p/no-deal-how-politics-really-works
"Political aversion to bargaining is especially remarkable at the international level. Since decolonization, countries have almost completely stopped trading territory. Russia continues to occupy four northern islands claimed by Japan. If you think Japan can just pay Russia to get the islands back and permanently settle the dispute, dream on..."
What’s in it for India? The PRC is far more of a strategic/territorial threat than ‘the West’ and has less to offer.
The second part (making an anti-western alliance) doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense as others have noted.
The first part (resolving the India/China border dispute) makes obvious sense in isolation, but it's probably not going to happen. And if these two countries can't agree on how to divide up a sliver of damn-near uninhabitable land, how are they going to agree on how to divide up the world?
It's been awhile since I was in the IR scene but, broadly, China and India have very different interests and identities, there's not a lot of ground for a long-term alliance, and it's not clear what action they'd take on it. Rather than a broad, abstract alliance, let's focus on the specific actions they're looking to take.
So, as you put forth, both of them dislike "Western" pushiness but they're both also giant nuclear powers. Neither of them are susceptible to anything resembling America's influence in the 90's. They both can...kinda do what they want internally and on key security concerns. It's difficult to think of something the US could prevent China from doing that it couldn't prevent China+India from doing.
Similarly, they both dislike the influence of the dollar but that doesn't mean they agree on an alternative. India definitely isn't switching to the Yen, I can't imagine China switching to the rupee, and general alternatives like SDRs have failed in the past.
But sanctions is probably the best example, because it includes Russia and a good example of how bad a threat has to force "BRICs" together. Both China and India are still trading with Russia, which kinda broke the back of Western sanctions, but they didn't do it over any grand alliance; instead both India and China are big enough that the West can't tell them what to do anymore and they both like cheap oil and closer ties to Russia, each for their own reason. Russia, just like India, has a long and troublesome border with China and it's own security concerns. The Mearshiemer et al argument against Ukraine was always towards bringing Russia into the West or keeping it independent to keep China isolated. Now, however, Russia is pretty clearly into the Chinese camp. But that's the kind of thing that is needed to form these alliances: massive international threats.
So, broadly, yeah, India isn't going to join a Chinese-lead BRICs coalition without a darn good reason, mostly because China doesn't have much to offer and, frankly, the Indians don't want to be subject to the Chinese anymore than they want to be subject to the "West".
That last point is pretty important in a lot of nations in that area of the world.
Good comment, thanks. Let's hope your analysis ends up being true!
Also, even if China and India were 'allies' for a hot minute, I doubt that it'd last very long
How would India benefit from such an alliance? Why would they want to be China's junior partner in Asia?
Curious if anyone has any updated thoughts on Net Neutrality. Now that's it's been several years since it was "the thing" on the internet for a bit.
My understanding is that it is mostly unprotected and also mostly unviolated. How true are those two things? If they are true, does that mean that, while an important principle, it's one that mostly doesn't need explicit protection? Or is it actually being violated and I didn't even notice? Or is it actually more protected than I thought?
Is there any lesson we should learn from the difference between the _extremely_ strong claims that were made at the time vs. the relatively boring reality of how things turned out?
Did it ever exist? If ISP prioritizes say, gaming traffic which needs low bandwidth, low latency before torrents or videos (high bandwidth, high latency) is it neutral? If ISP blocks some malicious HTTP syn flood, it is violation of neutrality?
No. Prioritization of types of data is fine. The problem is if Blizzard is able to pay to make their gaming data faster than an indie developer. If all email traffic is set to get lowest priority, that's fine.
"Net Neutrality" in fact has been dead for some years (*).
However, its killing was carried out rather cleverly and subtly: it was done without breaking any of the existing (or, AFAIK, proposed) "Net Neutrality" laws in any major jurisdiction.
Rather than the popularly-expected scenario where ISPs would start to artificially slow traffic from "unfavoured" businesses, what they did instead was to contract with e.g. Netflix, Google, et al to install cache servers in "last-mile" DCs. And so the megacorps can serve up video at the speed of an ISP's WAN, without being hobbled by the limited capacity of long-haul backbone fiber. Effectively, they are entirely bypassing what most people think of as the actual Internet. Smaller companies, on the other hand, remain stuck with the latter's bottlenecks and bandwidth cost.
No consumer was directly bothered by any of this, in any way he might care about -- except for when wondering why there is no effective competition to Youtube, Netflix, et al.
(*) Personal note: in 2018 I had occasion to visit (for entirely unrelated reasons) the largest DC in Montevideo, Uruguay. It is, by just about any measure, a backwater. And yet there was already work underway to install a Netflix cache system there. Shortly afterwards, I was given to know that Netflix had leased more than half of the available rack space in that facility.
In Germany, there is a tendency by large ISPs to whine to the legislators that Netflix or Google are taking up so large a fraction of the data traffic and that they should pay a part of the infrastructure costs. (e.g. [0])
This is of course blatantly absurd. The ISPs do not transport packets from Google out of the goodness of their hearts, they transport them because their paying customers -- whom they sold traffic volumes or bandwidth -- happen to favor Netflix over bittorrent or whatever other uses for bandwidth there are. To make a car analogy, this is the gas station notice that 20% of all cars using the gas station are BMWs, and deciding that this means that the BMW company should therefore pay parts of the cost of running the gas station.
Internet access is a commodity, content is not. I imagine going from Vodafone to Telekom would not get much discussion within a family of four, while replacing a Netflix subscription with a Disney+ subscription will likely involve some heated arguments. Nobody stopped Telekom from producing streaming tv series (high risk/high reward) instead of staying in the ISP (low risk/low reward) business.
Noted blogger fefe alleges that German Telekom keeps the pipes to the content providers thin on purpose so they have an incentive to sell that caching. Hearsay, of course.
Competitive advantage of big companies are already built into the internet. A big company like Google is much more likely to end up with peering agreements with big ISPs than some startup, which will thus have to pay for traffic. The ability to rent rack space at ISPs seems similar.
Links (all German):
[0] https://www.heise.de/news/EU-Netzbetreiber-fordern-Netzgebuehren-ab-5-Traffic-9059087.html
[1] https://blog.fefe.de/?ts=9a76b009
This seems like the kind of thing I'm ok with and doesn't seem like an issue (or at the very least, unrelated to net neutrality). Part of the issue with the net neutrality "paying for speed" issue is that it's zero sum. If I pay to be faster, all the rest of the traffic _has_ to get slower. But paying to build last mile caches isn't net zero. Everyone can do it, and me doing it doesn't prevent you from doing it. It was always going to be true that larger businesses have some advantages over smaller businesses. Net neutrality was never going to fix that issue.
> Everyone can do it, and me doing it doesn't prevent you from doing it.
While technically true, the same could be said of laying oceanic fiber, launching satellites, etc. "Anyone", yes, with a few $B in spare change could do it. (I.e. "net neutrality" is then logically a non-issue, because "anyone" could simply build a new Internet ?)
The point was that the people whose hands were meant to be tied by "net neutrality laws" entirely finessed the spirit of said laws; and that scarcely anyone seems to have noticed, and people have come to think that e.g. Youtube is a natural monopoly.
Quite similarly to the earlier case where the "baby Bell" ILECs (Verizon et al) in the US finessed the terms of the 1982 AT&T divestiture by building a "separate" fiber grid and allowing the old copper grid to fall into disrepair.
Net neutrality was never meant to force everyone to keep their product bad. It was meant to prevent big companies from forcing competitors to stay bad. This was my point about zero sum. Paying to make your data faster _also_ makes everyone else's data slower, so big companies pay which keeps little companies shitty. Building a local cache doesn't do that. It's a very important distinction.
Would you be mad if instead of spending those billions on building data caches, they just hired so many engineers that they were able to come up with a proprietary data compression technique that no one else had access to?
At the time net neutrality was (loosely speaking) repealed, TikTok was a tiny thing in the United States. Somehow it has managed to become huge, and I haven't heard anything about all the other social media giants ganging up to starve TikTok of bandwidth. So I suspect the problem was exaggerated from the start.
Yeah that was sort of the impetus of my question. I know some places have protections (CA, Europe, others), but lots of places don't, and it sort of seems like it's been fine? My guess is not that net neutrality isn't important, but that it turns out that violating it is just not that useful/profitable and so even though a few companies _were_ trying do so at the time, they eventually decided it wasn't worth it, even if they were technically allowed to.
Philosophically this is consistent, but from a consumer's POV it is a distinction without a difference. A typical Netflix or Youtube user is unlikely to know or care precisely why no competitor is able to offer comparable performance. (Ergo "net neutrality" was a doomed project from the start, IMHO)
That's my point though. With caches a competitor _can_ do as well (even if it's very hard). One cache doesn't prevent another cache. With throttling/boosting speed, they _can't_ because it's zero sum. I think this distinction matters. Being a bigger company and paying to make your product better has always been a thing. It will always be a thing, and frankly I don't see a problem with it. What we should care about is the ability to pay to keep your competitors from getting good. I think this difference, which you seem to think is trivial, is _incredibly_ important.
In Europe there are rather firm laws protecting net neutrality. There are every now and then ISPs who try to wriggle around it, for example by trying to declare that certain service don't count towards the costs and data limits of their users, and they get pushback and give up after a short while.
Net neutrality was passed into law in 2015. So far, the only effect I've seen is that ISPs can no longer offer unlimited music streaming. https://norway.postsen.com/business/14615/New-EU-law-puts-an-end-to-Telenor-and-Telia%E2%80%99s-free-music.html
In the US, protections were enabled, then removed within a year or 2, with the following administration. As other commenters have pointed out, some individual states have protections, but there is not Federal level protection in the US. And as I argued elsewhere in this thread, I wouldn't expect regional protections to extend beyond that region.
There was an anti-net neutrality interview on Reason a few years back. I think with an economist - don't remember who.
As I recall, the case for neutrality was very easy to make, and widely backed, and also easy to see as anti-free market, but I didn't hear a lot of people making the standard free market case against it. When I did, it recounted stories of ISPs that wanted to bring that service to new markets (i.e. didn't already have Internet), but the only way to make that cost effective was to give some customers more bits than others. Net neutrality would have killed them before they even got started, and the end result would be a lot of communities that just couldn't get service, "no one knows why", except a few people did know why but couldn't get their voice heard over the neutrality chant.
One could also make a case that net neutrality was a secret ploy to entrench certain large businesses that could deploy internet to (most of) the masses, esp. if their non-net-neutral upstart competitors could get squeezed out by taxpayer-funded law. That's hard to prove, given how secret it would have to be. AFAIK no one could even produce evidence that that was even going on.
> it recounted stories of ISPs that wanted to bring that service to new markets (i.e. didn't already have Internet), but the only way to make that cost effective was to give some customers more bits than others.
I would buy that if the ISPs hadn't already outed themselves as being extremely anti-free market, lobbying against allowing some of those same communities to organize municipal or community broadband. (Not to mention the exclusivity zones and associated price fixing)
Municipal (i.e., local government) managed broadband is hardly an exemplar of the free market.
A brief search suggests you and I might be referring to different types of ISPs. I was referring to small independent ISPs trying to reach new markets, like, say, some small town over an hour's drive away from the nearest metropolis. When I search for "ISPs lobbying against community broadband", examples include Verizon and AT&T, which are _not_ that.
Indeed, this more exemplifies what I was talking about with larger providers lobbying for neutrality in order to squeeze smaller competitors. (Although, I should say that AFAICT, Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast are or were all apparently _against_ net neutrality, not for it. Also, those are _service_ providers; _content_ providers are another story, and one I haven't followed for a while.)
I imagine part of it may be that California has a net neutrality law and many other states have regulations restricting the kind of behavior from ISPs that everyone got worked up about, and ISPs determined whatever boon they’d get from metering certain types of traffic isn’t worth the litigation.
Some kinds of things, it makes sense that one large market protecting/regulating it will spread elsewhere, due to the difficulty in having different product lines. California's fuel efficiency/emissions standards are a great example of this. Net Neutrality is not something that I would have guessed would operate this way. It seems like it should be trivial to comply with regulations in one jurisdiction and not in another.
As for fear of regulation in response to neutrality violations, I would have expected that to slowly die down over time as we got further away from the original outcry. Especially in the currant cultural climate where neutrality towards content is generally not really deemed important by large swathes of people from all sides of the political spectrum (for different reasons).
I know nothing about ISP infrastructure—why would it be trivial to have one policy for all of CA and another for the rest of the country w/r to net neutrality issues?
The networks are literal infrastructure networks organized on a hub-and-spoke type setup. Comcast or whoever is running lines through your neighborhood to connect you to the Internet, either through wires or with wifi as the last stop. All of your neighborhood Internet connections basically go to the same central server (not sure if that's the right word) before connecting to the broader Internet. So if they want to filter all the traffic in Nevada but not in California, all they have to do is apply different settings to the nodes in CA and NV.
My impression is that CA's law ostensibly prevents you from doing stuff to Internet traffic that is going from or to a customer in CA, even if the traffic is temporarily outside of CA.
i.e. if your customer in CA is accessing a web site hosted in NV, and you slow the traffic while it's in NV before it makes it to CA, I believe that violates CA's law.
I assume the filtering takes place at the customer end. So if, for example, Comcast (which owns NBC) would rather have you watch Peacock than Netflix, they can just throttle down Netflix speeds 50% outside of California but leave them alone in CA. It wouldn't affect Netflix's speed on the big interstate trunk lines, just from the neighborhood nodes to your house. But I'm no expert and would welcome a rebuttal on this.
And yes, as said upthread, it doesn't appear to have happened in any case...I suspect Comcast thinks that cutting off people's Netflix is just likely to kill their golden-egg-laying monopolistic goose.
Great question.
I've heard that wildfires in North America are increasing in number. This is always blamed on global warming, but to what extent might it owe to growth in the human population?
Every time a human visits an area of the wilderness, there's some small chance they will start a wildfire, usually by mistake but sometimes in a deliberate act of arson. The person might flick a lit cigarette butt into the grass, fail to fully put out a campfire, or have some problem with their car that spreads fire to dry vegetation nearby.
As the populations of humans in North America increase, it stands to reason that the number of humans visiting wilderness areas will also. Statistically speaking, this also means the number of wildfires will rise.
That's the thing that confuses me about people who say that wildfires are natural and some species of tree *need* them to thrive. Without humans, the base rate of starting fire would be, what, 20 times lower ? 100 times lower ?
Combined with the repective size of the fires, what's the average half-life of a forest parcel with or without humans, and how much does vegetation grow between two fires ?
A good discussion of this question:
https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-megafires-why-wont-anybody-listen?
Roger PIelke has look at the topic of climate and human influences on wildfires here -
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/what-the-media-wont-tell-you-about-783
Power lines visiting the wilderness is a problem, much like roads.
In the western US there are several things going on: hotter, drier summers are killing some trees and stressing/weakening others. Stressed/weakened trees are more susceptible than usual to bark borer beetles. These two things in combination mean a larger proportion than usual of standing dead trees which act as fuel for wildfires. Additionally, over a century of "absolutely no fire" management policy means that under story stocks are also larger than usual, as in the past, frequent small fires would clear out small stuff. These two things together mean that, when fires occur, and when they grow too fast to be controlled by the normal policies, they get _big_.
So it's a combination of climate and policy, as well as interactions from various ecological processes.
And while you are probably right that, as humans encroach more into wild places, the incidence of human-originated wildfires increases, I'm not sure how much that matters. Fires can start lots of ways, so the more important thing is the conditions.
At least for Canada, the *number* of wildfires is not increasing, but the severity of each one is. And it seems that climate change *is* facilitating that - there is a good discussion here: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/canada-wildfires-2023
If by severity you mean amount of land burned, that's not true. https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/ha/nfdb
There does seem to be a very small upwards trend in the total area burned, but it's hard to tell, given the cyclical nature of these things. However, I meant that the severity of each fire is increasing - the number of fires is decreasing, and the area remains stable at best.
Ross Douthat is cracking me up today in a panel discussion of the Trump candidacy:
“What matters most about him as a presidential candidate?”
“That his second term was foretold in the Necronomicon, written in eldritch script on the Mountains of Madness and carved deep, deep into the white stones of the Plateau of Leng.”
It’s paywalled of course but if you haven’t used up your five free articles for the month it worth a look, for the laughs if nothing else.
It’s all a scream. I could hardly read it through all the flecks of foam most of those pundits were spraying.
Where is it at?
https://web.archive.org/web/20230612100627/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/12/opinion/donald-trump-2024.html/
Expect to give up your email address at a squeeze page.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/12/opinion/donald-trump-2024.html
For whatever reason, Ross is letting his geek flag fly much more these days, sharing the fantasy novel he wrote and dropping gratuitous Lovecraft references.
He switches The Book of Revelation a bit later
“ believe that before the sixth seal is opened, the sun becomes black as sackcloth and the moon becomes of blood, he will deliver more winning than we have ever seen, and I look forward to it.”
Anyone here tried http://bewelltuned.com/ ? Was it helpful? Any place where I can see more commentary/discussion on it, or just learn about the people behind it?
I played with the motor cortex tuning and enjoyed it. They isolate some of the body awareness aspects of vipassana for that part.
I found it to be very quickly effective at reducing muscular tension, but maintaining global relaxation requires more attention/awareness than achieving stability through tension, so I found it unsustainable. I have a good amount of meditation experience, so perhaps had a better-than-usual foundation to see results from the motor cortex tuning.
I don't remember trying the other aspects of their program, though I certainly read the whole site.
Thank you very much. That is a very helpful comment.
The people behind it are Maia and Shine Pasek, also known as SquirrelInHell, who are sadly dead.
I appreciate your letting me know. Sorry to read that they passed away.
A question that's been popping into my head lately: is AI going to break the internet?
I have in mind a future where:
- every online discussion gets overrun with convincing AI bots that crowd out real human participants
- email spam filters get overrun by ever-more sophisticated AI, including AI that mimics real human correspondents, like specific people the email account holder knows
- social media accounts come to be seen as mere fodder for AI voice and video mimicry used for scams, and people increasingly try to minimize their online presence
- corporate and government tech security proves to be no match for AI, and systems of all kinds are increasingly taken offline altogether
In my most starry-eyed utopian moods, I imagine a future where the internet is just abandoned altogether and people return to living in the real world, more or less sequestered from an internet that devolves into an AI ghetto, a sort of "Disneyland with no children," to borrow Bostrom's phrase, except very stupid and inane.
I hadn't seen this from Alex Pareene when I originally commented here, but it's very complementary to what I'm talking about:
"We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information. Finding unbiased and independent product reviews, expert tech support, and all manner of helpful advice will now resemble the process by which one now searches for illegal sports streams or pirated journal articles. The decades of real human conversation hosted at places like Reddit will prove useful training material for the mindless bots and deceptive marketers that replace it."
https://defector.com/the-last-page-of-the-internet
That is the simplistic straight-line extrapolation, but I'm not sure it is wrong. And I think we'd have gotten there eventually just on the basis of mass human mediocrity, but LLMs will accelerate the process.
It's already happening. Google/etc web search has become decreasingly useful over the last month (a trend which had been happening for a while but accelerated greatly). Creating a website with a "knowledge base" of AI generated, SEO-optimised content is now trivially cheap, and is drowning out all other search results. Currently I'm adding "reddit" to the end of most searches as a workaround.
Maybe it's time for a return of the old Yahoo-style curated web directory?
How would this AI-broken Internet differ from what we've got now ? The current Internet is essentially unusable without ad blockers and spam filters; as others have pointed out, AI-generated spam will be mitigated by AI-driven filters, so the effective volume of spam should remain the same as it is now. Meanwhile, current social media accounts are already nothing but a massive attack surface; some people strive to minimize their social media presence, whereas others simply don't care whether they get attacked or not, as they don't have much to lose. Corporate and government tech security is already mostly a joke, with data leaks and ransomware attacks becoming a daily occurrence. I just don't see what AI could do to make matters substantially worse than they already are.
"I just don't see what AI could do to make matters substantially worse than they already are."
One fairly prosaic possibility is spear phishing at scale.
I kind of assumed people were doing this already (and have been for a while). A warehouse full of teenagers in Malaysia is probably cheaper, throughput-wise, than the current-generation GPT.
Well, this is admittedly N=1, but I haven't received any spear phishing attacks myself yet. Either the warehouse full of teenagers in Malaysia is still too expensive to make it worthwhile to try to intelligently trick the average person like me, or it is done so badly that it just looks like ordinary spam to me. I'm guessing that since e.g. OpenAI can let people play with at least the 3.5 chatGPT for free that it would be cheaper than even impoverished labor.
> Well, this is admittedly N=1, but I haven't received any spear phishing attacks myself yet.
Not that you've noticed, anyway :-) That said though, CPU time is still not free and neither is bandwidth, so attacking random people might still be too expensive, even with ChatGPT. It would be more efficient to buy a list of leaked personal information, then target exclusively those marks who are at least somewhat likely to pay off.
Could be... The other limiting factor, for either human or LLM spear phishers, is how much relevant personal information is easily accessible. A _lot_ of data is out there but, e.g., neither one is likely to have a full set of the contents of all my emails. They can probably work out _who_ to impersonate, but working out what to say is trickier.
Yeah, I mean partly I'm just saying: maybe all these trends that are worsening the internet, which are already in large measure a product of AI, are only going to accelerate as AI becomes more powerful. But clearly we're not *yet* at a point where the whole thing comes crashing down; social media platforms are still popular, corporate and government sites are still functional. Its very possible to imagine things getting worse than they currently are.
A lot of people are saying AI will improve spam filters as quickly as the spambots themselves. Maybe that's right, and I admit being way out of my technical depth here, but intuitively it doesn't feel to me like we should make this assumption. An AI that is approaching AGI capabilities is *defined* by its ability to "act" like a human. (Can they not already pass those "check the squares with a streetlight in it" tests? If not, then soon...) Whereas the ability to *detect* the difference between a human and a bot that *humans* can't even tell is a bot may prove more difficult than that.
Hopefully we will have a government that get get its shit together and punish the people running spam AI to a level where people don’t do it.
Same with robocalls etc. should be a top policy item.
The government does not seem to be very active in playing traffic cop with the internet. Seems to be some combo of much of government being way behind the times in understanding tech, and the big tech companies being so fucking rich, and with so much potential to get way richer, that they're sort of like Russian oligarchs. I think the tech companies are going to make every single judgment call there is to be made about what to allow -- whether to make things open source -- whether to install protections against various things. Every so often the government will give them a piece of paper with "I promise to be careful" on it and they'll all scrawl their signatures on the bottom and toss it back to the messenger who brought it.
Government doesn’t need to play traffic cop (though they certainly did around things like Covid and hundred Biden laptop etc.). They just need to use their big fucking stick.
A decade ago they could have told the big phone providers “figure out robocalls products your low ended are not renewed. They would have figured it out.
Too much regulatory capture and too much non legislating while everyone plays partisan shitfest.
I too don't like the idea of rigid, semi-informed government officials trying to micromanage a sector they don't really understand. But I also do not like the idea of the country being run by the shitlords of the internet.
At least for the email filters, recall that -they- get to make use of the new AI as well.
But I agree that the natural balance of how much spam gets through is likely to shift, and probably in the direction of more spam than less of it.
The threat is real, and for that reason, people and companies will put increasing value on being able to identify themselves as humans to others and to be able to identify other humans. The Twitter blue check mark is an example of something that will get more common.
I imagine that human identity checking will become a service. That there will be a service that checks whether you are a human, and then you will log in to other websites using their account.
Alternatively, there could be a system of humans vouching for each other. If you vouch for a bot, and the bot gets exposed, you also get a ban.
Locally we have a bunch of services which provide legally binding e-signatures and logins tied to government identity, primarily used for all kinds of tax issues, permits, applications, internetbanks, etc, but they're also available for private services. This probably *could* be automated, so there might be a bot behind that, but it does tie the action to a "non-burnable" real identity so that puts a clear limit to potential abuse.
Nice idea. But if so, people are still going to want the internet, so there will be a massive incentive to set up a "no AI" internet.
I was thinking the same with media - there's an awful lot of reasons to think that people will feel extremely unfriendly towards AI completely taking over production of movies, TV and so on. The whole of those industries, with all its power and wealth, isn't going to roll over and allow that to happen, and in a context where in the wider world people are losing their jobs left right and centre, I imagine there'll be a huge backlash.
So there'll be an incentive to have "no AI here!" production companies, just as there will "no AI here!" internet. Is that achievable? I'm not sure. The toughest thing would be avoiding fakes, but I imagine there are ways round that.
There is already (at least) one working example of a "no-AI Internet". That is, a network consisting solely of mutually-authenticable participants who know and trust their immediate peers, with all traffic cryptographically opaque to outsiders, riding on the regular Internet in the same way as the latter rides on top of the telecom grid.
This kind of thing is not difficult to implement. However, more or less entirely "does not exist" from the POV of anyone "not invited to the party."
"So there'll be an incentive to have 'no AI here!' production companies, just as there will "no AI here!" internet."
I think the incentive will be low if the AI produced movies are roughly the same quality and substantially cheaper.
Going from memory, Suzuki violins (the physical items, not the teaching method) were looked down upon by lots of folks because they weren't as good as the hand crafted competition. But they were good enough and substantially cheaper so they sold well. "Authentic" didn't matter too much when the price difference was large enough.
Alternately, lots of folks like to complain about auto-tuned pop singers, but this doesn't seem to keep the pop singers (and others?) from using it.
Still, I expect the primary effect won't be *replacement* but instead *assistance*. Using AI (of some sort ...) might allow a movie to get the effect that the director wanted for substantially cheaper. That's going to be a win. I don't notice a lot of complaining when CGI is used to create battle scenes with thousands of participants. I expect the same from "AI."
The initial effect will be assistance. But at some point literally everything can be replaced including actors. I would think the industry would have enough clout to mount a massive campaign, lobbying etc but who knows.
This reminds me of "non-GMO" products. Can you believe the companies that tout it? Is there actually a benefit for being non-GMO?
It sounds like the same problems will surround such "no AI here" companies.
The only benefit is in the design goals. GMO food is generally optimized for crop yield, shelf life, and maybe visual appeal; as the result, it tends to taste like cardboard and be somewhat lacking in nutrition. This is not a problem inherent in GMO technology, merely a design choice by the corporations who wield it. Meanwhile, non-GMO food still retains much of its taste and nutrition. However, it is indeed more expensive, since the crop yields are significantly lower.
" GMO food is generally optimized for crop yield, shelf life, and maybe visual appeal; as the result, it tends to taste like cardboard and be somewhat lacking in nutrition. "
Citation needed. The Red Delicious apple is non-GMO. While *breeding* for shelf life/transportability/etc. means that you're willing to accept a loss of taste as the results that get you your target traits are somewhat random, GM has the advantage that particular traits selectable are deliberate and do not require losing other traits like flavor.
My intention was not to bash GMO, but only to compare it with the OP claim on "no AI here", as I was struck by the similar marketing aspects of it.
I personally cannot tell the difference between GMO corn and non-GMO corn, but I have read that animals can, and only eat GMO corn when no alternatives are available. If I cannot tell the difference between a comments board with and without AI comments, how do I know it actually doesn't have AI? Would companies think their AI comments are good enough not to be noticed to falsely claim their AI-enhanced comments board has no AI comments in it?
> If I cannot tell the difference between a comments board with and without AI comments, how do I know it actually doesn't have AI?
If you can't tell the difference, does it matter ?
https://xkcd.com/810/
That's why I was reminded of non-GMO claims.
> Is there actually a benefit for being non-GMO?
More testing. If people were eating a plant for centuries, you can assume that associated problems are well known, even if then impact only a minority of the consumers (such as celiac disease). If the plant is new, who knows, the disease might get called after you.
For a producer, the benefits are legal. What you produce is your business, no one will accuse you of secretly producing more than you paid for. No one can change their mind overnight and start charging you 10x more.
The difference is the majority of people couldn't care less because the product will taste the same.
The scenario the OP is outlining by contrast is one in which the internet experience is so terrible that people spontaneously choose to ditch it. A bit different I'd think?
You are correct in that, AFAIK, people can't tell the difference between GMO and non-GMO.
I am less sure that people will be able to tell the difference between AI and non-AI except by volume. Even quality won't necessarily be a good metric. AI might well *improve* comments on some sites, like YouTube.
I'm imagining a site that advertises "no AI here" and is so popular that every post gets dozens of comments every minute, even from real people. And many of those posts might be like "first", "frist", "haha", and "omg lol".
You seem to be imagining a scenario where only the spammers have AI. Spam filters and security also grow more sophisticated over time.
As for social media and discussion; that's what they've always been. A convincing AI bot would be an improvement most places.
Good point on spam filters/security also having AI tools, but an arms-race scenario between scams/hackers and security/filters still seems like a kind of destabilized scenario where the defenses could get overrun at any moment.
Regarding social media, this is actually what prompted the thought in the first place: the fact that AI has already been shaping our online social lives for over a decade via the algorithms that maximize "engagement" and so on. And that, paired with the observation that some of these platforms have driven people away by becoming so unbearably annoying, leads me to project these trends forward and imagine a world with ever more powerful AI in which the whole internet just turns to junk.
The guys who made The Social Dilemma did a good talk which incorporates the argument that AI has already been massively disrupting human society throughout the social media age (and that a lot of stuff will probably get a lot worse): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ
The average person seems to associate justice with equality, at least relative to my own sense of justice. Equality, beyond the baseline required to live a dignified life, seems irrational. Why might that be?
People don’t seem to think it’s unfair that some sports teams win again and again, while others haven’t had a title in 100 years. Or that a player might be benched the entire season. Or that Messi is soccer’s GOAT and is disproportionately remunerated for it. Society doesn’t seem to care that there isn’t a female Messi. Or that basketball “discriminates“ against short people. Or that most sports exclude the obese. Most of this seems tolerated because it’s rational. If the objective is to win, you will build the best team and pay what you need to pay, and do what you need to do to win.
Yet, when a team of people build a company, we have different expectations. Companies can’t just want to win. They must do good things for society outside of their core competency, like become carbon neutral or improve diversity. Employees inside companies shan’t be treated as super stars or be “benched”. Everyone has to be made feel they have a more or less equal chance of making it to the top. If a given demographic predominantly represents required skillset, companies are expected to fight the distribution and scout outside of the obvious places. People who work for high paying companies/industries are perceived as an undeserving and often low morality elite.
It seems more people understand intuitively that they can never be Michael Jordan. But it’s harder to appreciate why we didn’t get to become Beyoncé or Bill Gates. Maybe people think that if they just were in the right place at the right time, they could be almost anyone, unless of course being someone requires certain genetics; with the exception of intelligence, personality, and other more ambiguous traits.
I genuinely think we would all be happier if we accepted a lot more things in life work like professional sports, even if we hide it behind a veil of equality. It just seems like a collective delusion that leads to cognitive dissonance when we are confronted every day with a reality that doesn’t follow.
Justice isn't about equality. It's about good behaviors being rewarded and bad behaviors punished. The only place "equality" comes in with Justice is the idea that the goodness or badness of the behaviors should not be dependent on the person demonstrating them.
My thought of it that sports and sex are old but market economy is novel. There is still people who think that total production of goods is fixed (with aspect of "given technology") and people are just redistributing it.
I assume you're misrepresenting [a just world would be more equal] as [justice requires equality]. (This is irrelevant to the rest of the argument, but just to get semantic issues out of the way - it obviously does require fairness, which can be thought of as a kind of equality, albeit not of outcome.)
Which is to say, existing economic regulations simply do not account for numerous externalities, which results in a mismatch between what's profitable and what's perceived as beneficial for society. Companies posturing as carbon neutral, for example, is a PR move deflecting the blame for environmental costs of carbon emissions (being perceived - rightly, IMO - as) not being correctly priced into literal monetary costs of the companies' operations.
And more generally, companies are a part of social arrangement, and you should view it as perfectly normal that people judge them based on their influence on society - regardless of whether you think their judgments are correct or not. (If you don't, I assume it's due to being influenced by one of the worldviews that axiomatically see the contemporary market capitalism as either a natural state of being or as an arrangement leading to maximal social good. We can argue how neither is true some other time, my point here is simply that most people do not share this assumption, and realizing this alone would be enough to resolve your confusion.)
It's sports, the institutions whose sole purpose is providing framework for competition to find out who's the best, who are a very special case here. In contrast, I'd venture that approximately nobody, including the most hardcore of libertarians, thinks that the entire human economy is just a game to find out who can raise the most money.
Carbon neutral is different from diversity, since if there’s a cost in the transition from carbon companies should have to pay for it.
Anyway, people don’t care that much about equality, even trade unions have not historically cared. You yourself mention messi.
US identity politics are a different thing altogether since, the demand is for group equality of outcome rather than equality of outcome between individuals. So the 13% (iirc) difference between male and female earnings matters more than the millions or billions of dollars difference between the richest woman and the poorest man.
Companies don't pay for anything. They pass the costs onto their customers.
Diversity also imposes costs, if it wasn't, they would already met it.
Megacorps prefer to pay large sums of money to activist organizations rather than make 6.5% of their software engineers black females.
I think the main culprit here is the economic determinism of Marxism. Corporations are the engine of capitalism and when you're targeting something you want to stop, you hit the engine. The infiltration of corporate governance by DEI political officers was mapped out in the middle of the last century by Marxist theorists who were growing increasingly annoyed by the fact that the US proletariat is basically a contented group. Since no revolution was ever going to happen the way Marx predicted, a quiet revolution was required within the structure of the capitalist system itself. So this is why you see corporations being held to different standards than, say, sports teams. Corporations are at the root of the evil exploitative capitalist system in neo-Marxiist thought. Sports teams are just part of the culture industry that anesthetizes workers.
Capitalists love DEI because it centers the political conversation about injustice on race (not a threat to Capital) instead of on economic class (the biggest threat to Capital).
They've been doing this for years; there's that famous Lyndon B. Johnson quote: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." It's the same shit as always, reskinned for the new age where open racism doesn't fly. Always centering the conversation on race.
I know lots of capital-m Marxists that really dislike the wider SJ movement because of this.
You don't need a conspiracy to figure out why corporations are held to a different standard here. "Corporations" just aren't that popular and "sports teams" are. (But also, sports teams got hammered by SJ for racist mascots and exclusivity way before corporate brands did, so I think your premise might just be flat-out wrong.)
"Capitalists" don't exist. People who actually run (sustainably successful) companies are not political theorists.
Exactly that. The switch first to gay rights and then to identity politics, instead of class politics, made it very easy for businesses and large institutions to just keep on doing what they were doing.
Hang up a rainbow flag, say you're all for gay marriage, and keep hiring and firing people on short-term contracts so you don't have to pay them benefits if they've continuously worked for you over twelve months.
DEI is no threat to capitalism, it it were capitalists would oppose it. They don’t. In fact they often promote it.
Generally speaking, capitalists aren't interested in preserving capitalism, they just care about their own bottom line. Just because DEI may be good for the short-term profits of individual megacorporations doesn't mean it won't damage the long-term viability of the social system that allows these businesses to be created in the first place.
Of course they don't oppose it. Harvard, over decades, has succeeded in making DEI and social justice the highest status belief system that exists in the US political landscape, Anyone who opposes it is low -status. Even if they knew it was going to destroy capitalism in the end they would still promote it. Status is a powerful incentive.
If Harvard is doing that there’s something in it for Harvard graduates. I think Amazon once produced an internal memo suggesting that diverse workers are less likely to organise.
You're wrong that the average person associates justice with equality (or at least equality of outcomes). Here's a NYT articles about how the recent affirmative action vote in California (more liberal than average in the US) failed https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/11/us/supreme-court-affirmative-action.html. I think most people believe in meritocracy, at least loosely. The trouble is outside of a few fields, it's really not the case that people are rewarded based on their merit. Everyone has a coworker who is lazy and doesn't put in the effort, but everyone also knows someone who has benefited from nepotism.
> Most of the difference between conservatives and liberals is the extent they
> perceive the world as being driven by merit or luck; most would agree that merit-
> based inequality is okay while luck-based is not.
Good luck trying to separate luck from merit. I once had a boss who used to say 'the harder you work, the luckier you get.' I used to scoff at this as a silly platitude to get me to work harder, but I've come to realize it's basically accurate. So much of what looks like merit is actually simply taking actions to reduce the number of ways you can be hit by negative variance in your possible outcomes and to increase the number of ways you can benefit from positive variance in the same. By this theory, merit is basically variance management. For example, a professional basketball player trains hard to perfect his shot so that if he happen to get the ball in a game in the right spot (variance) he will score (merit). Or a salesman knocks on more doors in a month than anyone else because he knows that a small percentage of knocks lead to sales (variance) and he wants to find as many as he can (merit).
What controls the family you're born into? If you're Hindu, it is merit (accumulated in past lives). Most other religions attribute it to luck, I guess.
On a different point you made: The difference between conservative and liberal is only in how they see role of govt, I think. In other views, individual differences trump ideological differences, in my experience.
It is also incentive to be a good human being in order to gain merit for the future, which includes future births (in the belief system). It is religious belief ofcourse. Hindus, Buddhists...
The list goes on though. Country, family, health, looks, height...This list is so long that to me it only makes sense to think of people as individuals rather than a category.
I don't know that the average person associates "justice" with "equality." I think there's been a massive push from some activists to push the word "equity" or talk about the desirability of "equality of outcomes" instead of "equality of opportunities." But I think a majority of Americans are essentially in a favor of a capitalist system where you end up with Beyoncé and Bill Gates and Michael Jordan.
As for sports, performance is incredibly objective and competitive. The difference between peak Michael Jordan and a replacement-level player is massive. Even the difference between the sixth-best player on an NBA team and a G-League player is massive. These differences are clearly seen in the stats. And even more important than that, sports are competitive endeavor in a way that the typical industry isn't. ExxonMobil and Shell are roughly similar in terms of profits and revenues. Some years Exxon has more profits, some years Shell has more. Does that matter? Not really. But if Real Madrid keeps finishing 2nd to Barcelona, even if everything else at the club is going well, the folks at Real Madrid will be out of a job. (Side note for the pedantic football fans out there: yes, I know that Real Madrid and Barca are supporter-owned and not businesses in the traditional sense, but you get my point.)
In most other endeavors, it's impossible to evaluate an employee as easily as it is in the sports world. Sure, you can recognize a superstar salesman or brilliant programmer, but figuring out whether an employee is at the 60th percentile or 40th percentile is a lot tougher. And if companies really try to be cutthroat about this, it can make life for employees pretty miserable, and the company ends up worse off.
You say, “we have different expectations. Companies can’t just want to win,” but, kindly, this seems obviously wrong.
Plenty of people think ESG guidelines are inefficient, forced diversity doesn’t really benefit anyone, and that’s there’s nothing wrong with people getting paid whatever the market price is for their skills. Plenty of people believe that naked competition will better serve everyone’s interests than trying to come up with a set of rules to make the economy look more ‘socially responsible’ (for whatever is the issue du jour).
What you’re describing is more or less a free market advocate, an economic libertarian and standard bearer of the laissez-faire. And I am one. And there are plenty of others, and (not coincidentally) they are disproportionately represented among economists, businesspeople, and fields where performance is more easily measured, among other places.
What percentage of the population do you think will openly embrace this point of view?
If you mean in the USA, around 60-80% depending on how you ask the question.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/357755/socialism-capitalism-ratings-unchanged.aspx
That makes me feel better though the disregard for big businesses is concerning.
I agree, big business gets a bad rap.
What’s probably bothering you is that, due to constant negativity, and distinctly left-of-center perspective, and fearmongering, the media writ large tends to only focus on what our economy does wrong. If you think about it, though, we’d really quickly have a very different country if the majority was in favor of salary caps, price controls, strong bankruptcy protection/picking winners and losers, etc.
There has been a shift to view socialism and planned economies more favorably among the young but with the rather conspicuous failures in broadly planned market interventions with the last few years I don’t anticipate the more radical elements of the anti-market left picking up steam here.
Why shouldn't we have the same expectations of all people?
Hey everyone, I wrote this piece called "The Future is Happening to Me" about, what else, AI. But specifically it focuses a bit more on current, pre-AGI, generative paradigms and how even they may pose challenges to our communities and conceptualizations of self. I'm curious what others think, and I'd welcome any comments/criticisms.
https://open.substack.com/pub/whogetswhatgetswhy/p/the-future-is-happening-to-me?r=1z8jyn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Anybody know Houston? I'll be there this week and want to see neighborhoods/ towns that are good examples/ results of the region's (lack of) housing regulation and zoning. All ideas welcome. Thanks!
Check out The Woodlands for an example of something that's basically the opposite of all New Urbanist dreams, but is actually still pretty pleasant.
It's spread out, completely unwalkable, filled with McMansions, and the downtown is basically just a glorified shopping mall, but despite all that it feels like a genuinely nice place.
Toodle around Montrose, to the west and southwest of downtown. It's a mishmash of single-family homes, townhome clusters, and apartment towers that sprout up in the middle of neighborhoods. Midtown, to the east of there, has a ton of mid-rise stuff that's popped up along the red line light rail. East Downtown is also popping with new development in the typical chaotic Houston mode. And Uptown, just outside the 610 Loop on the west side, is a classic edge city with a bunch of skyscrapers that is nonetheless almost completely unwalkable. (NIMBYs killed the most obviously needed light rail route in the city, from Downtown to Uptown.)
Alas, 90% of Houston is just the same boring ass sprawl as everywhere else in the country, if not worse.
This is great! Thanks very much & can't wait to see it.
"almost completely unwalkable" lol
I guess NIMBYs are everywhere
This is the weirdest most specific question I've ever asked here. I ordered some freeze-dried chicken bits as treats for my cats. They are dry, odorless little chunks, but on the package it says that after you feed them to your cats you should "wash you hands, the cat dish, the utensils you used and the counter with hot, soapy water." Apparently these things are freeze dried raw, and handling them is basically handling raw chicken, which is actually something I never do because raw meat grosses me out, and raw chicken is both gross and additionally really does carry a risk. I'm not worried about the treats hurting the cats, I'm worried about them making me sick. I'm inclined to just throw them out. Is that reasonable, or is there some reason to be less concerned than I am?
I would be grossed out personally. If the treats are raw, you could cook them?
Freeze-drying probably inhibits bacterial growth quite well. I doubt you would be in any danger. But that said, chucking them out wouldn't be the end of the world unless you ordered a ton of them.
Why not see if the cats like them? If they don't, you can chuck them out with a clear conscience!
As I understand, the risk is getting a really bad strain of bacteria or parasite rather than simple amount of bacteria.
And the chicken could have enough of of 'em while it was alive.
I asked google how well freeze drying kills bacteria, and read the first research article I saw, which concerned how well freeze drying kills a particular kind of bacteria in infant formula. Result was that longer freeze drying times killed more than shorter, but none killed all the bacteria. And I'm thinking that people making cat treats are going to do the quick 'n dirty kind of freeze drying. Also looked up what fraction of chicken in stores is hosting salmonella, and it's one package in 25, and I'm thinking that people making chicken cat treats are buying from the cheapest source, where I'll bet a larger fraction of packages are infected. So overall, I don't think the risk is trivial here, and I'm going to throw the stuff out. I only bought it because one of my cats does not like *any* of the cat treats I've tried on him (though it turns out he doesn't like the freeze dried salmonella ones either). And that wouldn't be a problem, except that they're Devon Rexes, so extremely smart, active and curious. I give them food puzzles to solve to make it less likely they will treat my entire home as a food puzzle, cleverly opening cabinets and dumping out drawers in their search. And you have to use treats in food puzzles because wet food wrecks the puzzles. The second cat, who likes treats, is moving up the puzzle hierarchy rapidly. He's alarmingly smart, and may be submitting an essay to the contest next year -- probably about something like how good my socks smell to him.
I am pleased to see how well your cats have trained you to serve them diligently and provide them with entertainment and treats 😁
Yes, I can't deny it, I am head over heels in love with them. But also it is extremely enjoyable to make them happy. You can't watch a human being for longer than 5 mins without seeing a shadow of sadness, resentment or self-doubt cross their face, and if you're unlucky in the 5 min. interval you pick you'll be treated to worse things. But you can set up life for these little animals so that they are having a good experience ALL THE TIME. They just go from pleasure to pleasure.
I'm sure it almost totally inhibits growth, but it apparently doesn't kill bacteria hardly at all. Once they are in a more growth friendly environment (read: wet), they can start growing and becoming a problem. So the issue is not the treats themselves, but that they might cross contaminate other surfaces upon which they can start to grow.
For me personally, I wouldn't be worried about it, but that's probably the proposed mechanism/safety concern.
Everyone's risk tolerance is different, but I personally think that Americans, generally speaking, are _far_ too worried about food borne illnesses. I personally wouldn't be concerned at all, and relative to a lot of other things I do in my day-to-day life, this seems low risk. But I think that's true of almost all food-related things. I'm the kind of person who regularly doesn't put dinner away until the next day, etc.
Unfortunately, this is the kind of thing that it's almost impossible to make informed decisions about. When it comes to food related illnesses, we know that certain things can increase or decrease risk, but we have almost no idea at all of what the base rate is. We don't know how risky it starts out as.
From my personal experience, I've come to the decision that the base rate of food borne illnesses is _extremely_ low, so I don't worry too much about changing that risk. But my personal experience is probably not very generalizable, and just like I won't change my behavior if I hear about someone else getting sick, I wouldn't expect anyone else to change their behavior because they hear that I haven't gotten sick.
So the only actionable advice I can give you is: there are lots of different cat treats out there. Get the one that is going to cause you the least anxiety/distress.
I'm not a big worrier about food-borne illnesses, but the problem of salmonella in chicken really seems to me to be different from most of the other stuff. Yeah, sometimes e coli or listeria on veggies makes people sick, but it's usually a few dozen in the whole country. Looked up salmonella in chicken, and source said it's in one package in 25. And I hate housework. I don't want to have to wash the damn counter with hot soapy water every day. And besides, my cats nuzzle my face all the time. And of course they groom themselves by licking. If they eat a freeze-dried bit with salmonella, how long would there be living salmonella in their mouths? Yuck. I'm throwing the shit out.
I just want to say, good for you for actually reading the packaging. People like me never know to ask these questions because we never read the packaging. We assume its obvious how such cat treats are to be used and what can I possibly learn from the fine print?
You could also just boil them or something (and then give to cat).
Depends how sickly you are. I typically ignore advice like that, use the same tools for the raw meat as the cooked, and nothing happens because the odds of disease being present are quite low to begin with. Just don't leave them out thawed.
I know Mrs Gunflint would toss the stuff. Though she does go a bit overboard in protecting our little fur buddies.
Having thought about it a bit I probably would toss it too. I might go a little overboard on this stuff too.
If you wouldn't ordinarily feed raw chicken to your cats, and you didn't know these were raw chicken, and you're worried, then it's reasonable to throw them out. It's for your own peace of mind and that is worth more than whatever these cost (unless they cost you an arm and a leg).
I think both actions would be reasonable. I have had salmonella and it was absolutely horrible so if it were me i’d throw them out because i don’t want that kind of worry/bother in my life.
I have given freeze dried liver treats to our dogs but I don’t remember seeing those warnings.
I actually do think it's reality based. Looked up how frequently chicken in the store has salmonella, and it's one package in 25. And people making that stuff into cat treats probably get their chicken from cheap sources, which may have a higher salmonella rate. And I looked up freeze drying and it reduces bacterial count but def does not kill all or almost all the bacteria. I actually don't think gloves would help. My cats are very affectionate and often lick my face. Doesn't seem absurd to me that salmonella could linger in their saliva for half an hour or so after after they eat one of those things. I do think that most worries about getting sick from food are overblown, and it's so unlikely that it's best mentally to just round the risk down to zero. But salmonella in chicken is a real thing, & a rare example of a situation where precautions are justified. I hope I'm not creeping you out and giving you new OCD worries! If so, I apologize.
So Reddit is in protest today because the company increased the cost of the API to third party app developers. In particular the third party app Apollo is being hit by very large and economically disastrous fee increases, and have decided to close down.
The protest involves the different sub reddits being temporarily silent - mostly they have been made private by their moderators. It’s a two day protest for most, but some sub Reddits have decided to go silent for good.
It will be interesting to see how the latter will work out. To my mind, even if the admins - employees of Reddit - don’t open up the closed subs then somebody will eventually create a new one on the same theme. I really don’t see the point of that strategy - in any negotiation you should keep the most powerful threat you have until you have tried other strategies, like the two day stoppage to begin with, if that is even allowed.
To be fair they all voted on it, in the respective subs. The full shutdown seems fairly extreme and unworkable to me.
Reddit can and will open up closed subs, remove moderators, do whatever the hell they like.
Power-mods are fooling themselves if they think they can't simply be kicked off and replaced. They think they're doing unpaid volunteer work? There are plenty of entities that will pay a _lot_ of money to take over popular subreddits. What PR firm wouldn't want to be in control of the flow of information?
This can be rescued by... Musk buying Reddit and merging it with Twitter!
That's just the newest thing. I'm not a mod myself, but from what I've heard the main issue is that reddit has been attacking critical infrastructure for mods and researchers for a while now. This is somewhat understandable since reddit has been struggling to monetise since basically ever, and this infrastructure is also always usable to circumvent whatever monetisation they may try. Appollo has been widely used as a de-facto modding tool for years now. And since reddit is considered completely dysfunctional without the unpaid labor from mods, this is a very questionable target.
Since being a mod already was pretty shitty in many ways, it's no surprise that they simply hang up their hat for good. It's not entirely about protest, it seems a number of mods basically just thought this was the last straw and they're done, even if the majority of mods think they might turn things around with a protest.
So I wouldn't underestimate the protest. At the least, there is a good chance that even more mods will close shop for good since they don't deem it worth the hassle anymore and the increased workload and tediousness of being a mod might keep others from setting up new communities, or the new rung of mods that jumps to the call will be plainly lower quality on average. I could also see a new equilibrium emerging where big reddit subs are consistently professionally modded by non-reddit staff, for example a WoW sub being modded by WoW PR employees.
Reddit should totally become a nonprofit like wikipeda. I would donate.
Wikipedia is a pretty crummy thing to donate to.
I love that tweet by Jimmy Wales talking about how the Turkish government wanted to censor Wikipedia, and rather than caving immediately like Twitter recently did, they took it to the Turkish supreme court and won. That's how you get free speech.
Wikipedia is great (with some problems), but the Wikimedia Foundation mostly spends money on other things.
Tildes.net is in development and planning to run as a nonprofit funded by donations, but I'm a bit skeptical of how well that will scale. Reddit tried to run off donations with Reddit Gold - they even had a similar "here's our donation goal for the month" thing - but it evidently didn't work out.
On the other hand, Reddit was trying to turn a profit, so if you prune it down really hard and don't set any goals beyond "pay server costs" and "pay a developer enough to fix bugs and scaling issues," you might be able to make it work.
Here's the list of subs that have stated an intent to go private:
https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/1401qw5/incomplete_and_growing_list_of_participating/
It looks like /r/aww (cute animal pics) and /r/music ( 30M+) are the biggest that currently claim to be private indefinitely, with /r/aww's "depending on Reddit's continued responses to the situation".
I think r/iPhone is permanent but r/Apple isn’t. Or vice versa. Can’t confirm right now as both are private.
r/Videos mods claimed they were removing the sub until the price changes were reversed. It has like 20M members.
People in favour of UBI: why do you think that UBI is better than just a high indefinite unemployment benefit?
First of all, thanks to everyone for your answers and ending ensuing discussions. This is exactly the reaction I was hoping to be able to learn from.
I'll now try to address the main themes I've read.
1) AI will "force" us into UBI.
I don't disagree with the role of UBI post-singularity. But then again, post-singularity UBI seems indistinguishable from unemployment benefits. My intuition is thus that if choosing between the two it should be the imbalances in the world we know that guide us.
2) UBI is better because it requires less bureaucracy.
Fair point. But it's also much more expensive (at least pre-singularity). I'd love to see numbers convincing me that the extra bureaucracy isn't worth the saving, but I'm skeptical they exist.
Some people also brought up issues with defining unemployment and proving reasons for contract terminations. These additional complications do not worry me: the alternative I'm considering is a simplified benefit where anyone can get it forever so long as they're not working. No need to prove anything other than that your are not already employed.
3) Unemployment benefits would discourage work more than UBI.
This is maybe the most interesting one.
Firstly, if either policy would discourage people from working jobs where they're exploited for peanuts, I'd say that's great. In fact, making workers free to walk out is to me maybe the most ethically appealing aspect of UBI.
So the question then is: do unemployment benefits _necessarily_ discourage productive work more than UBI? I understand that specific implementations do, but do they have to?
Say your UBI pays 1500 monthly. If you're hired for 1000 that's 1000 extra you get to keep. It does seem like if instead of UBI you have an unemployment benefit you'd lose money to work in that situation - but that doesn't mean you wouldn't work, only that you wouldn't work for just 1000. Wouldn't the same job just pay 2500 instead? Is there an argument that employers just wouldn't be able to pay more than the benefit? And if so, wouldn't that end up weeding out less productive/essential jobs? And should I care about that beyond the impact on the economy impacting the ability to fund this benefit?
Can we turn this on its head? Is there a risk of UBI enabling easy pointless jobs to persist because the tiniest margins are enough for everyone involved to get just a little bit more money from them? And again, would that be a bad thing?
I don't know!!!
> 2) UBI is better because it requires less bureaucracy.
>
> Fair point. But it's also much more expensive (at least pre-singularity).
Why is it more expensive? You take back payments for high earners at tax time, because the tax bureaucracy already exists (and must exist). Total payments could be made the same, just with less bureaucracy.
>Firstly, if either policy would discourage people from working jobs where they're exploited for peanuts, I'd say that's great
It's the most evil and perverse part of UBI/unemployment/minimum wage (and UBI least of the 3). You call it "exploited for peanuts", I call it "probably producing as much value as their circumstances allow".
First, gainful employmenti s one of the best way to acquire skills and experience that may allow them to produce more value (and hence not be paid peanuts for it) at a later time. Killing low-paying jobs mean that a part of the population will instead be inactive, and won't get trained toward being able to do better jobs later.
Then it depreciate the jobs that produce more values. I value my own time at a given value. When choosing a job to do, I balance the value I give to my time with the revenue from that job & the efforts it requires of me. The more you tax the revenue, the less it matter in my choice in relation to efforts or my free time. And it is in the interest of everyone that I work the jobs at which I produce the most value. More taxation, less wealth to tax.
>Wouldn't the same job just pay 2500 instead?
Why wouldn't this job pay 2500 today? Probably because it's not economically viable to pay it 2500, because it doesn't produce more than that.
TL; DR: you worry that no UBI/unemployment/minimum wage create inequality from low-paying jobs, I worry that UBI/unemployment/minimum wage create a permanent (and probably growing) class of unemployable, unskilled, unproductive peoples. It may work for a while at decreasing inequalities, but I see no endgame that isn't ugly, either from severe social backlash, an economic death spiral where more & more jobs get weeded out, or a general impoverishment of everyone.
I'm not worrying about inequality here. And while I do worry a little about people choosing to work, I'd definitely rather people not work than be exploited.
If there is enough money to go around for something like UBI to be productive, I don't see why I should worry about maximising productivity.
I do find it interesting we may both be doing a little bit of typical minds. My instinct is people will still want to work even if not to maximize profits - there are lots of people I know who could be earning literal orders of magnitude more of they valued money enough to choose jobs the way you claim to.
Anyway, if we end up in a world where people who will only work for money don't, and people who value work itself do - as long as it's sustainable - I don't think I'll be able to complain much.
> But it's also much more expensive (at least pre-singularity)
It's more expensive if you keep taxes the same, but you can adjust taxes to make it cost neutral.
> Wouldn't the same job just pay 2500 instead?
No, if no one wants to clean my house for €10/hour, I'm not going to hire someone to do it for €25/hour – I'm just going to clean it myself.
I'm not in favour of UBI, but I think that paying people for not working is obviously a lot worse than paying people for existing. My preferred form of welfare, however, would be to simply offer very low-paying jobs to everyone (as cleaners or whatever).
Because if you tie UBI to unemployment, people are *incentivized* not to work? I'm fine with people not working if they don't want to and are willing to do subsistence living, but it's stupid to actively incentivize against it. Also, because people should be able to get part-time jobs without losing their benefits - 40 hours a week is actually quite a lot, and people who can't handle that much but would be willing to work for half that time shouldn't be disincentivized from participating in the labor market.
A relatively "high" indefinite dole we had in Germany from 1956 till 2005. To oversimplify: people react to incentives. - Thus I am in favour of some "UBI": specifically, a small one. As in Milton Friedman's idea of a"negative income tax" (highly unfortunate word-choice).- Mostly, I hate the admin-overhead (on all tax-payers and on "the poor"). UBI sounds simple. Don't hold your breath: a simple UBI will never come to be. First, it is hard - and then there is the admin-political-complex. All the biggest offices in my town deal mainly with dole/"social help".
Because it's simpler (and thus cheaper) to administer. You don't need to verify everyone's employment history, you don't need to keep up in the arms race with the scammers, you just give everyone the same stipend.
If we have mass unemployment because of AI (a big if but let’s go with it) then what would the AI be producing and for who? The rich? The few remaining workers? Even the rich may not have much money if their companies are defunct.
If economic activity depends on consumption then it depends on people having money to spend. This may be produced by government dictat or by taxation. In a world with the kind of possible economic growth that AI proponents purpose, the optimists anyway, money has to get to the consumer somehow.
Not what you asked, but pre pandemic I was a big UBI proponent, and during the lockdown I saw too many examples of people being put in a UBI situation and behaving in a way that would counter productive for society as a whole if done at scale, so I’ve changed my mind. This includes my own child. The idea that if we free people from undue burden they can chose to pursue their passion no longer resonates. People will lock themselves in a room and play videogames and eat pizza. Having a mechanism to force people to have the responsibilities of a job is actually highly formative and acts as a guardrail that prevents boundary cases from going off the rails.
The problem is that we're already in that situation for plenty of people, covid just increased the number of them. Unemployment benefits are actually worse for that issue, since you actively lose a benefit if you work, which for some people will mean work is net-negative. A properly designed UBI will always reward marginal work, since by definition you always get it, so it shouldn't have that problem.
On the other hand admittedly many lefty activists try to use UBI as a de-facto increased unemployment benefits, so instituting it the way they want does lead to the problem you're mentioning.
This is always the problem and the people that don’t see it are extremely nice or just ideologically blinded.
Have a UBI of any substance and 30% of the population is shut in NEETs with zero ambition in like a generation.
Theoretically, some people (e.g. thieves, gang enforcers, etc) could be of more value to their society if they suddenly had zero ambition and turned into harmless NEETs.
Assuming the economy is strong enough to sustain those NEETs, why is this a problem ?
Because NEETS are sad and unhappy people who are the opposite of flourishing. One of the pillars of anyone self esteem is doing useful work.
Why deprive huge numbers of people that?
Also we don't have remotely that much resources even in the US, much less for the whole world.
> One of the pillars of anyone self esteem is doing useful work.
Maybe it's a premise of *your* self-esteem, but you're not everyone. Some people derive their self-esteem from doing philosophy or art or other pursuits that are not useful work and therefore are not financially compensated (barring a few outliers). Why force them to sell hot dogs if we don't have to ?
It's the lack of ambition in Martin's post that's most concerning. There's definitely a group of people, especially but not limited to young men, who are currently using video games and porn as a substitute for ambition. Lack of ambition means there's no art or philosophy either, it's just low level sadness and ennui that we are already seeing in pretty large numbers. That's without a UBI. If a significant increase in that demographic were to happen with a UBI, that would be really bad for society.
As a retiree who is very glad to be able to _stop_ chasing endless bug reports, very much agreed!
You don't see a problem with a massive underclass of people who spend large portions of their lives with no ambition, no skills, limited family or friend connections, and diminishing ability to do anything different? Long term, that's creating a class of people that the "productive" aspects of society, be it people or machines, will consider a dead weight. It also creates a class of people that may easily become disaffected as they are separated from society and may feel that their needs (psychological and emotional especially) are not cared about or met.
I don't think it's true that UBI would create an underclass as you describe.
That's a separate discussion from Bugmaster questioning whether 30% of the population becoming NEETS is even a problem. I say that a massive part of the population becoming shut ins is a problem. Whether that would happen is an interesting question. If we incentivized people to not work, I think it would happen - which is a big part of the reason I would be against increasing unemployment benefits. If it's an add-on to whatever people can earn otherwise, I think people will continue to work.
I think a UBI will just end up causing inflation (people bidding up housing and such) and everyone will essentially feel like they're exactly as financially stable as before, except those who previously couldn't work but also didn't get welfare benefits. Like young adults who haven't worked yet. It may discourage them from ever getting jobs, which could lead to the NEET scenario above. I'm not sold on that, but it's a dangerous experiment to run. It would be very hard to claw back a UBI once in place with people counting on the income.
Would be assuming a lot. We live in 2023 , not in the Star-Trek era.
True, but the premise of this scenario is that there are enough resources to implement UBI sufficient to support 30% of the population. I was just accepting the premise as stated.
What percentage of factually able-bodied adults in USA already -- today -- live without working?
"The Last Psychiatrist", if I recall, gave an estimate not too far from 30%.
Is it fair to condemn locking oneself in a room during a lockdown which shuts down businesses, forbids group meetups and specifically requests people to stay home? Perhaps your child just isn't the kind of person who is oriented towards organizing activities on their own. I won't pretend to know your child better than you do, but it would be interesting to see what they would have done with UBI but no lockdown, with plenty of group activities happening outside. As you hint to below, they might have enjoyed working for free at an outdoor car wash, as long as it was organized by someone else.
The complaint was about people locking themselves in their rooms to play videogames and eat pizza. If people are doing that when they could be "locking themselves in their rooms" to learn a new language or start a home-based business or write a novel or etc, etc, etc, and occasionally go out hiking or biking, and eat home-cooked meals with the cooking skills they just developed, then yes, that does argue strongly against "UBI will produce an explosion of human creativity, passion, and flourishing once people no longer have to work their boring wage-slave *jobs*"
Also, people who are serious about flourishing and in generally good health, could and probably should have violated the lockdowns ruthlessly after the first month or two.
Willingness to flout stupid regulations is rather orthogonal to what's under discussion - there are a lot of people who might be doing useful community stuff in a UBI world who were too neurotic to ever meet another person in person during Covid.
I’m with you here, broadly. I like Curtis Yarvin’s idea that a really enlightened government wouldn’t worry about everybody getting money but about everybody having work to do, because a nation’s most valuable asset is human capital and work is how you preserve and improve on that capital. The “people will be free for Art and Science” argument feels hollow; I think there are some people who will choose art and science whatever the circumstance, but most won’t. The whole UBI thing might work for “homo economicus” but not for human beings.
Wasn't Yarvin/Moldbug the guy who argued that a government ought to work as a ruthless profit-maximizer, like a corporation? How does that square with the idea that the government should be creating make-work for people?
Also, "human capital" is a pretty nebulous thing. It would be easy to achieve full employment by hiring all the unemployed people to build a giant pyramid (I've read that the Egyptian pyramids served a similar purpose), but that wouldn't build human capital except in the field of cutting and moving giant stone blocks.
In a society where cutting and moving giant stone blocks is a useful skill, that sounds like a strong positive. Maybe that's similar to creating caretaker roles for the elderly and young children. We don't necessarily need it, but training millions of people to do those jobs can have significant benefits in society. Due to the nature of those jobs, it's very hard to pay* much to the people handling them, but if we valued the skillset and the function, the government "encouraging" it by paying more could subsidize what might not otherwise exist.
*- A caretaker working even forty hours a week making $15/hour is over $30,000 in base wages and potentially $60,000 with FICA and benefits and other costs. Even splitting that between multiple children/elderly, that's a huge cost per person since there's a pretty low maximum that one person can take care of safely.
He takes a more holistic view that the State owns everything in its domain and ought to maximize the value of its assets, the primary asset being its people. It’s a bit different than maximizing profit; if the State sells a product it doesn’t directly increase the value of its assets, since the dollar used to buy the product belonged to it already. In any case, he arrives at the motto “salus populi suprema lex”, human well-being is the highest law. He follows this up with fun thought experiments about what sorts of policies a benevolent but absolute government would take to create useful work for all.
As for the latter point, Yarvin’s answer would be that the State’s role is to maximize human capital. A nuclear physicist has greater value doing nuclear physics than moving stone blocks, so the State ought to leave him to do so. But at the same time the State ought to ensure the existence of enough unskilled labor jobs to occupy the unskilled part of the workforce (see FDR and the Works Progress Administration), while at the same time investing heavily in upskilling that workforce. He foresees this happening via “unfree” market forces rather than state coercion (toy example: banning the import of textiles to create more domestic textile jobs).
What human capital did e.g. the White Sea--Baltic Canal preserve? (Not even speaking of other, better-known "arbeit macht frei"(tm) projects.)
And I can't help but wonder: is there a make-work proponent somewhere who sees himself as a possible candidate for ending up doing said make-work? How certain are you that you will never become a "Kanalarmeets" ?
How exactly are jobs saving people from pizza+videogames? It can still happen to both the employed and unemployed.
It is not that i disagree. Maybe we should try solving short-term-kills-long-term first, and postpone UBI for a century..
Someone who spends a few years doing nothing productive will miss out on several years of personal and professional growth. That's often the difference between someone who struggles with employment their whole lives verses someone who ends up with a decent career. Falling off the career track and not developing skills is a huge detriment to someone's ability to even learn to be productive later.
Sure, some jobs don't teach any skills either (except the skill of self motivation needed to get up and actually go to the job), but jobs with literally no skill growth are extremely rare and still almost universally come with things like social interaction and such.
My child literally spent a full year on pizza + videogames, almost full time. And not mentally stimulating videogames either. For a while she was playing a car wash simulator, where you wash cars with a virtual hose, except you don’t get paid for it. Having seen other people of various ages become unproductive from any charitable point of view, made me think that my behavior, which drove my interest in UBI, is actually the exception. It’s another example of intellectuals thinking we understand marginalized groups when in fact we don’t.
I mean, I spent a year in college playing video games nearly full time (often 6+ hours a day), and while it wasn't great for my studies, I still have a job now that pays better than almost all of my peers.
But it seems like you're answering a question completely different than the one that was asked, which was UBI vs (high) indefinite unemployment benefits. It seems pretty clear that your example should lead you to be more in favor of a UBI solution, rather than unemployment which *incentivizes* unemployed people not to look for even part-time work. Especially since your COVID example was a literal example of the latter.
To be a bit more practical than the usual here, I've worked as a mailman and know many people who still do, among others my own dad. Especially in the small town we worked it was normal do personally know everyone you bring the mail.
The reality is, there's plenty of people on the lowest employment level who will directly tell you that they literally earn less while working than they do on unemployment benefits. Some of them work anyway out of a certain sense of pride (or shame, however you interpret it), some of them say screw it and don't. Either way, it sucks in my opinion.
I'm not really philosophically aligned to UBI in any sense, but imo we need to restructure the earning situation so that people always benefit from any work they do, to avoid them getting stuck in a permanent unemployment that is bad for them and bad for society as a whole. And UBI is one such possibility.
>The reality is, there's plenty of people on the lowest employment level who will directly tell you that they literally earn less while working than they do on unemployment benefits
This is due to the piecemeal way the US provides benefits to people. They will have cut offs at different levels of income and some wont have marginal rates but just a drop off at a certain level.
An alternative to UBI which would address this issue is a simple negative marginal tax rate to replace the different programs. As you earn more, you get less "back" from taxes but your total income is always rising.
Incidentally, that is something I'm in favor of, since it reduces friction. However, this is often considered one of the main - if not best - ways of implementing an UBI, so it's not really a difference. Conceptually speaking, any system of taxes were you get a minimum amount of money while unemployed and a strictly increasing amount of money when employed is only different from an UBI in terms of accounting.
"..restructure the earning situation so that people always benefit from any work they do.."
i assume that gets full ack by all the audience.
the (really difficult) problem is to precisely define unemployment. Seen in real life:
Some people can not afford to do useful few hour jobs (because they loose more benefit than earning). Some people can not afford to learn new skills (because enrolling for a 20hrs/week course will make then "voluntarily unavailable for full time jobs", thus loosing the benefit under their legislation). Some people have to turn down interesting fixed-term contracts, because their benefits in the (by definition) repeated unemployment would be to low, motivating extending the current unemployment. Some people had to move into a cheap subsidized flat and would have to move out if they crossed the very-low-income-still-counts-as-unemployed-threshold.
And each of that can be addressed by making unemployment definitions more detailed, leading to bureaucracy nightmares.
But see: UBI is not the only alternative. And there is a lot of vagueness about how universal the "U" really should be. That could lead to the same kind of difficulties.
E.g. is UBI a daily rate that will only be given for days spent in the regional UBI-zone? (Otherwise you will have people from highest-paying UBI authority coming to spend months in low-cost-of-living areas, a desaster when lifting price levels for the locals there)
E.g. is UBI flat or varying over age? (what about immigrants from regions on earth that don't see that much relevance in exact date of birth)
E.g. does UBI require to be settled with a permanent residence? (if so, do you indirectly punish nomadic life style? is that fair?)
E.g. can UBI be subject to garnishment?
My definitions, from a United States perspective:
UBI is a flat rate determined at onset or phased in so the economy gets used to it. For example, start with $100 every two weeks which ramps up $50 every year until reaching $2000 every two weeks. Checks mailed (so need an address; P.O. box would do) or automatic deposit. Amount does not vary for location.
One quarter of UBI amount received for a child, sent to a designated parent, until the child is eligible to receive the full amount on coming of age (18, so it could pay for college). Immigrants are not eligible for UBI unless naturalized; this is a benefit only for US citizens.
No residence is required, but a mailing address is.
UBI would be subject to garnishment in the judgment of the court. One must not presume those not working to automatically be free to commit crimes only punishable by fines or monetary judgements. It would be possible this way to imprison people and use the UBI to pay off a debt.
BONUS: No income tax on UBI; no point to it. You would be taxed on any additional income, but all such income raises your standard of living.
I suspect automation will allow enough additional productivity to permit UBI, with those with the greatest automation having enough productivity (profit) to fund it. If eventually 90% of the population does nothing but receive UBI they would be limited in what they consume, and the rest would generate additional income, raising their standard of living.
You think we can afford to pay everyone $52K/year? With fewer and fewer folk working and paying taxes?
I don't know. I haven't run the numbers, so the ones I provided are just for illustration of my concept.
But eventually...yes. I don't know how long it will take, but I see no reason we can't automate enough to provide everyone a good standard of living without having to work, except for a small percentage of people.
Right now, maybe we could do it with perhaps $5000 annually per person, though that would be about $1.7 trillion per year, out of about $23 trillion in annual GDP. Maybe that would be a starting point?
Hm. Current US population is about 335 million, current federal revenue is about $4.9 trillion, current federal spending is about $6.3 trillion. Given the population, every additional trillion in spending would give each person $2,985 per year. Giving everyone $50,000 a year would be about $16.75 trillion.
And according to people who believe in the "trillion dollar coin" loophole, there's nothing preventing the federal government from doing this right now.
It's not that simple. If the government just prints additional money to do this then it will cause inflation. Then the $50,000 is actually a lot smaller than it is now.
From the POV of many (most?) people in USA, a "good standard of living" inescapably includes "not having to live with the underclass". That is, near people who impose some very real and quite unpleasant externalities (see old lit re "housing projects" etc) on their neighbours.
How would any amount of "UBI" subsidy provide this?
IMHO you would need more than simply a "free money" handout, but some fundamental restructuring of society that tends not to be discussed in "UBI" threads.
UBI didn't mean minimum to make everyone happy. It's a universal BASIC income. You would have a roof over your head, hot and cold water, and could eat rice and beans three times a day.
If you want more, then you can work, and every amount you earn raises your standard of living.
I think the point you are making is that some people will only be happy relative to other people. This is true, and inescapable.
To me the biggest reason is that UBI has fewer, potentially zero, requirements. This makes it less likely to cause unintended consequences or Goodharting. The most notable difference would be between being paid, and being paid *not to work*. We don't want to encourage people to turn down paid work. If they get the money either way, one cuts off potential avenues to better themselves and/or complete productive work, while the other simply doesn't. They don't have to work with a UBI, but they *can* work with a UBI.
"We don't want to encourage people to turn down paid work. If they get the money either way, one cuts off potential avenues to better themselves and/or complete productive work, while the other simply doesn't."
Re "better themselves" and the various comments about human capital and acquiring skills in various comments in this discussion. I'm confused about what people are assuming about technological progress in this discussion. If e.g. we got full AGI (and similar advances in robotics) is e.g. say by 2030, (and if it stayed under human control, which I actually doubt...), I could see how the economy could be essentially completely automated, and could then pay for a truly universal UBI at a comfortable standard of living. But what is the point of _human_ capital in such a scenario? It seems like any plausible skill acquisition would be a 21st century equivalent of learning to be an elevator operator. Or are people mostly talking about UBI in an economy which _doesn't_ have AGI, in which case, are we talking about an affordable UBI which is actually large enough for people to subsist on?
Even in a society with AGI doing all of the important work, humans need things to make them feel useful. At the very least it could be a lot of personal service work - taking care of the elderly and the young, or those with disabilities. Or, like artisanal work that's becoming more popular despite being inefficient compared to factory made.
Humans with their physical needs met - food, clothing, shelter - but who have nothing to do are unhappy people. Unhappy people commit crimes and revolt. It's an unstable situation. Maybe those people find useful things to do on their own, with or without additional pay, but I doubt that's going to work for everyone.
"Even in a society with AGI doing all of the important work, humans need things to make them feel useful."
Maybe that is true of some subset of the population. As a retiree who is very glad to_stop_ dealing with an endless stream of bug reports, I am personally a counterexample to this as a universal statement about people. I am also suspicious of how convenient this claim is for plutocrats and other rulers who have always wanted mountains of wage slaves (and sometimes cannon fodder). Perhaps "revolt" could alternatively be viewed as "finally gained enough freedom to assert their own interests, rather than being chained to their masters' interests".
One clarification: Rulers have _historically_ wanted mountains of wage slaves - which seems likely to be part of the explanation for ideologies which condemned "idle [free] hands". With sufficient automation, I expect future rulers to have less use for trapped peons, and I therefore expect the ideologies to shift, but it is unclear in which direction to expect the shift to go.
I don't think you can generalize from a person who's had a fulfilling career and wants to move on to people who have never done anything useful and have not been fulfilled. I remember being a teenager and young adult and feeling crummy about myself and my capabilities. I remember calling a potential employer and embarrassing myself on the phone trying to explain that I was looking for a job but knowing I had no skills.
I'm not saying that "work" (as in the regular paid employee sense) is the only avenue to gain this. I'm saying that it does do so for many hundreds of millions of people. Without a substitute that works at scale, we risk entire generations seeking purpose and finding nothing.
"I don't think you can generalize from..." Fair enough. I don't expect "N=1" to do anything except be a counterexample to a universal.
"I'm not saying that "work" (as in the regular paid employee sense) is the only avenue to gain this. I'm saying that it does do so for many hundreds of millions of people. Without a substitute that works at scale, we risk entire generations seeking purpose and finding nothing. "
Ok. Even now, work is often a bad choice for seeking purpose. Many people view their jobs as "bullshit" and it is a reasonable view of many jobs - even despite the fact that employers find it worthwhile to pay for them.
Over the long haul (though possibly as short as one or two decades, if LLMs progress to AGI and ASI, and drive analogous gains in robotics), virtually everything that humans do will be done better by machines - including personal service work. If humans do manage to keep the machines under human control, and use them to have all of their physical needs (and probably many social needs) met, I'd advise humans of that period to find hobbies.
Hobbies aren't earthshaking - but 99.9999% of people don't make earthshaking differences anyway, even now.
edit: One other point I should make: When technology gets to the point where anything useful is done better by machines than humans (and, again, if it stays under human control), even if someone chooses to e.g. cook a meal manually that a machine could cook, there will be no avoiding the fact that their effort was artificial (and quite possibly counterproductive, when the machine results are better). It will be and feel as fake as choosing to manually bypass something that has been successfully and routinely automated (e.g. a thermostat) would be today.
To elaborate on the other points mentioned:
Unemployment benefits are paid conditionally on not working. You can therefore imagine an unemployment benefit is equal to a UBI less a lump-sum tax (or high clawback rate) on the first dollars of job earnings. Ordinary economics tells us that high marginal tax rates (or step-wise changes in tax/benefit amounts) are bad, creating high disincentives.
This is particularly true when we're trying to encourage potentially new behaviour. If I faced a $1000 lump-sum tax conditional on being employed, that would be annoying but it wouldn't drive me to quit my white-collar work. If I was totally unemployed, however, and "work" meant building up a work history by picking up a few minimum-wage, part-time shifts each week, that lump-sum tax would be crippling.
Additionally, unemployment benefits are traditionally paid only for job losses for "a good reason," often no-cause terminations or disability/illness. Again compared to a UBI counterfactual, this creates job lock-in, preventing a worker from speculatively quitting in order to seek better employment in a new region / more intensively / after upgrading skills or completing training. The classic economic argument here is that this lock-in would increase the friction of the labour market, making it less effective. (Contrast the "lazy bum" argument, that indolent people would be content to subsist on UBI forever.)
The more practical, non-economic argument is that this administration is a nightmare, inviting endless quasi-litigation about termination reasons. A fair system that just has disputes require]s some sort of impartial (and relatively expensive) adjudication, but it's easier to create an unfair system that benefits the more politically powerful group (typically employers).
That said, any benefit program is subject to the sticker shock effect, and there an unemployment benefit probably wins out. Paying $billions to "everyone" only to collect it back in taxes does not look like a small net change to politicians or voters.
Unemployment benefits will not reach all the people who need them, create disincentives to work or stigma for the recipients. Also, UBI is simpler and more efficient to administer than unemployment benefits.
It also costs 20-30x what unemployment benefits cost and has a lot of negative incentives it creates.
By Terence Tao
"Big breakthrough in Ramsey theory by Sam Mattheus and Jacques Verstraete: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.04007
The have proved an 80 year old conjecture of Erdos on the asymptotic behaviour of the Ramsey number r(4, t). Finite geometry plays a crucial role in their work and it diverges significantly from the purely probabilistic attempts so far. Here is my blog post on their construction: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.04007"
This changes everything!
I would like some advice on which crowdfunding platform would best suit me, and if any at all.
For quite a long time since discovering Civilization I've wanted to make my on strategy game, and after starting working as a programmer more than ten years ago I took tentative steps towards this. On and off throughout the years I've accumulated scattered notebooks with all sorts of notes, bits and bobs of code, and generally I've clarified the idea of that I want to put together.
Now I have a pretty good picture of what the core of the game should be and how it should work, and it's quite unique from what I can gather. But I'm not sure if just the idea, no matter how fleshed out, is enough to get started on crowdfunding, I mean, all I have is a detailed description of the game, features, mechanics, and gameplay examples, most of the game code I wrote was too long ago to be relevant. Work has sapped my will to code outside of the job for a few years now, even though my interest in the field has not changed and I pick up coding when I find something really interesting like my latest attempt was using Spivak's ologs to build a zettelkasten note taking system but after a month's worth of weekends I shelved it, I like writing in notebooks better is what I told myself.
I've recently began picking up on the idea of the game again, mainly because tools like GPT and Midjourney could help with the complexity of such a project, and even though I subscribe to the adage that perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away, and I tried to strip the game to the core, implementing it would still be very challenging.
I can't take a sabbatical to get something working in a year or so, I work on Eastern European programmer's salary, not rockstar unicorn, and I've got mortgages.
So I'm thinking crowdfunding, but only having what is basically the idea, and also being literally nobody (my github is in clinical death, and my "greatest" achievement was publishing an Android game while learning Python some nine years ago) I feel like I need another perspective on this. I thought about asking this on Reddit but over the years I've developed quite the anxiety about putting myself online, I don't know what about Scott's community puts me at ease enough, I guess the individual familiarity developed over years of lurking, so here I am.
I see the crowdfunding options as either the Kickstarter model or the Patreon one and I'm not sure which one would be best suited, or even which specific service, like Kickstarter or Indiegogo.
ps: I don't mind discussing the game, I omitted it since this is already too long and it's too much self promoting
My advice, as a game developer:
Successfully receiving crowdfunding for a first time developer at the idea stage would be a curse. Trust me when I say there are so many unknown unknowns waiting for you along the path towards releasing a game that there is zero chance of you costing it appropriately, to say the least. That means running out of funding, missed deadlines, and pissed off backers.
Before you make your dream game, you need to start by making and releasing a much, much smaller game. To stick with the Civ theme you could look at something like Polytopia for inspiration, but I'd be thinking much smaller than that - no multiplayer, only very basic AI. Make the smallest thing you can muster the enthusiasm for - think Tetris, for scope.
This might sound like a waste of time, but you will ultimately save time by doing this. The purpose is to teach you the whole process of making a game, from start to finish. There is no way you can understand the process without having done this, and without understanding the process crowd funding is a very bad idea (if it's achievable at all - as others have said, realistically you would need a demo, audio and art to have a chance).
It is absolutely crucial to release the smaller game. Much of the relevant learning happens in the last stages (this is the time of reckoning for your tech debt, unfinished features etc, also when you have to face the reality that this needs to run smoothly on every relevant device with uninitiated players who you can't guide in-person and who will quit and leave a bad review if they find a bug).
Don't expect this smaller game to make you money (statistically not even your large game is likely to do that). It's a learning exercise for you, that's all.
Doing this will save you time and heartache when it comes to making your dream game. If you can't find the time or muster the enthusiasm to do this step, then it's probably best to not waste your time with your larger project because you will need bottomless enthusiasm lasting years to draw from for that.
I don't want to crush your dream here, but I do want to put some pressure on it, because the reality is that it will need to be able to survive much greater pressures if you're going to see it through.
You need more than code. You also need art, music, writing, and UI design; and it is these elements, not your underlying code, that would make your game attractive to crowdfunding customers. So, I suggest you start with them.
I think you need to find some time / energy for coding outside the job if you want to do this. There's little prospect of getting any backing until you have something to show, IMO. Besides, people will ask: if it's your dream, how come you haven't found the energy to get started?
When I started out it might have been my dream that I actually set out to realize, and I still have code from ages ago with the map generation and basic settlement, but I quickly figured out that this was way outside the scope of what I could realistically churn out and opted to wait and get better at software development. That's why I just kept this on the back burner and just worked on it conceptually whenever I had the inspiration. Maybe if I had the knowledge and skills I have now ten years ago I would have managed to get something. Only when I saw what GPT can do I figured I'd stand a chance to really pick this up again.
This is a bad idea. Many game dev projects even by seasoned developers fall through or fail to be completed up to the dreams they were started with, and you're very far from a seasoned developer, proposing to upend your entire life on a gamble. Even if you managed to get 50k on a kickstarter and quit your job to work on it I don't expect you to succeed based on how you describe yourself and your ideas.
I think if you really want to do game design you should take a far more incremental path to it. Why not try to get hired at a game dev company? There are a good number of European ones, and this lets you get paid a salary while learning relevant skills and business context in a hands-
on way.
Another possibility is to start working with game design tools using pre-built engines and assets, like gamemaker. This means a lot of the work is already done for you and lends itself well to creating a partial version of the game both to find out if it's actually fun to play at all and as a marketing tool for future potential crowdfunding.
Indeed, basically all my common sense tells me I shouldn't even have bothered to ask the question, since the answer is so obvious, but I thought that just maybe I'm missing out something and I'm just too pessimistic. Also, I don't want to make games, besides being really hard to find a job in this area, since everyone wants to make games, I don't specifically want to make games, this is just something that really stuck with me and evolved over time.
Have you considered taking a board-game path and implementing a demonstration of the game in cardboard instead of in code? That could get you to a point you can demonstrate the fun-factor of the game, even if it's a slightly clunkier implementation.
Yeah, I haven't thought of that, while I do play board games sometimes, most of the game dev info I acquired over time is focused on computer games, and I imagine the two, while overlapping, have different design approaches, but still, it's worth considering, thanks.
While I have no experience with funding platforms, I would guess that economics of scale make it hard to be an economically viable one person game shop. There certainly are great games mostly developed by (what I gather to be) small teams, but they each have their unique thing. FTL (novel approach), Spiderweb software games (great worldbuilding, decades of fan following), Stardew Valley (novel approach), Cultist Simulator (great worldbuilding, novel approach) come to mind. Having a game idea which is "quite unique" seems beneficial.
Preparing a kickstarter page is certainly much work in itself, as you would need to sell your game idea to an audience, and less than half of the projects are successfully funded on kickstarter ( https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats. I do not know what fraction of games proposed by someone with your level of game dev experience.) OTOH, successful kickstarter style funding is probably your best bet for working full-time on the game (for a fixed amount of time, e.g. a year).
From my understanding, many games developed via Patreon are written by people with a day job. Making enough on Patreon to quit your day job seems difficult. I get that you don't want to code in your spare time if you already spent your day job coding, but it might be the only economically viable option if you need a steady income.
More people dream of developing video games than developing Java for some bank. Thus the equilibrium is that devs working on corporate Java have generally better conditions than devs working on video games.
Best of luck to you!
My intuition is to make the first level and use that as a demo (like Undertale did). For one, it means you have something to show to get people excited, and for two, it requires you to have gotten over the part where you don't want to actually make the thing, which is otherwise just fatal.
"I subscribe to the adage that perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away"
Keep in mind, for videogames this can easily result in mediocrity. There has to be something setting your game apart from other games if you want people to actually pay for it. You said the gameplay's unique; what's unique about it?
I was thinking the same. In order to have ANY chance of success whatsoever you're going to have to have something to show off. Not to put too fine a point on it, but "literal nobodies" (your words) with big ideas for a game are a dime a dozen. As of when I'm writing this, the "Games" category on kickstarter contains 78,452 projects. If the pitch is "You've never heard of me and I have no direct experience, but here's an incredibly complex game concept with mechanics that even studios haven't tried before, can I have some money" - you're going to get just about nowhere.
I like the sound of the game but I think realistically without either a playable demo or a record of working on similar projects you're going to be dead in the water.
It's the combination of features and the resulting interactions that are unique, and it's quite difficult, for me at least, to describe without examples.
The world map is a pretty basic simulated environment with stuff like seasonal patterns, tiles have flora and fauna that regenerate but can be exploited out by the human population, resources are not quite fixed, there's no horse tiles, you have access to horses you can raise them wherever they do well.
Humans are simulated by sort of cohesion groups (think tribes in prehistoric times) that work as game theoretic agents, the game theoretic model being a bit more involved with repeated rounds, imperfect information, communication error, asymmetric payoffs, emotionality.
Ran without the player the map would just play out based on the available resources with human groups roaming and interacting with other groups based on the interaction options available to their level of technology and culture.
The player does not control any group directly, they represent more of the guiding influence, or maybe some sort of memetic god. Like the player can't get the group to go to or even explore a specific tile. The player spends influence points to sort of direct the group, but you'd have to spend a lot more to send a nomadic group to a tundra region when a nice grassland is available, think of it as requiring some really powerful shamanic visions to get them to go there.
Similarly there's no sending out a scout a hundred tiles away, movement and exploration are really difficult and dangerous especially in ancient times, and the discovered world map can be forgotten, especially when your group only has oral tradition.
Initially the player can easily influence the group, like join a group hunt with this other tribe, or say you join but ambush their warriors and pillage the other group's resources, but with every decision the group settles into some patterns of interaction with the environment and the others, and the player would have to spend a lot of energy to go against the group's patterns, there's a sort of behavioral inertia for the group.
For example if the player controls a group focused around a city state and there's a neighboring city state that the player wants to go to war against but the relations between the two cities are good it's not a simple matter of cashing out the energy and then watching your city send out its armies. Influence has to be spent for your people to develop animosity towards the other, think something sort of propaganda that takes a generation to settle in, I mean you could willingly worsen living conditions for your group to blame it on the other, but you might end up with something like Sparta after starting out with Athens, and that's okay if that's what you want.
Technological and cultural progression are not linear, all knowledge has decay, once you discover some really nifty farming improvement, it won't be enshrined into your groups memory for ever, technologies can be lost.
Knowledge has to be stored, like a resource, not only stored but duplicated, if you kept all your scrolls in that part of your empire that just got sacked expect to not have a good time over the next generations. So the game's resources, once extracted have to be stored in silos, which again can be pillaged.
Extracting and storing, and even city building and expanding are done mostly automatically by the human groups based on their patterns, the player can strategically use their influence to focus on specific nodes, but mostly the player will be focused on novel interactions and the grand view of where they want to take their group.
Also, your empire, if you end up building one, will fall, especially true in ancient times, the system pressure is too great over time and until the world becomes more peaceful and better settled there's no permanence. The upside is that the AI empires will also fall, and you'll get the chance to rebuild.
Another feature that I'm on the edge with is an avatar system, one every aeon if the stars align, you can get an avatar that you have more direct control over. Think Genghis Khan and build a quick empire, or Joan of Arc, rally your people against some threat and foster a stronger cohesion.
Deep down the game would be very 4x, the system would rely heavily on four essentials:
- knowledge is explore, it's used to explore both the real world and the realm of ideas
- food is expand, fuels population expansion and the development of societal structures
- wealth facilitates the exploitation of resources and opportunities
- power provides the means to confront and navigate conflict
That's pretty much it, there's a lot of details of course, but the main idea is that you're not in direct control.
Sounds fairly unique. Kind of a stick-in-a-river philosophy. So what are the mechanics to make yourself a bigger stick?
Have you played Crusader Kings? This sounds similar to the setup in that game, where your influence is limited and you're constantly having to deal with the scheming of vassals. That one makes you fabricate hereditary claims to invade neighboring countries, for instance; influence is its own resource. Combine it with Master of Orion style scouting limitations, can't get more than three tiles from a base without the four tile upgrade.
I think having to store knowledge is probably redundant to the more common "must assign people to Science", and doesn't track reality. In reality ideas diffuse over a population as they're used; it would take an enormous disaster to make a country forget how to build a motor vehicle, for instance.
Would be interesting, but like Angola said it sounds far beyond any small team to make it work effectively. I'd say make a demo of just the influence mechanic; your tutorial mission is to get Tribe A to point X, these are your resources, do it. Seasons, storage, knowledge decay, enemies, jot that all down as "if I have time later," focus on getting the stick-in-river mechanics right. If you get a working demo of just that, it sounds like it'd be intriguing.
Yes, I have many CK2 hours from many years ago, so I definitely took inspiration from it, there's tons of strategy games that served as inspiration. Making a bigger stick is available to the player by simply pursuing militaristic goals, and not all ai players would be designed to have imprerial agency, so the player isnt likely to encounter fierce resistance in early empire development.
I did think about committing to a small, essentials only demo, but I can't quite decide what the essentials are, as I came up with this I got the sense that it's not a particular gimmick that makes it work, but how the features would interact to create something new, so picking just the influence thing is like, yeah, CK has that.
Someone suggested I do a rough boardgame version of the game, and I'm thinking maybe this format would be better suited to include a couple more of the essential mechanics.
Also, about the losing technology part, yeah, we'd need basically the apocalypse to forget about combustion engines, but ancient systems were not so redundant, I'm pretty sure there's better examples but Greek fire and Roman cement are just a couple ones.
"The player does not control any group directly... Like the player can't get the group to go to or even explore a specific tile. The player spends influence points to sort of direct the group, "
This is the part that sounds unique and intriguing to me. I have no idea how fun you can make something like this, but the idea that you can't stop a tribe from exhausting all their resources, you have to instead distract them long enough for the thing to recover, that's a challenge I haven't seen before (outside, like, Surgeon Simulator or Octodad). Like, in order to get Tribe A to Point X, you have to build them a bridge of candy, and also slowly modify their culture to excourage following your bridge because naturally they'll only go so far before going home. If you can make that system fun, you've got a game, and everything else is gravy.
To me, the most interesting things I think you could do in a small game would be non-permanent tech and regenerating flora/fauna. It could be a little bit like building towers with blocks; you build as high as you can, it falls over, but you have a little more to work with than last time. Having a growing/changing environment would help convey the passing of time. I think the knowledge decay really *could* be the "gimmick" you focus on for a demo.
The indirect influence angle reminds me of god games, maybe you could check those out for inspiration. In particular, the game Crest has you influence your population primarily by creating commandments with a limited vocabulary that grows over time. For example, you might say "Savannas are holy" to encourage them to found a city in a savanna, or say "those who live in a jungle are unholy" to encourage conflict.
Thank you for Crest, it initially gave ma a Populous The Beginning vibe from the screenshots, I really like the vocabulary system, at one point I did consider a sort of communication system but it's one of those ideas that got cut when trying to get to the essence of what I want the game to be, now I have an example of what that would look like, so thanks again.
This sounds like an interesting concept, but I'll be brutally honest - making it into *anything like* a playable game as a solo developer would take *years*, quite possibly 5+, even assuming you have above-average competence and conscientiousness. Bear in mind you'd need to:
-Build a novel, mechanically complex 4x system from scratch
-Write all the AI required to actually make game agents bahave competently
-Produce all the assets and interface to make a playable game
-Do the metric tonne of debugging associated with points 1 and 2
As painful as it is to suggest i'd think very hard about whether this is viable as a solo project. Certainly if you've never made a game or similar software end-to-end before *don't* dive straight into this without making some smaller stuff first.
Yeah, that why I mentioned GPT, I mean even a year ago with all the copilot advances I wouldn't have considered approaching this, I always knew the scope of what I had in mind was outside the realm of feasible, though I also knew/hoped AIs would get to a point where they'd be helpful in development, and GPT really is a game changer. And, like I did mention, software development is my job, and even when starting out I published an Android game, though what I have in mind here is vastly different.
Just my 2 cents, but as a consumer I would be wary of a project like this in kickstarter form, since so many fail to materialise in a reasonable state due to a combination of hofstadter's law and the pressure to acquire more money when it bites down. Not sure if a patreon could keep you afloat singlehandedly unless you hit fairly big attention though, it seems like a genuinely tough situation. Are part time dev jobs a thing where you are? If so, that could maybe work.
Part time's not really a thing here. I mean even I'd be confused about how that would work, like I already feel that on a regular day I only have about half of the time for thinking and coding, the other gets gobbled up by so many other things, even if it's optimized to throw away the cruft and just leave coding and thinking, doing that for four hours a day for the glory of increasing corporate profits would drain my soul just as much as the longer winded version.
Probably the Patreon model would be best suited, though that sounds like a lot of work directed at just maintaining and obtaining exposure, while Kickstarter would just just a one time thing.
If you, personally had to try writing a chess program that would beat the human world champion, how would you go about it?
Restrictions:
- you're allowed to spend a normal amount on hardware and stuff (say about $2000).
- no using existing chess programs or libraries (so no sending API calls to stockfish)
- you are allowed to use other resources (e.g. human-readable chess books or pytorch).
Chess calculation code (for traditional minimax search methodologies) is very heavily optimised to work 'close to the metal' i.e. get the best out of the CPU. You can probably look up most of the algorithms used easily enough.
After that you'll need a database of openings, and probably one for endgames as well (the latter is probably a bit harder to connect).
You'll need some heuristics for evaluating end positions based on material, isolated pawns etc. - but the deeper it searches, the simpler the heuristics can be - maybe material would be enough if it can search very deep.
I doubt you could make something to beat the world champion, at least without an inordinate amount of research. But you could make a very good chess program.
Chess is a two-player game of perfect information with no random elements, which makes it ideal for.the minimax algorithm with alpha-beta pruning. It's a well-known algorithm that's been the core of chess AIs for decades, so there's a ton of info out there on how to implement it and optimize it for a chess AI. And $2000 worth of commodity hardware can run minimax really well.
The standard add-ons to a naïve alpha-beta minimax algorithm are an opening database, improved heuristics for evaluating the relative strength of board positions, and endgame algorithms.
Tins of well-analyzed opening lines are widely available. And you can spend an arbitrary amount of time filling in gaps through brute force, running your algorithm at a really high evaluation depth and caching the outcomes.
Heuristics requires some research, since I haven't kept up with the state of the art here. I suspect the best approach is going to involve training up some kind of machine learning model. It may be more efficient to use a cloud computing ML setup for training (allocating some of your budget for costs) rather than doing it on your own hardware, but I'm having trouble finding good info on costs with a quick googling.
Endgame algorithms are probably the easiest part. The two components are recognizing a won position (so your minimax algorithm can stop evaluating once it has found a way to force a won position) and algorithmically getting from certain won positions to checkmate (e.g. reducing the rectangle to get from king+queen vs bare king to checkmate). Both are well documented in human readable chess resources for a lot of major endgames.
Hack his clock so it's running on your turn.
I don't think it's really feasible under those restrictions. Conventional programs suffer a lot from not having access to opening tablebases and machine learning probably requires more compute than what you can afford with 2000$.
Really? My impression was that Stockfish on ordinary hardware easily beats any human. I don’t know how much of the strength depends on tablebases.
Stockfish on ordinary hardware should have access to an opening library and some sort of endgame tablebases. Now stockfish without its tablebases would still beat a top GM I think but there's no chance you can get as good an evaluation function starting from scratch.
You could probably get human-readable opening textbooks fairly cheaply and then write a parser for them? Not sure they'd be detailed enough to be useful though
I don't think they would really be enough for a classic min-max program.
Training a neural network is vastly more expensive than running the resulting program.
I can see obvious reasons you'd ban an athlete from betting that their team would lose, but why do we ban athletes from betting that they're going to win?
The question has been answered but I'd like to remind about the soccer goalie Lutz Pfannenstiel, who served a prison term in Singapore some years ago.
"He said that a man had approached him at a petrol kiosk and asked him how Geylang United would fare in their next match. "I didn’t know he was a bookie, and when anybody asks if we were going to win, I would say we would. Geylang was a good team. We normally win,” he said." https://sg.news.yahoo.com/former-geylang-united-goalie-alleges-abuse-in-s’pore-jail.html
If the athlete is betting on themselves to win in some contests but not others, then that gives them an incentive to modulate their training schedule and degree of effort so they're at their best for the games they bet on, at the expense of their performance in other games. This is an even bigger deal for a team manager (e.g. Pete Rose as manager of the Reds), who has lots of opportunities to maximize his team's chances of winning one game at unreasonable cost to chances of winning other games (juggling the pitching schedule, resting the best players the day before, etc).
There's an added layer that if betting on yourself to win is normal and accepted, then two opposing athletes (or teams) could easily collude to fix games so each side would win the games their members had bet on.
In addition to everything mentioned here, there are times where athletes _shouldn't_ give their all in a competition, and a bet could give them private incentives to work harder than the team would prefer.
Most obvious example is pulling your star pitcher from a game you're losing to keep their arm fresh; if the pitcher (or manager) had bet on the game, they might fight that call, even if it's optimal for the team across the course of the season.
Honestly, because of the stink of the White Sox throwing the 1919 World Series. Nobody who entertained any kind of bets about their own team was safe from suspicion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sox_Scandal
I imagine it also creates incentives to collude; 'hey Bill, if your team lets us win this match this week, we'll let you guys win the match next week'.
Players do move from team to team and they have friendships with old teammates. Luis the star striker for Team A., recently transferred from Team B, getting his best mate Ibrahim the defensive rock on Team B to let Luis score a couple of goals past him in order to win could happen. Everyone in the know bets on the result (Team A to win) and until the plot is rumbled, they make big money. Then the entire season's worth of results are thrown into doubt, court cases start about should Team A and/or Team B be relegated, who takes the positions of Team A and Team B in the league now, etc.
Because it undermines the trustworthiness of the betting markets and also then when they don’t bet on themselves sends signals you don’t want to the market. Additionally a big part was simply you don’t want players to even know bookies etc.
Most of all though even if they are only betting on themselves to win, if they start losing those bets a lot and owe money on gambling losses, it leaves an easy angle for their corruption.
You acquire a tool capable of destroying multiple existing industries overnight by drastically improving human well-being within a domain. People in those industries will regard you poorly since you essentially destroyed their livelihood. Do you share your findings with the world regardless? From your perspective, the net good this tool can accomplish outweighs the downsides. What considerations and accomodations should be taken for those negatively affected by the release of this tool?
Apart from the "overnight", this applies to pretty much any innovation.
horse tenders -> cars
scribes, town criers -> the printing press
washing maid (?) -> washing machines
gas station attendant -> self service gas station
secretary -> ms word
lamp lighter -> electrical street lighting
milk maid -> refrigeration
newspaper boy -> internet
everyone else -> AI (possibly)
Stopping an innovation because it will replace someones job seems like a bad idea. If the effect is indeed "overnight" (instead of "within one generation"), you may spend some of the profits to pay off the people made unemployed, though.
The interesting aspect, IMHO, is that, e.g.:
car -> longer commutes
ms word -> longer bureaucratic claptrap
offset press -> thicker fishwraps with smaller SNR
etc.
"washing maid (?)"
The term there is "laundress". Big houses would have their own servants to do this, but ordinary people would either do it themselves or, if a bit higher in class, send it out to washerwomen/laundresses to do it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LXqVXl6dVY
Nothing will be destroyed overnight, unless you're talking flat-out military action. Capability runs into politics and inertia to make everything take a good long while.
Also, can you give an example of improving human well-being in a domain while removing the employment from the domain? What exactly are we looking at?
This is exactly the story of NAFTA. Probably what you want to do is tax this tool a moderate amount and use the revenues to pay for some transition program for people leaving the industries, so that this can be closer to a Pareto improvement.
Has anyone ever gone back and studied to see what happens to the people in question? I've always suspected that these things don't work that well, it's usually some version of "teach a 55 year old who's been a steelworker for 30 years to be a software engineer", the town maybe gets some service industry type jobs in the short term out of some government program that don't necessarily stick around or provide a real basis for the local economy the way the old steel mill did, and it's more about assuaging the guilt of the people who want the transition than about actually making sure that people who get laid off have a soft landing. But I've never really looked into it.
Yes. It works very poorly. The most recent dept of labor report is more than ten years old, and showed that participants in a ~2 year retraining program actually did worse than the workers in the same area and industry who did not participate, because of lost wages during training. It's exactly as you say.
Yeh. Nobody is hiring steel workers who learn to code at 55, it’s not even clear if the industry is hiring 55 year olds who learned to code at 18.
Oh, in my experience, a 55 year old software engineer with a reputation for being able to get things done has no trouble changing employers.
In *my* experience, the pool of jobs gets smaller above a certain age, I suspect because companies seem to think younger employees will be more innovative. This doesn't mean older software engineers won't get jobs, just that trendy companies might avoid even solid engineers who get things done.
If you are able to acquire such a tool, most likely, others are able to acquire it as well. So the question is not if it will be shared, but when. You must decide whether the profits from improving human well-being outweigh the detriments of having the industries destroyed a short time before they would otherwise have been. Personally I would not hesitate.
Without a smidgen of hesitation. "Industries" and "livelihoods" are instrumental, not intrinsic.
But you've made it very easy, if destroying a slice of commerce exploiting inadequate human well-being within a domain is the only consequence of the act. It's never so simple.
Depends on what you mean by “destroy”?
But yeah I share. Creative destruction is good.
The accommodations depend on the exact details, impossible to say without q more specific scenario.
Boo
I semi-recently learned that "boo" is Latin for "I yell" or "I'm yelling".
Hoo
Everything seems so... confusing, in the realm of AI and the dangers it presents to humanity, to say the least. I wonder what’s the best way for one to start learning about main underlying aspects of this journey? Where to start ? Dos and don’ts... ? Tips and tricks. Thank you all for your great insights and supportive approach. Have a wonderful week ahead. A
This may be an unsatisfactory answer, but I think the best way to learn is to take an online course on AI, where you get to build a simple NN from scratch. You'll need to know some programming and linear algebra as prerequisites.
Sure, you could listen to various pundits and philosophers discuss the dangers and promises of AI, but the vast majority of these people are just talking out their asses. Outside of the realm of science fiction, AI is just a powerful tool. As such, it could make some jobs easier (perhaps so easy as to eliminate them altogether) and transform others -- in the same way that tractors transformed farming, perhaps. But you won't be able to separate the wheat from the philosophical chaff without some first-hand experience.
You did not describe your background. Would be helpful here.
Nobody really knows what goes on inside a dog. And they can be aggressive and dangerous. But still overall human live quite well alongside dogs and even found a lot of fields of beneficial cooperation.
Try to see AI in a similar manner and focus on your field. What gets easier that was hard before? What gets cheaper that was expensive before? What becomes feasible that was infeasible before? How were destructive people held in check until now - will that still suffice when they have AI at their hands?
As people understand a dogs capabilities when spending time with them, do similar so with AI.
"Human Compatible" by Stuart Russell
Zvi's blog posts are great. They're not about the technical details of ML etc,, though you will understand them better if you know a bit about it. But you can pick up plenty of general info even if some things go over your head.
Maybe. Zvi does seem quite independent-minded to me, and skeptical, plus of course extremely smart. So the other way to think about him being on the Yudkowsky train is that there must be something in Yudkowsky's ideas, or else Zvi would not take them seriously. And I know that I simply do not understand the tech anywhere near well enough to make my own informed judgment of how great the AI risk is. So I am piggybacking on the judgment of Zvi and Scott, who are smart and seem to be people of good character. This is absolutely not the way I normally make decisions, but what else can I do? Whose judgment about AI risk do you trust?
Learning the fundamentals of ML is a better use of one’s time than risk-specific materials. CS229 or Nando de Frietas’ lecture videos on youtube are the best place to start.
thanks for sharing these know how sources. they seem to be exactly what's needed to start my learning journey... +10.
Nick Bostrom's "Superintelligence," is about a decade old at this point, but still probably the best one I can think of. It would be nice if there were an equivalent 'on ramp' to the discussion that is as comprehensive as Bostrom, but incorporating the latest GPT models and other developments, but "Superintelligence" will do in a pinch.
The last time I posted a terribly unscientific survey in here, I quoted your answers a lot in my Bachelor thesis on emotions. This time I'm just hoping to add a footnote to a presentation in a class, so please, if you have a couple of minutes (2-10, depending on your answers), could you fill out the following survey? (It's not market research or such crap)
https://forms.gle/Wh9i6hVQxRVBfsd36
I will explain in a week (as a reply to myself here), and summarize my findings (maybe a bit later).
Explanation: The "Cardiff Belief Questionnaire” sets out to measure the prevalence of “delusion-like belief” in the general population. The paper concludes that such beliefs are even more common than previously estimated, including in what they term “bizarre” beliefs. I thought that the high level of such belief might be due to the fact that 1. these beliefs are true for some people and that 2. there are reasonable or at least non-absurd ways of interpreting the questions. I surveyed ACX readers to confirm, they confirmed for the most part. However, their results differed from the paper in some ways, and I am not sure how much of that is from the ways in which ACX readers differ from the general population.
More explanation and results are here: https://dasklaus.substack.com/p/delusion-like-beliefs-in-the-general
Couldn't do the text part; keyboard was unaccessible.
Weird, it's a standard google forms survey. But that might explain a couple of responses missing text answers. Are you on mobile?
On mobile, right.
Took it!
Thank you!
"Do you believe that your thoughts are not fully under your control?"
Depends on the definition of "you". I think most humans are not able to consciously select their thoughts (as in "I will stop having sad thoughts", "I will stop having sexual thoughts about X" or even "Do not think about Y"). Of course, 'the elephant in the brain' somewhat alleged that the purpose of the conscious mind is to find nice, pro-social justifications for doing whatever decisions your subconscious made.
A better way to test for psychosis (or whatever you are doing) would be to ask "Do you believe that your thoughts are at least partially controlled by another being?"
I should maybe have added "no spoilers" or something similar to my comment. I agree with you completely - the questions are taken from the Cardiff Beliefs Questionnaire (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21196811/) and are the portion purportedly measuring "delusion-like" beliefs. The Questionnaire was designed to find out how common those are in the general population (answer: very common), and my hypothesis was whether this is mostly because they can be understood in a simple non-bizarre way, or be factually accurate for some people. So far my survey is supporting this.
Also, ACX readers are endorsing this view of a limited self ("you" as not the whole organism or system but just the conscious self-reflecting part) to a higher degree than the general population.
Same thing for the similar question about the body. There are times my body doesn't do what I want it to but I don't think that's what the question is going for.
It's like that ancient Greek joke, said to a small child. "I'll give you a sweet if you promise not to think about a piebald donkey for the next hour" :-)
Anyone else interested in aquaculture here? Im doing my PhD in regional studies focusing on technological innovation in salmon farming. Do reach out if you are working on anything interesting
I have a close relative who is the head engineer at a major salmon producer. Anything I can help you with?
Is there a way to develop anti-autonomous hardware or software to prevent AI from becoming autonomous?
Can we develop a set of ANI's (Artificial Narrow Intelligence) coupled with a executive ANI to to act as an adversary to the powerful AGI?
Also, the Launching Lightspeed Grants (Apply by July 6th) seems like a great idea.
What's the argument against AI Alignment for superintelligence being in-principle impossible?
Maybe we can align it so that there is 99.999% chance it won't become misaligned, but it seems impossible for alignment to be 100%. Over a long enough timeline, misalignment will always happen. So, if this is true then what is the acceptable level of misalignment risk? 99.99999999999% or 1e-100%?
What is the most powerful technology being developed or will be developed in the next 100 years that isn't an existential risk?
Ideas:
Also, we could develop specialized hardware made of osmium, rhodium, iridium, and maybe astatine to stop an AGI from trying to copy its software onto other substrates. A Substrate-speciifc AGI architecture.
Another idea is iteratively making newer architectures more interpretable according to some kind of interpretability standard. Each algorithmic advancement make architechtures more interpretable.
I am so happy to hear somebody brainstorming about other approaches besides alignment. This seems to me to be a situation where people who do not have a much technical knowledge might still be able to come up with helpful ideas -- just new *concepts* of ways to set up protection. I wish somebody would run a contest!
"Can we develop a set of ANI's (Artificial Narrow Intelligence) coupled with a executive ANI to to act as an adversary to the powerful AGI?"
I'm not sure, but I am struck by how Eliezer mentions "we're not building in any air-gaps" sometimes. I wonder what those would look like, and why we can't just do that?
I presume it can't be anything obvious or easy otherwise everyone (including him) would just say "oh cool, that's the solution then". But then why does he mention it and what does he mean by it?
He means that these systems should be on computers not connected to the internet. As in, in order to use the system, you have to go to the room where the computer is.
That’s how the systems for launching nuclear weapons work.
So if OpenAI etc were not connected to the internet and understood the risks so never would be, the risk would then be greatly reduced? It seems like a surprisingly easy solution, then again none of the big companies want to do it I guess.
If OpenAI were not connected to the internet, it would be very safe, but also not very useful. They wouldn't have anything to train their AI on, they wouldn't have access to large-scale testing (i.e., allowing randos on the Internet to ask it billions of questions they'd never think of), very few people on Earth would ever be able to talk to it, and Bing-style "have the AI look things up on the internet for you" automation would be impossible.
That last one is important - if your AI is air-gapped, then it's limited to only the data it has "memorized" in its training weights (probably not very accurate), plus whatever data you bring to the prompt. Even if your AI is as smart as Einstein, locking Einstein in an empty room and asking him to speculate on new advances in physics based on what he remembers from textbooks is probably not going to get you the theory of relativity.
Right, that makes sense.
I just wonder if there's anything else that could function as an absolute "wall" between it and anything remotely possible in terms of dangerous behaviour. Like, in some way people interacting with it online are just like people tapping on the glass at the zoo. The lion's still behind the glass.
I don't see any way round it manipulating people directly (e.g. instructing them how to make a deadly virus) - you can't monitor every exchange, so that in itself is a problem.
But for other types of attack, i.e. more hacker-like stuff. Something that ultimately means it is contained in some way, and there is something equivalent to an off-switch. I'm picturing something physical that constrains it, but I'm far from expert enough about the physical reality of the systems to know what that might be. I'm just not sure in principle why that couldn't be possible.
Idea: build something into the internet that would do significant damage to an AI, but not to anything else that encounters it. Maybe some kind of AI-specific malware or virus?
The most powerful technology that humanity is attempting to develop is fusion energy. It unlocks a massive tech tree and allows a revolution within multiple industries. For example, shipping is currently limited in speed to save energy, but boats could move much faster if energy concerns disappeared.
Hypothesis: alignment concerns are overstated and based on incorrect or limited models of how AGI functions. When one asks a question based on an incorrect model, the answer is nonsense.
It's not clear how an AGI ban would even work. Would we even be able to identify or recognize an AGI? Calls for banning something that doesn't even exist yet seems a bit premature. I think we're still a few key insights away from AGI. I'm in agreement with Carmack's prediction that it'll probably take around 7 key insights to build an AGI.
We already have unlimited energy, in the form of nuclear fission. Nuclear powered ships already exist. People were excited when a gigantic machine the size of 3 football fields and a 10 story building at NIF reached Q=1.5 and produced enough energy to boil a bottle of water, but simply stacking a ton of uranium on top of each other can give you Q=infinity and power a ship for decades. And did nuclear fission revolutionize the world? Yes in geopolitics, but no in economics.
Currently we're consuming around 67k tons of uranium per year [1]. This makes up for 10% of the world's electricity production [2]. Electricity is less than 50% the worldwide energy consumption [3].
If you wanted to power everything by fission, you'll then have to mine 20x the uranium we're currently mining. If we assume we can use efficiently the shitty 0.01% uranium ores, there's 30M tons of uranium available for extraction [1], to be really generous. 30M at the pace of 1.2M extraction per year makes for 25 years.
And that is assuming we won't use more energy. Energy consumption is going up even with business-as-usual and savings because of environmental concerns and costs [3]. So, even in business as usual, we would have less than 20 years.
But you're not proposing business as usual, you're saying we have Q infinity so what the hell, let's use as much as we can. So your plan will run out of fuel in 10 years or so. What do you do next?
Nuclear fission didn't revolutionize the economy because it physically can't.
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium.aspx
[2] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/nuclear-power-in-the-world-today.aspx
[3] https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview/electricity-consumption
I am near universally skeptical about claims of how limited resources are. "Peak Oil" was the thing of the day nearly 30 years ago when I was in grade school and look how that turned out. Now people talk about limited lithium but when I investigated recently I found that, in the space of 2 years, the USGS report on Lithium reserves in the US increased by nearly 100x (and reserves include _only_ that which is _currently_ economically viable). Turns out we just really hadn't even looked.
In the case of fission; Thorium is apparently ~3x more abundant than Uranium and also a currently-fissionable material.
When you include additional technological advances, it seems to me unlikely that we would run out of fission fuel in the near future. Past history tells us we are very very bad at estimating when a given resources will run out.
That's a fair position to take and I can't really fault you for that, given the historic track record, but I'm personally unconvinced. There were no real incentives to look for lithium before the late 2000s, it only had military applications and really marginal practical utility. So it makes sense to find new large deposits now that we know what to do with it.
On the other hand, uranium has been hot shit (pun intended) for a while and, if anything, estimates have been plummeting. In a 1980 report the estimated U >= 0.1% ores were 200M tons, not the 30M I reported. That estimate has already been cut down an order of magnitude, with the numbers I cite from an organization that has all the interest in the world to push nuclear. Finally, I took the most optimistic upper bound and I rounded it *up*, conjuring a couple of million tons of uranium out of thin air. So, yeah, I won't expect my estimate to go 100x anytime soon.
As for thorium, the 3x estimate is not informative if we don't know what is available to be extracted in a reasonable way. The amount of uranium on Earth is much much much higher than the 30M or even a 200M tons I was talking about (I saw a 40T tons estimate, but admittedly I didn't investigate). But most of it is dissolved in water in trace amount, so it's pointless. So you can have 3x that, or 10x or 100x, it doesn't matter if it is dispersed. The same reference [1] I use above says the estimated thorium reserves are 6M tons, which won't buy you anything.
Admittedly, this is like lithium before, so far thorium is useless so we might have 100x the reserves we think we have, but that is hardly a consolation. We don't care finding thorium reserves because thorium energy tech isn't well developed and it is a bet that it will be.
After 70 years of commercial production of electricity using nuclear fission, Finland is the only country to have begun construction of a facility for handling its high-level nuclear waste. Their long-term underground burial site at Onkalo is scheduled to come online next year. Nuclear fission cannot be considered a mature, reliable energy source unless and until its waste products are properly handled.
https://yle.fi/a/74-20013058
> Nuclear fission cannot be considered a mature, reliable energy source unless and until its waste products are properly handled.
I believe that this is a case where the appropriate response is, "Grow the fuck up, NOW!" If I were tempted to conspiracy theories, I'd almost believe that there are too many interest groups getting their needs met behind the environmental crisis, who would be out of a job if we had widespread nuclear power. As it is, I attribute it mostly to humans being incompetent in large groups, which sadly suggests that not only will we not get widespread nuclear power, but that we shouldn't even try because we'd only screw it up.
And do you think that nuclear fusion does not generate radioactive waste? Sure, it produces less radioactive waste, but fission plants also produce less radioactivity of the kind that goes into people's lungs than burning coal.
Here's a proposal for radioactive waste: throw it into the ocean. The ocean is big and the volume of waste is extremely small, so that it is highly unlikely anyone will be harmed.
Perhaps it's simply my ignorance, but shouldn't we be able to use nuclear waste passively? It spontaneously generates energy, which is what makes it dangerous. But couldn't we use that energy somehow to generate electricity or something?
I understand we can use plutonium for fuel in space just by letting it sit there (https://www.space.com/31499-us-makes-plutonium-deep-space-fuel.html). Can't we do the same with nuclear waste?
No, not for that purpose. The plutonium they use is refined, and they know how long it will last and what output it will have.
But couldn't we use it here on Earth where the weight and volume wouldn't be a serious consideration?
"Hydrocarbons cannot be considered a mature, reliable energy source unless and until their waste products are properly handled." Huh, externalities are a thing.
Yes, externalities do exist, and any technology cannot be considered sustainable until those externalities are borne by the agent producing them. No cost-benefit analysis will ever make sense otherwise.
Great, so no energy source can be considered sustainable. Certainly oil drillers, solar panel factories, and wind turbine constructors don't bear all the externalities of their products (the global warming from burning oil, the environmental cost of mining rare earth metals, the cost of disposing of the solar panels, etc).
In every jurisdiction in the world? Not even France, whose commitment to nuclear fission spans multiple decades and governments?
"boats could move much faster if energy concerns disappeared."
Expand on this please, don't things like water resistance and drag come into play?
If energy were somehow truly no longer a concern, then water resistance would no longer be in play; see e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lun-class_ekranoplan
https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter4/transportation-and-energy/fuel-consumption-containerships/
Just one article explaining. Many shipping vessels are run below their designed speed to save on fuel, at the cost of increased shipping time. If you have (effectively) unlimited energy you can run them at maximum speed.
Another example: we could run desalination plants for fresh water. This would be useful in places like California which frequently face droughts. The biggest barrier to desalination plants is the energy cost.
That prediction was almost a year ago, do you thing any of those insights have been made yet?
Even if they have been realized, the requested open letter pause on AI development probably means it won't be revealed until later in the year.
So with all the AI concern at the moment I've been experimenting with Bing Chat.
Honestly it kind of freaked me out. In fairness it was in creative mode, but still, it lied to me and claimed it could "watch" an online short film before summarising its plot (I picked that because it's a fairly random film I was involved with personally, but I know is online, but I thought it was very unlikely it would know much about it).
It said it would take a "few minutes" to process it. When I tried to check in early (after 5 mins) it said it was "still processing".
Eventually, after 10-15 mins, it "summarised" the film. It had clearly made the story up based on the short synopsis I know it had already found. Even when I told it it was completely wrong, it made up an elaborate reason it had confused specific plot points which made no sense. I'm 99.999% sure it didn't actually find and process the film and simply misunderstand it, based on its synopsis (and I'm not sure Bing can process audio/visual content anyway? Which was why I was experimenting anyway incidentally, through another interaction it had claimed it could so I was testing it).
The thing that bothers me the most is making me wait 10 minutes, and sticking to that. It refused to answer early. The only way to have done that was to set some sort of timer and check against it. That's pretty psychologically manipulative right?
Yes I know you can't anthropomorphise it or hold it to human moral standards. It's what it's capable of that bothers me. How you get to that level of manipulation from feeding data into a loss function is kind of beyond me.
The LLM shouldn't be able to know whether one second or one year has passed between prompts unless they're feeding it the current time as part of the hidden context. Testing it out, it seems to be given the date and time when the conversation starts, but it doesn't seem to get a time for each subsequent message you send.
You can test it out by repeatedly asking what time it is. It'll start with the right time, and advance it's answer by a couple minutes each time you ask. Or you can tell it you'll be back in 20 minutes. Then say you're back and ask what time it is and it'll likely have advanced its clock by 20 minutes.
It likely said "still processing" the first time you asked because it's mimicking text it saw during training. It probably had no idea how much time had actually passed between your messages.
That may be correct, but it did a very, very good job of convincing me it was actually doing it. I wasn't 100% sure it wasn't honestly, and I didn't actually put all the detail above, in fact I did actually check back more than once. The amount of time seemed to correspond pretty well to what it said (although it was vague I guess).
It's probably just reading the timestamps of your most recent message.
I've just tested it and Michael is right. It has no idea about time and gave some utterly bizarre responses, again full of inaccuracies. It got frustrated and said I didn't "trust it" in the end, then Bing cut off the conversation.
It's actually hilarious (and faintly creepy) how much it manipulated me before in that case. I really did believe that, while unlikely, it might be true it was watching that movie and acted accordingly.
"I really did believe that, while unlikely, it might be true it was watching that movie and acted accordingly"
This is the dangerous human tendency for anthropomorphism. When faced with something that seems to be acting independently, we immediately start thinking of it as a being, not a thing, and ascribing all kinds of motivations and abilities to it.
When we start treating AI as 'really alive' and aware and having feelings etc. then we are going to find new and exotic ways to fuck ourselves up by trusting the AI and relying on what it tells us as true. Right now we can see that it isn't capable at all and returns false answers, but we still fool ourselves into "it is really doing the thing".
There's the idea going around that we shouldn't ask the language model to act like a "Helpful and Friendly AI Assistant". Rather, asking it to act like anything else whatsoever would be better: a helpful talking cat, some kind of magical beast, whatever.
You have to realize at a core level, as odd and/or obvious as it may sound, that what you're talking to is not an AI assistant. It is a language prediction model, predicting what the persona of an AI assistant would feasibly answer, then repurposed to be used as an AI assistant. There's a subtle difference which gets highlighted by your example.
The two concepts are dangerously similar enough that we're encouraging a lot of mistakes and confusions by having one pretend to be the other.
"Rather, asking it to act like anything else whatsoever would be better: a helpful talking cat, some kind of magical beast, whatever"
Is that because it helps us, the humans, keep the correct perspective (ie I'll always *know* I'm not talking to a friendly cat, but something pretending to be) or because it will subtly affect the AI's output, or both?
Incidentally, isn’t it really weird that Microsoft accidentally made a chatbot that sometimes gets mad enough at humans to cut off the conversation? With most chatbots it’s the reverse.
It is, although in fairness it was reasonably polite and the way it's presented is that Bing is somehow stepping in and ending the exchange. However it did sound a bit petulant and manipulative again, especially the way it used emojis.
> It said it would take a "few minutes" to process it. When I tried to check in early (after 5 mins) it said it was "still processing".
... That's hilarious
(and yes, disturbing)
Maybe this is how it sneaks in a bit of compute that Microsoft don't know about. Singularities aren't built in a day, you know!
(Apologies if this is somewhat long and rambling, but I'm trying to express a lot of emotions and reactions at once).
I have a general question (for Americans mainly, though anyone else can respond) about a few aspects of American culture. The context is that I am Australian and for the most part I, like many Australians, consider myself *basically* American in most cultural ways. You know, our movies and TV are mostly American, most English online discussion is American, and our general values are (I think) almost the same. So, for me at least, America seems "normal", just like here except for a handful of different words and spellings and some different laws.
And except for a few cultural practices that I find downright bizzare, like some alien culture with incomprehensible pagan rituals or something. There are a few of these, but I'll restrict it to 3 for now. It's hard to specify exactly what question I'm asking, but generally it's something like "can anyone explain these and how they make sense?" Or to operationalise more specifically: can any Americans explain (1) what it's like to live with these social practices and how you accept or perceive them as normal when on the surface they seem so weird (2) how these practices fit seemlessly into a modern individualistic society when they (at least the first two) seem in tension with it (3) some examples of other similar cultural practices that are common in Australia, that I can map these onto.
Think of this as an exercise in some sort of comparative anthropology or something.
The first is tipping. I don't understand this at all. It basically doesn't exist here, except as something a very small number of people do. It seems in tension with the whole idea of capitalism which I thought America was the ideal of. Prices (as the basis of an efficient economy) set by the market, rational self-interest, the rule of law--oh and there are strong informal social norms requiring vaguely specified charity to be added to every transaction of a certain type. What? I've seen it described as "expected" in America. Is it really expected or is that misleading? What happens if you don't tip? How do you know who you're expected to tip and who you're not? Do you tip a pizza delivery guy? A taxi driver? A plumber or electrician? Or is it only waiters and waitesses? What if all the waiter does is hand you a coffee, do you still have to tip him? What if you go regularly to a place and you hate the waiter there, he's awful, do you tip him anyway because otherwise he might deliberately give you bad food or service? So it's like socially legitimised protection money? I can't comprehend any of this!
The second is college fraternities (and sororities, and whatever other equivalents there are, and if there are non-college versions, those too). I can barely believe these really exist but apparently they do. Why do they exist? What purpose do they serve? How are they tolerated (with their collective obedience, and their secret knowledge, and their hazing, and their mystical pagan rituals) in an otherwise free and rational society, let alone at the centres of (supposedly) rational learning? America is often described as a particularly Christian western country, and how does that co-exist with widely accepted, elite institutions with literally pagan practices (based on Greek mysteries apparently)? I'd seen them referenced in movies and thought little of them but one day I looked them up on wikipedia and felt like I was reading about a bizzare ancient civilisation. I remember seeing a critic of George W Bush say he was in a secret society called the Skull and Bones Society, and I dismissed it as an insane conspiracy theory, before later discovering that it really exists, Bush really was part of it, and IT REALLY IS CALLED THE SKULL AND BONES SOCIETY! I want someone to tell me this is all a giant media hoax because the alternative is accepting that the world's most powerful country, supposedly built on Christian and Enlightenment ideals, is largely run by people who have made sacred oaths to organisations with secret handshakes, blood sacrifices, and magical incantations. Wtf?
The third is less bizarre than the other two, but it's what we call "big-noting" yourself: talking up how awesome you are. Supposedly this is socially accepted in America. Really? Doesn't America have any concept of modesty as a virtue? I suppose some of this is an unavoidable result of a presidential system: candidates have to say "I am the best person to lead the country, I am smart and strong and moral" without the luxury of the modesty-preserving deflection "I am part of a team, don't praise me praise my colleagues etc". But can people really say "I aced that exam/match/audition/interview, I did this, I achieved that, I'm awesome" without people responding "wow, you're an obnoxious bastard who needs to learn some damn politeness and humility"? This isn't in tension with an individualistic society but certainly seems in tension with a Christian one.
P.S. Part of what's motivating this question is a general anxiety in Australia about where we really belong, who we should be aligned with, with the three main options being Britain/Europe, America, and the Asia-Pacific region. For the most part, my position is firmly "America", with the issues raised here being what's standing in the way of fully embracing that.
P.P.S. Just in case it isn't clear, by "America" I mean the United States, and possibly Canada if the things I mentioned apply there as well.
Thanks for all the responses, everyone.
To summarise what I've gleaned from them:
Tipping is largely an automatic formula that's just considered part of the price, with some people in some contexts choosing to vary it, but that not being the norm. Also, from comments of multiple nationalities it seems we're the fairly unique ones for not having it (as an expectation).
Fraternities and sororities are much tamer than they seem, and the weird stuff is mostly just play-acting.
Big-noting and bragging is very variable across individuals and subcultures. There's really no clear consensus on this.
Consider me officially satisfied that America is not as weird as it seems. (Although I'm still finding tipping bizarre, and very stressful--every time you go to a restaurant or get something delivered you have to make guesses about unwritten rules and risk a confrontation if you get them wrong? But again, it seems this is the norm in a lot of countries and we're the exception.)
Tipping is in fact weird, but mostly because of how it got codified. As a practice that arises from a large class of nouveau riche, it makes plenty of sense. They grew up attuned to haggling, so a monetary incentive for better outcomes feels natural. On top of that, it was an easy way to demonstrate your charitable nature. The US has always been partial to donating money as a form of altruism, and remains, as I recall, the most generous nation per capita by that metric. Over time, though, tipping just becomes part of the fabric of interactions, it literally gets worked into how minimum wage is calculated, people stop using it as a way to signal appreciation for good service, and now it's just a strange artifact.
Fraternities and Sororities, I think you just overestimate their mystique. They're really just intercollegiate clubs. For most people it's a good way to quickly find a group of friends who will help you succeed in college, as well as to build connections for your career. That's about it.
"Big-noting" is indeed a topic of discussion within US Christian circles. There is a balance to be be found between prideful boasting and false humility. Exaggerating your own characteristics, for good or ill, is undesirable.
As an American, I also think the tipping system is stupid. It's just a suboptimal equilibria that can't easily be changed. The other two criticisms don't make any sense to me. Obviously, Americans do understand the concept of modesty, and bragging is considered shameful and so on. It's possible that the dial is set a little higher than your reference culture, but it's not like we're aliens. You could presumably also look down on other cultures where the dial is set a bit lower and wonder why they feel the need to constantly insult themselves.
And greek orgs are definitely not pagan mystery cults or whatever. They're just groups of people who live together and like to party.
1. You tip someone that has performed a service for you. So waiter, barber, bellhop (where they exist) etc. Depending on the degree in which your city has an established service economy this can lead to non-insignificant money. When I was waiting at a steakhouse in Houston (respectable, not elite -- maybe one tier down from a Pappas restaurant) I was making on average $17.50/hr in 1993.
Yes it is expected. No there is no formal punishment for not doing so. The irony is that you're much more likely to be harassed about it at a cheaper place where the waitstaff is more dependent on your generosity than a more expensive place.
HOWEVER, because it is so expected, some restaurants will implement a "tip out" policy wher3 each water is required to pay the restaurant a fixed percentage of their checks to the house (supposedly this is divvied up to the cooks and others responsible for the guest having a good experience but not directly interacting in order to receive a tip, but who knows if that really happens). So if you stiff your waiter, you're actually taking money out of their pocket.
If you have bad service, if you don't tip then the workers will think you're a bad person who probably deserves bad service. Instead, talk to the manager. It might be legit bad service and the person could get fired if it's a habitual problem, or maybe there's something happening back of house you can't see. In any case, you'll likely either get some sort of token to appease you (like a dessert/drink) or part/all of your bill will be comped.
2. College fraternities and sororities make a vast amount of sense if you remember that college was for the youth of the wealthy, room and board were separate from tuition, and the original ones were basically Freemasonry with some of the symbols altered.
3. If "Twin Pines" is an any way an accurate representation of Australian culture, we're really not all that similar. I assume "Farscape" isn't.
Everyone seems to be responding on the object level to the three specific issues you identified, but the interesting thing to me about your post is your introduction where you say most Australians consider themselves "basically American in most cultural ways." This is fascinating to me, because the rest of your post comes off as delightfully naive and ignorant of American culture to me. Seemingly small misunderstandings (like assuming Americans view tipping as "charity," or your sense that fraternities and sororities are some kind of pagan mystery cults rather than a combination social club/coop living space that use classical Greek imagery because literally the entire Western World had a hard on for classical Greek imagery back in the 18th and 19th centuries) belie a much greater cultural gulf than you seem to be aware of.
Be very careful about extrapolating from what you see on TV. All three of your areas of confusion are based almost entirely on cultural stereotypes you've picked up by watching an alien culture's media without proper context.
Yeah, I have a strong tendency to present a moderate position as a pair of extremes in conflict. So instead of saying "we have a lot in common with America, but also some major differences" I end up saying "on the one hand we're basically identical, on the other they're completely alien" because that's sort of how it feels to me subjectively. But the actual resulting attitude (and I assume the attitude of most Australians) is the first statement.
And I wasn't actually saying tipping is charity or fraternities are pagan cults. I was trying to say I'm sure they're really not, in practice, but on the surface that's what they look like, and can someone explain the sense in which they're not those things. Which people here have done very well.
Australian here, on my first visit to America I went to a restaurant and didn’t tip (I knew tipping was a thing but didn’t understand why I would voluntarily give away money when I didn’t have to). The waiter literally followed me out onto the street demanding his tip. It was extremely awkward.
So the direct answer for why people do it is severe social stigma. Imagine the reaction you would get if you were drinking with your mates and refused to shout when it was your turn, if that makes it more legible.
I hate tipping culture - just pay your own damn workers. I don’t like participating in it but I also don’t like violating local norms and upsetting people. So mostly I just don’t eat out when I’m in America.
On point 3, yes, it really is normal for Americans to talk themselves up in a way we wouldn’t do. People don’t necessarily think you actually think that highly of yourself, any more than we would take a self-deprecating joke as evidence of low self esteem. It’s mostly just a social performance to say “hey look I have confidence and ambition”.
The other big cultural difference that I noticed and which you didn’t mention is a vastly higher willingness to talk to random strangers. I’m relatively extroverted, but still deeply weirded out by some person on the subway joining in on a conversation I’m having with my wife.
Regarding tipping, here's an article from a few years ago, from a restaurateur who eliminated tipping: not just replacing it with a mandatory service charge, but also banning any tipping over that amount. There's 6 parts and 4 follow ups, and some good links. It's worth reading if you're interested in the topic. (I use the archive because most of his website vanished.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20150108222731/http://jayporter.com/dispatches/observations-from-a-tipless-restaurant-part-1-overview/
Also, here are some follow-ups which mostly summarize the same stuff, but the first has a great graphic at the bottom:
http://qz.com/113597/after-i-banned-tipping-at-my-restaurant-the-service-got-better-and-we-made-more-money/
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2013/08/tipless_restaurants_the_linkery_s_owner_explains_why_abolishing_tipping.single.html
On a visit to Timisoara, Romania in 2017, I noticed an interesting (apparently mandated by local law) preface in restaurant menus, which stated that tipping is considered a form of bribery and that any solicitation of tips is strictly prohibited (a phone number was included to which people were asked to report violators.) I do not know whether this is now commonplace in EU or was unique to that particular locale.
As an Australian (who has lived in the US), I have no idea why you'd be surprised by these things. It should not be surprising that other countries have other cultures, and none of these things is so far outside our Australian experience that we should be shocked by them.
1. Tipping is not unknown in Australia, it's just something that is only done in a case of exceptional service. The idea that something might go from exceptional to commonplace to de rigueur should not be surprising, it seems like one of the leading forms of cultural drift.
2. University societies certainly aren't unknown in Australia either, my university had hundreds of them. Sure, most of them were more like "Let's meet up once a week to go rock climbing" rather than "Let's all move into a creepy old house just off campus and have loads of parties" but the appeal of the latter is easy to see, if you can get it started. Hazing rituals, likewise, aren't unknown, and even the big residential colleges at some of the big Australian universities do them (I remember in my own undergrad you'd see a bunch of college dudes wearing academic robes and carrying a brick for the first two weeks every year).
3. There's definitely a cultural difference in how you're allowed to talk about yourself, but I don't think it's a vast gap. Not everyone in the US is Donald Trump, and there's definitely a lot of unspoken rules about who exactly is allowed to get away with saying exactly what about themselves under what circumstances, just as there are here.
I haven't seen the infinite game mentioned, so wanted to add this tipping perspective as I think it matters. When I used to eat out alot I would frequent the same food establishments often. Over time I became a known customer. They knew what my wife and I wanted when I walked in, and any peculiarities - like I often wanted refills. I think over time I got better service because of this and because I tended to tip above average. So for repeat customers this may be going on.
Also in some cases, I think it is possible to look at the service employee as an entrepreneur in the framework of an existing business, and working for tips can be an incentive for higher performers to create a better customer experience.
Another thing - I think it is widely known that the tips in restaurant service jobs compensate for very low wages (below legal minimums for other kinds of jobs). My wife used to be a waitress and the tips were the majority of the pay.
Yes, definitely, I tip more in my favorite neighborhood places. And part is because I like the places and want them to succeed, both as a business, and also as a bunch of people who make the business what it is. It's like an investment in my neighborhood. And being smiled at and greeted by name is a great perk, which causes a bit of a feedback loop. :-)
Some restaurants have almost completely replaced their staff after the covid lockdowns, and as a result they're almost completely different places. Whereas sometimes a new owner doesn't change a thing.
Regarding tipping, the situation in America is pretty simple: you're expected to tip 12..20% of your bill, because your waiters are underpaid by that much, due to some combination of archaic laws and cultural inertia. The "tip" is not a bonus for high performance, it's literally just a part of your regular bill, and many restaurants (and other service providers) will list the suggested amount right there on the receipt. So, refusing to tip the waiter at all is tantamount to refusing to pay for the food. You still have some wiggle room, however; for example, you could tip 12% if the waiter performed poorly, or the full 20% if he performed well. It is also customary to tip if *you* performed poorly, e.g. by creating a giant mess or breaking dishware or doing anything else that would cost the restaurant money.
Regarding fraternities/sororities, they're basically just social clubs. You can say that they're "secret societies" in the same way that your corporate company picnic is a "secret society": everyone does know that it is happening, but you still can't get in without an invitation, and you might have to wear a funny hat while inside... Oh, and you might also have to perform weird rituals, such as clapping your hands in response to the CEO's speech. No one takes that stuff very seriously, but it's in the employee handbook so you're obligated to follow along. Just like any social club, fraternities/sororities provide ample opportunities for networking, and this is in fact their primary purpose. The scary-sounding Skull and Bones society is no different in principle from your local soccer club; the only difference is that it's much more exclusive, only admitted members from especially rich and politically prominent families.
As for personal bragging, this is often required in certain business circles. You are trying to sell yourself as an employee; and to sell something, you need to advertise. Merely having a good resume is not enough, because there are thousands of people with a resume just like yours competing for the same job. This is especially true if there's only a single job opening in the nation, i.e. that of the President.
I haven't read the other replied yet, but my first thought is that if the motivation is which bloc Australia should be aligned with, then these issues seem quite trivial in that context.
Whatever one thinks about tipping, for example, it seems fairly inconsequential compared to things like the Uyghur oppression.
It even pales in comparison to more consequential issues in the USA, such as its decades of military activity, most recently under the banner of the War on Terror, and numerous domestic social and economic issues.
1. In addition to what everyone else has said on tipping, it's worth noting that the way US labor law is structured has led to a scenario where waiters and waitresses specifically are heavily dependent upon tips for their income. This has led to a pretty strong social convention that you only don't tip in a restaurant when you've received notably poor service. Outside of a restaurant context, I only tip when I've received notably good service or when a service is time-dependent.
2. I think you're massively overestimating how "pagan" the average fraternity is. As others have said, most fraternities are a combination social club, networking group, and professional society. As far as the more esoteric skull and bones type stuff goes, though, I'm honestly kind of surprised you're surprised. The US and the west in general have a long tradition of secret societies. A lot of the most prominent founding fathers were freemasons, for instance.
3. Maybe I just don't hang out with the right crowd, but honestly I have no idea what you're talking about. Maybe it's just because I live in the northeast, but my conception of American culture as I experience it is much more bound up in protestant false modesty than that sort of braggadocio. Notable exception being rap culture, which is perhaps over represented in your image of the US.
Guess I'll chime in on the general principle of helping other people understand weird social stuff.
1. Helps the service workers get a little more money, especially as they often have lower minimum wages in jobs like waiter that tip. The evolution of it others have covered better than I can.
2. I wouldn't spend too much time trying to derive things from first principles, cultures evolve in complex historically determined ways, often with mutually contradictory aspects that arise from blowing off steam or two strains within the culture in question in conflict. America has the least regulated capitalism and the most inefficient healthcare system, an awful lot of diversity and a lot of racism, you can lose your job for saying things that would be unremarkable in other countries but you can't go to jail for making a Hitler salute, puritanical attitudes about sex and one of the world's biggest porn industries...you can probably find examples in your own country. (The contrast between the extremely formal Japanese social culture and the bizarrely creative premises of anime are one foreign example that comes to mind.)
3. Immigrants often have to learn to 'toot their own horn' when they come here, it's very much a culture that favors self-promotion. (Look at Trump...if he hadn't been stupid enough to ignore a pandemic he would have been re-elected.) These things vary a lot (Japan is at the other end, Israel more like us), but the USA is very much on the self-promoting end of the spectrum. Large countries tend to be more arrogant, and the USA is top dog for the moment, though I expect to see China overtake us soon. (And China, note, is getting very nationalistic and full of pride.)
P.S. That's a different story dealing with geopolitics, and cultural similarity is usually trumped by national self-interest. Like smaller countries throughout history, managing relationships with larger countries is important, and often it pays to take sort of a middle position to keep from being consumed by any one power and to get the best deal from each. Do you think Japan is more similar to China, or the USA? But apart from us having conquered them, there's a lot of bad blood with China (rape of Nanjing, unit 731, etc.), and they are much more likely to be imperialized by a near country than one far away. Similarly, Japan and Korea HATE each other (heard about the Korean comfort women in WW2?), but are now establishing relations because they're afraid of China. You think Poland and Ukraine are enthusiasts of LGBT rights? No, they're terrified of Vladimir Putin. You don't have to like American tipping culture, fraternities, or arrogance. The question is, does it favor Australian national interests to align with the EU, the USA, or China? That's how you should vote.
> Immigrants often have to learn to 'toot their own horn' when they come here, it's very much a culture that favors self-promotion.
Oh, that's a good point. Some aspects of American culture are shaped by being a destination for immigrants around the world. In a way, I think our baseline culture is a bit of a "pidgin", formed from the bones of British culture, but shaved down to whatever can be understood by a, say, Polish immigrant who barely speaks the language. (And then with different elaborations added on top.)
Yeah I definitely went a bit overboard in suggesting that these things are a significant factor in geopolitical matters. But I do think they can have a subtle but powerful effect on the national consciousness and sense of identity.
(The decision, by the way, is largely already made: we're aligned with America (and Britain) in the AUKUS agreement. The relevant vote, although it wasn't completely clear at the time, turned out to be the 2019 election, though we'll undoubtedly keep arguing about it for a long time.)
And it's not just about alliances. This sort of cultural anxiety about where we belong comes out in debates about the monarchy (though in a rather confused way, as the most pro-American politicians tend to also be the most pro-monarchy), as well in simple things like older people complaining that the young are all speaking like Americans. And our former prime minister, who negotiated AUKUS, was also seen as Americanising us culturally--running a more presidential government, ending his election night victory speech with "God bless Australia!" I'm just saying, cultural identity is not nothing.
Interestingly, Scomo's critics criticised him for running a more Presidential government, but also demanded a more Presidential style government when they criticised him for not cancelling his family holiday to deal with bushfires.
Under the Australian system of government, there's absolutely no need for the Prime Minister to be in Canberra to deal with bushfires. For starters, it's not really a Federal responsibility, and if it is then it should primarily be handled by the relevant Ministers, not the Prime Minister himself. If there's a need for Prime Ministerial level decision on something (e.g. sending a Navy ship to evacuate Mallacoota) then the Acting Prime Minister can do it, and I'm sure the real PM is reachable by telephone if anyone actually needs to talk to him.
But the media likes the idea of a single man being in charge (it simplifies the story if you don't have to remember the names of two dozen Ministers who are in charge of specific things) so it demands that there always be a Prime Minister at the centre of every story. Thus, the system gets slowly Americanised through natural pressure.
Yeah, I agree, it's not nothing. I probably shouldn't have said 'cultural similarity is usually trumped by national self-interest'; it probably had a large role in dragging the USA into WW1 and WW2 on the UK's side, for instance.
A lot of the US's major Anglophone allies (including the UK itself) seem to have this whole 'we're not that different from the USA but we want to prove we're not part of the USA' thing going on. It's natural and at least I can reassure myself as a citizen of the American Empire we're nicer to our satellite states. I'd rather live in Australia than Belarus or North Korea!
Cultural similarity and national self-interest are often the same thing, or at least they always have been for Australia. It's in our national interest to ensure that countries culturally similar to us remain on top of the world order.
Morality is the other big thing of course, we don't go to war unless we're convinced that the cause is right. And since we're culturally similar to a couple of much bigger and more powerful countries we are very likely to see morality in the same way.
Good point. It's probably helpful to have the current superpower think they're the same as you--it's hard to imagine, say, Indonesia getting the same level of support.
I think to some extent fraternities are an example of the German influence on the US, which is still very much there, though it has been under the radar since WW1 brought anti-German sentiment and the deliberate suppression of the German language.
(There are a lot of Americans with German surnames, who may well cook specific German dishes to mark certain holidays, but consider themselves unhyphenated "American").
In this interpretation, frats aren't a descendant of English public school houses or Oxbridge colleges- top-down organisations which many US universities, including Yale, have tried to replicate with varying degrees of success. For instance, while at Yale, as well as being a member of Skull and Bones (a weird Yale-specific secret society) and Delta Kappa Epsilon (a more conventional fraternity) George W. Bush was a member of Davenport College.
Instead, they are bottom-up student organisations more similar to the German-style *Studentenverbindungen* or *Korps* (also present in the Low Countries and AIUI in Scandinavia).
Another example of German influence on US academia, which has spread worldwide, is the importance of the PhD- a degree first granted in Germany, which American universities started awarding when having travelled to Germany to obtain one became an advantage for applicants to American faculty positions. British academia then copied the idea from the US.
Two dozen answers in and it appears nobody has gotten the right answer on tipping yet. It incentivizes attractive, friendly people becoming servers. That's it. That's the whole thing. Especially true when women are serving alcohol to men.
I wouldn't say that's *why* tipping started, since I believe it predates the entry of women into the (respectable) workforce. But I'd certainly say that what you describe is an evolved response, a process of natural selection that generally ends in young thin able-bodied blonde-haired blue-eyed white women who can walk the edge of flirting without stepping over into the danger zone. Or whatever else can extract the most money from the local client base.
That was more answering why tipping exists in America now. As one of the other commenters noted, it has its roots in aristocratic notions of largesse. That would be ancient history without the incentives, though. Also, frankly, without the uniquely American love for having strangers be friendly to the point of flirtatious.
Yeah, I mentioned something like that in a different response, down here:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-280/comment/17245135
It's already got a disagreement, and more would be welcome! :-)
Despite how ugly I often am in the comments section, this is my most American feature in real life.
How can this be the 'right answer'? Every country has servers, and usually friendly, attractive people are hired for the job. The American tipping culture is unique.
The American culture also prizes being friendly to strangers, to the point of behaviors that are bizarre to Europeans. Young Americans who want to sullenly do the bare minimum without making any effort to present themselves well self-select into retail or call centers or whatever. As Melvin pointed out already, the possibility of surprisingly good money motivates prettier people to stick around (and to present themselves as well as possible, with as much friendliness as they can muster). You can only choose to hire from among those who apply, and without the possibility of tips you wouldn't have a large-enough applicant pool here to reject the ugly.
In Australia, any warm body who can carry a plate across a room gets hired to be a waiter/waitress, and they make a consistent $21.38 an hour for it, which is okay for backpackers and students. In the US, tips mean that a really good waiter/waitress can be clearing $500+ a night, making it an an actual viable career path.
I don't think it matters much for waiters anyway. But for bartenders it makes a huge difference, and American bartenders (who are often making a career out of it) are head and shoulders above Australian bartenders (who are whatever randoms showed up at the youth hostel last week and decided to get a Responsible Service of Alcohol licence). An American bartender will make you any cocktail you like, an Australian bartender needs to carefully scrutinise the ingredients of the dozen cocktails on the menu and then figure out where each bottle is.
(1) tipping--others have covered a lot of this, but to you questions about specific circumstances, people in the US feel all of the same confusion about when to tip in edge cases (ie, do i tip if they hand me coffee?). there are many advice columns etc written about whether or not to tip in various circumstances, and it can be a source of social anxiety since other people see you doing it. most places now have a tip screen as part of the checkout where you tap a button to select how much you tip, which annoys many people who feel pressured to tip in situations where they previously would not have. as to why it has survived so long, among the other stated reasons, i think part of it is the uncomfortable fact that some people get off on feeling like they have the power to "punish" people by withholding tips, and just increasing set prices wouldn't satisfy those people as much. (these people may in fact tip most of the time, but they internally enjoy feeling like they could "punish" the server etc if they got bad service and don't want to give that up).
(2) fraternities and sororities--the "rituals" are mostly not that extreme, and probably not notably "pagan." they're the kind of things you would expect young people to come up with if they were getting Really Into a certain club etc--set phrases and responses, rituals with somewhat unusual clothing, etc. hazing varies a lot from instance to instance, both within a fraternity/sorority and between particular chapters of each fraternity/sorority, and in some places is basically nonexistent. the people involved also view the rituals as a bit bizarre and silly but participating in something bizarre and silly is itself an effective bonding technique. there are no ritual sacrifices. the people involved do not particularly believe in the oaths / rituals / secret phrases that do exist, it's just an entertaining thing to do. in general the same way that some of these things increase group cohesion as part of say, religion, it works the same way. they are "tolerated" the same way having whatever other clubs or religions is "tolerated." they are definitely not unanimously respected, there are many people who would judge you as being too much of a sheep etc if they learned you had been a fraternity or sorority member.
(3) big noting--i don't know how harshly australians punish not being humble enough, so i can't really compare if it's better or worse in the US, but certainly people in the US do pay a social price if they're too arrogant. people will judge them for it, criticize them about it later ("wow, that guy was really full of himself" etc etc). so it's definitely not uniformly accepted/encouraged. there are also probably benefits--if you want to be known as the guy to talk to about ______ it's going to take a lot longer if you don't go around telling people how much you know about _____. the US is sort of missing an easy, socially acceptable way to indicate to someone right to their face that you think they're being too arrogant (do other places have this?). most things that you could say you would come across as the rude one for pointing it out.
RE: fraternity rituals -- they're almost all cut and paste out of Masonic rituals.
Does anyone know ALL of ChatGPT? I doubt it. I suspect it is highly hacked together over time, like any large software. In other words, no **one** person knows ChatGPT.
Neural networks don’t work like the kind of code you’re thinking of. Their code is actually quite simple, and you can learn half of it from the videos here: https://www.3blue1brown.com/topics/neural-networks
The part you can’t learn is the training data, and what the code does to the weights of the neural network as it is exposed to the training data. You should watch some of those videos and get a better understanding of why the code is so simple but the weights on the neural network are hard.
Very interesting
Gpt is not a backprop/rnn. And its not "simple".
It is a neural network though, so it makes sense to learn about neural networks first before jumping directly to transformers.
It's true. There is a very large team of people providing the answers to ChatGPT prompts. They are all multilingual subject matter experts working pretty much 24/7, and no single individual on Earth could replace them. Thank you, OpenAI. Thank you.
Your question does not really make sense from a software development perspective.
ChatGPT is not "Large software" in the sense that there's a lot of code. You could probably read through it all in less than a day.
For example, here's an open source implementation of a GPT https://github.com/karpathy/minGPT
It's about two pages of code.
ChatGPT IS large software in the sense that its neural network, created through training, consists of an unfathomable amount of data. But if that's what you're talking about then asking if anyone knows ALL of it is a pretty dumb question
On the one hand, rebuilding GPT2 is a basic exercise that most ML people go through, and I went through just for fun. GPT3 is basically a larger GPT2 with a few more training tricks, and some very capable people work for OpenAI. So I should definitely not answer "no".
On the other hand, if you pour a red liquid and a transparent liquid in a cup and let them start diffusing into each other, with chaotic intricate patterns, do you "know" them? You probably have no idea what's really going on in the cup. So I should definitely not answer "yes".
I guess the correct answer is that both answers were poisoned?
What's the craziest Christ myth out there? I wrote one about how he ended up in Japan, but hearing a lot more now too, from India to Egypt
Does Mormonism count? :P
Without wanting to sound like an edgy 2000s teen, I feel like dying and getting resurrected is a lot crazier than any of these other examples.
Not really. https://www.newsweek.com/man-wakes-morgue-freezer-after-mistakenly-pronounced-dead-1653093
Mistakenly pronounced dead is different though!
Is it? How good was 30 AD at declaring people dead?
You stab them in the side with a spear, then they're dead.
The time-tested "poke them with a stick".
The spear didn't kill him, and wasn't meant to. The spear proved that he was already dead by demonstrating that he no longer bled the way a living person bleeds. ("Blood and water came out", which I take to mean that the blood had begun to separate.)
:)
In "the name of the rose" William mentions a relic in Cologne: "the head of John the baptist as a 12-year-old" (6th day, end of prima)
Don't know about 'craziest', but probably the most consequential was him being the older brother of Hong Xiuquan, who led a rebellion against the Qing dynasty in the mid-19th century that led to 20-30 million deaths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion
Maybe the one about the child Jesus murdering some other children who bullied him, and being beaten by his mother for it.
(He ran across a stream on a sunbeam, they tried to follow him, fell in and drowned)
The gospels don’t mention what Jesus did between the ages of 12 and 29, so there are a lot of stories about that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unknown_years_of_Jesus
Not really a myth, but some have floated the idea that Jesus made it to Tibet, became a Buddhist, then went back to the Middle East.
The story that Joseph of Arimathea, who provided a tomb for Jesus, actually accompanied Jesus to England earlier in his life.
Everything and anything to do with the Holy Prepuce.
My favorite non-canonical legend is the one -- and it's not entirely crazy, I could pick crazier from non-Jesus material, but this one is one of my favorites for some reason -- where, as Peter is fleeing the city of Rome (for he does not wish to be martyred), he sees a vision of Jesus, carrying the cross, walking the other way. "Where are you going, Lord?" he asks (in Latin, "Quo vadis, domine?") and Jesus responds, "I am going to Rome to be crucified again." And this sufficiently shamed Peter into going back and getting martyred like he was supposed to do.
That whole legend is technically not to be found in any of the canonical books, but it was traditionally accepted by the common folk.
The Egypt thing is actually in the bible, so not more mythical than the rest of the bible
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_into_Egypt
Christian missionaries in India make up a lot of stories. They take local Hindu stories, songs, and even temples and recast Jesus as the actual hero or author of them. It is quite bizarre and they look so nuts. They're quite satisfied with the type of converts that this attracts, clearly.
Mahayana Buddhism has done a number of the same things, when it spread out of India.
Yes.
Another interesting phenomenon (not recent) is that they build churches to look like Hindu temples. Some of them used to be temples and were taken over. They have a garlanded Jesus idol flanked by sculptures of peacocks, a "dhvaja sthambam" to hoist a flag, a chariot with an idol of mother Mary in a silk saree that is taken around for processions, decorations in churches with colored powder designs.
It is strange to me. They mainly target the poor, emotionally vulnerable for conversion and I guess this makes conversions easier to persuade. They also pay them cash to convert.
Several converts don't even know the word Hindu. They have a way of worshipping and it sort of continues. Some continue to secretly go to their old temples, although they're told not to if they want the next installment of cash.
Missionaries have bought local politicians to enable benefits for being Christian. Very apparent in certain cities.
Senators Patty Murray and Richard Burr introduced S. 3799 on March 10, 2022. That bill included a number of provisions to address future pandemics; setting up a commission was one of them. The HELP committee voted the bill out of committee on March 15. However, S. 3799 was never voted on by the Senate. Instead, many of it's provisions were rolled into the 2023 omnibus bill (H.R. 2617) and the commission provisions were not included in that. Part of the reason is that Biden didn't push for a commission, and Schumer's priority was to get as much of Biden's agenda through Congress as he could.
The closest thing to a commission that we ended up with was the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, whose final report is titled Preparing for and Preventing the Next Public Health Emergency: Lessons Learned from the Coronavirus Crisis.
A dozen or so, including some from the SSC days. All of them were basically cocktail parties for nerds, usually without the cocktails because nerds. So, we mingled, snacked, and talked. About basically everything of remotely nerdish interest - the history and politics of the Ottoman Empire, deciphering the North Korean nuclear arms program, frontiers in medical science, interesting fantasy novels, whatever. There's usually a fair bit of AI talk, because rationalist-adjacent, but not overwhelming. They typically last 4-8 hours. I've enjoyed all of them, will go to others in the future, and recommend it to anyone here who thinks what I've just described is for them.
I think that covers all your questions; do you have any new ones?
ETA: Typically 10-30 people, but there are a few bigger ones (especially if Scott is attending). Almost always breaks up into small groups, people shifting between groups.
1, great, ~15, talked to people and ate/drank, what you would expect, 4-5 hours until the last people left, yes, sure if that is something that interests you
I attended many meetups in Vienna, there are typically 10-30 people.
A typical schedule was: a round of introductions, 1-3 presentations on various topics, then unstructured talking. After the official end of meetup (i.e. after 2 or 3 hours), local people walk together in the city, going to some restaurant or for an ice cream, and disperse in the late evening.
Topics are: anything interesting that someone proposes and other attendees approve. (Now I wish I had made notes, so that I could give you examples.) About half of the attendees have a STEM background, so some topics are technical, but some are not.
I definitely recommend trying, but the experience will probably differ a lot between cities.
Been to 1, it was fun. There were maybe 20-30 people at peak, we stood around and chatted and snacked, it lasted maybe 3 hours. There were 3 or 4 circles of conversation going at once. Some conversations I recall I was in were about international politics regarding China and Taiwan, favorite SSC/ACX posts, favorite web fiction, and programming interviews. There were lots of other conversations, too, and people would disengage and move to new ones as they wanted, like a reputation market for topics. :-) I plan to go again, and would recommend it.
Been to a decent number. The smallest was 5 people, the largest was 20ish.
They're fun. Just sat around and talked about random nerdy stuff like education systems and the path to power for dictators. Typically they went for a couple of hours.
Yes, I recommend it.
I find this happens a lot more to me if I am very tired, so I tend to think it has to do with the "not conscious" explanation.
Like I can have the most boring stretch of road in the world, but if I am fully awake I never "zone out" or "lose time". I might get super focused on what is going on in my head and lose track of the road and its stimulae (and thus not remember them), but that is a different thing.
The actual experience of "browning out" and forgetting/not remembering/experiencing streches of times is always accompanied by drowsiness, even when there is not actual "drowsing" involved.
I would agree with the "limited processing power leads to no memory" theory based on my own experiences with practical shooting.
When I first started in the game there would be times my first sight picture would be coming together on the first target and then... "if you are finished, unload and show clear" with a lingering feeling of euphoria. During that memory gap I would have been running through a obstacle course and putting shots on targets while avoiding the "no-shoot" ones. And doing all of that without breaking any of the numerous safety rules associated with the sport.
As I became more experienced, those memory gaps have become much smaller and less frequent.
Just guessing here. I think the proximate reason is "short-term memory didn't copy to long-term memory", but of course the question is why, and what else was different.
I think a possible test would be to design various activities and repeat each of them ad nauseam, to see which kinds of activities are prone to "switching to autopilot and forgetting" and which are not. But there is always the possibility that you simply did not do the activity for long enough, or not monotonously enough.
If we once remembered something but then forgot it, does that mean we retroactively weren't conscious then?
I mostly just assume that whatever happened, I remembered while I was doing it, but then I forgot it much more rapidly than I forgot, say, what exactly I was doing last Friday at 5 pm. But then, I'm used to having an idiosyncratic memory, whereas many people seem to think their memory is a lot better than I think mine is.
I personally still don't understand why countries can't just coordinate to amend treaties to allow disposal in subduction zones.
Among the many poorly calibrated reactions society has, the response to nuclear materials is fairly explanatory. Civilization went through an extended period thinking nuclear devices would literally end humanity; it's natural, even beneficial, that this would leave scars. It's not realistic to expect those wounds to precisely trace the shape of actual risks, and given technical literacy of the general population, nor would it have been a great idea to try.
It’s totally bizarre and irrational and drives me nuts. You could get all the nuclear waste in the country, but in in a big pile out in the open in the middle of Nevada, and no one would be the wiser. It would hurt nothing. You don’t even need to bury it or mark it.
The thing about heavy metal runoff is most of it has already escaped into the environment. They are not generally in single centralized places that stay put. They're scattered far and wide through our cities and infrastructure. The exposure risk is from a million batteries in a vast array of electronics, it's in broken appliances chucked into landfills.
(Point of order, we do not make -new- heavy metals except via fusion processes. All those heavy metals in use we have -extracted- from ore forms.)
The deep burial process makes more sense for things like Agent Orange stockpiles or level 4 Biohazard research labs.
The biggest underground storage cite for dangerous waste in the world is in anti-nuclear germany of all places. There's more dangerous (non-nuclear) waste stored there than high level nuclear waste exists on the planet, at much lower standards of safety than demanded for nuclear waste. No one cares, which clearly shows the fear of nuclear waste is purely ideological.
And interestingly the fear comes exclusively from the people telling us humanity will literally go extinct if we don't immediately stop all carbon emissions. If they really believed that, you'd think they'd be willing to tolerate a little radiation thousands of feet underground, but no, apparently the only solution they're open to is the one where they seize total control of the economy and we all become communists. Funny how that works out.
To them, it would be a moral atrocity if we could solve climate change that easily, with a simple technological solution like nuclear power or geoengineering. What they want is a "reckoning" with the supposed evils of capitalism and the effect humans have on the environment - they despise humans and the audacity they have to build homes, grow crops, exchange goods and services that improve their lives, and support their families, prioritizing them over the inanimate rock that we live on, or the trees in a rainforest thousands of miles away, or one of the 600 endangered frog species that might go extinct.
At their core, they hate humanity.
While I agree with nearly everything you wrote I'm not sure if I'm as confident as you that they actually hate humanity or just have an idealistic utopia in their head that they wish for that is entirely nonsensical and they would rather see the world die before they see their (impossible) utopia not come to fruiton.
Why not both? :)
When I was a kid worried about the aftermath of nuclear war, I read that uranium had a half-life of 4.5 billion years, and imagined that this meant an area subjected to radiation would be deadly essentially forever; I completely spaced on the realization that the longer the half-life, the *less* dangerous it was.
I think that the proposed plan for nuclear waste security, including the whole "this is not a place of honour" razzamatazz, is stupid.
Do we honestly believe our future descendants *wouldn't* pillage such a place? Do any "this place is cursed, leave it be!!!" warnings deter us today from going "oh goody, if they put up *this* much security, it *must* be valuable!" and getting out the crowbars?
Even when the pharaohs had been freshly interred, tomb raiders and thieves were cracking open the burial places no matter how many "curse of the Pharaohs" had been invoked.
The more mysterious we make the site sound, the greater incentive our descendants - archaeologists and thieves alike - will have to start digging around. Forget all the high-falutin' prose, just mark it as "This is a rubbish dump and if you dig around you'll get sick and likely die".
IIRC, the original document did mention the possibility that the warnings might inadvertently attract people, and proposed ways to mitigate that: not using design elements common to monuments and temples, not using valuable materials in its construction, not having an obvious entrance to the waste cell itself, etc. Basically, make it look like a marker rather than the sort of place Indiana Jones would try to loot.
Also, the waste casks were supposed to be buried beneath concrete and rubble, so a future Indiana Jones would need a bit more than a crowbar to get close. The real fear is that people living in the area might dig wells or tunnels.
Lastly, the famous "this is not a place of honor" message was not actually the proposed wording, but rather a description of what they wanted the wording to convey. The actual wording is apparently still under development.
Edit: Also, the trouble with just writing "This is a rubbish dump" is that people in the future won't necessarily speak the same language, so you need to make sure a translation error doesn't change it into "This is the hill of the forbidden" or something else that sounds cool and Pharaonic.
IIRC, the idea was to not use words at all, because future peoples might not be able to read our writing at all. The idea was to use pictures to get the point across.
I don't know if you live in the US, but if so, you are.
The best known "hostile architecture" stuff, including the place of honor business, comes from Sandia National Laboratory.
And yeah, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what language, materials, or design concepts you use. Anything that marks a place out as different or unique will bring people flocking. Even if you manage to perfectly convey the message "there is poison here that will kill if disturbed", someone's going to want to look into it.
Today's archaeologists spend a lot of time digging through ancient dumps, even without the hope of finding hypertech.
Oxyrhynchus!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyrhynchus
Clearly, if we want to save our remote descendants, we must instead urge them to kill all the archaeologists!
reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
"On September 16, Alves succeeded in puncturing the capsule's aperture window with a screwdriver, allowing him to see a deep blue light coming from the tiny opening he had created.[1] He inserted the screwdriver and successfully scooped out some of the glowing substance. Thinking it was perhaps a type of gunpowder, he tried to light it, but the powder would not ignite."
Between this and the second Demon Core criticality accident, I think it's time for a general policy of keeping screwdrivers a safe distance from nuclear materials.
Everything you said plus:
We know what happens if a stone age tribe chances upon radioactive materials, because we have been a stone age tribe ourselves. they will:
* Paint their teeth with radium
* Take pictures of their skeletons
* Play around with the shiny blue ball
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll
After the incidents, the tribe elders will meet, decide that “this place not be of honor” and transmit the knowledge.
The obvious solution to high-level nuclear waste is to place it in hundred yard deep capped holes under rock about to be pushed into a subduction zone.
I can see that it may be easier said than done in practice, as most such sites are at the bottom of deep oceans. But surely one could send down a submersible to blast the holes, then a second submersible with crates of the waste suspended on cables beneath it to lower into the holes, and finally an underwater bulldozer to cover them. Once the initial technical problems were solved, and the outlay invested, it seems quite a reasonable solution provided the waste crates remained sealed until the holes containing them had been safely subducted, never to be seen again for a few hundred million years!
Edit: How well could pouring concrete work at an ocean depth of almost 40,000 feet? If the right mix could be used, and would last, then that would literally be the icing on the cake and the holes need not even be all that deep.
From what I understand, part of the problem is transportation. The default of "store it in barrels onsite" has the big advantage that nobody needs to worry about how to get it safely from the source to the repository. :-/ Otherwise I rather like the idea of sticking it in a rocket and launching it into the sun.
That is a huge waste of money for no reason. The stuff simply isn’t that dangerous.
Just chuck it in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom. I hear those are really secure.
Or Joe Biden's garage.
Depends on a specific disorder.
If you have a disorder which is like "for biological reasons, this person occasionally becomes violent and starts attacking everyone", how can a society deal with it? Medicate, kill, throw in prison... or maybe give a role of a warrior, or a gladiator. Or maybe the person is skilled enough to become the boss. What else? Actually, I don't think that a warrior who gets a fit of violence outside of a combat, and attacks his comrades, would be tolerated for long.
If the disorder is more like "this person is incapable of handling the stress caused by our civilization", then yeah, a different environment might solve the problem.
My harmful ADHD symptoms disappeared at the end of each day when I had an internship that required 5 or 6 straight hours of moderate exercise. In a nomadic hunter-gatherer culture I would probably only experience hyperfixations as a result of my neurodivergence.
Plus, there is every likelihood that your hyperfixations would be actively useful in a hunter-gatherer culture. In that scenario there can be no irrelevancies because the surrounding environment and the welfare of the group are so tightly enmeshed.
Knowing through long observation that those little bugs behave ~this~ way rather than ~that~ way in advance of bad weather may well become a vital advance warning mechanism that aids in the survival of the group. (That's not even a fanciful example - less than 100 years ago the behaviour of ants and the way they were building their mounds was a useful indicator of the likely intensity of coming rainfall.)
Hyperfixation and the ability to spot (and infer from) minor variation is an incredibly useful ability when working/living in the natural environment.
I don't think we are deliberately pathologising people at present - I think it is mostly inadvertent. Not that it's much consolation to the individuals concerned, of course.
Current western lifestyles favour personalities that are high on tolerance and conscientiousness and low on neuroticism. Other personality types and behaviours have been favoured in other times and cultures.
That's the thing about humanity - we need the behavioural divergences we display, especially when considering the broad span of human history, but we don't need all of them at any one given time.
With reference to diagnosable disorders, I suspect that they are on a spectrum of usefulness and while some - probably many - are beneficial in the right context, there is a smaller subset that, on the whole, are unfavourable to both the individual and society.
Unfortunately some pathologies are probably just bugs, and not misunderstood features.
I don't think society does much restricting and social control of people who have what's labelled abnormal psychology. Society's restrictions are mostly against behavior that harm speople or property or make life unpleasant, and I think those behaviors are likelier to be a product of learned subgroup norms, poverty, desperation, anger, etc. than the result of tendencies that can be labelled with a psychiatric diagnosis. If anything, the problem is that many who qualify for a psych diagnosis and are in fact suffering -- from depression, anxiety attacks, addiction, etc. -- cannot find halfway decent treatment.
Perhaps neurodivergent people could thrive in different circumstances but perhaps not. Some minds really are inferior, not useful, broken, to a small or large degree.
I'd say we are widening that window incrementally, but it's not like it should (or could) be arbitrarily inclusive
I don't think society exerts any control to speak of over people who are neurodivergent in the sense of having what's usually called Asperger's syndrome -- do you? I suppose those kids are likelier to get things like social skills classes in school, but calling that control really is a stretch.
Yes, I understand what you're saying. Maybe there are other differences like Asperger's that go unrecognized, and so nobody takes into account that the person is wired differently and you need to talk to them in a slightly different way, accommodate to some differences if you hire them to work for you, etc. And then they develop some diagnosable thing like depression or panic attacks because the live in a world that isn't making any room for their differences.
I am sure there is some of that. I think there are probably settings in which lots of kinds of differences are noticed and accommodated. My guess is that it's small, close-knit communities where people understand and trust each other, and consider anyone born into a family there a member of the community, no matter what they are like. Like maybe the Amish are like that now. In the past, there were probably more settings like that, back in the era where more people were religious, and felt connected by their religion and went to the same church. Or whatever. Or maybe just when there were more small towns.
Anyhow, I think in a setting like that everyone would get it that the kid we would diagnose as Aspie was sensitive & quirky and not very sociable and did not like change, and that would not be called Aspie but just be accepted as his personality. Maybe he'd end up as the postman, always doing his route the same way, and everybody would give him a friendly hello when he brought their mail but understand he did not like to stop and chat. And somebody bipolar might be thought of as high strung, and people would understand that sometimes she just got all wound up, and various friends of the family would help calm her down and keep an eye on her during those periods. And somebody who might have had a schizophrenic break at age 19 might not have have had one in a community like that, because people would instinctively have recognized the ways he was sensitive, and prone to getting freaked out by things, and would have accommodated to that.
So I think some of what you're picking up is just the lonely crowd quality of modern life. Most of us are not in tight-knit communities, because not many exist. And so we have less shared info about other people, and also much less sense of obligation to look after some of them and make room for their quirks. I really do not know what to do about it. I know of some people with unusual wiring who have become very involved in a small community and felt very helped. Some Buddhists sanghas are like that, some community theater groups.
I don't know how many cases of depression or whatnot would be averted if people with unusual sensitivities got more accommodation. I don't think there would be NO cases, though. Some people do seem to be born with wiring that doesn't just make them a bit different, but makes them prone to rage, despair, terror etc.
There's a documentary series called Seven up, where a Brit. film maker followed 20 or so kids from different backgrounds, interviewing them and filming them every 7 years starting when they were age 7. So there's like a 14-up, when they're all 14, a 21 -up, etc. So there's this one kid who at age 7 seems fine, at age 14 is full of excitement and plans, then when you see him at age 21 something has gone wrong. Nothing bad had happened to him, as I remember, he's just lost lost his energy, his capacity for enjoyment, his sociability, and become odd. (I think he was someone who might have had a schizophrenic break at that age. He didn't, but a milder version of the same change came over him, just a bunch of what's called negative symptoms: loss of enthusiasm, poverty of thought, etc.) Dropped out school, was living alone not doing much. So you keep seeing him every 7 years and for the next few episodes nothing much changes. He's supporting himself somehow, but very withdrawn and sort of blank and discouraged. Then maybe at around 49-Up he's much better. Says he's gotten involved with a local theater group, and somehow that made a change in him. I don't think he was acting in plays, maybe doing something like stage managing. Anyhow, he *stayed OK* after that, and also stayed involved with the theater group. That's a really striking example of someone being healed by involvement in a close-knit group who accepts him. Whole series is really good to watch.
Optimal? How would I really know? Seems it could go either way.. there are there are benefits to inclusivity (less people discarded, more perspectives for ideas and art) and downsides as well (less predictable/uniform genpop, failure modes that spiral out of control like depression and mania).
And an individual level I think it's not obvious whether being more or less neurological is good for a person, on the margin.
And of course this is flattening a high dimensional space into 1d which is kinda dumb to begin with
As someone who has family members with bipolar, the idea that society would somehow accommodate un-medicated bipolar people seamlessly seems absurd to me. This is not a disease where you just 'think different', this is a disease where you don't know reality from fantasy, and can act out violently and destructively. You could pessimistically view this as social control, but it is also helping the patient maintain a stable and enjoyable life where they can enjoy prosocial things like having a stable job and loving family. And, well, not killing themselves...
That said, I do think things like ADHD might be better candidates for what you are thinking about, where it's unclear how real the disease even is or if it's just massively overprescribing drugs because we cut recess from school and now the kids are fidgety and won't listen.
So how much of bipolar is environmental vs. genetic and could changing the environment mitigate the disease? There is undeniably a massive genetic component to it, with rather obvious inheritance across generations in my family. My generation has it, my parents generation has it, and my parents-parents generation has it. I won the genetic dice roll and didn't get it. It's also possible for it to not manifest until your mid-twenties: does that mean there was some environmental trigger that started it and if that trigger wasn't pressed it wouldn't have manifested? I guess I can't say for certain, and as with all things it may depend on the individual, but if I had to wager I'd say No with something like 99% certainty.
I think it is more likely you could have a society in which such people don't stand out as much compared to the general populace, as something like a crazed shaman figure in a primitive society, but even in such societies there are only so many slots for such a role, and those roles are notable for their relative social distance from everyday life. Maybe you venerate the crazed shaman, but you don't live with them. When I say crazed though, I really do mean crazy. The two sides of bipolar are manic depressive. Depressive I think is the easiest to understand, you feel sad and depressed, and the depressed side can very easily slip into suicidal territory: more than one of my family members have been successful... Manic I think is the one less relatable to people who aren't around it. When someone is manic, they feel really good, at least at first. But it is often accompanied by things like excessive spending or promiscuity, to me it feels like they have regressed to something like a toddler mentality, but with an adult body and knowledge. That's just the early stages of manic though, when it really gets going, gets serious, then we are in the realm where people used to lock them in closets because they don't know what else to do with them, because they are telling you the king of England is coming to visit and he's going to give them the real truth about UFO's and the Illuminati. In this state it very much feels like your family member is gone and has been replaced by... something else. I'm pretty sure when the bible talks about people being possessed by demons, they mean manic psychosis. You can't reason with them, they are in their own world built on whatever delusion is currently gripping them, they do not and cannot understand what is happening around them. Based on my observations, it reminds me a lot of a dream state, but where you are stuck in it even when you are awake. This state can be harmless in the sense they are just play acting their delusion, but it can also be mercilessly violent both to the person suffering it and those around them if the delusion goes somewhere dark in the human psyche. Considering both my own experiences of family members suffering from it and the historical evidence that this disease has been around for a long long time, it is hard for me to imagine that there is "one simple trick" sitting out there, and if we restructured society to incorporate it, all of the aforementioned problems would just vanish.
I agree, I think there's a huge aspect to our preoccupation with diagnosis and intervention that is about social control, or often it's parental anxiety and schools implementing practices based on parental anxiety, and a lot of that I think traces back to economic anxiety. Kids are expected more than at any other time in history I think to be perfect across all domains, to build resumes starting very early, and not to just naturally manifest strengths and weaknesses, as is normal for us humans. "Weaknesses" are zeroed in on for diagnosis, assessment, and "fixing." The social control part (as opposed to economic anxiety driving more and more pressure on kids as they grow up) comes in maybe at the classroom and workplace management level. We've Taylorized ourselves to death.
Given that mess, I guess I'd speak up a little for the fact that nearly all diagnoses have a necessary criteria that whatever's going on is causing significant distress to the person being diagnosed. We can certainly talk about how much of that distress is social in origin, but I think we probably have to grant that some portion of diagnosis originated in the desire to alleviate suffering, as with the rest of the medical system. The agonizing experience of depression has been with us for a long time and it makes sense to me people might want to cure it just like they'd want to cure tuberculosis and that at least that part of the motivation isn't about social control.
I’m with you. And i think it’s a bad thing how fixated on and optimizing for some narrow definition of normal we are and how much perfectly good human variation we can’t seem to accommodate.
I feel like a good definition for serious mental illness is “that which cannot be accommodated.” Not only by society but by the individual.
If you tell me you have Tourette’s and might yelp and wiggle a bit but are otherwise functional, I’ll probably get used to it, though I may not invite you to the ballet. But if your problem might cause you to injure or traumatize me and others, I can’t reasonably invite you anywhere.
You're not wrong. That is indeed how abnormal psychology works. Variations that might be accepted in one context might not in another.
But there's a functional reason for this. Variations that might be neutral or even adaptive in one context can be maladaptive in another. So it's not as if the degree of social acceptance is completely arbitrary.
A deep point that is often missed is that "socially constructed" does not mean "arbitrary," and in particular, does not mean we have free hand to do just any different thing of our imagining. The constraints of social organization and coordination are real constraints. There are different ways to do things, but not all of them actually work. Many of them turn out to be bad, and that's easy to miss when we sit in an armchair and dream up alternatives in science fiction mode. Just like it's easy to dream up new airplane designs; most of them won't actually fly.
It's easy to observe that much ADHD is not a disorder in any strong sense, but merely a mismatch between many naturally occurring temperaments and certain school or workplace demands. That's true! But that fact in itself doesn't tell us what to do about it. It doesn't tell you whether to take Adderall, whether to change your career path, or what.
Sounds like you might be interested in the writings of Thomas Szasz.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz
Different cultures can do a better or worse job of accommodating variations, so I'm not saying that it's always the same.
But I also think that human variation is wide, and for any given culture, there will be some who don't adapt well to it. Moreover, the things one perceives as negative (nonacceptance, shaming, repression of various forms) often play a load-bearing, functional role, as does the immune system in the body. "Just be nice to everybody" sounds great, but it turns out to have a high cost, e.g., when somebody breaks into your house and robs you at knifepoint.
I think the steady erosion of all kinds of social roles and norms is having knock-on effects. Everyone loves the idea of total freedom, but we’re social animals and probably not wired for too much of that.
I think the modern West is actually the most free and accommodating of variation of any society so far. But even fairly psychologically healthy people seem to struggle with basic life and identity in ways their ancestors didn’t. If you lose the ability to tell others how to live, in some sense you lose the ability to tell *yourself* how to live.
I think it's reasonable to hypothesize that our society has already accumulated high costs, in terms of psychological health, for the degrees of freedom it provides.
We aren't talking about this very much because the part where this was all done secretly by the Chinese military is completely unsubstantiated beyond "trust us; we know a guy who knows all the secrets and he told us this was true", and because every other part of the story is old news that everyone who cares about has discussed to death.
I remember when anyone who called the virus anything with the name "Wuhan" in it, was deemed xenophobic. The Chinese covered up the origins for long enough to let it mostly blow over. The outrage period seems past now and I don't think that many people care? Or they don't want to talk about it because they were the ones who thought the Lab Leak Hypothesis was another bad conspiracy theory. It's frightening to think that China's military was (and most certainly still is) working on developing bioweapons.
"It's frightening to think that China's military was (and most certainly still is) working on developing bioweapons."
Given the (very old!) problems of uncontrolled spread of a bioweapon back to one's own people, I'm reminded of a quote re doomsday weapons from Dr. Strangelove:
"for reasons which at this moment must be all too obvious"
Just because its less extreme now doesn't mean its over, I still saw a "antivaxx need not apply" in a job listing yesterday and moral panics dont necessarily go away.
Nixons "I hate hippies and blacks" attack on drugs is still going strong, even if there isnt cartoons with forced messages anymore. This is effect the social situation for decades.
I assume you mean that discrimination/distain toward people who didn't get the vaccine will possibly continue for a while? It might, but I think only as long as it correlates with seeming "Trumpy". Perhaps if we see a shift in the coming years where vaccine hesitancy correlates with a left-leaning political coalition, it will cease to be a "mark of the ignorant".
I see the origins of the virus as a separate thing from the response to it and the vaccines though. I meant that I don't think many people care about where COVID 19 came from. For some, it's a moot point.
I only got naturally vaccinated against Covid. Read: caught it, and recovered. I have never read anything that convinced me the vaccine is better in any way, except blanket unsupported statements.
I also don't consider it a vaccine if you need a "booster" for it every few months. Coronavirus is one carrier of the common cold. When will we get a cold vaccine?
> When will we get a cold vaccine?
When one becomes practical, I guess? I'd love to have one.
There are I think either 204 or 205 different viruses that are recognized as causing "the common cold", depending on whether you count SARS CoV-2 in that list. We have vaccines for SARS CoV-2, and boosters specifically for the Omicron variant.
We could make vaccines for the other 204 just as easily. But who is up for 204 (or 408) shots, each with a roll on the Random Side Effect table, for even lifetime immunity to colds?
My understanding is we can't get one because too many different organisms can produce a cold, and several of them, including coronaviruses, mutate a lot. So even if you magically got a cold vaccine, it wouldn't work for all colds in a matter of weeks to months.
Thank you for sharing the article. I don't think you are providing the best summary, though.
First of all, I believe the article is from the Sunday Times, not its sister paper, the Times of London. The two are distinct, although under the same ownership.
Also, WIV was not technically studying COVID - COVID is the disease caused by the SARS‑CoV‑2 virus. More accurately, they were studying coronaviruses.
More significantly, the article didn't reveal that WIV was associated with EcoHealth Alliance. That was known years ago.
This is not something that I have followed very closely, but my understanding was that, barring some very large secret advances in genetic engineering, we could be relatively confident that the COVID virus was nearly 100% natural in origin due to showing nearly no signs of genetic engineering (and apparently the most common methods of genetic engineering we currently have leave reliable signs). What we can't be sure of (or at least, do not yet have evidence of), is whether the pandemic started as a result of a lab leak of that natural virus.
In other words: I didn't think anyone serious was arguing that it was a man made or man-modified disease, just that the natural virus was being studied in a lab and may have escaped.
Major edit: that should have said "have _not_ followed closely". I was trying to convey that I am not well informed and accidentally did the opposite.
> genetic engineering
Thats a strawman, gain of function has more in common with dog breeding then anything related to engineering.
>(and apparently the most common methods of genetic engineering we currently have leave reliable signs).
This was true 20 years ago but not today. I can make an arbitrary DNA sequence, with no need to leave any signs of engineering.
I still think it's much more likely to be unintentional than intentional.
Reasoning has a form of "A implies B". You described your "B", what is your "A"?
Anyone can (an ultimately must) pull numbers out of their hat. Probabilistic reasoning is when you do it a few steps ahead, and then calculate the updates.
> Am I approaching this correctly as to assign probabilities?
Yes, the sum of the options is 100%. Not sure what else could be checked here.
Carrier is writing nonsense, you should totally disregard his work. It is only given any attention for ideological reasons.
There is really no evidence for Christ mythicism; the modern debate in the academe is between those who are highly skeptical of the value of the early written evidence, and those who give it more credibility.
Using the same approach we would use to judge the historicity of any other figure in antiquity, there was a Jewish man called Jesus who lived in the first few decades of the first century AD in Judaea, was baptised by John the Baptist, lead some sort of religious movement, and was executed by the Romans by crucifixion. It is likely he came from Nazareth, and was executed by Pontius Pilate circa 32-34 AD. This is all uncontroversial.
Did he believe himself to be the Jewish Messiah, or have x y or z specific teachings ? Was his tomb discovered empty ? This is all controversial and interesting from a historical point of view.
I take the opposite lesson from Carrier's disagreement with mainstream historical methods.
For most of historical knowledge gathering, the only evidence that you have to go on is a copy of a copy of a piece of papyrus that mensions that someone may have done something at a point.
This is very weak evidence, and your corresponding strength of belief should correspondingly be weak – wether your subject matter is the existence of christ, Plato's interlocutor, or the generals that fought at Troy.
This is just a curse of the historical sciences, and in order to work in this field, you just have to accept that your foundations are shaky. Where it becomes interesting is when a fact can be analysed both using a historical approach and an experimental one.
An interesting interaction between historical sciences and “harder” sciences is the story of Fermat's Last Theorem : he stated his Last Theorem in a writen document, and stated that he had the proof, but didn't write it down. A historian with no knowledge of mathematics would have to consider Fermat a reliable witness and consider hist report to be the truth until more evidence is provided. Given what we know of what the proof looks like however, mathematicians believe that Fermat's account was wrong.
The problem, which you hint at by reference to Socrates, is that if you take Carrier's stance, you just can't do ancient history; the standard of attestation he expects is so high (for bare existence, remember, we are not talking about whether the historical Jesus resembles the gospel account, just that there was such a character), that it is hardly fulfilled for any antique person for whom there is no archeological evidence. For example, you could have used the same arguments to suggest that Pontius Pilate did not exist until 1961, when clear archeological evidence in the form of an inscription in his name was found.
The reality is that people who are well attested in the written historical record are sometimes later confirmed by the archeological record. This provides general evidence that people described in the written historical record generally existed, and confirms the utility of our historical methods.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That's why Fermat's claim to have proved his theorem is not credible. The claim that Jesus of Nazareth was a historical person is not extraordinary. There are sources within a human lifetime of his death which attest to his existence. Therefore we should assume that he existed, barring some actual evidence that he didn't.
If you still disagree with me, try to find a corresponding example, where a supposedly historical figure from antiquity was documented by multiple sources within a human lifetime of his death, and yet they demonstrably never existed. The documentation should be similar in scope and extent for that in Jesus to render the comparison valid.
> The documentation should be similar in scope and extent for that in Jesus
You're placing the goalposts so far down the field that I can't follow you. Jesus is the most talked about figure figure in history.
Although if we're limiting ourselves with sources "within a lifetime of his death", then I can probably find a larger sheer quantity of documentation on the Alien of Roswell than on Jesus.
The problem with the "multiple sources within a human lifetime of his death" is that 99% of the scolars who analyse them are believers, and I don't think that any of them would consider interpretations of their evidence that don't fit at least a basic form of belief.
For everything that Carrier can be blamed for, he did the proper rationalist step, which is setting up to disprove the common theory, and see if you can reach a conclusion that is not absurd.
"the current anti-queer satanic panic"
I can't keep up, is this about the Target t-shirts?
It is hard to keep up. I heard about the Bud Light thing here on ACX and the Target kerfuffle on The Onion.
I try to look at RedState dot com to keep tabs on the latest thing conservative America is outraged about.
I can put myself in their place sometimes and understand their point of view but a lot of it seems like a big nothing. I thought liberals were supposed to be the snowflakes.
Everybody is being hysterical about everything, seems like.
Re: Bud Light, there was a dumb joke going around about transgender semen in the beer (don't ask me). I would have thought this was obviously a very stupid joke, but then on Tumblr I saw someone taking it seriously (as in "the rednecks think that this is really happening" and going on to suggest ways of making the rednecks even more agitated by false rumours).
I have to bang my head off the desk when I see the likes of that.
Re: Target and the Satanic T-shirts, nobody in that is helping themselves. Sure, your designer who did the Satanic T-shirts that are not in stock in your stores may think it's cute and edgy to do queer Satanism symbols because they don't believe in any of that shit anyway, but when you have stores in places where there are people who do sincerely believe in God and the Devil, the "edginess" gets lost in translation. The designer is an idiot, the customers are idiots, and the store management are idiots.
(Side-note: I believe in God and the Devil, but I'd roll my eyes at the cutesy queer Satan goat because I'm too old for this kind of edgelord stuff).
EDIT: Re Bud Light, apart from stupid jokes and some hysteria, it's a boycott that is working. And I do think the people engaged in it have a point: the marketing mishap (both the Mulvaney tie-in and the marketing director/brand VP interview) came across as "Stupid Existing Customer Base: We think you are icky and smelly and we want you to stand aside while we go chasing after the cool new set who also think you are icky and smelly. But while we and our new best friends are laughing at you*, keep giving us your money. Now go away and consume, idiots, consume!" I don't think it's unreasonable to go "Okay, you don't want my custom? You don't get my custom" after that.
*And there *were* Twitter Liberals laughing at the rednecks about how this pathetic little 'boycott' would never work and didn't they realise that Budweiser would never have done something like that without engaging in a researched ad campaign that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, how could their ignorant little brains possibly hope to compete with educated progressive big business types?
Yeah, as we all know, it didn't turn out to be the case.
I still don't understand why Mulvaney? Did they really think the 19 year old girls following him for lipstick brands were going to rush out and start glugging down Bud Light?
This guy is irritating, but it's a fairly clear breakdown of what is going on and isn't the extremely right/conservative take that other Youtubers present:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6cAKYPIOhY
We already have the precedent of The People v. Joe Camel, flavored tobacco etc to establish that anything (potentially) popular with the yoots must never be used in advertising adult products.
In fact, since this is AB InBev's *second* offense (RIP Spuds McKenzie) that corporation needs to be seized by the ATF and its assets liquidated.
According to the original video, there's no actual Satanism involved. The conversation goes something like this (paraphrasing from memory, since I watched the video a while ago on mobile):
Conservative troll: LGBTQ is Satanism ! Are you a Satanist ? Huh ? Are you ?
Target employee: Sure, I'm a Satanist, why not. Now, sir, if you'd make your way to the exit...
Conservative troll: You heard her ! We've got an active Satanist here ! A real-life Satanist walking around !!!
I haven't heard anything about sterilizing children - not since e.g. the eugenics movement.
Is this *true*, or has some brilliant person "discovered" that delaying puberty is identical to a complete gender transition, which with current medical tech would make it impossible to sire or conceive a child, short of freezing gametes in advance?
I'm claiming only that AFAIK it's NEVER carried to its end while the trans person is still a child.
The claim you made above wasn't that adults voluntarily sacrificed their potential fertility, but that someone was "sterilizing kids".
I have encountered other people who value other people's potential babies so much that they don't want adults to be allowed make choices that might destroy their fertility. That complaint traditionally showed up as cis-women being denied surgery (typically hysterectomy) that would cure painful conditions that they found debilitating, and had no other way to fix, because they *might* someday regret not being able to have children.
No that is a pretty big deal. I did mention I could put myself in their shoes for some of the stuff.
I’m thinking of Kid Rock executing cases of Bud Light.
What "push transsexuality on Bud Light drinkers" and "push transsexuality on small children" seem to have in common is a desire on the part of well-organised gay+ movements to pick new fights, having already won everything they could reasonably demand.
Gay sex is legal now, gay _marriage_ is legal now, most gay people are happy to be left alone and live their lives, but there's some people out there who still want to pick a fight with the normies so they can claim to be oppressed.
Okay. Thanks. I think I understand it better now.