Is there a protocol for drawing Scott’s attention to commenters that should get a warning or banning? It’s also quite possible I’ve missed a FAQ explaining how to do this or why not to do this.
As of August 1, the sale of marijuana becomes legal in Minnesota. Gummies containing 5 mg of THC have been legal for a little over a year.
There are some inexplicable exceptions to the older law though. For example you can buy a canned soda like beverage with 50 mg total. I think of the poor novice to THC intoxication knocking back two or three cans as if that was comparable to drinking 2 or 3 beers. That’s the sort of dose a cancer patient might use for pain and nausea. You need to build up to that level.
Yikes. Happy trails, my friend. I’ll get back to you in 5 hours or so. You might want to lie down for a while. Give me your car keys and I’ll put on some Allman Brothers.
Fortunately the new law will limits the content of canned beverages to 5mg of THC per can.
Smoking kills you. It increases the rates lung cancer, throat cancer heart attacks and many other diseases. Smoking Cannabis seems to also cause cancer, but probably much less and eating it doesn't seem to cause cancer.
One kills you, the other probably is somewhat unhealthy, but you can just eat it and then it isn't unhealthy.
For me one or two puffs before I play golf or softball are plenty. Enough to put my head entirely in the the game and improve my performance. If I were a glued to my sofa binge watching Netflix sort of guy I’d definitely go with edibles.
Sorry for the naiv question: what is the fastest way to find a concrete comment of mine on this site? It was on use of media compared to use of social media in Germany. I think this should contain enough keywords to narrow it down, but I haven't been successful so far.
Have there been any major, damaging computer hack/virus incidents where the perpetrator gained nothing tangible from the act? I'm looking for an example like the "Bank of America Hack of 1998 where Mike Smith hacked into the database and deleted 1 million accounts, destroying $250 million."
The largest no-gain-only-destruction that comes to mind is the 2017 NotPetya malware which was masquerading as ransomware but really just wiped all the networks it could infect, causing billions of damage to major unrelated companies like Maersk, Merck, Fedex, and many others - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Ukraine_ransomware_attacks .
Maybe Stuxnet? A worm deployed by the US and Israel at the Natanz nuclear facility in Iran which had no other intention other than messing with the machinery to slow the advancement of the iranian nuclear program.
I think they are both playing at the local cinema duplex. It would be an interesting double feature. I suppose I’d want to view Barbie first. Much too difficult to go from interesting and intense biography to over the top silly social commentary.
Playing with Llama 2, poetry completion seems completely flat compared to Llama 1. Coherence is up but I can't get the 13B model to generate anything better than unimaginative doggerel. Maybe my prompts need serious revision, or I need to move to the 70B model, but so far I am disappointed.
"Some of the best responses were Yes, Students At Elite Schools Are Actually Taught Different Things,"
When my kids were applying to colleges, I researched this very carefully. My conclusion is that the "Ivy League" did very little educationally that could not be found at the flagship State Universities, all of which have "honors" programs and all of which have large graduate programs where the same stuff is taught everywhere.
Since their grandmother wanted to pay their tuition, my kids went to a Midwestern Private R1 university that is always ranked with the Ivies. They got good educations, but, in my estimation, if they had gone to State, they would have wound up the same.
My nephew did go to an Ivy. He wanted to go to medical school, so he took all of his required science courses at a state university branch in his hometown so he could be more assured of getting an "A". He went to Medical school and landed a residency in a famous Eastern hospital.
I am firmly in the Bryan Caplan school on this one.
"several people ... pointing out that smart people want to socialize with other smart people."
Yes, but, there are plenty of smart people everywhere. Let us think this through with numbers.
Most IQ scoring systems have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Applying this and a standard deviation calculator, to the approximately 5 million kids who turn 18 every year we find that:
IQ 115 -- 129 (definitely college material) 700,000
IQ 139 --144 (really smart professional/graduate school) 100,000
IQ 145 & up (I don't like the word genius) 7,000
Now the top schools. There are about 70,000 total undergraduates at the Ivy League schools. That would be about 18,000 admissions per year.
A good friend is a senior faculty member at an Ivy. From what he told me, and from what was publicized during the trials leading to the recent SCOTUS decision, Less than half of those admissions are made purely on the basis of academic evidence of intellectual prowess, the rest being, affirmative action, legacy, athletics, etc.
So, I would guess that no more than half of the incoming class of the Ivys consists of IQ >=130. That would be a total of less than 10,000 out of that 100,000. Take another tranche of 10,000 for the the non Ivy top schools (Cal Tech, MIT, Stanford, etc.) and there are still 80,000 really smart kids who have to go to other colleges.
I am willing to wager that any of the top 25 state universities has as many really smart kids (IQ >= 130) as the average Ivy. It is just that they are a smaller percentage of the student bodies at those schools. But, from a social viewpoint, it is not a real problem. They will meet each other in class and find the hang out locations where they can meet more.
Again, Bryan Caplan is right.
My conclusion is that the best reason to want to go to an IVY is the hope of meeting and marrying rich. As my father told me, a man can accumulate more wealth in a 15 minute wedding ceremony that he can in 45 years of honest toil.
John Kerry went to Yale. He was descended from the Forbes family so he never had trouble making rent. He didn’t hit the big time till he married Teresa Heinz though. Yeah, part of *that* Heinz family.
And Teresa Heinz was born Maria Teresa Thierstein Simões-Ferreira in Mozambique, which was then a Portuguese colony.
She became a Heinz by marrying John Heinz who became a US Senator. She inherited his money, or at least control of it, when he died in an airplane crash in 1992.
Kerry had divorced his first wife while she was suffering from a mental health crisis in the 1980s. Teresa's husband John and Kerry were both Senators at the time. Teresa married Kerry in 1995.
Not only did they not meet in college, they were middle aged and previously married when they married.
Hello smart people of ACX. I'm trying to find the word for a concept: when you do something which you're explaining or talking about. Some examples:
"Oh my god, you don't even know what condescending means", said John condescendingly.
"You're great at manipulating those people by flattering them", said Kim to Tom, causing him to beam.
Google thinks I'm looking for simile, metaphor or analogy because I can't search properly. Whichever Chat GPT is free thinks I want "performative speech". Bard thinks "exemplify", which I think is the closest. Any ideas?
My new - used - copy of Metamagical Themas came in today:
Chapter 1 On Self-Referential Sentences
Chapter 2 Self-Referential Sentences: A Follow-Up
Chapter 3 On Viral Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures
I had bought it in hard cover shortly after it came out. First time I ever saw the word ‘meme’. First discussion I ever saw of the Lisp programming language is in there too.
I think Douglas Hofstadter touched on this in Metamagical Themas. I misplaced my original copy but ordered a used volume from a local store a couple days ago. If it arrives in time I’ll checK on it.
Yeah, it's a little different to all the suggestions. I think self demonstrating and self referential are probably "correct", but not quite what I'm looking for. Full marks nonetheless.
Scott spoke some time ago of TPOT, the postrationalists, and how they never gave any philosophical grounding to their stuff. I'm not really a part of that, but I'm quite taken with their idea of the vibes, and I wrote an anti- or meta-philosophical defense of vibes.
A fair amount of science has been done by younger researchers inspired by how badly they think their elders have flubbed it ("it" being whatever aspect of science they are studying). Sometimes it's "That's weird", but sometimes it's "That *can't* be right" instead.
What's TPOT? I keep seeing it more and more, but when I google it the results are either for Battle of Dream Island: The Power of Two or a Python library.
No, the truth is not literally a vibe. But when you are well callibrated on the truth, the vibes you experience can be meaningful signals about the truth.
See the "noticing your confusion" rationality technique.
I think the experience of something being "true" is a conscious mental state, more or less accurately described as a "feeling". I'm not sure that is what the author was referring to, however.
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, CA 92660
Date: Saturday, July 22nd, 2023
Time: 2 PM
This week we are diving into the deep end of the Fermi Paradox, a 70-year-old question that has been surprisingly hard to answer when people have deeply investigated it. The universe seems to be a place that could be filled with intelligent technological life, why haven’t we observed any? There are a lot of simple-sounding solutions to this problem, but upon deep scrutiny, many of them don’t hold up well or rely on factors we just don’t have hard numbers for. Most of the viable solutions point towards disturbing conclusions.
Google Docs
LW/ACX Saturday (7/22/23) The Fermi Paradox (Why don't we see evide...
Re: Aella, but also as a statement of general grumpiness-- what is with the general tendency to treat self-report, self-selected internet polls as meaningful empirical evidence for real-world phenomena?
That goes especially intensely for polls being used to adjudicate culture war questions with strong allegiances among the Very Online, like trans/ poly/ LGBTQ issues. Since it's usually very obvious which answers would yield results that flatter Our Side ("Why, uh, yes, I really definitely *am *a cis woman! And *of course* I get super aroused by the thought of pawing my own boobs while wearing platform heels and a tiny bimbo skirt!"), it seems implausible that those polls wouldn't get a ton of brigading and possibly bot mobilization to give false answers and skew results in the most convenient direction.
Which, frankly, is the type of critique I practically learned to make from reading SSC/ACX. So can anyone explain the serious takes around here?
fwiw, my survey wasn't branded anything about autogynephilia. it was a 300+ question survey, the "are u trans" and the autogynephilia questions were located far away from each other, and tailcalleds questions were pretty neutrally worded. it would have been quite inconvenient for people to brigade the survey, and with the huge amount of questions (and some intentional design) it was pretty easy to remove inconsistent answer sets. the survey on average took 40 minutes to complete, and currently has a sample size of 600,000. actually brigading this in a way that gets past my checks and meaningfully affects the results would take a lot of time and intelligent coordination among a ton of people.
It apparently went viral on ticktock because once you took the survey you were given some kind of person most similar to you. And like 400000 people on ticktock took it. For example if you look at the gender ration its something like 60F 40M. Whereas Aellas normal followers are 85M 15F.
They're provocative, not conclusive. There may be flaws with the method, but it prompts other people to use an equal method to show a different result, and the longer things go without someone producing a different result the more likely the first result is meaningful. Information has to start somewhere.
If literally nobody takes the time or effort to back up a counterargument, then clearly nobody actually gives a crap about the question, and we can assume the thing is right with no ill effects.
"To the first approximation", nobody ran the original surveys and you have nothing to complain about.
>You would have to force most people at gunpoint to get them to express an opinion about, say, the national debt or zoning regulations or the quality of the energy grid,<
I don't think it's respondents we are trying to inspire, its other researchers. Some number of researchers are motivated by "That was an interesting topic, but damn I could it better." Then they do, and we learn something.
Because, as my old dissertation advisor used to say, "Use the data you have, not the data you wish you had." Not only is it impractical to design perfect experiments for every issue society needs to know more about, but there is no perfect research design. They all have advantages and disadvantages with respect to each other. The best designed experiment won't generalize perfectly to the real world, the best survey may produce less valid data, field studies are unreliable. The solution is not to rely on single methodologies, but to gather the widest range of data types possible, and look for the degree of convergence.
This makes sense, but surely there must be some threshold of terrible design below which the data is worse than nothing? We're talking internet self-report polls that are fully open to tampering, being broadcast to culture-war-selected readerships where many have strong motivation and ample means to tamper. That seems more like a rhetorical vehicle for the readership than an experiment of any kind.
Compare:
"Investigation Finds Drew Peterson Was Actually Innocent!" [source: we asked him]
"In Survey of 934 Democrats, 94% Admit to Wetting the Bed Regularly" [source: paper slips left in unattended box outside Republican National Convention]
Do these really update us meaningfully in any direction?
Probably not, though as Yug pointed out, they do serve to create interest, esp. for young people. I teach college level research design (social sciences) and what I would do is use some of these shallow approaches as a learning opportunity (extra credit to anyone who can enumerate the design flaws. Find an article that does it right). Of course, in so far as formal criteria of design quality we have measures of statistical significance and power.
Actually I can't speak to the original survey, since I never saw the link (the first I heard about it was De's post on the 19th). But in general, the proper response to bad stuff is to offer better stuff, not ignore it. The worse it was, the better the learning opportunity.
The replication crisis happened because no one would publish studies that were just replications. Journals would even ask you what unique contribution you were making to the field. Haven't published in a while, so hopefully that has changed somewhat.
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Here's an article in the New York Times about the future of Wikipedia in the age of ChatGPT. In addition to its topic, one notable feature for this forum is that the first source who is discussed in the article is presented only by his Wikipedia username, "Barkeep49", and the author explicitly states that he isn't giving this Wikipedian's real name, to avoid harassment.
I'm not sure if the difference in policy is an official change at the New York Times, or the fact that this article is in next Sunday's "New York Times Magazine" rather than a regular daily edition (there could be separate editorial policies for the two contexts), or just about the different attitude of the two authors. (You can see more of their articles at their respective pages. Note that Gertner has his own site, because his articles are published in different venues, while Metz seems to be just at the NYT. https://jongertner.net/category/article-archive/https://www.nytimes.com/by/cade-metz )
Given that Mr. Metz' view regarding harassment was to lightly laugh off death threats as "something journalists get all the time", it does seem like 'one rule for me and another for thee'.
But this is an old fight by now, and at least we see one writer on technical issues for the NYT isn't a total smeghead.
Yeah the article about SSC seemed particularly dickish. It came down hard on EA and tech bro culture.
But I think the articles cited differ in that Scott’s blog was at the center of the piece. The article about Wikipedia wasn’t really centered on one particular Wiki editor. The anonymity granted to one Wiki editor seemed more like those cases where politicians agree to comment on something if their name is withheld. That sort of thing seems pretty common in journalism.
As I remember it, and I could be wrong, the refusal of anonymity to Scott was (1) harassment is all part of it, dude (2) people can find out your name anyway (3) we don't give anonymity to anyone
Clearly (3) was not correct, since there were examples of people being given anonymity on request.
If "once you're on the Internet anyone can find out who you are and being harassed is all part of the experience and that's no reason to give you anonymity", then being a Wikipedia editor is also a public-facing role with a certain degree of power.
As pointed out, different writer this time so maybe different attitude here.
What works now is simply stopping the page from continuing to load after a few seconds . It might take a couple of tries to get the timing right, but it is pretty easy. Maybe easier on a laptop than mobile.
"I plan to ask Michael to design the questions for the next survey and demonstrate that they get the same result." Doesn't announcing how you'd like your test subjects to respond mean that your results will be invalid?
If we were omniscient, yes, we could determine validity based on such criteria. Since we are not omniscient, rules like "don't tell your subjects how to respond to your survey" determine whether results are valid or not.
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Based on your Substack posts, I suggest Historians Debate the Rise of the West by Jonathan Daly. I learned more about perspectives that I had heard of, and learned of new perspectives entirely.
A more recent alternative that I haven't read is How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin. From the brief review here (https://anowrasteh.substack.com/p/2022-book-roundup), it sounds similar.
I keep recommending this one, but Thomas Cromwell by Diarmuid Macculloch is a great read about how to climb up and then slide back down the greasy pole of Tudor power politics. You'll come away with your own opinion of the guy, whether you think he got what he deserved, or if he really is much misunderstood.
I recently read The Grid, a book about the history of America's electrical grid and how it's changing as we shift to renewable energy. I thought it was a really neat look at a part of the economy I don't usually think about.
https://politikbloggen.wordpress.com/2008/03/09/bevis-bla-valjare-ar-smarta-roda-korkade/ shows that the social democrats and communists (left) were very popular in the lowest-IQ municipalities in Sweden in 2006 while the moderates and liberals (right) were more popular in the highest-IQ municipalities. There have been some changes since then in that a then insignificant low-IQ anti-immigration party now makes up about half of the right wing, while the left wing has gained many new low-IQ supporters through immigration.
Hold on there a second. It's *college educated* people tend to be more left wing (which describes everything from Yellow Dog Democrat to Maoist Marxist-Leninist Stalin Did Nothing Wrong).
Unless you're correlating "college education = smarter", this doesn't necessarily indicate that the right wing is all dum-dum stupids. After all, we have US minorities are solid Democrat voters, and at least one commenter on here claiming that US blacks are 1 SD in IQ below whites, hence they would be amongst the dum-dum stupids but ostensibly, by voting patterns, on the left.
"White voters without college degrees made up a majority (54%) of Republican voters in 2022, compared with 27% of Democratic voters.
Hispanic voters continued to support Democrats, but by a much smaller margin than in 2018
Black voters continued to support Democrats by overwhelming margins".
So if you're going for "smarter", it will be "when talking about white voters/political party affiliations" in the US, whatever about the rest of the West. There's a Labour party tradition in Europe that doesn't have similarity with the American party political landscape, for instance, and they would be working class/lower middle class, less likely to be college educated, and hence not "smarter" in the sense used here, but solidly left.
High IQ people tend to be socially liberal. Some measures of fiscal conservatism also increase with IQ up to a point where the trend reverses. The relationship with fiscal conservatism seems to be much weaker and less robust to controls however.
I did find this study from Brazil where high IQ people tended to be center-right or centrist :
Smarter people tend to be less authoritarian and less likely to vote for extremes. If we use educational attainment as a proxy, in Europe, center-right neoliberal parties and socialist tend to be educated, but communists and the populist right tend to be uneducated :
Overall, smart people can be right wing or left wing, but they tend not to be authoritarian. "My tribe is smarter" seems to be a bad argument to defend one's policy views.
"Data are from the 2012 wave of the American National Election Study (ANES): a biennial/triennial survey concerned with Americans’ political attitudes and behaviours. In the 2012 wave, two separate nationally representative samples were collected, one via face-to-face interviewing, and one via the internet. The present study only utilises the face-to-face sample because one of the cognitive ability measures is not available for the internet sample."
Since I can't see the full study, I go looking for the 2012 ANES study and it tells me that it used educational attainment:
Maybe they did have something to measure "cognitive ability" but to me it looks like they're using educational attainment as a proxy for IQ and again, perhaps that works out - smart people stay in school longer - but it's an assumption, not proven.
Well, it seems more complicated than that. They use three measures: the one you mention (which they say loads on *crystalized* intelligence, i.e. some form of education), one that is subjective, and a PCA analysis of the previous two. (I may have misunderstood something, that was a quick read.)
But what I really wanted to see the most is how they figure who is conservative and who is liberal. Here is an excerpt:
"Twenty-four measures of fiscally conservative
beliefs are utilised. These encompass attitudes toward the size
and scope of government, the free market, business regulation,
income redistribution, government spending, the Affordable
Care Act, the budget deficit, the top rate of income tax, and
affirmative action. Details about each measure can be found in
the survey’s pre-election and post-election questionnaires
(ANES, 2014b, 2014c)."
How do they code belief about the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), I wonder. Unfortunately, I can't get anything out of ANES, 2014b, 2014c (no questions, or dead link).
"How do they code belief about the Affordable Care Act"
Oppose == conservative, same for Affirmative Action.
They actually separate all 24 questions and their respective correlations. The highest correlations (with their measure of intelligence) are "the less government the better" and similar.
Alright, I'm going to attack a core tenet of the Rationalists that has always bugged me. As I understand it, Rationalists claim to be slightly better at avoiding irrational, ingrained-by-evolution biases than the average person (even of the same intelligence). The Overcoming Bias image of Odysseus strapped to the mast to avoid the possibility of succumbing to the Siren's Song emblazons the belief that this is doable.
The belief one can overcome such ingrained biases strikes me as ludicrous. I'm reminded of Carl Jung saying that trying to overcome the unconscious with the conscious is like holding a mirror to the sun.
Whatever deep ingrained biases you have that are shaped by evolution are As Smart As You! Probably smarter. Your *rational* thought is not independent of such overwhelming forces as billions of years of evolution.
If you think you can outsmart your biases through concentrated reason, you will not only lose that battle, but you will have made yourself (forgive my frankness, Scott) stupider by thinking you can.
Have you ever deliberately memorized anything? That's using your conscious mind to train your unconscious mind and overcome your natural billions of years of evolution not caring about, for example, poetry. Millions of people use conscious training procedures to change the way their minds react to input to make them different than they naturally evolved to be. When you train with a firearm, you use your conscious mind to overcome your instinct to flinch and flee and hide at loud sounds. When you train acrobatics you are using your conscious mind to force your unconscious mind to no longer fear being in mid-air upside down. There are zillions of other examples of being able to use your conscious mind combined with deliberate effort to change how you subconsciously process data.
In addition, your biases aren't consciously TRYING to trick you. They're not intelligent. They're subroutines, not entities. You're not trying to outsmart them any more than you're outsmarting your muscles when you train by lifting weights.
I would say it's all about mitigating biases, not expecting to completely overcome them. If we're holding metaphorical mirrors up to the sun, at least we're in the shade. Believing that you're special and less affected by internal biases is itself a bias to be avoided. Rational thought is about being aware that you have biases, both conscious and unconscious, and looking for strategies to help make better decisions anyway. Like how the purpose of a double blind study is to restrict the researcher's access to information so that they don't affect the results with their biases. You can acknowledge that bias exists and employ strategies to lessen its effects.
I'm not arguing that no cognitive biases can be overcome through, say, learning about them. But these tend to be minor biases, the kinds that learning more about economics can correct.
But fundamental biases, such as that will to power dominates will to truth cannot be overcome.
I don't think all rationalists think that you *should* overcome all biases. Many rationalists note that many of these biases do in fact turn one more often towards the truth, particularly in certain contexts. This is why rationalists are so fond of ideas like "Chesterton's fence", which is a defense of something that is usually classified as a fallacy in more classical empiricist contexts.
I do think that there's a deep problem in that rationalists often seem to think that getting one's own beliefs closer to the truth and getting oneself to make more accurate predictions is generally the most important goal. When they discuss Philip Tetlock, they tend to emphasize that foxes are more accurate in their predictions. But I think it's important to note that Tetlock's hedgehogs are often the sources of the methods that foxes then use. There's value for the intellectual ecosystem in containing individuals that aren't themselves accurate and close to the truth.
> The belief one can overcome such ingrained biases strikes me as ludicrous
Belief is not required, it's been studied. Various forms of training have been empirically shown to change one's susceptibility to cognitive biases. The only bias that resists such training is bias blind spot [1], although video game training has seen some success [2].
> Whatever deep ingrained biases you have that are shaped by evolution are As Smart As You! Probably smarter.
Our ability to reason wouldn't be much of evolutionary advantage if it couldn't overcome such mistakes. As such, I don't think your conclusion is as plausible as you seem to think.
"Whatever deep ingrained biases you have that are shaped by evolution are As Smart As You! Probably smarter. Your *rational* thought is not independent of such overwhelming forces as billions of years of evolution."
I've been training judo for years and cross-trained in striking a modest amount. If it's possible to succeed at deliberately modifying the reflexes that evolution equipped me with to cope with falling down and getting punched in the face and adrenaline spikes and dumps - which surely were always under heavy selection pressure - then I'd assume it's possible to overcome hyperbolic discounting or whatever.
This is, of course, even before we get into other stuff like how behaviour is a combination of evolutionary heuristics and environment, the latter of which we're quite capable of modifying; and how evolution doesn't fine-tune, it mostly satisfices.
I think the point is that you have to be aware that you have biases before you can even think of overcoming them, and for Rationalists the lesson to be learned is "You, yes YOU, have biases as much as anyone else, despite your big smart brain, and you have to learn about them, recognise them when they're in operation, and decide how you're going to manage them".
You've made a very broad claim, and it's hard to know where to begin to respond.
I'll start with one example where I think I have made progress. One of the most common mistakes that people make is to underestimate how long a task will take (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy).
I believe that I can learn from my past mistakes and adjust accordingly so that my estimates are more accurate in the future. Are you saying that's not possible? Or is that not the kind of bias you had in mind?
Based on the responses, my claim is to broad. My notion of what Rationalism is may even be entirely wrong.
I suppose I had in mind more fundamental biases, such as believing your own social group is more likely to be correct than other groups. Obviously, I would need more examples than that one to make much of a case. EDIT: I think the most important bias that nobody is exempt from is Nietzsche's critique that the will to truth is secondary to the will to power. You may *think* you are interested in the *truth*, but you are actually, unwittingly, pursuing power while lying to yourself about your motives.
I'm not saying that one can't learn skills or economic concepts or to avoid common fallacies. It never would have occurred to me that learning any of those things were part of Rationalism, since they are things plenty of non-rationalists also learn.
I once had a conversation with a Scientologist who claimed that Scientology was just about improving your life through all sorts of practical methods. Every example he came up with made sense, although there was nothing special about the wisdom he offered; it was the sort of practical wisdom one could find in many self-help books. He didn't want to talk about thetans and audits or anti-pharmacology or anything like that. I'm not trying to compare Rationalism to Scientology -- except for the fact that I assumed Rationalism, like Scientology, has its own special knowledge and techniques. I have assumed it is about much more than the knowledge a regular reader of Marginal Revolution might know.
Is Rationalism just atheism plus what a regular reader of Marginal Revolution might know, or is it a lot more than that? (The capital R makes me assume it is much more.)
Hank, I appreciate the openness of both your critique and your response.
I think you’re onto something here: "I'm not saying that one can't learn skills or economic concepts or to avoid common fallacies. It never would have occurred to me that learning any of those things were part of Rationalism, since they are things plenty of non-rationalists also learn."
It seems like we agree that people can learn to reason more soundly. For me, that’s the core belief at stake here: believing that it’s possible to improve your ability to find out what’s true. At a very general level, I am convinced that the development of the scientific method helped humans reason more soundly. I think we’re still figuring out how to improve our reasoning.
We can agree on that and still criticize the specific Rationalist project consisting of Scott’s blog & readers, lesswrong.com, and folks calling themselves Rationalists. You are correct in thinking that they have their own special knowledge and techniques.
Specifically, I’d start with Bayesian reasoning. Does that give us anything that can help us find out what’s true more often? (See the Laws of Trading book review (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-laws-of-trading) for an example of Bayesian reasoning in the wild, with citations back to lesswrong). If that's been too broadly absorbed by the Marginal Revolution crowd and you want something even more specifically tied to this community, the *Sequences* on lesswrong try to lay out rules for reasoning.
There’s plenty in that project and community to criticize. You can judge whether there’s anything particularly useful there, as well.
Well, I'm not an atheist, but I'm also not particularly attached to the Rationalist label. When other people identify as Rationalist, I tend to assume it's more about participation in the community (e.g., regularly following certain blogs) than about any particular beliefs or concepts.
If there is anything "much more", I never learned it. I do think the ability to reason probabilistically on controversial topics is rare, and Scott does it well, but it's not unique to Rationalists.
> When other people identify as Rationalist, I tend to assume it's more about participation in the community (e.g., regularly following certain blogs) than about any particular beliefs or concepts.
Historically, people who joined the community were recommended to familiarize themselves with its basic beliefs and concepts, i. e. "read the Sequences" (i.e. read the articles that the community originally formed itself around).
Of course, this worked only as long as the people who actually "read the Sequences" were in the majority. Soon there were many people who enjoyed hanging out online with people who "read the Sequences" without wanting to "read the Sequences" themselves. Perhaps we need a new word today for people who actually "read the Sequences"... paleo-Rationalists, maybe?
Yeah, several years ago you could probably have defined a Rationalist as someone who has read the Sequences.
These days, I would say the Sequences were so successful at sparking a movement that they ironically became less important. The same ideas have been spread by many other people (even if the Sequences were where most of them originally learned it).
That's a nice theory, but fails on both theoretical grounds (evolution has very limited information bandwidth and is often optimizing for other stuff) and practice (rationalists aren't perfect but really are noticably better at this stuff when you compare).
The people you describe are outright anti-human. It's true that eliminating capitalism/civilization would "solve" climate change, in the same way that amputating a leg "solves" a broken toe. The way I always put it is "what's the point of eliminating climate change if there's nobody around to feel self-righteous about having done so?"
I would respond by confirming that they are actively proposing the deaths of billions of people and the impoverishment of the rest. I doubt that they see themselves as either dying or losing position and privilege, but that's going to happen too.
Are they aware of that? Are they okay with the generation that actively kills off most of the rest of the world's population? Maybe they think it will happen quietly, where everyone grows old and just doesn't have kids, but that would also be hellish as old people live in horrible conditions and die of preventable conditions while society collapses around them. And, since the majority of people would refuse, would still require something like mass kill squads.
That's for civilization itself. The track record for getting rid of capitalism is better, but not by much. I'd want to see some evidence that alternatives exist and are desirable. What we've seen in practice is countries going to pot while under other economic systems until or unless they start reopening markets and allowing more free trade. I'd be more supportive if there were even one good counterexample to look at. Democrat Socialists in Europe still use capitalism (mostly free markets, open trade, personal wealth accumulation), so that's not an example of "eliminat[ing] capitalism".
If they mean a gradual reduction in the number of babies born and society getting to a new population balance of 500m - 2b over a few hundred years, then maybe that's doable. You would still have civilization and likely still have capitalism. Also good news! That seems to be the long term projection anyway.
>>If they mean a gradual reduction in the number of babies born and society getting to a new population balance of 500m - 2b over a few hundred years, then maybe that's doable. You would still have civilization and likely still have capitalism. Also good news! That seems to be the long term projection anyway.<<
One friend in particular does not mean what you say above, because that is almost exactly my position, and she is not satisfied with my approach.
I have settled on a global population of 1 billion humans as being optimum. Notice that the geometric mean of a range of 500 million to 2 billion is very close to 1 billion.
One billion humans are quite enough persons to continue scientific and technological advances indefinitely. It is also few enough persons to enable nature to thrive indefinitely.
My target date for a global population of 1 billion is the year 2300.
Well, yeah the solution to global warming would be if you killed every single human being off overnight. No more large scale industrialisation or agriculture, eventually over centuries/however longer things would balance out.
But while capitalism is not perfect and we do need a better system, right now it's the one in operation. You can't simply change it wholesale, globally, overnight. Same with civilisation - we can't all live on forty acres and a mule, tempting as the notion is.
So either there is a *drastic* reduction in the human population, or A Miracle Happens, and I'm not expecting AI to be that miracle.
In my experience, the people who want to eliminate "capitalism" usually define it very differently from the people who support it.
For its supporters, a society is capitalist when people are generally free to trade in ways that make everyone better off. And they believe that freedom is the main reason why the average person is much more prosperous now than even kings and queens were a few centuries ago.
For its opponents, capitalism is a pseudo-religion in which the only standard of value for human beings is how much they can produce, as measured in dollars. Anything that isn't bought and paid for (for example, watching a sunset, or hugging a friend) has value only indirectly by increasing productivity.
As you might suspect, I believe we can appreciate capitalism as an economic system without letting it become our religion. With the right policies, we can make capitalism serve people, rather than forcing people to serve capitalism.
Also, as far as I know, countries that have eliminated capitalism have all collapsed within a few years (Venezuela today) or at most decades (the Soviet Union). And yes, that does lower carbon emissions, but it seems like a cure that's worse than the disease.
In the anti-capitalist space, capitalism is anything which is not a socialist utopia. Granting state monopolies to operate businesses in overseas territories? Capitalism. Governments bringing in third party contractors to operate prisons? Capitalism. Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Venezuela? All capitalist. It's a magic word. I've tried to eliminate it from my vocabulary.
Your summary of the two uses of the word capitalism is spot on. It's why for many years now I have banned that word from my spoken and written vocabulary. I say or write "free enterprise" or something similar. "Capitalism", at least in the U.S., has been a useless term since at least when I was in college.
When people use the word "capitalism" in this way it motivates me to quote Vaclav Havel: "Capitalism is a word vulgarized and popularized by Marx." If the word capitalism sounds ugly, it's because it was meant to. Havel goes on to say: "A market economy is as true as the air." He then goes on to explain why he is not a free-market absolutist.
It should be better known that all talk of capitalism is Marxist language. Purging the air of the laws of supply and demand isn't possible. No public policy rids the Earth of the market economy as a fact of human nature.
Sometimes I really wish people would get what they want. I am barely encouraged by the fact that luddites are as old as 1700s, so at least it's not getting worse. Probably.
Also it could be my bubble on SM, but what's with the literal wishing that billionaires would die? Those guys need to live in Romania for 20 years, to thoroughly appreciate being ruled by government paid filthy rich bureaucrats that do an incredibly shitty job, to the point of having negative value. That might reset their idea of "fair wealth".
Right, because it's sociopaths that are responsible for the high energy density of fossil fuels, which makes it indispensable for planes and trucks and extremely desirable for reliable and cheap electricity generation? Did sociopaths also make up the rules of chemistry which say that coal is necessary to make steel at reasonable price, and that everything from plastic to polyester to pesticides are petroleum byproducts? Are sociopaths in positions of power the ones buying cars, flights, and heating?
I think if we eliminated all sociopaths from society, we'd have most of the same problems. Less crime, fewer lawsuits, but the big problems would remain because the vast majority of humans are not sociopaths.
Hey, let's share embarrassing stories of a nerdy adolescence! I'll start:
Near the beginning of Grade 7, Mr Barlow the English teacher had us all submit two topics for short speeches. We would draw two topics at random out of a hat, and give a short talk on whichever of the two topics we chose.
My parents were moderate packrats, and a year earlier I had found a 3-year-old LIFE magazine in a box in the basement, a double issue on the the American city. I was enthralled; the photos, the writing, the futuristic drawings, everything just grabbed my young brain. Besides the mostly optimistic vision of the future, there was a rather Malthusian section about urban sprawl, with the forthcoming megapolises gobbling up arable land, this in a time of exponential population growth.
I was (and remain) a space nerd, so the topics I submitted were:
After The Moon - What's Next For Manned Spaceflight?
and
Urban Sprawl!
*************
The hat was passed around to collect the topics, Mr Barlow mixed them up, and the hat came around again for us to select topics.
Mr Barlow gave us a couple of minutes to check out the topics we'd pulled out of the hat, and then asked if everyone was happy with them.
A tough girl named Lori* raised her hand and said "I got one called Yurbin Sprail, and I don't even know what it is!"
Mr Barlow glowered and asked who had submitted it. I raised my hand. Lori and her peers sneered at me and snickered. Mr Barlow got mad and asked me if this was a joke. I stumbled through a brief explanation, and must have seemed sincere enough that Mr Barlow realized I had submitted the topic in good faith.
I don't remember what topics I had picked from the hat, but no doubt both involved pop music I hadn't heard, sports I didn't know anything about, or TV shows I hadn't seen.
Those who wish they could return to their teen years were better equipped to deal with adolescence than I was, or have shorter memories.
* Lori was part of a gang of girls who smoked, stole from the convenience store across the street, and used a lot of profanity. Our rookie homeroom teacher, Mrs. Lawson, took a leave of absence partway through the year. She was gone for a month or so.
I always dreaded oral presentations - quite justifiably as it turned out. I think there was little understanding of introversion in my day, and if recognized by teachers was seen as a character defect to be remedied.
I once asked a girl out at the place we both worked, and she accepted. The day of she called to say her car broke down and she had to go get it fixed. 30 minutes later I'm driving through town and see her driving her car. We never spoke about it, despite working together after that for a few years.
I wasn't upset, and in retrospect we would never have worked out, but at least use a more convincing lie?
One always hopes there had been some legitimate explanation, like the problem had been a bad ballast resistor, which had been diagnosed in seconds and replaced within 5 minutes. The driver was stressed by the car problem and was not up to anything else that day.
This probably happens more in movies than in real life.
I'm trying to learn more about free banking. To that end I'm reading George Selgin's "The Theory of Free Banking" (1988). I'm not an economist but am an econ-nerd, esp. on monetary policy, and got into Scott Sumner and market monetarism back in the day.
I don't think I quite get it. Selgin says that in the Scottish free banking era, banks were stable keeping only 1-2% of deposits as reserves in specie (I say specie here but it could be a base fiat currency as well), and they typically did not suffer from runs and failures. Why does the existence of private banknotes allow this? Is it because the base money and banknotes are no longer the same? If depositors get skittish and want to pull out in a textbook run scenario (regardless of whether those are actually real), how would the bank not quickly run out of reserves? From a financial stability standpoint, I sort of intuit that with banks printing their own money, the money supply endogenously rises and falls with liquidity demand, and insofar as financial crises are generally caused by a contagious liquidity crisis, self-printing of money would prevent runs and instead allow for private money to simply trade at a discount instead if a bank is insolvent (i.e. similar to how there is no such thing as a run on a stock because the price trades freely). But I'm having trouble putting all the pieces together.
I think I may need a plain English explanation to supplement the more jargony one.
I think a few pieces are missing here. My understanding is, three Scottish banks dominated note issuance. There was a private clearing system that allowed depositors to gain confidence in any bank within the clearing scheme. Initially, these banks held 50% of deposits in reserve, but the success of the scheme increased confidence significantly enough so that withdrawals were seldom enough to warrant just 2-3% reserves.
According to Selgin, banks did initially keep very high reserves, typically 10% but in some cases as high as 61% of deposits, because of "note dueling," a practice whereby rival banks would buy up one another's notes and attempt to bust them by turning them in for redemption. But "[n]ote dueling ceases to be advantageous to any bank as all of them learn how to protect themselves in response to it by holding large reserves." So then eventually you get to the 2ish% of deposits held as reserves. But how is that a stable equilibrium? Any bank with a 2% reserve ratio could be pretty easily busted through note-dueling (or an organic run). I'm still just unclear what's run-resistant about this system. Just thinking out loud, is it because there is ~0 for base money for day-to-day transactions, whereas an artifact of our current system is that Fed cash/deposits are both the base money and a money for everyday exchange? Or is it that equity cushions were just very high so solvency was typically not in doubt?
That's what a clearing system is. It socializes credit risk between counterparties, so if a small bank fails, all clearing members are on the hook for deposits (with the asterisk that it depends how a given clearinghouse is set up).
Ok that makes sense. Reading Kroszner, he also emphasizes the importance of being able to net out one another's notes each week, which relied on market confidence in a particular bank.
Are there any known techniques to improve general memory? I know a bit about the sort of repetition learning and the stuff Gwern has written about, but I more mean memories of experiences. Mine is terrible… it has its pros and cons, like I don’t really get traumatised because I just forget, but I tend to repeat the same mistakes pretty often. My general patterns of experience also seem to get repeated quite a lot.
Our hipoccampal apparatus was built for a few things - navigation/orientation, procedure/process, and narrative.
By leaning into these, you can leverage improved memory.
This is essentially what "memory champions" do by building memory palaces etc.
A good book to start is "moonwalking with einstein"
But actually a really insightful book about how medieval scholars used their memories (at a time when memory was far more important than it is today) that I recommend is "The Book of Memory" by Mary Carruthers.
I'm definitely bad at episodic memory. There are even some cases where there's some activity or event that I thought about for years, and then finally did, and then years later I don't remember that I actually did it, and just remember the fact that I thought about it for years.
I once spent several days trying to figure out a puzzle. One day during work I came up with an approach I hadn't tried before, and when work finally ended I went back to try it... to discover I'd already solved the puzzle previously.
Maybe practicing mindfulness. I've noticed my recollections of events where I'm distracted or off in my own head are less precise than when I'm more present in the moment.
Take notes about what you did during the day, including your state of mind and reasoning behind your decisions. This alone will help your memory since you'll be reviewing it, and it will help you process your decisions and incorporate them into your psyche (which seems like the main thrust of the latter part of your question)
That's an interesting question. I would presume that a lot of the same strategies of conscious elaboration that work for semantic memory might also work for episodic memories, but perhaps not? Perhaps that would only extract semantic elements out of the episodic memory. But much of episodic memory is just post-hoc elaboration based on some core semantic elements anyway, so maybe that's good enough.
Assuming that all of the QAnon predictions/prophecies were accurate (especially the ones that contradict each other), what is the current state of the world?
The problem with this type of question is that I see 4 distinct eras of "what is QAnon".
1) the 4chan hive-mind. "Q" is several of many anonymous 4chan posters. Some of them are shit-posters. But perhaps others are high-ranking CIA agents deliberately leaking certain information in code.
2) the first prophet. Somebody (as Q) gets a bit of popularity and runs with it.
3) the Watkins era. I don't have references on-hand, and I doubt the references are definitive on the point, but in my mind it is clear that the "original" Q was replaced Dread Pirate Roberts style by Jim Watkins (or his son) at some point.
4) the children of a false god. After 2021 January 6, the Watkins voice seems to have disappeared. Now there are dozens of self-appointed successors, none of whom have the original sin of a misleading identity, nor any ability to predict the outcome of secret battles against the Deep State.
The first era would have predictions like "the angry bear will catch its quarry"; too vague to impute anything to the then-future state of the world. As far as the others: I don't know, and don't really want to know.
> perhaps others are high-ranking CIA agents deliberately leaking certain information in code
What is the motive for leaking this way? If you want to leak anon or pseudonymously, you don't need to it in code. If you want to leak in code, you can do so in a more normal medium, such as through a journalist or through regular social media.
If you leak information in a blatant way then there will be a major investigation of the leak, which may result in you winding up in prison. If you leak information in a sufficiently subtle way (so that nobody in your own organisation is even sure that there was a leak) then you can get some of the satisfaction of leaking without so much of the risk.
I'm not saying that this is necessarily what happened. I _am_ saying that if I had access to top-secret information then I might be tempted to leak certain things obliquely on the internet. (Of course this is why I'd never be allowed through the screening process to get top secret clearance...)
...well, I've got a sudden bug and you folks get to hear about it.
Recently watched Paranoia Agent, an anime about a mysterious attacker in which every episode follows a different character up to their run-in with him. Started with Boogiepop Phantom, which has the same style of episodes following the various people that run afoul of her, but Boogiepop Phantom is not holding up to the latest viewing. Looking for other stories that have episodes revolving around minor characters who are themselves revolving around a central character. Google mentions another anime called Hell Girl, but it seems to not be available in the US.
Does anyone know any other stories in that style? Any medium.
I'd highly recommend The Carpet Makers, by Andreas Eschbach. It's perhaps not quite what you're looking for, but it may be close enough. It's a series of stories that follows ~one character from each into the next. A single character is explained throughout the series, in part through character interactions. Even outside of a closeness to your interests, it's quite good; I recommend it either way.
It's not quite the same thing, but you might enjoy Durarara!! It's a... actually, it's quite hard to explain. It's set in a nearly-real Ikebukuro, has a broad cast and a variety of character arcs. It's told from the perspective of 11 of the main characters, but their individual stories work together really well, in a chaotic sort of way.
I realise I haven't described the story itself, mainly because there are so many moving parts it's hard to summarise in anything less than an essay. The Wikipedia one-line description is "Durarara!! tells the story of a dullahan working as an underworld courier in Ikebukuro, an internet-based anonymous gang called the Dollars, and the chaos that unfolds around the most dangerous people in Ikebukuro.", and that's probably better than I could do. Worth checking out.
The anime / manga / light novel series Restaurant to Another World definitely fits into this category, as each chapter / episode centers on one of the Restaurant's patrons (and the menu item they are associated with), rather than the un-named chef / owner. I find it an enjoyable exercise in worldbuilding as we eventually can piece together the history of not just the Restaurant but of the fantasy world itself.
Re: the recurring subject of Bay Area "NIMBY" vs "YIMBY" wars:
Can anyone offer links demonstrating the reality of the much-discussed shortage of "affordable" (for people employed on location) housing there? A cursory look at various ads (browsed SF and even Palo Alto, arbitrarily close to various TBTF corp. headquarters) seems to show plenty of 1- to 3-room flats going for 3 to 5 thou. $ / mo; perhaps tight quarters, but not out of reach cost-wise for even an entry-level programmer. And not particularly more expensive than e.g. the habitable part of Washington DC.
I'm not sure you're comparing equivalent geographies. The first site I found that lists average one-bedroom rates in various cities lists these as the top 10 cities:
It's clear that San Francisco and New York are on a higher level than these others. You might have drawn a tighter definition of "habitable part" for DC than for SF.
DC has an entire quarter where most of the people tuned in here would likely not want to walk, much less live. It pulls down the cost average. (Granted, I have not lived in SF, and do not know whether it has a "red zone", and if so, what portion of the city it occupies and what effect it has on the cost average there. Reliable info on this subject seems to be rather hard to come by.)
It varies. 19th century is pretty old. Miami has a lot of new housing, and so do some neighborhoods in various cities (I think Seattle and jersey city do pretty well), but overall there is an issue where new housing is disproportionately sfh.
You can get a rough idea of how "affordable" housing is by looking at the portion of incomes dedicated to housing. In general you want this to be below 30%. The St Louis branch of the federal reserve publishes data on this exact figure: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DP04ACS006075
Strangely, the number drops from a high of 43% in 2012 to 33% in 2022. Definitely against my expectations.
This goes way up over that same period. Basically, poorer people moved out of the city until they could afford it (this is termed "drive til you qualify").
I don't have time to look at data for the larger region - thats way outside of the scope of a comment here. But there is lots of published data out there from the census and the fed!
Everyone is talking about a housing crisis in all the "superstar cities". The usual list of "superstar cities" is Boston, New York, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, with a possible second tier of Portland, Denver, Austin, Miami, and parts of Chicago.
Sometimes people single out San Francisco and New York as being on even a higher plane than the other "superstar cities".
Sometimes people make "superstar city" a global list and add Vancouver, Toronto, London, Sydney, Paris, with a larger second tier.
I realize I forgot to include San Diego. (I left out San Jose because I was thinking of the whole Bay Area as one unit, rather than two. But I do intend to not include Baltimore with Washington, and to not include the Inland Empire with Los Angeles.)
My suspicion is that it isn't "everyone" who talks about "housing crisis", but for the most part 1) the economically marginal "chattering class" who would like to live in the expensive city but cannot afford it, and 2) wealthy demagogues, who easily afford to live in the city, but would like to score political points with (1); and lastly, 3) people who (through a thought process which remains inscrutable to me) became convinced that an infinite number of people could comfortably live in a finite space.
I'm not sure who you mean by (3). It's possible you just mean people who think that Paris and Tokyo exist, and that the American superstar cities could be just as comfortable as those cities at the same density as those cities, which is far less than infinite. The fact that you described it as "infinite" and "inscrutable" suggests that you're more interested in sneering than in trying to understand the actual claims.
From reading various "YIMBY" discussions, it is not clear to me that the proponents of that POV have a termination condition (e.g. "as dense as Tokyo, please, and after that no more.") So, per my reading, they do in fact advocate an "infinite" density.
The question of whether e.g. the Japanese in fact are better behaved in various ways and thereby pack more comfortably than Americans is orthogonal, but IMHO also relevant.
Thats a great question! Part of it, I think, is media incentives to write about things happening SF/silicon valley/tech which push them to use SF/ bay area as the example of things if they can (kind of like how its always Harvard used as the example of "elite" schools where there are ~20 others in the US you could use).
But I do think there is some differences between DC/SF that have reduced the idea that DC is in a crisis (vs just very expensive):
Geography - SF/Bay Area is somewhat isolated because of the bay, ocean, and mountains. DC bleeds into MD and VA (even West Va or PA!) so it "feels" like there is more space to build (regardless of if that is true).
Economy - SF definitely has the more dynamic and fast growing economy because of Tech, but DC has the steady, high floor of the US Government and all the related industries. These provide slow but steady growth in incomes.
Housing policies - This is a huge topic, so we'll just look at surface level for now. Over the past 5 years, DC has build much more housing:
I am just eye balling these figures and this is just "units" which could mean a lot of different types of housing, but it's illustrative. This data is for the regional MSA/metro area so it helps correct for people moving to suburbs or close by cities (not perfect of course).
Of course the divisor also matters. Over 5 years this is the population changes:
DC: 6.2 million -> 6.3 million
SF: 4.7 million -> just under 4.6 million (there was a loss of about 200k since COVID)
So falling population should put downward pressure on housing prices, but thats not what we see. My theory is that there is built up demand so even with people leaving and a small amount of housing being added SF still hasn't worked through the back log. On top of that the new people coming in may be wealthier than the people leaving so while demand is static, the amount people can pay is going up. While in DC the people leaving and the people coming are probably making a similar amount because the jobs are similar (mostly turn over in Fed Gov and related industries which have pretty fixed pay structures).
There is also the wild card that DC spans three states and many counties that have very different political postures. Even though Northern VA is just as liberal as the MD suburbs, the next further layer of VA suburbs have been very open to building - places like Manassas, Gainesville, Herndon, etc. All the counties/cities in SF are still in CA which has state level policies that push up the price of new housing units.
Finally, in my view, the term "crisis" usually comes from the media through existing residents who feel priced out or housing groups that are politically aligned to dislike rising housing prices. I live in a small city that has had a big run up in housing prices and rents recently. Many people claim there is a crisis here, and there definitely could/should be more housing, but I and other new residents don't have trouble affording things, in fact its much cheaper from where I moved from. There is a lot of relativity here.
[Edited since I see that OP actually lives in DC, so I guess we disagree less on what the housing dynamics in the DMV area are and more on whether they rise to the level of "housing crisis."
I once heard a parable where an airline decides to poll arriving passengers about how full they felt their plane was. The poll finds 97% reporting that their plane was unbearably full. Clearly the airline needs more flights?
Then someone takes a closer look at the poll answers, and finds that two passengers reported being next to an empty seat, and one -- that the whole plane was empty except for him and the pilots. So was there a crowding problem? Turns out, two 100-seat planes had landed that day: one with 99 passengers and the other with only 1. The planes were, by any reasonable measure, half full.
Are you suggesting that we can bring housing costs down if we forcibly relocate homeowners from desirable neighborhoods into less desirable ones? I mean, that might do the trick but I don't know if NIMBY's would appreciate that approach.
On a more serious note, an actual airline in that situation (assuming you are equating neighborhoods to flights) would ask why one flight is slammed and the other empty (one is at 2PM, the other at 2AM, for example). Saying "oh there were always plenty of seats on the other one, quit whining and fly at 2AM" would be bad business.
That was my first thought as well. This is looking at housing costs only through the lens of highly paid individuals who voluntarily chose to live there specifically for high paying jobs. Service workers, teachers, cops, EMTs, retail workers - all need somewhere to live. A teacher making $80,000 (a great living in most the country) couldn't afford to live anywhere near SF. Which means all of these other types of people either leave the city (bad for them and the city) or live somewhere else and reduce their quality of life spending hours a day commuting to work. Or I guess living with a bunch of roommates even if you would prefer to have a family and more than a single bedroom to yourself.
Why? If you earn (say) $100K after tax, and you pay $48K in rent, and you still have $52K a year left over to buy groceries etc, then that's plenty of groceries etc. You're no worse off than the dude in Cleveland who earns $70K after tax and pays $18K in rent.
Your place of residence is by far the most important good or service that you consume, it's not surprising that it's going to wind up soaking up a huge fraction of your income.
Other things are more expensive too though (not that the overall point changes that much), but not evenly so it's interesting how that changes consumption patterns. It's mostly labor cost that changes (the workers have to live somewhere soon), so the relative expense of things changes in more or less direct proportion to the local amount of labor (and to a lesser degree land/floor space) involved. Things / goods / travel are cheap; restaurants, child care, haircuts, entertainment venues are more expensive. Living in one such place now, I can more or less ignore the price of any 'thing' I buy, but I eat out way less then I used to and we cut the kids hair at home. Eating out at the same rate as I did in the past would make a noticeable dent in the budget.
Just how much should they be willing to spend on rent without blanching? It seems that currently they are well within the industry-standard "below 30% of wage".
From reading kilometres of discussion about the "Bay Area housing crisis", I expected to find five-figure studio rents advertised in the proximity of the TBTF corps. But when actually looking at the advertised prices, I found roughly the same range as in the DC region where I live. Which suggests that what the Bay Area has (vs. e.g. DC) is simply an overpopulation of marginal "gold rush" types who insist on living there while waiting to win the VC lottery, rather than a housing crisis per se.
> It seems that currently they are well within the industry-standard "below 30% of wage".
I think that's a silly rule of thumb that no longer makes sense in HCOL locations anyway. Housing costs vary wildly between different locations in the US, but the price of almost everything else is roughly the same.
You shouldn't be asking yourself "is this rent less than 30% of my income", you should be asking "Do I have enough money left over for everything else once taxes and rent are paid?" and "am I willing to trade off a slightly worse living situation to have slightly more money left over?"
Haven't been here in a couple years, is there still culture war thread here or is that totally gone now?
I don't remember the exact rules, but there is:
a specialized culture war subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/
and there is no longer a distinction between CW and CW-free open threads.
Is there a protocol for drawing Scott’s attention to commenters that should get a warning or banning? It’s also quite possible I’ve missed a FAQ explaining how to do this or why not to do this.
There's three dots under each comment next to Reply, the 'Report' option is there. That's how to draw Scott's attention to them.
Thanks! I thought the report button sent the comment to Substack corporate.
As of August 1, the sale of marijuana becomes legal in Minnesota. Gummies containing 5 mg of THC have been legal for a little over a year.
There are some inexplicable exceptions to the older law though. For example you can buy a canned soda like beverage with 50 mg total. I think of the poor novice to THC intoxication knocking back two or three cans as if that was comparable to drinking 2 or 3 beers. That’s the sort of dose a cancer patient might use for pain and nausea. You need to build up to that level.
Yikes. Happy trails, my friend. I’ll get back to you in 5 hours or so. You might want to lie down for a while. Give me your car keys and I’ll put on some Allman Brothers.
Fortunately the new law will limits the content of canned beverages to 5mg of THC per can.
Always with the negative waves, trebuchet. Always with the negative waves.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=54oqYyy_r_Q
Smoking kills you. It increases the rates lung cancer, throat cancer heart attacks and many other diseases. Smoking Cannabis seems to also cause cancer, but probably much less and eating it doesn't seem to cause cancer.
One kills you, the other probably is somewhat unhealthy, but you can just eat it and then it isn't unhealthy.
For me one or two puffs before I play golf or softball are plenty. Enough to put my head entirely in the the game and improve my performance. If I were a glued to my sofa binge watching Netflix sort of guy I’d definitely go with edibles.
My advice MI, smile and shrug it off. It’s just not that important.
This might help.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0AEj3LA2vSo
Sorry for the naiv question: what is the fastest way to find a concrete comment of mine on this site? It was on use of media compared to use of social media in Germany. I think this should contain enough keywords to narrow it down, but I haven't been successful so far.
Text search on a particular domain name
https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-search-specific-domain-in-google-3481807
PS: you had also told me, that I needed to refresh the page if I wanted to see an edited comment. That's very useful!
Regardless, I'm a bit surprised substack hasn't fixed that by now. Maybe it's more complicated than I'm aware of.
Ha, I found it, thanks!!
Have there been any major, damaging computer hack/virus incidents where the perpetrator gained nothing tangible from the act? I'm looking for an example like the "Bank of America Hack of 1998 where Mike Smith hacked into the database and deleted 1 million accounts, destroying $250 million."
The largest no-gain-only-destruction that comes to mind is the 2017 NotPetya malware which was masquerading as ransomware but really just wiped all the networks it could infect, causing billions of damage to major unrelated companies like Maersk, Merck, Fedex, and many others - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Ukraine_ransomware_attacks .
For pure shenanigans-gone-unexpectedly-successful, the most famous IMHO are the 2000 ILoveYou virus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILOVEYOU , 1998 Chernobyl virus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIH_(computer_virus) and the original 1988 Morris worm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm .
Maybe Stuxnet? A worm deployed by the US and Israel at the Natanz nuclear facility in Iran which had no other intention other than messing with the machinery to slow the advancement of the iranian nuclear program.
yes, exactly
So Barbie is Eve in the garden of Eden.
Wish we had a kabbalistic review of that movie (and a kaballistic one of Oppenheimer too)
I think they are both playing at the local cinema duplex. It would be an interesting double feature. I suppose I’d want to view Barbie first. Much too difficult to go from interesting and intense biography to over the top silly social commentary.
Playing with Llama 2, poetry completion seems completely flat compared to Llama 1. Coherence is up but I can't get the 13B model to generate anything better than unimaginative doggerel. Maybe my prompts need serious revision, or I need to move to the 70B model, but so far I am disappointed.
Makes sense. The 1-l lama, he's a priest, the 2-l llama, he's a beast.
A 3-L lama is a big fire in South Boston. ;-)
"Some of the best responses were Yes, Students At Elite Schools Are Actually Taught Different Things,"
When my kids were applying to colleges, I researched this very carefully. My conclusion is that the "Ivy League" did very little educationally that could not be found at the flagship State Universities, all of which have "honors" programs and all of which have large graduate programs where the same stuff is taught everywhere.
Since their grandmother wanted to pay their tuition, my kids went to a Midwestern Private R1 university that is always ranked with the Ivies. They got good educations, but, in my estimation, if they had gone to State, they would have wound up the same.
My nephew did go to an Ivy. He wanted to go to medical school, so he took all of his required science courses at a state university branch in his hometown so he could be more assured of getting an "A". He went to Medical school and landed a residency in a famous Eastern hospital.
I am firmly in the Bryan Caplan school on this one.
"several people ... pointing out that smart people want to socialize with other smart people."
Yes, but, there are plenty of smart people everywhere. Let us think this through with numbers.
Most IQ scoring systems have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Applying this and a standard deviation calculator, to the approximately 5 million kids who turn 18 every year we find that:
IQ 115 -- 129 (definitely college material) 700,000
IQ 139 --144 (really smart professional/graduate school) 100,000
IQ 145 & up (I don't like the word genius) 7,000
Now the top schools. There are about 70,000 total undergraduates at the Ivy League schools. That would be about 18,000 admissions per year.
A good friend is a senior faculty member at an Ivy. From what he told me, and from what was publicized during the trials leading to the recent SCOTUS decision, Less than half of those admissions are made purely on the basis of academic evidence of intellectual prowess, the rest being, affirmative action, legacy, athletics, etc.
So, I would guess that no more than half of the incoming class of the Ivys consists of IQ >=130. That would be a total of less than 10,000 out of that 100,000. Take another tranche of 10,000 for the the non Ivy top schools (Cal Tech, MIT, Stanford, etc.) and there are still 80,000 really smart kids who have to go to other colleges.
I am willing to wager that any of the top 25 state universities has as many really smart kids (IQ >= 130) as the average Ivy. It is just that they are a smaller percentage of the student bodies at those schools. But, from a social viewpoint, it is not a real problem. They will meet each other in class and find the hang out locations where they can meet more.
Again, Bryan Caplan is right.
My conclusion is that the best reason to want to go to an IVY is the hope of meeting and marrying rich. As my father told me, a man can accumulate more wealth in a 15 minute wedding ceremony that he can in 45 years of honest toil.
John Kerry went to Yale. He was descended from the Forbes family so he never had trouble making rent. He didn’t hit the big time till he married Teresa Heinz though. Yeah, part of *that* Heinz family.
Before meeting Teresa Heinz, John Kerry had:
-- served in Viet Nam and been awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts.
-- served for several years as First Assistant District Attorney for Middlesex County, MA.
-- been elected Lt. Governor of Massachusetts.
-- been elected to the U.S. Senate.
And after meeting but before marrying Mrs. Heinz, Kerry was easily re-elected to the Senate.
Seems at least big-time-adjacent....
I was responding to
> As my father told me, a man can accumulate more wealth in a 15 minute wedding ceremony that he can in 45 years of honest toil.
Yep he was an accomplished man. Big time was meant financially. He himself said he married up when he wed Teresa Heinz.
And Teresa Heinz was born Maria Teresa Thierstein Simões-Ferreira in Mozambique, which was then a Portuguese colony.
She became a Heinz by marrying John Heinz who became a US Senator. She inherited his money, or at least control of it, when he died in an airplane crash in 1992.
Kerry had divorced his first wife while she was suffering from a mental health crisis in the 1980s. Teresa's husband John and Kerry were both Senators at the time. Teresa married Kerry in 1995.
Not only did they not meet in college, they were middle aged and previously married when they married.
See, you don't have to go to an Ivy.
Hello smart people of ACX. I'm trying to find the word for a concept: when you do something which you're explaining or talking about. Some examples:
"Oh my god, you don't even know what condescending means", said John condescendingly.
"You're great at manipulating those people by flattering them", said Kim to Tom, causing him to beam.
Google thinks I'm looking for simile, metaphor or analogy because I can't search properly. Whichever Chat GPT is free thinks I want "performative speech". Bard thinks "exemplify", which I think is the closest. Any ideas?
My new - used - copy of Metamagical Themas came in today:
Chapter 1 On Self-Referential Sentences
Chapter 2 Self-Referential Sentences: A Follow-Up
Chapter 3 On Viral Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures
I had bought it in hard cover shortly after it came out. First time I ever saw the word ‘meme’. First discussion I ever saw of the Lisp programming language is in there too.
This makes me want to move rereading GEB up the priority list. Let me know if you find anything relevant to my query in there.
Yes. Chapter XVI of GEB:
Self-Ref and Self-Rep
I think Douglas Hofstadter touched on this in Metamagical Themas. I misplaced my original copy but ordered a used volume from a local store a couple days ago. If it arrives in time I’ll checK on it.
Tom Swiftie?
No, those are puns, this is a little different.
Yeah, it's a little different to all the suggestions. I think self demonstrating and self referential are probably "correct", but not quite what I'm looking for. Full marks nonetheless.
Self-demonstrating?
good candidate
Self-referential? Self-implicating?
also a good candidate
Scott spoke some time ago of TPOT, the postrationalists, and how they never gave any philosophical grounding to their stuff. I'm not really a part of that, but I'm quite taken with their idea of the vibes, and I wrote an anti- or meta-philosophical defense of vibes.
The Truth Is Literally A Vibe
https://squarecircle.substack.com/p/the-truth-is-literally-a-vibe
A fair amount of science has been done by younger researchers inspired by how badly they think their elders have flubbed it ("it" being whatever aspect of science they are studying). Sometimes it's "That's weird", but sometimes it's "That *can't* be right" instead.
What's TPOT? I keep seeing it more and more, but when I google it the results are either for Battle of Dream Island: The Power of Two or a Python library.
This Part Of Twitter (i.e. the postrat community), presumably.
No, the truth is not literally a vibe. But when you are well callibrated on the truth, the vibes you experience can be meaningful signals about the truth.
See the "noticing your confusion" rationality technique.
I think the experience of something being "true" is a conscious mental state, more or less accurately described as a "feeling". I'm not sure that is what the author was referring to, however.
LW/ACX Saturday (7/22/23) The Fermi Paradox (Why don't we see evidence of alien life)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RirLmvmvVxzVS_m1zQ2jz2W1fgPyeHGAZ964CciCizU/edit?usp=sharing
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 35th 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, July 22nd, 2023
Time: 2 PM
This week we are diving into the deep end of the Fermi Paradox, a 70-year-old question that has been surprisingly hard to answer when people have deeply investigated it. The universe seems to be a place that could be filled with intelligent technological life, why haven’t we observed any? There are a lot of simple-sounding solutions to this problem, but upon deep scrutiny, many of them don’t hold up well or rely on factors we just don’t have hard numbers for. Most of the viable solutions point towards disturbing conclusions.
Google Docs
LW/ACX Saturday (7/22/23) The Fermi Paradox (Why don't we see evide...
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RirLmvmvVxzVS_m1zQ2jz2W1fgPyeHGAZ964CciCizU/edit?usp=sharing Hello Folks! We are excited to announce the 35th Orange County ACX/LW meetup, happening this Saturday and most Saturdays thereafter. Host: Michael Michalchik Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com (Fo...
[3:55 PM]
Follow the link for the full message
Re: Aella, but also as a statement of general grumpiness-- what is with the general tendency to treat self-report, self-selected internet polls as meaningful empirical evidence for real-world phenomena?
That goes especially intensely for polls being used to adjudicate culture war questions with strong allegiances among the Very Online, like trans/ poly/ LGBTQ issues. Since it's usually very obvious which answers would yield results that flatter Our Side ("Why, uh, yes, I really definitely *am *a cis woman! And *of course* I get super aroused by the thought of pawing my own boobs while wearing platform heels and a tiny bimbo skirt!"), it seems implausible that those polls wouldn't get a ton of brigading and possibly bot mobilization to give false answers and skew results in the most convenient direction.
Which, frankly, is the type of critique I practically learned to make from reading SSC/ACX. So can anyone explain the serious takes around here?
fwiw, my survey wasn't branded anything about autogynephilia. it was a 300+ question survey, the "are u trans" and the autogynephilia questions were located far away from each other, and tailcalleds questions were pretty neutrally worded. it would have been quite inconvenient for people to brigade the survey, and with the huge amount of questions (and some intentional design) it was pretty easy to remove inconsistent answer sets. the survey on average took 40 minutes to complete, and currently has a sample size of 600,000. actually brigading this in a way that gets past my checks and meaningfully affects the results would take a lot of time and intelligent coordination among a ton of people.
It apparently went viral on ticktock because once you took the survey you were given some kind of person most similar to you. And like 400000 people on ticktock took it. For example if you look at the gender ration its something like 60F 40M. Whereas Aellas normal followers are 85M 15F.
have you seen "real science" polls?
They're provocative, not conclusive. There may be flaws with the method, but it prompts other people to use an equal method to show a different result, and the longer things go without someone producing a different result the more likely the first result is meaningful. Information has to start somewhere.
If literally nobody takes the time or effort to back up a counterargument, then clearly nobody actually gives a crap about the question, and we can assume the thing is right with no ill effects.
In practice this will never happen.
>To a first approximation, nobody<
"To the first approximation", nobody ran the original surveys and you have nothing to complain about.
>You would have to force most people at gunpoint to get them to express an opinion about, say, the national debt or zoning regulations or the quality of the energy grid,<
A quick Google search gives first-page reports on the Energy Grid (https://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/MITEI-The-Future-of-the-Electric-Grid.pdf), the National Debt (https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/gov-finances.html) and Zoning Regulations (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1080/00420989120080681). People think they matter, therefore they put in work.
I don't think it's respondents we are trying to inspire, its other researchers. Some number of researchers are motivated by "That was an interesting topic, but damn I could it better." Then they do, and we learn something.
Because, as my old dissertation advisor used to say, "Use the data you have, not the data you wish you had." Not only is it impractical to design perfect experiments for every issue society needs to know more about, but there is no perfect research design. They all have advantages and disadvantages with respect to each other. The best designed experiment won't generalize perfectly to the real world, the best survey may produce less valid data, field studies are unreliable. The solution is not to rely on single methodologies, but to gather the widest range of data types possible, and look for the degree of convergence.
This makes sense, but surely there must be some threshold of terrible design below which the data is worse than nothing? We're talking internet self-report polls that are fully open to tampering, being broadcast to culture-war-selected readerships where many have strong motivation and ample means to tamper. That seems more like a rhetorical vehicle for the readership than an experiment of any kind.
Compare:
"Investigation Finds Drew Peterson Was Actually Innocent!" [source: we asked him]
"In Survey of 934 Democrats, 94% Admit to Wetting the Bed Regularly" [source: paper slips left in unattended box outside Republican National Convention]
Do these really update us meaningfully in any direction?
Probably not, though as Yug pointed out, they do serve to create interest, esp. for young people. I teach college level research design (social sciences) and what I would do is use some of these shallow approaches as a learning opportunity (extra credit to anyone who can enumerate the design flaws. Find an article that does it right). Of course, in so far as formal criteria of design quality we have measures of statistical significance and power.
Actually I can't speak to the original survey, since I never saw the link (the first I heard about it was De's post on the 19th). But in general, the proper response to bad stuff is to offer better stuff, not ignore it. The worse it was, the better the learning opportunity.
The replication crisis happened because no one would publish studies that were just replications. Journals would even ask you what unique contribution you were making to the field. Haven't published in a while, so hopefully that has changed somewhat.
dating ad: 26 year old woman looking for a slightly older male long-term partner
— am an Australian English/history teacher who enjoys reading (most on Bloom's Western Canon or any text written before the 20th century, miscellaneous articles on anything technical, a lot on Gutenberg and Archive.org, sometimes ArXiv too), classifying transport models, exercising, and travelling. wants children (have worked with them and teenagers for almost a decade, and I think they are the best)
— looking for somebody who is also averse to TikTok and Netflix and other numbing agents. somebody who enjoys reading widely (interest in history, tech, military affairs, and transport e.g. aircraft or trains would be excellent), explaining technically dense processes, travelling, a night out dancing, and Norm Macdonald. strong preference for engineers
lilyreadsyouremail @ gmail . com
It might help to know where you are geographically. Being a young woman, I don't think the lack of offers will be the problem.
What is the most negative Rick Steves travel video review?
The following is a proof-of-concept: a quote-supported opinion generated by a PIM App.
Looking for feedback on both content and format. Thanks!
A Balanced Sense of Self
https://1drv.ms/b/s!Av3DdRPJXjSngTvaHplrV0yFbGlz?e=gs89Fi
[MS OneDrive, recommend downloading]
Dear ACX readers,
I've just written a post on how to foster Antifragility - I think you will all enjoy it:
https://open.substack.com/pub/zantafakari/p/17-be-antifragile-by-expanding-awareness?r=p7wqp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Please leave feedback so that I can improve. And if you like my writing - share, like and subscribe!
Here's an article in the New York Times about the future of Wikipedia in the age of ChatGPT. In addition to its topic, one notable feature for this forum is that the first source who is discussed in the article is presented only by his Wikipedia username, "Barkeep49", and the author explicitly states that he isn't giving this Wikipedian's real name, to avoid harassment.
Notably, this article is by Jon Gertner, rather than Cade Metz, who is the one that wrote the article that gave Scott's legal last name (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-codex-rationalists.html).
I'm not sure if the difference in policy is an official change at the New York Times, or the fact that this article is in next Sunday's "New York Times Magazine" rather than a regular daily edition (there could be separate editorial policies for the two contexts), or just about the different attitude of the two authors. (You can see more of their articles at their respective pages. Note that Gertner has his own site, because his articles are published in different venues, while Metz seems to be just at the NYT. https://jongertner.net/category/article-archive/ https://www.nytimes.com/by/cade-metz )
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/18/magazine/wikipedia-ai-chatgpt.html
Article about Wikipedia
https://archive.ph/5YPKS
Article about SCC, Rationalist, EA and Scott
https://archive.ph/AkQtu
I dunno. Barkeep49 a Wikipedia editor being given anonymity in order to speak freely seems to fall into a different category.
Given that Mr. Metz' view regarding harassment was to lightly laugh off death threats as "something journalists get all the time", it does seem like 'one rule for me and another for thee'.
But this is an old fight by now, and at least we see one writer on technical issues for the NYT isn't a total smeghead.
Yeah the article about SSC seemed particularly dickish. It came down hard on EA and tech bro culture.
But I think the articles cited differ in that Scott’s blog was at the center of the piece. The article about Wikipedia wasn’t really centered on one particular Wiki editor. The anonymity granted to one Wiki editor seemed more like those cases where politicians agree to comment on something if their name is withheld. That sort of thing seems pretty common in journalism.
As I remember it, and I could be wrong, the refusal of anonymity to Scott was (1) harassment is all part of it, dude (2) people can find out your name anyway (3) we don't give anonymity to anyone
Clearly (3) was not correct, since there were examples of people being given anonymity on request.
If "once you're on the Internet anyone can find out who you are and being harassed is all part of the experience and that's no reason to give you anonymity", then being a Wikipedia editor is also a public-facing role with a certain degree of power.
As pointed out, different writer this time so maybe different attitude here.
paywalled.
You used to be able to get past the nytimes paywall by googling the url - I don’t know if that still works.
That worked, thanks.
Or just disable Javascript before loading the page.
What works now is simply stopping the page from continuing to load after a few seconds . It might take a couple of tries to get the timing right, but it is pretty easy. Maybe easier on a laptop than mobile.
"I plan to ask Michael to design the questions for the next survey and demonstrate that they get the same result." Doesn't announcing how you'd like your test subjects to respond mean that your results will be invalid?
Only if everyone remembers this thread in six months.
If we were omniscient, yes, we could determine validity based on such criteria. Since we are not omniscient, rules like "don't tell your subjects how to respond to your survey" determine whether results are valid or not.
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I'm running low on non-fiction books I'm interested in reading, wondering if anyone has any suggestions.
The Wager by David Grann
Based on your Substack posts, I suggest Historians Debate the Rise of the West by Jonathan Daly. I learned more about perspectives that I had heard of, and learned of new perspectives entirely.
A more recent alternative that I haven't read is How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin. From the brief review here (https://anowrasteh.substack.com/p/2022-book-roundup), it sounds similar.
Orwell, Down & Out in Paris & London?
I keep recommending this one, but Thomas Cromwell by Diarmuid Macculloch is a great read about how to climb up and then slide back down the greasy pole of Tudor power politics. You'll come away with your own opinion of the guy, whether you think he got what he deserved, or if he really is much misunderstood.
I recently read The Grid, a book about the history of America's electrical grid and how it's changing as we shift to renewable energy. I thought it was a really neat look at a part of the economy I don't usually think about.
1491 by Charles Mann
Anything by Oliver Sacks or Michael Pollan.
The Discarded Image by C. S. Lewis is good if you have any interest in Medieval history.
I note a few favorites here, https://eighteenthelephant.com/2022/12/31/the-year-in-books-2022-in-which-i-discovered-audiobooks/ , with links to earlier years' lists. (And a brief more recent list at https://eighteenthelephant.com/2023/06/22/reading-like-its-1965/). Highlights:
Based on your ACX review of Bullshit Jobs, I actually strongly recommend "Debt" by David Graeber too.
Also you've probably read them, but the Incerto series by Nassim Taleb is my favourite. I've summarised them here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/zantafakari/p/17-be-antifragile-by-expanding-awareness?r=p7wqp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Judging by a quick look at your subscription list, you might like Joel Mokry’s “The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress”.
The Song of the Cell, Siddhartha Mukherjee
River of the Gods, Candice Millard
The Buried, Peter Hessler
Those are some recent non-fiction books I enjoyed.
I'm writing a novel that involves these subjects:
* US & China economic war
* VLSI chips & EVs
* Global warming
* Pedophilia & hebephilia
* Daoism, Tantra, & Kundalini
* Industrial espionage
* China's aggressive goals
This is my reading list. Titles have been abreviated, but a search should bring up the book.
***** NONFICTION *****
AGE-GAP (9)
At Home in the World: Maynard ✓D
Autobio: Will & Ariel Durant ✓B
Autobio–Transition: Will Durant ✓K
Excavation: Wendy Ortiz ✓A✓
Guide to Older Men: Mitchell++ ✓N
Lolita–Covers: Bertram++ ✓U
Places Left Unfilled: Cauley ✓U
Refuge Jae-In Doe: Chu ✓P
Tiger Tiger: Margaux Fragoso ✓A
CHINA CULTURE (10)
Bribery & Corruption: Shaomin Li ✓YS
China Exposed: Che Chibala ✓U
China the Novel: Rutherfurd ✓A
China's New Youth: Alec Ash ✓D
Culture US, China, Japan: Conrad ✓K
Good Earth: Pearl Buck ✓U
Munk Debate on China: Kissinger ✓Y
Red Roulette: Desmond Shum ✓DA
River Town: Peter Hessler ✓YS
Socialism Is Great: Lijia ✓B ***
CONFUCIANISM (6)
Confucian Feminism: Jing Yin ✓D
Confucianism Feminism: Batista ✓I
Confucianism & Rivals: Giles ✓D
Confucianism--Intro: Berthrong++ ✓D
Confucius vs China Women: Orozco ✓P
Gender in Confucian Phil: Rosenlee ✓I
DAOISM, TANTRA & YOGA (32)
Autobiography of Yogi: Yogananda ✓K
Beyond Yoga: Brunton $10 K
Dào Dé Jīng: Lǎo Zǐ ✓U
Each Journey: Ming-dao Deng ✓D
Ecstatic Sex--Tantra: Sarita++ ✓D
Female Sexual Energy: Chia ✓A
Heart of Tantric Sex: Richardson ✓A
Kama Sutra Sex Guide: Mandala ✓U
Kriya Yoga: Hariharananda ✓U
Kundalini Awakening: Silva ✓D
Kundalini--Radical Freedom: Edwards ✓D
Kundalini--Sex Energy: Paramananda ✓D
Kundalini Tantra: Saraswati ✓K
Lao Tzu–Way of Nature: Schade ✓Y
Monk Who Sold Ferrari: Sharma ✓D
My Big Toe Awakening: Campbell ✓D
Sitting with Lao-Tzu: Beaulac ✓K
Tantra Supreme: Osho ✓K
Tantric Sex: Avaya Alorveda ✓DA
Tao New Interpretation: Kazden ✓U
Tao of Intimacy & Ecstasy: Towler ✓D
Tao of Love and Sex: Jolan Chang $6 B
Tao of Physics: Fritjof Capra ✓Y
Tao of Pooh: Benjamin Hoff ✓A
Tao of Tantric Yoga: ✓D
Tao Tantric Arts Women: de Vos ✓D
Taoist Master: Ming-dao Deng ✓B
Taoists, Tantrists, & Sex: Benson ✓D
Teachings Of White Tigress: Hsi Lai ✓D
Turning Point: Fritjof Capra ✓U
Urban Tantra: Carrellas ✓DA
Wisdom of the Overself: Brunton ✓D
DEMOCRACY & HUMAN RIGHTS (11)
China 2021: Human Rights Watch ✓I
China 2022: Amnesty International ✓I
China 2022: Human Rights Watch ✓I
China March to Freedom: Zhou ✓RS
China Surveillance: Strittmatter ✓D
Human Rights in China: Eva Pils ✓D
Rise & Fall of Third Reich: Shirer ✓U
Saving Democracy: O'Leary ✓B
Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt ✓U
We the People: Chemerinsky ✓B
Will China Democritize: Nathan ✓D
ECONOMIC WAR (23)
Beijing Bans Micron: Sharma ✓Y
Bully of Asia: Mosher ✓D
China Inc: Ted Fishman ✓B
China & Foreign Tech: Hannas ++ ✓T
China Unlawful Activities: Cassara ✓U
Chip War: Chris Miller ✓KA
Contest for Supremacy: Friedberg ✓YS
Destined for War: Allison ✓DA
End of US World Order: Acharya ✓D
Final Struggle: Ian Easton ✓D
Getting China Wrong: Friedberg $15 A
Has China Won?: Mahbubani ✓YSR
Hidden Hand: Hamilton++ ✓D
Hundred-Year Marathon: Pillsbury ✓U
Long Game: Rush Doshi ✓YS
Microchip War (USA vs China): Harris ✓Y
New China Playbook: Keyu Jin ✓D
Overreach--China: Susan Shirk ✓DA
Pandemonium: Curtis Ellis ✓D
Rise of China, Inc: Shaomin Li ✓YS
Stealth War: Robert Spalding ✓D
U.S.-China Tech War: Chang ✓U
World According to China: Economy ✓DA
ELECTRIC VEHICLES (6)
Autonomous Vehicles: Raymond ✓U
BYD Auto History: Various ✓I
Electric Vehicle Design: Tharakan ✓I
Eleven Unique EV Features: Hagon ✓I
Future Of Electric Vehicles: Ayodele ✓U
Top 10 EV Technologies: Swallow ✓M
ESPIONAGE (21)
Agent Zigzag: Ben Macintyre ✓D
Chinese Espionage: Mattis++ ✓D
Chinese Espionage: Hannas $21 B
Chinese Espionage: Hannas ✓PR
Chinese Intelligence: Eftimiades ✓D
Chinese Spies: Roger Faligot ✓YS
CIA Case Officers: Millick ✓US
Confessions Of Cia Spy: Warmka ✓U
Farewell: Kostin & Reynaud ✓D
Hidden Hand: Clive Hamilton ✓D
Honey Trapped: Schlesinger ✓D
How to Become a Spy: Knight ✓U
How to Become a Spy: SOE ✓D
Sandworm: Andy Greenberg ✓PX
Spies and Lies: Alex Joske ✓S $9 K
Spies, Lies, Algorithms: Zegart ✓DA
Spies Who Changed History: West ✓D
Spy and the Traitor: Macintyre ✓YS $6 B
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In the west, smarter people tend to be left wing. Are there countries where high IQ is correlated with being conservative/on the right ?
2016 USA was such a Western country according to to https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2020/03/12/the-republicans-are-becoming-the-stupid-party/.
https://politikbloggen.wordpress.com/2008/03/09/bevis-bla-valjare-ar-smarta-roda-korkade/ shows that the social democrats and communists (left) were very popular in the lowest-IQ municipalities in Sweden in 2006 while the moderates and liberals (right) were more popular in the highest-IQ municipalities. There have been some changes since then in that a then insignificant low-IQ anti-immigration party now makes up about half of the right wing, while the left wing has gained many new low-IQ supporters through immigration.
This is pretty recent, IQ used to be higher for republicans on average. It's been changing as education polarization overtook income polarization.
E.g. here's a paper in it from as recently as 2014
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289614001081
(Although note that this is affected by minorities who generally score lower on these tests voting overwhelmingly democrats)
Hold on there a second. It's *college educated* people tend to be more left wing (which describes everything from Yellow Dog Democrat to Maoist Marxist-Leninist Stalin Did Nothing Wrong).
Unless you're correlating "college education = smarter", this doesn't necessarily indicate that the right wing is all dum-dum stupids. After all, we have US minorities are solid Democrat voters, and at least one commenter on here claiming that US blacks are 1 SD in IQ below whites, hence they would be amongst the dum-dum stupids but ostensibly, by voting patterns, on the left.
"White voters without college degrees made up a majority (54%) of Republican voters in 2022, compared with 27% of Democratic voters.
Hispanic voters continued to support Democrats, but by a much smaller margin than in 2018
Black voters continued to support Democrats by overwhelming margins".
So if you're going for "smarter", it will be "when talking about white voters/political party affiliations" in the US, whatever about the rest of the West. There's a Labour party tradition in Europe that doesn't have similarity with the American party political landscape, for instance, and they would be working class/lower middle class, less likely to be college educated, and hence not "smarter" in the sense used here, but solidly left.
It's not only education, IQ is correlated to being on the left in the US :
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886915002925
High IQ people tend to be socially liberal. Some measures of fiscal conservatism also increase with IQ up to a point where the trend reverses. The relationship with fiscal conservatism seems to be much weaker and less robust to controls however.
I did find this study from Brazil where high IQ people tended to be center-right or centrist :
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289611001425?via%3Dihub
Smarter people tend to be less authoritarian and less likely to vote for extremes. If we use educational attainment as a proxy, in Europe, center-right neoliberal parties and socialist tend to be educated, but communists and the populist right tend to be uneducated :
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-663-09538-5_12
Overall, smart people can be right wing or left wing, but they tend not to be authoritarian. "My tribe is smarter" seems to be a bad argument to defend one's policy views.
"It's not only education, IQ is correlated to being on the left in the US :
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886915002925"
Okay, so I follow that link and it tells me:
"Data are from the 2012 wave of the American National Election Study (ANES): a biennial/triennial survey concerned with Americans’ political attitudes and behaviours. In the 2012 wave, two separate nationally representative samples were collected, one via face-to-face interviewing, and one via the internet. The present study only utilises the face-to-face sample because one of the cognitive ability measures is not available for the internet sample."
Since I can't see the full study, I go looking for the 2012 ANES study and it tells me that it used educational attainment:
https://electionstudies.org/data-tools/anes-guide/anes-guide.html?chart=education
Maybe they did have something to measure "cognitive ability" but to me it looks like they're using educational attainment as a proxy for IQ and again, perhaps that works out - smart people stay in school longer - but it's an assumption, not proven.
No, the study is on sci hub if you want to read it. They use an actual verbal IQ test which is highly g-loaded.
Well, it seems more complicated than that. They use three measures: the one you mention (which they say loads on *crystalized* intelligence, i.e. some form of education), one that is subjective, and a PCA analysis of the previous two. (I may have misunderstood something, that was a quick read.)
But what I really wanted to see the most is how they figure who is conservative and who is liberal. Here is an excerpt:
"Twenty-four measures of fiscally conservative
beliefs are utilised. These encompass attitudes toward the size
and scope of government, the free market, business regulation,
income redistribution, government spending, the Affordable
Care Act, the budget deficit, the top rate of income tax, and
affirmative action. Details about each measure can be found in
the survey’s pre-election and post-election questionnaires
(ANES, 2014b, 2014c)."
How do they code belief about the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), I wonder. Unfortunately, I can't get anything out of ANES, 2014b, 2014c (no questions, or dead link).
"How do they code belief about the Affordable Care Act"
Oppose == conservative, same for Affirmative Action.
They actually separate all 24 questions and their respective correlations. The highest correlations (with their measure of intelligence) are "the less government the better" and similar.
Good to know that, thanks for the information
Alright, I'm going to attack a core tenet of the Rationalists that has always bugged me. As I understand it, Rationalists claim to be slightly better at avoiding irrational, ingrained-by-evolution biases than the average person (even of the same intelligence). The Overcoming Bias image of Odysseus strapped to the mast to avoid the possibility of succumbing to the Siren's Song emblazons the belief that this is doable.
The belief one can overcome such ingrained biases strikes me as ludicrous. I'm reminded of Carl Jung saying that trying to overcome the unconscious with the conscious is like holding a mirror to the sun.
Whatever deep ingrained biases you have that are shaped by evolution are As Smart As You! Probably smarter. Your *rational* thought is not independent of such overwhelming forces as billions of years of evolution.
If you think you can outsmart your biases through concentrated reason, you will not only lose that battle, but you will have made yourself (forgive my frankness, Scott) stupider by thinking you can.
Have you ever deliberately memorized anything? That's using your conscious mind to train your unconscious mind and overcome your natural billions of years of evolution not caring about, for example, poetry. Millions of people use conscious training procedures to change the way their minds react to input to make them different than they naturally evolved to be. When you train with a firearm, you use your conscious mind to overcome your instinct to flinch and flee and hide at loud sounds. When you train acrobatics you are using your conscious mind to force your unconscious mind to no longer fear being in mid-air upside down. There are zillions of other examples of being able to use your conscious mind combined with deliberate effort to change how you subconsciously process data.
In addition, your biases aren't consciously TRYING to trick you. They're not intelligent. They're subroutines, not entities. You're not trying to outsmart them any more than you're outsmarting your muscles when you train by lifting weights.
I would say it's all about mitigating biases, not expecting to completely overcome them. If we're holding metaphorical mirrors up to the sun, at least we're in the shade. Believing that you're special and less affected by internal biases is itself a bias to be avoided. Rational thought is about being aware that you have biases, both conscious and unconscious, and looking for strategies to help make better decisions anyway. Like how the purpose of a double blind study is to restrict the researcher's access to information so that they don't affect the results with their biases. You can acknowledge that bias exists and employ strategies to lessen its effects.
Are you arguing that biased can't be overcome completely, or to any extent?
I'm not arguing that no cognitive biases can be overcome through, say, learning about them. But these tend to be minor biases, the kinds that learning more about economics can correct.
But fundamental biases, such as that will to power dominates will to truth cannot be overcome.
I don't think all rationalists think that you *should* overcome all biases. Many rationalists note that many of these biases do in fact turn one more often towards the truth, particularly in certain contexts. This is why rationalists are so fond of ideas like "Chesterton's fence", which is a defense of something that is usually classified as a fallacy in more classical empiricist contexts.
I do think that there's a deep problem in that rationalists often seem to think that getting one's own beliefs closer to the truth and getting oneself to make more accurate predictions is generally the most important goal. When they discuss Philip Tetlock, they tend to emphasize that foxes are more accurate in their predictions. But I think it's important to note that Tetlock's hedgehogs are often the sources of the methods that foxes then use. There's value for the intellectual ecosystem in containing individuals that aren't themselves accurate and close to the truth.
> The belief one can overcome such ingrained biases strikes me as ludicrous
Belief is not required, it's been studied. Various forms of training have been empirically shown to change one's susceptibility to cognitive biases. The only bias that resists such training is bias blind spot [1], although video game training has seen some success [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_blind_spot
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563216302606
> Whatever deep ingrained biases you have that are shaped by evolution are As Smart As You! Probably smarter.
Our ability to reason wouldn't be much of evolutionary advantage if it couldn't overcome such mistakes. As such, I don't think your conclusion is as plausible as you seem to think.
"Whatever deep ingrained biases you have that are shaped by evolution are As Smart As You! Probably smarter. Your *rational* thought is not independent of such overwhelming forces as billions of years of evolution."
I've been training judo for years and cross-trained in striking a modest amount. If it's possible to succeed at deliberately modifying the reflexes that evolution equipped me with to cope with falling down and getting punched in the face and adrenaline spikes and dumps - which surely were always under heavy selection pressure - then I'd assume it's possible to overcome hyperbolic discounting or whatever.
This is, of course, even before we get into other stuff like how behaviour is a combination of evolutionary heuristics and environment, the latter of which we're quite capable of modifying; and how evolution doesn't fine-tune, it mostly satisfices.
I think the point is that you have to be aware that you have biases before you can even think of overcoming them, and for Rationalists the lesson to be learned is "You, yes YOU, have biases as much as anyone else, despite your big smart brain, and you have to learn about them, recognise them when they're in operation, and decide how you're going to manage them".
You've made a very broad claim, and it's hard to know where to begin to respond.
I'll start with one example where I think I have made progress. One of the most common mistakes that people make is to underestimate how long a task will take (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy).
I believe that I can learn from my past mistakes and adjust accordingly so that my estimates are more accurate in the future. Are you saying that's not possible? Or is that not the kind of bias you had in mind?
Based on the responses, my claim is to broad. My notion of what Rationalism is may even be entirely wrong.
I suppose I had in mind more fundamental biases, such as believing your own social group is more likely to be correct than other groups. Obviously, I would need more examples than that one to make much of a case. EDIT: I think the most important bias that nobody is exempt from is Nietzsche's critique that the will to truth is secondary to the will to power. You may *think* you are interested in the *truth*, but you are actually, unwittingly, pursuing power while lying to yourself about your motives.
I'm not saying that one can't learn skills or economic concepts or to avoid common fallacies. It never would have occurred to me that learning any of those things were part of Rationalism, since they are things plenty of non-rationalists also learn.
I once had a conversation with a Scientologist who claimed that Scientology was just about improving your life through all sorts of practical methods. Every example he came up with made sense, although there was nothing special about the wisdom he offered; it was the sort of practical wisdom one could find in many self-help books. He didn't want to talk about thetans and audits or anti-pharmacology or anything like that. I'm not trying to compare Rationalism to Scientology -- except for the fact that I assumed Rationalism, like Scientology, has its own special knowledge and techniques. I have assumed it is about much more than the knowledge a regular reader of Marginal Revolution might know.
Is Rationalism just atheism plus what a regular reader of Marginal Revolution might know, or is it a lot more than that? (The capital R makes me assume it is much more.)
Hank, I appreciate the openness of both your critique and your response.
I think you’re onto something here: "I'm not saying that one can't learn skills or economic concepts or to avoid common fallacies. It never would have occurred to me that learning any of those things were part of Rationalism, since they are things plenty of non-rationalists also learn."
It seems like we agree that people can learn to reason more soundly. For me, that’s the core belief at stake here: believing that it’s possible to improve your ability to find out what’s true. At a very general level, I am convinced that the development of the scientific method helped humans reason more soundly. I think we’re still figuring out how to improve our reasoning.
We can agree on that and still criticize the specific Rationalist project consisting of Scott’s blog & readers, lesswrong.com, and folks calling themselves Rationalists. You are correct in thinking that they have their own special knowledge and techniques.
Specifically, I’d start with Bayesian reasoning. Does that give us anything that can help us find out what’s true more often? (See the Laws of Trading book review (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-laws-of-trading) for an example of Bayesian reasoning in the wild, with citations back to lesswrong). If that's been too broadly absorbed by the Marginal Revolution crowd and you want something even more specifically tied to this community, the *Sequences* on lesswrong try to lay out rules for reasoning.
There’s plenty in that project and community to criticize. You can judge whether there’s anything particularly useful there, as well.
Well, I'm not an atheist, but I'm also not particularly attached to the Rationalist label. When other people identify as Rationalist, I tend to assume it's more about participation in the community (e.g., regularly following certain blogs) than about any particular beliefs or concepts.
If there is anything "much more", I never learned it. I do think the ability to reason probabilistically on controversial topics is rare, and Scott does it well, but it's not unique to Rationalists.
> When other people identify as Rationalist, I tend to assume it's more about participation in the community (e.g., regularly following certain blogs) than about any particular beliefs or concepts.
Historically, people who joined the community were recommended to familiarize themselves with its basic beliefs and concepts, i. e. "read the Sequences" (i.e. read the articles that the community originally formed itself around).
Of course, this worked only as long as the people who actually "read the Sequences" were in the majority. Soon there were many people who enjoyed hanging out online with people who "read the Sequences" without wanting to "read the Sequences" themselves. Perhaps we need a new word today for people who actually "read the Sequences"... paleo-Rationalists, maybe?
Yeah, several years ago you could probably have defined a Rationalist as someone who has read the Sequences.
These days, I would say the Sequences were so successful at sparking a movement that they ironically became less important. The same ideas have been spread by many other people (even if the Sequences were where most of them originally learned it).
I was going to say something similar. Is the OP saying there's *no* zero practical use for knowing about the sunk cost fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment), or the Dunning-Kruger Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect), or confirmation bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias)?
That's a nice theory, but fails on both theoretical grounds (evolution has very limited information bandwidth and is often optimizing for other stuff) and practice (rationalists aren't perfect but really are noticably better at this stuff when you compare).
Some of my online friends believe that the solution to global warming is to eliminate capitalism and/or eliminate civilization.
Do you want to eliminate capitalism?
Do you want to eliminate civilization?
Please answer in any way you choose.
Peter
Thank you to everyone who has responded! These are great comments.
The people you describe are outright anti-human. It's true that eliminating capitalism/civilization would "solve" climate change, in the same way that amputating a leg "solves" a broken toe. The way I always put it is "what's the point of eliminating climate change if there's nobody around to feel self-righteous about having done so?"
I would respond by confirming that they are actively proposing the deaths of billions of people and the impoverishment of the rest. I doubt that they see themselves as either dying or losing position and privilege, but that's going to happen too.
Are they aware of that? Are they okay with the generation that actively kills off most of the rest of the world's population? Maybe they think it will happen quietly, where everyone grows old and just doesn't have kids, but that would also be hellish as old people live in horrible conditions and die of preventable conditions while society collapses around them. And, since the majority of people would refuse, would still require something like mass kill squads.
That's for civilization itself. The track record for getting rid of capitalism is better, but not by much. I'd want to see some evidence that alternatives exist and are desirable. What we've seen in practice is countries going to pot while under other economic systems until or unless they start reopening markets and allowing more free trade. I'd be more supportive if there were even one good counterexample to look at. Democrat Socialists in Europe still use capitalism (mostly free markets, open trade, personal wealth accumulation), so that's not an example of "eliminat[ing] capitalism".
If they mean a gradual reduction in the number of babies born and society getting to a new population balance of 500m - 2b over a few hundred years, then maybe that's doable. You would still have civilization and likely still have capitalism. Also good news! That seems to be the long term projection anyway.
>>If they mean a gradual reduction in the number of babies born and society getting to a new population balance of 500m - 2b over a few hundred years, then maybe that's doable. You would still have civilization and likely still have capitalism. Also good news! That seems to be the long term projection anyway.<<
One friend in particular does not mean what you say above, because that is almost exactly my position, and she is not satisfied with my approach.
I have settled on a global population of 1 billion humans as being optimum. Notice that the geometric mean of a range of 500 million to 2 billion is very close to 1 billion.
Here is my paper:
Rodes.pub/OneBillion
One billion humans are quite enough persons to continue scientific and technological advances indefinitely. It is also few enough persons to enable nature to thrive indefinitely.
My target date for a global population of 1 billion is the year 2300.
Well, yeah the solution to global warming would be if you killed every single human being off overnight. No more large scale industrialisation or agriculture, eventually over centuries/however longer things would balance out.
But while capitalism is not perfect and we do need a better system, right now it's the one in operation. You can't simply change it wholesale, globally, overnight. Same with civilisation - we can't all live on forty acres and a mule, tempting as the notion is.
So either there is a *drastic* reduction in the human population, or A Miracle Happens, and I'm not expecting AI to be that miracle.
In my experience, the people who want to eliminate "capitalism" usually define it very differently from the people who support it.
For its supporters, a society is capitalist when people are generally free to trade in ways that make everyone better off. And they believe that freedom is the main reason why the average person is much more prosperous now than even kings and queens were a few centuries ago.
For its opponents, capitalism is a pseudo-religion in which the only standard of value for human beings is how much they can produce, as measured in dollars. Anything that isn't bought and paid for (for example, watching a sunset, or hugging a friend) has value only indirectly by increasing productivity.
As you might suspect, I believe we can appreciate capitalism as an economic system without letting it become our religion. With the right policies, we can make capitalism serve people, rather than forcing people to serve capitalism.
Also, as far as I know, countries that have eliminated capitalism have all collapsed within a few years (Venezuela today) or at most decades (the Soviet Union). And yes, that does lower carbon emissions, but it seems like a cure that's worse than the disease.
In the anti-capitalist space, capitalism is anything which is not a socialist utopia. Granting state monopolies to operate businesses in overseas territories? Capitalism. Governments bringing in third party contractors to operate prisons? Capitalism. Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Venezuela? All capitalist. It's a magic word. I've tried to eliminate it from my vocabulary.
Your summary of the two uses of the word capitalism is spot on. It's why for many years now I have banned that word from my spoken and written vocabulary. I say or write "free enterprise" or something similar. "Capitalism", at least in the U.S., has been a useless term since at least when I was in college.
When people use the word "capitalism" in this way it motivates me to quote Vaclav Havel: "Capitalism is a word vulgarized and popularized by Marx." If the word capitalism sounds ugly, it's because it was meant to. Havel goes on to say: "A market economy is as true as the air." He then goes on to explain why he is not a free-market absolutist.
It should be better known that all talk of capitalism is Marxist language. Purging the air of the laws of supply and demand isn't possible. No public policy rids the Earth of the market economy as a fact of human nature.
Sometimes I really wish people would get what they want. I am barely encouraged by the fact that luddites are as old as 1700s, so at least it's not getting worse. Probably.
Also it could be my bubble on SM, but what's with the literal wishing that billionaires would die? Those guys need to live in Romania for 20 years, to thoroughly appreciate being ruled by government paid filthy rich bureaucrats that do an incredibly shitty job, to the point of having negative value. That might reset their idea of "fair wealth".
Right, because it's sociopaths that are responsible for the high energy density of fossil fuels, which makes it indispensable for planes and trucks and extremely desirable for reliable and cheap electricity generation? Did sociopaths also make up the rules of chemistry which say that coal is necessary to make steel at reasonable price, and that everything from plastic to polyester to pesticides are petroleum byproducts? Are sociopaths in positions of power the ones buying cars, flights, and heating?
I found the conflict theorist!
I think if we eliminated all sociopaths from society, we'd have most of the same problems. Less crime, fewer lawsuits, but the big problems would remain because the vast majority of humans are not sociopaths.
Vast majority of humans are not sociopaths, but sociopaths are over-represented at positions of power where the decisions are made.
Hey, let's share embarrassing stories of a nerdy adolescence! I'll start:
Near the beginning of Grade 7, Mr Barlow the English teacher had us all submit two topics for short speeches. We would draw two topics at random out of a hat, and give a short talk on whichever of the two topics we chose.
My parents were moderate packrats, and a year earlier I had found a 3-year-old LIFE magazine in a box in the basement, a double issue on the the American city. I was enthralled; the photos, the writing, the futuristic drawings, everything just grabbed my young brain. Besides the mostly optimistic vision of the future, there was a rather Malthusian section about urban sprawl, with the forthcoming megapolises gobbling up arable land, this in a time of exponential population growth.
I was (and remain) a space nerd, so the topics I submitted were:
After The Moon - What's Next For Manned Spaceflight?
and
Urban Sprawl!
*************
The hat was passed around to collect the topics, Mr Barlow mixed them up, and the hat came around again for us to select topics.
Mr Barlow gave us a couple of minutes to check out the topics we'd pulled out of the hat, and then asked if everyone was happy with them.
A tough girl named Lori* raised her hand and said "I got one called Yurbin Sprail, and I don't even know what it is!"
Mr Barlow glowered and asked who had submitted it. I raised my hand. Lori and her peers sneered at me and snickered. Mr Barlow got mad and asked me if this was a joke. I stumbled through a brief explanation, and must have seemed sincere enough that Mr Barlow realized I had submitted the topic in good faith.
I don't remember what topics I had picked from the hat, but no doubt both involved pop music I hadn't heard, sports I didn't know anything about, or TV shows I hadn't seen.
Those who wish they could return to their teen years were better equipped to deal with adolescence than I was, or have shorter memories.
* Lori was part of a gang of girls who smoked, stole from the convenience store across the street, and used a lot of profanity. Our rookie homeroom teacher, Mrs. Lawson, took a leave of absence partway through the year. She was gone for a month or so.
I'm sorry but this isn't an embarrassing story of nerdy adolescence, you come out of it looking better than your classmates, or even your teacher.
If you're going to prompt other people for embarrassing stories you're obliged to tell a genuinely embarrassing story.
You're likely right, but I certainly didn't have that perspective at 12. It was utterly humiliating.
I wonder whether teachers know how uncomfortable they make students with assignments like that.
I always dreaded oral presentations - quite justifiably as it turned out. I think there was little understanding of introversion in my day, and if recognized by teachers was seen as a character defect to be remedied.
I understand it's good to learn to give oral presentations, but giving them on prepared subjects is plenty challenging enough, especially at that age.
I once called a girl on the phone to ask her out. She had no idea who I was and assumed I was one of her friends pranking her.
I feel vicarious pain ... that must have been awful.
I once asked a girl out at the place we both worked, and she accepted. The day of she called to say her car broke down and she had to go get it fixed. 30 minutes later I'm driving through town and see her driving her car. We never spoke about it, despite working together after that for a few years.
I wasn't upset, and in retrospect we would never have worked out, but at least use a more convincing lie?
Ouch!
One always hopes there had been some legitimate explanation, like the problem had been a bad ballast resistor, which had been diagnosed in seconds and replaced within 5 minutes. The driver was stressed by the car problem and was not up to anything else that day.
This probably happens more in movies than in real life.
I'm trying to learn more about free banking. To that end I'm reading George Selgin's "The Theory of Free Banking" (1988). I'm not an economist but am an econ-nerd, esp. on monetary policy, and got into Scott Sumner and market monetarism back in the day.
I don't think I quite get it. Selgin says that in the Scottish free banking era, banks were stable keeping only 1-2% of deposits as reserves in specie (I say specie here but it could be a base fiat currency as well), and they typically did not suffer from runs and failures. Why does the existence of private banknotes allow this? Is it because the base money and banknotes are no longer the same? If depositors get skittish and want to pull out in a textbook run scenario (regardless of whether those are actually real), how would the bank not quickly run out of reserves? From a financial stability standpoint, I sort of intuit that with banks printing their own money, the money supply endogenously rises and falls with liquidity demand, and insofar as financial crises are generally caused by a contagious liquidity crisis, self-printing of money would prevent runs and instead allow for private money to simply trade at a discount instead if a bank is insolvent (i.e. similar to how there is no such thing as a run on a stock because the price trades freely). But I'm having trouble putting all the pieces together.
I think I may need a plain English explanation to supplement the more jargony one.
I think a few pieces are missing here. My understanding is, three Scottish banks dominated note issuance. There was a private clearing system that allowed depositors to gain confidence in any bank within the clearing scheme. Initially, these banks held 50% of deposits in reserve, but the success of the scheme increased confidence significantly enough so that withdrawals were seldom enough to warrant just 2-3% reserves.
Ok. According to this piece (https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/719951468760530224/pdf/multi-page.pdf) it does appear there were 3 big note issuing banks, but other banks could and did issue as well (?). Why would the clearing system instill such confidence?
According to Selgin, banks did initially keep very high reserves, typically 10% but in some cases as high as 61% of deposits, because of "note dueling," a practice whereby rival banks would buy up one another's notes and attempt to bust them by turning them in for redemption. But "[n]ote dueling ceases to be advantageous to any bank as all of them learn how to protect themselves in response to it by holding large reserves." So then eventually you get to the 2ish% of deposits held as reserves. But how is that a stable equilibrium? Any bank with a 2% reserve ratio could be pretty easily busted through note-dueling (or an organic run). I'm still just unclear what's run-resistant about this system. Just thinking out loud, is it because there is ~0 for base money for day-to-day transactions, whereas an artifact of our current system is that Fed cash/deposits are both the base money and a money for everyday exchange? Or is it that equity cushions were just very high so solvency was typically not in doubt?
That's what a clearing system is. It socializes credit risk between counterparties, so if a small bank fails, all clearing members are on the hook for deposits (with the asterisk that it depends how a given clearinghouse is set up).
Ok that makes sense. Reading Kroszner, he also emphasizes the importance of being able to net out one another's notes each week, which relied on market confidence in a particular bank.
Are there any known techniques to improve general memory? I know a bit about the sort of repetition learning and the stuff Gwern has written about, but I more mean memories of experiences. Mine is terrible… it has its pros and cons, like I don’t really get traumatised because I just forget, but I tend to repeat the same mistakes pretty often. My general patterns of experience also seem to get repeated quite a lot.
Any ideas?
Our hipoccampal apparatus was built for a few things - navigation/orientation, procedure/process, and narrative.
By leaning into these, you can leverage improved memory.
This is essentially what "memory champions" do by building memory palaces etc.
A good book to start is "moonwalking with einstein"
But actually a really insightful book about how medieval scholars used their memories (at a time when memory was far more important than it is today) that I recommend is "The Book of Memory" by Mary Carruthers.
I'm definitely bad at episodic memory. There are even some cases where there's some activity or event that I thought about for years, and then finally did, and then years later I don't remember that I actually did it, and just remember the fact that I thought about it for years.
I once spent several days trying to figure out a puzzle. One day during work I came up with an approach I hadn't tried before, and when work finally ended I went back to try it... to discover I'd already solved the puzzle previously.
Maybe practicing mindfulness. I've noticed my recollections of events where I'm distracted or off in my own head are less precise than when I'm more present in the moment.
Journaling and note taking
Take notes about what you did during the day, including your state of mind and reasoning behind your decisions. This alone will help your memory since you'll be reviewing it, and it will help you process your decisions and incorporate them into your psyche (which seems like the main thrust of the latter part of your question)
That's an interesting question. I would presume that a lot of the same strategies of conscious elaboration that work for semantic memory might also work for episodic memories, but perhaps not? Perhaps that would only extract semantic elements out of the episodic memory. But much of episodic memory is just post-hoc elaboration based on some core semantic elements anyway, so maybe that's good enough.
Assuming that all of the QAnon predictions/prophecies were accurate (especially the ones that contradict each other), what is the current state of the world?
The problem with this type of question is that I see 4 distinct eras of "what is QAnon".
1) the 4chan hive-mind. "Q" is several of many anonymous 4chan posters. Some of them are shit-posters. But perhaps others are high-ranking CIA agents deliberately leaking certain information in code.
2) the first prophet. Somebody (as Q) gets a bit of popularity and runs with it.
3) the Watkins era. I don't have references on-hand, and I doubt the references are definitive on the point, but in my mind it is clear that the "original" Q was replaced Dread Pirate Roberts style by Jim Watkins (or his son) at some point.
4) the children of a false god. After 2021 January 6, the Watkins voice seems to have disappeared. Now there are dozens of self-appointed successors, none of whom have the original sin of a misleading identity, nor any ability to predict the outcome of secret battles against the Deep State.
The first era would have predictions like "the angry bear will catch its quarry"; too vague to impute anything to the then-future state of the world. As far as the others: I don't know, and don't really want to know.
> perhaps others are high-ranking CIA agents deliberately leaking certain information in code
What is the motive for leaking this way? If you want to leak anon or pseudonymously, you don't need to it in code. If you want to leak in code, you can do so in a more normal medium, such as through a journalist or through regular social media.
For shits and giggles?
If you leak information in a blatant way then there will be a major investigation of the leak, which may result in you winding up in prison. If you leak information in a sufficiently subtle way (so that nobody in your own organisation is even sure that there was a leak) then you can get some of the satisfaction of leaking without so much of the risk.
I'm not saying that this is necessarily what happened. I _am_ saying that if I had access to top-secret information then I might be tempted to leak certain things obliquely on the internet. (Of course this is why I'd never be allowed through the screening process to get top secret clearance...)
I'm not saying the CIA did that, I'm saying that the 4chan regulars could have believed that the CIA did.
QAnon theories are not known for a fastidious tether to the boundaries of reason and simplicity.
"not known for a fastidious tether to the boundaries of reason and simplicity."
Bravo! I hope I can remember that phrase and use it myself someday.
...well, I've got a sudden bug and you folks get to hear about it.
Recently watched Paranoia Agent, an anime about a mysterious attacker in which every episode follows a different character up to their run-in with him. Started with Boogiepop Phantom, which has the same style of episodes following the various people that run afoul of her, but Boogiepop Phantom is not holding up to the latest viewing. Looking for other stories that have episodes revolving around minor characters who are themselves revolving around a central character. Google mentions another anime called Hell Girl, but it seems to not be available in the US.
Does anyone know any other stories in that style? Any medium.
I'd highly recommend The Carpet Makers, by Andreas Eschbach. It's perhaps not quite what you're looking for, but it may be close enough. It's a series of stories that follows ~one character from each into the next. A single character is explained throughout the series, in part through character interactions. Even outside of a closeness to your interests, it's quite good; I recommend it either way.
It's not quite the same thing, but you might enjoy Durarara!! It's a... actually, it's quite hard to explain. It's set in a nearly-real Ikebukuro, has a broad cast and a variety of character arcs. It's told from the perspective of 11 of the main characters, but their individual stories work together really well, in a chaotic sort of way.
I realise I haven't described the story itself, mainly because there are so many moving parts it's hard to summarise in anything less than an essay. The Wikipedia one-line description is "Durarara!! tells the story of a dullahan working as an underworld courier in Ikebukuro, an internet-based anonymous gang called the Dollars, and the chaos that unfolds around the most dangerous people in Ikebukuro.", and that's probably better than I could do. Worth checking out.
The anime / manga / light novel series Restaurant to Another World definitely fits into this category, as each chapter / episode centers on one of the Restaurant's patrons (and the menu item they are associated with), rather than the un-named chef / owner. I find it an enjoyable exercise in worldbuilding as we eventually can piece together the history of not just the Restaurant but of the fantasy world itself.
Re: the recurring subject of Bay Area "NIMBY" vs "YIMBY" wars:
Can anyone offer links demonstrating the reality of the much-discussed shortage of "affordable" (for people employed on location) housing there? A cursory look at various ads (browsed SF and even Palo Alto, arbitrarily close to various TBTF corp. headquarters) seems to show plenty of 1- to 3-room flats going for 3 to 5 thou. $ / mo; perhaps tight quarters, but not out of reach cost-wise for even an entry-level programmer. And not particularly more expensive than e.g. the habitable part of Washington DC.
I'm not sure you're comparing equivalent geographies. The first site I found that lists average one-bedroom rates in various cities lists these as the top 10 cities:
New York - $3900
Jersey City - $3370
San Francisco - $3000
Miami - $2860
Boston - $2750
San Jose - $2600
San Diego - $2440
Los Angeles - $2400
Arlington, VA - $2390
Washington - $2370
https://www.zumper.com/blog/rental-price-data/
It's clear that San Francisco and New York are on a higher level than these others. You might have drawn a tighter definition of "habitable part" for DC than for SF.
DC has an entire quarter where most of the people tuned in here would likely not want to walk, much less live. It pulls down the cost average. (Granted, I have not lived in SF, and do not know whether it has a "red zone", and if so, what portion of the city it occupies and what effect it has on the cost average there. Reliable info on this subject seems to be rather hard to come by.)
A sidenote, but quality is also an issue: most of these flats are old and worn-down, not nice comfortable new construction.
Is there a city in USA where most flats are comfortable and new?
(I for instance spent my student years and a considerable time afterwards living in 19th century houses converted to flats. Is this atypical?)
It varies. 19th century is pretty old. Miami has a lot of new housing, and so do some neighborhoods in various cities (I think Seattle and jersey city do pretty well), but overall there is an issue where new housing is disproportionately sfh.
You can get a rough idea of how "affordable" housing is by looking at the portion of incomes dedicated to housing. In general you want this to be below 30%. The St Louis branch of the federal reserve publishes data on this exact figure: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DP04ACS006075
Strangely, the number drops from a high of 43% in 2012 to 33% in 2022. Definitely against my expectations.
But we can also look at mean commute time:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B080ACS006075
This goes way up over that same period. Basically, poorer people moved out of the city until they could afford it (this is termed "drive til you qualify").
I don't have time to look at data for the larger region - thats way outside of the scope of a comment here. But there is lots of published data out there from the census and the fed!
Thank you for the links!
The interesting bit IMHO is that these figures are almost exactly the same in Washington DC:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B080ACS011001
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DP04ACS011001
... and yet no one seems to be talking about a "housing crisis" there.
Everyone is talking about a housing crisis in all the "superstar cities". The usual list of "superstar cities" is Boston, New York, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, with a possible second tier of Portland, Denver, Austin, Miami, and parts of Chicago.
Sometimes people single out San Francisco and New York as being on even a higher plane than the other "superstar cities".
Sometimes people make "superstar city" a global list and add Vancouver, Toronto, London, Sydney, Paris, with a larger second tier.
I realize I forgot to include San Diego. (I left out San Jose because I was thinking of the whole Bay Area as one unit, rather than two. But I do intend to not include Baltimore with Washington, and to not include the Inland Empire with Los Angeles.)
My suspicion is that it isn't "everyone" who talks about "housing crisis", but for the most part 1) the economically marginal "chattering class" who would like to live in the expensive city but cannot afford it, and 2) wealthy demagogues, who easily afford to live in the city, but would like to score political points with (1); and lastly, 3) people who (through a thought process which remains inscrutable to me) became convinced that an infinite number of people could comfortably live in a finite space.
I'm not sure who you mean by (3). It's possible you just mean people who think that Paris and Tokyo exist, and that the American superstar cities could be just as comfortable as those cities at the same density as those cities, which is far less than infinite. The fact that you described it as "infinite" and "inscrutable" suggests that you're more interested in sneering than in trying to understand the actual claims.
From reading various "YIMBY" discussions, it is not clear to me that the proponents of that POV have a termination condition (e.g. "as dense as Tokyo, please, and after that no more.") So, per my reading, they do in fact advocate an "infinite" density.
The question of whether e.g. the Japanese in fact are better behaved in various ways and thereby pack more comfortably than Americans is orthogonal, but IMHO also relevant.
Thats a great question! Part of it, I think, is media incentives to write about things happening SF/silicon valley/tech which push them to use SF/ bay area as the example of things if they can (kind of like how its always Harvard used as the example of "elite" schools where there are ~20 others in the US you could use).
But I do think there is some differences between DC/SF that have reduced the idea that DC is in a crisis (vs just very expensive):
Geography - SF/Bay Area is somewhat isolated because of the bay, ocean, and mountains. DC bleeds into MD and VA (even West Va or PA!) so it "feels" like there is more space to build (regardless of if that is true).
Economy - SF definitely has the more dynamic and fast growing economy because of Tech, but DC has the steady, high floor of the US Government and all the related industries. These provide slow but steady growth in incomes.
Housing policies - This is a huge topic, so we'll just look at surface level for now. Over the past 5 years, DC has build much more housing:
DC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WASH911BPPRIV#0 maybe average of 2200 units per month.
SF https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SANF806BPPRIV approximate average of 1000 units per month.
I am just eye balling these figures and this is just "units" which could mean a lot of different types of housing, but it's illustrative. This data is for the regional MSA/metro area so it helps correct for people moving to suburbs or close by cities (not perfect of course).
Of course the divisor also matters. Over 5 years this is the population changes:
DC: 6.2 million -> 6.3 million
SF: 4.7 million -> just under 4.6 million (there was a loss of about 200k since COVID)
So falling population should put downward pressure on housing prices, but thats not what we see. My theory is that there is built up demand so even with people leaving and a small amount of housing being added SF still hasn't worked through the back log. On top of that the new people coming in may be wealthier than the people leaving so while demand is static, the amount people can pay is going up. While in DC the people leaving and the people coming are probably making a similar amount because the jobs are similar (mostly turn over in Fed Gov and related industries which have pretty fixed pay structures).
There is also the wild card that DC spans three states and many counties that have very different political postures. Even though Northern VA is just as liberal as the MD suburbs, the next further layer of VA suburbs have been very open to building - places like Manassas, Gainesville, Herndon, etc. All the counties/cities in SF are still in CA which has state level policies that push up the price of new housing units.
Finally, in my view, the term "crisis" usually comes from the media through existing residents who feel priced out or housing groups that are politically aligned to dislike rising housing prices. I live in a small city that has had a big run up in housing prices and rents recently. Many people claim there is a crisis here, and there definitely could/should be more housing, but I and other new residents don't have trouble affording things, in fact its much cheaper from where I moved from. There is a lot of relativity here.
Know people in DC, can confirm.
[Edited since I see that OP actually lives in DC, so I guess we disagree less on what the housing dynamics in the DMV area are and more on whether they rise to the level of "housing crisis."
I once heard a parable where an airline decides to poll arriving passengers about how full they felt their plane was. The poll finds 97% reporting that their plane was unbearably full. Clearly the airline needs more flights?
Then someone takes a closer look at the poll answers, and finds that two passengers reported being next to an empty seat, and one -- that the whole plane was empty except for him and the pilots. So was there a crowding problem? Turns out, two 100-seat planes had landed that day: one with 99 passengers and the other with only 1. The planes were, by any reasonable measure, half full.
Are you suggesting that we can bring housing costs down if we forcibly relocate homeowners from desirable neighborhoods into less desirable ones? I mean, that might do the trick but I don't know if NIMBY's would appreciate that approach.
On a more serious note, an actual airline in that situation (assuming you are equating neighborhoods to flights) would ask why one flight is slammed and the other empty (one is at 2PM, the other at 2AM, for example). Saying "oh there were always plenty of seats on the other one, quit whining and fly at 2AM" would be bad business.
Most people don’t have the earnings of entry-level programmers, though.
That was my first thought as well. This is looking at housing costs only through the lens of highly paid individuals who voluntarily chose to live there specifically for high paying jobs. Service workers, teachers, cops, EMTs, retail workers - all need somewhere to live. A teacher making $80,000 (a great living in most the country) couldn't afford to live anywhere near SF. Which means all of these other types of people either leave the city (bad for them and the city) or live somewhere else and reduce their quality of life spending hours a day commuting to work. Or I guess living with a bunch of roommates even if you would prefer to have a family and more than a single bedroom to yourself.
Why? If you earn (say) $100K after tax, and you pay $48K in rent, and you still have $52K a year left over to buy groceries etc, then that's plenty of groceries etc. You're no worse off than the dude in Cleveland who earns $70K after tax and pays $18K in rent.
Your place of residence is by far the most important good or service that you consume, it's not surprising that it's going to wind up soaking up a huge fraction of your income.
Other things are more expensive too though (not that the overall point changes that much), but not evenly so it's interesting how that changes consumption patterns. It's mostly labor cost that changes (the workers have to live somewhere soon), so the relative expense of things changes in more or less direct proportion to the local amount of labor (and to a lesser degree land/floor space) involved. Things / goods / travel are cheap; restaurants, child care, haircuts, entertainment venues are more expensive. Living in one such place now, I can more or less ignore the price of any 'thing' I buy, but I eat out way less then I used to and we cut the kids hair at home. Eating out at the same rate as I did in the past would make a noticeable dent in the budget.
Just how much should they be willing to spend on rent without blanching? It seems that currently they are well within the industry-standard "below 30% of wage".
From reading kilometres of discussion about the "Bay Area housing crisis", I expected to find five-figure studio rents advertised in the proximity of the TBTF corps. But when actually looking at the advertised prices, I found roughly the same range as in the DC region where I live. Which suggests that what the Bay Area has (vs. e.g. DC) is simply an overpopulation of marginal "gold rush" types who insist on living there while waiting to win the VC lottery, rather than a housing crisis per se.
> It seems that currently they are well within the industry-standard "below 30% of wage".
I think that's a silly rule of thumb that no longer makes sense in HCOL locations anyway. Housing costs vary wildly between different locations in the US, but the price of almost everything else is roughly the same.
You shouldn't be asking yourself "is this rent less than 30% of my income", you should be asking "Do I have enough money left over for everything else once taxes and rent are paid?" and "am I willing to trade off a slightly worse living situation to have slightly more money left over?"