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?"
"Housing costs vary wildly between different locations in the US, but the price of almost everything else is roughly the same."
For some items this isn't true. Gas and energy prices vary wildly by state and region. There are also very different sales taxes depending state and municipality which can drastically increase the price of some goods.
I think the "30% of income on housing" was a rule formulated a few decades ago, when things like food and clothing were a higher percentage of average income than they are now. I've seen some people say "45% of income on housing+transportation" (https://cnt.org/tools/housing-and-transportation-affordability-index) but again, it's possible that with Baumol-type effects the percentage of income sent to these two categories could reasonably rise if others are falling.
If "the city" is defined as the overall Bay Area urban agglomeration then yes, if it's defined as the arbitrary 49 square miles on the tip of the peninsula then no. Plenty of people all over the world commute more than seven miles to work.
Speaking as somebody who lives in a similar metro area that just went through its own bout of NIMBYs vs YIMBYs, these arguments aren't terribly persuasive when the people who actually live in the desirable locations fight tooth and nail to undermine attempts to build more housing there.
Saying "that's just the way the market is, deal with it," is all well and good, but it falls pretty flat when coming from a population actively undermining the market by preventing new housing stocks being built, demanding bailouts to "protect home values" (i.e. "to keep housing prices higher than market") when there is a crisis, etc.
There was a trend of the Open Threads having other foreigners asking "is America really like that?". I guess I'll take my turn.
As a Canadian, something I see a lot in TV is Americans wearing their shoes in their own house. When people don't do this, it is usually called out. I've also seen a few shows refer to it as a Japanese practice.
Just dog piling on this, I'll echo what others have said. Where I grew up in the norhteastern US both were quite common. I had a few friends whose parents asked that people remove shoes in the house, and this was perfectly normal. I wear shoes in the house, and this is also perfectly normal. I've certainly never seen someone be "called out" for *not* wearing shoes in the house.
Sorry by called out, I mean by the TV show or movie. Eg the character might say "Oh sorry, can you take your shoes off? Yeah, we're doing the Japanese thing now."
If it wasn't for moments like that, I would have assumed that TV characters leave there shoes on for the same reason they don't say Hello or Good Bye in TV shows.
Also Canadian here. As other people have noted it probably varies a lot, I'll add more anecdotes anyway... I visited a friend in Kentucky years ago, he and his mother were shocked that I even asked if I should take my shoes off. They wore shoes right up until changing for bed. So did everyone else I met on that trip.
In my family - my brother and I were always in socks indoors. Our parents, both immigrants from Croatia, always wore slippers. From visiting family in Croatia, it seems that having slippers/indoor-shoes is absolutely the norm there, while going barefoot or refusing the offered slippers - if you're a family guest at least - is weird. Wearing outdoor-shoes inside is sacrilege, except with less intimate guests. Of course there's variation there too but overall the whole slipper thing seems way more important.
My late parents, both born in the early 1930s, would have worn carpet slippers at home but would not otherwise have thought to take shoes off indoors. Among people of my broad age group (late 50s) shoe removal would seem to be instinctive and universal. I am inclined to say quite right too.
Nobody has mentioned floor covering trends yet. You're more likely to wear shoes indoors if you have hard floors than if you have carpet, since carpet is harder to clean, easier to permanently stain, and more comfortable to walk on in bare feet. There was a trend towards full house carpeting which probably increased from the 1920s to the 1980s and then receded again.
For what it's worth, my house has carpet in one living area and tiles in the other, and we avoid wearing shoes on the carpet. Guests can keep their shoes on if they like though, since I think it's weirdly intimate to take your shoes off in someone else's home.
Growing up in New Jersey, yes, this was seen as mostly an Indian-American thing.
But I've seen plenty of conversations on reddit where Americans are disgusted by us other Americans not taking our shoes off.
Hypothesis: these are mostly Midwesterners who (rationally) developed the habit because their winters are snowy, like yours in Canada. Personally, I see where you all are coming from, but at the same time, I honestly don't think the bottom of my shoes are particularly dirty.
This was extremely common up until the last 10-20 years. I personally started taking off my shoes for weeb reasons and it was definitely unusual until very recently.
Most older people I know (60+) keep their shoes on indoors.
I live in SF, and I'd say taking shoes off is close to 50-50 (I take them off and ask guests to as well, to which no one bats an eye). The taking-off 50% is maybe slightly skewed towards Asian.
By "wearing their shoes" I assume you mean not removing them at the door. It's up to the homeowner for the most part. Growing up we had tons of company and no entryway so everyone kept their shoes on instead of forming a big shoe pile in the living room. Other folks with nicer entryways and muddier outdoors will have people take their shoes off.
Can't answer for the whole of America, but in my cultural bubble, while it's okay to wear shoes in the house if you just need to run in from inside and get something/go to the bathroom/etc., as a general rule shoes go off at the door. I think wearing them inside is more common here, but it's by no means universal.
RE the autogynephilia question, assuming the results are correct, it seems to suggest that it is somewhat associated with being trans, but more importantly that also that a lot of cis men have it/engage in it.
From a practical/trans rights point of view this is a mixed bag result, because the fact that lots of cis males engage in it definitely makes the argument that cis males can use very loose self-ID rules in locations like bathrooms and changing rooms and spas to involve cis females in unwanted sexualized role play of their own fashioning. Trans rights activists want to laser like focus on the idea that 'real' trans people are no more dangerous than cis people. But the problem is that there are lots more cis people. So if autogynephilia is semi-common among cis males, loosening the rules on previously sex segregated spaces ends up potentially exposing a lot of cis females to a lot of cis males.
This may still lead to different answers in different places (most female bathrooms tend to be single stall oriented so maybe no big deal while maybe naked spas could still be sex segregated).
In any case the finding that it isn't *particularly* associated with being trans doesn't answer the question of what we need to do with the cis guys who are autogynophile (in female spaces).
Realistically, just due to the numbers involved, you are more likely to get a cis male trying to enter a previously female place than a trans female. There are a lot of cis men and not (relatively) very many trans females. Even if all trans females were legit and just wanted a place to quietly go, the modal case would still be a pervert trying to spy on women.
A lot of my thinking on this subject goes back to a situation I dealt with personally, where a creepy guy repeatedly entered a female-only place and because the social norm at the time was definitely against that, I was able to chase him out (and eventually got him banned from that place). I fear that if he were doing that now, he could claim (or would be assumed) that he was trans female and would have assaulted or spied upon multiple women.
I think it's because the political parties have refined two aspects of electoral politics very finely over the last 50 years. One, safe districts for incumbents with political pull inside the party. And two, related, increased political power of long term and safe politicians within each party.
If your constituents can't really vote you out (Dianne Feinstein, Mitch McConnell) then you can work your way up the party apparatus and build power. Once you've built power, you can use it to gain further power such as higher level positions (president, committee chair, etc. ) or control over the party apparatus.
Once you've been at it long enough, it's very hard for anyone to intentionally get you out. Running against Dianne Feinstein is essentially impossible for a Republican and (at least until now, maybe still) forbidden as a Democrat. A Democrat running against her 10 years ago would have been very unlikely to get much support or funding, and may have been shunned by the party for trying.
As tempo says below "people tend to stay in office their entire lives".
Maybe that's the key to this puzzle. People are tiring of democracy and voting Olds into office is only a step away from ancestor worship and the restoration of monarchy.
People vote for candidates like them. Old people like old people.
Plenty of old politicians spoke with high pitched voices. Did JFK have a big baritone voice? FDR? LBR is pretty average. Reagan average. I guess Nixon was deepish?
yeah the old electorate is the thesis i am buying most as a big factor, although it doesn't explain everything. i suppose a big factor at the moment is plain bad luck.
forget the voice pitch for a moment and go by quality of voice. JKF, FDR, Reagan and Nixon all had great voices. JFK and FDR, famously. Reagan was a freaking actor, and when people talk about Nixon's "charisma" it's impossible to understand unless you forget what he looked like speaking and simply listen to his voice. He famously "won" that 1960 debate with JFK "on the radio" but not on TV.
my thought was that these particular drooling olds aren't showing any signs of living longer. but maybe, like some others here, you are thinking more of the electorate's age than the politicians'?
> people tend to stay in office their entire lives.
this is a very good point. no doubt true historically.
maybe the more specific question i should be asking is why in 2020 could the Dems not find a better candidate than Joe Biden, who was already very old and out of office?
Trump, OTOH, always seems like a special case, yet I'm kinda wondering if maybe he's a product of something deeper rooted than it seems. is it just a coincidence that he is also a very old candidate (even considering longer life expectancy)? Probably.
The leading candidates for the next presidential election will be the oldest in history by a large margin. Maybe that's dumb luck but maybe it's not. Maybe there are cultural explanations which also explain why Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Harrison Ford and other old farts are bigger movie stars than anyone under 40.
Not that it would tell us anything about the reason, but it would be interesting to see a graph showing the age of everyone in congress and how it has changed over recent decades. One of those animated graphs.
Not selling out should probably translate into being less financially successful overall, but economic growth plus volatility makes it pretty impossible to compare without bias the wealth of one generation against others.
Or maybe "deaths of despair" among Gen-x-ers is evidence of not having sold out? A whole generation of wannabe Kurt Cobains? Was Gen-x the primary cohort involved in January 6? That thought wouldn't have occurred to me if Jay Johnston from Mr. Show hadn't been one of them.
My pet theory is the reduction of natural population growth.
During the era of strong population growth, catering to younger voters was worth doing because that voting group is bigger than the older generation. Now they are about the same size. That inherent advantage is gone.
Politicians are usually better at catering to their own generation than a younger generation.
Combine this one with today's voters being on average a full decade older than the voters of just 30 years ago (which must be a first in U.S. history), and you've surfaced more than enough to explain the trend in national political leaders.
Once you get past a handful of "top politicians" (Trump, Biden, Sanders) and retired politicians (of course Jimmy Carter is old, but that doesn't imply anything), I'm not sure American politicians are "so goddamn old". Hakeem Jeffries is 52 and Kevin McCarthy is 58 - is that too old?
But there certainly are enough of those high-profile octogenarians to make a trend. I want to attribute our current situation to the Baby Boom (the generation of 1946 keeps sticking around). But both Biden and Sanders are older than that. What does it mean?
Perhaps it is just that, in the age of television, it is almost impossible to get people to leave the national stage.
There's a line chart in that article which really makes the connection plain. I'm actually surprised to see how well the median age in Congress has for a century tracked (up and down) with the median population age.
But why? Not sure, but maybe earlier wars or other national events forged a new generation of plausible politicians in a way that the Wars On Drugs And Terror didn't.
A related, equally specious theory: increasing distrust of the system, and/or increasing adoption of counterculture ethos by the mainstream, leads an increasing proportion of young political activists to work outside the system to effect change instead of within it. Radical energy is given fewer opportunities to be corrupted by realpolitik into dynamic moderacy.
yeah I was thinking about something along those lines. kinda like there's a fragmentation in media there is a fragmentation of radical political niches -- mainstream media itself plays to those niches in a way, but to speak figuratively it doesn't go Full Retard whereas the hundred niches themselves go Full Retard, each in their own way. e.g, Democratic Socialism, Slavery Reparations, Queer Stuff, Trans Stuff, Feminism, BLM, etc., etc., and that's just the right-centrists. all of these brands really want to be outside the party system and away from the "neo-liberals". Few voters understand any of that stuff and vote for the old guy who doesn't speak in language they don't understand.
I often watch TV with my girlfriend in the evenings. In principle I think a particular type of video game would be a better use of this time, but I don’t know games - can anybody recommend stuff which satisfy the following criteria:
- me and my girlfriend can play it together
- has artistic/literary value
-is some kind of big adventure
Basically I want something like an Elder Scrolls game or Red Dead Redemption, but which me and my gf play together.
The Tales series (Tales of Symphonia, Tales of Zestiria, etc) have couch co-op during battles. Combat is real-time, sort of a mix of RPG and fighting games, with each player controlling one party member. Outside of combat, only the first player does anything, so player 2 won't always be involved, but you're there for the story, mostly.
There's no continuity between games in the series, they just have shared design elements (like Final Fantasy), so start with whichever game looks interesting. I really enjoyed Symphonia's story, but it's pretty old, so you might want to try one of the more recent ones.
The Tales series is great for a longer co-op JRPG, but note that the latest main installment (Tales of Arise) is purely a single-player experience. This made many people quite annoyed and there are mods to address it, but I haven't tried any personally and don't expect much outside of PC use regardless.
First question, I think: Does your girlfriend enjoy video games so much that she chooses to play them by herself?
If not, then she, like me, might not think that video games are a "better use of this time." I'm a person who craves novelty and I don't enjoy the repetition involved in gaming (skill-building/ leveling up, long walks or rides between locations, etc) nearly as much as I enjoy the efficiency of watching a tightly-crafted story.
Feel free to ignore this if your girlfriend already plays video games or is on board with looking for something to play together.
* Skyrim. With the right Mod, you can play it as a 2+ person game. You will need two computers, though.
* Elder Scrolls Online. Or nearly any other MMO. If you're looking for story, I recommend ESO or Knights of the Old Republic, as those have had the best stories that I've seen in MMOs.
* Divinity Original Sin 2. I concur that it's great.
* If you don't mind having a single set of controls, I'd also highly recommend The Forgotten City. One of the best stories I've seen in a video game. It will take you only about 10 hours to get all four endings.
* Depending on what you mean by "artistic value," possibly Valheim. It's beautiful in its own way, though there really isn't a story.
Another recommendation that doesn't quite fit your criteria: Her Story. It's like an interactive crime mystery movie. There's not much interaction in a typical game sense, instead you spend most of your time thinking/talking through your theories to decide what thread to follow and eventually piece together a series of events. It's only 2-4 hours but makes for a really fun evening for a couple. IMO 2 people is the perfect way to play that game - "being detectives together" is a rare and interesting way to engage with your partner (or friend). I'd also recommend the board game Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective for this.
Forgot about The Golden Idol, which was another mystery game. You've got a static scene, and you go through the clues and solve the mystery of how this person died, and then onward to the next scene. A very pure mystery game, lending itself to as many co-detectives as you want. With some very solid art. ("For you, I would fight a tiger AND WIN!")
Not exactly what you asked for, but the board game Forbidden Island (and it’s sequels, Forbidden Desert and Forbidden Sky) are fun to play, involve strategy, and are great to play with a loved one, because they are cooperative: you both win or you both lose. You are not playing against each other; you are teaming up to beat the game.
I think WoW is still going, and there are plenty of others in that genre. They're called "MMO". You could probably look up which MMO has the best storyline.
The immediate first answer is It Takes Two (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ2VB6nbsUI), an asymmetric co-op game in which a divorcing couple gets turned into dolls and forced to cooperate through several videogame genres to turn back. Although it's completely linear, so not Skyrim.
...I don't actually play co-op, I can't think of many others. The Halo games all had co-op back in the Xbox days, if you're up for shooters. Pretty sure the Diablos still do, though I don't know about artistic/literary value.
I think 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is only singleplayer, and is pretty limited gamewise, but the plot is a jigsaw puzzle that's got more twists than a double helix, and might still be an alternative to TV. It's got very definitive segments so you could pass the controller around if you wanted to.
I guess if I'm mentioning Aegis Rim I should mention Disco Elysium too, which has even less gameplay and is even more interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igUK55Qn1Go
If you ever have a fight, the original Battletoads had a co-op mode that was literally impossible to win, you could troll her with that.
I feel like I remember that Scott linked a Noahpinion tweet of a graph from a paper comparing parenting hours spent by men and women across time, which showed that men today spend as much time on parenting as women did 50 years ago, but that women have similarly increased their time, so the gap between men and women has stayed ~the same. I can't for the life of me find either the tweet or scott's link to it.
Does anyone happen to know/remember what I'm talking about and where to find it?
Whatever happened to Rodney Brooks "Intelligence without Representation"-style robots? Wikipedia says it's correctly called "Subsumption architecture" (or maybe "behavior-based robotics"). Was it a dead end? How complex did their behaviors end up becoming? Is it still an area of active inquiry?
How important is proofreading in languages other than English?
I was reading the newest book review on The Educated Mind and noticed a place where the reviewer mixed up the words "good" and "well." This on it's own isn't very interesting; even extremely intelligent, native English speaking, professional writers who make a conscious effort to proofread their work make mistakes like this with such frequency that most of us sail right past them without a second thought. But that normalcy was striking to me. I am a native English speaker, with 19 years of education mostly spent on improving my reading and writing ability under my belt, who makes his living using the written word to persuade, and I would be shocked if this short paragraph didn't contain at least one error in grammar or punctuation. I can't remember the last blog post or newspaper article I read that didn't include multiple typos. I have no fewer than three separate books on my shelf on English style, grammar, and composition, which my employer considered important enough to my job to pay for as a business expense.
I've always taken this state of affairs for granted, where nobody really knows a lot of the rules and even the most literate among us mostly get by on extremely-error-prone intuition and are forced to spend significant amounts of time proofreading if they want to be clearly understood, but I'm also aware of just how weird/complex/idiosyncratic the English language is compared to other world languages.
For those of you whose native language is not English, do fluent and even skilled writers in your native language seem to struggle with grammar, punctuation, and spelling to a similar extent English writers do? How common are the sort of minor errors that most of us have learned to politely ignore when reading English-language newspapers? Are there different sorts of pitfalls than the ones I'm familiar with as a native English speaker? I'm especially interested in non-alphabetical writing systems like Chines, Korean, Japanese, etc.
The fact that languages like French, Spanish, and German have official academies that define a "correct" version of the language suggests that actually those languages would have *more* of this issue, since there *is* a "correct" version that differs from how people normally use the language. (Spelling is a pretty distinctive problem for English, that has parallels with character amnesia in Chinese. But Korean, and Japanese that is written with kana, should be just as easy as Italian or Spanish for native speakers.)
Germany had an orthography reform in the nineties, which was pretty much botched and everybody hated it. (E.g. people kept confusing "das" and "daß", and since they couldn't quite get themselves to lump them together, they turned the latter into "dass" which didn't help anybody at all.) BUT: In retrospect this reform helped make orthography somewhat more laissez-faire. Is it "Fahrrad fahren" or "Fahrradfahren"? Who cares? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uak8TG6Z9-w
When I read French internet forums, I'm surprised how many people don't seem to understand the first thing about their grammar. So many people mix up the infinitive and the participle all the time! ("J'ai manger") They commit errors that no foreigner would. Reminds me of that meme where the foreigner goes: "Excuse me for my bad English", and the native speaker answers "K bro".
Everyone hated it? Maybe at the beginning but as a now 20 year old German I have never heard anything bad about the reform. Maybe just the people who had to change their habits were annoyed but it was good overall?
Well, they were smoking something weird when they came up with their new rules. E.g. they wanted to change "aufwendig" (from "aufwenden") to "aufwändig" (from "Aufwand"), but luckily they rowed back on such things, and now both of them are allowed. Same with the "Spagetti" nonsense. I agree that "Kanguruh" which now is deemed obsolete might look fancier than "Kanguru", but so did "Elephant", and this is indeed only a matter of habit.
But the worst part is the ss/ß rule change. Obviously they had no idea where the previous rule came from, and it was really not difficult. Sure, it's easier when you remember that they used to have two "s" in German, the round s at the end of the syllable, and the long | at the beginning or middle of the syllable. We got used to getting along without this differentiation, only sometimes it might be confusing: "ha|chen" (snatch, or smoke weed) as opposed to "Häschen" (little rabbit), where the round s denotes that this is not a "sch", but the ch is part of the diminuitive ending.
Now you also have the confusion between "Passant" (passer-by, used to be written "Pa||ant") and "Passamt" (passport office in Austria) which used to be written "Paßamt", and it was clear that the ß (a ligature of | and s) was ending the syllable.
Instead, they now say that after a short vowel you should write "ss" instead of "ß". So great, should we write "Spass" in Westphalia? https://youtu.be/YtxdwtYfo3Q?t=42
Oh, PS, there is a text by Harry Rowohlt: "Behaltet euer Neuschreib, ihr Krücken", which you can find on Spotify.
Seems right. I recall hearing that the French equivalent of a spelling bee is a contest in which students must correctly conjugate verbs in their written form, since there are many conjugations that are far more complex in written than standard French.
I wonder if this problem is unique to French among Western languages -- that the written language in its proper form includes so much grammatical detail entirely absent in the spoken form. It seems like the sort of thing you would absolutely need an official academy to maintain.
My impression is that France takes a real pride in its language. This isn't unique to France, but it's rare among English speakers. Thus, I imagine poor use of the national language there is offensive in a way that it isn't here in the US. Here, poor spelling is a sign of ignorance, but no more noteworthy than a lack of knowledge of math, history, science, etc.
Yes, other languages require proofreading. (My experience mostly concerns Finnish and Swedish in addition to English — it’s not actually that different.) I guess all languages have different colloquial vs written styles, and people make mistakes with the grammar of the written language.
Korean is written in an alphabetic system, by the way.
Oh, I'd like to know about the quality of the english translations of Mikael Niemi's stuff. The german translations suck. Can you say anything about that?
The specific problems with "spelling" in the English language are somewhat unique, due to the unusually broad variety of etymological sources of words. But having unique problems is not a particularly unusual attribute of a language.
I assume the problems associated with uncommon words are present in every language, and the problems associated with complicated grammar are present in any attempt to express complicated concepts in language.
I have been testing out the theory that judicious use of linguistic splices can make it simpler to communicate 难 concepts. The obvious problem is that "people won't understand it". I am content to hope that ChatGPT will be able to translate for them.
PS: 难 = "difficult". In context, "very difficult", the language-shift conveys a sense of emphasis.
> I have been testing out the theory that judicious use of linguistic splices can make it simpler to communicate 难 concepts. The obvious problem is that "people won't understand it". I am content to hope that ChatGPT will be able to translate for them.
Evidence for this theory: the sheer amount of Latin (and to a lesser extent, German) phrases in Law and in Philosophy
There are two issues with the intermingling of kanji with English. People can't "hear" anything when they read the text, and people can't type the characters.
I use Mandarin vocalizations, so I type nan2 (it is both second tone, and second on the autocomplete list). But perhaps U+96BE would be a more useful keyboarding to the American monoglot audience. Ultimately, there is no good solution currently available.
And, of course, "how do you write characters" is a completely different type of "spelling" issue.
It's certainly an artistic style, but I don't think it's at all helpful for communicating your ideas more effectively, which is generally the goal of a blog post. The reader isn't going to know the meanings you assigned to all the colors, especially since you invented new names for two of them. They also aren't likely to speak Chinese or Japanese, and even if they put it into Google Translate that's not going to tell them what you mean by "rice fire" or similar. (And no, providing the explanation on another page isn't helping - nobody is going to keep the translation guide open in another tab while reading your blog.)
Basically, you're putting up a bunch of barriers to comprehensibility for no apparent reason.
Even if I could consistently read kanji, it seems really out of place. It's an English blogpost about a French event, why the Chinese/Japanese?
I don't know what the color changes are supposed to represent, but the /color title looks like a mistake. And then we hit /xanthum and I'm like "what is this nonsense fantasy color doing here with all the practical boys like /red and /yellow?" (/mogue is unreadable but that might be an intentional joke, considering what he's saying.)
If the colors are just supposed to be characters, I'd recommend Red: and Yellow: instead. Leading with /red looks like you've mistyped a tag, like we weren't supposed to see that.
> one of the dark secrets of the “trans” movement is that, according to all accounts, hormones are intensely pleasurable, in the sense that a recreational drug would be.
As noted, "mogue" comments are in a somewhat hyperbolic register. As well as a "are you sure you want to open Pandora's Box" register.
But I have heard several accounts, first-hand and second-hand, that hormone injections give a noticeable short-term sense of elation. Not to the degree of fentanyl, but far beyond that anything a person on warfarin or atorvastatin would experience.
Certainly the chemicals are not a painful experience.
Turing, IIRC, did not much enjoy his injections. Perhaps this only applies to testosterone? (See e.g. Chuck Palahniuk's account of his episode of steroid use.)
The synthesis of your post regarding admissions and your link from reddit about advanced math classes, is this:
Harvard et al really do have a big share of the smartest, most driven students. But that isn't the bulk of the student body. The bulk is kids who are less smart/driven and there in part due to privilege.
Sure, great that you can take grad-level math classes as a junior, but realistically most Harvard kids don't do that.
Part of the advantage of going to Harvard is the ambiguity. Are you "pothead child of hedge fund billionaire", "somewhat smart kid of two doctor/lawyer/etc types", or "Mr. math genius, take-multiple-graduate-level-math-classes-as-a-junior"?
Also - just to say it - I think the last group will be disproportionately from well-off families, just because that sort of ability isn't only about talent, but also about having it cultivated from a young age. There are perhaps "doing calculus in preschool" level prodigies out there for whom it doesn't matter, but they're a *very* small slice, even smaller than the "Mr. math genius" group.
>Part of the advantage of going to Harvard is the ambiguity. Are you "pothead child of hedge fund billionaire", "somewhat smart kid of two doctor/lawyer/etc types", or "Mr. math genius, take-multiple-graduate-level-math-classes-as-a-junior"?
It is funny you say this, because I bet it is at the root of my total dismissive/frustrated attitude towards the Ivy's and their grads. I am a consultant, so by the very nature of it I am generally working places where there is a mess (not always, but predominantly). Over the years I have stumbled across a bunch of Ivy grads, and I have always found them incredibly underwhelming compared to their and other people's opinions of them.
Lots of people who think they are brilliant, but are slightly above average at best (for a college grad in a high level position). But I bet when you cross reference my industry, with orgs that are a mess in my industry...I bet I am almost solely interacting with the "pothead child of hedge fund billionaire" and "somewhat smart kid of two doctor/lawyer/etc" types and never the "Mr. math genius, take-multiple-graduate-level-math-classes-as-a-junior".
While I was the latter type of person but just went to a totally underwhelming university, so being condescended to by people from the former groups is particularly galling. I always love intellectually/professionally stuffing them in a locker (which happens a lot).
Bullying, it's not just for kids, and pairs great with class resentment!
There's an adverse selection issue here. The prospective employer has a hard time telling which of the three categories a given Harvard grad is, but the "grad level math as a junior" person probably went to grad school, and the "somewhat smart kid of two doctors/lawyers" likely has other offers, so you're more likely to get the former.
Yeah, a lot of the Ivy thing is just branding. The student body overlaps a ton with "pretty smart but didn't get into an Ivy." Hardly anyone appreciates that most students at elite colleges are just pretty smart.
But the part I think the most interesting here is whether you think Mr. Math Genius doesn't create messes, or is just more analytical and whatnot when discussing the messes. I've been noodling on how much being extremely smart helps one actually make less mistakes, correct mistakes faster, or just rationalize and cover up mistakes more capably. In my mind, it's kind of related to how people who are more knowledgeable about public policy don't necessarily have more correct positions on which policies are optimal, they are just better at rationalizing the positions they do have. I wonder if that's a general effect beyond politics.
>I've been noodling on how much being extremely smart helps one actually make less mistakes, correct mistakes faster, or just rationalize and cover up mistakes more capably.
I think mostly the latter two. Plus if you are actually a crackerjack hotshot who can think their way out of anything, well you probably have less of a need to bring in a hired gun.
Not that a lot of this problems I solve are really *that* complicated (some of them are the consulting equivalent of "did you try turning it off and on again"). But they do often involve careful thinking, attention to detail, and abstract reasoning in a way that a wide swath of college graduates from all universities basically abandon once they are done with school.
That's assuming they even did it in school. I think much of this is just being unwilling to put in mental effort and attend to detail, like you mention, rather than depending on intelligence per se. But who knows, intelligence is a pretty fuzzy concept anyway.
On my Substack reader app, there is now an annoying feed. They try to put in links to blogs they think I might like. And one-line comments much like tweets keep popping up. It is distracting and annoying. I cannot find what I subscribed to and want to read.
Or rather, there are plugins that prevent you from being *noticeably* impacted by your information being collected. I use a browser with some plugins and I pretty much don't see sponsorships or ads anywhere online - not on YouTube, not on Facebook, not on retail sites, and not on news sites to which the retail sites attempt to follow me.
If a targeted ad is invisible to its target, is it even an ad?
It may be entertaining to watch, but I don't expect it to be the caliber of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, which remains one of my favorite movies, and which I consider better than the book. In fact, watching the trailer made me think that the script could have been generated by an AI. So...I asked ChatGPT, which only has training data before 2022, to tell me the plot of such a prequel.
I actually like ChatGPT's plot a little better, but found, as expected, it didn't really have much new. It told of Willy's adventures, with his friend Matilda, went in search of magical confections, including Vanilla Sprites, Sugar Sylphs, and the finding of oompa-loompas.
I asked it to expand on Sugar Sylphs, and found they lived in clouds, which Willy and Matilda reached using some kind of magic rituals. Though I kind of liked this idea, I found it missing the essential ingredient, as it were, of what made the original movie so great, which was the zaniness. I suggested that Willy and Matilda should, instead, reach the Sugar Sylphs' clouds by eating the right combination of specially-crafted sweets, to obtain a sugar high. This seems in-line with Willy mixing a coat into a batch of candy because it was too cold, and some shoes in another batch to give it a little kick.
This illustrates to me why LLMs like ChatGPT can't yet replace humans. Hollywood currently has a writer's strike going on, protesting AIs. If the writers only produce what AIs can produce, then Hollywood has a point. If they can do better, generating actually good content, even with the help of AI, then Hollywood doesn't realize their true value.
Though I have never written a screenplay, I bet I could do better than the prequel coming out in December, with help from ChatGPT. A professional screenwriter ought to, on average, do better than me.
...so they're protesting AIs by making the studios rely on the AIs? That... I mean the AI isn't up to it, so maybe that's the point and this is all a good idea.
A Willy Wonka prequel should be a rom-com about how Charlie's parents met and all the grandparents moved in. There should be, like, one tangential mention of Willy Wonka, and chocolate in whole.
Don't like this prequel trailer. Wonka seems to have his head on straight, which is not the Wonka I know. (That "scratch that, reverse it" had so little life in it.)
Timothée Chalamet as young Willy Wonka is all I needed to know, if I didn't already have strong priors about what a prequel based on nothing in Dahl would be like.
I presume you mean the 70s movie? Yeah, that was a bit all over the place, it seemed to be too long to me. But it was perfect for the Christmas Day movie on TV for years.
I suppose the newer Depp version has taken over from that, and I never saw that one.
I imagine it was just the author going "They changed everything, they took out the best bits and replaced them with their own silly ideas" which always happens with book adaptations.
I loved the 70s movie (and still do), solely because of Gene Wilder's portrayal of Wonka. We never quite can tell (not even at the end) what Wonka is at the core, a villain or a hero; all we know is that he's got a hidden agenda, the power to push it through, and the intelligence to warp his audience to his will. And just what did he do to the native country of the Oompa-Loompas ? One look at his face, and... you'll have more questions than answers...
Gene Wilder was very good at portraying the level of danger within Wonka; he's probably got good intentions, but he can go the long (and weird) way round to get to where he wants.
The trippy boat ride in the 70s movie was exactly that:
I do not get this Chalamet craze. He's this tiny, twiggy guy, he makes Ezra Miller look beefy by comparison. As Paul Atreides? Why? To draw in the audience of swooning fangirls who otherwise would never go to a SF movie?
As young Willy Wonka? Just seems wrong. I could maybe see it if they were going for a Tim Burton style movie, but that doesn't seem to be it. Gene Wilder in the original movie was fine for me. The only other Chocolate Factory book completed was a sequel, the third book never got past the first chapter. And neither of those are about young Willy Wonka.
It's a variation on the Batman casting problem, for which the right answer really was Michael Keaton once upon a time. You need someone who can play both Bruce Wayne and Batman, or Clark Kent and Superman, or Paul Atreides and Muad'Dib. Chalmont did pretty well as the Atreides kid; we'll have to wait and see if he can pull off Muad'Dib.
My problem with Chalamet (and it may be simply that I am Too Damn Old) is that sure, he can pull off the "kid" roles. Can he do the mature, adult Paul? Who knows?
Eh, I think that he does make sense as Paul Atreides, because Paul is supposed to be a bit of a thin, whiny, twiggy colonial prince from a water planet who is the ultimate dark horse on Arrakis; of course, in the book he does toughen up considerably (as needs must), and I doubt we'll see this happen in the movie.
That said though, I don't really care about the young WIllie Wonka one way or the other; I just enjoy imagining the Dune/Wonka crossover movie that we could've gotten, instead of whatever this is. "He's got the Voice ! The Candy Way !"
The Oompa-Loompas are Fremen 🤣 The secret ingredient in the chocolate comes from the sandworm spice! That's how you know the Wonka Bar Eaters by their blue eyes!
If by "edgy" you mean controversial, I agree. But then I don't expect controversial. More like, "'What you got here, Wonka? Some kind of fun house?' 'Why? Are you having fun?'" Or a musical lock that a teacher doesn't recognize the correct composer.
It is true that some Fun and Original things are also controversial, and some may also be considered controversial by the restrictions LLMs put into place. They are not mutually exclusive. But that still leaves a lot of fun and original content to be created.
I just don't expect LLMs to be able to create fun and original content any time soon. They are still awful at making up jokes and puns.
How would the US military deal with minefields, like what the Ukrainian military is dealing with now? Like, how would they clear them? I understand US dominance is based on air superiority, but you do have to cross the actual minefield at some point- right? I read the Wiki page on demining, but it just lists general tactics.
Inspired by the Wiki page and the Ukrainian struggle, I (a non-engineer) came up with a couple of random cheap demining tactics. These are more in the category of 'shower thoughts' and not like a serious proposal, but just for fun:
How about a pressure washer to trigger them? A cheap remotely-controlled vehicle like a tractor or excavator can carry a commercial pressure washer that sprays the ground in front of it. The amount of pressure a pressure washer can generate is amazing- like more than a human's weight- so should be enough to trigger the mines. Just keep spraying the ground and advancing. Will some of them get damaged? Sure- just roll out the next cheap tractor/pressure washer combo and keep going. Water supplies might be a hard limit.
Alternately you could just do an agricultural-style controlled burn on vegetation, where the heat should trigger all the mines. Do a spray of a cheap propellant (again via a remote-controlled tractor), the burn will detonate buried mines, if the tractor gets damaged replace with another, and keep advancing. Lots of farmers do controlled burns in their fields, not a high-tech problem
Mines come in two overall varieties: antipersonnel (AP) and antitank (AT). These get triggered in a number of ways.
AT mines have a large quantity of explosive, sufficient to destroy an armored vehicle. These have a couple different varieties within them. Pressure plate mines, where pressing on a plate with a large weight will trigger the mine, is the most straightforward. Typically, the weight required is much larger than a person, since it's something of a waste to use this much explosive on a single individual. However, pressure plate mines have the downside of only being triggered if a track passes *directly* over the mine. So these tend to be called "track width" mines, because they only affect a vehicle Another variety is a "tilt rod" fuze, where you have a ~3 ft rod that sticks up from the mine, so a tank or truck passing over will hit it and trigger the mine whether or not they happen to hit it directly with their wheel or track. You also have magnetic mines that detect the large mass of metal in a vehicle, which will also trigger if you don't happen to get hit by the track. Tilt rod and magnetic mines are referred to as "full width" mines, since they can be triggered by the full width of a vehicle, not just the track.
Antipersonnel mines often have a much smaller quantity of explosive (often just enough to disable but not reliably kill), and tend to require very little force to trigger their fuzes. Pressure plate varieties exist, but so do tripwires. Either way, these don't have much explosive, but are optimized to be triggered by troops moving around.
You'll note that these tend to have effects and triggering conditions that don't really overlap. For example, a person can just wander through a 100% AT minefield, and they're going to be able to step on pressure plates without setting them off, and they can easily see and avoid the tiltrods. Similarly, a tank can just...drive through an AP minefield, since it probably won't even feel the little bangs from AP mines. Then personnel can just stay in the tracks and know that all the mines there have been triggered.
So these get used together, where the AP and AT mines reinforce each other. A typical minefield will consist of a bunch of AT mines, each with a cluster of a few AP mines around it to thwart troops not in vehicles. You also do use what are called "anti-handling devices" (AHDs) so enemy troops can't just easily pick the mines up once they find them. These basically will cause the mine to go off if you attempt to move them. They can be as elaborate as electronic mercury tilt switches, to as simple as a string tied to a small stake below the mine and attached to the fuze, so if the mine is picked up the string pulls on the fuze and sets the mine off. You don't use AHDs on every mine, just enough of them such that enemy troops don't want to bother picking up the mines to use themselves.
Assuming the enemy has emplaced a minefield with this mix of AT and AP mines, what do you do? There are a bunch of options.
First, bypass it if you can. If the enemy was smart, they made sure to tie the minefield (as part of a system of obstacles) into terrain so you *can't* go around it, but sometimes the enemy screwed up and didn't do this, so you should always consider it.
Secondly, since triggering the mine requires triggering it in a way as described above (depending on type), you can find the mines. The most straightforward and low-tech way to do this is to have your engineers crawl on their bellies, and use a bayonet to probe the ground ahead of them. (Or, these days, a nonmetallic probe to avoid triggering magnetic fuzes.) They stick their probe into the ground every couple of inches across the width of their shoulders, and if they find something solid, they dig with their fingers to expose it and see if it's a rock (probable) or a mine. If it's a mine, they mark it with a piece of engineer tape, and change the direction of their track of movement to go around it. If they've gone the whole width of their shoulders and not found any mines, then they crawl forward a couple inches and do the whole operation again.
You can also find the mines by doing the above "crawl forward a few inches at a time", except with a mine detector, which is (at least when I was in) just a really sensitive metal detector. Both this and probing are so absolutely fucking tedious that you want to rotate personnel on something like a 20 minute basis, because it's hard for a person to maintain focus on a task like this even if their life depends on it. This is also very, very slow, and a lot of mines are "minimum metal" so you can't reliably detect them with a metal detector.
More kinetic ways use vehicles with specialized equipment. Mine rollers and plows have been mentioned, which are attached to tanks to trigger the mines ahead of the vehicle itself. These have the disadvantage that you noted in a comment above, where they only can take a few hits before being destroyed, so if you try to clear a lane with just these you'll need to have the vehicle back out so you can replace the device (a slow and difficult task in a minefield). Because of this, mine rollers and plows tend to be used for "proofing" a lane cleared with other methods--i.e., make sure you really did get all the mines. (One other way to do proofing if you don't have tanks with rollers and plows is to put sandbags in the bed of a truck and drive it backwards through the lane, though you'd better have a plan to pull a disabled truck back out to the friendly side in case you missed a mine.)
So another way is to use a Mine-Clearing Line Charge (MICLIC). This is a rope of plastic explosives attached to a rocket, which you fire over the minefield so the rope lays across your intended path of movement. You then detonate the plastic explosive rope to set off the mines along the path. However, note that these set off the mines *through their fuzes*: they DO NOT sympathetically detonate the mines' explosives directly. That is, the pressure pulse from the MICLIC exerts enough force on the pressure plate to trigger them, or disturbs tilt rods and tripwires enough to set them off.
Because of this, more modern designs often use fuze designs to avoid explosive overpressure to a limited extent. As an example for AT mines, the TS-50 mine (an Italian design; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TS-50_mine) uses an air bladder system in the fuze such that you have to wait a little bit of time for air from the squeezed bladder to leak through a calibrated pinhole and generate enough pressure impinging on the striker assembly to set the mine off. This means that not only do you need enough weight on the plate, you need to hold it for a little bit of time. Not much time--like a tenth or hundredth of a second or something--but enough that the overpressure from a blast lasting a few thousandths of a second won't reliably set it off. As an example of an AT mine, the PMN2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PMN_mine) has a cruciform pressure plate, which can be triggered by a boot over most of the mine's footprint, but which has a smaller area to reduce the amount of force
So this is why "dropping a big bomb" on the minefield isn't likely to be reliable. Firstly, because it's only going to exert enough pressure to trigger mines on a relatively small portion of the minefield--the square-cube law is a bitch--so a bunch of smaller explosives close together is much more efficient. Which is what the MICLIC does. Secondly because depending on the mines in use they may be resistant to it anyway.
As for something like a pressure washer, that's not going to exert force on the pressure plate of any mine for a while. It's going to first expend energy on blowing the soil away, and then possibly exert pressure on the mine once it's dug down a couple inches to be blasting the plate directly. So what you're proposing to do is pressure wash the entire top three to four inches of the soil away. Hope there's a place for all that eroded soil and water to go, or you're going to create a huge mudhole that you then have to (try to) drive through. This is in addition to needing enough water to do this. And, of course, it's less likely than a MICLIC (or even a big bomb) to trigger tilt rods.
And, while you're trying to do all of this, the enemy is trying to kill you. Remember, mines are just an obstacle, and like all obstacles they don't stop you, they act as a force multiplier so the enemy can stop you with fewer troops and weapons.
Googling US military anti-mine gets me this 517 page pdf of military minefield doctrine. https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/FM%2020-32%20W%20CH%201-4.pdf You may be surprised to hear I'm not willing to read the whole thing, but for the length I assume it mentions the specific tools used for clearing minefields.
If all else fails, drop a bunker buster on it. Why bother with the mines when you can remove the whole field.
It seems that clearing a path through a minefield is only tricky if you're under enemy fire. The difference between US and Ukrainian military doctrine and capabilities is that the US can use air supremacy to ensure there's no enemy nearby before clearing the minefield as a mopping-up operation, whereas the Ukrainians are stuck trying to get through minefields under enemy fire.
Presumably in many cases, you're not just fighting in a nihilistic war of destruction, but are actually trying to enable people to return to their homeland.
The pressure washer sounds like a mine roller or plow with extra steps - either way you're putting something on the front of your tank to mechanically set off mines. Which is a pretty reliable strategy, but I'm not sure what the washer adds.
The cool, military way to clear land mines is with a line charge - use a rocket to lay a literal rope made of explosives over the minefield, and set it off, blowing up all the mines in a straight line. It's very fast, but it's a one-use item, naturally.
I don't think there's really anything more clever than what the wiki article says. There are lots of ways to clear mines if you're willing to take your time and move slowly, the trouble is that behind the minefield are enemy soldiers, and if you take too long doing it they'll see you coming and shoot you. And stopping the defenders from shooting at you while you cross the minefield is less "demining" and more "combined arms tactics."
Don't they get damaged/destroyed by the mines though? I guess if you had a fleet of cheap plows it might not be an issue, but that seems like a hard constraint. Versus, the pressure washer is mostly insulated from the mine blast by being further away- it's only the water flow that's touching the mine, the washer itself could be 10 feet away. Some will get damaged, but it seems like you'd chew up your plows much much faster via constant contact with the mines
The whole point of a minefield is to slow attackers down and fix them in place so that your people can shoot them. A minefield that isn't covered by soldiers is just a delay.
So to clear a minefield you must either suppress the covering fire (can be very difficult if the defenders are at all competent) or you use human wave attacks, which end up with casualty counts like the battles of WWI.
David Brooks had an interesting piece in the NYT about Douglas Hofstadter changing his mind about AI. He links to a LW article that Gwern posted with a transcript of an interview with Hofstadter.
DH: It “just renders humanity a very small phenomenon compared to something else that is far more intelligent and will become incomprehensible to us, as incomprehensible to us as we are to cockroaches.”
Brooks was surprised by the interview and the change in thinking and called Hofstadter to talk about the change.
It was a pleasant surprise to see the thoughtful, sensible, mild mannered conservative I try to watch every Friday night on The News Hour - yes I’m an old guy - reference “I Am a Strange Loop.” and “Gödel, Escher, Bach”.
Edit: I suppose he doesn't really qualify as 'conservative' if I use bat guano 2023 standards.
My god I used to eye-roll so hard at David Brooks' Op-Eds carried by my local paper (10+ years ago). But he's reasonable in the modern era. How times have changed!
Yes and yes. Someone aspiring to do this full-time would be ideal, but I think some people can make a great contribution by writing as a side project to a main thing, especially if that main thing is in science, engineering, startups, policy, etc. Scott himself and, e.g., Sarah Constantin are examples.
I have a blog that’s intended to (eventually) take the dense ideas presented by, eg, Qualia Computing, and jailbreak them for a less scientifically rigorous audience (in a more infotainment sort of way). Would this be considered too informal/playful for the program? My assumption is yes but I’d be pleasantly surprised to learn otherwise. Thanks!
Hard to say without seeing an example. Popular communication of ideas that have only been presented in academic or other less-accessible setting is good. Infotainment doesn't sound like what we want to prioritize supporting right now though. Maybe send a sample?
The standard evolutionary explanation for morning sickness is that, in combination with hyperosmia, it deters pregnant humans from eating questionable food during the first trimester when embryos are sensitive to teratogens, thereby serving an adaptive role by compensating for the cost of not being able to eat very much or do much of anything except lie in your cave feeling miserable.
I think this is a plausible explanation for hyperosmia, but fails to explain species-specificity and timing of nausea and vomiting. Routine vomiting during gestation has barely been reported in non-human animals, including other omnivores (rats don't vomit at all, some reports of mild food aversion in gravid dogs and cats); I don't know of any evidence that human embryos are more vulnerable to environmental teratogenesis, and if we were I'd guess it would be during the the late first and throughout the second trimester during the most intense periods of neurogenesis and neuron migration to make our abnormally complex brains, whereas morning sickness is usually worst around weeks 6–14.
My alternative hypothesis is that the adaptive value is as a stress test of the social caloric support system. Humans are so social and invest so heavily in each offspring that it's almost impossible to survive and successfully complete pregnancy and lactation unless you have conspecifics bringing you lots of food. Therefore, instead of being selected to minimize hormonally-induced nausea like other mammals, early humans found that it increased lifetime fitness if they stopped being able to feed themselves for a month or so right at the beginning of pregnancy—and, if this test revealed that they were in a situation where nobody was able or willing to feed them, to cut their losses by having malnutrition-induced miscarriages before going through the extremely dangerous process of late gestation and childbirth, and to try again later.
This alternative hypothesis explains not only why our bodies would do something with such obvious fitness costs, but also why other animals don't do it (except perhaps those that rely on humans feeding them when they feel bad!) and why it happens essentially as soon as the body is confident that it's pregnant.
What is the explanation for why children can be such picky eaters? It doesn’t make sense especially when you consider they refuse food their parents offer them (that is known to be safe).
Another related question - often small children come close to death and need iv fluids during ordinary viral gastroenteritis because they lose fluid and then refuse to drink (not because they can’t drink - whatever can’t means — maybe it’s a revealed preference). This also seems completely counterintuitive.
I think it's common for children to be picky eaters when their parents try to get them to eat new things. But when the parents eat a regular diet of the same thing every day (as most parents have for 10,000 years) kids are rarely picky about *that* thing.
Re pickiness, I believe it develops at around the same time as children learn to walk, so it's probably to stop them wandering off and eating some strange berries or something. As for refusing food their parents offer, I suppose "doesn't like strange food except when it's being offered by a parent" is too fine-grained a preference for evolution to produce when "doesn't like strange food" is close enough and has the same advantages re: not getting poisoned.
It's my suspicion that children often aren't actually hungry at mealtimes, but want to snack a lot. (I don't think that's entirely because snacks tend to be made especially tempting.)
Speaking not as a scientist, but just as a parent and old person: kids have far more sensitive taste buds. This is why they like bland things (plain pasta, chicken nuggets, etc.). As our taste buds die over the course of our lives, we crave spice and things to make food interesting (hence older people putting Tabasco/red hot/pepper flakes on everything).
I haven't done my homework in this area, but a very large fraction of the humans in history died in early childhood, before their immune systems were as well-developed and experienced as their parents', from eating unpasteurized food and drinking water with water-borne diseases. So in evolutionary time, I don't think the premise "food and water offered by your parents or other caregivers is known to be safe" holds.
Sure, but evidently not to the extent that it's maladaptive for young kids to have an independent mechanism for rejecting strange-tasting food given to them by adults.
Definitely a possibility, equally consistent with the mechanism of relaxing selection by increased food-sharing, although it doesn't explain why it's so strong in the first trimester and not afterwards (it's believed that human chorionic gonadotropin plays a role in the etiology, but that remains 4-5 orders of magnitude higher than baseline throughout pregnancy).
To properly motivate my hypothesis, I'd probably have to make a model of lifetime reproductive success and do the math with a literature-supported range of numbers like (miscarriage risk)=f(nutrition/month), p(maternal death|severe malnutrition in first trimester), p(neonatal death|severe maternal malnutrition during lactation), the autocorrelation of nutrient availability over a 9-month characteristic time in the paleolithic Great Rift Valley, etc.
My understanding is that morning sickness (and nausea more generally) has a fair amount of influence from the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve carries all kinds of signals involving the thoracic cavity and organs and could plausibly be changing/moving or has some new duties/signalling during early pregnancy that is manifesting, as a side effect, morning sickness.
The fact that stronger morning sickness is correlated with lower chance of an early miscarriage sort of seems like it fits with this?
I agree with the above commenter that my prior/default belief would be that morning sickness is a side effect of some other pregnancy process and is not itself adaptive in any way. I'd want to see pretty strong evidence to the contrary to believe otherwise.
I write a Substack newsletter where I share three things I find interesting, once a week.
In the latest issue I shared:
1. A study finding an unexpected overlap in the demographics of BLM and anti lockdown protests in the USA
2. A chart demonstrating the U shaped relationship between fertility and household income
3. My mapping of median income per capita against average yearly working hours across a number of countries. This shows among other things that the higher the incomes, the lower the average working hours, with the exception of Korea.
You know, something that I haven't heard mentioned in the autogynaphilia debate, but which I think supports the mainstream trans-as-dysmorphia story, is furries.
The furry community plays host to people with a wide variety of paraphilias- attraction to characters with animal features, transformation, vore, micro and macro, etc. But what really connects people in the community isn't the kinky stuff- it's the common longing to be something other than human. Almost everything that makes a furry a furry- the fursuits, the OCs, the role-playing- in an expression of that desire, and finding people who share it is the main reason people become furries. Functionally, the furry community is a social network for people suffering from species dysmorphia.
So how does the autogynaphilia model account for that? Are they supposed to secretly be zoophiles pretending to be dysmorphic? Obviously, that doesn't make sense. Why should one socially unaccepted paraphilia masquerade as a different one? Also, many of the fetishes associed with the community, ilke micro and macro, have nothing to do with animals- instead, the common thread is an attraction to being something not quite human.
It's generally assumed in the community that the fetishes arise from the dysmorphia. That's supported by the fact that most furries' obsession with being non-human started before puberty. It's also just a lot more parsimonious than the alternative.
Finally, furries make no public claims of dysmorphia- most still try to insist to outsiders that it's just an anthropomorphic animal fandom. So, if dysmorphia is supposed to just be posturing for social acceptance, why would they only express it in private?
I don't know about the current stuff. After going to the cinema the first time, aged about six years, I felt I wanted to be a black panther like Bagheera. Some years, I climbed trees and woodwork and tried to hang out on a limb like a leopard. It somehow didn't work and it took years until I accepted my human body and started working out to make the best of it within its limitations.
Maybe these times, kids with strange ideas like mine experienced less frustration?
Second thought: Are we talking totem stuff here? Anybody can dress up, but integrating another identity is something else. Something old we are supposed to have gotten rid of. Jewish tradition got rid of that big time. Christian tradition reintroduced one and only totem. In the far east, things went differently in some relevant places. Fox spirits and the like, demons, not helpful for one's identitiy. Except you're a mongol.
I agree being a furry seems in many respects comparable, but I've known several people who're furries closely enough for them to share their private feelings about it, and not all of them agreed that they experience dysmorphia. I think people who're deeply invested in the community are probably more likely to, some people seem to be deeply attracted to it as a kink who don't.
I personally lean towards thinking of transgender the same way. There are some people who definitely seem to experience dysmorphia, where it's a central element of their own self-identification. Some appear not to, and I've spoken to some for whom envisioning themselves as members of the sex opposite their assigned one appears to be a genuinely intense kink.
I don't think autogynephila is *the* explanation for MtF transgender, and I think any hypothesis as such rendered much less plausible by how uncommon autoandrophilia seems to be relative to FtM transgender. But I've seen sufficiently strong anecdotal evidence that I'm strongly convinced that autogynephilia is at least a genuine thing that some AMAB people experience. And I think that if we sufficiently normalize "anyone who wants to identify as the sex opposite the one they were assigned at birth, for any reason, is trans," then the proportion of self-identified trans people will tend to change due to their being a significant pool of non-dysphoric people for whom that's the case.
This seems like evidence *for* the agn theory: furries have an animal fetish (or a fetish for things that look slightly like animals) and thus enjoy dressing up as animals, adopting fursonas and arguing for widespread social acceptability. I don't think a lot of people disputes that furries have a fetish.
My point is that people in the furry community have a wide variety of different fetishes, some of which have nothing at all to do with animals, but all of which seem to be related to this longing to be non-human, and which seem to usually develop after that longing.
Dysmorphia and paraphilia may be related, but the evidence of the furry community suggests the causality goes from the former to the latter, not the other way around.
When it comes to putting DD breasts on snakes, I'm leaning to the "fetish" and not "really want to be a snake" explanation.
I do think there's a division within furrydom between those who genuinely have the "I hate being a human, I wish I were something else" dysmorphia, and the "anthropomorphised animal cartoon figures yiffing" types. (I was online acquainted with a furry/brony of the first type, who really seemed to be steered into it due to a terrible family life as a teenager with a domineering stepmother who constantly undercut them).
And now, I have recently been made aware of another controversy roiling the community about "ferals" - people who do straight-up art of animals having sex, not the anthro type of furry but as realistic as a cartoon dog gets type. There's arguments over 'isn't this just bestiality?' and 'it's just another type of furry, why are you getting your knickers in a twist over this?'.
Well, a photo isn't much good since it doesn't have your fursona and Fido romantically interacting, and that is as far into this as I am willing to go.
I'm one of the straight cis male respondents who gave a non-zero answer to the autogynephilia question, and I still don't think I have autogynephilia. Let me explain why.
In a question of the form "Picture a very beautiful woman. How sexually arousing would you find it to imagine <X, where X involves her>?" I am never not going to be aroused by that, unless X is actively disgusting. X could be "her standing in the corner holding textbooks and pretending to be a bookshelf", "her attached to the end of your foot like a shoe" (sorry), or "her as a gigantic godlike figure holding up the night sky" and I wouldn't answer zero. I'm not attracted to X, but I am attracted to beautiful women doing any old thing.
The answers of respondents probably differed more by how they read the question than whether they really have autogynephillia. Some of the cis attracted-to-women respondents are either disgusted by the premise, or answering the question relative to their base rate of being aroused by things. Some of them are answering it literally. Most/all of the trans respondents are disgusted. This entirely explains the weirder results and also invalidates any conclusions drawn from them.
FWIW, I've never been attracted to any woman without imagining her reactions to me. So the model of her reactions to me is a part of what I'm aware of. It's (usually) a secondary part, but sometimes it becomes the viewpoint of the scenario. It's the interaction that's stimulating.
I can confirm that in my research, this question also correlated especially with gynephilia and had relatively high endorsement rates. I also tried showing some AGP porn to men, and it was also associated with gynephilia, presumably because it included imagery that focused on women.
I think this is a general challenge for all of these questions, though - how does one meaningfully disentangle arousal to the thought of being a woman from nonspecific arousal to the female form?
Especially when autogynephilia is hypothesized to be nonspecific arousal to the female form directed towards oneself in some sense. Controlling overly much for this phenomenon might be rejecting the underlying theory, but controlling too little for it might lead to biased comparisons.
I don't know of any convincing solution to this, so I partly consider it an open philosophical problem what to do. When I proposed the item to Scott, I emphasized that it was experimental and of unclear validity. (When I originally reached out to him, my purpose wasn't about studying AGP in cis women, but instead I proposed a different question for studying AGP in cis men. I just also rought up this question because I knew some people consider AGP in cis women relevant.)
>I think this is a general challenge for all of these questions, though - how does one meaningfully disentangle arousal to the thought of being a woman from nonspecific arousal to the female form?
This is part of why I still think that a cross-sex gender identity in conjunction with traditional gynephilia can result in what is called autogynephilia. You're driven to imagine yourself as a woman, people generally do not make their imaginary selves unattractive, being gynephilic you are consequently turned on by your imaginary self, and that results in quickly coupling thoughts of femininity with arousal through classical conditioning. Even if you're skeptical of the whole desire + taboo = arousal thing this alternate pathway still leads to the same direction.
As to the first mover, since would-be cisgender people who are reassigned at birth tend to develop gender dysphoria remarkably often I find it plausible that there might be a non-cultural substrate to "sex conspecific" identification. That might play a role in why some people are transgender.
I'm not as radical about this as I used to be, though. If such a thing exists then I see it as more of a predisposing factor toward or away from being transgender. Think Kinsey scores. If so, then perhaps some liminal cases could be swayed by constantly thinking about transitioning, in the same way that some bisexuals socialized into apparent heterosexuality could be "turned gay" by regularly considering the possibility of entering a same-sex relationship. The first step toward wanting something is thinking about it, after all. And if that is so then thinking about it because it's a fixture of your sexual fantasies is no less effective than thinking about it for any other reason.
This neatly marries the theories you usually advocate for and the ones you write against.
I do think this is a genuine question that needs to be disentangled - we're all of us, male or female, socialised to find the female form sexually arousing (e.g. think of imagery of people in lingerie - it's mostly going to be women, you're not going to find a lot of 'hot guy in silky camisole' posing pictures around you).
So how much work is "imagine a beautiful woman in a vaguely sexual situation, how arousing do you find that?" is "oooh I like women, women are sexy, that is arousing" distinct from "Ooh I wish I were a sexy woman"?
You get (or used to, anyway) online discussions of "if you were a woman for a day, what would you do?" amongst young men, and the general tenor seems to be "play with my breasts/masturbate while looking at myself in the mirror" (any women who join in the discussion point out that when you have breasts, you generally are not that fascinated with them).
So what there is the difference between "I find it sexually arousing to think of myself as a woman" in that context distinguishing "it's like viewing porn" (masturbating while looking in the mirror - in both instances looking at hot women having sex) from "I secretly want to be a woman"?
The gay community provides a very strong counter example with bountiful sexual imagery of men.
My general conclusion is that men really like looking at pictures of their platonic partner (on the sexy axis) regardless of their orientation. Advertisers seek to confuse our innate interest in provocative women for a can of soda. This is mostly scantily clad women because the gay community is too small in most places. I only have speculation for the other half of society.
As for my own experience, it’s just shy of impossible to believe that socialization is responsible for our interest - in addition to what seems to be universal desire to control over this imagery at the societal level across the globe.
This. I feel like straight men have an innate mechanism to make them attracted to women.
On the other hand, there's something interesting going on for straight women. Why do they find lesbian porn as hot as gay male porn? Why do they find the female form more aesthetic than they find the male form? Why, when you ask straught women to describe the way they experience their sexuality, do they seem more likely to spontaneously talk about how they like being feminine than how they find the male body hot?
"Why do they find lesbian porn as hot as gay male porn?"
One theory is that straight women are inclined to watch lesbian porn simply because it focuses on women being pleasured and receiving oral sex, and most straight porn doesn't. Straight porn is largely meant for the male gaze, so it focuses on activities that men find enjoyable, like blowjobs and penetrative sex. Things like fingering and eating out are usually just shown briefly during the foreplay phase if they're shown at all; it's rare for hetero porn to specifically focus on those things. There are exceptions, but it's probably just easier to look up lesbian porn than to dig for female-centric hetero content. If there was more straight porn designed for the female gaze, the amount of straight women who watch lesbian porn might substantially decline.
[Why men are more exclusively attracted to women, while women are more ambivalent]
My guess is (in super condensed form, potentially politically incorrect)...
As a first approximation, men are (in general, yadda yadda) attracted to physical features. Women are relatively more attracted to status. (We can discuss why separately.) So it is evolutionary beneficial for men to acquire status, but beneficial for women to acquire physical beauty. Both sexes would have evolved their respective behaviors according to these constraints.
But for a woman to know that she is beautiful, what better way to be herself attracted to female beauty? So as a second approximation, women are also attracted to feminine features.
Not sure about your last paragraph; I'm not attracted to men, but I can still tell which men are attractive.
Alternate theory: As a man, I'm attracted to appearance, and very few men have the appearance I'm looking for. If I were attracted to status, though, any gender could potentially have what I'm looking for.
I think this is probably only true for us as a result of culture, not inherently. If you look at other primates, the males are clearly the "attractive" ones. Silverback male gorillas, or male baboons, are fancy-looking; the females of those species are plain and aesthetically less impressive. This holds true for every other mammal I know of where there's a significant sexual dimorphism. There's no need for females to be attractive, because males want every female by default. Females are generally the ones who choose, so attractiveness actually matters for males.
So it would be very odd if this pattern was flipped in humans in particular, wouldn't it? Particularly since it still remains true in humans that males still basically want any available reproductive-age female (okay, that's an exaggeration, but still), and females are the choosy ones. So why on earth would it be the *females* whose bodies put lots of energy into attractiveness, rather than the males? That doesn't really make evolutionary sense. At worst, you'd expect *equal* levels of attractiveness (if we assume we've evolved into a state where both sexes are choosing).
Conclusion: I think men are actually the fancy ones, or at least are equally fancy as women. Men have beards! So fancy. I think we only think of women as the beautiful ones because (a) they put more effort into their appearance and (b) cultural conditioning: heterosexual men find women to be the more attractive ones, and it's the perspective of heterosexual men that enshrined in the world's art and literature and culture more broadly, achieving such cultural hegemony that even women see themselves through the eyes of men to a large extent.
Based on the responses I get in surveys, I suspect that most men actually wouldn't be very excited to play with their female bodies if they were women for a day. A lot of men report no arousal from the corresponding sexual fantasy, and of the ones who do report arousal for it, a lot of them report no arousal. But embarassingly, I haven't asked this exact question, so I don't know for sure.
... It would actually be an interesting investigation into autogynephilia theory, to see if there are differences in what men qulaitatively report they would do if they were women for a day, based on traits like gender identity or autogynephilia. I should test that.
It's also reminds me of another complication, which is that if you ask post-transition trans women about their sexuality, then they typically don't report stuff that would be overtly framed as autogynephilia. A lot of people discussing it (e.g. Moser) believed that autogynephilia went away with transition, in accordance with the implied theory by the cis women ("when you have breasts, you generally are not that fascinated with them"). However, when I asked trans women on ACX to rate things retrospectively, they generally didn't report a drop in autogynephilia: https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2022/11/25/astral-codex-ten-autogynephilia-results-incomplete-post/
Another tangential anecdote: One time I did a qualitative survey asking people what they felt was the best thing about being their sex. One cis woman mentioned something along the lines of "jiggling my boobs/butt", which kind of contradicted the "when you have breasts, you generally are not that fascinated with them" sentiment, so I found that kind of intruiging and wanted a sense for how common it was. I did a strawpoll on it, but unfortunately strawpoll has shut down so we can't double-check what the results were. But IIRC most women weren't really into it but a substantial minority were.
Regarding the difference between autogynephilia vs "it's like viewing porn", maybe what's needed is an in-depth qualitative study investigating the phenomenology experienced by autogynephiles vs definitely-not-autogynephiles vs those who feel "it's like viewing porn", to see which of the former groups the latter group most resembles.
Perhaps the jiggling is related to signaling--showing off for others, with an associated feeling of attractiveness--more than to pure self-satisfaction. C.f. flexing muscles, which can be fun by one's self or with an audience.
Consider the "twerking" phenomenon, which seems to be all about display; many women got really into it (possibly in oppositional reaction to lingering waif and "hardbody" messaging, which would seem to penalize jiggling).
Prevalence of exhibitionism kink is around 2% for women from the data I've seen, so that's a lower bound. Adding in those doing it for signalling purposes can only increase that number.
Personally I agree and it is why I haven't made it my own research priority in studying these topics. Still, a lot of people including Ray Blanchard (inventor of the term "autogynephilia") consider it important.
Some people, including Bailey and Moser (but not me), claim that women cannot have paraphilias (euphemism treadmill for "sexual perversions") and therefore women being paraphilic would be in tension with autogynephilia being a paraphilia: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19591032/
That's a reasonable evolutionary explanation for the origin of this sexual perversion. While not all sexual perversions will have evolutionary origins, no doubt some others do.
Bailey doesn't explain it, but he comments on it here:
> Some women display behavior and report feelings that may seem to reflect paraphilias, but they have not been well studied. In our view, some have been too quick to assume that such women have paraphilias (see, e.g., Bergner, 2009, Chapter 2). The women’s unusual behavior may be due to other causes. Seto (2016) notes that most paraphilias are far more common in men than in women but lists masochism as an exception. Alternatively, perhaps masochistic phenomena in women are not often paraphilic. The dangerous practice, autoerotic asphyxiation, appears most often to be motivated by masochism in men and has the markings of a paraphilia: It is solitary (thus not engaged in for social reasons), sexually motivated, and often associated with other paraphilias (Blanchard & Hucker, 1991). Inconsistent with a high rate of paraphilic masochism in women, deaths due to autoerotic asphyxiation are fifty times more common among men than among women, and women who die this way are less likely to display paraphilic markings (e.g., their death scenes are less likely to include masochistic pornography). We suspect that female masochism and garden variety BDSM have similar origins in both sexes, and that both are quite different from paraphilic masochism. Similarly, we doubt that women accused of sex crimes against children are often pedohebephilic. If truly paraphilic women exist, we hypothesize they may be especially likely to be homosexual. This is because homosexual women have some degree of category specificity.
This sort of thing, with "We suspect that female masochism and garden variety BDSM have similar origins in both sexes, and that both are quite different from paraphilic masochism.", where he vaguely alludes to having some deeper theory but doesn't explain what it is, is something I find him to commonly do. I eventually stopped believing that he actually had any deeper theory, because he never came up with explanations for it.
So basically he just defines paraphilia as a sex-related term and then simply dismisses any countervailing arguments without justification. All too common these days unfortunately.
"Menstruation fetishism, knitting, etc are not typical autogynephilic sexual interests"
But in some online trans groups there does seem to be a lot of interest in menstruation; the "is it okay to offer a tampon to a woman in a restroom?" discourse which I personally find sort of disturbing because it is veering on the fetishistic, and it's hard to parse out what is "really desperately trying to act like a real woman in order to pass and trying way too hard" from "I get all tingly down below thinking of this scenario".
Then there is the insistence that trans women *do* have menstrual periods just like cis women, apart from the bleeding. That's an entire debate of its own (and a separate one to the "trans men/non-binary people who menstruate"):
I've heard a theory (many years ago, long before modern trans debate, and with non-negligible woo factor) that biological males might experience some sort of periodic hormonal cycle analogous to menstruation. I will say that life has its ups and downs, daily, weekly or monthly, but I have not been able to discern a period myself.
Just throwing that out there in case anyone's heard something similar.
FWIW, yes, this is or was accepted. The analogy to the menstrual cycle shouldn't be overstated, though. It was more cycles in testosterone level correlated with cycles of sexual interest. (I've no idea how they measured the latter.) And the periodicity had a different average, but I can't remember what.
A brief search seemed to show that this was not well studied, and that there was a lot of disagreement, including about whether the cycles in the testosterone level were correlated with the cycles in sexual interest.
Like first of all, even if some trans women do have a kink for menstruation, I'm not sure it's more common among autogynephiles than it is among cis women (who also occasionally have it). So if it's a rare thing that some cis women and some trans women are into, it doesn't really contradict "cis women are AGP" in any meaningful way.
Also I am not sure whether the things you mention are actually indicative of a menstruation fetish among trans women. I know one trans woman (not gonna name names) who most of the leading Blanchardians consider to be HSTS, who reports experiencing period-like symptoms. Admittedly I am not sure the Blanchardians are right about her being HSTS, and also maybe we are just dealing with a gAyGP situation, but I am pretty sure she isn't *strongly* AGP. So it would be kind of weird for a menstruation fetish to explain her claims to be experiencing period symptoms. Unless one thinks she has a menstruation fetish that far exceeds her degree of AGP, which I suppose fits with what I know about her, except for her not mentioning this at all even when we discussed her sexuality in quite vivid detail.
I'm sympathetic to the notion that maybe some trans women just get period symptoms. Not confident about it, because I haven't seen it myself and I don't have much expertise in the area and haven't spent much effort investigating it. But when I attempted to look up the biology of it, substantial parts of the rebuttals to trans women having period symptoms seemed to just be in complete contradiction with what I read as being our scientific understanding of how periods work. Still some things don't quite add up, for instance the hormones that trans women take which might cause periods are usually taken in doses that are very temporally concentrated, which to me seems like it shouldn't be able to cause periods.
It could be weirdness bias, but for example a bunch of the trans women in Dylan Mulvaney's orbit seem to have a menstruation thing which includes both claiming to have very intense cramping and wanting to simulate menses with some sort of red fluid. They seem to want to get lots of praise/attention for it. That feels like it is in the autogyneophilia zone.
A galaxybrained answer might be that a handful of trans women whose autogynephilia focuses on menstruation have written a lot on that, and then a bunch of trans women who don't have menstruation autogynephilia have picked up a bunch of odd ideas about menstruation and trans women through memetic mechanisms.
At this faraway point I just chalk it all up to the near-infinite flexibility of the human mind, and cannot be bothered to form an opinion anymore. Thanks for sharing your explorations though!
Yeah, I think unless one gives a higher arousal score to "imagine that you are a woman doing X" than to "imagine a woman doing X", calling that autogynephilia seems unwarranted.
Last year, after reading one of the ACX book reviews, I built a short survey about inner voice and memory (mostly from existing scales), to test a hypothesis that seemed likely to me after reading this review. After analysing the data, well my hypothesis was totally wrong, but there seems to be something unexpected and interesting going on in the data. But the number of responses I got is slightly too low for me to draw firm conclusions.
If you have a few minutes to spare (about 5/7 minutes), would you agree to answer the survey below? If I get a few more responses, I can finish the analyses and post the results if people are interested. Thank you so much :-)
Just to be clear, is it the same survey as last year? I would be happy to fill it out, but I think (not 100% sure) that I already filled out a survey by you, and then you would only get a duplicate participant.
In any case, thanks for taking the initiative! I am curious to learn your hypothesis and result when it is done.
Yes, it is mostly the same, so you don't need to fill it again, and thank you for your participation! I plan to post the result on the next Open thread if I manage to finish the analyses by then.
I finished 'Of Boys and Men' By Richard Reeves. I didn't like it so much. Here's my Goodreads review.
2/5 Stars
The first part of the book deals with the gender gap in outcomes between men and women. There are some interesting figures here, but the basic gist of the first part succumbs to "gapism" ie., listing a bunch of gaps in outcomes and declaring that an argument was made. "There aren't as many male nurses, there aren't as many male teachers!" Reeves, says. I'm sure he's right. But he never questions the medical or educational systems directly - not their organization, not their waste and mismanagement, not the government meddling, not their enormous subsidy.
Reeves spends the chapter on solutions basically arguing for even more subsidy, even more affirmative action, and even more meddling. He anticipates that the reader will criticize him from the left, "Maybe you'll want to report me to the EEOC." Yea, maybe. "What about all of the affirmative action for women!" He says. Yea, I don't think so.
The question from the outset should be: What are the structural problems in the education and medical systems that can be improved at the benefit of everyone? I think redshirting sounds like an ok idea, but the rest of the solutions discussed in this book border on total social and labor market planning - which got us into this mess in the first place. I'm skeptical that more of it will get us out.
What I don't think I've ever seen discussed is how teaching switched from being predominantly male to predominantly female; it used to be that women might combine childminding with some basic education (dame schools) and that if young women went on to get further education, it would be in female-teacher schools, and that one career for young women was governess (as tutor was for young men) but if you meant schooling in general, then you meant schoolmasters - men.
How did that switch? Is it the same in higher education - are more men professors/at higher levels of the profession?
You can more easily explain why men aren't nurses - with the revolution in what nursing was and how it was professionalised by Florence Nightingale, it was established that women were going into nursing. Men were doctors, women were nurses:
""I am Dr. Verrinder Smith."
Dr. Ripley was so surprised that he dropped his hat and forgot to pick it up again.
"What!" he gasped, "the Lee Hopkins prizeman! You!"
He had never seen a woman doctor before, and his whole conservative soul rose up in revolt at the idea. He could not recall any Biblical injunction that the man should remain ever the doctor and the woman the nurse, and yet he felt as if a blasphemy had been committed. His face betrayed his feelings only too clearly."
I think the sheer fact of the name probably also contributes to the gap in nursing. It shares its name with one of the most strictly female biological activities, and people clearly find the job title itself female coded enough that they often use specific gender qualifiers to characterize exceptions, like "Male nurse," or even portmanteaus like "murse."
I think there might be a more even gender split if we renamed the job profession to something more gender neutral, which we have done with a lot of other job titles. But instead, it seems what we've done is created other more gender neutral job titles, like "medical assistant," and made "nurse" a more highly qualified and credentialed version of that.
How do you know to trust Liam without being able to evaluate the quality of his thinking on the topic (which you can't do, because, you know, you don't know the topic? :)
I finished reading your review. Didn't like it so much. I got no sense of what the book is about, and hence have no way to examine (what seem like) your very scattershot objections against it. Your review seems to assume that everyone reading it is already familiar with the book, which is an odd presumption to make when writing a review.
Yes, that thought did occur to me. But if he's copy pasting the review, copy pasting the context would have made the review better, which is all I was saying anyway.
I ask because America markets itself as this rugged individualistic country.
But then I hear of people calling the police because they say a kid walking to school or what’s weirdly called a “welfare check” where if someone doesn’t answer your calls you claim they are suicidal and police smash their door in(yes I’m exaggerating but only a litttle; look at all the swatting incidents).
In the UK and most of Europe calls like this would be treated as wasting police time and you would get a warning. So why are they common in America?
Is it because , contrary to the marketing , America is actually a nanny state?
A kid alone walking to school is completely normal in the UK (except in London), you should not call police about that unless he looks lost and distressed. Even then you would probably want to talk to the kid first.
As for suicidal people you could call police if you had reason to suspect that that is the case. However, police how higher threshold to actually break the door or do something. Just because no one answers the call, would not be the reason to do that. If you open the door and talk to the police and claim that everything is find and you don't a weapon or some instrument in hand for self-harm, the police just talk to you how do you feel and would let you go.
Sometimes police is called to help to deal with schizophrenic people. The ambulance will come but they may not be equipped to deal with violent people so they ask police to restrain so that they can inject haloperidol or something.
That's an interesting way to see it. I've grown to think that the term "nanny-state" only applies to states where the public organs police private citizens, confiscate a noteworthy portion of your income to use in whatever they see best, such as nuclear proof bomb-shelters for the whole population, as we have in Finland.
But what I learned of people who've actually lived in the States with children, they had to do much authoritarian nannying than here. Here the children are used to walk to school alone, roam around where they please.
I would say yes but not due to those reasons. Patriot act, remnants of alcohol & drug prohibition, and the existence of such a thing as “jaywalking” are more indicative of it being a nanny state.
On the other hand it’s less of a nanny state than European countries in other aspects such as not having to wear a helmet in many states, far lower taxation, no obligation to use a particular health provider (this is at least more free than countries with Beveridge systems), ease of buying guns, and more freedom of speech.
Overall I’d say it’s still more of a nanny state but it’s difficult to find an objective measure of that.
> the existence of such a thing as “jaywalking” are more indicative of it being a nanny state
I'm confused by this line of argument, and I've heard it before (it seems to come from one of those "hey did you know jaywalking wasn't even a crime except for motor industry lobbyists?" articles that gets posted on Hacker News every six weeks).
People who think jaywalking shouldn't be illegal, are you saying it shouldn't be illegal to step out in front of fast-moving traffic on a busy road? Or just that it shouldn't be illegal if there's no cars around?
In Europe pedestrians have a right of way and crossing the street is not considered an offence. I find it utterly absurd that you could get fined and arrested for crossing the street. Naturally this doesn’t mean people are allowed to cross motorways, but I see no reason why people should not be allowed to cross streets under reasonable circumstances. It’s a great example of state overreach.
Everywhere in Europe? I took German in high school, and the teacher had lived in Germany, and he said that jaywalking was enforced there much more strictly than in the U.S.
Then I’m afraid he was wrong. In Germany people will tell you off for all kinds of things, including crossing at a red light. If there’s a zebra crossing you have to use it, but if there isn’t one you can cross the road wherever you want. As anywhere you have to do a best effort to not jump in front of traffic, but ultimately cars and bikes need to be able to stop for pedestrians everywhere.
"Under reasonable circumstances" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Is it inherently unreasonable to have the crossing of busy streets coordinated in space and time such that motorists have an easier time figuring out when they need to stop for pedestrians and pedestrians have less chance of being hit by a car?
I'm not sure that binary questions like this will be productive. Most Western states are not as different as they like to pretend. When people argue about political identity in the modern sense, they're mostly arguing about slightly different shades of grey. If any state in the Western World can be called a "Nanny State" then all of them will be one to some extent.
Also, the % of spending by the US government has steadily increased over time. That suggests an objective increase in nanny statism, possibly correlating with the migration to cities. (City living is a significant correlate with wanting increased government involvement. I don't know, offhand, if it is causal. But I suspect it would be to some extent.)
Helicopter parenting has certainly increased over the past two generations. I remember drinking from the hose as a kid. I don't think that would be acceptable for my kid's generation. Kids would walk to school. That's become less acceptable. Basically, America today is less risk tolerant. There are fewer functional communities and more of a push for government to step in and fill the gaps that those communities have left. Though in some areas, religious observance still provides a basis for community. And there are some other communities which revolve around other activities. But, generally speaking American society is increasingly atomized.
When you talk about what America markets itself as.... how old are those marketing materials? Who distributed them?
Edit: To be clear, swatting is illegal in the US. How often it can be successfully prosecuted is a different story.
>Helicopter parenting has certainly increased over the past two generations. I remember drinking from the hose as a kid.
IDK that is still normal in my neighborhood. But I live in the Midwest. There certainly are some helicopter crazies out there.
Anyway, a large part of this I think is just the natural reaction you get from low birth rates and better childhood mortality rates.
If you have 10 kids and 5 of them are going to be dead by age 8, your risk tolerance for their behaviors is probably pretty high (especially if the behaviors have other benefits to you/them). Whether that be helping on the farm, or walking across town on their own.
Once you have 2 kids and they almost never die, real minor risks become a lot more worrisome because they have gone from very minor considerations, to one of the only things that could remove your precious child. The risk environment is just wildly different in a way that makes small risks much more noticeable.
In fairness, a lagging response and a linear relationship are orthogonal to one another.
If you work every month and are paid the following month then there will be a linear relationship between work and pay. But pay will lag labor by a month.
It's definitely correlated and caused by urbanization. Also by fast communicaitons and faster travel. People living in rural environments CAN'T depend on the state. At best they can hope for help from their neighbors. Help from the state would take literally hours to arrive, if not days. And that's assuming that you were high on their priorities list. (They might just plan on you to going to the nearest ER. That's what they plan for most people.)
"In the UK and most of Europe calls like this would be treated as wasting police time and you would get a warning."
Really? So in the UK, if my severely mentally ill elderly mother hasn't been answering any calls from friends or family, I can't ask the police to check if she's alright? I just have to hope that she's not dying, and if she is, that the death is at least quick and painless?
It was a neighbour not a relative, but I'm in the UK and the police checked in on someone in basically the circumstances you described (and eventually broke down the door to recover the body).
What makes you think that these things are common in America? Is it because you hear about it on the news?
If it were such a common occurrence, then it wouldn't be newsworthy. If you base your perception of what America is like solely off of what's in the news, then you'll have a distorted perception.
That’s an interesting observation, and I’ll try to keep in mind. But it’s not capturing the whole picture. For instance, school shootings are a very rare thing to happen in the US.
Yet, the news coverage about them also informs me that it is much more frequent in the US than in Europe.
It's true, they are, but to the extent that anyone in the US lives in fear of school shootings, that's mostly a consequence of reporting on them, because the actual rate hasn't changed that much relative to a time when practically nobody thought about them at all.
I think there's a change, though. A school shooting from a rifle is different from one with an assault rifle. The second is likely to leave a lot more people dead. It's not the level of difference between a block buster and an a-bomb, but it's the same kind of difference.
> A school shooting from a rifle is different from one with an assault rifle.
I'm not so sure. Given an untrained, inexperienced shooter, I'm thinking that the sheer rate at which the shooter is able to pump out bullets probably isn't the limiting factor in the body count.
That's definitely a change relative to the 18th century, but if you look at the events documented in the link, those have been happening since well before Columbine.
People overestimate how new these weapons are. The AR-15 has been sold to the public since the mid 60s, and semiautomatic rifles weren't new then. Semiautomatic handguns of basically modern design have been available to the public for a century.
This assertion is… bizarre? Lost for words here. Are you suggesting that there always were school shootings, they just weren’t reported pre-Columbine or some such?
A lot of the "data" on this is VERY unreliable. Things are so politicized.
I remember a comparison on something gun violence related to Canada that didn't control for the differences in population. So the article was breathless about how X has only happened 2 times ever in Canada but happened dozens of time in the US over the same timespan.
...Of course it turns out that by "dozens" they meant 21, and the US is almost exactly 10 times larger than Canada.
So really the whole premise of the article was based on a lie/misunderstanding. And that was in the fucking Atlantic or soemthing.
There's also a big difference between a school shooting as in "shooting that occurs at a school" and a school shooting as in "Columbine-style indiscriminate massacre". If you actually dig into one of these sources making breathless claims about how there' s a school shooting in the US every day, the vast majority are "man shoots rival gang member in front of school" or similar.
Yes. I actually used to be of the impression that school shootings became more common post-Columbine because the reporting encouraged copycat events, but I've since read figures on the rates over time which suggest that's not the case.
Reporting doesn't seem to be complete enough to draw a clear trend line over history, but the earliest reported school shooting dates back to the 18th century, and they continue through the 19th and 20th. If anything, fatalities due to school shootings in the 1990s seem to have been higher on average than post-Columbine in 1999.
That reference seems to be counting a whole lot of one-on-one or one-on-few shootings that, as ADD notes, tend to be ordinary criminal violence that happens to sometimes happen on school property. The base rate of that is large, compared to "one or two disaffected students try to go full Heathers and kill as many of their classmates as possible", but in common usage the phrase "school shooting" is generally interpreted as just the latter.
And you'll be hard-pressed to find the trend in that, if you clutter your data with the singletons.
Ha, I'm out in Berkeley this week, but will have to miss the 7/23 meetup... as that's the day I'm returning to New York! So, see you in New York, I guess. :)
Has anyone observed a correlation between niceness/kindness/generosity and lower IQ? I’m not talking about people who are nice enough. I’m thinking of someone who would be first and foremost described as nice or kind by their friends.
On the other hand of the equation, the “term” calculating is associated with being unkind or inauthentic. But from a rationalist pov being calculating seems like a compliment. Why shouldn’t I use my intelligence to make smart decisions about my relationships?
I was thinking this might have to do with a social expectation that relationships are more authentic when they are based on emotions instead of logic.
I don't think this is the kind of question personal experience has anything useful to say about - no-one's experience of humanity is anywhere near objective and representative enough to reveal anything meaningful about it.
My guess, for what it's worth, is that nothing meaningful along these lines is true.
I suspect that most people one is friends with are accurately described as "nice". But for most people, there's some more distinctive fact about them that you'd be more likely to mention first. If "nice" is the first thing you mention about them, then either they're way off-the-charts nice, or there's just not a lot else that you have to mention.
The philosopher of language Paul Grice developed the concept of "implicature" for cases like this. Saying that someone is nice, or that they have good handwriting, or that they're punctual, only says positive things about them, and these facts don't imply (or even correlate with) negative features of the person. But if you're writing a recommendation letter, and the *only * things you mention are that they're nice, they have good handwriting, and that they're very punctual, then that is a *very* negative letter, because you have "implicated" that there is nothing better to say about this person.
Otherwise known as "damning with faint praise." There's even a traditional legal canon regarding this: "expressio unius est exclusio alterius" (the expression of one thing is the exclusion of the other). Depending on the context, conspicuously failing to include something is effectively the same as explicitly excluding it.
>Has anyone observed a correlation between niceness/kindness/generosity and lower IQ? I’m not talking about people who are nice enough. I’m thinking of someone who would be first and foremost described as nice or kind by their friends.
Couple off the cuff comments/theories.
1) People who are intelligent have less need to be kind because they have other things people value.
2) Conversely, people mentally so-so have the reverse incentive, where their is some increased value in focusing on their social skills and attending to empathy because of their lack in other areas. You see this to some extent with sibling effects where frequently you have a mature/intelligent/sporty older child thriving at high status things, and a funny/social/artsy second child avoiding competing with the older child on axes they cannot win.
3) There is a limit because to some extent if you are too dumb you start losing contact with being able to even tract/model what is the right behavior. Similarly intelligent people are often good at modeling/faking kindness even when they don't feel/mean it, but they less often need to employ this method of relation when they have a whole suite of tools they can use.
Certainly myself, as a maybe slight autistic and very intellectual person, ...I have always felt I can never have the level of "love" or "loyalty" to people others have. It just doesn't come naturally to me at all, I am too up in my own thoughts and calculations about the world and relationships to ever be the Sam to someone's Frodo. Too much of a narcissist.
But then again I also had a very neglectful single parent, so maybe that just emotionally crippled me. I have a hard time picking apart the self-reinforcing nest of:
Extreme intelligence (especially as a teenager), reading voraciously, childhood neglect, and slight "autism".
I think you're asking that because of literary traditions (and their causes).
People who are significantly different from most other people will tend to have fewer friends, but not necessarily fewer enemies. Literary depictions of the very smart and the very stupid both then to be as malign characters. And it's only a tendency, derived partially from the intended audience, and partially from the intended message.
In actual life, people with few friends tend to be kinder to fewer people. This doesn't mean that they are malign to the out-group, but they can be without injuring their self-esteem. Intelligence isn't quite irrelevant...but nearly.
My conviction from a lifetime of observation is that kindness and intelligence are orthogonal. If a correlation can be demonstrated, I would suspect it to be circumstantial (more intelligent people are more successful, and can better afford to be kind).
Certainly I have personally known unusually intelligent people who exhibited extraordinary meanness and niggardliness of spirit. (Toward third parties, to control for my own personality.)
They're not entirely orthogonal: sufferers of certain kinds of congenital brain damage (IIRC there was an old SSC piece re: Williams syndrome? Or was it Down's?) are perma-locked into "always cooperate" (in the PD sense) mode, which some people seem to view as "ideal good".
>I was thinking this might have to do with a social expectation that relationships are more authentic when they are based on emotions instead of logic.
Whether they're more authentic is hard to rate, but someone who doesn't calculate cost-benefit of every interaction is much more *useful* as a friend/lover/associate. Because you don't have to worry about getting exploited (and, for the lacking-in-ethics, because you can exploit them), but also because that calculation wastes effort and tends to have deadweight loss.
I remember a treatise on a strategy game, which noted that the most productive alliances were always those where people didn't calculate out the cost-benefit of every interaction. Works IRL too. There are reasons evolution programmed us the way it did.
Be calculating, perhaps, about *who* is your friend. Don't be calculating *with* your friends.
Rationality in the EY sense is systematised winning, which includes "when to not be Buridan's ass".
Just anecdotaly, I have two groups of friends, one is from math undergrad at a very good school in my country (probably a high IQ group) and one is from my time in my country's military (infantry, probably lower IQ than the former group).
I can say with utter certainity that the math group is much "nicer", they fight and argue much less, they are more generous, they are less prone to lying or stealing etc.
I'd probably chalk it down to a class difference though, rather than it being inherent to their respective intelligence levels
Is the difference in niceness fully generalized, or is it specific to behavior amongst the friend group?
If the later, I would hypothesize that the difference is that serving together in an infantry unit tends to create stronger group cohesion than taking undergraduate math classes together.
What do you mean by "lower IQ"? Are you actually taking IQ tests for these people, or is it just a feeling based on observation?
"I’m thinking of someone who would be first and foremost described as nice or kind by their friends."
Well this is tautology, isn't it? If their most memorable trait is their kindness, then they won't have other memorable traits like problem-solving ability.
My experience is the more frustrated someone is, the more likely they'll be rude. Dumber people tend to be more frustrated about things, but it's not hard and fast at all. Then you hit a threshold like Down's Syndrome where the people no longer have any responsibilities and are nearly completely frustration free.
"the “term” calculating is associated with being unkind or inauthentic."
The term "calculating" is specifically about being inauthentic. Being inauthentic is separately associated with having nefarious purposes; if they weren't nefarious you wouldn't hide them.
Yeah, thought of that later. Niceness can be anything from saying "good morning" when they see you, to giving you their lunch even though they haven't eaten in six days.
> Has anyone observed a correlation between niceness/kindness/generosity and lower IQ?
No, but I have observed that people with poorly integrated identity and internal ethical system tend to view kindness and generosity as stupidity. You can perhaps get a better idea of what I mean if you read my recent post on psychoanalytic object relations theory in relation to group and mass psychology (the first, theoretical part; the second is coming soon): https://transferenceinterpretation.substack.com/p/being-in-the-crowd-pt-i-the-theory.
> On the other hand of the equation, the “term” calculating is associated with being unkind or inauthentic. But from a rationalist pov being calculating seems like a compliment.
There's a difference between opportunism and being rational. Arriving at rational decisions does not have to imply unethical intentions. Also, you cannot extricate rational thinking from emotions and the rest of you personality, no matter how hard you try (hence you can never be fully rational, and btw shouldn't). Both rationality and emotions are parts of human experience, two aspects of a dynamic integration that is a personality.
This quote from your article seems to support my original inquiry
“ Intelligent, self-reflective individuals who try to analyze the situation rationally tend to be envied and ostracized, and mediocre individuals who make simplistic statements that have a calming effect tend to be supported. ”
The context of the quote is what happens in large group regression, where the members experience (temporary) loss of individuality and delegation of morality to the selected leader. So that's not a normal situation. It's an interesting observation, but I wouldn't connect this with your question, which is a generalization. It doesn't support the assumption that there is a correlation between someone being perceived nice and having a low IQ in general, nor it supports the claim that being rational is generally socially disliked (I assume you meant 'rational', but I again stress that there is a difference between being rational and just opportune or calculating). The quote just states that people in unorganized groups, when faced with anxiety, tend to pick a leader who gives a simple, soothing explanations, instead of one who comes up with complex ones.
With the post, I just wanted you to get a better idea of how people with an unintegrated personality structure tend to perceive others in an idealizing or devaluing way, or devalue generosity and kindness because of their perception of the world as a dangerous place where one must be shrewd, selfish, calculating, or whatever, to get by, and thus see people who exhibit generosity and kindness as naïve or stupid.
> expectation that relationships are more authentic when they are based on emotions instead of logic.
I think this is a really good inquiry, because I have certainly encountered a lot of distortions around this issue. I propose that based on “caring”, rather than emotion (which is kind of a vague term) resolves things a little better. But “relationships “ is a big umbrella as well. If you mean “personal “ relationships (as opposed to business or competitive ones) then I think it helps to think of caring, which to me gets along just fine with logic (although other emotions might muddy the waters.)
>observed a correlation between niceness/kindness/generosity and lower IQ?
Im sure I have made this observation in my life more than once but I don’t think it is an accurate one.
There's likely a selection effect at play here. I'm assuming you and most of your friends are reasonably smart people. If someone was both dumb and unkind they'd never end up in your social circle but a person who's exceptionally kind may be kept around even if they're not as smart aa the rest of the group. So dumb unkind people exist you just interact with them less
And relatedly, "someone who would be first and foremost described as nice or kind by their friends" might in part point to someone who lacks other distinguishing qualities.
It is in the very definition of what they are. They are at most going to be as nice as the main road, because what makes something an "alley" is generally that it is less about presentation and more about utility.
In my large small town - St Paul, MN - most people just think of alleys as the place where you enter your garage and put the garbage and recycling bins. But there are folks that work to make them easier on the eyes. My retired hippie neighbor for example. There are prizes awarded for the most attractive alley adjacent landscaping and flora.
But this is a place with a lot of sidewalk poetry and lawns tuned into bee habitats too.
Big fan of alleys because they make the street so much more pleasant for pedestrians and drivers by shifting garbage, loading trucks, curb cuts, yawning garage doors, and overhead power and telco lines away.
Maybe that is part of it. Most of the places I'm thinking of where built after WW2. So maybe that led builders and planners to treating them as just a place for garbage dumpsters and parking access.
What I find weird is that people spend much more time in the laneway than on the main street, yet all the effort goes into making the street looking good.
Part of the issue is that *visitors* come on the main street, and while *residents* care just as much about convenience for dumping garbage and moving their cars as they do about how the place looks, visitors only care about how it looks. So the alley side is optimized for a mix of things, but the front side is optimized only for looking nice.
They tend to be where the trash dumpsters are which isn't pleasant and which attracts pests making it even less pleasant. They're also not very visible most of the time making it not worth the money to make them look nicer
In Southern California, specifically in Long Beach, California, there are some old--like very early 20th century--neighborhoods where it was common for the houses and lots to be small and for some of the houses to face the alley (these alleys have names like streets do, usually Such-and-Such Court, but they are entirely alley-like otherwise--narrow, no lane stripes, etc.). If you can find a street where most of the lots facing the alley still have little houses, the alley can be quite cute. But it seems that a lot of those lots over the years became host to full-sized shitbox apartment complexes, which means that sometimes you'll see a little house orphaned in what is otherwise an alley in the "shabby area with trash cans and dumped mattresses and the ass end of apartment buildings" sense.
They represent the dark side of duality. They are the seamy underside of the facade, the place where the dumpsters live and the overworked employees squat on smoke breaks. They are necessary. At least they are necessary in this world of masks.
Long ago, those of our ancestors who lived in cities had only tiny alleyways in the residential sections, with the grand thoroughfares designed for markets and public pomp and the work of governance. Sometimes I think that when people remember that they were happiest in college living in the dorms, they are experiencing a kind of ancestral nostalgia for the barrio. remembering deep in our hearts the time when we lived at arms reach of our neighbors and friends and when anything and anybody that you could want was within not very many steps.
God bless the alleyways. Perhaps they are the last human thing remaining to these cities of tortured machines. A place where dreams can hide out of reach of the streetsweepers.
I've added a fun Friday type entry for my "blog" https://icdstories.substack.com/. Now every Friday I ask GPT4 to make up an ICD-10-CM code and a vignette to go with it!
Whom will Biden appoint to the UFO Disclosure Review Board as economist and sociologist?
(4) QUALIFICATIONS.—Persons nominated to the Review Board— (A) shall be impartial citizens, none of whom shall have had any previous or current involvement with any legacy program or controlling authority relating to the collection, exploitation, or reverse engineering of technologies of unknown origin or the examination of biological evidence of living or deceased nonhuman intelligence; (B) shall be distinguished persons of high national professional reputation in their respective fields who are capable of exercising the independent and objective judgment necessary to the fulfillment of their role in ensuring and facilitating the review, transmission to the public, and public disclosure of records related to the government’s understanding of, and activities associated with unidentified anomalous phenomena, technologies of unknown origin, and non-human intelligence and who possess an appreciation of the value of such material to the public, scholars, and government; and (C) shall include at least — (i) 1 current or former national security official; (ii) 1 current or former foreign service official; (iii) 1 scientist or engineer; (iv) 1 economist; (v) 1 professional historian; and (vi) 1 sociologist.
Last week I published a report on the anonymous salary survey in Berlin, Germany. Tech bias, but maybe still useful for some of you. It also has an interactive dashboard. I am also open to suggestions, collaborations and other improvements.
I only started reading ACX after the move from SSC. I have gone back and read the top posts from SSC but still felt like I was missing out on some of the old classics. I built a website to resurface old content from blogs by sending weekly emails. Let me know if you have any suggestions of other blogs / content you’d like to see, hope you find it helpful!
Have you ever felt like you have a song "stuck in your head" while you're doing other things?
If you usually think in words, and the song had lyrics, does that mean you felt like the song lyrics were going through your head at the same time other things were going through your head, ie you had two parallel internal audio streams?
Can you voluntarily give yourself two parallel internal audio streams, ie play two songs with lyrics in your head at the same time?
Can you voluntarily give yourself two parallel internal visual streams, ie visualize a tiger and a sunflower at the same time? If yes, how sure are you that you're not switching back and forth between them very quickly? How many internal visual streams can you maintain at once?
Can you focus on two different areas of your (internal) visual field? IE can you close your eyes and imagine some text in the far top-left corner of your visual field, and some other text in the far bottom-right corner of your visual field, and perceive both clearly, in a way you wouldn't be able to focus on two pieces of text in opposite parts of the visual field in the external world?
What if it's one piece of text, but it goes all the way across your visual field (ie it's in very big font)? Does that make it easier, or not?
I can't really think in words while I also have a song with lyrics repeating in my head. If I'm humming or thinking a song without lyrics, I can still think in words, though it's a lot easier if I'm thinking in tune to the music or replacing the lyrics with my thoughts.
Weirdly, I can read just fine even when I'm repeating a song with lyrics in my head. I think it's because reading text is less self-directed and so requires less attention and focus than composing an internal monologue.
>Have you ever felt like you have a song "stuck in your head" while you're doing other things?
Yes
>If you usually think in words, and the song had lyrics, does that mean you felt like the song lyrics were going through your head at the same time other things were going through your head, ie you had two parallel internal audio streams?
Yes
>Can you voluntarily give yourself two parallel internal audio streams, ie play two songs with lyrics in your head at the same time?
To some degree, in short bursts
>Can you voluntarily give yourself two parallel internal visual streams, ie visualize a tiger and a sunflower at the same time?
Yes
>If yes, how sure are you that you're not switching back and forth between them very quickly?
I can't be sure, but my perception is that they're occurring simultaneously
>How many internal visual streams can you maintain at once?
~3. At 4 I'm *definitely* switching my attention between them.
>Can you focus on two different areas of your (internal) visual field? IE can you close your eyes and imagine some text in the far top-left corner of your visual field, and some other text in the far bottom-right corner of your visual field, and perceive both clearly, in a way you wouldn't be able to focus on two pieces of text in opposite parts of the visual field in the external world?
Yes
>What if it's one piece of text, but it goes all the way across your visual field (ie it's in very big font)? Does that make it easier, or not?
I'm a musician and non-normal person, so some grains of salt...
I almost always have a tune running thru my head, but if it's a song with words I just have the melody. I can do multiple audio streams easily if they do not have words, and can do (maybe fewer) multiple audio streams if only one stream has words. Could not do multiple audio streams with words. While I'm performing music it is difficult/impossible for me to carry on a conversation, altho there are some rare people who can do this. It's easier if I'm drumming as opposed to playing something with pitches. One time when I wasn't drumming someone came up to the drummer next to me and started conversing with him. He was able to do both but I noticed what he was playing changed, as if it had been put on auto-pilot. Reflecting on that now, it's fascinating that I could notice that and form a memory of it while performing - some mental processes can be done in parallel and some can't.
Advice for earworms - I keep a mental stash of earwormy melodies that I like so that I can switch when I find myself stuck with an earworm I don't like.
I'm very not visually oriented, so have nothing useful to say about visual streams.
Yes, I often have a song stuck in my head and do lots of other things while that happens. The part going through my head is often a short and repetitive portion of a song. I often have parallel audio streams. When I focus on listening in, one predominates and often the other drops entirely. The one "stuck" in my head returns when I stop thinking about it.
I can give myself two audio streams, but it's very difficult to maintain both for more than a tiny amount of time. If I know both songs well, it helps.
I can easily have multiple parallel visual steams, to the point that I'm confused that this could be a question (which implies other people cannot). Thinking about it, I liken it to imagining a picture that has multiple portions such as two or more people (or poker playing dogs) - and it seems obvious that we should be able to picture each item as part of the whole. I think this is a composite picture instead of maintaining each individual component. It feels as though I can hold several layers together or mentally combine them and make incredibly complex pictures (complex like a movie scene). I can visualize a tiger and a sunflower as very distinct pictures with no overlap, in which case it does feel more like switching back and forth. I think I can maintain 3-4 visual streams, but I'm not certain if they are separate feeds or one composite feed of different components.
Mentally picturing something I find I can have lots and lots of details, but that the overall picture fuzzes out what I'm not paying attention to. This is the same when I dream. I can know that the image is extremely complex and detailed, but maybe not know what color something is within the picture if I'm concentrating on something else.
I'm struggling to picture words in any kind of complex format, including multiple words at once, regardless of location in my mental image. Words are audio to me, or oddly enough, I think of words by mentally typing them out on a keyboard. Image macro-type visuals do not work well for me and trying to do anything with them feels like I'm straining.
Not what you asked, but maybe relevant. I find it easier to read while listening to music. I think it helps block out outside interference and therefore increases focus, or perhaps that my brain is often distracting itself and the background music helps keep it on track so that I don't mentally wander. Thinking on this, I recognize that this shouldn't be true, that the two streams should conflict, but they definitely do not conflict. When reading for pleasure, the music can become like a soundtrack to the story (which can have some weird results when they don't match at all, but it's still not distracting somehow).
I don't have "internal visual streams". Well, *almost* don't have; I can do mental wireframes with the assistance of certain psychoactive chemicals. It is akin to persistence-of-vision with a single point of light used for tracing.
I do have audio streams. I generally don't try to listen to two songs at once, either in the mind's ear or in the symphony of life. When considering a song, my ability to *know* the lyrics are accurate interferes with the ability to think too deeply about anything else.
But, trying to think of two songs at once, I can mostly experience it. Or, perhaps, I am able to delude myself into experiencing it; what I actually experience seems to be either a blurred conflation of the two songs, or high-speed switching between them.
Inasmuch as I have "visual streams": a tiger + a sunflower isn't any different than having both "the front of the elephant" and "the back of the elephant" in-focus at the same time. They are both something I can't do.
>Can you voluntarily give yourself two parallel internal audio streams, ie play two songs with lyrics in your head at the same time?
Musical mash-ups are a thing; some are pedestrian, others are very clever and successful. I can make an annoying game of combining two songs, selecting segments from each one as appropriate. I'm also very annoyed/provoked by new music which seems to draw on a classic hook, but substitutes a different "payoff". These seem like examples of some ability to compare two different tracks in real time (or at least, at mental "playback" speed). I can't think of a way to demonstrate that very fast task-switching isn't going on, or whether it's asynchronous.
Some music has simultaneous verse and chorus, sometimes double-tracked by the same singer. I can mentally recreate (and even compose) these structures, although I can't tell if the "playback" is symbolic or just a series of sounds. I can even (attempt to) sing them in a forced arpeggio.
I don't think I have any special musical or mental abilities.
A couple of tangential thoughts:
Freestyle rap (and other improvisational songwriting) is a really intense exercise of several different faculties, once you make an effort to push past the elementary conventions. Like something between speed chess and juggling. Everybody should try it, probably in private.
I have a good ear for music, but I have a hard time understanding song lyrics. Often when I play back songs in my head, lyrics have a non-verbal placeholder that's part symbolic, part string of phonemes. Many times recently I've had the very interesting experience of revisiting songs from my younger years, and immediately parsing formerly unintelligible lyrics, plain as day. I suppose my pattern recognition was trained on a large corpus of various data in the interim.
I have three parallel streams in my head at all times; one is sub-lingual meaning, one is a constant, slower translation of the first into words, one is pattern recall. That third is almost always being used as a song player, but music can be kicked out by poetry, memorized text, or speeches. When I did speech and debate it was the third stream that I spoke aloud, which allowed the other two to be proactively thinking about how the audience was reacting and what I should do to keep things lively.
I can't hear two songs at the same time in my head. I can't, honestly, even pick out individual instruments most of the time when I listen to a song live.
I don't think I can really do parallel visual streams either. Even when I have my eyes open, if I'm focused on a mental image, I process nothing of what I'm physically seeing beyond low level instinct. I generally walk away from long car trips with almost zero memory of any places I drove through.
1) Yes, all the time. I've actually observed that it's stuck in my head, even if I don't hear it consciously; the lyrics will have some connection to my internal monologue, and/or it continues on at the appropriate pace while "I" can't "hear" it
2) No, all words get in the way of all other words; listening, reading, thinking, mentally hearing. However non-word audio easily combines with other thoughts
3) no
4) no, only by compositing them somehow
5) question is confusing; text can only be read in the center of my visual field to begin with, once or twice doesn't matter
I had a somg stuck in my head as I was reading the question (and also I cannot read without hearing the words in my head), so yes, but I cannot *concentrate* on both simultaneously.
For basically alll of these questions, I find it difficult to distinguish between "simultaneous" and "rapidly switching between the two." I feel like I'm doing both, but more specifically I'm doing one, and then when I check on the other process it's like "yup, I'm still doing that, and it sure feels like I was doing it even before I checked." When I actively try to do both simultaneously, it feels more like rapidly switching between them
I think for me, hearing an internal monologue is basically what it means to be "actively" thinking about something/concentrating on it. I can think about things, like how I plan out what I'm gonna say as I'm typing, non-verbally, but as soon as I turn my mind towards it those thoughts coallesce into words essentially by definition. This makes it feel like all my thoughts are words, and in turn that makes it feel like I can hear two streams of words at once
>>Have you ever felt like you have a song "stuck in your head" while you're doing other things?
Yes.
>>If you usually think in words, and the song had lyrics, does that mean you felt like the song lyrics were going through your head at the same time other things were going through your head, ie you had two parallel internal audio streams?
No. Usually, the songs that get stuck do not include lyrics, or I’m doing things that do not involve my internal monologue.
>>Can you voluntarily give yourself two parallel internal audio streams, ie play two songs with lyrics in your head at the same time?
No.
>>Can you voluntarily give yourself two parallel internal visual streams, ie visualize a tiger and a sunflower at the same time? If yes, how sure are you that you're not switching back and forth between them very quickly? How many internal visual streams can you maintain at once?
Not now. I remember in preschool (~4 years old) a teacher told me it was impossible to think of two things at once. And I tried really, really hard and convinced myself I could do an airplane and a fish simultaneously if they were different colors. I seem to have lost this ability.
>>Can you focus on two different areas of your (internal) visual field? IE can you close your eyes and imagine some text in the far top-left corner of your visual field, and some other text in the far bottom-right corner of your visual field, and perceive both clearly, in a way you wouldn't be able to focus on two pieces of text in opposite parts of the visual field in the external world?
Sort of? My visual and touch sense are mixed together when I’m visualizing things. I cannot clearly visualize more than two letters at a time (I’m bad at spelling), but those two letters can be in opposite parts of my “visual” field.
>>What if it's one piece of text, but it goes all the way across your visual field (ie it's in very big font)? Does that make it easier, or not?
>Have you ever felt like you have a song stuck in your head?
Nope. I don't actively dislike music but it seems like too much hassle to get into for something I don't enjoy so I have never deliberately listened to music. Maybe it's because my lack of exposure, but I can't remember more than the first dozen words or notes of any song .
This also might be a quirk of my memory, I can't play back my wife's voice in my head despite her sitting next to me now. If I try very hard I can get the faintest hint of a wisp of what she might sound like.
I usually think in words.
>Can you voluntarily give yourself two parallel internal visual streams, Can you focus on two different areas of your (internal) visual field?
I also can't do this. I don't have internal visual fields, when I think its all in words. Once again, if I close my eyes, I can't picture my wife's face.
Two parallel internal audio streams: Yes, I can do that. I sometimes even make a game of it, seeing how many simultaneous audio streams (usually songs, sometimes people speaking words) I can run at once.
Two parallel internal visual streams: I can visualize two objects at the same time, but they stay on the same "stage"; the two objects always have relative position to one another, even if I have them overlap on the same space.
Two different areas of internal visual field: ...Huh, apparently I can't do that with text on opposite sides, or even one large piece of text, but I _can_ do it for simple things like colors (eg orange from the top-left while blue from the bottom-right).
I cannot have song lyrics in my head at the same time as other thoughts. It can only happen if I'm doing something that doesn't require conscious thought: driving, showering, laundry, dishes, etc.
I don't think I can have two internal audio streams. (I don't even like having two *external* audio streams.)
I don't think I can have two visual streams at the same time either.
My mental visualization is not very sharp/detailed, so I don't think I can visualize text very well. I tried visualizing objects instead. I don't think I can do two at once. Actually I can't even “focus” on something in the corner without actually moving my eyeballs in that direction, even though my eyes are closed.
PS, in the shower, I wanted to time how long it took me to shave, but I didn't have a clock with a second hand, so I just counted in my head. I was able to shave (haptic/proprioceptive) while counting (mental audio). In fact, I think I was paying more attention to the shaving than to the counting, which was proceeding pretty automatically.
Bonus: while this was happening I realized “hey, this is related to the question Scott asked on his open thread,” and I thought about coming back and writing this comment. That thought came to me without words, like sort of a conceptual overlay.
(I sometimes think in words and sometimes without. Thinking without words seems smoother, faster, more fluid, more efficient. But like shifting into low gear, using words can help me think through something difficult, or when I'm tired.)
I also remembered that Feynman had a story about doing similar experiments… I can't find it right now, but it's probably in Surely You're Joking. This HN comment mentions the same thing and links to an interview with him: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4802725
Aha, here's a better reference: “While reading What Do You Care What Other People Think, I came across the section in which Feynman describes trying to count to sixty while performing various activities. Eventually he notes he cannot count and speak out loud at the same time. But he has no problem reading while counting.” https://medium.com/for-your-information/counting-reading-subvocalization-and-some-feynman-75b2601d9cff
I often have songs running through my head (with lyrics and spare instrumentation) while talking or listening to something intermittent, but I think a cleaner test of "parallel internal audio streams" is whether I can really cleanly audioize two voices in harmony, maintaining attention to the contour of each line in addition to their relationship to each other.
I have musical training, both in playing viola (a harmony instrument) and composition, but I can make myself cleanly imagine two lines only with focused effort and practice, and three lines only after several hours of focused study (transcribing each voice, playing the three-part harmony on a keyboard, etc). Professional composers practice this skill much more than I do and are often much better at it than I am, with the ability to mentally "check" how it will sound for the brass section to play chord progression X while the strings play a melody and two harmonies, etc.
2) Rarely. If there are lyrics, they're usually displacing my other verbal thoughts.
3) If the streams are music and vocals/structured thought, I can do it, but not if they're both the same kind (e.g. two instrumental tracks, or two different verbal thought processes).
4) Yes, and very sure. I can superimpose them the same way I superimpose the imagined tiger on the real world. I don't know how many layers of this I could get away with, though, and am now curious and should experiment with it. :)
I mostly listen to instrumental music, but I can voluntarily recall a song with lyrics. It doesn't sound internally like two audio streams, the very words are doing the melody in a single stream.
I can hold two familiar melodies in my head at the same time, but it takes effort, and falls apart if I try to add words, or the moment I stop actively trying.
Completely suck at visualization, so no to the rest.
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
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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?"
"Housing costs vary wildly between different locations in the US, but the price of almost everything else is roughly the same."
For some items this isn't true. Gas and energy prices vary wildly by state and region. There are also very different sales taxes depending state and municipality which can drastically increase the price of some goods.
Something like this seems right.
I think the "30% of income on housing" was a rule formulated a few decades ago, when things like food and clothing were a higher percentage of average income than they are now. I've seen some people say "45% of income on housing+transportation" (https://cnt.org/tools/housing-and-transportation-affordability-index) but again, it's possible that with Baumol-type effects the percentage of income sent to these two categories could reasonably rise if others are falling.
> The garbagemen and plumbers are just as valuable to society ... and they should be able to live somewhere in the city too
Where do they currently live?
Legacy housing from before costs went up so much or long commutes.
If "the city" is defined as the overall Bay Area urban agglomeration then yes, if it's defined as the arbitrary 49 square miles on the tip of the peninsula then no. Plenty of people all over the world commute more than seven miles to work.
Speaking as somebody who lives in a similar metro area that just went through its own bout of NIMBYs vs YIMBYs, these arguments aren't terribly persuasive when the people who actually live in the desirable locations fight tooth and nail to undermine attempts to build more housing there.
Saying "that's just the way the market is, deal with it," is all well and good, but it falls pretty flat when coming from a population actively undermining the market by preventing new housing stocks being built, demanding bailouts to "protect home values" (i.e. "to keep housing prices higher than market") when there is a crisis, etc.
There was a trend of the Open Threads having other foreigners asking "is America really like that?". I guess I'll take my turn.
As a Canadian, something I see a lot in TV is Americans wearing their shoes in their own house. When people don't do this, it is usually called out. I've also seen a few shows refer to it as a Japanese practice.
Do all Americans do this? Is it a regional thing?
Just dog piling on this, I'll echo what others have said. Where I grew up in the norhteastern US both were quite common. I had a few friends whose parents asked that people remove shoes in the house, and this was perfectly normal. I wear shoes in the house, and this is also perfectly normal. I've certainly never seen someone be "called out" for *not* wearing shoes in the house.
Sorry by called out, I mean by the TV show or movie. Eg the character might say "Oh sorry, can you take your shoes off? Yeah, we're doing the Japanese thing now."
If it wasn't for moments like that, I would have assumed that TV characters leave there shoes on for the same reason they don't say Hello or Good Bye in TV shows.
American who grew up in the Western US, I always take my shoes off indoors. You'll track mud inside if you don't! Shoes are dirty!
Also Canadian here. As other people have noted it probably varies a lot, I'll add more anecdotes anyway... I visited a friend in Kentucky years ago, he and his mother were shocked that I even asked if I should take my shoes off. They wore shoes right up until changing for bed. So did everyone else I met on that trip.
In my family - my brother and I were always in socks indoors. Our parents, both immigrants from Croatia, always wore slippers. From visiting family in Croatia, it seems that having slippers/indoor-shoes is absolutely the norm there, while going barefoot or refusing the offered slippers - if you're a family guest at least - is weird. Wearing outdoor-shoes inside is sacrilege, except with less intimate guests. Of course there's variation there too but overall the whole slipper thing seems way more important.
You didn't ask about the UK, but....
My late parents, both born in the early 1930s, would have worn carpet slippers at home but would not otherwise have thought to take shoes off indoors. Among people of my broad age group (late 50s) shoe removal would seem to be instinctive and universal. I am inclined to say quite right too.
Nobody has mentioned floor covering trends yet. You're more likely to wear shoes indoors if you have hard floors than if you have carpet, since carpet is harder to clean, easier to permanently stain, and more comfortable to walk on in bare feet. There was a trend towards full house carpeting which probably increased from the 1920s to the 1980s and then receded again.
For what it's worth, my house has carpet in one living area and tiles in the other, and we avoid wearing shoes on the carpet. Guests can keep their shoes on if they like though, since I think it's weirdly intimate to take your shoes off in someone else's home.
Growing up in New Jersey, yes, this was seen as mostly an Indian-American thing.
But I've seen plenty of conversations on reddit where Americans are disgusted by us other Americans not taking our shoes off.
Hypothesis: these are mostly Midwesterners who (rationally) developed the habit because their winters are snowy, like yours in Canada. Personally, I see where you all are coming from, but at the same time, I honestly don't think the bottom of my shoes are particularly dirty.
This was extremely common up until the last 10-20 years. I personally started taking off my shoes for weeb reasons and it was definitely unusual until very recently.
Most older people I know (60+) keep their shoes on indoors.
Apparently, in the mid-twentieth century the practice of removing shoes indoors was brought to the USA from Japan by veterans of the American occupation: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1680298573806575616.
It is no longer out of the ordinary, but remains from universal.
I live in SF, and I'd say taking shoes off is close to 50-50 (I take them off and ask guests to as well, to which no one bats an eye). The taking-off 50% is maybe slightly skewed towards Asian.
I grew up wearing shoes indoors. I had neighbors who didn't. There's a lot of variation there.
By "wearing their shoes" I assume you mean not removing them at the door. It's up to the homeowner for the most part. Growing up we had tons of company and no entryway so everyone kept their shoes on instead of forming a big shoe pile in the living room. Other folks with nicer entryways and muddier outdoors will have people take their shoes off.
Can't answer for the whole of America, but in my cultural bubble, while it's okay to wear shoes in the house if you just need to run in from inside and get something/go to the bathroom/etc., as a general rule shoes go off at the door. I think wearing them inside is more common here, but it's by no means universal.
RE the autogynephilia question, assuming the results are correct, it seems to suggest that it is somewhat associated with being trans, but more importantly that also that a lot of cis men have it/engage in it.
From a practical/trans rights point of view this is a mixed bag result, because the fact that lots of cis males engage in it definitely makes the argument that cis males can use very loose self-ID rules in locations like bathrooms and changing rooms and spas to involve cis females in unwanted sexualized role play of their own fashioning. Trans rights activists want to laser like focus on the idea that 'real' trans people are no more dangerous than cis people. But the problem is that there are lots more cis people. So if autogynephilia is semi-common among cis males, loosening the rules on previously sex segregated spaces ends up potentially exposing a lot of cis females to a lot of cis males.
This may still lead to different answers in different places (most female bathrooms tend to be single stall oriented so maybe no big deal while maybe naked spas could still be sex segregated).
In any case the finding that it isn't *particularly* associated with being trans doesn't answer the question of what we need to do with the cis guys who are autogynophile (in female spaces).
Realistically, just due to the numbers involved, you are more likely to get a cis male trying to enter a previously female place than a trans female. There are a lot of cis men and not (relatively) very many trans females. Even if all trans females were legit and just wanted a place to quietly go, the modal case would still be a pervert trying to spy on women.
A lot of my thinking on this subject goes back to a situation I dealt with personally, where a creepy guy repeatedly entered a female-only place and because the social norm at the time was definitely against that, I was able to chase him out (and eventually got him banned from that place). I fear that if he were doing that now, he could claim (or would be assumed) that he was trans female and would have assaulted or spied upon multiple women.
What are some theories for why top American politicians are so goddamn old now?
My spur of the moment hypothesis is that, lacking other qualities, oldness is the closest proxy left for presidential.
Another is: in a feminized era where increasingly more men speak with high-pitched voices (see: Ron DeSantis), only really old guys have any gravitas.
I think it's because the political parties have refined two aspects of electoral politics very finely over the last 50 years. One, safe districts for incumbents with political pull inside the party. And two, related, increased political power of long term and safe politicians within each party.
If your constituents can't really vote you out (Dianne Feinstein, Mitch McConnell) then you can work your way up the party apparatus and build power. Once you've built power, you can use it to gain further power such as higher level positions (president, committee chair, etc. ) or control over the party apparatus.
Once you've been at it long enough, it's very hard for anyone to intentionally get you out. Running against Dianne Feinstein is essentially impossible for a Republican and (at least until now, maybe still) forbidden as a Democrat. A Democrat running against her 10 years ago would have been very unlikely to get much support or funding, and may have been shunned by the party for trying.
As tempo says below "people tend to stay in office their entire lives".
Maybe that's the key to this puzzle. People are tiring of democracy and voting Olds into office is only a step away from ancestor worship and the restoration of monarchy.
Voters are getting older:
The U.S. electorate is aging: 52% of registered voters are ages 50 and older, up from 41% in 1996.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/10/26/what-the-2020-electorate-looks-like-by-party-race-and-ethnicity-age-education-and-religion/
People vote for candidates like them. Old people like old people.
Plenty of old politicians spoke with high pitched voices. Did JFK have a big baritone voice? FDR? LBR is pretty average. Reagan average. I guess Nixon was deepish?
yeah the old electorate is the thesis i am buying most as a big factor, although it doesn't explain everything. i suppose a big factor at the moment is plain bad luck.
forget the voice pitch for a moment and go by quality of voice. JKF, FDR, Reagan and Nixon all had great voices. JFK and FDR, famously. Reagan was a freaking actor, and when people talk about Nixon's "charisma" it's impossible to understand unless you forget what he looked like speaking and simply listen to his voice. He famously "won" that 1960 debate with JFK "on the radio" but not on TV.
would any be explained by incumbancy and increased lifespan?
the problem with the increased lifespan theory is these old as shit politicians are going senile and shitting their diapers as we watch
I don't quite understand why that would disprove this as an explanation
my thought was that these particular drooling olds aren't showing any signs of living longer. but maybe, like some others here, you are thinking more of the electorate's age than the politicians'?
no. whatever their current capacities are, they are still alive. people tend to stay in office their entire lives.
> people tend to stay in office their entire lives.
this is a very good point. no doubt true historically.
maybe the more specific question i should be asking is why in 2020 could the Dems not find a better candidate than Joe Biden, who was already very old and out of office?
Trump, OTOH, always seems like a special case, yet I'm kinda wondering if maybe he's a product of something deeper rooted than it seems. is it just a coincidence that he is also a very old candidate (even considering longer life expectancy)? Probably.
The leading candidates for the next presidential election will be the oldest in history by a large margin. Maybe that's dumb luck but maybe it's not. Maybe there are cultural explanations which also explain why Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Harrison Ford and other old farts are bigger movie stars than anyone under 40.
I have heard people seriously propose that this is because Gen X is cynical, and views participating in politics as selling out.
Could we prove or disprove this theory?
>Could we prove or disprove this theory?
Not that it would tell us anything about the reason, but it would be interesting to see a graph showing the age of everyone in congress and how it has changed over recent decades. One of those animated graphs.
Not selling out should probably translate into being less financially successful overall, but economic growth plus volatility makes it pretty impossible to compare without bias the wealth of one generation against others.
Or maybe "deaths of despair" among Gen-x-ers is evidence of not having sold out? A whole generation of wannabe Kurt Cobains? Was Gen-x the primary cohort involved in January 6? That thought wouldn't have occurred to me if Jay Johnston from Mr. Show hadn't been one of them.
My pet theory is the reduction of natural population growth.
During the era of strong population growth, catering to younger voters was worth doing because that voting group is bigger than the older generation. Now they are about the same size. That inherent advantage is gone.
Politicians are usually better at catering to their own generation than a younger generation.
Oh, that one makes a lot of sense.
Combine this one with today's voters being on average a full decade older than the voters of just 30 years ago (which must be a first in U.S. history), and you've surfaced more than enough to explain the trend in national political leaders.
Once you get past a handful of "top politicians" (Trump, Biden, Sanders) and retired politicians (of course Jimmy Carter is old, but that doesn't imply anything), I'm not sure American politicians are "so goddamn old". Hakeem Jeffries is 52 and Kevin McCarthy is 58 - is that too old?
But there certainly are enough of those high-profile octogenarians to make a trend. I want to attribute our current situation to the Baby Boom (the generation of 1946 keeps sticking around). But both Biden and Sanders are older than that. What does it mean?
Perhaps it is just that, in the age of television, it is almost impossible to get people to leave the national stage.
538 is saying that this is the oldest Congress ever. FWIW they are attributing it to an overall aging of the general population.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/aging-congress-boomers/
There's a line chart in that article which really makes the connection plain. I'm actually surprised to see how well the median age in Congress has for a century tracked (up and down) with the median population age.
Who in the 40 to 50 age cohort would you throw up there.? I’m drawing a blank.
There are a lot of 40-50 year old politicians that would make me throw up.
Nobody. But as geoduck says, why?
Is it something about Gen X? Are they too cynical for politics?
Having given it a bit more thought, Gretchen Whitmer at 51 would have been a smart choice for the Dems had the stars aligned.
Pipeline problem: no credible younger options.
But why? Not sure, but maybe earlier wars or other national events forged a new generation of plausible politicians in a way that the Wars On Drugs And Terror didn't.
A related, equally specious theory: increasing distrust of the system, and/or increasing adoption of counterculture ethos by the mainstream, leads an increasing proportion of young political activists to work outside the system to effect change instead of within it. Radical energy is given fewer opportunities to be corrupted by realpolitik into dynamic moderacy.
yeah I was thinking about something along those lines. kinda like there's a fragmentation in media there is a fragmentation of radical political niches -- mainstream media itself plays to those niches in a way, but to speak figuratively it doesn't go Full Retard whereas the hundred niches themselves go Full Retard, each in their own way. e.g, Democratic Socialism, Slavery Reparations, Queer Stuff, Trans Stuff, Feminism, BLM, etc., etc., and that's just the right-centrists. all of these brands really want to be outside the party system and away from the "neo-liberals". Few voters understand any of that stuff and vote for the old guy who doesn't speak in language they don't understand.
I've also wondered if it's somehow a related phenomenon.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/how-woke-caused-cultural-decadence
I often watch TV with my girlfriend in the evenings. In principle I think a particular type of video game would be a better use of this time, but I don’t know games - can anybody recommend stuff which satisfy the following criteria:
- me and my girlfriend can play it together
- has artistic/literary value
-is some kind of big adventure
Basically I want something like an Elder Scrolls game or Red Dead Redemption, but which me and my gf play together.
Thanks
The Tales series (Tales of Symphonia, Tales of Zestiria, etc) have couch co-op during battles. Combat is real-time, sort of a mix of RPG and fighting games, with each player controlling one party member. Outside of combat, only the first player does anything, so player 2 won't always be involved, but you're there for the story, mostly.
There's no continuity between games in the series, they just have shared design elements (like Final Fantasy), so start with whichever game looks interesting. I really enjoyed Symphonia's story, but it's pretty old, so you might want to try one of the more recent ones.
The Tales series is great for a longer co-op JRPG, but note that the latest main installment (Tales of Arise) is purely a single-player experience. This made many people quite annoyed and there are mods to address it, but I haven't tried any personally and don't expect much outside of PC use regardless.
First question, I think: Does your girlfriend enjoy video games so much that she chooses to play them by herself?
If not, then she, like me, might not think that video games are a "better use of this time." I'm a person who craves novelty and I don't enjoy the repetition involved in gaming (skill-building/ leveling up, long walks or rides between locations, etc) nearly as much as I enjoy the efficiency of watching a tightly-crafted story.
Feel free to ignore this if your girlfriend already plays video games or is on board with looking for something to play together.
* Skyrim. With the right Mod, you can play it as a 2+ person game. You will need two computers, though.
* Elder Scrolls Online. Or nearly any other MMO. If you're looking for story, I recommend ESO or Knights of the Old Republic, as those have had the best stories that I've seen in MMOs.
* Divinity Original Sin 2. I concur that it's great.
* If you don't mind having a single set of controls, I'd also highly recommend The Forgotten City. One of the best stories I've seen in a video game. It will take you only about 10 hours to get all four endings.
* Depending on what you mean by "artistic value," possibly Valheim. It's beautiful in its own way, though there really isn't a story.
Old point-and-click adventure games work well for my wife and I.
Some examples that we've really liked:
Myst and its sequels
Grim Fandago
The Return of the Obra Dinn
The King's Quest and Space Quest games
"Thimbleweed Park" isn't even that old!
Divinity: Original Sin II
Another recommendation that doesn't quite fit your criteria: Her Story. It's like an interactive crime mystery movie. There's not much interaction in a typical game sense, instead you spend most of your time thinking/talking through your theories to decide what thread to follow and eventually piece together a series of events. It's only 2-4 hours but makes for a really fun evening for a couple. IMO 2 people is the perfect way to play that game - "being detectives together" is a rare and interesting way to engage with your partner (or friend). I'd also recommend the board game Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective for this.
Forgot about The Golden Idol, which was another mystery game. You've got a static scene, and you go through the clues and solve the mystery of how this person died, and then onward to the next scene. A very pure mystery game, lending itself to as many co-detectives as you want. With some very solid art. ("For you, I would fight a tiger AND WIN!")
Not exactly what you asked for, but the board game Forbidden Island (and it’s sequels, Forbidden Desert and Forbidden Sky) are fun to play, involve strategy, and are great to play with a loved one, because they are cooperative: you both win or you both lose. You are not playing against each other; you are teaming up to beat the game.
Something like World of Warcraft? Assuming that is still going.
I think WoW is still going, and there are plenty of others in that genre. They're called "MMO". You could probably look up which MMO has the best storyline.
The immediate first answer is It Takes Two (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ2VB6nbsUI), an asymmetric co-op game in which a divorcing couple gets turned into dolls and forced to cooperate through several videogame genres to turn back. Although it's completely linear, so not Skyrim.
...I don't actually play co-op, I can't think of many others. The Halo games all had co-op back in the Xbox days, if you're up for shooters. Pretty sure the Diablos still do, though I don't know about artistic/literary value.
I think 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is only singleplayer, and is pretty limited gamewise, but the plot is a jigsaw puzzle that's got more twists than a double helix, and might still be an alternative to TV. It's got very definitive segments so you could pass the controller around if you wanted to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAlA6j8ddfU
I guess if I'm mentioning Aegis Rim I should mention Disco Elysium too, which has even less gameplay and is even more interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igUK55Qn1Go
If you ever have a fight, the original Battletoads had a co-op mode that was literally impossible to win, you could troll her with that.
It takes two sounds great, thanks.
Wonderful game - played it with my Fiance. But be prepared to put out the world's most awkward hit on a child's favorite stuffed elephant.
+1 for that suggestion
I feel like I remember that Scott linked a Noahpinion tweet of a graph from a paper comparing parenting hours spent by men and women across time, which showed that men today spend as much time on parenting as women did 50 years ago, but that women have similarly increased their time, so the gap between men and women has stayed ~the same. I can't for the life of me find either the tweet or scott's link to it.
Does anyone happen to know/remember what I'm talking about and where to find it?
This is a similar idea: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/03/14/modern-parenthood-roles-of-moms-and-dads-converge-as-they-balance-work-and-family/
I'm quite confident that that is the paper/survey/poll that the tweet was referencing, so thank you!
Whatever happened to Rodney Brooks "Intelligence without Representation"-style robots? Wikipedia says it's correctly called "Subsumption architecture" (or maybe "behavior-based robotics"). Was it a dead end? How complex did their behaviors end up becoming? Is it still an area of active inquiry?
Blog post on a novel but flawed libertarian exegesis of Romans 13:
https://thearchy.substack.com/p/the-need-for-good-libertarian-exegesis
Libertarian Biblical exegesis. There's a new circle of Hell I was hitherto unaware of 🤔
There's better and worse, just like with anything else.
New blog post exploring the case against the FDA regulating general purpose medical AI and the growing need for decentralized approaches to oversight.
"Why AI doctors should not be FDA regulated"
https://moreisdifferent.substack.com/p/why-ai-doctors-should-not-be-fda
How important is proofreading in languages other than English?
I was reading the newest book review on The Educated Mind and noticed a place where the reviewer mixed up the words "good" and "well." This on it's own isn't very interesting; even extremely intelligent, native English speaking, professional writers who make a conscious effort to proofread their work make mistakes like this with such frequency that most of us sail right past them without a second thought. But that normalcy was striking to me. I am a native English speaker, with 19 years of education mostly spent on improving my reading and writing ability under my belt, who makes his living using the written word to persuade, and I would be shocked if this short paragraph didn't contain at least one error in grammar or punctuation. I can't remember the last blog post or newspaper article I read that didn't include multiple typos. I have no fewer than three separate books on my shelf on English style, grammar, and composition, which my employer considered important enough to my job to pay for as a business expense.
I've always taken this state of affairs for granted, where nobody really knows a lot of the rules and even the most literate among us mostly get by on extremely-error-prone intuition and are forced to spend significant amounts of time proofreading if they want to be clearly understood, but I'm also aware of just how weird/complex/idiosyncratic the English language is compared to other world languages.
For those of you whose native language is not English, do fluent and even skilled writers in your native language seem to struggle with grammar, punctuation, and spelling to a similar extent English writers do? How common are the sort of minor errors that most of us have learned to politely ignore when reading English-language newspapers? Are there different sorts of pitfalls than the ones I'm familiar with as a native English speaker? I'm especially interested in non-alphabetical writing systems like Chines, Korean, Japanese, etc.
You have heard, of course, about the once idealistic but latterly corrupted politician? He started off doing good, he ended up doing well.
The fact that languages like French, Spanish, and German have official academies that define a "correct" version of the language suggests that actually those languages would have *more* of this issue, since there *is* a "correct" version that differs from how people normally use the language. (Spelling is a pretty distinctive problem for English, that has parallels with character amnesia in Chinese. But Korean, and Japanese that is written with kana, should be just as easy as Italian or Spanish for native speakers.)
Germany had an orthography reform in the nineties, which was pretty much botched and everybody hated it. (E.g. people kept confusing "das" and "daß", and since they couldn't quite get themselves to lump them together, they turned the latter into "dass" which didn't help anybody at all.) BUT: In retrospect this reform helped make orthography somewhat more laissez-faire. Is it "Fahrrad fahren" or "Fahrradfahren"? Who cares? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uak8TG6Z9-w
When I read French internet forums, I'm surprised how many people don't seem to understand the first thing about their grammar. So many people mix up the infinitive and the participle all the time! ("J'ai manger") They commit errors that no foreigner would. Reminds me of that meme where the foreigner goes: "Excuse me for my bad English", and the native speaker answers "K bro".
Everyone hated it? Maybe at the beginning but as a now 20 year old German I have never heard anything bad about the reform. Maybe just the people who had to change their habits were annoyed but it was good overall?
Well, they were smoking something weird when they came up with their new rules. E.g. they wanted to change "aufwendig" (from "aufwenden") to "aufwändig" (from "Aufwand"), but luckily they rowed back on such things, and now both of them are allowed. Same with the "Spagetti" nonsense. I agree that "Kanguruh" which now is deemed obsolete might look fancier than "Kanguru", but so did "Elephant", and this is indeed only a matter of habit.
But the worst part is the ss/ß rule change. Obviously they had no idea where the previous rule came from, and it was really not difficult. Sure, it's easier when you remember that they used to have two "s" in German, the round s at the end of the syllable, and the long | at the beginning or middle of the syllable. We got used to getting along without this differentiation, only sometimes it might be confusing: "ha|chen" (snatch, or smoke weed) as opposed to "Häschen" (little rabbit), where the round s denotes that this is not a "sch", but the ch is part of the diminuitive ending.
Now you also have the confusion between "Passant" (passer-by, used to be written "Pa||ant") and "Passamt" (passport office in Austria) which used to be written "Paßamt", and it was clear that the ß (a ligature of | and s) was ending the syllable.
Instead, they now say that after a short vowel you should write "ss" instead of "ß". So great, should we write "Spass" in Westphalia? https://youtu.be/YtxdwtYfo3Q?t=42
Oh, PS, there is a text by Harry Rowohlt: "Behaltet euer Neuschreib, ihr Krücken", which you can find on Spotify.
Seems right. I recall hearing that the French equivalent of a spelling bee is a contest in which students must correctly conjugate verbs in their written form, since there are many conjugations that are far more complex in written than standard French.
I wonder if this problem is unique to French among Western languages -- that the written language in its proper form includes so much grammatical detail entirely absent in the spoken form. It seems like the sort of thing you would absolutely need an official academy to maintain.
Has the Academy ever had the power to determine the style of any writer or publisher? Ever in the modern era?
I think the idea many English speakers have about the role of these Academies involves a fair degree of myth.
There are also standardized ”correct” versions of written English, so it’s not that different.
Thanks, that's interesting.
My impression is that France takes a real pride in its language. This isn't unique to France, but it's rare among English speakers. Thus, I imagine poor use of the national language there is offensive in a way that it isn't here in the US. Here, poor spelling is a sign of ignorance, but no more noteworthy than a lack of knowledge of math, history, science, etc.
"Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?" -- Henry Higgins
I can assure you that my uncorrected spelling in Czech (my native tongue) is almost as atrocious as in English.
Yes, other languages require proofreading. (My experience mostly concerns Finnish and Swedish in addition to English — it’s not actually that different.) I guess all languages have different colloquial vs written styles, and people make mistakes with the grammar of the written language.
Korean is written in an alphabetic system, by the way.
Oh, I'd like to know about the quality of the english translations of Mikael Niemi's stuff. The german translations suck. Can you say anything about that?
No, unfortunately I haven't read him in any language.
The specific problems with "spelling" in the English language are somewhat unique, due to the unusually broad variety of etymological sources of words. But having unique problems is not a particularly unusual attribute of a language.
I assume the problems associated with uncommon words are present in every language, and the problems associated with complicated grammar are present in any attempt to express complicated concepts in language.
I have been testing out the theory that judicious use of linguistic splices can make it simpler to communicate 难 concepts. The obvious problem is that "people won't understand it". I am content to hope that ChatGPT will be able to translate for them.
PS: 难 = "difficult". In context, "very difficult", the language-shift conveys a sense of emphasis.
> I have been testing out the theory that judicious use of linguistic splices can make it simpler to communicate 难 concepts. The obvious problem is that "people won't understand it". I am content to hope that ChatGPT will be able to translate for them.
Evidence for this theory: the sheer amount of Latin (and to a lesser extent, German) phrases in Law and in Philosophy
难?
How do you spell that?
There are two issues with the intermingling of kanji with English. People can't "hear" anything when they read the text, and people can't type the characters.
I use Mandarin vocalizations, so I type nan2 (it is both second tone, and second on the autocomplete list). But perhaps U+96BE would be a more useful keyboarding to the American monoglot audience. Ultimately, there is no good solution currently available.
And, of course, "how do you write characters" is a completely different type of "spelling" issue.
I have been working on a new *style* of blogging, and it might be ready for previews: https://shragafeivel.com/
It's certainly an artistic style, but I don't think it's at all helpful for communicating your ideas more effectively, which is generally the goal of a blog post. The reader isn't going to know the meanings you assigned to all the colors, especially since you invented new names for two of them. They also aren't likely to speak Chinese or Japanese, and even if they put it into Google Translate that's not going to tell them what you mean by "rice fire" or similar. (And no, providing the explanation on another page isn't helping - nobody is going to keep the translation guide open in another tab while reading your blog.)
Basically, you're putting up a bunch of barriers to comprehensibility for no apparent reason.
I've read a few pages. Really nice idea.
I like this style a lot, thanks for posting. FYI your mogue324 character's color is difficult to read on my screen.
That looks intentional.
As Chris Horner once said, "Rice Man Big Fire". https://jisho.org/search/%E7%B1%B3%E4%BA%BA%E5%A4%A7%E7%81%AB
Even if I could consistently read kanji, it seems really out of place. It's an English blogpost about a French event, why the Chinese/Japanese?
I don't know what the color changes are supposed to represent, but the /color title looks like a mistake. And then we hit /xanthum and I'm like "what is this nonsense fantasy color doing here with all the practical boys like /red and /yellow?" (/mogue is unreadable but that might be an intentional joke, considering what he's saying.)
> Even if I could consistently read kanji, it seems really out of place. It's an English blogpost about a French event, why the Chinese/Japanese?
'Cus it's mysterious and pretty?
米人大火 is supposed to mean "lighting a giant rice-paper caricature of oneself on fire, presumably for the attention".
The /color tags are because this is already too confusing, and relying on readers to also not be color-blind seemed like too much.
And "xantham" and "mogue" are my new words for "infrared" and "ultraviolet". Both of them are a bit hyperbolic. https://shragafeivel.com/colors/
For what it's worth, "xanthum" is an archaic word for "blond", as well as a type of tree sap used as a food additive.
If the colors are just supposed to be characters, I'd recommend Red: and Yellow: instead. Leading with /red looks like you've mistyped a tag, like we weren't supposed to see that.
The colors aren't supposed to be "characters", they are supposed to be "registers".
Well. That is indeed a style. Yes.
From the link:
> one of the dark secrets of the “trans” movement is that, according to all accounts, hormones are intensely pleasurable, in the sense that a recreational drug would be.
Which accounts were these?
As noted, "mogue" comments are in a somewhat hyperbolic register. As well as a "are you sure you want to open Pandora's Box" register.
But I have heard several accounts, first-hand and second-hand, that hormone injections give a noticeable short-term sense of elation. Not to the degree of fentanyl, but far beyond that anything a person on warfarin or atorvastatin would experience.
Certainly the chemicals are not a painful experience.
Turing, IIRC, did not much enjoy his injections. Perhaps this only applies to testosterone? (See e.g. Chuck Palahniuk's account of his episode of steroid use.)
The synthesis of your post regarding admissions and your link from reddit about advanced math classes, is this:
Harvard et al really do have a big share of the smartest, most driven students. But that isn't the bulk of the student body. The bulk is kids who are less smart/driven and there in part due to privilege.
Sure, great that you can take grad-level math classes as a junior, but realistically most Harvard kids don't do that.
Part of the advantage of going to Harvard is the ambiguity. Are you "pothead child of hedge fund billionaire", "somewhat smart kid of two doctor/lawyer/etc types", or "Mr. math genius, take-multiple-graduate-level-math-classes-as-a-junior"?
Also - just to say it - I think the last group will be disproportionately from well-off families, just because that sort of ability isn't only about talent, but also about having it cultivated from a young age. There are perhaps "doing calculus in preschool" level prodigies out there for whom it doesn't matter, but they're a *very* small slice, even smaller than the "Mr. math genius" group.
>Part of the advantage of going to Harvard is the ambiguity. Are you "pothead child of hedge fund billionaire", "somewhat smart kid of two doctor/lawyer/etc types", or "Mr. math genius, take-multiple-graduate-level-math-classes-as-a-junior"?
It is funny you say this, because I bet it is at the root of my total dismissive/frustrated attitude towards the Ivy's and their grads. I am a consultant, so by the very nature of it I am generally working places where there is a mess (not always, but predominantly). Over the years I have stumbled across a bunch of Ivy grads, and I have always found them incredibly underwhelming compared to their and other people's opinions of them.
Lots of people who think they are brilliant, but are slightly above average at best (for a college grad in a high level position). But I bet when you cross reference my industry, with orgs that are a mess in my industry...I bet I am almost solely interacting with the "pothead child of hedge fund billionaire" and "somewhat smart kid of two doctor/lawyer/etc" types and never the "Mr. math genius, take-multiple-graduate-level-math-classes-as-a-junior".
While I was the latter type of person but just went to a totally underwhelming university, so being condescended to by people from the former groups is particularly galling. I always love intellectually/professionally stuffing them in a locker (which happens a lot).
Bullying, it's not just for kids, and pairs great with class resentment!
There's an adverse selection issue here. The prospective employer has a hard time telling which of the three categories a given Harvard grad is, but the "grad level math as a junior" person probably went to grad school, and the "somewhat smart kid of two doctors/lawyers" likely has other offers, so you're more likely to get the former.
Indeed, especially in a low status field like I am in.
Yeah, a lot of the Ivy thing is just branding. The student body overlaps a ton with "pretty smart but didn't get into an Ivy." Hardly anyone appreciates that most students at elite colleges are just pretty smart.
But the part I think the most interesting here is whether you think Mr. Math Genius doesn't create messes, or is just more analytical and whatnot when discussing the messes. I've been noodling on how much being extremely smart helps one actually make less mistakes, correct mistakes faster, or just rationalize and cover up mistakes more capably. In my mind, it's kind of related to how people who are more knowledgeable about public policy don't necessarily have more correct positions on which policies are optimal, they are just better at rationalizing the positions they do have. I wonder if that's a general effect beyond politics.
I think experience helps one make less mistakes, and intelligence let's one make new ones, and faster, and think of a way to fix them.
>I've been noodling on how much being extremely smart helps one actually make less mistakes, correct mistakes faster, or just rationalize and cover up mistakes more capably.
I think mostly the latter two. Plus if you are actually a crackerjack hotshot who can think their way out of anything, well you probably have less of a need to bring in a hired gun.
Not that a lot of this problems I solve are really *that* complicated (some of them are the consulting equivalent of "did you try turning it off and on again"). But they do often involve careful thinking, attention to detail, and abstract reasoning in a way that a wide swath of college graduates from all universities basically abandon once they are done with school.
That's assuming they even did it in school. I think much of this is just being unwilling to put in mental effort and attend to detail, like you mention, rather than depending on intelligence per se. But who knows, intelligence is a pretty fuzzy concept anyway.
Substack has become extremely annoying.
On my Substack reader app, there is now an annoying feed. They try to put in links to blogs they think I might like. And one-line comments much like tweets keep popping up. It is distracting and annoying. I cannot find what I subscribed to and want to read.
I deleted the app.
(I got here from my browser. )
I don't ever use apps for almost anything. They are always bad and looking to steal info and track you and mold you.
Browsers can gather far more information. And web pages are more easily compromised.
There are plugins for that.
Or rather, there are plugins that prevent you from being *noticeably* impacted by your information being collected. I use a browser with some plugins and I pretty much don't see sponsorships or ads anywhere online - not on YouTube, not on Facebook, not on retail sites, and not on news sites to which the retail sites attempt to follow me.
If a targeted ad is invisible to its target, is it even an ad?
Yes but in general a website has more chance of being compromised.
As opposed to the web based versions that don't track or mold you?
They have a much harder time of it.
Yeah, me too. Browser is perfectly serviceable alternative for most cases.
Yeah, they almost got me to switch to their app to find blog updates, then they added that, so I’ve switched back to using rss, and deleted the app.
So they're coming out with a new Willy Wonka movie, a prequel: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjkod2f9ZWAAxUyFTQIHeDqC_EQ3yx6BAgQEAI&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DotNh9bTjXWg&usg=AOvVaw1RftwKs8aMeFnIOtj_DKoV&opi=89978449
It may be entertaining to watch, but I don't expect it to be the caliber of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, which remains one of my favorite movies, and which I consider better than the book. In fact, watching the trailer made me think that the script could have been generated by an AI. So...I asked ChatGPT, which only has training data before 2022, to tell me the plot of such a prequel.
I actually like ChatGPT's plot a little better, but found, as expected, it didn't really have much new. It told of Willy's adventures, with his friend Matilda, went in search of magical confections, including Vanilla Sprites, Sugar Sylphs, and the finding of oompa-loompas.
I asked it to expand on Sugar Sylphs, and found they lived in clouds, which Willy and Matilda reached using some kind of magic rituals. Though I kind of liked this idea, I found it missing the essential ingredient, as it were, of what made the original movie so great, which was the zaniness. I suggested that Willy and Matilda should, instead, reach the Sugar Sylphs' clouds by eating the right combination of specially-crafted sweets, to obtain a sugar high. This seems in-line with Willy mixing a coat into a batch of candy because it was too cold, and some shoes in another batch to give it a little kick.
This illustrates to me why LLMs like ChatGPT can't yet replace humans. Hollywood currently has a writer's strike going on, protesting AIs. If the writers only produce what AIs can produce, then Hollywood has a point. If they can do better, generating actually good content, even with the help of AI, then Hollywood doesn't realize their true value.
Though I have never written a screenplay, I bet I could do better than the prequel coming out in December, with help from ChatGPT. A professional screenwriter ought to, on average, do better than me.
>Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, which remains one of my favorite movies, and which I consider better than the book.
I hated the movie as a child, unreasonably, because I felt, reasonably, that it wasn't as good as the book.
...so they're protesting AIs by making the studios rely on the AIs? That... I mean the AI isn't up to it, so maybe that's the point and this is all a good idea.
A Willy Wonka prequel should be a rom-com about how Charlie's parents met and all the grandparents moved in. There should be, like, one tangential mention of Willy Wonka, and chocolate in whole.
Don't like this prequel trailer. Wonka seems to have his head on straight, which is not the Wonka I know. (That "scratch that, reverse it" had so little life in it.)
You would actually want a rom-com about Charlie's parents over the zaniness of how the factory came into existence? Why would a rom-com need Wonka?
Timothée Chalamet as young Willy Wonka is all I needed to know, if I didn't already have strong priors about what a prequel based on nothing in Dahl would be like.
But Dahl hated the movie, for reasons I never understood. This is one of only a few cases where I liked the movie better than the book.
I presume you mean the 70s movie? Yeah, that was a bit all over the place, it seemed to be too long to me. But it was perfect for the Christmas Day movie on TV for years.
I suppose the newer Depp version has taken over from that, and I never saw that one.
I imagine it was just the author going "They changed everything, they took out the best bits and replaced them with their own silly ideas" which always happens with book adaptations.
I loved the 70s movie (and still do), solely because of Gene Wilder's portrayal of Wonka. We never quite can tell (not even at the end) what Wonka is at the core, a villain or a hero; all we know is that he's got a hidden agenda, the power to push it through, and the intelligence to warp his audience to his will. And just what did he do to the native country of the Oompa-Loompas ? One look at his face, and... you'll have more questions than answers...
Gene Wilder was very good at portraying the level of danger within Wonka; he's probably got good intentions, but he can go the long (and weird) way round to get to where he wants.
The trippy boat ride in the 70s movie was exactly that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB401RfGMlM
At the very end, he can switch between scary, genuine, anger and beaming benevolence, and both sides are real.
Ah, but Timothée Chalamet also starred in Dune as Paul Atreides. You have to admit, the crossover possibilities are intriguing.
---
"We are the music makers, we are the dreamers of dreams... and the Sleeper Must AWAKEN !"
---
"Put your right hand in the box."
"What's in the box ?"
"CHOCOLATE !!!"
I do not get this Chalamet craze. He's this tiny, twiggy guy, he makes Ezra Miller look beefy by comparison. As Paul Atreides? Why? To draw in the audience of swooning fangirls who otherwise would never go to a SF movie?
As young Willy Wonka? Just seems wrong. I could maybe see it if they were going for a Tim Burton style movie, but that doesn't seem to be it. Gene Wilder in the original movie was fine for me. The only other Chocolate Factory book completed was a sequel, the third book never got past the first chapter. And neither of those are about young Willy Wonka.
It's a variation on the Batman casting problem, for which the right answer really was Michael Keaton once upon a time. You need someone who can play both Bruce Wayne and Batman, or Clark Kent and Superman, or Paul Atreides and Muad'Dib. Chalmont did pretty well as the Atreides kid; we'll have to wait and see if he can pull off Muad'Dib.
My problem with Chalamet (and it may be simply that I am Too Damn Old) is that sure, he can pull off the "kid" roles. Can he do the mature, adult Paul? Who knows?
Eh, I think that he does make sense as Paul Atreides, because Paul is supposed to be a bit of a thin, whiny, twiggy colonial prince from a water planet who is the ultimate dark horse on Arrakis; of course, in the book he does toughen up considerably (as needs must), and I doubt we'll see this happen in the movie.
That said though, I don't really care about the young WIllie Wonka one way or the other; I just enjoy imagining the Dune/Wonka crossover movie that we could've gotten, instead of whatever this is. "He's got the Voice ! The Candy Way !"
The Oompa-Loompas are Fremen 🤣 The secret ingredient in the chocolate comes from the sandworm spice! That's how you know the Wonka Bar Eaters by their blue eyes!
If by "edgy" you mean controversial, I agree. But then I don't expect controversial. More like, "'What you got here, Wonka? Some kind of fun house?' 'Why? Are you having fun?'" Or a musical lock that a teacher doesn't recognize the correct composer.
It is true that some Fun and Original things are also controversial, and some may also be considered controversial by the restrictions LLMs put into place. They are not mutually exclusive. But that still leaves a lot of fun and original content to be created.
I just don't expect LLMs to be able to create fun and original content any time soon. They are still awful at making up jokes and puns.
How would the US military deal with minefields, like what the Ukrainian military is dealing with now? Like, how would they clear them? I understand US dominance is based on air superiority, but you do have to cross the actual minefield at some point- right? I read the Wiki page on demining, but it just lists general tactics.
Inspired by the Wiki page and the Ukrainian struggle, I (a non-engineer) came up with a couple of random cheap demining tactics. These are more in the category of 'shower thoughts' and not like a serious proposal, but just for fun:
How about a pressure washer to trigger them? A cheap remotely-controlled vehicle like a tractor or excavator can carry a commercial pressure washer that sprays the ground in front of it. The amount of pressure a pressure washer can generate is amazing- like more than a human's weight- so should be enough to trigger the mines. Just keep spraying the ground and advancing. Will some of them get damaged? Sure- just roll out the next cheap tractor/pressure washer combo and keep going. Water supplies might be a hard limit.
Alternately you could just do an agricultural-style controlled burn on vegetation, where the heat should trigger all the mines. Do a spray of a cheap propellant (again via a remote-controlled tractor), the burn will detonate buried mines, if the tractor gets damaged replace with another, and keep advancing. Lots of farmers do controlled burns in their fields, not a high-tech problem
Mines come in two overall varieties: antipersonnel (AP) and antitank (AT). These get triggered in a number of ways.
AT mines have a large quantity of explosive, sufficient to destroy an armored vehicle. These have a couple different varieties within them. Pressure plate mines, where pressing on a plate with a large weight will trigger the mine, is the most straightforward. Typically, the weight required is much larger than a person, since it's something of a waste to use this much explosive on a single individual. However, pressure plate mines have the downside of only being triggered if a track passes *directly* over the mine. So these tend to be called "track width" mines, because they only affect a vehicle Another variety is a "tilt rod" fuze, where you have a ~3 ft rod that sticks up from the mine, so a tank or truck passing over will hit it and trigger the mine whether or not they happen to hit it directly with their wheel or track. You also have magnetic mines that detect the large mass of metal in a vehicle, which will also trigger if you don't happen to get hit by the track. Tilt rod and magnetic mines are referred to as "full width" mines, since they can be triggered by the full width of a vehicle, not just the track.
Antipersonnel mines often have a much smaller quantity of explosive (often just enough to disable but not reliably kill), and tend to require very little force to trigger their fuzes. Pressure plate varieties exist, but so do tripwires. Either way, these don't have much explosive, but are optimized to be triggered by troops moving around.
You'll note that these tend to have effects and triggering conditions that don't really overlap. For example, a person can just wander through a 100% AT minefield, and they're going to be able to step on pressure plates without setting them off, and they can easily see and avoid the tiltrods. Similarly, a tank can just...drive through an AP minefield, since it probably won't even feel the little bangs from AP mines. Then personnel can just stay in the tracks and know that all the mines there have been triggered.
So these get used together, where the AP and AT mines reinforce each other. A typical minefield will consist of a bunch of AT mines, each with a cluster of a few AP mines around it to thwart troops not in vehicles. You also do use what are called "anti-handling devices" (AHDs) so enemy troops can't just easily pick the mines up once they find them. These basically will cause the mine to go off if you attempt to move them. They can be as elaborate as electronic mercury tilt switches, to as simple as a string tied to a small stake below the mine and attached to the fuze, so if the mine is picked up the string pulls on the fuze and sets the mine off. You don't use AHDs on every mine, just enough of them such that enemy troops don't want to bother picking up the mines to use themselves.
Assuming the enemy has emplaced a minefield with this mix of AT and AP mines, what do you do? There are a bunch of options.
First, bypass it if you can. If the enemy was smart, they made sure to tie the minefield (as part of a system of obstacles) into terrain so you *can't* go around it, but sometimes the enemy screwed up and didn't do this, so you should always consider it.
Secondly, since triggering the mine requires triggering it in a way as described above (depending on type), you can find the mines. The most straightforward and low-tech way to do this is to have your engineers crawl on their bellies, and use a bayonet to probe the ground ahead of them. (Or, these days, a nonmetallic probe to avoid triggering magnetic fuzes.) They stick their probe into the ground every couple of inches across the width of their shoulders, and if they find something solid, they dig with their fingers to expose it and see if it's a rock (probable) or a mine. If it's a mine, they mark it with a piece of engineer tape, and change the direction of their track of movement to go around it. If they've gone the whole width of their shoulders and not found any mines, then they crawl forward a couple inches and do the whole operation again.
You can also find the mines by doing the above "crawl forward a few inches at a time", except with a mine detector, which is (at least when I was in) just a really sensitive metal detector. Both this and probing are so absolutely fucking tedious that you want to rotate personnel on something like a 20 minute basis, because it's hard for a person to maintain focus on a task like this even if their life depends on it. This is also very, very slow, and a lot of mines are "minimum metal" so you can't reliably detect them with a metal detector.
More kinetic ways use vehicles with specialized equipment. Mine rollers and plows have been mentioned, which are attached to tanks to trigger the mines ahead of the vehicle itself. These have the disadvantage that you noted in a comment above, where they only can take a few hits before being destroyed, so if you try to clear a lane with just these you'll need to have the vehicle back out so you can replace the device (a slow and difficult task in a minefield). Because of this, mine rollers and plows tend to be used for "proofing" a lane cleared with other methods--i.e., make sure you really did get all the mines. (One other way to do proofing if you don't have tanks with rollers and plows is to put sandbags in the bed of a truck and drive it backwards through the lane, though you'd better have a plan to pull a disabled truck back out to the friendly side in case you missed a mine.)
So another way is to use a Mine-Clearing Line Charge (MICLIC). This is a rope of plastic explosives attached to a rocket, which you fire over the minefield so the rope lays across your intended path of movement. You then detonate the plastic explosive rope to set off the mines along the path. However, note that these set off the mines *through their fuzes*: they DO NOT sympathetically detonate the mines' explosives directly. That is, the pressure pulse from the MICLIC exerts enough force on the pressure plate to trigger them, or disturbs tilt rods and tripwires enough to set them off.
Because of this, more modern designs often use fuze designs to avoid explosive overpressure to a limited extent. As an example for AT mines, the TS-50 mine (an Italian design; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TS-50_mine) uses an air bladder system in the fuze such that you have to wait a little bit of time for air from the squeezed bladder to leak through a calibrated pinhole and generate enough pressure impinging on the striker assembly to set the mine off. This means that not only do you need enough weight on the plate, you need to hold it for a little bit of time. Not much time--like a tenth or hundredth of a second or something--but enough that the overpressure from a blast lasting a few thousandths of a second won't reliably set it off. As an example of an AT mine, the PMN2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PMN_mine) has a cruciform pressure plate, which can be triggered by a boot over most of the mine's footprint, but which has a smaller area to reduce the amount of force
So this is why "dropping a big bomb" on the minefield isn't likely to be reliable. Firstly, because it's only going to exert enough pressure to trigger mines on a relatively small portion of the minefield--the square-cube law is a bitch--so a bunch of smaller explosives close together is much more efficient. Which is what the MICLIC does. Secondly because depending on the mines in use they may be resistant to it anyway.
As for something like a pressure washer, that's not going to exert force on the pressure plate of any mine for a while. It's going to first expend energy on blowing the soil away, and then possibly exert pressure on the mine once it's dug down a couple inches to be blasting the plate directly. So what you're proposing to do is pressure wash the entire top three to four inches of the soil away. Hope there's a place for all that eroded soil and water to go, or you're going to create a huge mudhole that you then have to (try to) drive through. This is in addition to needing enough water to do this. And, of course, it's less likely than a MICLIC (or even a big bomb) to trigger tilt rods.
And, while you're trying to do all of this, the enemy is trying to kill you. Remember, mines are just an obstacle, and like all obstacles they don't stop you, they act as a force multiplier so the enemy can stop you with fewer troops and weapons.
I just saw this excellent comment. Thank you
Googling US military anti-mine gets me this 517 page pdf of military minefield doctrine. https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/FM%2020-32%20W%20CH%201-4.pdf You may be surprised to hear I'm not willing to read the whole thing, but for the length I assume it mentions the specific tools used for clearing minefields.
If all else fails, drop a bunker buster on it. Why bother with the mines when you can remove the whole field.
Also this much shorter article about how the US dealt with Iraqi minefields during Desert Storm. https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2317&context=cisr-journal
It seems that clearing a path through a minefield is only tricky if you're under enemy fire. The difference between US and Ukrainian military doctrine and capabilities is that the US can use air supremacy to ensure there's no enemy nearby before clearing the minefield as a mopping-up operation, whereas the Ukrainians are stuck trying to get through minefields under enemy fire.
Its always amazing to me how much specific knowledge is published on the internet and is just an, at most, 10 minute search away.
Also, you can use cluster bombs for the same thing as your bunker bomb idea but with less geographic impact. Basically a giant shot gun blast.
Presumably in many cases, you're not just fighting in a nihilistic war of destruction, but are actually trying to enable people to return to their homeland.
And now they'll be returning through a valley.
The pressure washer sounds like a mine roller or plow with extra steps - either way you're putting something on the front of your tank to mechanically set off mines. Which is a pretty reliable strategy, but I'm not sure what the washer adds.
The cool, military way to clear land mines is with a line charge - use a rocket to lay a literal rope made of explosives over the minefield, and set it off, blowing up all the mines in a straight line. It's very fast, but it's a one-use item, naturally.
I don't think there's really anything more clever than what the wiki article says. There are lots of ways to clear mines if you're willing to take your time and move slowly, the trouble is that behind the minefield are enemy soldiers, and if you take too long doing it they'll see you coming and shoot you. And stopping the defenders from shooting at you while you cross the minefield is less "demining" and more "combined arms tactics."
>mine roller or plow
Don't they get damaged/destroyed by the mines though? I guess if you had a fleet of cheap plows it might not be an issue, but that seems like a hard constraint. Versus, the pressure washer is mostly insulated from the mine blast by being further away- it's only the water flow that's touching the mine, the washer itself could be 10 feet away. Some will get damaged, but it seems like you'd chew up your plows much much faster via constant contact with the mines
How much water would you need? How long would that supply line be?
The whole point of a minefield is to slow attackers down and fix them in place so that your people can shoot them. A minefield that isn't covered by soldiers is just a delay.
So to clear a minefield you must either suppress the covering fire (can be very difficult if the defenders are at all competent) or you use human wave attacks, which end up with casualty counts like the battles of WWI.
David Brooks had an interesting piece in the NYT about Douglas Hofstadter changing his mind about AI. He links to a LW article that Gwern posted with a transcript of an interview with Hofstadter.
DH: It “just renders humanity a very small phenomenon compared to something else that is far more intelligent and will become incomprehensible to us, as incomprehensible to us as we are to cockroaches.”
Brooks was surprised by the interview and the change in thinking and called Hofstadter to talk about the change.
Brooks OpEd
‘Human Beings Are Soon Going to Be Eclipsed'
’https://archive.ph/3kref
Brooks reads LW??
Strictly speaking, Brooks quotes (a modified version of) the title of my LW post, attributing it to a 'newsletter', but then links directly to the video. My guess would be he actually saw it in https://aisupremacy.substack.com/p/the-generative-ai-brief-issue-7#%C2%A7dystopian
It was a pleasant surprise to see the thoughtful, sensible, mild mannered conservative I try to watch every Friday night on The News Hour - yes I’m an old guy - reference “I Am a Strange Loop.” and “Gödel, Escher, Bach”.
Edit: I suppose he doesn't really qualify as 'conservative' if I use bat guano 2023 standards.
David Brooks has always attempted to engage with social science, and he usually does it better than Malcolm Gladwell.
My god I used to eye-roll so hard at David Brooks' Op-Eds carried by my local paper (10+ years ago). But he's reasonable in the modern era. How times have changed!
:wave: The Roots of Progress founder here, AMA about the blogging program.
I assume this is only for established writers with an existing blog and so on?
No, definitely open to people who don't have a blog yet and who want to launch something.
In that case how do you handle the questions that ask for links to writing?
You can link to a Google Doc or something if you don't have anything published.
Are your ideal applicants people aiming to become public intellectuals, or you also want people who write in addition to being builders / researchers?
Yes and yes. Someone aspiring to do this full-time would be ideal, but I think some people can make a great contribution by writing as a side project to a main thing, especially if that main thing is in science, engineering, startups, policy, etc. Scott himself and, e.g., Sarah Constantin are examples.
I have a blog that’s intended to (eventually) take the dense ideas presented by, eg, Qualia Computing, and jailbreak them for a less scientifically rigorous audience (in a more infotainment sort of way). Would this be considered too informal/playful for the program? My assumption is yes but I’d be pleasantly surprised to learn otherwise. Thanks!
Hard to say without seeing an example. Popular communication of ideas that have only been presented in academic or other less-accessible setting is good. Infotainment doesn't sound like what we want to prioritize supporting right now though. Maybe send a sample?
The standard evolutionary explanation for morning sickness is that, in combination with hyperosmia, it deters pregnant humans from eating questionable food during the first trimester when embryos are sensitive to teratogens, thereby serving an adaptive role by compensating for the cost of not being able to eat very much or do much of anything except lie in your cave feeling miserable.
I think this is a plausible explanation for hyperosmia, but fails to explain species-specificity and timing of nausea and vomiting. Routine vomiting during gestation has barely been reported in non-human animals, including other omnivores (rats don't vomit at all, some reports of mild food aversion in gravid dogs and cats); I don't know of any evidence that human embryos are more vulnerable to environmental teratogenesis, and if we were I'd guess it would be during the the late first and throughout the second trimester during the most intense periods of neurogenesis and neuron migration to make our abnormally complex brains, whereas morning sickness is usually worst around weeks 6–14.
My alternative hypothesis is that the adaptive value is as a stress test of the social caloric support system. Humans are so social and invest so heavily in each offspring that it's almost impossible to survive and successfully complete pregnancy and lactation unless you have conspecifics bringing you lots of food. Therefore, instead of being selected to minimize hormonally-induced nausea like other mammals, early humans found that it increased lifetime fitness if they stopped being able to feed themselves for a month or so right at the beginning of pregnancy—and, if this test revealed that they were in a situation where nobody was able or willing to feed them, to cut their losses by having malnutrition-induced miscarriages before going through the extremely dangerous process of late gestation and childbirth, and to try again later.
This alternative hypothesis explains not only why our bodies would do something with such obvious fitness costs, but also why other animals don't do it (except perhaps those that rely on humans feeding them when they feel bad!) and why it happens essentially as soon as the body is confident that it's pregnant.
What is the explanation for why children can be such picky eaters? It doesn’t make sense especially when you consider they refuse food their parents offer them (that is known to be safe).
Another related question - often small children come close to death and need iv fluids during ordinary viral gastroenteritis because they lose fluid and then refuse to drink (not because they can’t drink - whatever can’t means — maybe it’s a revealed preference). This also seems completely counterintuitive.
I think it's common for children to be picky eaters when their parents try to get them to eat new things. But when the parents eat a regular diet of the same thing every day (as most parents have for 10,000 years) kids are rarely picky about *that* thing.
Re pickiness, I believe it develops at around the same time as children learn to walk, so it's probably to stop them wandering off and eating some strange berries or something. As for refusing food their parents offer, I suppose "doesn't like strange food except when it's being offered by a parent" is too fine-grained a preference for evolution to produce when "doesn't like strange food" is close enough and has the same advantages re: not getting poisoned.
But aren’t children always walking off and putting stuff in their mouths? That is why we have child safety lids on tablet containers and the like.
I think these are different ages.
Is it true of children that are actually hungry?
It's my suspicion that children often aren't actually hungry at mealtimes, but want to snack a lot. (I don't think that's entirely because snacks tend to be made especially tempting.)
Speaking not as a scientist, but just as a parent and old person: kids have far more sensitive taste buds. This is why they like bland things (plain pasta, chicken nuggets, etc.). As our taste buds die over the course of our lives, we crave spice and things to make food interesting (hence older people putting Tabasco/red hot/pepper flakes on everything).
I haven't done my homework in this area, but a very large fraction of the humans in history died in early childhood, before their immune systems were as well-developed and experienced as their parents', from eating unpasteurized food and drinking water with water-borne diseases. So in evolutionary time, I don't think the premise "food and water offered by your parents or other caregivers is known to be safe" holds.
Maybe, but it would seem to me that the parents’ belief probably increases the probability the food is safe.
Sure, but evidently not to the extent that it's maladaptive for young kids to have an independent mechanism for rejecting strange-tasting food given to them by adults.
Definitely a possibility, equally consistent with the mechanism of relaxing selection by increased food-sharing, although it doesn't explain why it's so strong in the first trimester and not afterwards (it's believed that human chorionic gonadotropin plays a role in the etiology, but that remains 4-5 orders of magnitude higher than baseline throughout pregnancy).
To properly motivate my hypothesis, I'd probably have to make a model of lifetime reproductive success and do the math with a literature-supported range of numbers like (miscarriage risk)=f(nutrition/month), p(maternal death|severe malnutrition in first trimester), p(neonatal death|severe maternal malnutrition during lactation), the autocorrelation of nutrient availability over a 9-month characteristic time in the paleolithic Great Rift Valley, etc.
My understanding is that morning sickness (and nausea more generally) has a fair amount of influence from the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve carries all kinds of signals involving the thoracic cavity and organs and could plausibly be changing/moving or has some new duties/signalling during early pregnancy that is manifesting, as a side effect, morning sickness.
The fact that stronger morning sickness is correlated with lower chance of an early miscarriage sort of seems like it fits with this?
I agree with the above commenter that my prior/default belief would be that morning sickness is a side effect of some other pregnancy process and is not itself adaptive in any way. I'd want to see pretty strong evidence to the contrary to believe otherwise.
I write a Substack newsletter where I share three things I find interesting, once a week.
In the latest issue I shared:
1. A study finding an unexpected overlap in the demographics of BLM and anti lockdown protests in the USA
2. A chart demonstrating the U shaped relationship between fertility and household income
3. My mapping of median income per capita against average yearly working hours across a number of countries. This shows among other things that the higher the incomes, the lower the average working hours, with the exception of Korea.
If this sounds like the sort of thing you’d be interested in, you can check it out and subscribe using the following link: https://open.substack.com/pub/interessant3/p/interessant3-45
"Progress" is *such* a loaded word these days.
It would help if 'progressives' clearly stated what they were progressing towards.
"Justice", because that's not a loaded word at all.
You know, something that I haven't heard mentioned in the autogynaphilia debate, but which I think supports the mainstream trans-as-dysmorphia story, is furries.
The furry community plays host to people with a wide variety of paraphilias- attraction to characters with animal features, transformation, vore, micro and macro, etc. But what really connects people in the community isn't the kinky stuff- it's the common longing to be something other than human. Almost everything that makes a furry a furry- the fursuits, the OCs, the role-playing- in an expression of that desire, and finding people who share it is the main reason people become furries. Functionally, the furry community is a social network for people suffering from species dysmorphia.
So how does the autogynaphilia model account for that? Are they supposed to secretly be zoophiles pretending to be dysmorphic? Obviously, that doesn't make sense. Why should one socially unaccepted paraphilia masquerade as a different one? Also, many of the fetishes associed with the community, ilke micro and macro, have nothing to do with animals- instead, the common thread is an attraction to being something not quite human.
It's generally assumed in the community that the fetishes arise from the dysmorphia. That's supported by the fact that most furries' obsession with being non-human started before puberty. It's also just a lot more parsimonious than the alternative.
Finally, furries make no public claims of dysmorphia- most still try to insist to outsiders that it's just an anthropomorphic animal fandom. So, if dysmorphia is supposed to just be posturing for social acceptance, why would they only express it in private?
I don't know about the current stuff. After going to the cinema the first time, aged about six years, I felt I wanted to be a black panther like Bagheera. Some years, I climbed trees and woodwork and tried to hang out on a limb like a leopard. It somehow didn't work and it took years until I accepted my human body and started working out to make the best of it within its limitations.
Maybe these times, kids with strange ideas like mine experienced less frustration?
Second thought: Are we talking totem stuff here? Anybody can dress up, but integrating another identity is something else. Something old we are supposed to have gotten rid of. Jewish tradition got rid of that big time. Christian tradition reintroduced one and only totem. In the far east, things went differently in some relevant places. Fox spirits and the like, demons, not helpful for one's identitiy. Except you're a mongol.
I agree being a furry seems in many respects comparable, but I've known several people who're furries closely enough for them to share their private feelings about it, and not all of them agreed that they experience dysmorphia. I think people who're deeply invested in the community are probably more likely to, some people seem to be deeply attracted to it as a kink who don't.
I personally lean towards thinking of transgender the same way. There are some people who definitely seem to experience dysmorphia, where it's a central element of their own self-identification. Some appear not to, and I've spoken to some for whom envisioning themselves as members of the sex opposite their assigned one appears to be a genuinely intense kink.
I don't think autogynephila is *the* explanation for MtF transgender, and I think any hypothesis as such rendered much less plausible by how uncommon autoandrophilia seems to be relative to FtM transgender. But I've seen sufficiently strong anecdotal evidence that I'm strongly convinced that autogynephilia is at least a genuine thing that some AMAB people experience. And I think that if we sufficiently normalize "anyone who wants to identify as the sex opposite the one they were assigned at birth, for any reason, is trans," then the proportion of self-identified trans people will tend to change due to their being a significant pool of non-dysphoric people for whom that's the case.
This seems like evidence *for* the agn theory: furries have an animal fetish (or a fetish for things that look slightly like animals) and thus enjoy dressing up as animals, adopting fursonas and arguing for widespread social acceptability. I don't think a lot of people disputes that furries have a fetish.
Alternative theory: it's a convenient way for ugly-but-horny people to have a lot of sex.
My point is that people in the furry community have a wide variety of different fetishes, some of which have nothing at all to do with animals, but all of which seem to be related to this longing to be non-human, and which seem to usually develop after that longing.
Dysmorphia and paraphilia may be related, but the evidence of the furry community suggests the causality goes from the former to the latter, not the other way around.
When it comes to putting DD breasts on snakes, I'm leaning to the "fetish" and not "really want to be a snake" explanation.
I do think there's a division within furrydom between those who genuinely have the "I hate being a human, I wish I were something else" dysmorphia, and the "anthropomorphised animal cartoon figures yiffing" types. (I was online acquainted with a furry/brony of the first type, who really seemed to be steered into it due to a terrible family life as a teenager with a domineering stepmother who constantly undercut them).
And now, I have recently been made aware of another controversy roiling the community about "ferals" - people who do straight-up art of animals having sex, not the anthro type of furry but as realistic as a cartoon dog gets type. There's arguments over 'isn't this just bestiality?' and 'it's just another type of furry, why are you getting your knickers in a twist over this?'.
If you're going to be realistic, why use cartoons rather than photos?
Something unexplained is happening. I suspect that PART of it is that cartoons are obviously imaginary, but that's just a suspicion.
Well, a photo isn't much good since it doesn't have your fursona and Fido romantically interacting, and that is as far into this as I am willing to go.
> Something unexplained is happening
Imprinting. Fetishes self-replicate.
I'm one of the straight cis male respondents who gave a non-zero answer to the autogynephilia question, and I still don't think I have autogynephilia. Let me explain why.
In a question of the form "Picture a very beautiful woman. How sexually arousing would you find it to imagine <X, where X involves her>?" I am never not going to be aroused by that, unless X is actively disgusting. X could be "her standing in the corner holding textbooks and pretending to be a bookshelf", "her attached to the end of your foot like a shoe" (sorry), or "her as a gigantic godlike figure holding up the night sky" and I wouldn't answer zero. I'm not attracted to X, but I am attracted to beautiful women doing any old thing.
The answers of respondents probably differed more by how they read the question than whether they really have autogynephillia. Some of the cis attracted-to-women respondents are either disgusted by the premise, or answering the question relative to their base rate of being aroused by things. Some of them are answering it literally. Most/all of the trans respondents are disgusted. This entirely explains the weirder results and also invalidates any conclusions drawn from them.
FWIW, I've never been attracted to any woman without imagining her reactions to me. So the model of her reactions to me is a part of what I'm aware of. It's (usually) a secondary part, but sometimes it becomes the viewpoint of the scenario. It's the interaction that's stimulating.
I can confirm that in my research, this question also correlated especially with gynephilia and had relatively high endorsement rates. I also tried showing some AGP porn to men, and it was also associated with gynephilia, presumably because it included imagery that focused on women.
I think this is a general challenge for all of these questions, though - how does one meaningfully disentangle arousal to the thought of being a woman from nonspecific arousal to the female form?
Especially when autogynephilia is hypothesized to be nonspecific arousal to the female form directed towards oneself in some sense. Controlling overly much for this phenomenon might be rejecting the underlying theory, but controlling too little for it might lead to biased comparisons.
I don't know of any convincing solution to this, so I partly consider it an open philosophical problem what to do. When I proposed the item to Scott, I emphasized that it was experimental and of unclear validity. (When I originally reached out to him, my purpose wasn't about studying AGP in cis women, but instead I proposed a different question for studying AGP in cis men. I just also rought up this question because I knew some people consider AGP in cis women relevant.)
This is all getting so… diverse. Whatever happened to fantasizing about a stern looking woman in jodhpurs?
Ah, but do you want to *be* the stern looking woman in jodhpurs, Gunflint? That is the question today!
I’ll have to think about that one.
Or the horse!
Or the jodhpurs themselves!
Hard no to this one. I’m pretty sure. Though I’ve never really stopped to consider it.
Long time no see, Survey.
>I think this is a general challenge for all of these questions, though - how does one meaningfully disentangle arousal to the thought of being a woman from nonspecific arousal to the female form?
This is part of why I still think that a cross-sex gender identity in conjunction with traditional gynephilia can result in what is called autogynephilia. You're driven to imagine yourself as a woman, people generally do not make their imaginary selves unattractive, being gynephilic you are consequently turned on by your imaginary self, and that results in quickly coupling thoughts of femininity with arousal through classical conditioning. Even if you're skeptical of the whole desire + taboo = arousal thing this alternate pathway still leads to the same direction.
As to the first mover, since would-be cisgender people who are reassigned at birth tend to develop gender dysphoria remarkably often I find it plausible that there might be a non-cultural substrate to "sex conspecific" identification. That might play a role in why some people are transgender.
I'm not as radical about this as I used to be, though. If such a thing exists then I see it as more of a predisposing factor toward or away from being transgender. Think Kinsey scores. If so, then perhaps some liminal cases could be swayed by constantly thinking about transitioning, in the same way that some bisexuals socialized into apparent heterosexuality could be "turned gay" by regularly considering the possibility of entering a same-sex relationship. The first step toward wanting something is thinking about it, after all. And if that is so then thinking about it because it's a fixture of your sexual fantasies is no less effective than thinking about it for any other reason.
This neatly marries the theories you usually advocate for and the ones you write against.
I do think this is a genuine question that needs to be disentangled - we're all of us, male or female, socialised to find the female form sexually arousing (e.g. think of imagery of people in lingerie - it's mostly going to be women, you're not going to find a lot of 'hot guy in silky camisole' posing pictures around you).
So how much work is "imagine a beautiful woman in a vaguely sexual situation, how arousing do you find that?" is "oooh I like women, women are sexy, that is arousing" distinct from "Ooh I wish I were a sexy woman"?
You get (or used to, anyway) online discussions of "if you were a woman for a day, what would you do?" amongst young men, and the general tenor seems to be "play with my breasts/masturbate while looking at myself in the mirror" (any women who join in the discussion point out that when you have breasts, you generally are not that fascinated with them).
So what there is the difference between "I find it sexually arousing to think of myself as a woman" in that context distinguishing "it's like viewing porn" (masturbating while looking in the mirror - in both instances looking at hot women having sex) from "I secretly want to be a woman"?
The gay community provides a very strong counter example with bountiful sexual imagery of men.
My general conclusion is that men really like looking at pictures of their platonic partner (on the sexy axis) regardless of their orientation. Advertisers seek to confuse our innate interest in provocative women for a can of soda. This is mostly scantily clad women because the gay community is too small in most places. I only have speculation for the other half of society.
As for my own experience, it’s just shy of impossible to believe that socialization is responsible for our interest - in addition to what seems to be universal desire to control over this imagery at the societal level across the globe.
Do you really think we are socialized to find women attractive and not that it is innate? (There is no doubt some socialization around the edges. )
This. I feel like straight men have an innate mechanism to make them attracted to women.
On the other hand, there's something interesting going on for straight women. Why do they find lesbian porn as hot as gay male porn? Why do they find the female form more aesthetic than they find the male form? Why, when you ask straught women to describe the way they experience their sexuality, do they seem more likely to spontaneously talk about how they like being feminine than how they find the male body hot?
I don't know the answer to this one.
"Why do they find lesbian porn as hot as gay male porn?"
One theory is that straight women are inclined to watch lesbian porn simply because it focuses on women being pleasured and receiving oral sex, and most straight porn doesn't. Straight porn is largely meant for the male gaze, so it focuses on activities that men find enjoyable, like blowjobs and penetrative sex. Things like fingering and eating out are usually just shown briefly during the foreplay phase if they're shown at all; it's rare for hetero porn to specifically focus on those things. There are exceptions, but it's probably just easier to look up lesbian porn than to dig for female-centric hetero content. If there was more straight porn designed for the female gaze, the amount of straight women who watch lesbian porn might substantially decline.
[Why men are more exclusively attracted to women, while women are more ambivalent]
My guess is (in super condensed form, potentially politically incorrect)...
As a first approximation, men are (in general, yadda yadda) attracted to physical features. Women are relatively more attracted to status. (We can discuss why separately.) So it is evolutionary beneficial for men to acquire status, but beneficial for women to acquire physical beauty. Both sexes would have evolved their respective behaviors according to these constraints.
But for a woman to know that she is beautiful, what better way to be herself attracted to female beauty? So as a second approximation, women are also attracted to feminine features.
Not sure about your last paragraph; I'm not attracted to men, but I can still tell which men are attractive.
Alternate theory: As a man, I'm attracted to appearance, and very few men have the appearance I'm looking for. If I were attracted to status, though, any gender could potentially have what I'm looking for.
Partly I think women just are more beautiful, the way that young people are more beautiful than old people and children are cuter than adults.
I know that isn’t anything like all that is going on, but it is a point.
I think this is probably only true for us as a result of culture, not inherently. If you look at other primates, the males are clearly the "attractive" ones. Silverback male gorillas, or male baboons, are fancy-looking; the females of those species are plain and aesthetically less impressive. This holds true for every other mammal I know of where there's a significant sexual dimorphism. There's no need for females to be attractive, because males want every female by default. Females are generally the ones who choose, so attractiveness actually matters for males.
So it would be very odd if this pattern was flipped in humans in particular, wouldn't it? Particularly since it still remains true in humans that males still basically want any available reproductive-age female (okay, that's an exaggeration, but still), and females are the choosy ones. So why on earth would it be the *females* whose bodies put lots of energy into attractiveness, rather than the males? That doesn't really make evolutionary sense. At worst, you'd expect *equal* levels of attractiveness (if we assume we've evolved into a state where both sexes are choosing).
Conclusion: I think men are actually the fancy ones, or at least are equally fancy as women. Men have beards! So fancy. I think we only think of women as the beautiful ones because (a) they put more effort into their appearance and (b) cultural conditioning: heterosexual men find women to be the more attractive ones, and it's the perspective of heterosexual men that enshrined in the world's art and literature and culture more broadly, achieving such cultural hegemony that even women see themselves through the eyes of men to a large extent.
Based on the responses I get in surveys, I suspect that most men actually wouldn't be very excited to play with their female bodies if they were women for a day. A lot of men report no arousal from the corresponding sexual fantasy, and of the ones who do report arousal for it, a lot of them report no arousal. But embarassingly, I haven't asked this exact question, so I don't know for sure.
... It would actually be an interesting investigation into autogynephilia theory, to see if there are differences in what men qulaitatively report they would do if they were women for a day, based on traits like gender identity or autogynephilia. I should test that.
It's also reminds me of another complication, which is that if you ask post-transition trans women about their sexuality, then they typically don't report stuff that would be overtly framed as autogynephilia. A lot of people discussing it (e.g. Moser) believed that autogynephilia went away with transition, in accordance with the implied theory by the cis women ("when you have breasts, you generally are not that fascinated with them"). However, when I asked trans women on ACX to rate things retrospectively, they generally didn't report a drop in autogynephilia: https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2022/11/25/astral-codex-ten-autogynephilia-results-incomplete-post/
Another tangential anecdote: One time I did a qualitative survey asking people what they felt was the best thing about being their sex. One cis woman mentioned something along the lines of "jiggling my boobs/butt", which kind of contradicted the "when you have breasts, you generally are not that fascinated with them" sentiment, so I found that kind of intruiging and wanted a sense for how common it was. I did a strawpoll on it, but unfortunately strawpoll has shut down so we can't double-check what the results were. But IIRC most women weren't really into it but a substantial minority were.
Regarding the difference between autogynephilia vs "it's like viewing porn", maybe what's needed is an in-depth qualitative study investigating the phenomenology experienced by autogynephiles vs definitely-not-autogynephiles vs those who feel "it's like viewing porn", to see which of the former groups the latter group most resembles.
Perhaps the jiggling is related to signaling--showing off for others, with an associated feeling of attractiveness--more than to pure self-satisfaction. C.f. flexing muscles, which can be fun by one's self or with an audience.
Consider the "twerking" phenomenon, which seems to be all about display; many women got really into it (possibly in oppositional reaction to lingering waif and "hardbody" messaging, which would seem to penalize jiggling).
I think this is a plausible theory; I didn't really go in-depth about it.
Prevalence of exhibitionism kink is around 2% for women from the data I've seen, so that's a lower bound. Adding in those doing it for signalling purposes can only increase that number.
I don’t really understand the relevance of demonstrating that cis women have ”autogynophilia” or not. Can someone explain?
Personally I agree and it is why I haven't made it my own research priority in studying these topics. Still, a lot of people including Ray Blanchard (inventor of the term "autogynephilia") consider it important.
Ray Blanchard's argument is that if trans women have any characteristics that neither cis men nor cis women have, then that shows that transness can't be exolained by mental feminization, whether total or partial: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5420507_Deconstructing_the_Feminine_Essence_Narrative
Scott Alexander and many trans activists argue that cis women might have autogynephilia because of reverse causality, with gender identity contributing to autogynephilia: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/
Some people, including Bailey and Moser (but not me), claim that women cannot have paraphilias (euphemism treadmill for "sexual perversions") and therefore women being paraphilic would be in tension with autogynephilia being a paraphilia: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19591032/
> Some people, including Bailey and Moser (but not me), claim that women cannot have paraphilias (euphemism treadmill for "sexual perversions")
How do they explain the widespread prevalence of rape fantasies [1]? Or bondage and dominance fantasies [2]?
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19085605/
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31617765/
Here's someone else's explanation.
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/fifty-shades-of-apes
That's a reasonable evolutionary explanation for the origin of this sexual perversion. While not all sexual perversions will have evolutionary origins, no doubt some others do.
Bailey doesn't explain it, but he comments on it here:
> Some women display behavior and report feelings that may seem to reflect paraphilias, but they have not been well studied. In our view, some have been too quick to assume that such women have paraphilias (see, e.g., Bergner, 2009, Chapter 2). The women’s unusual behavior may be due to other causes. Seto (2016) notes that most paraphilias are far more common in men than in women but lists masochism as an exception. Alternatively, perhaps masochistic phenomena in women are not often paraphilic. The dangerous practice, autoerotic asphyxiation, appears most often to be motivated by masochism in men and has the markings of a paraphilia: It is solitary (thus not engaged in for social reasons), sexually motivated, and often associated with other paraphilias (Blanchard & Hucker, 1991). Inconsistent with a high rate of paraphilic masochism in women, deaths due to autoerotic asphyxiation are fifty times more common among men than among women, and women who die this way are less likely to display paraphilic markings (e.g., their death scenes are less likely to include masochistic pornography). We suspect that female masochism and garden variety BDSM have similar origins in both sexes, and that both are quite different from paraphilic masochism. Similarly, we doubt that women accused of sex crimes against children are often pedohebephilic. If truly paraphilic women exist, we hypothesize they may be especially likely to be homosexual. This is because homosexual women have some degree of category specificity.
via https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309734622_Orienting_Basic_Research_on_Chronophilias
This sort of thing, with "We suspect that female masochism and garden variety BDSM have similar origins in both sexes, and that both are quite different from paraphilic masochism.", where he vaguely alludes to having some deeper theory but doesn't explain what it is, is something I find him to commonly do. I eventually stopped believing that he actually had any deeper theory, because he never came up with explanations for it.
So basically he just defines paraphilia as a sex-related term and then simply dismisses any countervailing arguments without justification. All too common these days unfortunately.
I should add, I think Blanchard is egregiously misrepresenting what autogynephilia is like in his paper. Menstruation fetishism, knitting, etc are not typical autogynephilic sexual interests: https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2020/07/07/a-dataset-of-common-agp-aap-fantasies/
"Menstruation fetishism, knitting, etc are not typical autogynephilic sexual interests"
But in some online trans groups there does seem to be a lot of interest in menstruation; the "is it okay to offer a tampon to a woman in a restroom?" discourse which I personally find sort of disturbing because it is veering on the fetishistic, and it's hard to parse out what is "really desperately trying to act like a real woman in order to pass and trying way too hard" from "I get all tingly down below thinking of this scenario".
Then there is the insistence that trans women *do* have menstrual periods just like cis women, apart from the bleeding. That's an entire debate of its own (and a separate one to the "trans men/non-binary people who menstruate"):
https://periodaisle.com/blogs/all/6-transgender-women-talk-menstruation
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/can-trans-women-get-periods
https://medium.com/the-establishment/yes-trans-women-can-get-period-symptoms-e43a43979e8c
Over the years, I've come to the conclusion that *anything* can be a fetish, even stuff you would never imagine (e.g. emetophilia).
I've heard a theory (many years ago, long before modern trans debate, and with non-negligible woo factor) that biological males might experience some sort of periodic hormonal cycle analogous to menstruation. I will say that life has its ups and downs, daily, weekly or monthly, but I have not been able to discern a period myself.
Just throwing that out there in case anyone's heard something similar.
FWIW, yes, this is or was accepted. The analogy to the menstrual cycle shouldn't be overstated, though. It was more cycles in testosterone level correlated with cycles of sexual interest. (I've no idea how they measured the latter.) And the periodicity had a different average, but I can't remember what.
A brief search seemed to show that this was not well studied, and that there was a lot of disagreement, including about whether the cycles in the testosterone level were correlated with the cycles in sexual interest.
I don't know.
Like first of all, even if some trans women do have a kink for menstruation, I'm not sure it's more common among autogynephiles than it is among cis women (who also occasionally have it). So if it's a rare thing that some cis women and some trans women are into, it doesn't really contradict "cis women are AGP" in any meaningful way.
Also I am not sure whether the things you mention are actually indicative of a menstruation fetish among trans women. I know one trans woman (not gonna name names) who most of the leading Blanchardians consider to be HSTS, who reports experiencing period-like symptoms. Admittedly I am not sure the Blanchardians are right about her being HSTS, and also maybe we are just dealing with a gAyGP situation, but I am pretty sure she isn't *strongly* AGP. So it would be kind of weird for a menstruation fetish to explain her claims to be experiencing period symptoms. Unless one thinks she has a menstruation fetish that far exceeds her degree of AGP, which I suppose fits with what I know about her, except for her not mentioning this at all even when we discussed her sexuality in quite vivid detail.
I'm sympathetic to the notion that maybe some trans women just get period symptoms. Not confident about it, because I haven't seen it myself and I don't have much expertise in the area and haven't spent much effort investigating it. But when I attempted to look up the biology of it, substantial parts of the rebuttals to trans women having period symptoms seemed to just be in complete contradiction with what I read as being our scientific understanding of how periods work. Still some things don't quite add up, for instance the hormones that trans women take which might cause periods are usually taken in doses that are very temporally concentrated, which to me seems like it shouldn't be able to cause periods.
It could be weirdness bias, but for example a bunch of the trans women in Dylan Mulvaney's orbit seem to have a menstruation thing which includes both claiming to have very intense cramping and wanting to simulate menses with some sort of red fluid. They seem to want to get lots of praise/attention for it. That feels like it is in the autogyneophilia zone.
A galaxybrained answer might be that a handful of trans women whose autogynephilia focuses on menstruation have written a lot on that, and then a bunch of trans women who don't have menstruation autogynephilia have picked up a bunch of odd ideas about menstruation and trans women through memetic mechanisms.
At this faraway point I just chalk it all up to the near-infinite flexibility of the human mind, and cannot be bothered to form an opinion anymore. Thanks for sharing your explorations though!
Yeah, I think unless one gives a higher arousal score to "imagine that you are a woman doing X" than to "imagine a woman doing X", calling that autogynephilia seems unwarranted.
Hello everyone,
Last year, after reading one of the ACX book reviews, I built a short survey about inner voice and memory (mostly from existing scales), to test a hypothesis that seemed likely to me after reading this review. After analysing the data, well my hypothesis was totally wrong, but there seems to be something unexpected and interesting going on in the data. But the number of responses I got is slightly too low for me to draw firm conclusions.
If you have a few minutes to spare (about 5/7 minutes), would you agree to answer the survey below? If I get a few more responses, I can finish the analyses and post the results if people are interested. Thank you so much :-)
https://shorturl.at/jnG19
Finished. I had a bit of a problem with the word 'easily' in many of the questions. I have only a limited understanding of how other people think.
Yeah I found if a lot of the question make big assumptions about how much I know about other “typical” minds.
Some things are easy to judge. I absolutely have a better memory and sense of direction than others.
But how vivid my imaginings are? No fucking idea. Th hey seem VERY vivid. But who knows.
Just to be clear, is it the same survey as last year? I would be happy to fill it out, but I think (not 100% sure) that I already filled out a survey by you, and then you would only get a duplicate participant.
In any case, thanks for taking the initiative! I am curious to learn your hypothesis and result when it is done.
Yes, it is mostly the same, so you don't need to fill it again, and thank you for your participation! I plan to post the result on the next Open thread if I manage to finish the analyses by then.
I finished 'Of Boys and Men' By Richard Reeves. I didn't like it so much. Here's my Goodreads review.
2/5 Stars
The first part of the book deals with the gender gap in outcomes between men and women. There are some interesting figures here, but the basic gist of the first part succumbs to "gapism" ie., listing a bunch of gaps in outcomes and declaring that an argument was made. "There aren't as many male nurses, there aren't as many male teachers!" Reeves, says. I'm sure he's right. But he never questions the medical or educational systems directly - not their organization, not their waste and mismanagement, not the government meddling, not their enormous subsidy.
Reeves spends the chapter on solutions basically arguing for even more subsidy, even more affirmative action, and even more meddling. He anticipates that the reader will criticize him from the left, "Maybe you'll want to report me to the EEOC." Yea, maybe. "What about all of the affirmative action for women!" He says. Yea, I don't think so.
The question from the outset should be: What are the structural problems in the education and medical systems that can be improved at the benefit of everyone? I think redshirting sounds like an ok idea, but the rest of the solutions discussed in this book border on total social and labor market planning - which got us into this mess in the first place. I'm skeptical that more of it will get us out.
What I don't think I've ever seen discussed is how teaching switched from being predominantly male to predominantly female; it used to be that women might combine childminding with some basic education (dame schools) and that if young women went on to get further education, it would be in female-teacher schools, and that one career for young women was governess (as tutor was for young men) but if you meant schooling in general, then you meant schoolmasters - men.
How did that switch? Is it the same in higher education - are more men professors/at higher levels of the profession?
You can more easily explain why men aren't nurses - with the revolution in what nursing was and how it was professionalised by Florence Nightingale, it was established that women were going into nursing. Men were doctors, women were nurses:
""I am Dr. Verrinder Smith."
Dr. Ripley was so surprised that he dropped his hat and forgot to pick it up again.
"What!" he gasped, "the Lee Hopkins prizeman! You!"
He had never seen a woman doctor before, and his whole conservative soul rose up in revolt at the idea. He could not recall any Biblical injunction that the man should remain ever the doctor and the woman the nurse, and yet he felt as if a blasphemy had been committed. His face betrayed his feelings only too clearly."
I suspect that higher education is just taking longer to make the same sort of switch. It clearly has switched in some disciplines.
I think the sheer fact of the name probably also contributes to the gap in nursing. It shares its name with one of the most strictly female biological activities, and people clearly find the job title itself female coded enough that they often use specific gender qualifiers to characterize exceptions, like "Male nurse," or even portmanteaus like "murse."
I think there might be a more even gender split if we renamed the job profession to something more gender neutral, which we have done with a lot of other job titles. But instead, it seems what we've done is created other more gender neutral job titles, like "medical assistant," and made "nurse" a more highly qualified and credentialed version of that.
Contrary to Bidysabba, I found your review helpful precisely because it was concise and reached a conclusion about the value of reading the book.
Thanks.
How do you know to trust Liam without being able to evaluate the quality of his thinking on the topic (which you can't do, because, you know, you don't know the topic? :)
I finished reading your review. Didn't like it so much. I got no sense of what the book is about, and hence have no way to examine (what seem like) your very scattershot objections against it. Your review seems to assume that everyone reading it is already familiar with the book, which is an odd presumption to make when writing a review.
Doesn't Goodreads add context which would be redundant to add? Perhaps the review just doesn't work well in isolation.
Yes, that thought did occur to me. But if he's copy pasting the review, copy pasting the context would have made the review better, which is all I was saying anyway.
You forgot to rate my review out of 5 stars!
Is America a nanny state?
I ask because America markets itself as this rugged individualistic country.
But then I hear of people calling the police because they say a kid walking to school or what’s weirdly called a “welfare check” where if someone doesn’t answer your calls you claim they are suicidal and police smash their door in(yes I’m exaggerating but only a litttle; look at all the swatting incidents).
In the UK and most of Europe calls like this would be treated as wasting police time and you would get a warning. So why are they common in America?
Is it because , contrary to the marketing , America is actually a nanny state?
A kid alone walking to school is completely normal in the UK (except in London), you should not call police about that unless he looks lost and distressed. Even then you would probably want to talk to the kid first.
As for suicidal people you could call police if you had reason to suspect that that is the case. However, police how higher threshold to actually break the door or do something. Just because no one answers the call, would not be the reason to do that. If you open the door and talk to the police and claim that everything is find and you don't a weapon or some instrument in hand for self-harm, the police just talk to you how do you feel and would let you go.
Sometimes police is called to help to deal with schizophrenic people. The ambulance will come but they may not be equipped to deal with violent people so they ask police to restrain so that they can inject haloperidol or something.
That's an interesting way to see it. I've grown to think that the term "nanny-state" only applies to states where the public organs police private citizens, confiscate a noteworthy portion of your income to use in whatever they see best, such as nuclear proof bomb-shelters for the whole population, as we have in Finland.
But what I learned of people who've actually lived in the States with children, they had to do much authoritarian nannying than here. Here the children are used to walk to school alone, roam around where they please.
I would say yes but not due to those reasons. Patriot act, remnants of alcohol & drug prohibition, and the existence of such a thing as “jaywalking” are more indicative of it being a nanny state.
On the other hand it’s less of a nanny state than European countries in other aspects such as not having to wear a helmet in many states, far lower taxation, no obligation to use a particular health provider (this is at least more free than countries with Beveridge systems), ease of buying guns, and more freedom of speech.
Overall I’d say it’s still more of a nanny state but it’s difficult to find an objective measure of that.
> the existence of such a thing as “jaywalking” are more indicative of it being a nanny state
I'm confused by this line of argument, and I've heard it before (it seems to come from one of those "hey did you know jaywalking wasn't even a crime except for motor industry lobbyists?" articles that gets posted on Hacker News every six weeks).
People who think jaywalking shouldn't be illegal, are you saying it shouldn't be illegal to step out in front of fast-moving traffic on a busy road? Or just that it shouldn't be illegal if there's no cars around?
In Europe pedestrians have a right of way and crossing the street is not considered an offence. I find it utterly absurd that you could get fined and arrested for crossing the street. Naturally this doesn’t mean people are allowed to cross motorways, but I see no reason why people should not be allowed to cross streets under reasonable circumstances. It’s a great example of state overreach.
Everywhere in Europe? I took German in high school, and the teacher had lived in Germany, and he said that jaywalking was enforced there much more strictly than in the U.S.
Then I’m afraid he was wrong. In Germany people will tell you off for all kinds of things, including crossing at a red light. If there’s a zebra crossing you have to use it, but if there isn’t one you can cross the road wherever you want. As anywhere you have to do a best effort to not jump in front of traffic, but ultimately cars and bikes need to be able to stop for pedestrians everywhere.
"If there's a zebra crossing you have to use it"
Sounds like a jaywalking law to me.
"Under reasonable circumstances" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Is it inherently unreasonable to have the crossing of busy streets coordinated in space and time such that motorists have an easier time figuring out when they need to stop for pedestrians and pedestrians have less chance of being hit by a car?
I’m sure you can figure out what those circumstances might be. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/rules-for-pedestrians-1-to-35#:~:text=Wait%20until%20traffic%20has%20stopped,crossing%20(see%20Rule%20H2).
I'm not sure that binary questions like this will be productive. Most Western states are not as different as they like to pretend. When people argue about political identity in the modern sense, they're mostly arguing about slightly different shades of grey. If any state in the Western World can be called a "Nanny State" then all of them will be one to some extent.
Also, the % of spending by the US government has steadily increased over time. That suggests an objective increase in nanny statism, possibly correlating with the migration to cities. (City living is a significant correlate with wanting increased government involvement. I don't know, offhand, if it is causal. But I suspect it would be to some extent.)
Helicopter parenting has certainly increased over the past two generations. I remember drinking from the hose as a kid. I don't think that would be acceptable for my kid's generation. Kids would walk to school. That's become less acceptable. Basically, America today is less risk tolerant. There are fewer functional communities and more of a push for government to step in and fill the gaps that those communities have left. Though in some areas, religious observance still provides a basis for community. And there are some other communities which revolve around other activities. But, generally speaking American society is increasingly atomized.
When you talk about what America markets itself as.... how old are those marketing materials? Who distributed them?
Edit: To be clear, swatting is illegal in the US. How often it can be successfully prosecuted is a different story.
>Helicopter parenting has certainly increased over the past two generations. I remember drinking from the hose as a kid.
IDK that is still normal in my neighborhood. But I live in the Midwest. There certainly are some helicopter crazies out there.
Anyway, a large part of this I think is just the natural reaction you get from low birth rates and better childhood mortality rates.
If you have 10 kids and 5 of them are going to be dead by age 8, your risk tolerance for their behaviors is probably pretty high (especially if the behaviors have other benefits to you/them). Whether that be helping on the farm, or walking across town on their own.
Once you have 2 kids and they almost never die, real minor risks become a lot more worrisome because they have gone from very minor considerations, to one of the only things that could remove your precious child. The risk environment is just wildly different in a way that makes small risks much more noticeable.
I agree. I do kind of wonder whether the reduced cultural acceptance for risk slightly lagged the decreased birthrate.
I suspect the relationship was pretty linear. People were complaining about helicopter parents when I was a kid in the 80s.
In fairness, a lagging response and a linear relationship are orthogonal to one another.
If you work every month and are paid the following month then there will be a linear relationship between work and pay. But pay will lag labor by a month.
It's definitely correlated and caused by urbanization. Also by fast communicaitons and faster travel. People living in rural environments CAN'T depend on the state. At best they can hope for help from their neighbors. Help from the state would take literally hours to arrive, if not days. And that's assuming that you were high on their priorities list. (They might just plan on you to going to the nearest ER. That's what they plan for most people.)
"In the UK and most of Europe calls like this would be treated as wasting police time and you would get a warning."
Really? So in the UK, if my severely mentally ill elderly mother hasn't been answering any calls from friends or family, I can't ask the police to check if she's alright? I just have to hope that she's not dying, and if she is, that the death is at least quick and painless?
It was a neighbour not a relative, but I'm in the UK and the police checked in on someone in basically the circumstances you described (and eventually broke down the door to recover the body).
Same for the old lady who was the neighbour of my parents in Germany. The police broke down the door, and this was how she was found dead.
Pretty much I think. There are other organisations to help there though, like NHS carers and so on.
What makes you think that these things are common in America? Is it because you hear about it on the news?
If it were such a common occurrence, then it wouldn't be newsworthy. If you base your perception of what America is like solely off of what's in the news, then you'll have a distorted perception.
That’s an interesting observation, and I’ll try to keep in mind. But it’s not capturing the whole picture. For instance, school shootings are a very rare thing to happen in the US.
Yet, the news coverage about them also informs me that it is much more frequent in the US than in Europe.
It's true, they are, but to the extent that anyone in the US lives in fear of school shootings, that's mostly a consequence of reporting on them, because the actual rate hasn't changed that much relative to a time when practically nobody thought about them at all.
I think there's a change, though. A school shooting from a rifle is different from one with an assault rifle. The second is likely to leave a lot more people dead. It's not the level of difference between a block buster and an a-bomb, but it's the same kind of difference.
> A school shooting from a rifle is different from one with an assault rifle.
I'm not so sure. Given an untrained, inexperienced shooter, I'm thinking that the sheer rate at which the shooter is able to pump out bullets probably isn't the limiting factor in the body count.
That's definitely a change relative to the 18th century, but if you look at the events documented in the link, those have been happening since well before Columbine.
People overestimate how new these weapons are. The AR-15 has been sold to the public since the mid 60s, and semiautomatic rifles weren't new then. Semiautomatic handguns of basically modern design have been available to the public for a century.
Hell, fully automatic Thompson machine guns were available for $20 through the Sears Catalogue until 1934.
This assertion is… bizarre? Lost for words here. Are you suggesting that there always were school shootings, they just weren’t reported pre-Columbine or some such?
A lot of the "data" on this is VERY unreliable. Things are so politicized.
I remember a comparison on something gun violence related to Canada that didn't control for the differences in population. So the article was breathless about how X has only happened 2 times ever in Canada but happened dozens of time in the US over the same timespan.
...Of course it turns out that by "dozens" they meant 21, and the US is almost exactly 10 times larger than Canada.
So really the whole premise of the article was based on a lie/misunderstanding. And that was in the fucking Atlantic or soemthing.
A lot of the data on this is very reliable. The UK has had far few're school shootings than the US, adjusting for population.
There's also a big difference between a school shooting as in "shooting that occurs at a school" and a school shooting as in "Columbine-style indiscriminate massacre". If you actually dig into one of these sources making breathless claims about how there' s a school shooting in the US every day, the vast majority are "man shoots rival gang member in front of school" or similar.
Yes. I actually used to be of the impression that school shootings became more common post-Columbine because the reporting encouraged copycat events, but I've since read figures on the rates over time which suggest that's not the case.
https://www.k12academics.com/school-shootings/history-school-shootings-united-states
Reporting doesn't seem to be complete enough to draw a clear trend line over history, but the earliest reported school shooting dates back to the 18th century, and they continue through the 19th and 20th. If anything, fatalities due to school shootings in the 1990s seem to have been higher on average than post-Columbine in 1999.
That reference seems to be counting a whole lot of one-on-one or one-on-few shootings that, as ADD notes, tend to be ordinary criminal violence that happens to sometimes happen on school property. The base rate of that is large, compared to "one or two disaffected students try to go full Heathers and kill as many of their classmates as possible", but in common usage the phrase "school shooting" is generally interpreted as just the latter.
And you'll be hard-pressed to find the trend in that, if you clutter your data with the singletons.
Huh… I’m going to dig into this later. Thank you for the link.
Amen
About a week and a half ago I published my first article on Substack:
https://samschoenberg.substack.com/p/belief-and-the-truth
It's about my own reflections on the Ideas of Belief and Truth, and about whether It's truly possible to separate the two.
Ha, I'm out in Berkeley this week, but will have to miss the 7/23 meetup... as that's the day I'm returning to New York! So, see you in New York, I guess. :)
Rational Animations recently animated "The Goddess of Everything Else": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bbwp4PbWYzw
(Full disclosure that I am currently doing some writing for RA, but I had no involvement with this video)
Brings to mind Leslie Fish's older piece with the "opposite sign bit", “The Sun is Also a Warrior” : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiEAz1TDm1c
Yeah, thanks for the reminder. I debated putting that here but I'm going to save it for the next Links thread so I can conveniently embed the video.
Has anyone observed a correlation between niceness/kindness/generosity and lower IQ? I’m not talking about people who are nice enough. I’m thinking of someone who would be first and foremost described as nice or kind by their friends.
On the other hand of the equation, the “term” calculating is associated with being unkind or inauthentic. But from a rationalist pov being calculating seems like a compliment. Why shouldn’t I use my intelligence to make smart decisions about my relationships?
I was thinking this might have to do with a social expectation that relationships are more authentic when they are based on emotions instead of logic.
I don't think this is the kind of question personal experience has anything useful to say about - no-one's experience of humanity is anywhere near objective and representative enough to reveal anything meaningful about it.
My guess, for what it's worth, is that nothing meaningful along these lines is true.
TVTropes certainly has!
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DumbIsGood
I suspect that most people one is friends with are accurately described as "nice". But for most people, there's some more distinctive fact about them that you'd be more likely to mention first. If "nice" is the first thing you mention about them, then either they're way off-the-charts nice, or there's just not a lot else that you have to mention.
The philosopher of language Paul Grice developed the concept of "implicature" for cases like this. Saying that someone is nice, or that they have good handwriting, or that they're punctual, only says positive things about them, and these facts don't imply (or even correlate with) negative features of the person. But if you're writing a recommendation letter, and the *only * things you mention are that they're nice, they have good handwriting, and that they're very punctual, then that is a *very* negative letter, because you have "implicated" that there is nothing better to say about this person.
Otherwise known as "damning with faint praise." There's even a traditional legal canon regarding this: "expressio unius est exclusio alterius" (the expression of one thing is the exclusion of the other). Depending on the context, conspicuously failing to include something is effectively the same as explicitly excluding it.
>Has anyone observed a correlation between niceness/kindness/generosity and lower IQ? I’m not talking about people who are nice enough. I’m thinking of someone who would be first and foremost described as nice or kind by their friends.
Couple off the cuff comments/theories.
1) People who are intelligent have less need to be kind because they have other things people value.
2) Conversely, people mentally so-so have the reverse incentive, where their is some increased value in focusing on their social skills and attending to empathy because of their lack in other areas. You see this to some extent with sibling effects where frequently you have a mature/intelligent/sporty older child thriving at high status things, and a funny/social/artsy second child avoiding competing with the older child on axes they cannot win.
3) There is a limit because to some extent if you are too dumb you start losing contact with being able to even tract/model what is the right behavior. Similarly intelligent people are often good at modeling/faking kindness even when they don't feel/mean it, but they less often need to employ this method of relation when they have a whole suite of tools they can use.
Certainly myself, as a maybe slight autistic and very intellectual person, ...I have always felt I can never have the level of "love" or "loyalty" to people others have. It just doesn't come naturally to me at all, I am too up in my own thoughts and calculations about the world and relationships to ever be the Sam to someone's Frodo. Too much of a narcissist.
But then again I also had a very neglectful single parent, so maybe that just emotionally crippled me. I have a hard time picking apart the self-reinforcing nest of:
Extreme intelligence (especially as a teenager), reading voraciously, childhood neglect, and slight "autism".
And which things lead to which others.
I would like to chat some time. I’ve been exploring adjacent issues for a couple years and it seems we are on a similar place.
I think you're asking that because of literary traditions (and their causes).
People who are significantly different from most other people will tend to have fewer friends, but not necessarily fewer enemies. Literary depictions of the very smart and the very stupid both then to be as malign characters. And it's only a tendency, derived partially from the intended audience, and partially from the intended message.
In actual life, people with few friends tend to be kinder to fewer people. This doesn't mean that they are malign to the out-group, but they can be without injuring their self-esteem. Intelligence isn't quite irrelevant...but nearly.
My conviction from a lifetime of observation is that kindness and intelligence are orthogonal. If a correlation can be demonstrated, I would suspect it to be circumstantial (more intelligent people are more successful, and can better afford to be kind).
Certainly I have personally known unusually intelligent people who exhibited extraordinary meanness and niggardliness of spirit. (Toward third parties, to control for my own personality.)
They're not entirely orthogonal: sufferers of certain kinds of congenital brain damage (IIRC there was an old SSC piece re: Williams syndrome? Or was it Down's?) are perma-locked into "always cooperate" (in the PD sense) mode, which some people seem to view as "ideal good".
>I was thinking this might have to do with a social expectation that relationships are more authentic when they are based on emotions instead of logic.
Whether they're more authentic is hard to rate, but someone who doesn't calculate cost-benefit of every interaction is much more *useful* as a friend/lover/associate. Because you don't have to worry about getting exploited (and, for the lacking-in-ethics, because you can exploit them), but also because that calculation wastes effort and tends to have deadweight loss.
I remember a treatise on a strategy game, which noted that the most productive alliances were always those where people didn't calculate out the cost-benefit of every interaction. Works IRL too. There are reasons evolution programmed us the way it did.
Be calculating, perhaps, about *who* is your friend. Don't be calculating *with* your friends.
Rationality in the EY sense is systematised winning, which includes "when to not be Buridan's ass".
Just anecdotaly, I have two groups of friends, one is from math undergrad at a very good school in my country (probably a high IQ group) and one is from my time in my country's military (infantry, probably lower IQ than the former group).
I can say with utter certainity that the math group is much "nicer", they fight and argue much less, they are more generous, they are less prone to lying or stealing etc.
I'd probably chalk it down to a class difference though, rather than it being inherent to their respective intelligence levels
Is the difference in niceness fully generalized, or is it specific to behavior amongst the friend group?
If the later, I would hypothesize that the difference is that serving together in an infantry unit tends to create stronger group cohesion than taking undergraduate math classes together.
Also, the military is selected for people willing to go to war, unless you live in Israel or some other country with a universal draft.
I do actually
What do you mean by "lower IQ"? Are you actually taking IQ tests for these people, or is it just a feeling based on observation?
"I’m thinking of someone who would be first and foremost described as nice or kind by their friends."
Well this is tautology, isn't it? If their most memorable trait is their kindness, then they won't have other memorable traits like problem-solving ability.
My experience is the more frustrated someone is, the more likely they'll be rude. Dumber people tend to be more frustrated about things, but it's not hard and fast at all. Then you hit a threshold like Down's Syndrome where the people no longer have any responsibilities and are nearly completely frustration free.
"the “term” calculating is associated with being unkind or inauthentic."
The term "calculating" is specifically about being inauthentic. Being inauthentic is separately associated with having nefarious purposes; if they weren't nefarious you wouldn't hide them.
> Are you actually taking IQ tests for these people, or is it just a feeling based on observation?
The degree of niceness is probably a feeling , too.
Yeah, thought of that later. Niceness can be anything from saying "good morning" when they see you, to giving you their lunch even though they haven't eaten in six days.
The two most helpful people I know are pretty intelligent.
> Has anyone observed a correlation between niceness/kindness/generosity and lower IQ?
No, but I have observed that people with poorly integrated identity and internal ethical system tend to view kindness and generosity as stupidity. You can perhaps get a better idea of what I mean if you read my recent post on psychoanalytic object relations theory in relation to group and mass psychology (the first, theoretical part; the second is coming soon): https://transferenceinterpretation.substack.com/p/being-in-the-crowd-pt-i-the-theory.
> On the other hand of the equation, the “term” calculating is associated with being unkind or inauthentic. But from a rationalist pov being calculating seems like a compliment.
There's a difference between opportunism and being rational. Arriving at rational decisions does not have to imply unethical intentions. Also, you cannot extricate rational thinking from emotions and the rest of you personality, no matter how hard you try (hence you can never be fully rational, and btw shouldn't). Both rationality and emotions are parts of human experience, two aspects of a dynamic integration that is a personality.
This quote from your article seems to support my original inquiry
“ Intelligent, self-reflective individuals who try to analyze the situation rationally tend to be envied and ostracized, and mediocre individuals who make simplistic statements that have a calming effect tend to be supported. ”
The context of the quote is what happens in large group regression, where the members experience (temporary) loss of individuality and delegation of morality to the selected leader. So that's not a normal situation. It's an interesting observation, but I wouldn't connect this with your question, which is a generalization. It doesn't support the assumption that there is a correlation between someone being perceived nice and having a low IQ in general, nor it supports the claim that being rational is generally socially disliked (I assume you meant 'rational', but I again stress that there is a difference between being rational and just opportune or calculating). The quote just states that people in unorganized groups, when faced with anxiety, tend to pick a leader who gives a simple, soothing explanations, instead of one who comes up with complex ones.
With the post, I just wanted you to get a better idea of how people with an unintegrated personality structure tend to perceive others in an idealizing or devaluing way, or devalue generosity and kindness because of their perception of the world as a dangerous place where one must be shrewd, selfish, calculating, or whatever, to get by, and thus see people who exhibit generosity and kindness as naïve or stupid.
> expectation that relationships are more authentic when they are based on emotions instead of logic.
I think this is a really good inquiry, because I have certainly encountered a lot of distortions around this issue. I propose that based on “caring”, rather than emotion (which is kind of a vague term) resolves things a little better. But “relationships “ is a big umbrella as well. If you mean “personal “ relationships (as opposed to business or competitive ones) then I think it helps to think of caring, which to me gets along just fine with logic (although other emotions might muddy the waters.)
>observed a correlation between niceness/kindness/generosity and lower IQ?
Im sure I have made this observation in my life more than once but I don’t think it is an accurate one.
There's likely a selection effect at play here. I'm assuming you and most of your friends are reasonably smart people. If someone was both dumb and unkind they'd never end up in your social circle but a person who's exceptionally kind may be kept around even if they're not as smart aa the rest of the group. So dumb unkind people exist you just interact with them less
And relatedly, "someone who would be first and foremost described as nice or kind by their friends" might in part point to someone who lacks other distinguishing qualities.
Yeah this is a great point.
Why are alleyways (also called laneways) always so ugly? Or are they perhaps not ugly where you are from?
They don't have to be ugly, they can be maintained as quick shortcuts for pedestrians...
https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=AB5stBhT-C2AwYEfKTlicIeVD19NHlphqA:1689631477434&q=snickelways+of+york&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiFzo3g35aAAxVERuUKHb5ICtYQ0pQJegQICBAB&biw=384&bih=729&dpr=2.81
It is in the very definition of what they are. They are at most going to be as nice as the main road, because what makes something an "alley" is generally that it is less about presentation and more about utility.
In my large small town - St Paul, MN - most people just think of alleys as the place where you enter your garage and put the garbage and recycling bins. But there are folks that work to make them easier on the eyes. My retired hippie neighbor for example. There are prizes awarded for the most attractive alley adjacent landscaping and flora.
But this is a place with a lot of sidewalk poetry and lawns tuned into bee habitats too.
Big fan of alleys because they make the street so much more pleasant for pedestrians and drivers by shifting garbage, loading trucks, curb cuts, yawning garage doors, and overhead power and telco lines away.
Cordoba's Calleja de las flores is a famously beautiful alleyway. In my experience, pleasant alleyways are common in older neighbourhoods.
Maybe that is part of it. Most of the places I'm thinking of where built after WW2. So maybe that led builders and planners to treating them as just a place for garbage dumpsters and parking access.
What I find weird is that people spend much more time in the laneway than on the main street, yet all the effort goes into making the street looking good.
Part of the issue is that *visitors* come on the main street, and while *residents* care just as much about convenience for dumping garbage and moving their cars as they do about how the place looks, visitors only care about how it looks. So the alley side is optimized for a mix of things, but the front side is optimized only for looking nice.
Interesting question. I am visiting Tokyo right now, and I am very struck by the lanes/alleyways here. They are quite lively.
They tend to be where the trash dumpsters are which isn't pleasant and which attracts pests making it even less pleasant. They're also not very visible most of the time making it not worth the money to make them look nicer
Interesting. Maybe my neighbourhood is weird but there is much more people in the laneway than in front.
That's possible.
In Southern California, specifically in Long Beach, California, there are some old--like very early 20th century--neighborhoods where it was common for the houses and lots to be small and for some of the houses to face the alley (these alleys have names like streets do, usually Such-and-Such Court, but they are entirely alley-like otherwise--narrow, no lane stripes, etc.). If you can find a street where most of the lots facing the alley still have little houses, the alley can be quite cute. But it seems that a lot of those lots over the years became host to full-sized shitbox apartment complexes, which means that sometimes you'll see a little house orphaned in what is otherwise an alley in the "shabby area with trash cans and dumped mattresses and the ass end of apartment buildings" sense.
https://goo.gl/maps/iwUfE73H3qdvyYPp9
They're quite nice where I live now (and I think I'm most places I've lived).
They represent the dark side of duality. They are the seamy underside of the facade, the place where the dumpsters live and the overworked employees squat on smoke breaks. They are necessary. At least they are necessary in this world of masks.
Long ago, those of our ancestors who lived in cities had only tiny alleyways in the residential sections, with the grand thoroughfares designed for markets and public pomp and the work of governance. Sometimes I think that when people remember that they were happiest in college living in the dorms, they are experiencing a kind of ancestral nostalgia for the barrio. remembering deep in our hearts the time when we lived at arms reach of our neighbors and friends and when anything and anybody that you could want was within not very many steps.
God bless the alleyways. Perhaps they are the last human thing remaining to these cities of tortured machines. A place where dreams can hide out of reach of the streetsweepers.
What time Sunday for Berkeley? Afternoon? I might be able to make it.
I've added a fun Friday type entry for my "blog" https://icdstories.substack.com/. Now every Friday I ask GPT4 to make up an ICD-10-CM code and a vignette to go with it!
Whom will Biden appoint to the UFO Disclosure Review Board as economist and sociologist?
(4) QUALIFICATIONS.—Persons nominated to the Review Board— (A) shall be impartial citizens, none of whom shall have had any previous or current involvement with any legacy program or controlling authority relating to the collection, exploitation, or reverse engineering of technologies of unknown origin or the examination of biological evidence of living or deceased nonhuman intelligence; (B) shall be distinguished persons of high national professional reputation in their respective fields who are capable of exercising the independent and objective judgment necessary to the fulfillment of their role in ensuring and facilitating the review, transmission to the public, and public disclosure of records related to the government’s understanding of, and activities associated with unidentified anomalous phenomena, technologies of unknown origin, and non-human intelligence and who possess an appreciation of the value of such material to the public, scholars, and government; and (C) shall include at least — (i) 1 current or former national security official; (ii) 1 current or former foreign service official; (iii) 1 scientist or engineer; (iv) 1 economist; (v) 1 professional historian; and (vi) 1 sociologist.
Last week I published a report on the anonymous salary survey in Berlin, Germany. Tech bias, but maybe still useful for some of you. It also has an interactive dashboard. I am also open to suggestions, collaborations and other improvements.
Check it out:
https://handpickedberlin.com/report-on-berlin-salary-trends-survey-june-2023?utm_source=act&utm_medium=comment&utm_campaign=report_release
Wrote a very short story about what can happen when AI gets too integrated with people:
https://ageofai.substack.com/p/for-the-greater-intelligence
The story could use some improvement, but I haven't found ChatGPT to be that good at writing stories yet...
At this point I've used Claude-2 enough to strongly recommend it over ChatGPT for fiction-writing purposes.
I only started reading ACX after the move from SSC. I have gone back and read the top posts from SSC but still felt like I was missing out on some of the old classics. I built a website to resurface old content from blogs by sending weekly emails. Let me know if you have any suggestions of other blogs / content you’d like to see, hope you find it helpful!
https://www.evergreenessays.com/
Cool idea! Signed up. Also I like your name. 😉
Have you ever felt like you have a song "stuck in your head" while you're doing other things?
If you usually think in words, and the song had lyrics, does that mean you felt like the song lyrics were going through your head at the same time other things were going through your head, ie you had two parallel internal audio streams?
Can you voluntarily give yourself two parallel internal audio streams, ie play two songs with lyrics in your head at the same time?
Can you voluntarily give yourself two parallel internal visual streams, ie visualize a tiger and a sunflower at the same time? If yes, how sure are you that you're not switching back and forth between them very quickly? How many internal visual streams can you maintain at once?
Can you focus on two different areas of your (internal) visual field? IE can you close your eyes and imagine some text in the far top-left corner of your visual field, and some other text in the far bottom-right corner of your visual field, and perceive both clearly, in a way you wouldn't be able to focus on two pieces of text in opposite parts of the visual field in the external world?
What if it's one piece of text, but it goes all the way across your visual field (ie it's in very big font)? Does that make it easier, or not?
I can't really think in words while I also have a song with lyrics repeating in my head. If I'm humming or thinking a song without lyrics, I can still think in words, though it's a lot easier if I'm thinking in tune to the music or replacing the lyrics with my thoughts.
Weirdly, I can read just fine even when I'm repeating a song with lyrics in my head. I think it's because reading text is less self-directed and so requires less attention and focus than composing an internal monologue.
>Have you ever felt like you have a song "stuck in your head" while you're doing other things?
Yes
>If you usually think in words, and the song had lyrics, does that mean you felt like the song lyrics were going through your head at the same time other things were going through your head, ie you had two parallel internal audio streams?
Yes
>Can you voluntarily give yourself two parallel internal audio streams, ie play two songs with lyrics in your head at the same time?
To some degree, in short bursts
>Can you voluntarily give yourself two parallel internal visual streams, ie visualize a tiger and a sunflower at the same time?
Yes
>If yes, how sure are you that you're not switching back and forth between them very quickly?
I can't be sure, but my perception is that they're occurring simultaneously
>How many internal visual streams can you maintain at once?
~3. At 4 I'm *definitely* switching my attention between them.
>Can you focus on two different areas of your (internal) visual field? IE can you close your eyes and imagine some text in the far top-left corner of your visual field, and some other text in the far bottom-right corner of your visual field, and perceive both clearly, in a way you wouldn't be able to focus on two pieces of text in opposite parts of the visual field in the external world?
Yes
>What if it's one piece of text, but it goes all the way across your visual field (ie it's in very big font)? Does that make it easier, or not?
It is easier
I'm a musician and non-normal person, so some grains of salt...
I almost always have a tune running thru my head, but if it's a song with words I just have the melody. I can do multiple audio streams easily if they do not have words, and can do (maybe fewer) multiple audio streams if only one stream has words. Could not do multiple audio streams with words. While I'm performing music it is difficult/impossible for me to carry on a conversation, altho there are some rare people who can do this. It's easier if I'm drumming as opposed to playing something with pitches. One time when I wasn't drumming someone came up to the drummer next to me and started conversing with him. He was able to do both but I noticed what he was playing changed, as if it had been put on auto-pilot. Reflecting on that now, it's fascinating that I could notice that and form a memory of it while performing - some mental processes can be done in parallel and some can't.
Advice for earworms - I keep a mental stash of earwormy melodies that I like so that I can switch when I find myself stuck with an earworm I don't like.
I'm very not visually oriented, so have nothing useful to say about visual streams.
Yes, I often have a song stuck in my head and do lots of other things while that happens. The part going through my head is often a short and repetitive portion of a song. I often have parallel audio streams. When I focus on listening in, one predominates and often the other drops entirely. The one "stuck" in my head returns when I stop thinking about it.
I can give myself two audio streams, but it's very difficult to maintain both for more than a tiny amount of time. If I know both songs well, it helps.
I can easily have multiple parallel visual steams, to the point that I'm confused that this could be a question (which implies other people cannot). Thinking about it, I liken it to imagining a picture that has multiple portions such as two or more people (or poker playing dogs) - and it seems obvious that we should be able to picture each item as part of the whole. I think this is a composite picture instead of maintaining each individual component. It feels as though I can hold several layers together or mentally combine them and make incredibly complex pictures (complex like a movie scene). I can visualize a tiger and a sunflower as very distinct pictures with no overlap, in which case it does feel more like switching back and forth. I think I can maintain 3-4 visual streams, but I'm not certain if they are separate feeds or one composite feed of different components.
Mentally picturing something I find I can have lots and lots of details, but that the overall picture fuzzes out what I'm not paying attention to. This is the same when I dream. I can know that the image is extremely complex and detailed, but maybe not know what color something is within the picture if I'm concentrating on something else.
I'm struggling to picture words in any kind of complex format, including multiple words at once, regardless of location in my mental image. Words are audio to me, or oddly enough, I think of words by mentally typing them out on a keyboard. Image macro-type visuals do not work well for me and trying to do anything with them feels like I'm straining.
Not what you asked, but maybe relevant. I find it easier to read while listening to music. I think it helps block out outside interference and therefore increases focus, or perhaps that my brain is often distracting itself and the background music helps keep it on track so that I don't mentally wander. Thinking on this, I recognize that this shouldn't be true, that the two streams should conflict, but they definitely do not conflict. When reading for pleasure, the music can become like a soundtrack to the story (which can have some weird results when they don't match at all, but it's still not distracting somehow).
I don't have "internal visual streams". Well, *almost* don't have; I can do mental wireframes with the assistance of certain psychoactive chemicals. It is akin to persistence-of-vision with a single point of light used for tracing.
I do have audio streams. I generally don't try to listen to two songs at once, either in the mind's ear or in the symphony of life. When considering a song, my ability to *know* the lyrics are accurate interferes with the ability to think too deeply about anything else.
But, trying to think of two songs at once, I can mostly experience it. Or, perhaps, I am able to delude myself into experiencing it; what I actually experience seems to be either a blurred conflation of the two songs, or high-speed switching between them.
Inasmuch as I have "visual streams": a tiger + a sunflower isn't any different than having both "the front of the elephant" and "the back of the elephant" in-focus at the same time. They are both something I can't do.
>Can you voluntarily give yourself two parallel internal audio streams, ie play two songs with lyrics in your head at the same time?
Musical mash-ups are a thing; some are pedestrian, others are very clever and successful. I can make an annoying game of combining two songs, selecting segments from each one as appropriate. I'm also very annoyed/provoked by new music which seems to draw on a classic hook, but substitutes a different "payoff". These seem like examples of some ability to compare two different tracks in real time (or at least, at mental "playback" speed). I can't think of a way to demonstrate that very fast task-switching isn't going on, or whether it's asynchronous.
Some music has simultaneous verse and chorus, sometimes double-tracked by the same singer. I can mentally recreate (and even compose) these structures, although I can't tell if the "playback" is symbolic or just a series of sounds. I can even (attempt to) sing them in a forced arpeggio.
I don't think I have any special musical or mental abilities.
A couple of tangential thoughts:
Freestyle rap (and other improvisational songwriting) is a really intense exercise of several different faculties, once you make an effort to push past the elementary conventions. Like something between speed chess and juggling. Everybody should try it, probably in private.
I have a good ear for music, but I have a hard time understanding song lyrics. Often when I play back songs in my head, lyrics have a non-verbal placeholder that's part symbolic, part string of phonemes. Many times recently I've had the very interesting experience of revisiting songs from my younger years, and immediately parsing formerly unintelligible lyrics, plain as day. I suppose my pattern recognition was trained on a large corpus of various data in the interim.
I have three parallel streams in my head at all times; one is sub-lingual meaning, one is a constant, slower translation of the first into words, one is pattern recall. That third is almost always being used as a song player, but music can be kicked out by poetry, memorized text, or speeches. When I did speech and debate it was the third stream that I spoke aloud, which allowed the other two to be proactively thinking about how the audience was reacting and what I should do to keep things lively.
I can't hear two songs at the same time in my head. I can't, honestly, even pick out individual instruments most of the time when I listen to a song live.
I don't think I can really do parallel visual streams either. Even when I have my eyes open, if I'm focused on a mental image, I process nothing of what I'm physically seeing beyond low level instinct. I generally walk away from long car trips with almost zero memory of any places I drove through.
1) Yes, all the time. I've actually observed that it's stuck in my head, even if I don't hear it consciously; the lyrics will have some connection to my internal monologue, and/or it continues on at the appropriate pace while "I" can't "hear" it
2) No, all words get in the way of all other words; listening, reading, thinking, mentally hearing. However non-word audio easily combines with other thoughts
3) no
4) no, only by compositing them somehow
5) question is confusing; text can only be read in the center of my visual field to begin with, once or twice doesn't matter
6) no
I had a somg stuck in my head as I was reading the question (and also I cannot read without hearing the words in my head), so yes, but I cannot *concentrate* on both simultaneously.
For basically alll of these questions, I find it difficult to distinguish between "simultaneous" and "rapidly switching between the two." I feel like I'm doing both, but more specifically I'm doing one, and then when I check on the other process it's like "yup, I'm still doing that, and it sure feels like I was doing it even before I checked." When I actively try to do both simultaneously, it feels more like rapidly switching between them
I think for me, hearing an internal monologue is basically what it means to be "actively" thinking about something/concentrating on it. I can think about things, like how I plan out what I'm gonna say as I'm typing, non-verbally, but as soon as I turn my mind towards it those thoughts coallesce into words essentially by definition. This makes it feel like all my thoughts are words, and in turn that makes it feel like I can hear two streams of words at once
>>Have you ever felt like you have a song "stuck in your head" while you're doing other things?
Yes.
>>If you usually think in words, and the song had lyrics, does that mean you felt like the song lyrics were going through your head at the same time other things were going through your head, ie you had two parallel internal audio streams?
No. Usually, the songs that get stuck do not include lyrics, or I’m doing things that do not involve my internal monologue.
>>Can you voluntarily give yourself two parallel internal audio streams, ie play two songs with lyrics in your head at the same time?
No.
>>Can you voluntarily give yourself two parallel internal visual streams, ie visualize a tiger and a sunflower at the same time? If yes, how sure are you that you're not switching back and forth between them very quickly? How many internal visual streams can you maintain at once?
Not now. I remember in preschool (~4 years old) a teacher told me it was impossible to think of two things at once. And I tried really, really hard and convinced myself I could do an airplane and a fish simultaneously if they were different colors. I seem to have lost this ability.
>>Can you focus on two different areas of your (internal) visual field? IE can you close your eyes and imagine some text in the far top-left corner of your visual field, and some other text in the far bottom-right corner of your visual field, and perceive both clearly, in a way you wouldn't be able to focus on two pieces of text in opposite parts of the visual field in the external world?
Sort of? My visual and touch sense are mixed together when I’m visualizing things. I cannot clearly visualize more than two letters at a time (I’m bad at spelling), but those two letters can be in opposite parts of my “visual” field.
>>What if it's one piece of text, but it goes all the way across your visual field (ie it's in very big font)? Does that make it easier, or not?
It’s harder.
>Have you ever felt like you have a song stuck in your head?
Nope. I don't actively dislike music but it seems like too much hassle to get into for something I don't enjoy so I have never deliberately listened to music. Maybe it's because my lack of exposure, but I can't remember more than the first dozen words or notes of any song .
This also might be a quirk of my memory, I can't play back my wife's voice in my head despite her sitting next to me now. If I try very hard I can get the faintest hint of a wisp of what she might sound like.
I usually think in words.
>Can you voluntarily give yourself two parallel internal visual streams, Can you focus on two different areas of your (internal) visual field?
I also can't do this. I don't have internal visual fields, when I think its all in words. Once again, if I close my eyes, I can't picture my wife's face.
Song stuck in head: Yes.
Two parallel internal audio streams: Yes, I can do that. I sometimes even make a game of it, seeing how many simultaneous audio streams (usually songs, sometimes people speaking words) I can run at once.
Two parallel internal visual streams: I can visualize two objects at the same time, but they stay on the same "stage"; the two objects always have relative position to one another, even if I have them overlap on the same space.
Two different areas of internal visual field: ...Huh, apparently I can't do that with text on opposite sides, or even one large piece of text, but I _can_ do it for simple things like colors (eg orange from the top-left while blue from the bottom-right).
Yes, I get songs stuck in my head (often).
I cannot have song lyrics in my head at the same time as other thoughts. It can only happen if I'm doing something that doesn't require conscious thought: driving, showering, laundry, dishes, etc.
I don't think I can have two internal audio streams. (I don't even like having two *external* audio streams.)
I don't think I can have two visual streams at the same time either.
My mental visualization is not very sharp/detailed, so I don't think I can visualize text very well. I tried visualizing objects instead. I don't think I can do two at once. Actually I can't even “focus” on something in the corner without actually moving my eyeballs in that direction, even though my eyes are closed.
PS, in the shower, I wanted to time how long it took me to shave, but I didn't have a clock with a second hand, so I just counted in my head. I was able to shave (haptic/proprioceptive) while counting (mental audio). In fact, I think I was paying more attention to the shaving than to the counting, which was proceeding pretty automatically.
Bonus: while this was happening I realized “hey, this is related to the question Scott asked on his open thread,” and I thought about coming back and writing this comment. That thought came to me without words, like sort of a conceptual overlay.
(I sometimes think in words and sometimes without. Thinking without words seems smoother, faster, more fluid, more efficient. But like shifting into low gear, using words can help me think through something difficult, or when I'm tired.)
I also remembered that Feynman had a story about doing similar experiments… I can't find it right now, but it's probably in Surely You're Joking. This HN comment mentions the same thing and links to an interview with him: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4802725
Aha, here's a better reference: “While reading What Do You Care What Other People Think, I came across the section in which Feynman describes trying to count to sixty while performing various activities. Eventually he notes he cannot count and speak out loud at the same time. But he has no problem reading while counting.” https://medium.com/for-your-information/counting-reading-subvocalization-and-some-feynman-75b2601d9cff
I often have songs running through my head (with lyrics and spare instrumentation) while talking or listening to something intermittent, but I think a cleaner test of "parallel internal audio streams" is whether I can really cleanly audioize two voices in harmony, maintaining attention to the contour of each line in addition to their relationship to each other.
I have musical training, both in playing viola (a harmony instrument) and composition, but I can make myself cleanly imagine two lines only with focused effort and practice, and three lines only after several hours of focused study (transcribing each voice, playing the three-part harmony on a keyboard, etc). Professional composers practice this skill much more than I do and are often much better at it than I am, with the ability to mentally "check" how it will sound for the brass section to play chord progression X while the strings play a melody and two harmonies, etc.
1) Yes.
2) Rarely. If there are lyrics, they're usually displacing my other verbal thoughts.
3) If the streams are music and vocals/structured thought, I can do it, but not if they're both the same kind (e.g. two instrumental tracks, or two different verbal thought processes).
4) Yes, and very sure. I can superimpose them the same way I superimpose the imagined tiger on the real world. I don't know how many layers of this I could get away with, though, and am now curious and should experiment with it. :)
5) With great concentration, but mostly no.
6) That does not make it easier.
Song stuck in head: yes, many times.
I mostly listen to instrumental music, but I can voluntarily recall a song with lyrics. It doesn't sound internally like two audio streams, the very words are doing the melody in a single stream.
I can hold two familiar melodies in my head at the same time, but it takes effort, and falls apart if I try to add words, or the moment I stop actively trying.
Completely suck at visualization, so no to the rest.