Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are easily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected that changed your perspective on the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
There is only one reading this week because it is pretty long. Here is a summary according to chatGPT and Claude 2, respectively.
ChatGPT
1. The book "The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding" by Kieran Egan discusses the idea of cognitive tools, mental frameworks that help us understand and interpret the world.
2. Egan proposes a theory of education based on these cognitive tools, which he categorizes into five different stages: Somatic, Mythic, Romantic, Philosophic, and Ironic.
3. The Somatic stage is pre-linguistic and is based on bodily sensations and emotions.
4. The Mythic stage involves understanding the world through stories and binary opposites.
5. The Romantic stage is characterized by a fascination with the limits of reality and a focus on heroes and heroic qualities.
6. The Philosophic stage involves systematic thinking and the search for underlying principles and theories.
7. The Ironic stage is characterized by skepticism towards all grand theories and a focus on the complexity and contradictions of life.
8. Egan criticizes traditional education systems for focusing too much on the Philosophic stage and neglecting the other stages.
9. He suggests that education should be a process of guiding students through these stages in order to allow them to fully develop their understanding and cognitive abilities.
10. The original review's author agrees with many of Egan's points but also raises some criticisms, such as the lack of practical suggestions for implementing Egan's theories in real-world education systems.
11. The author also questions whether Egan's stages are truly universal or whether they are specific to Western culture.
12. Despite these criticisms, the author concludes that "The Educated Mind" is a thought-provoking book that offers valuable insights into education and cognitive development.
13. Other reviews describe the book as a "tour de force" that offers a fresh perspective on education, with Egan's ideas seen as radical and thought-provoking.
14. Some readers found the book to be a bit dense and academic but still highly insightful.
15. Egan's emphasis on the importance of imagination in education is highlighted in multiple reviews.
16. While Egan's ideas are compelling, they may be difficult to implement in practice, as noted by several reviewers.
17. Egan's critique of the three traditional educational ideas (socialization, platonic, and progressivist) is seen as a significant contribution to the field.
18. Egan's ideas require a radical shift in our understanding of education, which may be challenging but necessary, as per some reviewers.
Claude 2:
The review discusses the educational theory of Kieran Egan, laid out in his 1997 book The Educated Mind. Egan argues that mainstream education is failing students by trying to balance three incompatible goals: socializing students to fit into society, teaching academic content, and facilitating individual development. This "sad triangle" of mismatched aims sabotages real learning.
As an alternative, Egan proposes rebuilding education around a series of "cognitive tools" that have served humanity successfully for millennia, like storytelling, binary opposites, humor, gossip, extremes, and the lure of certainty. By tapping into capacities students already possess, education can become meaningful and motivating.
The core of Egan's theory outlines five "kinds of understanding" that education should foster in sequence:
- Mythic understanding deals with metaphor, story, jokes, and mental imagery. This matches the cognitive strengths of young children.
- Romantic understanding seeks extremes, ideals, and heroic individuals. It suits early adolescents' hunger for inspiration.
- Philosophic understanding builds general conceptual schemes and seeks anomalies. It emerges in older adolescents.
- Ironic understanding juxtaposes perspectives and doubts certainties. It aims for sophistication.
- Somatic understanding is bodily and intuitive rather than linguistic. It grounds all human cognition.
Egan argues this sequence represents the natural order in which humans gain new cognitive abilities as their language evolves. Education should therefore recapitulate this pattern to properly prepare the mind for more complex thinking.
Unlike traditional stage theories, Egan stresses that the goal is to educate students to use all these modes of understanding in harmony. Ironic understanding, in particular, helps balance the others. This approach aims to make education more meaningful by embracing emotion, imagination, and the wisdom accumulated through cultural evolution. Done right, Egan believes it can motivate students and develop sophisticated rational thinking.
The reviewer argues that Egan's theory rings true by describing how many members of the rationalist community learn - through stories, extremes, theoretical debates, and intellectual irony. Egan also anticipated ideas from scholars of cultural evolution like Joseph Henrich about how cognition builds on collective wisdom.
However, critics worry that Egan's paradigm is too eccentric and academically unfashionable ever to be widely implemented. But the review suggests it may warrant small experiments to empirically test its merits. Overall, Egan's vision promises a bold new conception of human education, even if uncertainties remain about its practicality.
Think this is a political issue vulnerable to some directed focus/effective altruism: some pro-life groups have started trying to fuck up PEPFAR, a bipartisan initiative that has stopped tens of millions of Africans from dying of aids over the past 20 years. Currently about twenty million people get anti-AIDS medication through it. Whether you live in a red or blue state, whether you live in a county that's +40 Trump or +40 Biden, please call your rep/senators and tell them to pass PEPFAR on through as it failing to be renewed or getting thousand cutted to death could kill literally millions of people, and it's the sort of thing that's never going to catch the national media news because it's not spicy kulturkampf shit.
Looks like the pro-life groups object to PEPFAR funds being used to lobby foreign governments to enact pro-choice legislation. That seems like a pretty normal stance for a political advocacy group to take: "We will rate you badly if you vote to give money to groups who lobby against our cause." The specific organizations they accuse of doing this are Population Services International, Village Reach and Pathfinder International. Who knows whether it's true or not. Seems like a screwed-up situation.
Seems like simply excising groups like PSI (who actively perform abortions) from PEPFAR is the most obvious way through this mess. The money that PSI gets from PEPFAR is a tiny proportion of each of their budgets. I haven't looked at the other orgs, but it's probably a similar story there.
(And no, it's not still there, I turned it over to someone at the lost-and-found who looked like a manager, who said he'd have to give it to a manager. It'd be interesting to see what happened to it. Maybe it'd have made a good indie movie, back in the day - follow a hundred-dollar bill around and watch it expose people's inner character.)
(But this shouldn't disprove my disproof. People have used statistics to claim that I don't exist, ergo I didn't pick it up!)
An imaginary version of me showed up earlier and noticed it, so my showing up counts as the 2nd time. :-P Although I did actually wait for about 45 seconds to see if anyone else would pick it up, but no one did.
Slightly more seriously, the standard joke based on the popular misunderstanding is that the dollar bill "shouldn't" exist, not about what the response should be if one found free money.
Although probably a better angle of attack is the idea that it was "market forces" involved, since I didn't even keep it. I actually sacrificed about 5 minutes of life to turn it in. Somehow I doubt that this type of motivation would scale well enough to produce what anyone would call an "efficient market".
The future we never got - unless it's going to happen with Bezos, Musk, et al (also why the hopes about "if we can just align AI and get it right, then we'll have Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism where everyone is rich and has their own staff of personal robots run by AI churning out all they ever need or want" sound so old hat to me and don't get me all excited - we were promised this kind of lifestyle by the 80s/90s/00s):
The article is a little bit sour - I don't think O'Leary was "unhinged" for his fears of what might happen instead of the 70s techno-optimism, and while Bezos' view of Space Colonies is dated, what makes it grim? - but it's a useful reminder of the high hopes for Science! of the past, and how culture-bound such hopes are (the very 70s imagining of the near future should remind us that our imaginings of the near-future are likely every bit as misplaced about how it will be like; e.g. even if we had people doing zero-g commutes today, they're not going to be reading magazines but instead they'll be on their smartphones):
"In his High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space (1977), written as a speculative dispatch from the future, it is the accommodating gyroscopic cylinder, not the planetary sphere, that holds the secret for life freed from earthen ground.
'To go on with our situation, it's a comfortable life here. Fresh vegetables and fruit are in season all the time, because there are agricultural cylinders for each month of the year, each with its own day-length. We grow avocados and papayas in our own garden, and never need to use insecticide sprays. Of course we like being able to get a suntan without ever being bitten by a mosquito. To be free of those pests, it's worth it to go through the inspections before getting aboard the shuttle from Earth.'
The cylinder becomes a kind of Eden regained in O’Neill’s fantasy, an Arcadia retrofitted with solar panels and cosmic-ray shields. Not only can you slurp personal papayas under a bug-free sun, but laborers tasked with processing raw space materials will have time for “reading magazines” during their zero-gravity commutes. Resource mining will be automated, leaving workers plenty of opportunity for “swapping stories and passing the coffee-pot back and forth”. Even television reception will be better, and “the ubiquitous, ugly TV antenna of American suburbia will vanish”, due to receivers built directly into the cylindrical endcaps.
...In an interview about the project, Davis discusses how his images of O’Neill’s ideas still have a “freshness”, for they continue to embody “the aspirations people have had ever since the space age began”. While this is certainly true — and the artists’ visions of artificial cylindrical worlds have had an outsized influence on science fiction — these psychedelic vistas populated by high-tech homes and cocktail-sipping residents were also a product of their cultural climate.
It was a heady time for both artists and theorists. A report on O’Neill’s 1977 summer study, claiming that space cities would be feasible by 1990, appeared next to Timothy Leary’s unhinged essay about “The Psychological Effects of High Orbital Migration”, in which the hallucinogen researcher expressed his concerns about “the South Americanization of Space (i.e. the emergence of civil-service bureaucracies, military dictatorships, class struggle, centralized monopolies, imposition of standardized life-styles)”.
...If Jeff Bezos’ mockups of Blue Origin space colonies feel as dated as they do grim, it is because they borrow heavily from Gerard O’Neill, whom he studied under at Princeton in the 1980s, and the artworks featured below."
Also, I had no idea Bezos studied under O'Neill, you learn something every day!
I have fond memories of O'Neill cylinders in futurist picture books of my childhood. And there's a glorious animated version - watch the first minute or so at this link, and unmute if you don't mind sappy Japanese love songs:
("Gundam 0080" is a fantastic miniseries. If you can find a subtitled version and have 3 hours, it's well worth watching. (I can't stand dubs, but alas not everyone agrees with me.) No prior experience is necessary; think of it as starting in media res, and everything important is explained. Just be prepared to have your heart ripped out, emotionally speaking.)
Indeed, Bezos studying under O'Neill is news to me, and explains much. Thank you for pointing that out. Unfortunately, he didn't study engineering, and so his rockets mostly don't work.
All the requests for book recommendations below reminded me - any news of the lady who got the ACX grant to write her book about the patriarchy? I know that's not exactly it, but it's early morning and my brain can't dredge up the real facts.
Is she currently off researching? When is the likely publication date?
The researcher is Alice Evans. Princeton University Press's website has promised a forthcoming The Great Gender Divergence since March 2020. Scott awarded her a grant in December 2021. I don't know if she has announced a publication date. She blogs regularly, and this is one of her blog posts on the subject: https://www.draliceevans.com/post/ten-thousand-years-of-patriarchy-1
My trouble is that I can only get so far into her post before the urge to snark becomes irresistible:
"There was no pre-Neolithic feminist utopia. If recent studies of foragers are any guide, during the 100,000 years that our ancestors had spent as hunter-gatherers, girls may have been forced into marriage, often polygynously, beaten and raped. However, since female labour is a crucial element of the forager economy, women were at least not secluded and lived alongside their own kin."
Hello. Me Grug. It beautiful day on savannah. Sun is high in sky so time for me to beat harem. Lazy bitches need to be kept nose to grindstone (only grindstone not invented yet). Me good husband, let me women live beside their clan. Also lets me marry sisters so have polygyny (only concept not invented yet, just practice).
Later, me pick out which sisters to carry off and rape and force into me harem. Life is busy for hunter-gatherer, but me can't complain. Bye!
Just like today and the Cishetnormative Patriarchal Rape-Culture, amirite ladies? I mean - yeah. Life was hard. Things were bad. But I sort of think that *maybe* the men of the pre-Neolithic didn't spend *every* single minute of the day beating, raping, and forcing women into working for them? *Maybe* pre-Neolithic humans could manage to get along with each other somehow and even like each other a little bit?
This is why I'm interested in the progress of the book, to see if there will be any novel information rather than the same old social studies feminism guff. Again, I am not denying the oppression of women over the course of human history, just that other members of the species were also being oppressed as well, and that at times mutual survival wasn't based on "me stronger, you weaker" but people - even of different sexes! - working together.
I speculate a lot of that stuff is speculative. We don't really know that much about stuff that happened that long ago, all we have are a bunch of tools and burial grounds. I'm not picking on archaeologists--they really have very little to work from, especially that far back. At least with the Minoans we apparently translated their legal code. But before writing? It's really an educated guess. Even with writing we don't fully understand their concepts.
We don't need archaeology to know what primitive hunter-gatherer tribes were like, we have anthropological studies of them from recent centuries. The many and varied tribes of Australian Aborigines survived in hunter-gatherer form up to the 19th or 20th centuries, and we know all sorts of things about gender relations in these tribes, which varied from fairly monagamous to highly polygynous.
Right, but those are hunter-gatherer tribes on the worst land that was left over after chiefdoms and states took all the best stuff. Back when hunter-gatherer tribes roamed the European plains or the Yellow River Valley, who knows how things were?
That's the problem, there's an immense ton of speculation about the distant past, as Chesterton pointed out when discussing popular views of The Caveman in his day.
Dr. Evans' view of the hunter-gatherer past doesn't sound greatly removed from H.G. Wells' Old Man ("first, the fear of the chief of the tribe (whom Mr. Wells insists on calling, with regrettable familiarity, the Old Man)":
"It is therefore absurd to argue that the first pioneers of humanity must have been identical with some of the last and most stagnant leavings of it. There were almost certainly some things, there were probably many things, in which the two were widely different or flatly contrary. An example of the way in which this distinction works, and an example essential to our argument here, is that of the nature and origin of government I have already alluded to Mr. H. G. Wells and the Old Man, with whom he appears to be on such intimate terms. If we considered the cold facts of prehistoric evidence for this portrait of the prehistoric chief of the tribe, we could only excuse it by saying that its brilliant and versatile author simply forgot for a moment that he was supposed to be writing a history, and dreamed he was writing one of his own very wonderful and imaginative romances. At least I cannot imagine how he can possibly know that the prehistoric ruler was called the Old Man or that court etiquette requires it to be spelt with capital letters. He says of the same potentate, 'No one was allowed to touch his spear or to sit in his seat.' I have difficulty in believing that anybody has dug up a prehistoric spear with a prehistoric label, 'Visitors are Requested not to Touch,' or a complete throne with the inscription, 'Reserved for the Old Man.' But it may be presumed that the writer, who can hardly be supposed to be merely making up things out of his own head, was merely taking for granted this very dubious parallel between the prehistoric and the decivilised man. It may be that in certain savage tribes the chief is called the Old Man and nobody is allowed to touch his spear or sit on his seat. It may be that in those cases he is surrounded with superstitious and traditional terrors; and it may be that in those cases, for all I know, he is despotic and tyrannical. But there is not a grain of evidence that primitive government was despotic and tyrannical. It may have been, of course, for it may have been anything or even nothing; it may not have existed at all. But the despotism in certain dingy and decayed tribes in the twentieth century does not prove that the first men were ruled despotically."
When speaking of cave art:
"To-day all our novels and newspapers will be found swarming with numberless allusions to a popular character called a Cave-Man. He seems to be quite familiar to us, not only as a public character but as a private character. His psychology is seriously taken into account in psychological fiction and psychological medicine. So far as I can understand, his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about, or treating women in general with what is, I believe, known in the world of the film as 'rough stuff.' I have never happened to come upon the evidence for this idea; and I do not know on what primitive diaries or prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded. Nor, as I have explained elsewhere, have I ever been able to see the probability of it, even considered a priori. We are always told without any explanation or authority that primitive man waved a club and knocked the woman down before he carried her off. But on every animal analogy, it would seem an almost morbid modesty and reluctance, on the part of the lady, always to insist on being knocked down before consenting to be carried off. And I repeat that I can never comprehend why, when the male was so very rude, the female should have been so very refined. The cave-man may have been a brute, but there is no reason why he should have been more brutal than the brutes. And the loves of the giraffes and the river romance of the hippopotami are effected without any of this preliminary fracas or shindy. The cave-man may have been no better that the cave-bear; but the child she-bear, so famous in hymnology, is not trained with any such bias for spinsterhood. In short these details of the domestic life of the cave puzzle me upon either the revolutionary or the static hypothesis; and in any case I should like to look into the evidence for them, but unfortunately I have never been able to find it. But the curious thing is this: that while ten thousand tongues of more or less scientific or literary gossip seemed to be talking at once about this unfortunate fellow, under the title of the cave-man, the one connection in which it is really relevant and sensible to talk about him as the cave-man has been comparatively neglected. People have used this loose term in twenty loose ways, but they have never even looked at their own term for what could really be learned from it.
…When novelists and educationists and psychologists of all sorts talk about the cave-man, they never conceive him in connection with anything that is really in the cave. When the realist of the sex novel writes, 'Red sparks danced in Dagmar Doubledick's brain; he felt the spirit of the cave-man rising within him,' the novelist's readers would be very much disappointed if Dagmar only went off and drew large pictures of cows on the drawing-room wall. When the psycho-analyst writes to a patient, 'The submerged instincts of the cave-man are doubtless prompting you to gratify a violent impulse,' he does not refer to the impulse to paint in water-colours; or to make conscientious studies of how cattle swing their heads when they graze. Yet we do know for a fact that the cave man did these mild and innocent things; and we have not the most minute speck of evidence that he did any of the violent and ferocious things.
…The artist may have had another side to his character besides that which he has alone left on record in his works of art. The primitive man may have taken a pleasure in beating women as well as in drawing animals; all we can say is that the drawings record the one but not the other. It may be true that when the cave-man's finished jumping on his mother, or his wife as the case may be, he loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling, and also to watch the deer as they come down to drink at the brook. These things are not impossible, but they are irrelevant. The common sense of the child could confine itself to learning from the facts what the facts have to teach; and the pictures in the cave are very nearly all the facts there are."
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith. The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated . Kindle Edition.
Wow! Thanks for that link, it was an extremely gratifying read.
I love seeing the supporting evidence that demonstrates that, no, contrary to what the GrrlPower!Disney messaging today might have you believe, progressive social thought wasn't the force which freed women from thousands of years of patriarchy. Meaningful lifestyle gender equality emerging only in the mid-1970s-ish had virtually nothing to do with "women speaking up" and everything to do with the economic imperative for women to participate more-or-less equally in the economy. After all, it's hard for a civilization to tell a woman she can't have her own bank account when the health of the civilization's economy kinda depends on her having her own bank account (to oversimplify tremendously).
But even more gratifying is that I nevertheless have to update some of my priors! I knew very little about the civilizations that didn't experience the conquest, inherited wealth, and religion which shaped the patriarchal ones.
I'm hardly a Marxist, but one of the things Marx did get right is 'follow the money'. Labor-saving devices had as much to do with the women's movement as anything else--now you don't have to spend all day washing your clothes by hand, so you can go out and do a job outside the home.
That said without a women's movement you don't have abortion rights, sexual harassment laws, affirmative action for women, mandated pumping rooms, and all the other stuff that helps women thrive.
Interestingly, I watched a guy (was it Yuri Bezmenov?) claim the feminist movement was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation to increase the labor force and drive down wages. (It gets shared a lot on right-wing sites.) Funny how one side's social advance is the other side's evil conspiracy.
Well, spending all day washing clothes by hand *was* a means of doing a job outside the home - there were (and in some places probably still are) washerwomen and laundresses (or indeed washermen).
It's a complicated history because there have always been women working 'outside the home' or within the home to generate income to support the home (farmers' wives selling butter and eggs at markets, as well as what befell this young damsel in the song*). The Industrial Revolution gave large-scale employment in factories by mechanising what were cottage industries (this is the main plot in the novel "Shirley", after all, where the Luddites are smashing the mechanised looms because they are taking jobs away, while the mill-owner needs to automate in order to stop losing money).
This also made jobs available for women and children, and the employment of women was paid at a lower rate than that of men - this is where we get our historical pay gap from, and it wasn't due to the factors often quoted today about women working part-time etc.
I think this isn't real. The perspective that makes this clearest is to look at how "does this politician promote feminism" correlates with other policy preferences.
If I don't finish reading more than 25% of The Sequences, can I still criticize the Rationalist community here? I mean the Sequences are so tedious and boring and I'm yet to come across an idea I haven't heard before. In general, it reads like an old-school self-help book but with a culty vibe. Like Dianetics, maybe. The culty vibe comes from the use of the word "rationalists" (to separate the enlightened from the un) and claims that rationalism is "an art" and the general tone that this is The Answer. All the same information could be conveyed without that culty sounding shit, but I suspect it is the culty sounding shit that has made it so popular because the information is basically all the stuff that was in the air in the intellectual sphere of teh webz at the time. Many of the same ideas were also on PUA blogs. As the lady says, everything that rises must converge.
I think it's better to criticise specific ideas than nebulous "communities".
Criticising a "community" is like shooting fish in a barrel, you can always just find the worst loud bozos in the community, criticise their obvious flaws, and declare the job done.
Every generation renames existing concepts and pretends they invented them. To the extent that things are any different now, it may be because there is less of a common mass culture.
Whatever. I'm pretty skeptical about a lot of the higher-level stuff (paperclip maximizers, AI x-risk, anything Yudkowsky says), but if you treat it as a modestly-right-leaning bunch of geeks you can have a good time arguing and shooting the shit at LW meetups.
It's better than the social justice religion where you spend all your time hating yourself or the neofascist BAP one where you're tanning your testicles.
John Derbyshire, who is way to my right, said when talking about the Anglican Church a lot of religion is just a way to do a group activity around people like you, and all the theology is just indoor fun for intellectuals.
Forget the sequences, read Zvi and Scott Aaronson to learn about what this AI stuff is doing, read Hanania to hear the view from the right that accepts how dumb they are, read Falkovich to learn about dating, read Aella for the weirdest sex stuff you'll ever see, watch Simone and Malcolm Collins to see some neat speculations and laugh your head off, make your own list that includes none of these people. Study your experience, take what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is essentially your own. There is no guru with the true way. There never was.
Wokies and communists aren't the same thing, though they do overlap. (How often do you hear wokies talk about workers?) But yeah, right-leaning relative to both.
"The album title is evocative of a 1966 quotation by Jiddu Krishnamurti: "...there is no teacher, no pupil; there is no leader; there is no guru; there is no Master, no Saviour. You yourself are the teacher and the pupil; you are the Master; you are the guru; you are the leader; you are everything."
When I say "criticize the Rationalist community", to be clear, my chief criticism is that it is a community, like any other, that spreads biases among its members. There would be nothing inherently wrong with that were it not a community that claims to be exceptionally self-aware of cognitive biases. It probably is more aware of avoiding, say, the sunk-cost fallacy, but there are bigger and worse biases at stake here. AI x-risk has spread through the community like Ice-9. Fear is the most contagious of the various emotions.
It's fascinating that ideas about Rationalism and ideas about how an AI "thinks" are so incestuously intertwined. Eliezer views thinking in terms of utility functions as a rationalist ideal and behold: that is exactly how AIs will think! Rationalism means not only making the map a better match of the territory but also it means arranging the future state of the universe to be in line with your desires. That's how AIs will think too!
For all of Scott's epistemic humility, we get an evil, opposite twin in Eliezer, who has not one iota of epistemic humility. That probably wouldn't matter if Scott weren't so influenced by Eliezer. But as things stand, Scott is irrationally influenced by the Rationalist community, which seethes irrationally like small townspeople in a Twilight Zone episode full of existential doom over nothing but fear itself.
> thinking in terms of utility functions as a rationalist ideal and behold: that is exactly how AIs will think!
You clearly lack in understanding here. It matters not "how the AI thinks" on a mechanical level - regardless of its internal mechanisms, we can *model* it from the outside as having some utility function that it it maximizing for. The same analysis can be done for anything that has a decision process of some kind.
I'm not in software engineering, so there's not much I can do. I have my doubts Yudkowsky's as smart as he thinks he is; maybe he's got people thinking about the AI getting out of control, which may be for the best if they develop better ways to control it.
I just sort of roll my eyes at the AI stuff and read all the other interesting stuff in there. Maybe they're right, I don't know.
Yud is ultimately a doomsday profit and is constrained by the laws of doomsday doomsday prophecy (e.g. if he was different, you wouldn't be talking about him).
"I just sort of roll my eyes at the AI stuff and read all the other interesting stuff in there. Maybe they're right, I don't know." This community were COVID doom maximalists early in the pandemic if that helps you calibrate.
That was not my impression, at all. Scott and Zvi recognized early that a pandemic was possible, provided useful advice throughout (I bought some essentials before the big lockdown rush), and pushed back against the poor messaging about how the virus spreads, but also quickly updating downward their early overly pessimistic assessments. What are you referring to?
Scott was wearing a full respirator out in public early on. When the diamond princess numbers came out (march 2020ish) it was pretty clear that the whole thing was overblown. I ended up leaving the community shortly after because the people were so hostile to the good news.
> AI x-risk has spread through the community like Ice-9. Fear is the most contagious of the various emotions.
This would be an evidence of terrible bias if you could prove that AI x-risk concerns are wrong. Otherwise it just as well can be reasonable reaction to a terrible danger. You can't just point at an emotion and deem it a priori irrational.
> It's fascinating that ideas about Rationalism and ideas about how an AI "thinks" are so incestuously intertwined.
There is nothing fascinating here. Rationality is the systematic way to find truth. AI have to possess such ability. Insights about rationality are intertwined with insights about AI because they are simply the same insights.
Likening Bibi to a dictator is pretty funny to me. The guy has given up is PM position multiple times after losing.
Plus the English language reporting on this courts situation is ridiculously misleading. The courts aren't just "independent" in a US/UK sort of way, they have insulated them from political feedback of any sort. Imagine if, for some reason the US courts operated like this:
In the 1780s a bunch of Federalists were appointed to the Supreme Court. They then appointed a bunch of other Federalists to lower courts. The Federalists then lose every major election for decades, eventually no longer existing as a real political party. However, the courts are still all Federalists. Federalist SCOTUS justices appoint all the lower court justices, and their replacements on SCOTUS. It is not merely that the courts in Israel are out of step with the electorate, they are even out of step with the left leaning part of the electorate. We aren't talking something like the 6-3 SCOTUS we have right now. We are talking about a SCOTUS with 9 Clarence Thomas types where the last 8 presidents were 6 Obamas and 2 Joe Manchins.
After his last term expired he successfully extended his term and delayed the election for several months. It did eventually fail and he was forced to go to another series of elections (which he eventually lost), but that was in part to to intervention by the courts that he's now depowering. You have to be pretty naive to think he won't at least try to mess with the next one.
(And no, the court in Israel isn't particularly activitist, especially compared to the American SCOTUS. They have something like 1% of the rate of overturning laws iirc).
In what universe can a leader who's lost an election and then peacefully left office twice, and who has not tried to suppress an economy-paralyzing mass protest, also twice, be considered a dictator?
Your expansion below is super interesting. Can you elaborate on the nature of inappropriate arrogation to the Court and how the proposed reforms are targeted to resolve that without meaningfully undermining antimajoritarian functions or their prerequisite judicial independence?
I am confused as to how allowing the governing coalition to perpetually control the judicial nomination committee can be construed as other than an undermine of the court? That one seems very clearcut from here (metropolitan USA, lapsed conservative Jew), I'm curious what I'm missing. I mostly lack context to evaluate critiques or defenses of the Standard of Review reform enacted Monday.
I am not an expert on this topic, and am not strong on the details (not a good enough Hebrew reader to be). Eugene Kontorovich would be who I would recommend you read for the maximalist scholarly pro-reform side in English, you should be able to find him on Twitter and his articles on Google.
But my opinion is based on the following broad-strokes understanding of the history:
- Israel does not have a constitution.
- It does have a series of "Basic Laws" which provide the legal framework for the Knesset and supreme court to operate.
- The "Basic Laws" are very, well, basic and do not clearly delineate separation of powers and responsibilities.
- From the founding up until the early 90's, the Israeli Supreme Court was a very minor player in the country's politics and legal foundation. The Knesset passed laws, the Cabinet executed them, and when something needed reform, they passed more laws and amended others.
- The ISC was, from the founding, a left-leaning and insular institution. New justices were nominated by a system that gave strong weight to the preferences of existing justices and the attorneys who argued the higher-level cases, with minimal input from the Knesset. This meant that the ISC was exclusively made up of the secular Ashkenazi economic and cultural elite who founded the country at the start, and remained so even as the country's demographics shifted.
- Despite all this, the ISC was not a target for reform even when the right wing took power for the first time in 1977 because they had such minimal power and involved themselves so rarely in hot-button issues.
- This all changed when a very talented, ambitious, and ideological jurist named Aharon Barak became president of the ISC. He turned the ISC decisively activist, and began asserting that the court had the right to veto certain Knesset and Cabinet actions. They began to do so more and more often, and began claiming a wider and wider aera of action.
- The ISC and the circle that appointed it's justices also created the independent position of Attorney General, and the system for nominating them. This AG also quickly accrued more power and influence, while shedding the responsibility to defend the Cabinet's actions in front of the ISC when necessary if he or she just didn't feel like it. Just like the ISC, no one voted for these changes, and there is nothing in the "Basic Laws" that calls for it.
- Now the right-wing begins to wake up, but it takes decades for the true understanding of what just happened to filter into the mass consciousness. Decades of ISC and AG interference with right-wing governments and right-wing reform programs and individual right-wing politicians. Decades of clear anti-Religious rulings. Decades of disenfranchisement of the ascendant Mizrachi majority, who lean right-wing and were denied entry into the legal elite, denied seats on the courts and entry into the law firms who argued before them.
- Beginning with the more activist wing of the right, demands for judicial reform begin becoming part of party platforms and coalition negotiations. Bibi Netanyahu, master politician that he is, spends almost a decade fighting off this wing, playing party off against party in order to keep building his coalitions without having to poke poke this bear.
- But the shifting demographics of the right eventually force his hand, and this time, when he builds his coalition, he has no choice but to promise his partners that he will go ahead with reform.
That's how we get to here. Are the reforms a good idea? Not sure. There are some things I like and some things I don't. Are they anti-democratic? Laughable. A strong and durable majority of the populace wants this reform to happen, while a wealthy and cultural elite are threatening to bring the country to its knees to prevent it. Will the reforms break the balance of power and create a majoritarian nightmare? I don't think so. The hypothetical post-reform future would look very similar to the structures in a lot of other strong and durable democracies. Will the reforms "undermine" the courts? That depends on your definition of the word I guess. I personally don't think taking power away from an entity that just helped itself to it counts as "undermining" in the traditional sense of the word.
So that's my long-winded response to your Q. Hope it was helpful.
Thanks for the analysis and recommendation. Haven't gotten there yet but talking more anyway:
The revolution didn't come out of nowhere, it followed from the 1992 basic laws which are very clearly structured as (part of?) a Bill of Rights. It was totally foreseeable that the courts would undertake judicial review of primary legislation to enforce a bill of rights, even if they hadn't undertaken it before and even if doing so wasn't inevitable. This is important context because a) the point of a bill of rights is to be anti-democratic, and b) if you
i) endorse enforcement of a bill of rights but specifically dislike judicial supremacy as the enforcement mechanism, then you propose changing the mechanism of enforcement, whereas if you
ii) disendorse enforcement of a bill of rights but expect this would be a facially unpopular position, then you propose undermining the enforcement mechanism without offering a replacement.
Israel is going through scenario b-ii.
The 9-member judicial election committee initially made its recommendation based on a strict majority of 5 votes, but now requires 7 of 9 votes to advance a candidate to office. Five seats are reserved, as you described above, for incumbent Supreme Court justices (3) and members of a lawyers guild / bar association thing (2), but the government gets the other 4 (Justice Minister, another Minister, 2 MKs appointed directly by the Knesset) so bloc politics was possible initially, but isn't anymore.
'Our group should control who goes on the court' isn't actually a principled improvement on 'that group controls who goes on the court'.
Israel also is engaged in ongoing military occupation of an ethnically distinct population, so extra rigor in maintaining rule of law and liberality in the democratic regime seems particularly important. You'd expect that to be unpopular, and that's a reason to do more of it not less.
As came up in a sub-thread, while you are denotationally correct, I think 'democracy' connotes anti-Hobbesian liberalism commonly enough in discourse that it's worth discussing/clarifying rather than arguing semantically.
Get into power, gradually undermine the courts while increasingly paint your opposition as illegitimate is fairly standard dictator playbook. I don't think he was there in 2003 but he's working hard towards it now.
In fairness I do expect this to be fuzzier than "suddenly dictator" - gradually undermining democratic norms that make it harder for him to stay in power (I expect the next step after finishing the judiciary will be to try to ban Arab parties once the courts can't stop him, left-leaning Jewish parties will probably be a harder stretch). And he's old enough that he probably doesn't have more than a decade or so left, which isn't really enough to break the system singlehandedly. But I wouldn't be surprised if by 2030 it's uncontroversial in the west to lump him with Erdogan and Orban.
The ironic thing is that Bibi is the most "small-d" democratic leader in history. He's been in power for 15 years, and has won 6 and lost 2 elections in that span, plus a few elections that he participated in that didn't produce a working coalition. That's the history of a person who has been in constant dialogue with the citizens of his country and who has spent more time directly responding to the public's desires and shaping his message to their needs than any other democratic leader I can think of.
You can only call Bibi a dictator or even vaguely dictatorial if you either:
A). Accept the premise that West Bank Palestinians are disenfranchised from Israeli elections, and that therefore any Israeli PM is a dictator
B). See an attempt by an elected, representative branch of government to claw back some of the power an un-elected branch has accrued to itself over the last 30 years as dictatorial.
So I would be surprised if it was uncontroversial in 2030 to call Netanyahu a dictator. You can hand-wave away the history of the Israeli Supreme Court all you like, but the people of Israel never agreed to give that body that power it currently wields, and when the dust settles, the attempt, successful or not, to rein it in will most likely not be seen as an illegitimate power grab by the super-majority of the country or fair-minded international observers.
We've had Erdogan (and modi) in the dictator book clubs, and both won elections (modi won more voted in a democratic election than anyone else in history!). We call them (wannabe) dictators because they work hard on undermining balances and limits to their power, which Bibi has done a lot of (most famously by undermining the courts, but also by avoiding having a deputy to remain unchallenged, and he has in fact delayed elections past the legal limit before).
Modern dictators operate according to the rules of democracy. Look, I am a legitimate leader, we had elections and everything! I was democratically voted into power eighteen times over the past forty years!
I'd be fascinated to read a book club on Bibi, but "he won in elections" isn't an all-purpose denial of dictatorship.
Modern dictators win elections by cheating, and they never lose elections and then go away quietly. Bibi has never done the former and he has done the latter twice.
There's winning elections, and then using that power to change election rules to ensure your hold on power and whipping up religious and and ethnic majorities into intimidating the minority away from voting, and then there's winning 6 elections without any reasonable accusations of fraud and losing 2 without making any public accusations of fraud over more than two decades.
I'm sorry, but comparing Modi, let alone Erdogan, to Bibi strains just credulity.
"he conceded an election he didn't effectively have the power to challenge twenty years ago so he's probably well-meaning and trustworthy when trying to dismantle the courts' power to check him" is... Not reassuring. Especially since in 2019 he did do the maximum amount of shenanigans to try to delay or avoid losing power (note that the 2015 government did in fact last beyond its term limits).
To what specific actions of Joe Biden do you refer? I will grant that he has characterized the coup-attempting wing of his opposition as illegitimate, but I'm mystified what you're pointing to w/r/t courts.
There's an obvious asymmetry in that Biden is on the team that the prestige media and cultural elites like, and Netanyahu is on the team that they dislike. So even in an alternative universe where Biden and Netanyahu did exactly the same things, it would still follow that Biden is bravely upholding democracy whereas Netanyahu is engaging in coup-like behavior.
This just reads as bizarre. What judges are suffering 'intimidation' by 'mobs'? You list a series of major court holdings that create a strong presumption against anyone being intimidated.
Also, like, what laws? The right to peaceably assemble and to petition for redress of grievances shall not be infringed, bro.
I know of some folks who already packed the US Supreme Court, and none of them was named Biden. Merrick Garland still has the receipts for a little while. No, not the receipts ProPublica found; we're talking about the court-packing receipts, not the corruption receipts.
If you have some substance here I'm curious, but I don't hold my breath.
To get at it from a different lens, are you willing to classify Orban as a dictator in Hungary at this point? Whether y/n, what do you see as the rubicon there that he has (not) crossed?
My impression is that Netanyahu is changing the procedural rules so that the Supreme Court has less power within the government. I am not aware of Biden attempting to do anything like that.
I interpreted the comment to mean that Netanyahu is not yet a dictator, but will unambiguously become one in 3-5 years. I don't agree with that, but at least it's a testable prediction.
Ahh, you're probably right. @shaked my bad for misunderstanding.
For the record I'm 95% confident that Bibi will never do anything that will allow an honest observer to call him a dictator, if we're just making predictions here. He's old and unwell, his coalition is shaky, and the majority of the right wing doesn't actually have the stomach for dominating the left in that way.
I picked up an old backburnered, simply for fun, programming project yesterday. I want to code up an app that will let me generate themed crossword puzzles in the style of those offered by the NYTs. I would enter a few answers that establish a theme and the code would fill in the rest.
I have an XML file with about 100,000 thousand words and phrases. It's been so long since I worked with the data that I've forgotten who I stole it from. It's a great list in that there are few entries that are terribly obscure.
Here's a handful from the 15 1etter section of the XML.
These are great for my purposes. I'd like to make the puzzles challenging in the newer NYTs style of word play rather than simple obscurity. In the late 90's and early 2000's the later in the week puzzles were made more challenging using clues like "Second place finisher in the 1932 Kentucky Derby." Yuck.
But eyeballing the list yesterday I realized there were no plurals. I think this would seriously hobble the fill in the remaining answers algorithm, making it more likely that the code would be forced to pick, oh say, specialize botany terminology. I plan to manual purge those sorts of words from the list as they appear.
If the data set had part of speech markings, I could easily write code to create plurals for the nouns, but no such luck.
In poking around I've found data sets with plurals included but they contain too many obscure words and none of them contain common phrases.
So can any one point out a similar data set similar to what I now have with nouns along with their plurals?
I'd look into using ChatGPT (or more likely one of the underlying APIs) to solve this problem by augmenting the word list you already have, I suspect that would do a good job of determining what words are in a provided phrase, whether they can be pluralized, and probably also could handle things like changing the tense of verbs. It's possible using a large language model could also work well for generating or verifying clues, although that might take more prompt optimization.
Professional crossword creators seriously guard their wordlists. They're constantly adding new entries to their lists as new phrases enter the lexicon and they (rightly) see the word list as key to their creation process far more than the particular software used.
Would it be good enough for your purposes to just add in all the words that end in "s" where the "s"-less form is in the list you like and the full form is in one of the lists that you already found that have plurals but also too many obscure words? This probably would have some false positives but worst case they'd be occasional obscure real words, and the words where false positives are most likely are short words, which are less likely to be obscure. You could even allow a variety of changes to the last few letters to include verb conjugations (other than the third person singular present tense "-s") and irregular plurals.
What non fiction book would you recommend that will change the way I see the world and make me understand much more of what is going on around me.
I am planning on reading Gödel Escher Bach, the book of why (Pearl) , the Feynman lectures, the elephant in the brain (Hanson), Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), Quantum Computing since Democritus (Aaronson) and other similar books.
I haven't ready any of them yet, only started some. Do you have any similar books. They don't have to be very similar, I wouldn't mind reading something about linguistics, anthropology or history.
I think Chesterton's Orthodoxy has a great chance of changing how you look at the world, even if you're not a religious person.
I would second somebody else's recommendation of Plato. It's hard to overstate how much we're still living in the shadow cast by The Republic.
Something about the list makes me feel like you would get more out of Nietzsche than Wittgenstein. I seem to remember Wittgenstein having a pretty steep on-ramp.
I read Gödel, Escher, Bach in 1980 and it made a lasting impression on my worldview. A book that expands on G.E.B. and is similarly intriguing is Incomplete Nature by Terrence Deacon.
Just one?? Flat out impossible. I can't responsibly recommend less than an entire bookshelf:
"Tom Brown's Field Guide to the Forgotten Wilderness" and "Reading Nature" Tristan Gooley will give you a reasonable grounding on the physical world around you.
Stephan Gould's "The Flamingo's Smile" for insights into how evolution plays out in the natural world.
"The Story of Philosophy" by Will Durant (who also wrote an extensive series of history books) provides a readable background into some of the world's most influential thinkers.
"The Better Angels of Our Nature" by Steven Pinker is an optimistic yet empirical treatment of the decline of deaths by violence over the last 400 years or so.
"Rationality" by Pinker again is an overview of the most common skills for objective thinking.
"Evil Genius's" by Kurt Anderson is an overview of the effect dark money has had on American politics in the last half century or so.
If you want to challenge yourself, anything by Isaiah Berlin. Literally anything.
Forget "the book of why", not worth it. I love the Feynman lectures, but not for everyone. (And he makes things sound to simple sometimes, you need to work problems on your own to test your physics understanding.) Two books I read recently that changed my world view are; "The Selfish Gene" and "The Goodness Paradox". ("Who we are and how we got here" is also good.) I'll think of three others as soon as I post this.
I read somewhere (I think on Less Wrong) someone wrote he read "the book of why" at the same time he was learning about econometrics, and liked it, and I will take an econometrics course at university soon so I thought I would read it at the same time. But thanks for the advice, If I find it boring I will make sure to read something else instead.
Got stuck in the "book of why", too. The part about the "proving that smoking causes cancer" was interesting. My key insight from it is that: "The statement 'A causes B' is a counterfactual statement, in that it says that in the counterfactual / alternative world where A didn't happen, B wouldn't have happened either."
My "everything book" is Behave by Robert Sapolsky. It's different to those you've mentioned (that I've read), but was much more readable for me.
It's about human behaviour: from what's happening in the brain when you do something, through hormones and genes to social structures. It may not be the perfect book for any one of the topics it covers, but it goes reasonably deep and will help you find out which bits interest you most.
Another recommendation, also historical, but which can further understanding of how the ideas develop, and anyway, historia magistra vitae est, or something like that..., is Alec Ryrie "Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt", which presents a history of development of atheism from medieval Europe to modernity, and it really shows you the mechanisms.
If you do not want the book you can simply listen to the author on youtube:
Perhaps (sadly late) Patricia Crone (a well known historian of Islam) "Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World". It is an accessible book book about, well, preindustrial societies and their constraints. It really makes you appreciate how world changed in the last two centuries, to the extent it is not so much a gradual change as phase change.
While you asked for non-fiction, I would nevertheles recommend also a "Voyage to Arcturus":
which you may read for free (its out of copyright): a very weird philosophical sci-fi from the 1920 which explores themes which should of interest to the readers of this blog: consciousness, meaning of life, and how our worldview or even morality in contingent on our senses and other bodily features. A warning: do not read it if you are depressed, it will make it worse, I know from experience.
Duped: Truth-Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception by Timothy Levine.
Excellent social science meta-meta-analysis that builds a framework for how people act in their day-to-day lives. Really incredible in its universality. Great insight into (problems with) social science studies, statistics generally, and humanity.
My go to recommendation for this is The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. It isn't like any of the books you have list there. It's technically fiction so it doesn't really qualify for your question (sorry), but the fiction is just a device. Think of it more like a very long anecdote in a non-fiction book.
Anyway, it's a story about process optimization (basically how best to run a factory) and the authors "Theory of Constraints". But it has lessons for all sorts of processes. It's highly adjacent to things like just in time processing or lean. The core theory of constraints has changed the way i think about a ton of things around me including global supply chains, economics, programming, even how to best clean the house or cook dinner.
The style is very polarizing so there is a good chance you'll hate it, but it's a short book you could skim/read in a day.
For any of you that went to the meet up in Berkeley or are otherwise familiar, could you point me in the direction of the discontinued history forecasting project that Scott was referring to during the Q&A?
He was talking about various AI’s that were to compete against one another in a forecasting tournament wherein they would attempt to predict historical outcomes with a limited dataset. For example, the fall of the Byzantine empire, or other verifiable outcomes from the past. He mentioned that the project was funded by FTX and was discontinued.
I’d love to look into it and read more if anyone knows what I’m referring to.
Aw man, has FTX not left one thing without spoiling it? That's the kind of project I would be very much interested in to see if AI could do anything there (there are so many gaps in the historical record, if we could get accurate forecasting in line with what we knew happened in the real world, then turn it loose on the parts where we don't), and of course it went under in the Great Fake Money Disaster.
I'm trying to finally read the Sequences, but am constantly annoyed that it reads like it was written by a teenager. For instance:
"This is one of the secret writing rules behind Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. When I write a character, e.g. Draco Malfoy, I don't just extrapolate their mind, I extrapolate the surrounding subjective world they live in, which has that character at the center; all other things seem important, or are considered at all, in relation to how important they are to that character. Most other books are never told from more than one character's viewpoint, but if they are, it's strange how often the other characters seem to be living inside the protagonist's universe and to think mostly about things that are important to the main protagonist."
The Sequences is a world in which Harry Potter exists but 20th century literature does not.
I wanted to answer "I don't know what you're reading, but it's not the Sequences - they were finished in 2009, while HPMOR started in 2010." Then I Googled your quote and noticed it's from that single Sequence which he wrote in 2012, so you're technically correct.
I'm curious now what most people mean when they say: "Read The Sequences." On Less Wrong, it says, currently, on the home page menu: "Rationality: A-Z (or "The Sequences") is a series of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky on human rationality and irrationality in cognitive science. It is an edited and reorganized version of posts published to Less Wrong and Overcoming Bias between 2006 and 2009. This collection serves as a long-form introduction to formative ideas behind Less Wrong, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, the Center for Applied Rationality, and substantial parts of the effective altruist community."
Well, he's really just using $5 words to describe something any half-competent writer would know: when using 3rd person limited, describe the setting through the point of view character's eyes.
Not coincidentally, perhaps that also describes many of the sequences.
FWIW, I read about 2/3 of HPMOR a few years ago, having enjoyed SSC and a bit of less wrong. Only 2/3 because I would agree: it was not very well written. Which may have been tolerable had it not been paired with the impression that Eliezer thought he was writing psychological fiction on par with Tolstoy.
This is a product of its time, not anything related to being a teenager. At the time he was writing, the internet had a ton of HP fan fic and a huge audience of people reading HP fan fic. He wanted to write a fictional story through the lens of his worldview, and chose HP because that fan fic was by far more likely to get views than one on say Picture of Dorian Gray.
The part your quoting is talking about his experience writing. He can't give examples from something he didn't write, or at least it would not be as effective. Truthfully you could replace Draco Malfoy with Gollum from LotR, or any other side character, and it would also be true.
I'm referring to his ridiculous claim that: " Most other books are never told from more than one character's viewpoint, but if they are, it's strange how often the other characters seem to be living inside the protagonist's universe and to think mostly about things that are important to the main protagonist."
"[I]t's strange how often the other characters seem to be living inside the protagonist's universe and to think mostly about things that are important to the main protagonist" doesn't strike me as being wrong, it strikes me as being surprising that anyone would find it strange.
Most works of fiction tell a story. The protagonist is the main character in a story; the story is the protagonist's universe. If you change the thought to "it's strange how often the other characters seem to be living inside the [story] and to think mostly about things that are important to the [story]" it seems almost redundant. The characters in a story are almost by definition connected to the story. If they weren't, there would be no reason to include them. If we're seeing their thoughts, it's because we're viewing the story; their thoughts are interesting in proportion to their relation to the story.
Not the same thing at all. Eddard Stark is the protagonist of A Game of Thrones, but when Jon gets a chapter he's not constantly thinking "where's Eddard, how will this affect Eddard?" He's got his own plot going on. That's why he gets a viewpoint.
Presumably, whatever Jon gets up to will have some relevance to Eddard down the line. I don't know ASOIAF, so I'll go with a Bond reference. When we see the villain early on in a Bond movie, he's not thinking about Bond. He's thinking about his nefarious scheme, his henchmen or about his girl. But all of those are important to Bond later. Jon's plot in ASOIAF will connect with Eddard's larger plot at some point in the story, and what happened to Jon will be important. It may merely be to set up who Jon is so his interactions with Eddard will be meaningful to the audience.
It may be a more valid criticism of the original quote to focus on the word 'book' when many stories these days are spread over multiple books (or movies) and the seemingly unimportant gun mentioned in book 1 may actually only be important several books down the line when the gun is fired.
Villain cutaways are different; they're pretty much always setting up a problem for the protagonist. Or they basically ARE the protagonist, like in Netflix shows. I can't think of a Bond movie that had a second significant viewpoint character; it's all Bond, all the time.
Yakuza 0 is an example. It has two protagonists, with two separate stories, that intersect and resolve in such a way that neither protagonist ever knows the other one is there.
A Song Of Ice And Fire (aka Game of Thrones) is definitely an outlier, but it's really the strongest example against; Eddard is the central protagonist of Book 1, and then at the end of Book 1 Eddard dies, and the plot rolls on through the other books without him. And that's the difference between other characters revolving around the 'protagonist', or revolving around the 'story'.
So you are claiming that most books are indeed written from more than one character perspective in a way that point of view characters do not seem to be living inside the protagonist universe? And that it's ridiculous not to agree with this statement?
This doesn't seem obvious to me at all. Surely, there are a lot of books that do it, it's not some secret technique that only EY possess. But whether such books are the majority among all books ever written is a priori unclear. How sre you so certain in this?
The key words Eliezer writes here are "if they are....". I suppose it's possible he mostly has young adult books in mind and not, say, As I Lay Dying or The Sound and The Fury... so maybe his experience with books told from the perspective of multiple characters aligns with what he says.
My point is only that he doesn't seem to write for a literate audience, and that, because of that, I have trouble wanting to read further.
> The key words Eliezer writes here are "if they are....".
So? Are you claiming that among those books where there are multiple point of view characters it's not the case that often these characters seem to be living in the protagonist universe?
> I suppose it's possible he mostly has young adult books in mind and not, say, As I Lay Dying or The Sound and The Fury
He literally said "most books". So I suppose it's reasonable to assume that he meant exactly that. Do you believe that there are more books such as As I Lay Dying or The Sound and The Fury than young adult books?
Nobody has read enough to know what is in most books. I don't know and neither does Eliezer.
I do know there are classic books, such as William Faulkner's, which have the quality Eliezer claims rarely exists in fiction. So one of the most famous American novelists wrote works with the quality which Eliezer claims almost never exists.
HPMOR is self-insert fan fiction. I think Yudkowsky can write engaging, fun, fictional snippets but I would no more take them as life advice than I would anything off reality TV.
I mean his claim: "Most other books are never told from more than one character's viewpoint, but if they are, it's strange how often the other characters seem to be living inside the protagonist's universe and to think mostly about things that are important to the main protagonist."
It makes me think he has only read children's books. There are plenty of classic novels written from more than one character's viewpoint which he has obviously not read. Nothing wrong with that, but he speaks as if he is well read when he obviously isn't.
I'm talking about Eliezer Yudkowsky's The Sequences, aka Rationality: A-Z on Less Wrong, which I am told is the major text behind Rationalism, which I am undertaking to understand.
I think that if they ever were the major text behind rationalism, they have been superseded by other works since. Pinker's "Rationality" comes to mind.
Yale has in recent years perpetrated/enabled several of the most egregious examples of academia spinelessness in today's culture wars. I was therefore pleasantly surprised to find this article in the current issue of the alumni magazine:
I feel like there should be a climate group, just stop oil or extinction rebellion style, that releases SO2 to try to lower temperatures. Reading https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/06/06/we-should-not-let-the-earth-overheat/ makes it quite clear that this would not be that difficult to achieve... you'd need a motivated billionaire and few dozen engineers (plus some good opsec). The big problem would probably be arousing suspicion from distorting the sulphur market, although I'm sure there are ways round that.
I assume you'd only need to do it for a few months before it would have noticeable effects (I'm no climate scientist so maybe it would take more/less time), and it would be an instant global story for days or weeks, at which point you'd all probably be arrested. BUT the cat would be out of the bag, and I think it would have a high chance of making geoengineering done by governments a reality.
Lil' Missy there blaming the Daily Mail is just extra hilarity - yes, how dare some grubby proles interrupt your nice luncheon in an historic building while a harpist provides background accompaniment for your highly important schmoozing? The mid-upper middle classness on show there is just part of why these groups annoy ordinary people so much.
People seem to think that the lower local concentration, compared to factory smokestacks back in the day, wouldn't be enough to result in acid rain. But it's the kind of thing we'd want to check.
I think you also need the Queen of the Netherlands on your team for that to work, and even then some Indian-Canadian martial artist will show up at your facility with a dirty bomb.
More seriously, A: anything that requires a billionaire in an active and thoroughly committed role, is not "stop oil or extinction rebellion style" by any standard, and B: as Stephenson correctly points out, people are going to push back in unpredictable but problematic ways. Including people who run governments, and I think you skipped a step between "the government arrests all the protesters for doing [Thing]", and "[Thing] is now official government policy".
I would prefer to organize protest lines outside of fossil fuel burning power plants. Get a local high school or college involved. Of course, people are already doing that, so maybe volunteer? Or donate?
If you mean a technological innovation as a subversion, I don't think those really exist. The closest I can come is a fund-raising campaign to buy poor people solar panels (or upgrade their home in multiple ways).
I got news for you, Victor. The electrical power which is generated to run the devices on which you are posting, and we are reading, this, and which you would use to notifiy and co-ordinate your volunteer protestors mostly comes from fossil fuel burning plants.
We're not yet at the point of totally green energy, and if your protest works and they shut down the plant right that minute - well, no more phones. Are you ferrying everybody to the protest by public transport? Electric vehicles have to be charged by - you guessed it - and ordinary vehicles burn fossil fuels. Unless your power plant is on the doorstep, or everyone sets out to walk miles on foot, you're dependent on the fossil fuels as well.
That's the trap. That's the problem. That's the Gordian Knot feel-good protests won't do a damn thing to cut.
Heh, I realize that you are probably trolling me, but on the off chance you aren't, and for anyone reading this, I'll take your objections seriously. Of course the amount of electricity used by the phones to organize a protest is trivial compared to the amount of power even one fossil fuel burning plant produces, so if that investment causes us to shift to green energy sooner, resources well spent I guess.
In general, it's also obvious that one cannot carry out a protest movement from within a society that relies on fossil fuels without expending more fossil fuels, but the same considerations apply. Carbon is killing us, so it seems wise to expend the carbon it takes in the short term to get us to expel less carbon in the long term.
And that seems to be true of any form of technical innovation whatsoever. One designs the next big operating system using the old operating system. One designs new architectural innovations while working in a building designed using the old principles. Until the new technology becomes widespread, we must continue to rely on the old technology.
I'd prefer to see solar mirrors at the L1 point, the effects are less unpredictable and they can easily be turned off.
I found an old paper which estimated the cost of reducing solar insolation by 1% at something like a trillion dollars, but with the SpaceX Starship you could presumably do it a lot cheaper, possibly cheaper than (say) buying Twitter.
There is no "militarization of space" treaty, nor any treaty that would prohibit any realistic near-term orbital mirror. Also, the extent to which orbital mirrors can be used as death rays is greatly, *greatly* exaggerated, usually by people who have never heard of the conservation of radiance.
At that distance (1.5 million miles from Earth) I don't think they could be used to usefully fry anything on Earth. I guess it would be worth proving rather than guessing.
"I feel like there should be a climate group, just stop oil or extinction rebellion style, that releases SO2 to try to lower temperatures."
You reference the two most useless, annoying, irritating try-hard groups out there that have achieved nothing except to make ordinary people angry and think climate change activism is a bunch of lunatic narcissists?
If they tried releasing SO2 they'd only blow themselves up or make the problem even worse. You'd do better suggesting Barney the Dinosaur as a leader and inspirational exemplar.
If we were lucky. Any movement that thinks throwing paint and sitting in the middle of the road is going to work to end capitalism and climate change is not going for the most effective route, is what I think.
They'd end up doing worse than the Ice Age by accident since I don't think they have a clue what they are doing in actuality.
just out of interest, what do you think would be a form of protest thats on a more effective route? From my perspective these groups have put some thought into their form of protest and are aware of the backlash they create while still arguing that they further their cause as a whole.
And I'd say there are definitely examples for extreme public protest by few or single actors thats has been very successful. (eg. the suffragettes, or judging by currents levels of meat consumption maybe also Peta)
I don't think PETA is effective. The suffragettes did have big public exhibitions, but they also had a plan of campaign and worked to get things done by legislation, not simply by relying on stunts.
You need a solution that you present to the public alongside "stop using oil". Don't drive cars, don't have the industrial civilisation you are living in - great, but what do you put in its place? And there isn't a coherent answer to that, or at least not one that gets out as a public message unlike "sit in the road, hold up traffic, piss people off and make them less sympathetic to the movement".
Hey, I'm totally down with throwing paint and sitting in the road and then getting dragged away by the pigs in handcuffs! They were the high points of my youth! I think of protests as a sort of coming-of-age youthful folly.
Folly because, over the past fifty years, I can't think of any example in the First World where protests have made any significant change. Even the Vietnam War protests didn't really end US involvement in the war (despite what the aging peace activists claim).
My concern is that very smart people are so very very stupid.
Correction: smart people can be stupid because they think they know the answers without researching deeper into the subject.
For instance, some knowledge of Pleistocene and Quaternary climate variation would be helpful. Also, a little history of the progression of Phanerozoic climates would tend to put the current global "warming" situation in perspective.
Folly is the thing. It's not helping publicise the problem, it's simply making people angry and inconveniencing them, and the protestors then have the warm glow of virtue over having 'done' something.
Just about any conceivable "geo enginnering" could be construed as an act of war by countries which did not agree to have the planet they stand on geo-engineered (e.g. Russia, which stands to benefit from warming.)
The thing is, he said "just stop oil/extinction rebellion style" which I read as "in the style of those groups".
Since their style is to be ineffectual nuisances, that's not what I'd hope an effective and useful movement would copy. Even the idea of "pop up guerilla geo-engineering" is something you want to consider *very carefully*, because mucking around with the climate is not something you can go "ooops, didn't intend that" and mop it up with a dishcloth.
Political leaders standing in the way of necessary environmental solutions, obviously. If one has the right to intervene in the global ecosystem, it would take a bizarrely religious attitude towards human lives to declare them outside your sphere of action.
It occurs to me in hindsight that one factor that weighed in significantly in determining my career path, quasi-consciously, is evaluating likeness to prospective peers. While it's normal enough in the first place to ask yourself what everyone else is doing, I was bothered by the perception that I wouldn't fit in or didn't like anyone - or that the jobs in question weren't something "guys like me" would do (self-image/narcissism did some lifting here, but I was mostly concerned with whether I would enjoy the work). Later when I discovered that many software developers either pined for or had an interest in drastically different fields, I questioned if that was foolish, or if those particular devs are also different than I am.
Judging in-group potential intuitively like a book cover was probably foolhardy. I've never seen a crowd I would describe as "my people", not at rat meetups or otherwise. I like individuals, I knew few. I was never compelled to follow in their path.
I can't say I've ever found a burst of enthusiasm for woodworking, farming or whatever, but sometimes I identify with the desire to set aside the abstract work I don't measure up to, and pick up a tool. Not for mindlessness, but the kind of focus and flow that is... just going through the motions. Even if I were to entertain this seriously, it seems unwise now. So many trades take 5+ years to become a journeyman, notwithstanding time and money sunk into education, and fighting for an apprenticeship. And of course, the grass is always greener. But I do feel burned and over-matched. I don't belong.
I write high performance software using niche in-house tools. We are a small team, this sometimes requires some low-level engineering and sifting through technical specifications/docs, and solving things on my own. It is frustratingly difficult, and I find my performance to be mediocre. Management is only part of the problem (they don't like my performance either, and I expect to be pushed out if I don't leave). I am just not a 10x who easily grasps and loves this stuff.
I'd like to excel or have more "flow" in my day-to-day. I know that doing "hard things" is a necessary step towards mastery, but I'm not improving much, and I'm not motivated to. I am more inclined to procrastinate or get things done so I can move on to the next.
The recent post on laws of trading mentioned knowing your edge. If I do have one, it's being a generalist with decent diplomatic and social skills, and a shallow interest in a myriad of things. The only thing I have a deeper interest in is music. I'd like to do that more for fun, but it's difficult to focus on it when I feel my career is in jeopardy.
What do you think about other software jobs? Music software isn't huge, but it seems like a niche one could get into. You might be more into engineering if it's not as low level.
It doesn't take much to reset the brain. I just signed up for a bow making apprenticeship, which I am pursuing in addition to my job. Just a few hours a month, but I feel better--I'm having fun!
Apologies for the length, but I needed to get this out.
Caplan mentions the "Success Sequence" in his argument, and I found the link enlightening to his viewpoint on moral culpability:
"The underlying moral principle: You shouldn’t blame people for problems they have no reasonable way to avoid. You shouldn’t blame them if avoiding the problem is literally impossible; nor should you blame them if they can only avoid the problem by enduring years of abject misery.
The flip side, though, is that you should blame people for problems they do have a reasonable way to avoid. And the steps of the success sequence are eminently reasonable."
"Eminently reasonable"? Says who? Says Caplan? Well, guess what: I know people who found the steps to being athletic champions to be "eminently reasonable". I know people who found the steps to being witty, extraverted, and popular to be "eminently reasonable". I know people who found the steps to making excellent grades and high test scores to be "eminently reasonable". So are high schoolers who aren't Popular-Athlete-Valedictorians just lazy bums, then?
To me, "eminently reasonable" ultimately translates to nothing more than, "X is easy for me, therefore it is easy for everyone, therefore everyone is culpable for doing it." To Caplan I would respond that that's simply not true. If someone is born in rural America with below-average intelligence, below-average conscientiousness, and maybe above-average impulsivity, then it's going to actually be quite hard for them to perform the "eminently reasonable" steps of High School, Job, Marriage, and Children. It might not seem hard to Caplan (a UC Berkeley and Princeton educated economist) or his readers, but then again, having a cumulative 4.0 in the most difficult classes didn't seem too difficult to the top minds in my class.
Bringing this back to the topic at hand: sure, it may seem obvious to people like Caplan that severe drug abusers who harm others just shouldn't do what they do, because it's "eminently reasonable" not to. But if you have a brain structure that's highly sensitive to chemical reward, a tendency towards heavy impulsivity, and yes, a degree of selfishness (which is also partially caused by inherited qualities), staying away from destructive substances may be just as difficult as it is for a C student to be Valedictorian. We can't just judge others relative to what's easy for ourselves, when that standard so obviously differs throughout the population. So Premise 3 doesn't follow from 1 and 2.
Of course, whether drug prohibition is justifiable is another matter, one involving the questions of whether a government has the moral right to do so and whether prohibition reduces drug abuse. I am skeptical of the former and uncertain about the latter.
But reading Caplan's article, he obviously is opposed to prohibition for the same reasons I am. When I first saw this post, I thought that Caplan was going to argue that we should increase punishments on abuse directly, and that stuck me as highly un-libertarian. But his actual remedy is to increase (or at least effectively enforce) punishment for property rights violations. This will decrease abuse simply by nature of not letting people get away with abuse-related activites. And while I'm personally uncomfortable with increasing "punishment" in the sense Caplan talks about (see David Boonin's The Problem of Punishment)... I actually can somewhat get behind this. Just because I don't morally judge abusers doesn't mean that I want to see them continue their destructive behavior, and if protecting property rights has the effect of doing so, then I see that as a win-win for non-abusers and abusers.
If we're being real here, in my utopian vision, drug abusers would have access to far more effective medications that could block their natural addictive tendencies, at least long enough for those people to get themselves out of the environments that keep their behavior and sense of self stuck in "addict-mode" (addiction psychologist Marc Lewis makes similar arguments in his book The Biology of Desire). Since I honestly believe that most addicts would willingly choose to get better if getting better was as easy as taking a pill and moving out of town, I think that the free market could supply this - not much government "punishment" needed.
Whew, that was a lot. If this would be better suited as a blog post, tell me; I'm no more the kind of person who likes to read essay-length comments than you are.
I fundamentally disagree with Caplan's arguments for free will, but I agree with his suggestions for handling crime, because whether you believe in free will or in Sam Harris's argument that it doesn't exist (https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-illusion-of-free-will, etc), it's kind of obvious that only force can prevent undesirable behavior.
Spit-balling from the "No Free Will" perspective:
1. No one has free will, even when it seems like they do.
2. When drug abusers do bad things to get more drugs, it is because they were *literally* *incapable* of doing otherwise.
3. Thus we should not blame drug abusers.
4. We have established that current incentives do not produce the desired outcome of lessening crime.
5. Therefore drug abusers who commit other crimes must be forcibly prevented from doing so (by physical deterrents and defense/imprisonment/execution/magical behavior control brain chips/etc).
I think it's pretty hard to disagree with the conclusion of #5. After all, if nothing else, forcibly preventing crime by imprisonment (or killing in self-defense of a person or property, I suppose), has the indisputable benefit of minimizing reproduction and intergenerational trauma, which reduces crime in the long run.
"Abusers don’t just mistreat their families, friends, neighbors, and passersby. Even worse, they give vice a bad name. Abusers inspire the indiscriminate, unjust “wars” on innocent users. They inspire prohibition, which takes production out of the hands of ordinary businesspeople and into the hands of criminals."
I don't give two straws about "innocent" users. They can go take a long walk off a short pier, because they are the whitewashing of the entire problem. "Oh, it's not *me*, I just have some fun and I know my limits, it's the unwashed crazy druggies living on the streets and smashing in car windows to rob whatever they can sell for their fix that are the problem". The gangs are just as happy to take your money as the thief's money, they have the impartiality of Vespasian about where it comes from, and both of you are buying the same shit off the same bad guys.
No, *both* of you are the problem, and I am damn well willing to be tough on *both* of you. Because in yet another job, I've heard yet another story about drugs and kids. And the social worker involved had nothing better to say than "Drugs are normal, now". That's the goddamn "innocent users" mindset at work.
If an 'innocent user' wants to decriminalise fun party goods, then they should be the ones having to stand in front of a crying five year old whose drug user mother broke yet another promise about coming to collect them from childcare, and tell the kid "It is your mother's right to prioritise fucking off to buy drugs over caring for you, and you have no right to inflict your opinions or view of what the law should be on her by crying about 'don't you love me?'"
There are no 'innocent people/innocent users' when it comes to drugs. You're single/have no committments, go ahead and bake your brain. You have dependents, drop the 'it's my choice, I'm harming no-one' bullshit.
I think this argument would apply equally well to alcohol. Anyone who buys a beer ought to stand in front of a crying five year old and explain why their daddy drinks himself into a stupor every night, otherwise you're just normalizing alcohol abuse.
Consumption of chemicals that happen to have an effect on the mammalian reward evaluation pathway aren't the only things that cause compulsive behavior that gets unhealthy for some % of the population. This is also true of, for example, shopping. You could move the argument there too. Any time you purchase something that isn't a need to keep you alive, you should have to explain to a crying five year old whose parents compulsive shopping habits are throwing their lives into chaos before you're allowed to do it. Eating food that isn't a warm mush meant to keep you alive for one more day? Well...
I absolutely am coming around to this view. The older I get, the more I am in the world of work, and the more I see how people fuck up their own lives - which is their own business - and their kids lives, which is where I draw the line.
Anyone who wants to defend drinking/smoking/fun party substances *should* have to see the first-hand damage; not the college students who will straighten up and fly right once they graduate, or the Bay Area programmer who gets his brain hacks off the grey markets, but the crying children who don't understand why Mommy or Daddy is always, *always* disappointing them (and the useless social workers who enable Mommy and Daddy because well you don't want to be judgemental or authoritarian now do you?)
Stand knee-deep in the manure and argue the same position, then I'll countenance it.
(Social workers do have a terrible job and burn out, but Jesus, Mary and Joseph, they come out of the colleges with this fucking social liberal ideology firmly crammed up their arses and reality bites very late, if at all).
Everyone who uses household cleaning chemicals shares responsibility for accidental poisoning.
Everyone who drives a car shares responsibility for car accidents.
Everyone who goes to parties that end after 9PM shares responsibility for fatigue related accidents.
Everyone who swims recreationally shares responsibility for drowned children.
Everyone who eats tasty foods shares responsibility for obesity related deaths.
Everyone spends their days doing things not strictly necessary for survival, many of which have the potential to have nasty impacts if they go badly. The argument proves too much.
Criminalizing Wrongfun has a long and proud tradition of making everyone's life worse. From Cromwell to Carrie Nation to Cuomo, using nth-order "societal harms" to remove icky people from one's line of sight is an impulse that, like communism, just needs to be implemented correctly to bring about utopia.
Prohibitionists seem to be entirely immune to argument. They define away the damage they do as "criminals getting their just desserts", and proceed from there. The police state required to enforce their vision they view as "not a bug, but a feature."
To be fair, some (most?) of the problems occur because concurrently with decriminalizing (some) wrongfun, people have been criminalized for ejecting trespassers from their own property.
People, not tools. We need to rid ourselves of those people, not the drugs they're on. There are some edge-case tools that need to be banned. Drugs aren't it.
"Argumentum ad crying five year old" cuts both ways.
A former mayor (!) of the town I live in (USA, near Wash. DC) once woke up to police breaking down his door, shooting his dog, on an anonymous dope tip. (None was found.) Who should stand in front of his crying five year old? How about those shot in ganglang crossfires that did not exist prior to the prohibition mania?
Those engaging in gangland crossfires would still be shooting each other over something else - gambling, porn, hookers - if drugs were miraculously legal. That argument about "think of the poor criminals" doesn't convince me.
Who should stand in front of the mayor's child? The people who did that. The person who phoned in the tip-off. But by the same token, that does not get "yeah I'd rather get wasted and break my word about collecting my child, who as far as I am concerned can go hungry and neglected, because I'm off on a date with my drug dealer boyfriend" off the hook.
You're the only person here talking about a bad parent being let off the hook. What other fun activities would you like banned because a minority population abuses them? Do you have a list? Video games, porn, maybe? Bicycles? Red meat? Tobacco? Rock climbing? Sky diving? Should someone who likes hiking stand in front of his friend's child who lost his father because of a hiking mishap? Or is there a line somewhere, where an activity instantly becomes immoral after a discrete number of fatalities occur?
I used to be "live and let live" and "meh, if you want to fuck yourself up, I disapprove but you're free to do what you want".
Then like I said - I got older. I worked in various jobs. I saw the consequences of "it's my right and I'm free to do what I want".
If we were starting from scratch, we probably would ban alcohol consumption and other things. Also, it's odd how the people arguing over "why are the other lot so obessed with what we do/our bodies/our private lives?" then turn around and demand that it is our business what they do with their bodies. I don't care about what bathroom you use. If you cry and stamp your foot and declare it's genocide unless laws are passed so that 1% of the population can inflict their delusions on the rest of us, you're making it my problem when I don't want it and don't care about it.
"Then like I said - I got older. I worked in various jobs. I saw the consequences of "it's my right and I'm free to do what I want"."
*Of course* there are consequences to living in a free society. We have known this forever. There are a lot of guilty people who are tried and let go because in our justice system in which we are innocent until proven guilty, we can't prove that they're actually guilty. There are endless negative consequences to being free. I'll refer here to Benjamin Franklin's quote about freedom and security. We need a balance, but your suggestions are too far into the authoritarian/safe side. And we know what happens when we give authoritarians authority. They suddenly start deciding things that might threaten their power are unsafe. I reject your authoritarianism.
"There's a problem over there, therefore I'm going to punish people before they can become part of the problem" is one of those universal arguments that can be used to justify any behavior.
Bryan's post ignores another category between abusers and moderate users: addicts who ruin their own lives but don't commit crimes that have victims. The woman who lives in a flophouse and supports her drug habit with casual prostitution isn't victimizing anyone, but most everyone wouldn't want their daughter to turn out like that. It's concern for these people that drives the "drug war." I'm not saying prohibition is the answer: I'm genuinely unsure.
As to Bryan's policy prescription of enforcing existing laws against the homeless, I agree strongly.
Whether or not an addict has free will when they inject their thousandth dose of heroin, they had free will when they injected the first one.
Saying "it's not my fault, I'm an addict" is like saying "it's not my fault where the bullets land, I just fire them up into the air". It's the choice to take addictive drugs in the first place that's the evil one, and that's the one we need to be punishing a lot harder.
That's a bad argument. "Free will" is a poorly defined term, that can mean lots of different things. And it may well be that nobody has "free will". They didn't in Newton's universe, and it's not clear that quantum theory has changed anything.
You can reasonably talk about the harm they do in various direct and indirect ways, but bringing in "free will" just muddies things.
"Free will" usually has a technical meaning that refers to libertarian free will, which is a minority position in philosophy that is very hard to plausibly support and is defended mostly by people with prior religious commitments to the concept. Here, people mean something more like "choices you are morally responsible for" which isn't free will per se, but is something that a more respectable number of people are willing to argue in favor of with arguments that aren't obviously deficient. But they don't believe any choice a person makes is "free" in these sense either and would regard having to defend that as a strawman.
This person is arguing something like that they can understand that the effects of an addictive substance are such that they rob a person of agency in the sense (choices they can be held morally responsible for), but the first "choice" to use is made free of the influence of those substances. The natural counter-point is that people get addicted to substances sometimes as a result of decisions where a person's moral responsibility is murky, such as someone starting use when they were very young and where consent is ambiguous or where the effects of their choices weren't foreseeable to them even if we think they should've been.
"Whether or not an addict has free will when they inject their thousandth dose of heroin, they had free will when they injected the first one." Yeah, but they are often so immature when they start that they should not have an opportunity, at that age, to exercise their free will about something so important. I started smoking at 17 because older college students I admired were smoking. While I was aware that smoking is terrible for you, I was just too young to really get that I, too, could get hooked, or even to fully grasp that I was mortal. And if you think actually I was old enough to make a sensible decision about whether to buy a pack of cigarettes, consider that the tobacco companies at one point were handing out free cigarettes on *playgrounds*. I'm not saying that addicts don't have free will, just objecting to your implication that they bear full responsibility for becoming addicted.
But I think it’s likely that those lucky enough not to be living a life of despair have a lot more free will in their tank than those that have been beat up by life through no fault of their own.
Caplan's point was precisely the opposite : that for each drug there are a lot of casual users who manage to keep a reasonable behaviour beyond their first use and that punishing them for an (as yet) victimless crime is counter-productive.
Yes, that sounds dumb. I would punish them all equally.
Drug crimes seem like a no-brainer to punish harshly, because by putting someone in prison for long enough you can cure their addiction. (Assuming the prison is competently run, of course, which I understand that they are most certainly not in almost all parts of the world.)
You are discounting all the utility people get from drugs.
To suggest my nonviolent behavior should be punished harshly is insulting to me and a threat to my life and values, and many feel the same. It's also wasteful societally because it doesn't really stop people effectively, it just costs a great deal as a policy and (much more importantly) makes people no longer able to be productive (many drug users are productive)
The punishments you are proposing inflict their own sort of harm, both on the user, and on all the people that the user's life touches. And putting a person in prison for a long time for consuming an addictive substance that risks a substance use disorder, such as drinking a beer, is likely to yield more aggregate harm than what you're seeking to prevent. This doesn't mean that alcoholism doesn't cause a lot of problems, but this is about as classic of an example of a cure being worse than the disease as there is.
This... doesn't seem that bad. Do you know of a book/article criticizing these estimates and making the case for radical climate action ? How reliable are these estimates ?
1, climate impacts keep getting much worse into the far future, costs probably get a lot worse after.
2, From reading the comment threads at Tyler's blog, it seems like these are extrapolations from the economic effect of the slight temperature etc changes we've seen so far? IOW this is strictly a dramatic underestimate because they just haven't considered discontinuous thresholds and predictable-but-unseen forms of damage at all? Like, wet bulb > 35 C is a red line condition for humans, some regions will become outdoor-uninhabitable, that's super expensive. Flash flooding and flash drought in agricultural regions destroy crops, at the same time that sea level rise inundates productive river valleys with salt, that's super expensive. There's a lot more to 4 C warming than doing the first degree of warming 3 more times.
I've given this some thought. I agree that the GDP numbers often don't seem terrible. I can't really say whether they're reliable, but they're the best we have.
But having read The Ministry of the Future and absorbed the catastrophic potential of a wet bulb mass casualty event, I thought about it in human terms. How many people account for 3-6% of GDP? I don't know the exact answer, but based on back of the napkin math I believe it's around 2 billion. What if part of that GDP loss came about because many of those people simply died? Just as a thought experiment, would we feel better about a billion people dying prematurely because they only contributed a couple of percent of world GDP?
Another thing to consider is that the estimates probably combine gains and losses from climate change. Northern countries might gain 5%, and hot countries might lose 11%, netting out to a "this is fine" 6% loss. Except not if you're in the hot countries.
So yes, those estimates make me feel better about the robustness of human civilization to climate change, but I think they're pretty incomplete for considering how hard we should work to avoid climate impacts.
On the bright side, we seem to have most of the technology identified to stop climate change, and renewable energy is quickly becoming cheaper than fossil fuels, so I think with a smidge of geoengineering we'll be on the right track.
The hot countries are already hot. They will get richer. The biggest changes are in moderately hot countries, in the mid latitudes, in places like Europe. Watch the headlines now. Europe won’t get all that much richer unless things economically improve. It might be one of the poorer regions on earth by 2100.
If people want to be doomsterish I would worry about the opposite to what environmentalists worry about, depopulation not overpopulation.
There's hot, and then there's "everyone who lives here dies if the power goes out".
I do hope that Europe gets some of its mojo back, but I don't think they're going to be as impacted by climate change. Sure, there will be heat waves, but overall I bet Europe benefits slightly from getting warmer.
Europe is where the excess deaths caused by heat are now happening. It’s much more likely that places not adapted to 100f will suffer more than places where 100+ is common already.
“everyone who lives here dies if the power goes out".
But that’s true of place like Doha and Saudi now. Max temperature in doha today is 44C. 111F. It’s above 105 all
Week. Peaking at 116F on Saturday. A few degrees more there won’t matter.
33,000 deaths since 2014 in Paris. Crowded, ageing European cities with no air conditioning will fare the worst. There’s no respite from heat in Europe, go into a cafe or a pub, go home, go to the cinema and it’s hotter.
You also kind of give the impression you don’t understand the non-preponderance of artificial cooling with the “ everyone who lives here dies if the power goes out” because the power going out doesn’t matter in much of Europe and other parts of the world not used to heat, where air conditioning isn’t common.
Doesn’t affect the heat or cold indoors. There are poorer countries without air conditioning that are already hot, but their societies and built environment has over the centuries become accommodated to heat.
Let me introduce the concept of dry-heat vs wet-heat.
You can acclimate to a dry-heat weather. Sweat a lot, use air-circulating clothes, hide from the sun, etc. Thus even a 44°C is survivable by a traditionnal desert dweller. Plus desertic regions tend to go coller at night, so you have a chance to store cold into the walls of your house.
Now take wet-heat. If the humidity is above 80% you cannot sweat. Above 34°C your body just keeps heating up until you die. No amount of shading / air circulation / window opening or closing will help you because the air is hot everywhere all the time. And doesn't cool at night.
This is the condition that was reached in a large part of Pakistan last year, and is apparently the case right now in the lower mississipi swamp.
The only way to survive there is with a working AC unit.
Not sure of your point here regarding European deaths due to heatwave or not? It gets pretty humid in parts of Europe. Those kinds of temperatures and humidities could well happen in Europe.
I agree that Europe is suffering from the heat to some extent and that this will increase. It's also a fair point about air conditioning not being common in much of the world.
Poorer countries being more acclimated to heat won't necessarily help when wet bulb temperatures go above what the human body can survive.
If you think about it, energy allows the creation of capital. So, don't forget to include the GDP losses when cheap plentiful energy sources stop being available. Without the ~26,000 Terawatt hours we consume every year, the current economic structure will be unsustainable. We're living in an economic golden age right now. Unless we have breakthroughs in nuclear fusion technology, we'll be back to living at a 1980s East German standard of living by the end of this century—that's if we're lucky. Well, "we" as humanity. I'll likely be dead before it gets that bad.
If you're fine with reducing everything to GDP, and ignoring that some people die, while others are barely inconvenienced, then that may be a reasonable argument. Otherwise not.
Some people will die while others will be barely inconvenienced is an accurate description of literally all government decisions. Including things like setting speed limits or universal healthcare. You might want to make a more substantial, less demagogue-y argument.
If the GDP of Senegal is 3 times what it is now by 2100, deaths from climate change will very likely be compensated by better food and medicine. On net they will be better off, although not better off than under the zero warming scenario.
The issue is that those losses do not stop compounding in 2100. If you don't care about what happens outside of your lifespan then it's unlikely to affect you. If you do then you want to minimize the loss by taking sensible climate action. Sensible meaning long term, cost minimized transition to cleaner fuels, more efficient energy use, and perhaps things like carbon capture/scrubbing. The case for radical action, as you noted, is mostly overstated and more a matter of faith than science. As is the idea it will cause ecological or social collapse.
OK, but you've got to remember that thermodynamics guarantees that carbon scrubbing will cost more energy that was released in freeing the carbon. Currently it's mainly window dressing and an excuse to keep polluting. There are some lab studies where it's useful, though. But it requires exogenous energy inputs. (Solar, wind, wave, coal...something.)
> but you've got to remember that thermodynamics guarantees that carbon scrubbing will cost more energy that was released in freeing the carbon
That is just straightforwardly wrong I think? You don't convert the CO2 back into coal or hydrocarbons, but store it directly or convert it into a form that has lower binding energy than the fuel. See e.g. here for some calculations for coal plants: https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/a/135335
If you're pulling it from the atmosphere, or even the ocean, you've got to re-concentrate it SOMEHOW, if only at the surface of the molecule. This is expensive. Pulling it from the flue only helps to a slight extent. (You've got to filter out all the waste products.) And the things you are building aren't THAT much lower in binding energy.
Build tons of wind farms offshore, enough to power a grid on a moderately windy day. Or on a slightly windy day ( remember that offshore is always breezier than onshore) - on very windy days use the excess to capture carbon, or generate hydrogen - or whatever.
While true. you need to grind that rock to powder to get very rapid re-absorption. That's cheaper than many approaches, but I'm not sure how cost effective it would be. And the rock doesn't exist everywhere. (Most places the rock is already old enough to have absorbed all it's going to absorb.)
I suspect that it's cheaper to build a solar or wind power plant and use the electricity to drive the conversion. Then you've got to convince people not to burn it again.
That's why I said perhaps. The ideal energy mix for minimal pollution in an advanced industrial economy is already solved. We just can't do it because it involves a lot of nuclear and Greens really dislike nuclear for... reasons.
I haven't read the papers in question, but I assume that in order to make this kind of argument, you have to consider a world that by 2100 still ressembles ours quite a lot.
In contrary I see basically two possible paths for humanity:
* either we fail to find a source of energy before oil runs out, and the civilisation basically crumbles -> the GDP loss is on the order of 99%
* or we+AI developp a free abundant form of energy, plus all the technology to mitigate and/or reverse global warming -> the GDP gain is on the order of 10000%
Either way, the pure consequences of global warming seems a blip on the radar. (although a post-apocaliptic civilation would still rather have a livable planet than not).
The oil will never run out. Long before it runs out it will be replaced by other technologies - which we already have for the most part. We will have to legislate to keep the oil in the ground eventually.
That is the issue with most climate change discourse. They say to believe the science, but then when you actually look at "the science" (if economic papers can be called that*,) you usually see numbers that hardly seem worth worrying about.
*IPCC estimates are probably as "science" as it comes, and those definitely do not support all the doom and gloom you often hear as the right stance to have.
The IPCC has consistently low-balled their predictions by excluding those models that predict extreme events. And they've been pretty consistently wrong, predicting less change than happened. If you want to consider them "sciency", use them for the low-ball line of your whisker graph.
Well, your page contradict two other reports that I've read, so I'll need to think a bit about whether to adjust my beliefs, continue to hold them, or try to do the calculations myself. (That last is quite unlikely as it's not that high on my priorities.)
Complicating things is that the two prior reports may have been based on the same study. I read it in either Science News or New Scientist, or perhaps both. And I don't remember enough about the articles to track the original study. Also this article was at least 5 years ago.
OTOH, I've been continually encountering articles where someone involved in a climate science project says that the results they are getting are well above what their models predicted. So I'm going to have trouble if I try to lower my belief that the IPCC has been underestimating warming. (Granted, articles carry comments that evoke interest, and this strongly biases what they report. Still....)
I've already read that. I wasn't presuming the worst case even before I read it. But sea level warming is happening. (i.e. the top layer of the sea is getting excessively warm). Permafrost melting is happening. (Check out Zombie fires.) They keep finding new ways that the ice is melting faster than they've previously noticed. Unexpected sources of methane keep showing up. (There was a new one this week, though I don't remember the details.) Forests are drying out and catching fire more than usual.
Now I can't tell how serious any of this is, probably nobody knows for sure. But it's all headed in one direction. (Well, not ALL. Mainly.)
The current warm spell was sort of expected as part of the normal cycle, but it's a lot hotter than was expected.
"hardly worth worrying about" is a stretch, they're still much bigger than the negative impact of any mitigation policies in the Overton window (if not as big as some hardcore environmentalists would support).
I wasn't able to find 3 to 6 % in linked blogpost, but that is indeed somewhat in the range of mainstream estimates (IPCCC etc.) for plausible levels of warming.
I am not sure what you mean by "radical climate action" (some conservatives I've met seem to think that any sort of action in this area is, like, tantamount to impending communist revolution), but in general climate doomerism of "Extinction rebellion" variety is not supported by scientific evidence.
The problem is that the climate models become quite unreliable when you get into uncharted territory. We don't really know that the "doom" scenarios are wrong. And some of the official models have actually predicted some of them. (E.g. "no more clouds". I couldn't find a link in a quick internet search, but it came out a few years ago. I only read a popular summary, but the gist was if temperature rises ? 5 degrees? F or C? then all the cloud cover will disappear). You can't trust those models, though, because the climate models become quite unreliable when you get into uncharted territory. It might well not be that bad. Or it might be worse.
I *think* that's a different article. The abstract didn't talk much about increased temperature. (Of course, I never read the original article. And that's in the right time-frame to be the same paper. Or perhaps a second paper reporting on the same simulation...you can usually frame things more than one way. The abstract does mention that they were doing multiple simulations, as, I guess, one should expect.)
OTOH, I may just have remembered the pieces that impressed me. "CO2 levels rise above 1,200 ppm" doesn't yield, to me, any intuitive sense that they're talking about tripling the CO2 level, and that's clearly very significant.
On the third hand, the model shouldn't be taken too seriously, because it's well outside the range at which the models have been validated. Even where we are we keep finding unexpected feedback loops.
I mean, yeah, there is definitely a possibility that things will turn out to be worse than mainstream models predict, just like there is a possibility that things will turn out to be better than those models predict. What is virtually impossible to not happen is large scale collapse of civilization
ation because we will slightly miss Paris targets. All rhetoric about "we have /insert low number/ years to save the planet" is wildly exxaggerated.
The planet's in no danger. Civilization is, but it's unlikely that warming alone will cause civilization to collapse. Social unrest caused be warming (e.g. starvation riots) is another matter. That might well get serious enough the civilization collapsed, probably by causing someone to start a major war. And it might be unrecoverable. MIGHT. I can't assign any defensible probability weighing to anything in that area.
Catastrophic war might happen even without climate change having anything to do with it; after all, most recent major war was started by a country (Russia), that is not exactly on the top of the list of regions most vulnerable to global warming.
I do agree that a world with higher living standards is less likely to have catastrophic social unrest, so to an extent that climate change mitigation helps to raise overall everyday quality of life, it marginally decreases chances of a major war, but at the same time, humanity is perfectly able to find reasons to destroy ourselves with e.g. nuclear weapons even without climate change.
David Friedman has a number of blog posts basically arguing that the estimates are extremely uncertain and we don't even know what sign the cost of global warming has. There was some discussion about this in a previous thread: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-261/comment/12342030
On the other hand, last I checked he was still repeating the "cold deaths > heat deaths" argument that Scott already debunked. (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/chilling-effects) Also, "lie back and think of all the new farmland in Siberia" isn't terribly encouraging to people who don't live in Siberia.
Having read that thread, it didn't look like any sort of debunking. Scott raised a lot of interesting questions that focused on one study indicating about ten times as many cold-related deaths as heat-related, and starting with "that seems wrong; is it?" and then going from there into the details of how that study laid out its reasoning and standards of measurement. Overall, he's skeptical of what nearly everyone is reporting.
That said, some of his questions had been addressed by an argument David Friedman had made about 35 years prior to Scott's article, and Friedman himself addressed some of the remaining ones in a comment on that article.
I also have some questions about the studies that claimed to model increases in mortality related to warming. Even assuming all the models are perfectly correct, As quoted by Scott, Bressler writes: "For all 23 countries, Gasparrini et al. predict an increase in heat-related excess mortality and a decrease in cold-related excess mortality under climate change scenarios, with most countries experiencing a net increase in mortality."
However, if you look at Gasparrini's study, under the RCP 2.6 scenario, they predicted increased mortality in 11/23 countries, which is not most countries.
Even under the RCP 4.5 scenario, they only predicted increased mortality in 12/23 countries, which is the barest possible majority.
It seems like a much more accurate version of what Gasparrini said about this scenario is that net mortality would increase in about half of countries and decrease in about half of countries.
Not Siberia, but northern Canada? It should be possible to find out if farmland is expanding in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and I'm not the only inquiring mind that wants to know. Reasons to be sceptical - 1 Farmers actually want fewer extreme weather events more than just warmer temps. 2 Increased CO2 does cause more plant growth but weeds benefit more from it than cultivated crops (source - an article in Science News I once read). OTOH, if Canadian farmers are benefiting, some media might want to not mention it.
How are the extremists running the show? By yelling at people on Twitter? Or by giving people a rebate for buying a heat pump? In the everyday world, I still see everyone driving around in their SUVs, so while I get frustrated with doomerism too, I think they've gotten worked up in part because they've seen so little progress.
On the bright side, technology and capitalism will mostly take care of it for us, so the politics of climate at this point are mostly a sideshow. The real heroes were the people who subsidized solar panels and wind from the 70's through the 2010's.
Short story recommendation! From a 2016 anthology of Lovecraftian fiction, the story "Bright Crown of Joy" by Livia Llewelleyn.
There's a summary here but it doesn't convey the strangely beautiful writing, which is chock-full of body horror (if you look at it one way) but the narrator doesn't, and so we don't either:
There seems to be a strain of new Mythos writers who take the side of the monsters, and while generally I harrumph about that, this story is beautiful and strange and poetic. I recommend it! The anthology is "Children of Lovecraft" edited by Ellen Datlow.
You could say it's a kind of transhumanism.
And while "Humanity is becoming something without consciousness or individuality" I much prefer Llewelleyn's take on it than Peter Watts in "Blindsight".
I'd love to find some way to do formatting in the comments, markdown seems not to work and Substack pages are more interested in getting you to be an author yourself and publish on Substack rather than give any help.
I'm reading this on laptop, and the really long comments get cut off at the bottom, until you click to expand it. So I think it would work if you did this:
So the other day I came across the following short poem by Abbas Kiarostami:
Beyond good and evil,
the sky
is blue.
It's clearly(?) meant as a haikuesque juxtaposition of the timelessness objectivity of natura versus the tumultuous abstract life of humans. I like that interpretation, it feels nice and simple yet powerful, like this sort of poem ought to be.
Anyone have sources for ideas about architecture that adapts to its environment and climate?
I live in the Far Southwest at 32° latitude outside Tucson; our climate is similar to that of El Paso, so we share a lot of architectural practices. But I’d like to look into building techniques, especially passive ones, that mitigate extremes at 32° latitude north or south, e.g.
Tel Aviv, Jordan
Santiago, Valparaiso
Buenos Aires
Perth, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne
Alexandria, Cairo
Beirut, Damascus
Lahore, Delhi
Madeira Islands, Morocco
Nanking
Nagasaki, Miyazaki
Does anyone else sleep outdoors?
I found Aysegul Seker IIlgin’s master’s thesis for Middle East Technical University — Form and Space in Roman Domestic Architecture: The Architectural Language of the Atrium House — online. It’s been a great resource for discovering how Roman engineers used architecture to adapt to their environment and climate. But it’s about fifteen centuries dated.
What does the wind rose look like in your area? Middle eastern vernacular architecture uses windcatchers to pull the prevailing wind down into houses. Or it can act as a chimney if the air is still
A good thick adobe should do what you want. You can also place an awning over it when the climate is hot, so it cools at night and then never really warms up during the day. I suppose you could use a mirror in winter to provide extra heat, if it's a dry climate.
But the basis is the adobe. You can't change it after you fire it, so work out the plans carefully. (Airflow patterns, water, and electric passages. You can't change the adobe after you fire it.) And I don't know that it works for more then two stories high.
In Madeira I've never noticed anything special in this department. Just the same combo of good insulation, decent but not big windows and window doors. That more or less completely block out the sun. Funnily enough, some homes (usually of the well-off) even have fireplaces even though they're literally never needed (unless you're up in the mountains).
Most heat regulation revolves around opening and closing windows at the right time, as far as I can see.
We slept sort of outdoors in an eco-hotel on the Baja Pennnsula. Huge windows, taking up half the wall. No screens, no glass in windows and I'm not sure there was even a way to close the windows -- maybe there were some shutters. In any case, we slept with the windows wide open and unscreened, and it was cool and lovely. There were no mosquitos. I suppose bats and whatnot flew through while we slept, but whatever happened there open to the night did not trouble us at all, and we had deep wonderful sleeps.
From talking to elderly relatives I think it used to be quite common that you'd have a huge verandah surrounded with flyscreens, and in the summer you'd put your bed out there and sleep outside. You'd basically move your whole life to the verandah.
We call them "Arizona rooms" here. It's really just a screened-in porch surrounding the structure. They may have been used for sleeping before electricity and swamp coolers.
Yeah absolutely, I grew up that way (early 70s, small country town two hours from Brisbane). Only moved to my first residence with AC in the last few years because I hated sleeping in hotel AC (too drying) and assumed that residential would be the same. I was wrong, but I still don't leave the AC on overnight until it's 30deg+ as I prefer the ceiling fan.
This used to be common even outside climates we consider warm. I visited a national park in upstate New York and the old house there had a second story screened in "sleeping porch" where people would sleep in summer.
I've seen a thermal convection structure at the Tucson airport, and was pretty impressed. The Turkish architecture student writes quite a bit about Roman passive techniques of mitigating adverse environmental factors. Some cultures developed such techniques over centuries, and they're embedded in the culture.
There’s also geothermal heat pumps. Even if the ground temperature isn’t *hot* where you are, you can at least count on it being stable, e.g. if you go below frost line you can be assured it won’t drop below freezing. This is helpful if you’re relying on a heat pump for your primary heat, since the conventional ones stop working when the outside air gets too cold.
Agreed. A stable underground temperature indeed is a very nice heat sink for a heat pump to pump to or from. ( A pity the system initial cost is so high. I considered it for the house I and my late wife had built, but the payback time was comparable to our expected lifetime at the time we decided. )
What was Google Zeitgeist? It is referring to [[Google Hot Trends]] here, not their annual conference (nor a generic concept of attendance at an infamous SF bar). The filtered real-time feed of the top 100 "trending" search queries.
It was wonderful, and it was terrible, and eventually Google got people called "project managers" who realized that maybe Google should just not have that data stream available for free to the entire internet.
Book Recs on Family Systems Theory?!? (Family Systems Theory tends to focus heavily on individuals maintaining their integrity in the face of opposition, to use specialized meanings of the words "differentiation" and "regressive," and to worry about enmeshment more than about open conflict.)
I am slightly obsessed with a few books that build stuff on it--first "A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix" by Edwin H. Friedman, and now ones by the "sexual crucible" psychologist guy, David Schnarch... mainly "Passionate Marriage."
I haven't read the original one Murray Bowen yet, but I know it exists! Does anyone have other recs of good solid books that use this analysis? I'd like to have one to recommend to people that isn't "Here's this leadership book that was thrown together from some guy's notes after he died" or "Here's.. basically a sex book intended for people who've been in a long-term relationship for quite a while."
Yes! I have an excellent recommendation. But first I have to say that I am depressed to hear that absurdly diluted and debased versions of Bowen's ideas are all that's available. Wonder whether there's one on what Bowen would have had to say about the pros and cons of Brazilian butt lifts.
Anyhow, my recommendation : The Power Tactics of Jesus Christ, byJay Haley, who worked with Minuchin, another of the family systems guys. It's a collection of interconnected essays about family therapy, the dynamics of families with a schizophrenic child who is the identified patient, and, as the title says, the power tactics of Jesus. Last essay looks at key moments in the biblical story of Jesus, analyzing things he said from the point of view of their value as tactical moves to gain and maintain power in a complex situation. The book's rude, funny, entertaining and smart.
Also, if you're want to read one of the originators of the approach, Minuchin is a lot more readable than Bowen.
Thanks for the recommendation; I just read the first chapter, and I enjoyed it a lot! It is very funny and simultaneously points to important things. Reminds me of Eric Berne.
I'm glad you're enjoying it. I liked it so much that I still remember a few bits verbatim. One's in the chapter on schizophrenia, and how to be schizophrenic you need the proper kind of sibling, "a weak kind bastard of a sibling . . ."
> "But first I have to say that I am depressed to hear that absurdly diluted and debased versions of Bowen's ideas are all that's available."
It sounds like you're saying you inferred this from what I said!? Am I right?! If so... I wasn't intending to say that! I was just saying those are the books I've stumbled into so far on the topic. I, umm.. decided to ask here before going to any great effort to find Family Systems Theory books that didn't just jump off the shelf and hit me in the face. :D
And I didn't think either of those two books was bad ...just... one of them the author didn't live long enough to finish putting the book together himself, so we maybe don't get to read exactly what he was intending to write and... the other book is applying FST to one very specific (though significant) part of people's lives.
Thank you for your recommendation!! (I intend to say more later!)
Strange question: can anyone point me to good resources - preferably academic writings or advanced blog posts - that thoroughly deal with / argue against Radical Skepticism? (like Epistemological Nihilism, Pyrrhonism, etc.) I'm aware of Meditations on First Philosophy, but I was interested to know if there are more.
I'm asking for a friend. No, I'm dead serious - I recently had a debate with an old friend where he (as far as I could tell) honestly defended the idea that - paraphrasing his own words here - all truth is relative, or if it isn't it's impossible to know, that believing the truth "doesn't matter" anyway, and so on. He even went so far as to express doubt over his own existence.
Personally, I find nihilism like that to be repulsive and pseudo-philosophical, and obviously wrong. But what kind of resources would - at least in theory - help someone like my friend pull himself out of whatever hole he's fallen into? (He admitted to me that he thought nihilism was stupid, but he couldn't see any way to avoid it; so he's open to changing his mind.)
Weird recommendation, but Hogfather by Terry Pratchett. There's a conversation between Death and his granddaughter at the end that I often reflect back on in moments of nihilism. "YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN'T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME?"
The main problem with radical skepticism is that you never have time/resources/inclination to check everything. And it's a real problem. Most solve it by only being skeptical in a limited area. If you want to be really radical, though, you can never take a step, because you don't know the floor will support you.
OTOH, this is quite different from the position that "all truth is relative". That phrase is basically meaningless, because it has too many possible meanings. But if you want to challenge it, you could do worse than "cogito ergo sum". Or consider "thus I refute Berkeley" if you want an argument. (The appropriate refutation depends on how your friend thinks about things.)
OTOH, radical skepticism isn't the position that "all truth is relative", but rather "all truth is unknowable", which is probably correct, though I have a math-oriented friend who disagrees with me about that. (N.B. "all truth is unknowable" is snappy, but what it means is that we can never be certain that something is true, or, in Bayesian terms, priors should never be either 0 or 1.
It's true that you can never fully check everything. But I feel that you have no choice but to take that first step, at some point. I may not be able to prove with 100% mathematical logic that the sun will rise tomorrow, but through inductive intuition I can say it almost certainly will, and that I should believe it will. That is where my friend disagrees; he says that induction is invalid, and that all we can really say is that we (paraphrasing here) choose to have faith in induction if it makes us happy. If we don't want to, we don't need to, and there is no deep sense in which not believing in inductively proven statements is just wrong.
What you say about relativism makes sense to me, and is the main reason I reject it. I another comment, however, I explained that this didn't work for him; he just bit the bullet and through out the law of non-contradiction (and if you look up Dialetheism on Wikipedia, you'll find seemingly serious philosophers doing the same, as crazy as that sounds to me.)
Personally, the "all truth is unknowable" thing bothers me, because while it is trivially true (as you say, priors can never be fully 0 or 1, due to the natural uncertainty of our perceptions and cognitions), you can't use that as an excuse to drop out of making any knowledge claims ever - like my friend. Sure, I can't prove 100% that my cat exists when I see him and pet him; I can't prove 100% that seeing something and petting something is even valid grounds for belief at all. But come now; we're serious adults here. If we see a car hurtling towards us at 100kmph, you can sit and say that it's impossible to know anything for sure - I'm going to jump out of the way.
Not trying to be confrontational, by the way. Those last sentences were addressed more to my friend than to you. Your comment was very good and made me think harder about my positions.
But knowledge claims ARE invalid. What is valid are claims of what your estimates are. I'd never bet against the sun rising (though this isn't a claim that it would be visible), but I don't claim to KNOW it as TRUTH. And I don't claim that about 1+1 = 2 either. I just claim that it's so likely it would be absurd to bet against it.
You don't really give up anything important by refusing certainty. Not if you accept that probabilities can be really high or low.
I'm something of a radical skeptic; truth is unknowable.
That said, the entire premise of the website "Less Wrong" is that, even if we cannot reach truth, we can get closer to it; we cannot be "right", or at least to be certain of our own "rightness", but we -can- become, incrementally, less wrong.
Relativity may or may not be correct, but it is less wrong than Newtonian gravity, which in turn is less wrong than what predated it, which is less wrong than what predated it, where "less wrong" in context means "In greater agreement with reality". Newtonian gravity is "close enough" for almost all purposes, however; one note about becoming incrementally less wrong is both that, historically, the math has gotten increasingly difficult, and also that the areas in which each succeeding model fail become smaller and smaller.
That last point is critical; most people don't even need Newtonian gravity. All you really need to know is that things fall downwards, and fast enough to damage something. The areas which this fails in your daily life are basically nonexistent for the majority of people. Being less wrong about gravity doesn't help most people!
(If this offends your sense of scientific literacy, well, why does it matter that people properly understand -this- thing? The sphere of knowledge is expanding faster than any one person could ever keep up with. We live in tiny islands of knowledge surrounded by vast oceans of ignorance. The proper thing to do is to learn to adapt to this situation, not to try to insist that the island you happens you occupy is the one everybody should live on.)
The aliens will have the exact same version of Pythagoras’ theorem as we do, with differences only in the mathematical symbols. If we used dots for numbers it would be exactly the same.
I think Kristian is right that the problem with your friend is unlikely philosophical but is instead psychological/emotional. Radical Skepticism and Nihilism are contradictory positions. A nihilist believes that something doesn't exist, while a radical skeptic believes that beliefs about anything are unjustified since we can't have enough knowledge to confidently make such claims. Radical Skepticism on it's own is self-defeating since a radical skeptic holds the belief that you can't hold beliefs, which is absurd. But even if one is loosely adopting these positions, at best they should be an Absurdist, not a Nihilist. Martin Blank is also right that radical skepticism is just a pointless position to adopt, maybe suggest your friend read some Kierkegaard or Frankl?
I've seen multiple people point out that Radical Skepticism / Relativism / Nihilism are not the same thing. Fair enough; there are technical differences between the three. But I would argue that, in practice, they all lead to the same place: a state of profound doubt of intuitions that I consider basic to all intellectual progress, namely the beliefs that statements are objectively True or False, and that this can be known through the correct epistemological rules. This is where my friend seems to be.
The point that Radical Skepticism is self-defeating seems clearly correct to me. Although I worry that it's almost too obvious; the Radical Skeptic could simply dig themselves in deeper hole by denying the law of non-contradiction. In fact, this is what my friend did when I challenged him with this point. Worse still, while I think rejecting basic principles of logic is clearly insane, some apparently thoughtful thinkers seem to actually claim otherwise - see Graham Priest's Dialetheism, a form of logic that allows self-contradicting statements(!)
I agree that Absurdism is far more sensible than pure Nihilism, and I actually think that Kierkegaard or Frankly could be great for my friend. Thanks for the recommendations.
https://meaningness.com is great. This page is specifically about nihilism: https://meaningness.com/preview-eternalism-and-nihilism. "[E]ternalism and nihilism are each half right. Eternalism rightly recognizes that the world is meaningful to us, and that it must be accepted as it is. This is the acknowledgement of pattern: the world in all its variety, pain and pleasure alike. Nihilism rightly recognizes that there is no eternal source of meaning, so there is no ultimate basis or necessity for rejecting anything. This is the acceptance of nebulosity: the chaos and contingency of the world, and the recognition that we are free from divine law."
It’s a bit unclear whether his problem here is philosophical or psychological. I don’t want to be offensive, but often people justify their emotional problems with philosophical rationalizing. Is this just an intellectual debate or is he hurt someway by this?
He admitted to me that he thought that nihilism was "stupid" but that he couldn't find a way out of it. He was open to me showing him a different way.
I personally intuited that he was disturbed by his thinking. And yes, I certainly could see that he's really just rationalizing his own depressive feelings. I know I've done the same in the past.
You can't argue yourself out of chemical imbalance.
On a philosophical level, we can talk about what "existence" is, we can discuss Tegmark multiverse, Everett branches, etc. It is fun (but has diminishing returns after some point).
Saying that "truth does not exist" is often just a refusal to update on a specific uncomfortable information. Turning this into an abstract epistemological debate is walking in exactly the opposite direction.
But if there is actual *behavior* corresponding to "nothing is true, I probably don't even exist", such as dropping out of school, neglecting former hobbies, or not leaving the bed for the whole day, then the required resource is therapy and/or a pill.
Not sure if this is precisely what you're looking for, but Eliezer has a fairly rigorous sequence of posts titled Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for Beginners that discusses the nature of truth and why you should care about it:
Yes, this seems like an excellent resource. I haven't read the Sequences yet (yes, you may gasp at my lack of education), but Eliezer definitely strikes me as the kind of person who's both skilled and meticulous enough to give me the kind of "start-from-the-beginning" epistemology that I'm looking for. Will read. Thanks
But he's not quite right. A lot of stuff is metaphor, which is neither true or false until interpreted...and often not then. It's frequently "this is the way to act with this group of people, if you want to be accepted by them".
I object to the claim "Any meaningful belief has a truth-condition, some way reality can be which can make that belief true, or alternatively false."
There are many things humans will never understand or know. Religious beliefs may not have a "truth-condition"; interpretations of quantum physics may not have a "truth-condition". Yet beliefs about those things can be meaningful and useful. Our brains may not be big enough to understand much of what is really going on in the universe, and dividing things into simple categories of truth/untruth may be good enough for 4-year-olds but not all that meaningful to an entity significantly smarter than us apes.
Believing in Christianity could be one. Christianity might not be the literal truth, yet it could be a belief system which is no falser about humanity's place in the universe than is atheism or other religions and therefore meaningful and useful, useful in the sense that it may lead to a happier life for the believer and others that the believer spends their life around. There may exist no religious or philosophical belief or belief system which could correspond with either truth or non-truth, because the dichotomy of truth/non-truth could be a social construction by humans.
Another could be the multi-worlds interpretation quantum mechanics. There may be no correct interpretation of quantum mechanics. But believing in the multi-world interpretation might be meaningful in the sense that it could cause one to make different decisions in life than they would otherwise.
Typical obvious examples of beliefs within Christianity, like "god exists" and "Jesus was resurrected", definitely have truth-conditions. If you have in mind some particular Christian beliefs that lack truth-conditions then please be more specific.
I am not willing to say that a statement has meaning or truth just because it gives you emotions or changes your actions. Saying "garble snarble fiddle gux" could plausibly change someone's emotions or actions in some way, but that doesn't imply that it's meaningful or true.
And saying "the dichotomy of truth/non-truth could be a social construction by humans" just sounds like you're trying to muddy the waters. What do you mean "could be"? Do you have, like, actual REASONS for thinking it could? Eliezer has a pretty reasonable-sounding story about how "truth" is whatever thing determines the outcomes of experiments; do see some problem with that or have some alternate story?
I have a problem with buying something because it has a pretty reasonable-sounding story. Eliezer invokes Nietzsche regarding the nature of truth. Those are deep waters to dive into without more swimming gear than a pretty reasonable sounding story.
Probablism and Fallblism allow sceptical objections to be addressed by lowering the bar on non-scepticism -- indeed, they could be seen as scepticism about certainty.
There is no knock down argument to radical skepticism, other than you can’t do much of anything with it and it is much more practically and emotional fulfilling to just get on with life and stop staring into the coal pit of skepticism.
Douglas Adam's Ruler of the Universe is a fun example of a radical sceptic. Obviously, it has the flaw of being dependent on outside workers to maintain his existence, but still.
This seems correct to me. Ironically, despite radical skeptics often presenting as anti-metaphysics, I find radical skepticism to be far too metaphysical; in the real world, nobody actually acts like truth doesn't exist, and it's seemingly very hard if not impossible to do so, so why not just admit that our basic day-to-day intuitions are correct and move on with life?
Radical skepticism may be a good way to stop worrying about philosophy and getting on with the practical things of life. Some of the happiest, most practical people I know are nihilists.
There's an argument against radical scepticism to the effect that it is self defeating ...at least, the sceptic has to abandon the principle of non contradiction.
No philosophy is livable unless you either choose to reject the principle of non-contradiction or add a set of epicycles/exceptions to the purported principles.
I’ve noticed that I have an inherent distrust for advertisements. When I see an ad for a product, I come away wanting to buy it less (~95% of the time) and will often make a point of avoiding buying it. I never thought about it much but I realized that I must be in the minority here, or ad campaigns wouldn’t be a thing that companies did. Do y’all ever buy anything from ads?
I rarely find advertisements for *brands* consciously convincing (as in “here’s a product you are going to need one way or the other, buy it from us instead of the other guy”). I usually do other research for big purchases that would outweigh it. Then again, these might still be influencing me in more subtle ways, maybe associating brand A with “excellent service” and brand B with “lowest possible cost”, subconsciously impacting which brand I consider.
But “awareness” ads definitely work on me to some extent, either “here’s a cool product you didn’t know about” or “hey this thing you like already? It’s on sale this week!”
I think most people _think_ they distrust advertisements, but in fact they're working perfectly. It's easy to watch the nine out of ten ads that advertise something you're not interested in and say "pah, stupid ad, I'm actively going to avoid buying that, heh, that'll show them" but then the tenth ad comes along and you say "oh wow there's a new hunkdorian veeblespritzer coming out?" and you forget all about how much you hate ads for a moment.
I suspect most people on this forum view things this way, including me, and I also suspect we're wrong, including me. I think the flaw in most people's thinking is that a particular viewing of an ad gets one to buy things, whereas it is the cumulative effect that works.
That said, throwing advertising dollars out to get your message out isn't enough if it isn't done well. Coca Cola is famous for its advertising campaign, so they know what they're doing; if they let up, then they will see a drop in sales.
"Five strange tricks to loose weight, number 4 will blow your mind" will print money but not for the average ACX reader. For better or for worse, most ads (and most media for that matter) aren't made for us.
Ads work when you trust the brand. When you don't, they become a lot less effective. And even if you trust the brand, it has to be selling something you want.
OTOH, if you suddenly decide that you want a veeblefetzer, you are likely to look for someone you know that sells them. This may be a lot less true when you're buying over the web, but I notice that I'm skeptical about the quality of things sold under a brand I've never heard of before.
I was just thinking the other day I could use a veeblefetzer, since I don't have one, and you never know when you will need one.
Every ad isn't for every person. If EVERYONE hates an ad, then it won't be effective, but sending out a message to a million people, 99% of whom hate it, is $1 per person if it costs $10,000 to send out. And with how expensive veeblefetzers are these days, I'm sure you can see how cost-effective that is.
Me too, but that just applies to specific brands, not products. I'll often want to eat e.g. nachos after I see a character in a TV series eating nachos, just not the same brand of them.
I would also like to claim that I am mostly immune to advertisement, but on further reflection, I can't be sure. I am doubtful that a victim of advertisement is aware that they are even influenced by it.
The internet is mostly ad-free for me, so there is little reason to suspect I am affected by internet ads. I definitely see ads on the subway and the like, but I'd like to think they don't influence my consumer decisions.
Empirically, I buy few branded goods. In my daily life, mostly Coke (Zero), which is a bit suspicious given that Coke has probably one of the biggest advertising budgets on the planet.
(By contrast, from my understanding, the producers of Club Mate (another favorite of mine) are blissfully unaware of the cult status their product has acquired within the German hacker community. I think their lack of advertisement was actually a prerequisite to gaining that status. Still, you can accuse me of liking it because it is associated with a lifestyle I like.)
You may be in a minority, but you're certainly not alone! I'll give an advert a brief look the first time I see it, if it involves something that might interest me. But I also actively avoid buying something which I recall being advertised repeatedly over time. My rationale is that the product is probably no better than its competitors and, given all the money the sellers are spending on advertising it, very likely worse. Even if it is slightly better than similar products, I don't much care to pay for my own brainwashing!
As an example, take Casillero del Diablo wine, "from the Devil's cellar" they boast! Normally one can fast forward through TV ads, but Casillero del Diablo has some deal whereby its ads appear at the start of films and at each intermission. Now the prices of this product in supermarkets are the same as for other wines one doesn't see advertised. Ergo, despite its claims, it must be gut rot compared with the competition, or else the advertising funds would have been put into improving the wine's quality somehow, such as leaving it to mature for longer or something.
"My rationale is that the product is probably no better than its competitors and, given all the money the sellers are spending on advertising it, very likely worse."
This is not, strictly speaking, true, although it can be true in practice. A company with a healthy advertising budget is likely to just be selling a lot more product than its competitors, leaving it more to spend on not just advertising but R&D, quality, etc. Advertising is presumably a rational spend for companies, so there's got to be cases where they make more money from doing it, even after accounting for costs, than not doing it.
"the product is probably no better than its competitors and, given all the money the sellers are spending on advertising it, very likely worse"
Yup. I'm _particularly_ averse to financial products, since they are, to a 0-th approximation anyway, a zero-sum game. There was one instance where a car salesman actively pushed a lease deal at me, and the mere fact that it was in his interest to push it made me more and more distrustful of him as his pitch wore on.
I have wondered about the same thing myself, how ads work. Especially ads on the internet. Maybe a poster in a mall or a supermarket has affected my purchases, but I don’t think I have ever bought anything because I saw it advertised on the internet (I don’t include the ”similar products” type of thing on vendor websites when I say this, those are obviously helpful if I am looking for a specific type of product). An ad only has to work on a small percentage of people to work though. And I suspect a lot of the work ads do is just making people aware something exists.
I don't know how effective ads actually are. I'm not sure if advertisers know, either.
However, I think most people greatly underestimate their susceptibility to advertisements, because when they reflect on how ads affect them, they (1) overly focus on the ads they most hated, and (2) mostly think about how they felt while watching the ad, rather than how they felt a month later when choosing which product to buy at the store.
I make a conscious effort to penalize companies for ads that I disapprove of, in an effort to make such ads a less-effective strategy. I suspect I put more effort into this than most people. I still do not think I put enough effort to *reliably* make showing me such ads a negative-EV proposition for the advertiser, though. (Partly because most such ads are for things I would never have bought anyway.)
I have, on rare occasions, happily bought something as a direct result of an ad. I do think it's possible to do non-evil ads (though hardly anyone does). IMO good ads are ones that provide true information that rationally influences the audience; for example, informing me of some product that I would already be buying except that I didn't know it existed, or pointing out legitimate advantages or use-cases that I hadn't thought of. In principle, even just giving evidence that they're better than their competitors--though in practice it is so common for ads to give misleading evidence and so difficult for a viewer to identify it as misleading that I mostly just try to ignore stuff fitting that pattern.
> I think most people greatly underestimate their susceptibility to advertisements
Probably, I imagine, ads are generally most effective not so much at persuading people to buy something out of the blue which would never have occurred to them otherwise, but to remind them to buy something more often that they would and do buy anyway.
If you don't buy things, you don' buy them. If you buy them anyway, you already have established preferences. Ads are the most effective at the sweet spot where you're just deciding to buy something, but have no prior knowledge about either the thing you want to buy or the options that are available on the market.
Definitely. I bought Coke Zero entirely because I liked the packaging better than regular Coke, and I've bought at least one game after seeing their demo. For more traditional ads, I played the online RPG brawler Dungeon Fighter Online entirely because I saw a banner ad for it and said "this is a genre I didn't realize I wanted." Although that might not count since it's free-to-play.
I've had Adblock up for a decade now, but before that movie trailers got me interested in movies. I never did watch Dead Silence, but still have the urge to, just because of how... utterly trash their trailer was. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8b_HVtHmK30&t=17s ("The ventriloquist who LOST HER VOICE!")
Coke Zero is interesting, because the product is a near direct clone of Diet Coke with different branding so men can drink it without feeling feminine.
Now I am trying to think of other grocery store products that sit next to each other, are nearly identical, but are packaged/branded differently to each gender. Seems like there must be, but I am drawing a blank.
For a while, I bought Carlton Draught-brand beer more than the taste and price point would have made me otherwise, because they were producing funny and creative add that I wanted to encourage. And sometimes, an ad mentions a feature that I wouldn’t otherwise be aware of (e.g. I thought there wasn’t much competition in paper sustainability beyond “FSC good, PEFC is sponsored by logging companies”, until an ad mentioned it, and I learned that they were making toilet paper from bamboo), and then that information affects my purchases (I don’t buy that toilet paper, but I might if it starts feeling better).
I think most of the time someone is already in the market for something and advertising becomes the portal for further exploration. I think that’s true for me anyway.
It's possible that you're in the majority and ad companies rely on 'whales', the minority of people who actually buy stuff from ads. I suspect most people have, if not active disdain, a healthy skepticism towards mass advertised products.
I can't find it now, but I believe Scott made a post theorizing that ads work not because people want the things advertised, but because the ad allows them to signal something to other people, like "I'm environmentally conscious" by buying an electric car. It's far from ironclad though. I think it's more likely that ad companies have convinced the industry at large that they need ads for their products to succeed, even though buying ads is a huge waste of money.
Car Ads tell you nothing. A car drives along a scenic road. There’s nice music. That’s it.
All the features of the car, all the added extras, why it’s better than last years model, or the competition, its mpg, speed, safety features, the mapping software, the technology - nothing. Sometimes car shows like Top Gear will go into detail but TV ads and print ads gave nothing.
It's similar to spam: if the ad annoys hundred people, but convinces one person to buy the product - and the profit from that one extra buyer exceeds the costs of showing the ads to the hundred - it makes sense to do so, economically. The other people feeling annoyed is just a negative externality no one cares about. Most of them wouldn't buy your product anyway.
I can imagine two kinds of good targets. First, mentally weak people, who literally believe when the ad tells them that something is the best choice. Second, people who buy stuff for someone else (e.g. as a gift) which they really do not understand, so they are happy to follow any advice.
"it's more likely that ad companies have convinced the industry at large that they need ads for their products to succeed, even though buying ads is a huge waste of money."
This is my strong suspicion regarding a number of sectors, and I have one rather vivid piece of real-life experience to back it up with.
Just over twenty years ago I was the managing director of a young professional theater company in Chicago (despite not being a lifer in that industry -- long story). As is true for most professional theater companies ticket sales were the financial lifeblood of operations, and this company was too young to have yet built up a season-subscriber base. Hence successfully selling tickets to individual productions was crucial.
The theater artists involved were all absolutely certain that the placing of attractive and sizeable, hence expensive, display ads in the city's two newspapers was essential to selling tickets. So was the marketing director, and the rest of the small salaried staff all of whom had experience in professional theater. Accordingly, for the first full season in the company's new theater in the Loop we spent piles of operating cash on those ads.
I detected no positive correlation in the results: the size/frequency of those ads compared to sales results. Examining more closely the behavior on this point of the city's larger more established companies (Steppenwolf, Goodman, etc) did not support the idea that placing those ads was "the way" to sell tickets to live theater productions. I voiced these tentative conclusions, and also raised the possibility that online techniques might generate results at least as good at a fraction of the dollar costs.
This was before social media and a time when lots of adult Americans didn't yet spend much of their daily life online, so that last part came across to staff and ensemble alike as dubious at best. And the idea of cutting way back on the expensive newspaper ads sparked borderline hysteria among the core artists who were the face of the company -- they'd all grown up with newspaper ads being "the way you sold tickets". I was able to trim things a bit at the margins but in large part simply had to back down.
The ultimate fate of the company didn't directly support or contradict my hypothesis; it eventually shut down but this was just one issue among many. Trends during the last two decades in Chicago professional theater more broadly though have definitely supported my skepticism, which has been a blow to our [staggering, shadows of their former selves] two newspapers.
Personally I regret to this day that I didn't dig in my heels and insist that our theater company stop wasting a lot of precious operating cash on those newspaper ads. With that one ongoing fiscal wound staunched we could have at least gained some more time to address the startup's other issues. (No guarantees of success of course.) And I doubt very much that it would have harmed us much at the box office.
In the late 1990s I worked for a three-person on-site computer repair business. After assorted periods of feast and famine the owner decided it was time to go big or go home, and contracted a radio ad by Howard Stern through a local station. This type of local spot was a bulk deal for Stern; 15 second recordings about how such-and-such outfit he'd never heard of was the greatest. The ad cost $10,000 in late 1990s dollars.
Hearing our skills and wisdom crisply endorsed by Howard Stern in a public broadcast was surreal and invigorating. Subsequently, we received zero discernible customer contacts through this ad. (In retrospect, I'm not sure how we found customers at all. Maybe by word of mouth, or by dropping off business cards--IT services were in demand.) Unsurprisingly, since we had no money, we didn't pay. I believe the owner worked out an alternative deal with the station that combined a token pittance, shame over the ad's total ineffectiveness, and some free computer work.
The ad stayed in rotation for months, perhaps even a year after this debacle, by which time we'd all had to find gainful employment elsewhere. Gotta fill those slots!
This anecdote made me laugh; I like that "alternative deal" a lot.
Unfortunately newspapers had learned how to deal with startup theater companies long before I got involved with any of it -- all our display ads were on a strict cash-up-front basis!
I too have a background in theatre, and I agree with you. It’s not a great way to build an audience for an unknown theatre company. You have to start close to the ground and build word of mouth. Takes time.
This is why product placement is so much more effective. I saw the Apple logo on the back of iPhones in films for 5 years before I developed any urge to buy one. But eventually I did cave.
Do you remember your distaste for products that you've seen in advertisements when you see them in a shop? A lot of advertising seems to just be about keeping the name of the brand or product cached in your memory so that you have a manufactured sense of familiarity if you see it in a new context. Even if it annoyed you at one point, maybe recognition of the product would still be influential?
I guess I usually don’t remember(except for when Reece’s ran an awful ad campaign and I have actually bought less Reece’s since then). I do remember that I saw a Cane’s (chicken fast food) billboard and it made me go get Cane’s, but that was only after I’ve already been to Cane’s a lot and really like their food.
I’ll also say that I would never ever by a product from a brand I don’t recognize off of an Instagram ad, I trust them even less
I've wondered this too because I find ads really grating, but also people are subconsciously attracted to objects associated with prestige, even if the prestige is connected in an arbitrary way (e.g. basketball player recommending a yogurt brand).
Personally when I hear an annoying commercial I think "ugh, a commercial" rather than "ugh a commercial by Reece's" or whatever. Maybe if you harbor a more personalized grudge you would have more resistance to the brand.
I've had a go at an "Explained Fiction" about ubiquitous LLM virtual assistants. I think we're not far away. The fiction is shorter than the explanation. I welcome all feedback, especially from the discerning ACX hoards.
No Barbie/Oppenheimer discussion? Personally I enjoyed them both, but probably enjoyed Barbie more. Barbie had that 30 Rock/Mean Girls energy where even if I don't agree with everything in it it was still fun to watch and felt like a breath of fresh air. By far the worst scene in it is the car chase for it's gratuitous ad placement. Oppenheimer was fine I suppose. I liked the execution of the bomb scene, and the movie flew by (definitely did not feel like 3 hours). I wish Nolan would've focused more on either Oppenheimer or on the dilemma behind creating the bomb. As it is it felt to me like a weird mix of the two (along with the RDJ scenes). I haven't read the book it's based on though, so perhaps this is just how the work is structured. Really though it was nice being back in a theatre, can't wait for Dune Pt 2 later this year!
I read "Oppenheimer", the book, just last year and it was really, really good. Highly recommended.
But, I've through experience learned a strong policy against seeing films made from books that I'd really liked. So although the reviews for this film are tempting and obviously the subject matter is of interest to me....Hollywood's track record with this sort of thing is just too risky, and it's really hard to un-see a movie that's mangled a good book.
Oh but 3 hours with no intermission. I have no trouble sleeping 8 hours without peeing but to sit for 3 hours wondering, Do I have to pee yet? That’s another story altogether. A whole lot of distracting squirming will be involved in the last half hour.
I've just accepted I have a weak bladder. I buy seats near the aisle and am just ok with missing 1-2 minutes part way through the film. Better that road than sitting there praying for the film to end
Have you considered taking your breaks during chase scenes? Perhaps it's counterintuitive to leave during an exciting part. But I imagine that your friends can summarize them for you in <10 whispered seconds. (Some screenwriters supposedly just put "insert chase scene" in their scripts.) And Youtube is full of them.
I'm boycotting biopics for the next decade as they are the most insidious movies Hollywood produces. There are worse genres, but nothing is more responsible for unimaginative films supplanting imaginative ones than the biopic craze.
OK, this comment made me realize that Barbie and Oppenheimer do not appear in the same movie. I am finding the world so fucking weird now that I barely blinked at the idea of a movie that's a biopic of both together. Maybe they hook up at some point in the movie. Um, whatever, you know?
Here's how I imagine it goes as one movie. Nuclear war kills us all over a few weeks or months, mostly through radiation sickness. Luckily, the radioactivity was just enough to bring Mattel's dolls to life. Barbie meets Oppenheimer on his deathbed, and he entrusts her with some special MacGuffin. Thus one civilization succeeds another.
So we would get not just Barbie and Oppenheimer, but also some combination of transhumanism and cyclical eschatology (Hinduism being one of Oppenheimer's personal interests).
EdRealist was getting spicy lately about Caplan, so I went back and read his things about the Caplan. What struck me is:
"Caplan argues that only students from the Excellent or Good categories should invest in college. The NAAL report finds that only two percent of blacks read at proficient levels, 31% score at the intermediate level. If blacks or colleges took Caplan’s directive and only went to college with that qualification (which is actually broader than Caplan would like) just 4% of the overall population would be black college graduates."
I'd hope Mr. Ed can come and explain why the best answer isn't just. "So?" Why not? Are black college graduates from the lower tiers of achievement worth educating in this way in some objective way? Or is it just some sort of racial balancing desire and we must always take into account the peculiar desires of college administrators to be around black twenty somethings?
I haven't read either author, except for listening to Caplan (if it's the same guy?) appear on Sullivan's Dishcast and sound absolutely out of touch about open borders.
Premises:
1. The racial wealth gap is worse than not having a racial wealth gap.
2. There is still a wage premium for college degrees, if you read in a sufficiently technical field.
Claim: A higher proportion of black college grads earning the wage premium is a valuable societal goal b/c it decreases the racial wealth gap.
Racial wealth gaps are only a problem because people talk and think about it.
If we made it taboo to talk about it (the same way we make it taboo to talk about the wealth gap between Jews and others) then people wouldn't care about it (the way nobody cares about the wealth gap between Jews and others).
IIUC, this as pointing to Jews having disproportionately greater wealth / less poverty, which I think is the true direction of variance if any.
Minority wealth isn't a problem unless it has oligopolistic tendencies (as the ultra-rich in the US / the global economy today do in fact, but that's extraneous). Minority poverty is a social problem because minority social networks are in aggregate ~ more cohesive than adhesive (not sure this is the optimal phrasing), so the deprivation is stickier and creates pockets of extreme poverty which a) is bad prima facia and b) causes broader social problems.
Discussing Jim Crow in the south was super taboo, and yet racial discrimination was problematic.
I'm not sure I follow. Isn't there a whole ecosystem of antisemites and conspiracy theorists that care deeply about this issue, notwithstanding whatever alleged taboos bar us from talking about it? "Make it taboo to talk about" (assuming that effort has been successful) doesn't seem to have been effective in making such people stop caring about it. Mainly it just seems to (a) push them out of polite society and into dirty corners where they maybe do less to pollute the rest of us but also grow more extreme in isolation, while (b) making them more prone to marketing their nonsense as a "hidden truth *they* don't want you to know about" and the like.
If you read to the end of the article you link, I think you'll find this is pretty well addressed: fundamentally, the objection is that that would mean that a lot of black Americans who would benefit from going to College would not be doing so.
I don't see him clearly demonstrate that that Caplan's guidelines don't apply to Blacks. The closest I see is his claim that low proficiency Blacks who graduate from college are able to graduate from college. I don't see him showing that the percentage of low-proficiency Blacks who *will* graduate from college is high enough for them to benefit from going to college.
Even were it true that the degree of proficiency necessary for college to be a worthy investment differs by race, I don't know that that's a major issue for Caplan.
Of course, the more you break down the data, the more exact your predictions will be. That doesn't invalidate the disaggregated data.
If you want to claim that low-proficiency Blacks are likelier to graduate than average, such that low-proficiency Whites are less likely than the disaggregated average, then fine so be it.
Probably, if you were to break down the data along all sorts of dimensions, you'd find differences. I don't see how any of that affects Caplan's main points.
It seems that Clutzy's characterization was correct. The mains complaint consisted waving angrily at the implications, rather than actually rebutting them.
To broaden that reasoning: race also correlates independently with wealth, private tutors do a LOT to improve academic credentials/skills when there are gaps, which confounds the 'achievement' measures as a comparison between students even if the schools are comparable.
I'm thinking of test prep tutoring, and application polishing services, and also straight-forward 1:1 academic intervention services.
At the end he is talking about the benefit of high school for black Americans.
Its no doubt that blacks that go to college benefit from the degree because of accreditation creep. But mostly only if equally unqualified Whites/Asians are excluded from doing so based on race.
If there is evidence that black students do better at college than white students with similarly low levels of achievement at high school, I'd anticipate this being that the black students have higher natural aptitude for academics (ie g), which would make sense as they're from a higher percentile, but they have (on average) been in an inferior educational environment (worse schools, less well educated parents) and going to college puts them in a similar environment to other college students, and their higher natural aptitude means they can start catching up on their peers.
If race is a proxy for bad parents and a bad high school, then that would explain why you adopt lower standards at entry for some races than others: because you're aiming for the same standard at exit.
Obviously, this will mean that upper middle class black students will get advantages at admission that they don't deserve. But someone is going to get undeserved advantages, because any proxies you are using are imperfect. Even test results are only a proxy for ability to study at college level and we know they're not a perfect proxy.
Question about legal marijuana growing: I'm trying to help some people whose very difficult adult son has filled their back yard with marijuana plants. In our state, people with medical marijuana cards, which the son has, are allowed to grow "up to twelve flowering and twelve vegetative cannabis plants in your home for personal use." Can someone explain what the point is of the distinction between flowering and vegetative plants. I looked up marijuana cultivation and it seems like a vegetative marijuana plant is just an immature one that has not reached the flowering stage yet. Is that right? If so, what's the point of having the law written this way, rather than just stating that people with medical marijuana cards are allowed to grow 24 plants per year? Is the point that people have to stagger when they plant the things, so that the second 12 reach maturity a month or so later than the first 12? The law in a neighboring state is similar, except for allowing fewer plants in each of the 2 categories. What's the point of the state micromanaging the planting schedule? (And also, isn't 24 plants a ridiculously large number for personal use? The plants are *big,* like 5 feet or more tall. I looked up how much weed you get from each plant, & google said 1 lb per plant average. 24 plants/yr. works out to an ounce per day!)
Yeah that's easy. You want to grow female plants and kill the males before they can pollinate the females. It's the female flowers that have all the THC and such. You can't really tell the sex of a plant till it starts to flower. So if you want to allow people to grow 12 females then it makes sense to allow them to start with 24 total plants.
I grow 2-4 plants every year. This gives me way more pot than I can use and I give at least 1/2 away.
That's interesting, but unless I'm missing something it's not addressing the question I'm asking: People are allowed to have 12 vegetative plants and 12 flowering ones at one time. So they have to stagger when they start plants, right? Start one batch of 12, then wait a few weeks til those start to flower before starting the second batch of 12. My question is, what is the point of insisting on that, rather than just saying a grower can have 24 plants?
Isn't this rule just making it possible for a person to wind up with 12 plants -- you have to plant 24 to get 12 female plants if roughly half are going to be male and aren't going to give you any buds. ?
Thinking about this as a vegetable gardener... you want to sow seeds repeatedly in order to have a steady harvest rather than one big harvest all at once. So perhaps the regulation is intended to allow a person to continuously grow pot for personal use, but then is seeking to limit how much they can harvest at any one time. They could have just limited it to 12 plants at any stage, but perhaps wanted to allow a person to have fresh buds to harvest year round for a steady supply (presuming indoor growing, in which you can control flowering by how many hours of light you supply I think).
Yes, if by "12 vegetative and 12 flowering" they mean that at any one time that's all you can have. But that would mean that a person can start 12 new plants every 5 weeks, for a total of 60 plants a year, each giving about a pound of marijuana. This law applies to people with medical marijuana cards growing it for personal use. They're going to use 60 lbs a year? 4 ounces a day?!?!
Speculation: Anti-seed production? Which might either create an industry that they weren't willing to figure out how to regulate and/or the "propagation of non-native invasive weed problem"?
Actually, can't be a measure to protect against seed production, because both male and female plants have flowers, or at least something called "flowers" in the industry. It's there that most of the THC is concentrated. Looked up marijuana growing, and vegetative plants are just immature plants that haven't flowered yet.
My understanding is that, with controlled (as opposed to natural) lighting, the vegetative state can be maintained indefinitely. The duration here roughly determines the overall size and yield. Typically veg for 3 months, then flower for 2 months to determine final yield, maybe?
Indoors, you could veg for 3 years, then create a huge harvest after flowering for a couple months. You run into serial/parallel tradeoffs. If I want 10 units, I can veg one plant for 10 months, or instead 10 plants for one month.
No idea what motivation is behind the legislation.
I mean Marijuana is very valuable compared to anything else that easy to produce.
Given the highly market distorting "X plants per medical Marijuana card" it makes sense for an industrious young person to grow their quota! Probably good for him if he manages to not smoke too much of it.
People do things like this all the time, as I'm sure you've noticed. I asked here for some factual info that will be useful in helping the situation, and am not prepared to discuss my friends' psyches.
Cannabis flower refers to the dried flower bud, sometimes referred to as a “nug,” of a female cannabis plant. Typically, the flower of a marijuana plant is what’s harvested, dried, cured, and sold at dispensaries, but flower is also used to create other cannabis products like concentrates, tinctures, and oils.
Thanks. But do you have any idea of what the point is of distinguishing between vegetative and flowering plants? According to Google a vegetative marijuana plant is just a plant that has not yet reached the flowering stage. So why say person’s allowed 12 in vegetative
Stage and 12 in flowering stage? Is the point that people shouldn’t start more than 12 at once? Then they have to wait til those 12 reach the flowering stage before starting the second 12? What use is that? Also, it’s unclear what the yearly limit is. Can somebody have 12 veg + 12 flowering at any one time, but keep that up all year? If so, then somebody could start 12 plants approx every 5 weeks — as soon as the prior crop has reached the flowering stage. So that would let them grow about 100 of these suckers per year ?
Never thought I’d be someone angry about weed cultivation! But in this case a middle-aged, unemployed adult son is living in his elderly parents basement and has filled the garden plots they usually fill with vegetables and flowering plants in the summer with something like 30 marijuana plants. Parents don’t know what to do.
Plus law in my state seems absurdly unclear and permissive, and while I like weed I don’t like stoopit governance.
Honestly I think the reason the law is weird is because it had to be passed by a majority of folks who don’t know much about marijuana cultivation or consumption. A number is proposed, some legislators object, so they come up with some confounding comprise that pleases no one.
My state’s new law goes into effect on the first of August. It allows possession of 2 ounces on your person but up to 2 pounds within your residence.
The way the bill was originally written a person could possess up to 8 pounds in their residence. But compromise brought that down to 2. I look at this and all I can do is shrug.
The new law permits a person to grow up to 8 plants for personal use with no hair splitting about the stage of growth.
One pretty sensible thing our new law does is revoking the right to sell “soft drinks” with up to 50mg of THC that had been in effect since last July. That amount has been reduced to 5 mg a serving.
A couple of 50 mg doses is what a late stage cancer patient might take to control pain and nausea. It would only be considered recreational for somebody like Willy Nelson.
I’m thinking of buying a couple of cans of the 50mg stuff in the remaining days of July simply as conversation pieces.
"Honestly I think the reason the law is weird is because it had to be passed by a majority of folks who don’t know much about marijuana cultivation or consumption. "
So I wrote a loooong piece on YIMBYism recently (https://woolyai.substack.com/p/yimbies-overpromise) and one of the things that confused the dickens out of me was the New York and Washington DC suburbs.
See, for data I was looking at Metropolitan Statistical Areas, which are less about cities and more about cities and burbs, like New York is really New York plus Jersey plus any place you could get in an hour's drive from Manhattan. And these MSAs show those prices are...really well managed and affordable. Like, apparently the New York burbs are some of the most affordable, at least in terms of price growth, in the US. Which is superweird but I went and grabbed the raw zillow data (https://www.zillow.com/research/data/) and it looks like it's true.
Which is kinda wild to me, because I ain't an East Coast boy and if you go an hour outside of LA or SF, like Dublin or Napa, the prices are still stupid. So I'm sure we got some East Coast people here, what's going on with the NY burbs. Is it like Manhattan is stupidly expensive but you can get a nice house in the burbs for a reasonable price or is it prices are stupid everywhere and I'm missing something? Because I genuinely couldn't figure this out.
Nice post. Re. your question here: Did you use Google maps to figure out how far you could get in an hour's drive from Manhattan, or did you just look at a map and imagine you can travel thru NYC as quickly as you can travel thru Los Angeles? 'Coz you can't. Not nearly. Aside from how slow the traffic always is everywhere in NYC, each bridge you cross adds half an hour at rush hour.
Also, are these low-rent places the parts of Jersey that stink day and night like a fire in a rubber factory? Also, consider crime statistics.
I use the official MSA definition, see here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area, mostly just for a standardized definition that each dataset could use. Like, it's not just me deciding what is and isn't in New York, the AEI and Zillow and Census datasets all need to use the same definition which means MSA, CSBA, or Zip.
That's hard to avoid, since the data is grouped that way. But when talking about reasonable housing prices within range of a city, we should be comparing prices of houses that are an equal commute time away from the city, not an equal physical distance away. California is much more car-friendly than New York City, where it can take an hour to go 10 miles. Also, in Californian cities, people can park at work. In NYC, they have to park at a train station, take the train to a subway station, and then take the subway in, which at least doubles and could triple the commute time.
So I think your intuition that prices seemed too low "within commuting distance" of NYC was probably right; and that was probably because you were looking at houses that were not in fact within commuting distance of NYC.
I lived in DC for years, and any two randomly chosen places within DC are probably not within commuting distance (eg < 1hr) of each other. Commutes by train and bus within the DC metro area could be 2 hours each way.
There are two big piece of data missing from this analysis (and its not your fault because i dont think they even exist): first, how many people WANT to live somewhere, but can't either because they have been priced out and have to move or can't afford to live there in the first place; and second, who is competing for housing that is for sale and how much money they have to spend.
No idea if the first data set exists, but its probably unlikely a group would spend the money to collect that data (and if the FRED doesn't have it that means it probably doesn't exist on a wide scale to their standards).
For the second, I think you can reduce the impact of this by looking at rented units only and not houses/condos for sale. Rents aren't as subject to negotiations as sales are and the prices are more set by the market than the marginal buyer. And in many cities, the people buying houses are different than people renting apartments or renting houses. Having the savings to make a down payment on a house makes you a different person than someone who doesn't have those savings even if you have the same household income (it likely means you are older but could reflect credit difference or other things).
This second piece, I think, is really throwing off your intuition around Austin. My theory is that despite lots of new housing, prices keep increasing because the new people moving in are much wealthier than the average Austin resident. You can see this in the FRED data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AUST448PCPI per capita income has gone way up, especially after COVID.
Some anecdotal stuff:
Over the past 10 years, an area of Washington DC called Navy Yards has been redeveloped. 15 years ago it was taxi parking, some gay bars, sketchy auto shops (and a naval base as well as some DC city offices). Now it's at least 10 square blocks of high density housing (as high density as DC gets as there is a height limit on buildings). There have been similar booms around H street, the Wharf, and in the suburbs in Bethesda, Clarendon, Court House, etc. Basically they have built a ton of housing for the young professionals that make up a huge portion of the new residents and did it without tearing down much old housing stock. All of these have been huge wins for YIMBY groups as some of these areas needed to have zoning changes or fight off political challenges.
Also on DC: the differing municipalities that DC MSA spans make a big difference when you compare to places like SF or LA. If you want to build a big housing development in the DC area and MD says no, you just go to VA and they will probably welcome you. VA especially has been encouraging a ton of house building. Some of it, like Clarendon and Courthouse referenced above as well as Reston and Tysons Corner and others, have been explores of "new urbanism": high density mixed use build around public transit. Others are just classic sprawl. The sprawl lets people "drive til you qualify" and keeps costs low. DC is also strange because of the effect of the Fed Government which keeps unemployment low, turn over high (presidential changes lead to lots of people moving in and out), and acts as a big weight on salaries.
Anyway, I really have to object to your conclusion:
"So, just a straight up for the people who are really confident in their stance on YIMBY/NIMBY/housing...just be less confident."
At least for me, I don't support deregulation of housing (call it YIMBY if you want) because I think the data shows it to be "correct". I support it because I am extremely skeptical that the current process involving municipal planners dictating land use and tiny minorities of residents using civic and legal processes to derail private developments will produce positive outcomes. And right now that skepticism is looking pretty good as housing in places people want to live jumps up in price and the "affordable" housing is pushed farther and farther away from economic cores. I don't believe that building more housing will necessarily lower prices. I do believe it will reduce the increase in prices relative to wages and at some point the market can reach an equilibrium, just like most markets we have in the economy.
In general I dont think you can do analyses like you have done to conclude anything about what *will* happen in a housing market. The market is way too heterogeneous and the force too complex for us to model with the data we have. And this just pushes me more to believe that removing barriers to building housing and letting the industry be more dictated by market forces will allow us to see what the "true" housing market is like. Right now regulations and zoning etc put their finger on the scales. But it's not a scale, it's a three body problem that we just can't model accurately.
I agree those are both good data to add on and I think the second one is probably doable. If I figured out the Census API, I could probably pull median income and per capita gdp figures and it would be really interesting to see whether that is a major determinant.
I'm not sure I understand your critique at the end though. Like, I agree accurate prices are good but...it's kind of abstract good compared to the very material and concrete good of lower housing. Is that actually what you value?
And if the housing market is too complex to model, how do we know that more housing stock will fix it? Like, it should work that way, but does it?
Yeah sorry my concluding part wasn't very clear, i'll try to restate.
For me, I am against policies which restrict housing inventory (zoning, height limits, etc) or artificially increase the cost of new construction (parking minimums, some building codes, environmental reviews, public hears, etc), because I am skeptical humans can create a set of policies which don't cause harm by "getting it wrong" on how land should be used. Essentially this is the Economic Calculation Problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem) applied to local housing policy.
The negative effect of bad policies my be raising housing costs or could be a lack of housing or housing in the wrong place (exurban sprawl for example). We get a mix of these things and others in many cities.
I took your conclusion to be that YIMBY proponents should be more skeptical that their ideas will solve the problem they are trying to fix (high housing costs). I just wanted to note that, for me, this is a side effect not my main reason for being against restrictive policies. (Also most people would call me a libertarian and so I bristle whenever the government wants to restrict people's freedoms such as doing what they want with their property).
> how do we know that more housing stock will fix it? Like, it should work that way, but does it?
So above I claim lowering housing costs isn't my primary motivation, but I do believe adding more housing will lower housing cost *growth* and probably lower it *relative to wages in a locality*. How do we prove or disprove it? Your analysis is a good contribution as well as a lot of the other amateur or academic research on the subject. Research reports such as this from UCLA: https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/market-rate-development-impacts/ make me less skeptical that supply and demand doesn't apply to house. Unfortunately, the only way to "prove" is de-regulation will work is by doing it at a large scale and running those policies for 4 or 5 decades - not exactly easy!
I also think if we flip the hypothesis around, it's easier to at least say we need some thing to change. So if we ask "on average, does our current housing policy regime, create a healthy housing market". I think the answer to that ("no") is more clear than what the effect of any change in policy will be.
Jersey City and the area is one of the few places in the country that builds a reasonable amount of housing, so outer suburbs of NYC are surprisingly cheap yeah. Part of the problem with the west coast is that it's all low-density and nimby, NYC metro area is still much denser than anywhere out west.
On the other hand: (a) it's worth noting that NYC proper is much bigger than San Francisco (more analogous to SF+ East Bay and the peninsula), and (b) you don't ever want to driver into NYC (but otoh commuter rail is much more extensive than anywhere on the west coast).
How many other states does your California example run into? My initial take is comparing an aggregate of prices across New York and New Jersey, or D.C and Virginia and Maryland, to prices entirely inside California, seems iffy.
I can't really control which example cross state lines and which don't; I'm just using the standardized MSA definitions. It was either that, CSBA, or ZIP codes.
No expertise or data to back this up, even though I live outside NYC.
I wonder if differences in duration from settlement to industrial urbanization are contributory here? East Coast being older might have different levels of functionality to the municipalities, or different (earlier?) histories of zoning practices that modulate lot size or something?
There may be a case here of "the average patient's temperature in the hospital, including the ones in the morgue."
DC (personally can't speak for other cities) has a quarter or so where you definitely would not want to live (property crimes being a regular thing, and ~zero interest from police) or even walk (constant threat of violence, occasionally made good on) if you have any way of avoiding it. The properties in said quarter palpably pull down the average prices.
I guess it depends on what you consider reasonable. I live in Nassau County on Long Island and can get to Manhattan in 40 minutes by train. Depending on the neighborhood you can get a house around here for as low as 400K (bad neighborhood) up through several million dollars. I guess right now an average single family house in a good school district in Nassau will run you somewhere between 600 and 900 thousand (ours was 580K when we bought it 7 years ago; it’d be closer to 700K now).
Yea, that was the thing that threw me. 40 minutes outside of SF by BART (it's like a train but pareto suboptimal) you'd be in...Contra Costa I think, which is 1.2-1.5 million in my brain.
I have heard your property taxes are brutal though.
Would gas lines in urban areas continue to work during extended, multiday or longer power outages? So any heating system that uses gas, mostly involving a boiler. Extended outages could be caused by a natural disaster, cyberattack, war, etc.
One could construct a battery to run the boiler itself. My question is- would gas continue to flow through city infrastructure if power were out for several days, weeks, longer....? I mean the gas plant must itself run on electricity- right? Because if the gas doesn't flow from the city line without electricity, then everyone with a heat source that's not firewood is in pretty bad shape
The US natural gas grid is historically quite reliable, with the notable exception of earthquakes (where large chunks of it tend to get turned off preemptively to reduce fire hazard from broken pipes.) But even so, FWIW the industry standard for data centers, telco exchanges, sewage pumping stations, hospitals, etc. is still diesel (with typically 2-3 weeks of fuel kept on site.)
How do hospitals etc. store 2-3 weeks worth of diesel? I can imagine in an industrial site you just have a large stainless steel tank or something. But that's a very large quantity of diesel fuel- a car tank of maybe 16 gallons wouldn't last 24 hours. Do hospitals have giant vats of diesel somewhere on site.....? Seems like they'd be enormous and a huge hazard
yes its dangerous but it will keep people alive, so the trade off is easy.
But diesel has a much higher flash point than gasoline. Of both, it's the fumes that burn, not the liquid. Gasoline turns to a gas at very low temperatures so it's constantly trying to turn into fumes. But Diesel needs to heat up to turn into a gas, much hotter than the environment would normally be. So storing diesel isn't very dangerous if it's in a proper tank. And usually the tanks are under ground adding more protection.
Diesel is (afaik) quite similar to the oil burned for heating buildings. So if buildings can keep oil tanks holding enough energy to get them through the winter, it is very plausible that they also have oil tanks storing a few weeks worth of their electric energy requirements.
What about the 2021 power crisis? In February 2021 temperatures were way below normal, causing a massive spike in natural gas and electricity demand as well as the shutdown of a lot of natural gas infrastructure that wasn't designed to work in the extreme cold. Prices skyrocketed as everybody needed it, and some people who elected to buy their natural gas at market rates (as opposed to a fixed rate from a gas company) ended up owing thousands of dollars for a few weeks worth of gas. Of course, this was a unique situation in that it was a nationwide problem rather than a localized natural disaster, but something similar could happen any winter and gas companies haven't made the investments needed to prevent this from recurring.
You are right that this was a unique situation, but the "crisis" was not nation wide but specific to Texas which has a unique (to say the least) power industry. And customers got big electric bills, not gas. The demand for gas shot up as a substitute for other electrical generation sources which weren't functioning. Yes the price of gas went way up but it was passed through to consumers on their electric bill. I dont think gas heat is very common in texas as it doesn't get very cold so the costs savings aren't there like it is in other colder parts of the country.
A basic gas water heater isn't connected to power, and needs very little power to function. You can trigger the pilot light by just pressing a button or even using a match in the old days.
Some heaters can do the same. Central air may have issues if it uses a blower fan. Hot water boilers just need to heat the water and (outside of large buildings), convection will do the rest. Thermostats don't need to be connected to mains power to work. Some modern furnaces/boilers may not work or lose some functions but in principle you dont need power to run these things.
Well luckily it wasn’t cold so heat wasn’t an issue. Food was an issue and restaurants and such could cook. My most profound memory of those times was the Life Cafe on the corner of 10th St. and Avenue B making scrambled eggs and coffee for a flat fee because the gas was working. That and the pizza on the corner of 11th and B was the only game in town unless I wanted to hike up to 34th St. where the electricity was still going.
My girlfriend at the time happened to be in Ukraine monitoring the elections and I had to take care of her cats. She lived in a building on Avenue C and 11th St., which had an elevator that did not work because there was no electricity. It was kind of a nightmare. There was one bar in the neighborhood that stayed open with candlelight and warm beer. Not so bad.
Natural gas infrastructure relies on pumps, compressors, and valves that are typically electrically operated. However, usually they have backup generators to continue working during a power outage. How long they last depends on how much fuel they have on hand/can get access to during the outage. A couple of days, probably yes, much longer than that, and I'd guess that they would start to run out of fuel. Weeks, almost certainly not.
There is a much better design argument from physics than biology. In this episode of our podcast Physics to God, we argue that the qualitative laws of physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity, exhibit clear signs of being designed.
We do not argue about science as the intelligent design argument does in biology. Rather we accept the scientific position about the laws of physics and only argue about the proper philosophical conclusion to be inferred from these laws. This leads to an independent support for the existence of an intelligent cause of our universe.
> This leads to an independent support for the existence of an intelligent cause of our universe.
Why intelligence? It's not necessary in the capacity of having a prime mover. It's also hard to reconcile "design" with the notion of God being inseparable from eternity / existence, as is usually accepted by theists. Design would have to be contingent on a finite godless universe cycling through it's time interval, and another plane of existence beyond it, which seems redundant (what "designs" the other plane? why is intelligence necessary for the Universe but not for conceiving God? This just circles back to eternity, which by definition is uncomplex)
You're right that the ancient "Prime Mover" argument doesn't imply intelligence, but only a force that "moves" the universe. We're making a different argument from the purpose of the laws and constants of producing a resultant complex, ordered, and structured universe.
The reason intelligence is not necessary for conceiving of God is because God is simple with no complexity. But you are indeed right that anyone who believes in a complex god with parts is involved in the logical fallacy of begging the question.
It's easy to explain the appearance of design by assuming the existence of endless universes, each with different laws of physics, and we live in the only one whose physics supports life (in the same way that there are endless sterile planets, and we live in the only one that supports life).
That's a naive version of multiverse theory and it doesn't work (and even multiverse scientists know that). It's essentially a theory of the gaps that can explain any universe. i.e. if there are an infinite number of universes, then everything possible happens.
Multiverse theory has to additionally show that we live in a typical universe with intelligent observers and that is much more challenging. We'll discuss that in our upcoming miniseries on the multiverse.
If we don't live in a typical universe with intelligent observers, and the laws of physics appear to have been designed, then what have they been designed for?
a universe with real planets, stars, galaxies, life, etc. as opposed to a universe filled with random chaos and a lot of ephemeral boltzmann brains who mistakenly believe there are planets, stars, galaxies, life, etc.
I know multiverse isn't a good theory, so for me the skeptical doubt that all my memories are the false recollections of a boltzmann brain can be dismissed as mere radical doubt.
The better question is how you, who profess to believe in a multiverse, know that you are not a boltzmann brain, when the overwhelming number of intelligent observers in the naive multiverse you proposed are boltzmann brains?
Sounds interesting! Reminds me of the Heisenberg quote: “The first drink from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
And therefore, God never wrought miracle, to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it. It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion. For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity.
If you're accepting all scientific conclusions, then does that mean you're arguing for a Deist view of God? God's role is solely as the prime mover, setting the physical constants and then kicking off the big bang?
We're Jewish, so I guess that means we're not Unitarians. We are going to argue for the existence of one God with no complexity, so it's possible we share a common idea of God...
just wanna plug nicomachean.substack.com cus I think its pretty awesome and I would love brutal feedback on how to improve which is something the rationalist community does well. HIT ME BABY!
This would fit perfectly in Teentopia next to Zane's page, with the flames and handguns and MSPaint avatar of himself. I can hear the Squishers theme kicking up. SQUISHEEERRRS! (squishers)
Like, I have no idea why Zeus is skateboarding while blasting off green lightning, or how that relates to growing kindness, but it sure does make me smile.
Ok, ignore the clickbait lede and forgive my non-knowledge of AIs/LLMs. I think what I'm asking is, are AI models performing downtime processing and/or code changes? To be more specific, lets say you have an LLM with a single text input box as it's only input, ask it a question, and then took a hash of the code immediately after closing the input window. If you took another hash six hours later would it be the same? And if no, are the code changes analogous to our own neural processing? Are the models constantly replaying inputs and strengthening/weakening/trimming connections?
Reinforcement Learning-based AIs will sometimes re-use previous outputs as a part of their training, which is kind of "dreaming", in the sense that AI is not processing some "current" information, but rather something it seen before. As others pointed out, AIs do not usually update their weights outside of training. This is certainly true of current LLMs. But I imagine e.g. a game AI which is designed to adapt to player's style, and therefore never stops at least fine-tuning some of its weights will have to "dream" a lot, relieving the same episodes over and over again simply because it would get only a very limited number of new experiences.
I mention this, even though there is no released in any game I know of which implements such AI, and game AIs currently aren't center of public perception. But as a game programmer, I always wanted to try to add a continuously-learning AI into a single-player game, so I spent some time thinking about. Actually, games are probably the best environment in which one can safely implement agentic, learning AI and see what comes out.
This is along the lines of what I was thinking. I know current LLMs are sandboxed and not in learn mode, but I assume that continuously learning AIs exist in labs somewhere, where any query is integrated into the model. My imagination is wondering if the output algorithm also triggers a single re-weighting event then the model sits senescent until the next input, or if it is continually "dreaming" and churning through it's own code, reweighting itself.
I'm not privy to inner workings of AI labs, but I would imagine that continually dreaming model is not very useful. It is either already trained to required quality, and will not benefit much from additional training (and may even degrade into overfitting), or has not achieved it yet, and then exist in normal training mode. If the dataset is expanded (e.g. with new queries and correct answers), it makes more sense to gather new information into a big batch, and then run training for a while, until good results are achieved on the new data, then shut down training again (it's expensive, and running it past good point may harm the model, just as dwelling too much on the past might be harmful to a human).
I think that generally, with contemporary AI, training phase is separate from usage phase. And there is no constant replaying of inputs or any other activity when nobody is watching. Think of training as writing a computer program. Once it is written it does not change while you are using it.
I believe that current LLMs do nothing after they are trained and before you use them. In fact, they don't even have memory between queries - it's just that the code of the page feeds them the past 2000 words of queries and responses as part of the query that you feed this time, and it responds to that whole thing in a way that makes it seem like a continuous conversation. If you were to copy and paste in part of a past conversation, it would pick up as though it were continuing that one (though if there was actually some change in the model between then and now, it might not say precisely the same thing it would have continued with then).
I think you are correct that the model is not changing/doing anything in between queries, but, depending on the settings your provide, you will get different answers even with the same exact prompt because the model has some noise/randomness in it's responses. I _think_ you can turn this off so that it gives the exact same answer to the same prompt, but I don't believe that's the default.
More strictly speaking, neural networks usually generate (deterministically) probability distributions over classifications/next tokens/etc. Then you can either pick most probable solution, or if you want to be extra creative you can sample from this probability distribution.
I'm not knowledgeable, but here'e something interesting & related: I have logged a LOT of time playing with Dall-e, and in the process have stumbled upon 2 prompts that make DAll-e produce nightmare images -- intensely bizarre, grisly, lewd images. And the prompts that produce them are not in the least violent or sexual. And Dall-e is exceptionally prissy. It refuses to make images from prompts that are mild-to-moderately sexual or violent. If is willing to generate images for prompts asking for impossible beings, such as two-headed dogs, but complete fails at representing the bizarre element. Can give some links to some of the grotesque images it's made to the nightmare prompts if you're curious.
I have an international tax question, not particularly deep but difficult to google, and I wonder if anyone here might have answers.
I’m a dual citizen of the US and Germany with both passports. I like Europe--I lived in NYC for decades and I’m done. I want to stay this side of the pond. What I’m looking for is a ~Schengen country I can 1. live in on the basis of my German passport and 2. work in remotely for a US employer: normal US job, normal US paychecks, earning dollars, paying the IRS first. This is not viable in Germany. Last fall my US employer gave up on trying to solve it and set me up with German HR at a sister company. Alas, that job has recently and suddenly become untenable. Other than the global factor, it wouldn’t be a problem. I’m in high demand. But it will be much easier (endanger my prospects of retaining US payscale much less) if I don’t have to ask a new employer to do this whole sister-company maneuver. In Germany it’s the only way. So, as much as I was just starting to feel settled here, damn it, it seems reasonable to look at other options.
My research this last few years was oriented to third-country nationals, focused on residency/path to citizenship. Now that I have the holy-grail Schengen passport, those aren’t issues any longer, and I feel almost back to square one. Portugal’s non-habitual residency still seems interesting. Bulgaria may be a thing? It’s tricky. I now have multiple critical search terms that aren’t normally expected to go together and basically nothing I find online fits.
Is there a go-to answer, resource, or recommendation?
(To clarify, I’m not rich enough for, like, Monaco. I’m talking about a middling New York non-finance salary: kind of rich in much of Europe in day to day terms but nothing like tax-haven rich. I just want to do, like, normal-person-level tax planning.)
The obvious answer is to have one of those international firms figure things out for you. PwC, Deloitte, or one of the others. It seems like a fairly standard thing, right?
My two top priorities are 1. to avoid illegal employment and 2. to continue to get paid at US payscale. To that end, I’m trying to figure out if there’s a reasonably accessible arrangement somewhere that doesn’t force the employer to execute a complex procedure such as “opening a new branch overseas” requiring an extensive team of lawyers and accountants. The nice-to-have third priority would be 3. paying less. I’m interested in that mostly because it seems as if low onerousness and low tax rates might conceivably be found together in some country in, say, southern Europe or the Baltics, that’s actively decided to make it easy to work there.
1. Have you considered the social aspects of forming friendship and being part of a "community of place"?
2. Is it reasonable and ethical for you to expect a US pay scale without living in US?
Rule 2.1 "In representing a client, a lawyer shall exercise independent professional judgment and render candid advice. In rendering advice, a lawyer may refer not only to law but to other considerations such as moral, economic, social and political factors, that may be relevant to the client's situation "
2. These are US jobs that make US time and intensity demands resulting in a US work-life balance or lack thereof, so no, I can’t say I’m enthusiastic about working like an American but not earning like one. It would be a great outcome, though, if it turned out that a pleasant to live in country had a residency status I was eligible for where they would let me work remotely to the US and not make it a requirement that my US employer open an office there ... even if they charged me a high, social-democracy-compatible tax rate, which, at the end of the day, I support.
And here is one discussing the supposedly best solution, "Employer of Record". There are companies which offer to take over the role of the sister-company. The article is paywalled, but I can copy/paste it into a dm if you don't have access.
I did a bit of looking into this; the general trend is:
1) developed countries want you to pay taxes for living there, and using their services
2) developing countries are okay with you living their without paying income tax, since you'll boost the economy in other ways
The difficult part on the USA side is getting the employer to let you work abroad, because it makes the tax situation so complicated (this is sidestepped if you're a "digital nomad" who doesn't stay long enough in any country to trigger tax residency). One (questionably-ethical) solution is to just lie, and use something like keepyourhomeip [dotcom] to maintain the illusion of physical presence in the USA. In the event that the employer discovers, you can be fired, but not much else (they could sue you, but they'd have to show damages somehow).
On the non-USA side it's tricky because you do, in fact, have to follow the tax laws of the country where you are resident (since for tax fraud you can be jailed, rather than just sued). Count on paying a CPA who's double-licensed in both countries, and count on it being expensive (i.e., a couple thousand dollars to have your taxes done - still cheaper than fucking up and being subject to penalties).
So offhand, Eastern Europe might be the way to go - developing enough to not be too picky about how you pay (i.e., happy to just collect sales taxes and indirect property taxes through your rent). PM me if you'd like to discuss further.
From that link it looks like the difficulty would be keeping nonresident status, without which the tax bill would be appreciably higher albeit possibly less onerous than here. Noted and thanks. I do love Stockholm, tho tbh it was hard enough finding an apartment in Berlin.
Yeah, you would be considered a resident for tax purposes, like in most places in Europe. But that comes with the social safety net that does not exist in the US, not anymore, anyway. Whether the trade-off seems fair to you, well, is up to you. I assume you did the calculation.
Right, the ~40% of GDP going to entitlements just... does not exist. Social security, food stamps, unemployment, disability, medicaid, public housing - none of those things exist either. All science fiction.
I guess we really should figure out where that $10 trillion has been going!
It’s a perfectly reasonable tradeoff and one I broadly support. Like, I moved to Germany on purpose. I am in favor of infrastructure and transit and safety nets. I’m literally just trying to figure out how to optimize my situation for a new job search. I moved on the basis of an existing, known salary. The more seamless and low-hassle I can make it for the next employer to hire me, the less likely they are to decide they don’t need to pay me in line with what I’ve been making because oh, look, European pay scales. (These are US employers with US work cultures and US time demands, and I’m not interested in doing what I do for them for a third of the money. I don’t automatically get a humane work-life balance just because I live here.) I’m looking down the barrel of a job search that’s likely going to involve tricky negotiating, thinking about how to optimize for it, and going hmm, is there a tax regime where it’d be easier than here to just straight up work remotely?
Paying the IRS first is odd if you are not living in the US. Can you not tell them you are abroad? They will still need returns - all US citizens need to do that. However double taxation agreements will largely protect you from paying the IRS anything.
To a point. Sigh. If you have a US paycheck, the deductions on it go to US taxes. This is the Wrong Way to Do It when you live abroad and will make a deeply hideous tax mess. You do claw most of it back in the end but risibly huge bills,accounting onerous as hell, it’s a bad scene. I initially moved kind of ass backwards in the pandemic and wasn’t my most sober adult planning self about it and tax year 2021 was a nightmare I’m not eager to repeat. But I gather that not all countries are as difficult as Germany in various respects about this. It might be more viable with better advance planning in a different tax regime.
It’s not just Germany. It’s the US. Germany would be happy to have your tax. You need a legal entity in Germany (or elsewhere in the EU - Schengen isn’t important except for travel) that bills the US company and pays you. Let that company handle the employee taxes.
That’s what I do in Ireland while working for a Canadian company. Online accounting firms do it for a fee, they have already existing companies set up and you join as an employee or a director or both. The director route has some tax advantages in terms of what you can expense but the fees are higher. I get a paycheque from the Irish company, tax taken out at source.
As an American Citizen you do have to file returns but there should be no extra wage taxes.
As a Germany citizen resident in Germany you should be paying taxes there. Also as a German citizen you can be resident and work anywhere in the EU.
Ps I don’t recommend Ireland right now because of the housing crisis but other European countries will allow this, in fact I’m surprised that Germany doesn’t.
Employer of Record, right? Question there is how easily I could find one on my end and whether doing that could make it more or less turnkey for a prospective employer.
If you're a contractor they don't have to do any additional paperwork beyond what they'd need to do for a standard contractor. It slightly complicates your own tax picture and means you won't get benefits. But you probably aren't going to get benefits living abroad anyway. But that's what most digital nomad types do.
Possible in theory but freelancing is unfortunately pretty rare in my function. Be good to think about that more, though, it’s strongly appealing for its own sake, it’s a question of if the work is out there. (I do core brand strategy for biopharma clients--you see a lot more freelancing in creative or even account.)
I am solely talking about the legal part. You sign a contract that's a normal contract except it fits the parameters of a contractor instead of an employee (which if you're working on another continent you probably meet). And then you work normally. They have to file a pretty limited set of forms and you have to file a somewhat more complex ones. And that's it.
Clearly something to look into! My impression is that freelancers’ hours are strictly capped so you can’t do a facsimile of full-time on a freelance basis, but I’m hazy on the specifics and maybe it’s a less meaningful limit than I was assuming. Thank you.
1.) You must be able to work when and where you want with a minimal control over your location and schedule. Obviously they can require you to attend meetings but not, for example, to be in a specific office from 9-5.
2.) You must mostly own your own equipment, pay your own expenses out of the contract money, and be free to offer your services to anyone (ie, work on a non-exclusive basis).
3.) You can't receive employee like benefits or have a contract that otherwise is basically an employee contract but with "I am a freelancer" written on top.
Capped hours are definitely a thing for freelancers in my industry. I think it may literally just be about budget control. Freelancers are expensive. And if ~every employer has these capping policies then it doesn’t matter that the law says it’s fine not to. I will find out what the actual situation is, though; it may not be a dealbreaker.
Can you name any interesting powerful people worth learning about that aren't very well known to the public? Looking for powerful but relatively obscure figures.
The first example that came to mind for me is most of Biden's cabinet [0]. Looking through that list I barely recognize anyone, and yet they all probably wield a good amount of power within their area.
A different kind of example would be how two developers were the only ones responsible for OpenSSL back in 2014 during the Hearbleed bug, despite how important it was to the Internet.
Are there any really important things which are basically propped up by 1 or 2 people continuing to maintain something?
I have been listening the Martyr Made podcast which has deep (long) episodes on very historical topics and the people profiled have often been lost to (common) history but were very powerful (lost of figures from pre-ww2 europe or the civil rights era). If you are looking for current day - not sure but you could definitely start with the richest people in authoritarian countries. They probably have to be powerful to stay alive and gain wealth and probably aren't well known in the west.
- The people running some of the big hidden infrastructure stuff (I have no idea who the CEO of asml is)
- apparently there are <40 people who actually know how a modern CPU works and one bad bus crash at a conference could be... bad.
- in the US: whoever's in charge of the dockworker unions has a huge impact on the economy (could crash it with a strike or boost it by allowing automation)
A month is a decent time to wait to get a first cold look at a complex event, and so we have one the best summaries I’ve seen of what that Wagner rebellion was about. Here’s a reasonable translation from the original Russian:
“Today is a month since Wagner rebelled and moved to Moscow, capturing two Russian regional centers in the course of movement, not meeting the slightest resistance.
Then, of course, we were informed that next to Moscow he would have been met and defeated, but it is difficult to say how it would be in reality. Several fainting soldiers and ten bags of sand near the Moscow Ring Road somehow did not look like an indestructible line of defense.
In reality there was no rebellion. There was a banal dispute between economic entities, which was to be resolved through supreme arbitration long before its acute phase. But the problem is that the arbitrator is no longer able to make prompt decisions. What is the reason, it does not even matter, the main thing here is the statement of this regrettable fact.
It was the lack of a solution to the dispute that led to an escalation, an increase in the conflict and its self-developing state. It is possible that Prigozhin was not going to go to Moscow, but the logic of events dragged him, it was impossible to stop.
In fact, Lukashenko literally saved Putin by acting as such an arbitrator and fixing the situation without bringing it to the point of no return. If this mess had lasted for another day, Wagner would have crossed the Moscow Ring Road by that time, and then events could have begun to develop according to their internal scenario. It was enough for one or two ministers to run to Prigozhin with an oath of allegiance, and the mass defection to his banner would not be stopped - officials have their own understanding of the situation, they always swear an oath to the strong. And on June 25, Lukashenko would have nothing to manage, but he would have to congratulate the new Fuhrer of Russia.
In general, Putin was very, very lucky, as it is unlikely that it would all end well for him personally. Someone has to be responsible for all the outrages.
Nevertheless, the events of June 23-24 should not be presented as a rebellion. Rather, they are described by the phrase "it happened."
The main thing in these events is what they have demonstrated - the regime is absolutely vulnerable. It has no way to resist in the event of a real, not cardboard, internal shock. And these shocks are inevitable, as Putin has ceased to play his role and ceased to perform his functionality. More precisely, now he's doing it randomly. And bringing another dispute between two or even more criminal clans to a boiling point in such an environment is a matter of time. Maybe in a month everything will happen again with other organized criminal groups, maybe in a year. But this is most likely inevitable. And Lukashenko may be busy at this time and will not have time, as a month ago.”
I think that's just the thing: the author proposes, and I tend to agree, that Prigozhin wasn't trying to unseat Putin to start with, the whole thing just spiraled out of a "mafia clans" of sorts (any analogies to organized crime structures are imperfect, but it's really hard to come up with a short description without a deep dive into the culture, which is... just no.) fighting over resources/power.
If I were hazard a guess, Prigozhin came to deeply regret his involvement in this Russia's insanity in Ukraine, and would rather be back in Africa doing whatever things he was doing there.
If Prigozhin wasn't trying to unseat Putin, then I don't understand why Putin is lucky that it didn't end badly for him, and how it could be that Lukashenko might well have to congratulate new Fuhrer of Russia.
I mean, I get that it might be that Prigozhin didn't plan to challenge Putin initially, but when he refused to back down after being declared a rebel, he clearly and willingly chose to do so. Just to change his mind after Lukashenko's intervention. Occam's razor imho implies that in few hours between these two events he started to think that things are not going well for him.
Prigozhin would almost certainly have been happy with, A: Shoigu and Gerasimov out, Prigozhin as the Kremlin's go-to guy for victories in Ukraine, and the new defense ministry backing him up on that or. B: Putin out and Prigozhin as the kingmaker who appoints the Tsar of All Russia or, B': Prigozhin as the Tsar of All Russia. It doesn't really matter which of these he preferred, which he was "trying" to do, because he never reached the point where he had to decide. Right up to the point where he called the whole thing off, the path to all three outcomes ran down the M-4 expressway from Rostov to Moscow, by mechanized column at all possible speed.
But there's only a narrow range of outside support, in both kind and degree, that allows for Plan A. Too little support, and Prigozhin simply loses. More than a little support, especially if it's not support very closely aligned with Prigozhin's interests, and those supporters are going to insist on getting more out of the plan than a shakeup in the Russian MoD - roughly speaking, they're going to want to be big players in the new regime.
So Prigozhin had to plan for all three outcomes, and he had to understand that no matter what he was personally after, plan B or B' was more likely to come about than Plan A. Hence, Putin was at real risk of being replaced (and defenestrated) even if that wasn't Prigozhin's preferred outcome.
Exactly, Prigozhin may not have had the initial goal of unseating Putin but once he got the ball rolling the inescapable logic of events may have had propelled him toward the inevitable. So both things could be true: Prigozhin didn't start with unseating Putin in mind, and yet had Luka not intervened that's where the party may have ended.
And we can't exclude the possibility that Prigozhin realized things actually were going "too well" for him, and in a few hours he would be faced with a real possibility of... what? take Putin prisoner? declare himself VolkFuhrer? Supreme Leader of a failed state spiraling into a civil war? and he panicked and started looking for a way out because he had no intent to go THAT far...
I highly doubt that Prigozhin panicked on the thought of things going too well and going to far. I've read his CV, and he is many things, but "risk averse", and "fearful of chaos" are not among them.
"Then, of course, we were informed that next to Moscow he would have been met and defeated, but it is difficult to say how it would be in reality."
El-Murid, perhaps out of a long and justifiable habit of criticising Putin, overstates this difficulty.
The rebellion was the tantrum of a volatile man who was about to have his PMC taken away by the MoD. A few of his better paid/higher-ranking mercenaries, who would have been integrated into the regular armed forces by MoD contract and asked to perform duties more dangerous than final-phase mopping up after prisoner-recruit waves, were presumably also not happy.
The military scenario of 1.5-4k unsupplied Wagnerites taking Moscow was as close to impossible as anything in this war, even without Kadyrov moving in to help.
The political scenario in which significant elements of Rosgvardia and the army proper join Prigozhin's rebellion, and a general 'let's get rid of Putin for bungling the war' sentiment rises, was not impossible, perhaps. However, Surovikin's 'hostage video' quickly demonstrated to any lesser dreamers that the behind-the-scenes safeguards are working. And why on earth would ministers risk treasonous oaths to an unstable courtier upset about money, who has no support in the army, the security services, or society at large - and no independent patronage networks beyond the PMC and a bit of media? In what world was he the strong horse to back?
Whether the whole affair is the breach of a taboo against rebellion (and shows the regime's weakness in letting it get that far, etc.) or a demonstration of the regime's resilience (bloodless resolution without much given away) is very much arguable both ways.
I… don’t know? They met no resistance, took Rostov, shot down several aircraft, and people were taking selfies with them. Why would we expect Moscow defenses to be any better/different at this point?
Even if Moscow is completely undefended, it's still a city of twelve million people. To minimally garrison and police such a city, even with a generally friendly populace, requires a lot more than the maybe 4,000 men in Prigozhin's flying column. If he somehow managed to "take" Moscow, then unless Moscow's government and police actively supported his cause most of Moscow would be left to its own devices with nothing to stop any Putin loyalists from plotting revenge. And there were going to be way more than 4,000 Putin loyalists in Moscow, so any plan that leaves them free to organize and raid armories is a Very Bad Plan.
Prigozhin absolutely needed more support if he was to prevail, by any path or standard. Sometimes early spectacular success brings out new supporters. Sometimes it doesn't.
It's true that the Wagnerites met no resistance in Rostov-on-Don. There were no orders to stop the 'heroes of Artyomovsk' from moving about. Prigozhin declared his mutiny on the night of Friday, June 23rd, while already in Rostov.
In what sense did he 'take' the city, though? Did he replace the civilian administration with Prigozhin loyalists? Did he in any sense become the leader of the Southern Military District? Did he force Yevkurov and Alexeyev, the senior generals on site, to surrender or swear allegiance? Did Wagner commandeer the military aircraft at the blockaded airport, or even so much as ransacked the local ammunition dumps? None of this happened. Prigozhin indulged himself in a lot of insolence and then drove off for Voronezh.
His Petersburg cronies (Shugalei et al) stayed silent. The Tula governor Dyumin (Prigozhin's friend and desired minister of defence) came closest to a kind of support by way of not declaring an emergency and choosing not to make a public statement of loyalty to Putin when every other governor did, but later made up for it by helping to broker the Lukashenko deal. General Alexeyev's reaction likely reflected the sentiment of much of the officer corps: seething at the prospect of the collective West laughing its collective arse off at the whole clownshow.
Of course, all that was before ten o'clock on Saturday, June 24th, when Putin declared the former heroes to be mutineers and enemies of the state. At that point, the ambiguity was over, and the state was going to fight. Fighting the 2nd Guards Rifles at the gates of Moscow is on the bucket list of no mercenary ever.
Actually, the aftermath, not the event itself, is at the heart of the pro-weakness argument: Putin went on television and, in overwrought stentorian tones, accused a man of trying to destroy the country; then, a few days later, during a somber ceremony, held a minute of silence for the army pilots killed by that man; and that man is still enjoying his freedom, exile or not.
yes, I see your point. if the city is not even trying to resist, what does it mean to "take it"? They didn't seem to know what to do with it. My point in bringing up selfies was that maybe they didn't have widespread population support (how would we know?), but definitely there were signs of popularity among the locals.
Definitely agree with the weakness argument; not only Prigozhin, no one was even investigated. Several aircraft down, some 10 men dead, and... nothing.
Because it's Moscow, and because coup-proofing Moscow is the Putin organisation's top priority.
The US government doesn't really think about the scenario where some fraction of the US army decides to take Washington DC, because that's not a plausible scenario in the US, but in Russia it's the number one scenario that keeps Putin up at night.
Prigozhin, for his part, was hoping for a preference cascade. His tiny force couldn't possibly manage a coup on its own, but he gambled that if he stood up and said "actually fuck Putin, it's coup time" then other elements of the armed forces would join him. In the end the gamble didn't work but he was lucky enough to escape with his life.
I'm pretty sure this is the correct analysis. Prigozhin was desperate because he was about to lose approximately everything and become a politically inconvenient nobody, so he did something desperate. It was an extreme long shot, that depended on both military and political factors lining up perfectly. And, perhaps in testament to Prigozhin's talent as a mercenary captain and his understanding of Russia's weakness, the military side did seem to be lining up pretty well as far as it could go. The political side, wasn't coming together and that was completely outside his control. So when Lukashenko stepped in as mediator, Prigozhin backed down.
We'll see how that works for him. You come after the king, you'd best not miss. And wimping out at the last minute isn't much better. But maybe he'll have a peaceful retirement in Belarus.
Thanks rightfully go to an AI translator for doing the bulk of the work, I just fixed a few obvious bloopers.
The guy is a decent system analyst. He does go off into wild directions on subjects where his initial conditions are way off. But here he gets the big picture correctly, IMHO:
Russia is a failed state
Putin is an incompetent coward
The system is incapable of planning beyond the immediate reaction to events.
From these basic premises the likeliest explanation is that various groups are jockeying for position, and we just happened to see a move get out of hand and almost spiral into chaos.
Yoram, how much would you proposal cost an average middle class individual that doesn't qualify for EITC and doesn't live in a rural community? It seems in the neighborhood of $50-60 per year on gasoline and a 10% increase in utility bills on gas and electric, both increasing regularly for the foreseeable future. That gets pretty steep pretty quickly.
Utah already has fairly high state income, and very low property taxes. Your proposal feels like yet another strike against younger people, typically transplants, who live in SLC, don't have family roots in the state, don't own real property in this state, and typically are disliked by the legislature of this state, yet seem to be expected to pay for everything in the state while subsidizing longtime residents/property owners/landlords who pay very little. I haven't been here for very long and frankly I'm not sure I'm staying much longer, why would I want to pay more to maintain the value and usability of their property? Good luck on this bill but I don't think I want to volunteer, if anything it seems directly against my interests.
If you write a ballot act that pays for this with an increase in our laughably low property tax or a tax on a certain non-profit entity I won't name, I'll be all for it.
Hi Jacob: I think you're missing the cut in the state sales tax on groceries. For more, here's a link to our analysis of the "Beehive Family", created by the Utah Taxpayers Association to show the impact of taxes on a typical Utah family. Our analysis is that the sales tax cut on groceries roughly balances out the impacts of the carbon tax, with the Beehive Family ending up with $26 in _savings_. Each household is of course different, but this analysis suggests that our proposal is pocketbook-friendly: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Xb8o4vBIMgAJcW8oE0Kf8Ao6t1FBzyXFUCa4Y_fKe-I/edit?usp=sharing
Scott, not sure how to reply but unless I am badly misunderstanding this bill and his proposal, the projection is revenue neutral in the sense that it collects a lot of money and spends all of it without adding to debt, but that is not the same thing as me paying $100 and getting $100 back.
Per Yoram's website, "They estimate carbon tax revenue of $243m in FY 2026 (i.e., the year ending June 30, 2026; note that our policy goes into effect Jan 1 2026 so this is only a half-year of revenue), $569m in FY 2027 (the first full fiscal year for our policy), and $611m in FY 2028." (1), put simply he wants to fund his ideas with a $569m carbon tax in 2027 across gasoline, electric etc.
Then, per Yoram's website,"
$100 million a year for cleaning up local air pollution from wood-burning stoves, dirty school buses, and more.
$50 million a year for rural economic development through the Governor’s Office of Economic Development.
Some revenue goes to airports and highways because of legal and economic considerations described in other FAQs. (This is 35m on the pie chart)
Elimination of the state sales tax on grocery store food and other regressive sales taxes. (this is 220m on the pie chart)
A 20% match of the federal Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income working families. (This is 75m on the pie chart?)
Any money “left over” goes to additional tax cuts as determined by the state legislature. (This is 90m on the pie chart)", (2) which is a total of 570m out.
Of the $570m carbon tax,
$220m pays for the state sales tax on groceries, which, to my original point, a smaller percentage of which will probably go to me than the carbon tax I'm paying as I do drive for work, heat my home etc. but do not have 10 children like many families in this great state.
$100m to clean air programs which are nice but not as important to me, a new resident and possibly not long term resident, as they should be to landowners who pay very little property tax and are not particularly hit by this proposal.
$50m to rural economies I don't live in.
$35m to Airports and Highways because of federal laws. If anything this is the part of the bill that benefits me the most fairly as I use both, and probably fly more than the average Utahn.
$75m to EITC which is nice and all but again I don't see why this should be paid for by a carbon tax and not a property tax. We already have gas tax and our property tax is pitiful, meanwhile legacy family landowners and a certain non-profit group hold all the political power.
$90m to be determined by a state legislature I don't remotely trust or support, did not vote in favor of electing, and don't think is the best user of my money. They are currently trying to throw away over $500m on a pointless Gondola to private ski resorts as a massive handout to a well connected former government official who owns the land, I guess this will help them pay for it.
I've read through the two page more detailed PDF and was not impressed by it. To your response, at best, if you include EITC and the misc. cuts, of the $570m in revenue $385m is returned through tax cuts and EITC.
tl;dr I am not a fan of my state legislature and their financial decision making. I feel that I and people in my cohort of educated, transplanted, renting SLC dwellers overproduce and are overtaxed compared to the majority of the state, yet have very little political power. I don't support additional taxes that don't increase the property tax to make landowners pay their fare share, and I certainly don't support anything that increases my taxes to provide open ended funds to the state legislature. I strongly encourage you to read about the gondola below if you think doing so is a good idea.
tl;dr per Yoram's website
"They estimate carbon tax revenue of $243m in FY 2026 (i.e., the year ending June 30, 2026; note that our policy goes into effect Jan 1 2026 so this is only a half-year of revenue), $569m in FY 2027 (the first full fiscal year for our policy), and $611m in FY 2028.
They estimate FY 2027 impacts to the General Fund (from lost sales tax revenue on groceries) of $221m.
They estimate FY 2027 impacts to the Income Tax Fund (from the expanded EITC match) of $75m."
Hi Jacob: Thanks for doing such a thorough look at our proposal! Other than re-recommending our Beehive Family analysis (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Xb8o4vBIMgAJcW8oE0Kf8Ao6t1FBzyXFUCa4Y_fKe-I/edit?usp=sharing) I think the best I can do is suggest that we actually do the numbers for you. If you're interested send me an email (yoram@standupeconomist.com) and we can set up a google doc or otherwise work through an estimate of how much you'd save from the sales tax cut on groceries and how much you'd pay in carbon taxes. My guess is that you'll end up pretty close to zero, but of course each household is different.
Does Yoram even live here? My sense was that he’s a policy vagabond trying to implement his neat ideas wherever he can get traction.
The difference between Yoram and the “few dozen refineries and steel mills” be proposes taxing is the latter actually provides something to valuable to society that people are willing to pay for.
I look forward to seeing this ballot initiative crushed and Yoram’s good idea fairies flutter to a better aligned constituency, like California or New York.
We have a wonderful thing going for us here. Let’s not let some pseudo intellectuals fuck it up.
I've lived in Utah since 2017. Prior to that I was in Washington State, where I worked in I-732. As for your sense that I'm a "policy vagabond", I do work on pocketbook-friendly climate policy in other states as well. I'm not sure why you don't like that kind of approach: maybe you're not convinced by climate science? If so I encourage you to join the bet that Bryan Caplan made with me! https://standupeconomist.com/2023-update-on-my-global-warming-traffic-light-bet-with-bryan-caplan-and-alex-tabarrok/
I certainly don't live in Utah, but I will comment anyway. I do not expect this referendum to pass.
Energy taxes are enormously unpopular, and this will be sold as a massive tax hike. What this immediately does is increase the gasoline tax from 34c/gal to 43c/gal. The promises of adding another dollar over the next two decades are just promises. Even if this referendum succeeds, Utah will not be bound to the dead hand of the past.
There is also a bunch of random ear-marked spending and tax bailouts. It is an attempt to do a compromise-based approach to legislation. But it is doing the epicycle approach to government budgeting; targeted handouts to hopefully reach "51% of taxpayers are better off under this proposal".
Hi Alex: Energy taxes are unpopular, but so are sales taxes on groceries. Local air pollution is a big issue here in Utah as well. So our proposal in a nutshell is to "tax pollution, not potatoes, and use the money that's left over to Clean The Darn Air." I certainly can't guarantee that our proposal would pass, but I think we'd have a fighting chance if we made the ballot!
I didn't even realize that. I left the east coast to get away from people like that, and if he's asking me to volunteer to bring that nonsense with me I'd strongly invite him to fuck off back to the state he actually lives in and lobby for tax increases that he, not I, will be on the hook for.
Apologies, I relied on the other commenter and your Wikipedia which both had you moving from California to Washington. Of course if you live here you're fully entitled to lobby for political change in the state. Either way my tone was unacceptable, sorry.
It's stated as revenue-neutral and offset by lower sales taxes, I'm not sure any of the groups you mention disproportionately use carbon over buying goods and services.
It's revenue neutral in the sense that it increases taxes on gas and utilities to give money to parts of the state I don't live in, and people connected enough to get state funding for some pork environmental projects. Any tax increase for Utah that doesn't propose increasing taxes on real property and/or a certain non-profit entity that he may not have even heard of if he doesn't live here is absurd. I won't be volunteering and will be voting no.
I think you’re misunderstanding. This is a tax increase, so it is paid for by a tax *decrease* on sales taxes. If you buy products that are subject to sales tax, and if your purchase of those and of gasoline are average, then you have no net change in your tax burden.
The bill purports to be overall revenue neutral. This means the energy tax hike pays for the sales tax cut AND Uta services AND rural community??? AND green energy grift AND whatever other junk is in the bill
Hi Jacob: The bill purports to be (and is) _mostly_ revenue-neutral, not 100% revenue neutral: a big chunk of the carbon tax revenue is going to cut the state sales tax on grocery store food, but as you note there is some money for things like local air quality programs. (If you think that's junk then you're entitled to your opinion, but perhaps you haven't lived in Utah long enough to becoming aware of our local air pollution problems.) As noted above, I think the best way to see how close it is to revenue neutral is to run the numbers: we did that for the Beehive Family (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Xb8o4vBIMgAJcW8oE0Kf8Ao6t1FBzyXFUCa4Y_fKe-I/edit?usp=sharing) and they ended up with a net _savings_ of $26. I'd be happy to work with you to run the numbers for your household: email me at yoram@standupeconomist.com if you want to do that!
I ran it for myself. 400 gallons a year (vs. 1152? in your spreadsheet), $4000 groceries (single household, your spreadsheet has $5334 for a 2.7 person household and 18038 for a 5 person), my actual gas and electric expenditures for the previous twelve months of 21.8mcf and 68**kwh(derived with your constant from my electric bill), which left me at a loss of $29.57 (Gas -38.88, Natgas -14.37, Electric -46.32, Groceries +70).
That's not as bad as I expected, but on principle I am still quite opposed to increasing other Utah taxes while our income tax is quite high and our property taxes are so low. We (moderate republicans and democrats in Salt Lake City, which might include you?) just lost our congressional seat in the gerrymander, have very little social or political power compared to the mormons, have above average incomes and pay above average income taxes already. I don't think we should be paying any more for this state, if new taxes are required they should be assessed against property, which has been skyrocketing to the benefit of longtime residents and the detriment of transplants who moved here and have to rent or buy into it.
Interesting, I'll probably take a crack at the numbers myself. However just skimming through I am single, not a family with 5 kids, so I'd be far closer to your starting figures rather than spending 18k a year on groceries.
In fact, that was essentially my initial point. That family of 5 probably owns a home on which they pay some of the lowest property taxes in the state. My income roughly matches theirs but because they have a much larger family they are getting more back in a grocery tax rebate, all the while paying very little in the property tax on their home. I think if you'd like to raise taxes in Utah it should be on homeowners
Recently, 7 US AI companies - including OpenAI and Meta - pledged that they would make their system safer to use for public. And one way they thought to go about is to 'watermark' the content that AI generates.
This would look effective on AI gen image. But it feels superficial, doesn't it?
Watermark on Ai gen image? You could always remove it via Crop and Photoshop. Same is the case with watermarked AI gen videos; there do exist tools online which you can use to remove watermarks on a video.
Watermark on Ai Gen Audio? Silence that specific frequency, and (maybe) layer it with non-watermarked sound. Watermark on AI-generated essays? Well firstly, how would you go about watermarking a 'text'?
Is this even as effective?
What, in your opinion, is the best way to watermark AI-generated content?
It sounds to me like they're using safety as an excuse to cover up how many other people's watermarks their AI are creating because they're using indiscriminate training data. "We'll train our AI to exclusively make this one watermark, and no others. For SAFETY!"
Authenticity can be demonstrated with digital signatures. At the audio/video recording level, this could work at the hardware level -- e.g. this video is signed by a device certificate signed in turn by a trusted root certificate associated with Apple, therefore we can have reasonable assurance that this is unaltered video recorded from an iOS device.
I think this ends not with being able to infallibly demonstrate that certain content is AI-created, but with a general downgrade in the evidentiary value of unsigned material, (which might be AI generated, or might be the kind of material the author wished to have plausible deniability for).
To clarify: Your proposal is that, instead of watermarking ai-generated content, we should instead sign all NON-ai-generated content? Like, ALL of it?
That seems logistically impossible, and if you somehow did it anyway then the security would be broken before you finished rolling it out. (If my iPhone signs all videos I record with it, that implies that the digital signing key is stored on my iPhone, which implies that a jailbroken iPhone can sign anything you want.)
This kind of thing massively boosts the payoff for finding exploitable vulnerabilities, and not merely in software but extends all the way through bringing out the electron microscopes, ion beam workstations, and similar "heavy artillery" where the searcher is not afraid to blow away tens of millions of dollars to extract a key or otherwise produce an "authentic, really, don't you know $iron is impossible to fool?" signature.
Probably, but putting it on a physical screen is a pretty crude way of doing it. (It's just a really easy example to understand). The fancy CIA way would probably be to open up the camera and find a way to send your own video feed to the signing chip. The less fancy way would be to just compress the video heavily so any telltale signs of it being on a screen get covered up with compression artifacts.
The "less fancy" CIA way would be to subpoena+gag order the key from the vendor itself (or individual employees thereof who happen to have custody of it.) Which is commonly believed to be exactly what happens with SSL certs, firmware signing keys, etc. A piece of paper from the FISA kangaroo court is orders of magnitude cheaper than reversing.
The proposal I've heard for watermarking a text is the following:
Divide the dictionary into two halves, basically randomly.
When the text-generator is generating its next word, have it down-weight the half of the dictionary that word was in.
If the fraction of pairs of consecutive words from the same half of the dictionary is substantially less than 50%, then that is a strong statistical signature of the text having been generated by this generator. This will be robust to small edits of the text, especially for long texts.
If the different language models use different random divisions of the dictionary, you could even identify *which* generator was likely to have generated this text, or if the text was pasted together from the outputs of multiple generators.
The signal is going to be weaker for very tightly constrained texts, like a sonnet where every word starts with the same letter of the alphabet.
Very likely, something similar would be possible for audio and images, which would be nearly undetectable by humans, and moderately hard to hide.
It's clever, but I imagine you could remove it pretty easily just by asking another non-watermarked LLM to rewrite the text. Then you could use the expensive, high-quality but watermarked LLM to create your text, and use a smaller, cheaper LLM for watermark removal. Then someone would probably make a free online watermark removal site.
I agree. I'm predicting that if watermarking becomes popular, free online watermark removal tools will become popular shortly after. This diminishes their usefulness for catching dishonest people (eg, cheating students) as it will only catch those that don't know about the watermark or are too lazy to remove it. It'll still be useful for checking the work of honest people, as in people who aren't trying to hide the tools they used but may not have actually declared it anywhere.
Is this scheme likely to identify human authors, too? I know I have a bunch of preferred words and others I avoid, whenever I look at a thesaurus I can divide the synonyms into these categories.
This is called text fingerprinting (or at least it was, when I was involved in that stuff 20+ years ago). It's a mature art, almost in the same reliability ballbark as physical fingerprints. Given a large enough text corpus (maybe surprisingly, in practice not very much text is required) known to originate from person A, any text of more that half a page or so can quite reliably be judged if it was authored by the same individual, if no effort to conceal (like thesaurus randomizing plus scrupulous spelling, punctuation and grammar checks) was made. But even with effort to conceal, text has so many dimensions of possible idiosyncrasy that anonymous writing is almost impossible these days. The tools for text fingerprinting are quite trivial and take almost no compute. Any old laptop can do it in a heartbeat.
The more involved (and less reliable) task is the reverse: Given a text by individal X, go and find other texts out there by the same individual (so that we may identify him). This is obviously way harder, but for anybody in possession of a fulltext mirror of the internet, a quick computer, and the right tools it's only a matter of seconds. Not quick enough yet for Google or the NSA to do it with every text entered anywhere in real-time as a matter of routine AFAIK, but not far off either. GPT-like AI will not speed that process up: the compression inherent in LLM action is only useful along a few of the idiosyncrasy dimensions of text even in theory, and in practice would slow things down there too with current tech. Brute-forcing large volumes of text is quick, LLMs are not.
Probably yes, but you would need a lot of text. If it's just one sentence, almost anyone could have written it. If it is a book, an algorithm could probably compare it with a few other books and say which one has the same author.
The question is how much text is necessary to figure out that e.g. this Substack user is the same as this Reddit user. Though there would be a lot of noise, for example you probably discuss different topics on different websites, which obviously also has a huge impact on word frequency.
This (and other "watermark") schemes suffers from a problem already well-explored (in re: images) in the late '90s: if an attacker has ready access to the watermark detector (even if the latter is a remote service and must be treated as "black box") he can simply permute the input until the detector reports a negative. And often enough, random permutation will give a still-palatable but de-watermarked output, even without access to the detector. And any attempt at making the latter more sensitive will crank up the false positive rate.
It’s definitely not going to be secure enough for some applications. But for others, like reliably identifying when a student is trying to turn in an AI-generated essay as their own, it seems likely to be sufficient.
Seems like the maximum possible work that might be required to circumvent that scheme is to slightly paraphrase everything in the essay. That's not a trivial amount of work, but is still considerably less work than actually doing most writing assignments honestly.
In fact, that sounds so much easier that I bet a talented high school student could take a weekend to write a program to do the paraphrasing automatically (and then put that program online for the entire world to use). So even if you could somehow guarantee that 100% of "AI" programs abide by your watermarking scheme, I don't think that gets you very far.
>Seems like the maximum possible work that might be required to circumvent that scheme is to slightly paraphrase everything in the essay. That's not a trivial amount of work, but is still considerably less work than actually doing most writing assignments honestly.
It might work to Goggle translate into Russian and translate back into English.
Who was it that said all translation is paraphrase?
- Not a rhetorical question. I honestly don’t remember. -
Edit
Holey bucket I was looking for the source of the quote and found that the Grammarly app will paraphrase text. They specifically mention avoiding plagiarism by rewording someone else’s ideas or research.
The cheating student is not likely to put in the sweat of removing watermarks with his own hands, but will simply buy text from a cheat shop which does so -- exactly like how they currently buy human-written essays.
For higher education, I really don't see a way around requiring that work done for a grade be done in a monitored environment. Homework is practice, assigned for your benefit to assist you in mastering the material. It forms no part of your course grade. Anything done for a grade, including short and long form writing, is done in a monitored room. This does not have to imply it is timed -- a student might check into the essay-writing lab, spent as short or as long a time as they like, come back later to revise or complete the work before submitting, etc. The important part is that if it's for a grade, we will monitor the room in which your pencil is on the page, or your fingers on the keyboard.
<cynicism on> Require every piece have an identified human author, and punish that author for falsehoods and anything else we don't want AI doing. Publishing AI-generated content then becomes too risky for anyone with sense.</end cynicism>
That would be bad for other reasons - anonymity serves various useful purposes. But our problem mostly isn't with AI-generated content; it's with lies, confabulations, etc. Humans are perfectly capable of writing falsehoods, complete with fake footnotes; all AI does is facilitate doing this at scale.
Open Source AI tools are far more powerful and 'safer' than those by private AI companies. OpenAI at this point is burning money to keep GPT4 up and running. Comparatively, in this sense, Open Source AI is much more economical and efficient.
KYC is an interesting approach to avoid being fooled by these algorithmic monsters. I've read that the EU in its AI Act is incorporating this KYC approach in its AI Act.
So I'm keeping my hopes high - I don't want to exchange my privacy for the development of these artificially intelligent beings.
Last year, I read with great interest on ACX a very well-written review of the book "Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts" by Stanislas Dehaene. Based on the book, Dehaene defines consciousness as the subjective awareness of oneself and the external world. He considers the main function of consciousness to be the brain's "global workspace," acting as a central hub that integrates and transmits information from different specialized brain modules.
After reading the review, I started to contemplate whether consciousness, as a global workspace that integrate information ‘spatially’, from different parts of the brain, could also play a similar role temporally in integrating different successive events into episodic autobiographical memory. To my delight, I later came across a paper that mentioned, "Previous research suggests that episodic autobiographical memory, autonoetic consciousness, and sense of self rely on one another." So my hypothesis seems in fact an already accepted idea!.
I wanted to test whether correlates of 'consciousness' would positively correlate with episodic memory but not with other types of memory. To conduct the test, I created a short survey using mostly existing scales developed for cognition studies. I selected scales that estimated the frequency of inner monologue and self-awareness as correlates of consciousness, while including episodic memory as my primary focus, and semantic and spatial memory as controls. I have a particular interest in inner monologue since I barely experience it, making it a rather mysterious phenomenon to me! I posted two slightly different surveys on one of ACX's open threads, and on ACX and Sam Harris subReddit about a year ago, and recently reposted them.
To my surprise, my seemingly obvious hypothesis turned out to be generally false: people with frequent verbal inner monologue do not, in fact, have better episodic memory. Self-awareness showed only a small positive effect on it. The factor that strongly correlates with episodic memory is visual self-talk. These results were consistent across two different samples from ACX readers, providing me with a reasonable level of confidence that it is not just a random outcome. My current proposed explanation (kind of an ad hoc explanation!) is that may be verbal thoughts are too recent on an evolutionary time scale to have been integrated in our memory processes.
I was quite surprised by the absence of link between inner monologue and episodic memory. Moreover, individuals with frequent verbal inner monologue not only don't have better episodic memory, but they also, on average, perform slightly worse in spatial memory. This led me to wonder whether inner monologue is more related to personality than cognition. As a result, I included a measurement of personality (Big Five) in the second version of the survey. Interestingly, inner monologue showed no significant relationship with these five personality traits, while visual self-talk displayed significant correlations. So this inner monologue thing remains very mysterious for me!
I would be, of course, very interested in any comments you might have on this subject
I think I have a different concept of inner monologue. I am also a person with little to none inner monologue. As a mathematician, I think this is rather unusual. When I develop a proof, then there are almost no words involved. I struggle to say what is involved instead. Some images are involved, but sometimes I have the feeling that it involves neither images nor audio. I have talked to a few other mathematicians, and most of them seem to use verbal thinking in order to develop proofs, for example they would internally "read" involved formulas verbally to themselves.
Anyway, what I want to get to: I think that verbal inner monologue is one way of conscious thinking, where the internal state centers around words. But that there are other ways of conscious thinking that center around images or even other modes. There has been related research on how people count.
An example: some people seem to count verbally, while other people count visually. (And perhaps there are yet different ways?) In some experiments, people were told to count while they had to do some competing verbal tasks. It turns out that people who count verbally are slowed down by the competing tasks. The hypothesis is that the counting process is briefly interrupted and resumes with the old speed after the other task is finished. But people who count visually are not slowed down. So we have some more evidence than just introspection on that.
So if inner monologue is just one of several modes of conscious thinking, then the questions about inner monologue are perhaps not a good indicator for the strength/frequency of consciousness, but rather of its mode of operation. You and I don't have inner monologues often, but I wouldn't assume that we are less conscious than other people. So I find it quite natural that there is no correlation between "verbal self-talk" and "episodic memory"/"semantic memory".
On the other hand, "low self-awareness" does sound like an indicator for weak consciousness, so it seems natural that it correlates negatively with episodic and semantic memory. (Though from the example question for low self-awareness it might be a bit circular, since it literally contains the phrase "can't remember why". Perhaps this already tests episodic memory?)
I don't have a very good explanation for the strong correlation between visual self-talk and episodic/semantic memory, though. This is the most surprising bit for me. Perhaps it is as you say, and verbal thoughts are evolutionary younger. We are a pretty vision-based species after all. It's all ad-hoc, but it also seems to me that most of my episodic memory is visual. Since I don't use inner monologue, I am a poor data point, so I wonder whether episodic memory for other people is also more visual than verbal?
For the negative correlation between verbal self-talk and spatial memory, this also makes sense if verbal and visual are two different modes of thinking. Visual people probably have an advantage for spatial tasks because spatial information is much easier to represent visually than verbally. So if people can either think verbally or visually, then the visual group has a lot more practice with visual representations, and is thus better on spatial tasks. And the verbal group has less visual practice and is worse. It's as if you ask right-handed and left-handed people to use a pair of left-handed scissors. The right-handers are generally not so good with their left hands because they use them less, and so they will not be very good with the left-handed scissors.
"but sometimes I have the feeling that it involves neither images nor audio" a note that Hurlburt calls this "unsymbolized thinking". See the Descriptive Experience Sampling codebook: https://hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu//codebook.html
I tend to call it "conceptual thinking". I use it a lot - more than verbal I think, but I'm not sure. It seems particularly useful for maths/computers.
Highly recommended digging into Hurlburt's work, that gives lots of terminology that would be invaluable for this conversation!
"I don't have a very good explanation for the strong correlation between visual self-talk and episodic/semantic memory, though. This is the most surprising bit for me. Perhaps it is as you say, and verbal thoughts are evolutionary younger. We are a pretty vision-based species after all. It's all ad-hoc, but it also seems to me that most of my episodic memory is visual. Since I don't use inner monologue, I am a poor data point, so I wonder whether episodic memory for other people is also more visual than verbal?"
That was also the big surprise for me, as I did not expect any special relationship between visual thoughts and type of memory. I did not realize it but now that you mention it, same as you, if I am remembering old memories, they tend to be based on pictures. It might also of course be due to me not using verbal thoughts much. I note to ask people whether whether their episodic memory is also more visual than verbal!
"For the negative correlation between verbal self-talk and spatial memory, this also makes sense if verbal and visual are two different modes of thinking. Visual people probably have an advantage for spatial tasks because spatial information is much easier to represent visually than verbally. So if people can either think verbally or visually, then the visual group has a lot more practice with visual representations, and is thus better on spatial tasks. And the verbal group has less visual practice and is worse. It's as if you ask right-handed and left-handed people to use a pair of left-handed scissors. The right-handers are generally not so good with their left hands because they use them less, and so they will not be very good with the left-handed scissors." Yes, it seems a very plausible explanation.
Yes, I would also be interested to know whether other people's episodic memory are visual as well. It might be something to ask in the next Open Thread.
There's a symptom called Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM) where people have a very poor episodic memory, because they don't have a visual imagination.
This applies to me. I'm hypophantasic (almost aphantasic), and I don't recall specific events. Only for really really important life events I get some spatial memory, no colour or texture. Instead I remember concepts and facts about what happened to me and reason from those, which is ineffective for lots of kinds of recall.
Judging by talking to people about this, and my own experience, what I now call episodic memory is entirely sensory - mainly visual, but people also recall other senses. I think fact-based conceptual or verbal memories I have about the past are likely a different kind of memory.
"So if inner monologue is just one of several modes of conscious thinking, then the questions about inner monologue are perhaps not a good indicator for the strength/frequency of consciousness, but rather of its mode of operation. You and I don't have inner monologues often, but I wouldn't assume that we are less conscious than other people. So I find it quite natural that there is no correlation between "verbal self-talk" and "episodic memory"/"semantic memory"."
I do agree that that inner monologue is just one of several modes of conscious thinking but I had the, false, expectation that it would be linked with self-awareness. It seemed to me that an inner monologue was a stronger indication of someone being 'there' than the presence of images, which does not in fact seem the case.
"Though from the example question for low self-awareness it might be a bit circular, since it literally contains the phrase "can't remember why". Perhaps this already tests episodic memory". Thank you for the comment. I used the following questions, with only one mentioning memory. I will check whether removing it changes the relationship.
Questions :
- It seems that I am frequently “running on automatic pilot,” without much awareness of what I’m doing.
- I often daydream while doing daily tasks.
- [I often find myself doing something and can't remember why.
- Most of the time I am well aware of what I am doing and why I am doing it.
- I start doing tasks that I don't intend to do because they are more common tasks that closely resemble the intended task (i.e. open the wrong app on my phone).
"I am also a person with little to none inner monologue. As a mathematician, I think this is rather unusual. When I develop a proof, then there are almost no words involved. I struggle to say what is involved instead. Some images are involved, but sometimes I have the feeling that it involves neither images nor audio" A description that I have seen for thoughts that are neither verbal nor visual is "abstract". Or, on a related post on Reddit, someone proposed that it probably consists partly of sense qualia.
Another commentor used a metaphor that I find very illustrative : "I think in concepts to and describe them as clouds of 'stuff' which does include words which are not articulated, but belong to the 'concept'. This is compatible with the Thousand-brains-theory of Jeff Hawkins, who claims that we store frameworks of 'stuff' in neuronal networks: The concept of a cat is made up of the neural correlates of fur, meowing, cat eyes, scratching, hunting mice, and so forth. When we think about a cat, we activate those neurons and there you have your cloud of 'stuff' that makes up a cat.
Seems to me that inner monologue and language is downstream from that. In a sense, concept thinkers are assembler coders of the mind, whereas people with inner monologue use higher order 'coding languages' that are built on assembler."
Yes, "abstract thought" and "concepts" describe it quite well for me. I can zoom into sub-concepts. For example, when I prove a theorem, I start with the overall concept of "this statement is correct and this is how the proof goes", and when queried I can fill out the details of the various proof steps.
demost_ and Emma_B - I'm starting a podcast about inner mental experiences, and it would be great to have a conversation with either or both of you on it about the topic of this thread! And Emma's survey.
If you're up for it email me francis@flourish.org or reply to this message with a way to find you (e.g. on Twitter).
I'm very interested in consciousness, & researched phenomenology in grad school. You mention that you used scales that estimated frequency of inner monologue and self-awareness. Were these self-report scales, with items like "I engage in inner monologues" and answer choices along the lines of "never, occasionally, fairly often, ....etc."? If so, I don't believe scales like that are valid for measuring mental processes.
First of all, I don't think the meaning of the phrase "inner monologue" is nearly as clear as it sounds. As it happens, today there was a moment when I asked myself whether I was having an inner monologue. (I ask myself stuff like that a lot.). I had been walking along a sunny sidewalk, thinking about how to express myself in an upcoming difficult conversation I knew I was going to have with someone I was annoyed at. And when I asked myself whether I was having a mental monologue, I couldn't decide.. There were definitely actual phrases in my train of thought -- mostly things I was imagining saying. But they weren't long speeches, just phrases like "it's not reasonable to expect me to . .." Then mixed in were some mental images of the situation I was annoyed about, and of the prospective talk. And then there was a lot of *thought* about the situation that was neither words nor images, but ideas -- for example, the idea that if I spoke too harshly the person would probably tune me out. So here I am, a psychologist, fascinated by phenomenology, catching a train of thought hot off the press, and yet I am unable to answer confidently whether I was having a mental monologue.
Second, even if I were able to identify clearly occasions when I was having a mental monologue, there's no reason to think another person asked about mental monologues would be using the same criteria as I do to decide whether they are having one.
Third, if the tests asks retrospectively about how often people have mental monologues, I really do not think that is something people are able to answer. I can tell you approximately how often I pee on a given day, or how often I turn a key in a lock, but I haven't the faintest idea how frequently I have something that even sort of qualifies as a mental monologue. In fact I can remember very few of the actual individual thoughts I had today, let alone what modality they were in. I can certainly tell you the topics that were on my mind today, on my mind either because they are current preoccupations or because they were related to major events of the day. But almost all of the individual thoughts are gone. Early in the day I rode my bike to work. I can remember that it was a beautiful day and I was feeling tired but in a good mood, but trying now to remember what I thought about on that bike ride, I cannot remember a single topic, much less the individual thoughts about the topic.
So the upshot is that I do not think it is possible to get valid measures of characteristics of subjects' thoughts by self-report questionnaires. If you want to do that you have to do thought sampling, and train your subjects ahead of time on what counts as an "inner monologue" or a "mental image" or "self-awareness."
I just read a book by Eric Schwitzgebel called *Perplexities of Consciousness," which is mostly about how little clarity we actually have about our own phenomenology. It's a good book, & I recommend it highly. Reviewed it for the book review contest, actually -- review is on the Substack called Book Review Group.
Out of interest, what do you think of Hurlburt's Descriptive Experience Sampling for getting more objective accounts of inner experience? Schiwtzgebel is skeptical, and I read the book where he and Hurlburt discuss this, but I still think DES is way way way better than giving up!
I agree that it is way way better than nothing. I think it is most useful for practical purposes. Here are 2 examples:
-In one study somebody, it may have been Hurlburt, interviewed subjects before thought sampling and developed a Current Concerns list for each subject -- the 5 or 10 things most on their minds that week -- then used list as part of categorizing collected thoughts. I think a lot more could be done with that than experimentors did. For instance it's likely people's current concerns influence their take on experiences they have -- there's a selective attention thing going on.
-I just read the wiki entry about DES and it mentioned a subject who believed he mostly felt anxiety, but thought sampling revealed that a lot of his thoughts were angry. I'm a clinical psychologist, and I think thought sampling would probably be an excellent way of putting people in touch with feelings that they might otherwise take a long time to recognize.
On the other hand, I think a lot of the qualitative stuff about inner experience is much less easy to capture than it seems -- things like how visual the experience is, how much of it involves words. Overall, I think simple things like topic of thought are possible and useful to collect, but not more subtle qualitative things. I've done a fair amount of thought sampling using myself as subject, so that conclusion is based not mostly on theory but on careful examination of my own experience. I loved Schwitzgebel's *Perplexities of Consciousness.* He observations about the weird gelatinous hard-to-capture quality of much inner experience absolutely match. mine.
I think consciousness is like a field of icebergs. A lot of what is happening is below the surface, i.e. not accessible via introspection. But the stuff below the surface isn't the Freudian unconscious -- it's cognitive processing via alrorithms, etc. We don't figure out what we think and see by paying careful attention to our inner experience and percepts. We know what we think and see because the knowledge pops into conscious experience along with the wispy remnants of the raw material it's based on.
Personally fascinated, and would love more people to be aware of and talk about this stuff. In general everyday life, people know people are good at different things, but because we don't have the habit and vocabulary to introspect at all, we're often more mystified than we should be.
I realised the variety existed when I found out I'm basically aphantasic (actually I have a bit of imagery, but very very minimal). And then discovered that everyone else uses their imagery in different ways with different qualities.
I half want to start some kind of public phenomenlogy institute - so helping spread that everyone's minds (what we can observe of them) work differently, that you can learn different ways of working (I get more imagery when I'm paying attention and doing exercises that might lead to that - I'm confident if I did that intensely it would get a lot better), and helping use it to improve things like teaching, and self-improvement.
Meanwhile I'm recording things for a podcast! Very amateur though.
Of course I agree with you that asking people a few questions about their recollection of their thought process is not going to produce an accurate and detailed description of that process ... but I think it does allow useful rough estimates to be made with reasonable reliability.
As for the problem of "inner monologue" not being clear enough, as is common with the approach I used, I asked several questions from a published scale about different aspects of inner monologue (cf below), and then extracted the common latent factor among the answers. This allows both to clarify (a bit!) what is meant by inner monologue, and also to average the answers from several questions related to various aspects of this factor.
The questions were from the Internal Representations Questionnaire by Roebuck et al. (2020):
- I often think about problems in my mind in the form of a conversation with myself.
- I often talk to myself to review things that have happened in the recent past.
- I often talk to myself to anticipate what someone will say and how I’ll respond to him or her.
As for the problem of people not remembering their thoughts accurately, yes, it would be much better to use experience sampling. But given that we are dealing with large differences (from zero to almost constant monologue) for an extremely common phenomenon for most people (thinking!), I am reasonably sure that the memories are sufficiently correlated with the process that there is a signal in the data.
More generally, this sort of approach, a series of questions to which people answer on the basis of their subjectively remembered experience, has a long history of use in psychology (for example, in personality measurement with the Big Five model), and we have plenty of evidence to suggest that it works, i.e. that it measures things with some reliability. To name a few: internal consistency of the scale, repeatability of the estimate between two time periods, correlation between different scales measuring similar traits, correlation with objective measures.
Finally, thanks for the suggestion, great idea to centralize the reviews and wonderful to start one with a Nabokov quote! I really liked Speak memory and am still thunderstruck by Ada!
Here's an example of something that I ran across that supports what I said about people using different criteria to decide whether they are having a certain experience. It's an article by someone who says they cured their aphantasia in 2 weeks using a little online e-course. But the most interesting thing to me is that they had the wrong idea of what mental images were like: "[The course] starts by laying out a huge misconception that many people with aphantasia have. Which is: usually people with aphantasia imagine that visualizing people are really seeing images. Like, when they close their eyes, they don’t just see a black void. But that’s not true! Most people see a black void just like aphantasics do. They just have a sense of an image alongside it, hovering in some imaginary parallel nether-space."
I would never have described myself as having aphantasia, but when I close my eyes I too see a black void, but have a sense of an image in some other space. And the images I have are like the ones Sasha Chapin describes after successfully completing the course. He seems to think they're lower quality than most people's, but they sound just like mine: "My visual pictures aren’t great. They’re pretty low-detail, colors are faint, I can’t do more than a word of text, and, with faces, I can imagine flickers of characteristic details—vivid eyes, a vehemence in the smile—but the full picture is hazy." I can offer a couple of bits of evidence that my flickering and detail-poor mental images are of at least average quality: I am certainly not a good artist, but I can draw familiar sights from memory well enough that they are recognizable. For instance I could draw a cat in any one of a number of postures and a viewer would recognize the posture. I have an unusually good memory for color. I actually took a little test of that once, and scored 90-something percentile. Here's the aphantasia article: "https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/i-cured-my-aphantasia-with-a-low"
My review of Schwitzgebel, once you get past the intro, summarizes his views of about 5 other mental experiences, and his case for maintaining that people's notions of what they are like are inaccurate.
I totally agree that people do not report accurately about their experience. But I think that we have a lot of evidence supporting the idea that people can report it accurately enough for the data to contain signal and not only noise. For example, I think that it is reasonable to think that, in average, people with high level of visual imagery will report higher frequency of visual imagery than people with low levels.
I just read this yesterday, and I think it’s interesting in the context of the issues that you were discussing. The TL; DR of it is that the shape and size of the brain is more significant because it’s kind of a resonating chamber. The model of specific areas controlling specific things does not correlate very well.
I’m not a scientist, but it seems to make an interesting case.
Here's a common take which I would like to understand better: "Investment/stock analysis, even among professionals, doesn't really work. Passive investment strategies are the way to go. One time Warren Buffett made a bet.... [etc. etc.] ....and that's why actively managed funds are terrible and you should just put your money in the S&P 500".
Obviously this is a little shallow. Given that 1. there are a bunch of analysts still employed, 2. they seem to be paid decently well, and 3. (judging by the previous book review) they seem to have reasonably sophisticated techniques, I have to assume there's a bit more to this story. I know that many finance jobs are not entirely about profit-maximization (and instead something like managing risk), but as I understand it, there are still tons of people in hedge funds with the sole goal of making money from markets.
Could anyone shed light on this topic? I'm especially interested in eg an essay by a professional trader defending their usefulness in light of common criticisms of actively managed funds.
(this is not a question about personal finance. I just want to understand)
*On average* "Investment/stock analysis, even among professionals, doesn't really work". Which is why for most people passive will be best. Just like there are some professional gamblers that make money but you probably wont go to Vegas and come out very much ahead.
Most jobs in the finance sector are boring administrative jobs. The one we think about when we say "finance" like at hedge funds or investment banks are mostly sales jobs and highly relationship based. They often make money (for themselves or clients) through providing services (so it doesn't matter what the market does), underwriting (which again isn't solely market dependent), or in deals which aren't in the stock (or bond) market like private debt offerings and such.
There are traders that try to make money from "beating" the market. And they usually use leverage to do this which makes these riskier on an individual level but at a large firm across a lot of traders or trading strategies, the risk can be reduced and profits can be found.
I think that something was lost in translation. Actual correct take is that passive investment stategies are the way to go FOR-NONPROFESSIONALS (edit: meaning people who don't work as/for investors). As a non-professional, you are usually not able to pick which actively managed fund is good and which is not.
I think the key part you are missing is the fees. Active funds charge much higher fees, which turn out to completely eat the advantage of having a professional stock picker. One way to look at this is that the labor of the active manager provides some value, but they take it all as compensation. I'm not sure why that would be, but it seems to be empirically demonstrated (see Malkiel's books for details.)
I can't recommend Peter Lynch's books on the stock market enough. He was the manager of Fidelity's most successful fund and he consistently beat the stock market getting a 29.2% annual return.
The main point expressed in his books is that the best (and pretty much only) way to consistently beat the market is to know something it doesn't. His mantra is: "Invest in what you know".
Much of his books consist of anecdotes about how his job as a hedge fund manager consisted mainly of getting information and on companies that other people don't have, and getting to know these companies intricately and he invested based on that knowledge, and that is basically what those analysts do all day, they get to know companies and recommend investments based on that knowledge gained.
For the average joe, you basically have 2 options. Either "invest in what you know": Companies which you know intimately due to your profession/hobbies/personal life etc. (and intensive personal research) or just stay with the indexes if you can't/don't want to do that.
From a retail investor perspective, there are two big issues with investing in professionally managed funds. The first is what Shaked Koplewitz already replied, that the level of effort necessary to (on average) beat the market by a nontrivial amount is very high, to such an extent that management fees tend to eat up that outperformance and then some.
The second problem is that picking good actively managed funds is itself a fiendishly difficult problem. Sure, some funds do outperform the market even after fees, but the trick is identifying those funds in advance rather than with hindsight. The funds that will outperform over the coming years aren't necessarily the same ones that outperformed last year (or the last five or ten or twenty years).
A fund might outperform the market on average simply because it's riskier. Perhaps due to use of leverage (i.e. borrowing some of the money you invest, which multiplies both gains and losses to your equity investors), or perhaps due to a "picking up pennies in front of steamrollers" strategy (i.e. stuff that pays off a reasonable amount something like 99% of the time, but the other 1% you go broke).
Or a fund might outperform because it bet heavily on a particular company or industry and happened to be right over the medium term. Anyone who bet heavily on tech stocks in the 90s looked like a genius for a while. Likewise for people who bet heavily on banks and financial services companies in the early to mid 2000s. After 2000 and 2007 respectively, somewhat less so.
So the actual rough estimate is "active investment lets you beat the market, but the effort and payoff is roughly proportional to your skill and the amount of work you put in". People in hedge funds who make money work hard to find new strategies that tend to become less viable over time and have limited potential payoff - for example you might spend a year working on a strategy that makes 200K the first year and then decays by half each subsequent year. (Of course, a lot of hedge funds never manage to find much and collapse).
I'm not especially going to defend trader usefulness here - some hedge funds (including both my current and previous employers) do consistently beat the market over long periods of time, but they generally won't take money from a random investor (the EMH also applies to investing in hedge funds, not just buying stocks).
To the degree that "the market" is in fact engineered to, among other things, maintain a caste system, i.e. reliably move value from designated losers to designated winners, it is then no great mystery why "they won't take money from a random investor."
But it isn't exactly a secret that hedge funds and investment banks can do things which you cannot do -- even on a correspondingly-smaller scale -- with a typical household budget, even if you are a domain expert; and not simply in the "quantity has a quality all its own" sense. They have various licenses, access to real-time market data, access to trading without risk of being front-run (unlike e.g. "Robin Hood" et al. users), ultra-low-interest loans from central banks and other financial corps, and, often enough: bailouts, in the event of "losing big".
That's not how it works. They have access to more data because they spend a lot of money on getting and aggregating it - basic data like 10-Ks is publicly available on the SEC website. And front running trading isn't a thing the way you seem to think - Robinhood users actually get better deals than institutional investors (because they're less risky to trade with). Also, hedge funds don't get funding or bailouts from central banks, only heavily-regulated banks (that *can't* just do this sort of trading) can get those.
It's probably worth reading a Bogle book (guy who founded Vanguard) to understand the arguments and theory underlying index investing. For my money, it's hard to beat "The Little Book of Common Sense Investing" by Bogle.
In theory (the theory is called the Efficient Market Hypothesis), asset prices are based on all available information. That is to say that at any point in time there is no such thing as a good deal, and that you can't 'beat the market' by being smarter/more informed. The logical conclusion is to just buy index funds. The alternative is that asset prices are not based on all current information, and that it's possible for a trader to get an 'edge', which is worth paying them 2% or so for. Read the latest book review from a few days ago, it discusses it in some detail
>asset prices are based on all available information.
Would it be more accurate to say that asset prices are based on the prevailing interpretation of all available information ? I wonder.. assets can be mispriced under that scenario.
From what I read and remember, one of the important reasons is that for huge amounts of money, passive funds can be worse then active management, esp. considering tax optimizations. Bundled derivative products allow for clever schemes that outearn passive instestments.
Another thing is that hedge funds employ very, sometimes extremely sophisticated methods. Read about medallion fund, it is fascinating.
Evidence based software engineering is something of a niche topic. Publicly available data is hard to find (yes, there is lots of code on Github, which is a bit like saying that there are lots of animals in the jungle) and good data analysis skills are rewarded in many other venues. There is now a discord channel https://discord.gg/hAPX2UrV
Not the person you are asking... but there are a lot of debates within software engineering about which practices are best or at least better than the known alternatives. These debates don’t usually have scientific studies to cite. Instead it is based off your experience and delegating to well known personalities.
Some examples:
* are static types or dynamic types better?
* are some programming languages better than others, or is it preference?
* how much should we value developer time vs computer time?
Two examples that I think are solved:
* strong vs weak types. Strong types won.
* formatting. This has been studied. The thing that matters most is consistency. As long as consistency is maintained, the particular style doesn’t seem to matter.
This seems off. I guess much of it depends on how you define "weak" and "strong" in the first place (and whatever definition you assume, I'm no expert and in no position to correct you), but a more specific, and in a way more fundamental objection I'd raise here is:
As far as I understand, dynamic and, particularly duck typing can still be strong: python is arguably strongly typed language, only types are attached to values, not variables or function parameters. A better argument for weak typing not being completely defeated is that while strong typing is indeed prevalent in typical application programming, people still use and love C in system and embedded programming precisely because its typing is weak, and you can do everything with your values (which may be needed in those applications)
The problem with "weak" as a descriptive term is that it seems to encompass two fundamentally different concepts. First is, just like in your example, low-level languages that just let you assign types on the fly to chunks of raw data, the second is high-level languages that implicitly convert between data types and let you (force you to) entirely ignore how the data is represented.
Duck typing allows for arguably "strong" languages to vastly simplify the former, and basically reproduce the latter entirely. (It also, at least to an extent, fixes the inherent lack of clarity of high-level "weak" languages like JavaScript.) Problems of both approaches fixed, dichotomy resolved.
Incidentally, duck typing has also static version in the form of typeclasses: the canonical version can be found, of course, in Haskell, but a programmer without a Phd in category theory may look at a more limited, but analogous constructs in other languages (Golang interface may be considered a very limited form of a single parameter typeclass).
I've mostly experienced those debates as a new fad every year or two. If there's any "evidence" presented for them, it's either a single cherry-picked study, or one restricted to a narrow use case, but hyped as if it was more generally applicable.
Thus for example it seems that C++ is better than C - it prevents some types of dynamic memory abuse (yay!) and that's more important than the ways that inheritance and such can be - and are - used to make it difficult or impossible to predict what a given line of code will actually do.
FWIW, even though I'm retired now, and so no longer need ammunition against fad-chasing managers, I'd be interested in citations to whatever research exists.
My book Evidence-based Software Engineering discusses what is currently known about software engineering, based on an analysis of all the publicly available data. pdf+code+all data freely available here
That's a big article, and doesn't use the term "evidence-based". I also didn't see any likely matches (under a different name) in the Methodology section.
FWIW, I'm not so sure we have theories of civil engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, etc.. Compared to software engineering, those fields have more established methodologies, and we have a lot more willingness to punish practitioners and firms that produce non-functioning or dangerous implementations. But theories?
Part of strangeness of software engineering is that a significant part of it is really about humans: how to write source code in such a way that it is understandable and easy to change. and extend by human programmers.
That's something of an understatement. Chess is a popular game to design variants of, and hexes are one of the more obvious variants. A search for "hex" on chessvariants.com turns up over 1000 hits.
Elo everything is good and all, but what about restricting the scope a bit? Ideas: ranking cities (people who lived in both cities say where they liked it more), diseases (more/less painful), employers… It seems like a weekend project, especially with gpt4. Getting people on board to kickstart it is the hard part.
Is this purely for entertainment, or are you hoping to get actual usefulness out of it? If you want actual usefulness, you're going to have all the problems of any review platform: You need to somehow get large amounts of honest user input while resisting spam and manipulation attempts, and you start at a huge disadvantage against incumbents because usefulness grows with size.
I guess it depends on the project. The disease one would be interesting from a purely academic point of view and I suspect that the incentive to lie about which disease hurts more would be low-ish. On the other hand sorting cities by the feelings of people who actually lived there would be practically useful, probably more than similar lists built using various indicators like walkability etc. But then there is a strong incentive to lie.
It's pretty good but not where I'd expect the tech to be considering we had diaspora in 2009. Would be nice if users and communities could be matched up/coalesced across instances.
LW/ACX Saturday (7/29/23) The Educated mind (book review)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X42X6cYg2bOJDLh_KPewNIo2cSCCXr790hex-O9zri8/edit?usp=sharing
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 36th 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 29th, 2023
Time: 2 PM
Conversation Starters :
Your Book Review: The Educated Mind - by a reader
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-educated-mind
Audio https://podcastaddict.com/astral-codex-ten-podcast/episode/160946654
Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are easily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected that changed your perspective on the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
There is only one reading this week because it is pretty long. Here is a summary according to chatGPT and Claude 2, respectively.
ChatGPT
1. The book "The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding" by Kieran Egan discusses the idea of cognitive tools, mental frameworks that help us understand and interpret the world.
2. Egan proposes a theory of education based on these cognitive tools, which he categorizes into five different stages: Somatic, Mythic, Romantic, Philosophic, and Ironic.
3. The Somatic stage is pre-linguistic and is based on bodily sensations and emotions.
4. The Mythic stage involves understanding the world through stories and binary opposites.
5. The Romantic stage is characterized by a fascination with the limits of reality and a focus on heroes and heroic qualities.
6. The Philosophic stage involves systematic thinking and the search for underlying principles and theories.
7. The Ironic stage is characterized by skepticism towards all grand theories and a focus on the complexity and contradictions of life.
8. Egan criticizes traditional education systems for focusing too much on the Philosophic stage and neglecting the other stages.
9. He suggests that education should be a process of guiding students through these stages in order to allow them to fully develop their understanding and cognitive abilities.
10. The original review's author agrees with many of Egan's points but also raises some criticisms, such as the lack of practical suggestions for implementing Egan's theories in real-world education systems.
11. The author also questions whether Egan's stages are truly universal or whether they are specific to Western culture.
12. Despite these criticisms, the author concludes that "The Educated Mind" is a thought-provoking book that offers valuable insights into education and cognitive development.
13. Other reviews describe the book as a "tour de force" that offers a fresh perspective on education, with Egan's ideas seen as radical and thought-provoking.
14. Some readers found the book to be a bit dense and academic but still highly insightful.
15. Egan's emphasis on the importance of imagination in education is highlighted in multiple reviews.
16. While Egan's ideas are compelling, they may be difficult to implement in practice, as noted by several reviewers.
17. Egan's critique of the three traditional educational ideas (socialization, platonic, and progressivist) is seen as a significant contribution to the field.
18. Egan's ideas require a radical shift in our understanding of education, which may be challenging but necessary, as per some reviewers.
Claude 2:
The review discusses the educational theory of Kieran Egan, laid out in his 1997 book The Educated Mind. Egan argues that mainstream education is failing students by trying to balance three incompatible goals: socializing students to fit into society, teaching academic content, and facilitating individual development. This "sad triangle" of mismatched aims sabotages real learning.
As an alternative, Egan proposes rebuilding education around a series of "cognitive tools" that have served humanity successfully for millennia, like storytelling, binary opposites, humor, gossip, extremes, and the lure of certainty. By tapping into capacities students already possess, education can become meaningful and motivating.
The core of Egan's theory outlines five "kinds of understanding" that education should foster in sequence:
- Mythic understanding deals with metaphor, story, jokes, and mental imagery. This matches the cognitive strengths of young children.
- Romantic understanding seeks extremes, ideals, and heroic individuals. It suits early adolescents' hunger for inspiration.
- Philosophic understanding builds general conceptual schemes and seeks anomalies. It emerges in older adolescents.
- Ironic understanding juxtaposes perspectives and doubts certainties. It aims for sophistication.
- Somatic understanding is bodily and intuitive rather than linguistic. It grounds all human cognition.
Egan argues this sequence represents the natural order in which humans gain new cognitive abilities as their language evolves. Education should therefore recapitulate this pattern to properly prepare the mind for more complex thinking.
Unlike traditional stage theories, Egan stresses that the goal is to educate students to use all these modes of understanding in harmony. Ironic understanding, in particular, helps balance the others. This approach aims to make education more meaningful by embracing emotion, imagination, and the wisdom accumulated through cultural evolution. Done right, Egan believes it can motivate students and develop sophisticated rational thinking.
The reviewer argues that Egan's theory rings true by describing how many members of the rationalist community learn - through stories, extremes, theoretical debates, and intellectual irony. Egan also anticipated ideas from scholars of cultural evolution like Joseph Henrich about how cognition builds on collective wisdom.
However, critics worry that Egan's paradigm is too eccentric and academically unfashionable ever to be widely implemented. But the review suggests it may warrant small experiments to empirically test its merits. Overall, Egan's vision promises a bold new conception of human education, even if uncertainties remain about its practicality.
Why did Substack quit sending notifications for sibling comments? It was easier to follow threads of interest when they did.
Think this is a political issue vulnerable to some directed focus/effective altruism: some pro-life groups have started trying to fuck up PEPFAR, a bipartisan initiative that has stopped tens of millions of Africans from dying of aids over the past 20 years. Currently about twenty million people get anti-AIDS medication through it. Whether you live in a red or blue state, whether you live in a county that's +40 Trump or +40 Biden, please call your rep/senators and tell them to pass PEPFAR on through as it failing to be renewed or getting thousand cutted to death could kill literally millions of people, and it's the sort of thing that's never going to catch the national media news because it's not spicy kulturkampf shit.
https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2023/july/pepfar-hiv-aids-congress-pro-life.html
Looks like the pro-life groups object to PEPFAR funds being used to lobby foreign governments to enact pro-choice legislation. That seems like a pretty normal stance for a political advocacy group to take: "We will rate you badly if you vote to give money to groups who lobby against our cause." The specific organizations they accuse of doing this are Population Services International, Village Reach and Pathfinder International. Who knows whether it's true or not. Seems like a screwed-up situation.
Seems like simply excising groups like PSI (who actively perform abortions) from PEPFAR is the most obvious way through this mess. The money that PSI gets from PEPFAR is a tiny proportion of each of their budgets. I haven't looked at the other orgs, but it's probably a similar story there.
Random prediction market tidbit: Betting site has the No result heavily favoured (at 1.22) in Australia's Indigenous Voice referendum: https://www.bluebet.com.au/sports/Politics/142/Australian-Referendums/The-Voice-Referendum/The-Voice-Referendum/1192045/All-Markets
Manifold (https://manifold.markets/Nostradamnedus/will-australia-vote-affirmatively-t) and Metaculus (https://www.metaculus.com/questions/12255/aus-referendum-on-an-indigenous-voice/) also have markets. At the time of writing, 16% and 22% chance of passing respectively.
I literally found a $100 bill lying on the ground in a busy area.
Checkmate, economists!
[A social psychologist pops up from behind a bush]: "Gotcha!"
Now if I saw that I would expect it to be attached to a fishing line with giggling pranksters holding the other end.
Ooh, where? I'd like to go pick it up!
Costco!
(This is not an advertisement.)
(And no, it's not still there, I turned it over to someone at the lost-and-found who looked like a manager, who said he'd have to give it to a manager. It'd be interesting to see what happened to it. Maybe it'd have made a good indie movie, back in the day - follow a hundred-dollar bill around and watch it expose people's inner character.)
(But this shouldn't disprove my disproof. People have used statistics to claim that I don't exist, ergo I didn't pick it up!)
Ah, but you picking it up doesn’t disprove the EMH - it is exactly what the EMH says will happen.
The EMH doesn’t say that all prices are accurate the moment they are set - it says that inaccurate prices are rapidly corrected by market forces.
If you wanted to disprove the EMH you should have left it there and come back to get it an hour later. 😁
An imaginary version of me showed up earlier and noticed it, so my showing up counts as the 2nd time. :-P Although I did actually wait for about 45 seconds to see if anyone else would pick it up, but no one did.
Slightly more seriously, the standard joke based on the popular misunderstanding is that the dollar bill "shouldn't" exist, not about what the response should be if one found free money.
Although probably a better angle of attack is the idea that it was "market forces" involved, since I didn't even keep it. I actually sacrificed about 5 minutes of life to turn it in. Somehow I doubt that this type of motivation would scale well enough to produce what anyone would call an "efficient market".
Perhaps in Zimbabwe?
God bless Max, who else has a boar guy on standby? 😁
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODgRispGojc
Boar and Hazelnut Stew.
The future we never got - unless it's going to happen with Bezos, Musk, et al (also why the hopes about "if we can just align AI and get it right, then we'll have Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism where everyone is rich and has their own staff of personal robots run by AI churning out all they ever need or want" sound so old hat to me and don't get me all excited - we were promised this kind of lifestyle by the 80s/90s/00s):
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/space-colony-art-from-the-1970s/?utm_source=newsletter
The article is a little bit sour - I don't think O'Leary was "unhinged" for his fears of what might happen instead of the 70s techno-optimism, and while Bezos' view of Space Colonies is dated, what makes it grim? - but it's a useful reminder of the high hopes for Science! of the past, and how culture-bound such hopes are (the very 70s imagining of the near future should remind us that our imaginings of the near-future are likely every bit as misplaced about how it will be like; e.g. even if we had people doing zero-g commutes today, they're not going to be reading magazines but instead they'll be on their smartphones):
"In his High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space (1977), written as a speculative dispatch from the future, it is the accommodating gyroscopic cylinder, not the planetary sphere, that holds the secret for life freed from earthen ground.
'To go on with our situation, it's a comfortable life here. Fresh vegetables and fruit are in season all the time, because there are agricultural cylinders for each month of the year, each with its own day-length. We grow avocados and papayas in our own garden, and never need to use insecticide sprays. Of course we like being able to get a suntan without ever being bitten by a mosquito. To be free of those pests, it's worth it to go through the inspections before getting aboard the shuttle from Earth.'
The cylinder becomes a kind of Eden regained in O’Neill’s fantasy, an Arcadia retrofitted with solar panels and cosmic-ray shields. Not only can you slurp personal papayas under a bug-free sun, but laborers tasked with processing raw space materials will have time for “reading magazines” during their zero-gravity commutes. Resource mining will be automated, leaving workers plenty of opportunity for “swapping stories and passing the coffee-pot back and forth”. Even television reception will be better, and “the ubiquitous, ugly TV antenna of American suburbia will vanish”, due to receivers built directly into the cylindrical endcaps.
...In an interview about the project, Davis discusses how his images of O’Neill’s ideas still have a “freshness”, for they continue to embody “the aspirations people have had ever since the space age began”. While this is certainly true — and the artists’ visions of artificial cylindrical worlds have had an outsized influence on science fiction — these psychedelic vistas populated by high-tech homes and cocktail-sipping residents were also a product of their cultural climate.
It was a heady time for both artists and theorists. A report on O’Neill’s 1977 summer study, claiming that space cities would be feasible by 1990, appeared next to Timothy Leary’s unhinged essay about “The Psychological Effects of High Orbital Migration”, in which the hallucinogen researcher expressed his concerns about “the South Americanization of Space (i.e. the emergence of civil-service bureaucracies, military dictatorships, class struggle, centralized monopolies, imposition of standardized life-styles)”.
...If Jeff Bezos’ mockups of Blue Origin space colonies feel as dated as they do grim, it is because they borrow heavily from Gerard O’Neill, whom he studied under at Princeton in the 1980s, and the artworks featured below."
Also, I had no idea Bezos studied under O'Neill, you learn something every day!
We could have sizable space habitats now if we were willing to invest the bucks. The barriers are mostly economic and political, not technical.
I have fond memories of O'Neill cylinders in futurist picture books of my childhood. And there's a glorious animated version - watch the first minute or so at this link, and unmute if you don't mind sappy Japanese love songs:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6zh35n?start=293
("Gundam 0080" is a fantastic miniseries. If you can find a subtitled version and have 3 hours, it's well worth watching. (I can't stand dubs, but alas not everyone agrees with me.) No prior experience is necessary; think of it as starting in media res, and everything important is explained. Just be prepared to have your heart ripped out, emotionally speaking.)
Indeed, Bezos studying under O'Neill is news to me, and explains much. Thank you for pointing that out. Unfortunately, he didn't study engineering, and so his rockets mostly don't work.
What are you talking about? His emergency escape rocket works like a charm.
Now the BE-4 on the other hand...
All the requests for book recommendations below reminded me - any news of the lady who got the ACX grant to write her book about the patriarchy? I know that's not exactly it, but it's early morning and my brain can't dredge up the real facts.
Is she currently off researching? When is the likely publication date?
The researcher is Alice Evans. Princeton University Press's website has promised a forthcoming The Great Gender Divergence since March 2020. Scott awarded her a grant in December 2021. I don't know if she has announced a publication date. She blogs regularly, and this is one of her blog posts on the subject: https://www.draliceevans.com/post/ten-thousand-years-of-patriarchy-1
My trouble is that I can only get so far into her post before the urge to snark becomes irresistible:
"There was no pre-Neolithic feminist utopia. If recent studies of foragers are any guide, during the 100,000 years that our ancestors had spent as hunter-gatherers, girls may have been forced into marriage, often polygynously, beaten and raped. However, since female labour is a crucial element of the forager economy, women were at least not secluded and lived alongside their own kin."
Hello. Me Grug. It beautiful day on savannah. Sun is high in sky so time for me to beat harem. Lazy bitches need to be kept nose to grindstone (only grindstone not invented yet). Me good husband, let me women live beside their clan. Also lets me marry sisters so have polygyny (only concept not invented yet, just practice).
Later, me pick out which sisters to carry off and rape and force into me harem. Life is busy for hunter-gatherer, but me can't complain. Bye!
Just like today and the Cishetnormative Patriarchal Rape-Culture, amirite ladies? I mean - yeah. Life was hard. Things were bad. But I sort of think that *maybe* the men of the pre-Neolithic didn't spend *every* single minute of the day beating, raping, and forcing women into working for them? *Maybe* pre-Neolithic humans could manage to get along with each other somehow and even like each other a little bit?
This is why I'm interested in the progress of the book, to see if there will be any novel information rather than the same old social studies feminism guff. Again, I am not denying the oppression of women over the course of human history, just that other members of the species were also being oppressed as well, and that at times mutual survival wasn't based on "me stronger, you weaker" but people - even of different sexes! - working together.
I speculate a lot of that stuff is speculative. We don't really know that much about stuff that happened that long ago, all we have are a bunch of tools and burial grounds. I'm not picking on archaeologists--they really have very little to work from, especially that far back. At least with the Minoans we apparently translated their legal code. But before writing? It's really an educated guess. Even with writing we don't fully understand their concepts.
We don't need archaeology to know what primitive hunter-gatherer tribes were like, we have anthropological studies of them from recent centuries. The many and varied tribes of Australian Aborigines survived in hunter-gatherer form up to the 19th or 20th centuries, and we know all sorts of things about gender relations in these tribes, which varied from fairly monagamous to highly polygynous.
Right, but those are hunter-gatherer tribes on the worst land that was left over after chiefdoms and states took all the best stuff. Back when hunter-gatherer tribes roamed the European plains or the Yellow River Valley, who knows how things were?
That's the problem, there's an immense ton of speculation about the distant past, as Chesterton pointed out when discussing popular views of The Caveman in his day.
Dr. Evans' view of the hunter-gatherer past doesn't sound greatly removed from H.G. Wells' Old Man ("first, the fear of the chief of the tribe (whom Mr. Wells insists on calling, with regrettable familiarity, the Old Man)":
"It is therefore absurd to argue that the first pioneers of humanity must have been identical with some of the last and most stagnant leavings of it. There were almost certainly some things, there were probably many things, in which the two were widely different or flatly contrary. An example of the way in which this distinction works, and an example essential to our argument here, is that of the nature and origin of government I have already alluded to Mr. H. G. Wells and the Old Man, with whom he appears to be on such intimate terms. If we considered the cold facts of prehistoric evidence for this portrait of the prehistoric chief of the tribe, we could only excuse it by saying that its brilliant and versatile author simply forgot for a moment that he was supposed to be writing a history, and dreamed he was writing one of his own very wonderful and imaginative romances. At least I cannot imagine how he can possibly know that the prehistoric ruler was called the Old Man or that court etiquette requires it to be spelt with capital letters. He says of the same potentate, 'No one was allowed to touch his spear or to sit in his seat.' I have difficulty in believing that anybody has dug up a prehistoric spear with a prehistoric label, 'Visitors are Requested not to Touch,' or a complete throne with the inscription, 'Reserved for the Old Man.' But it may be presumed that the writer, who can hardly be supposed to be merely making up things out of his own head, was merely taking for granted this very dubious parallel between the prehistoric and the decivilised man. It may be that in certain savage tribes the chief is called the Old Man and nobody is allowed to touch his spear or sit on his seat. It may be that in those cases he is surrounded with superstitious and traditional terrors; and it may be that in those cases, for all I know, he is despotic and tyrannical. But there is not a grain of evidence that primitive government was despotic and tyrannical. It may have been, of course, for it may have been anything or even nothing; it may not have existed at all. But the despotism in certain dingy and decayed tribes in the twentieth century does not prove that the first men were ruled despotically."
When speaking of cave art:
"To-day all our novels and newspapers will be found swarming with numberless allusions to a popular character called a Cave-Man. He seems to be quite familiar to us, not only as a public character but as a private character. His psychology is seriously taken into account in psychological fiction and psychological medicine. So far as I can understand, his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about, or treating women in general with what is, I believe, known in the world of the film as 'rough stuff.' I have never happened to come upon the evidence for this idea; and I do not know on what primitive diaries or prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded. Nor, as I have explained elsewhere, have I ever been able to see the probability of it, even considered a priori. We are always told without any explanation or authority that primitive man waved a club and knocked the woman down before he carried her off. But on every animal analogy, it would seem an almost morbid modesty and reluctance, on the part of the lady, always to insist on being knocked down before consenting to be carried off. And I repeat that I can never comprehend why, when the male was so very rude, the female should have been so very refined. The cave-man may have been a brute, but there is no reason why he should have been more brutal than the brutes. And the loves of the giraffes and the river romance of the hippopotami are effected without any of this preliminary fracas or shindy. The cave-man may have been no better that the cave-bear; but the child she-bear, so famous in hymnology, is not trained with any such bias for spinsterhood. In short these details of the domestic life of the cave puzzle me upon either the revolutionary or the static hypothesis; and in any case I should like to look into the evidence for them, but unfortunately I have never been able to find it. But the curious thing is this: that while ten thousand tongues of more or less scientific or literary gossip seemed to be talking at once about this unfortunate fellow, under the title of the cave-man, the one connection in which it is really relevant and sensible to talk about him as the cave-man has been comparatively neglected. People have used this loose term in twenty loose ways, but they have never even looked at their own term for what could really be learned from it.
…When novelists and educationists and psychologists of all sorts talk about the cave-man, they never conceive him in connection with anything that is really in the cave. When the realist of the sex novel writes, 'Red sparks danced in Dagmar Doubledick's brain; he felt the spirit of the cave-man rising within him,' the novelist's readers would be very much disappointed if Dagmar only went off and drew large pictures of cows on the drawing-room wall. When the psycho-analyst writes to a patient, 'The submerged instincts of the cave-man are doubtless prompting you to gratify a violent impulse,' he does not refer to the impulse to paint in water-colours; or to make conscientious studies of how cattle swing their heads when they graze. Yet we do know for a fact that the cave man did these mild and innocent things; and we have not the most minute speck of evidence that he did any of the violent and ferocious things.
…The artist may have had another side to his character besides that which he has alone left on record in his works of art. The primitive man may have taken a pleasure in beating women as well as in drawing animals; all we can say is that the drawings record the one but not the other. It may be true that when the cave-man's finished jumping on his mother, or his wife as the case may be, he loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling, and also to watch the deer as they come down to drink at the brook. These things are not impossible, but they are irrelevant. The common sense of the child could confine itself to learning from the facts what the facts have to teach; and the pictures in the cave are very nearly all the facts there are."
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith. The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated . Kindle Edition.
Wow! Thanks for that link, it was an extremely gratifying read.
I love seeing the supporting evidence that demonstrates that, no, contrary to what the GrrlPower!Disney messaging today might have you believe, progressive social thought wasn't the force which freed women from thousands of years of patriarchy. Meaningful lifestyle gender equality emerging only in the mid-1970s-ish had virtually nothing to do with "women speaking up" and everything to do with the economic imperative for women to participate more-or-less equally in the economy. After all, it's hard for a civilization to tell a woman she can't have her own bank account when the health of the civilization's economy kinda depends on her having her own bank account (to oversimplify tremendously).
But even more gratifying is that I nevertheless have to update some of my priors! I knew very little about the civilizations that didn't experience the conquest, inherited wealth, and religion which shaped the patriarchal ones.
I'll be excited to see her book!
I'm hardly a Marxist, but one of the things Marx did get right is 'follow the money'. Labor-saving devices had as much to do with the women's movement as anything else--now you don't have to spend all day washing your clothes by hand, so you can go out and do a job outside the home.
That said without a women's movement you don't have abortion rights, sexual harassment laws, affirmative action for women, mandated pumping rooms, and all the other stuff that helps women thrive.
Interestingly, I watched a guy (was it Yuri Bezmenov?) claim the feminist movement was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation to increase the labor force and drive down wages. (It gets shared a lot on right-wing sites.) Funny how one side's social advance is the other side's evil conspiracy.
Well, spending all day washing clothes by hand *was* a means of doing a job outside the home - there were (and in some places probably still are) washerwomen and laundresses (or indeed washermen).
It's a complicated history because there have always been women working 'outside the home' or within the home to generate income to support the home (farmers' wives selling butter and eggs at markets, as well as what befell this young damsel in the song*). The Industrial Revolution gave large-scale employment in factories by mechanising what were cottage industries (this is the main plot in the novel "Shirley", after all, where the Luddites are smashing the mechanised looms because they are taking jobs away, while the mill-owner needs to automate in order to stop losing money).
This also made jobs available for women and children, and the employment of women was paid at a lower rate than that of men - this is where we get our historical pay gap from, and it wasn't due to the factors often quoted today about women working part-time etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_mill_girls
Or that women don't do the hard, dangerous, physical labour that men do:
https://cynonvalleymuseum.wales/2021/12/07/women-in-the-mines/
So what we are really speaking about is the mid 20th century onwards.
*https://lyricsplayground.com/alpha/songs/n/nextmarketdaythe.html
Libertarians make the point that feminism is promoted by the government to increases the tax base, as a woman at home isn't generating taxable income.
Where as a working woman generates a taxable W-2 and also taxes on payments for childcare, etc.
Note sure if any of it is real, but I wouldn't be surprised either way.
I think this isn't real. The perspective that makes this clearest is to look at how "does this politician promote feminism" correlates with other policy preferences.
Promoting feminism correlates with promotion of high taxes.
What is the best evaluation you've seen of the evidence linking Johnson & Johnson talc with various forms of cancer?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/business/media/johnson-johnson-talc-settlement.html
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/johnson-johnson-sues-researchers-who-linked-talc-cancer-2023-07-13/
If I don't finish reading more than 25% of The Sequences, can I still criticize the Rationalist community here? I mean the Sequences are so tedious and boring and I'm yet to come across an idea I haven't heard before. In general, it reads like an old-school self-help book but with a culty vibe. Like Dianetics, maybe. The culty vibe comes from the use of the word "rationalists" (to separate the enlightened from the un) and claims that rationalism is "an art" and the general tone that this is The Answer. All the same information could be conveyed without that culty sounding shit, but I suspect it is the culty sounding shit that has made it so popular because the information is basically all the stuff that was in the air in the intellectual sphere of teh webz at the time. Many of the same ideas were also on PUA blogs. As the lady says, everything that rises must converge.
I think it's better to criticise specific ideas than nebulous "communities".
Criticising a "community" is like shooting fish in a barrel, you can always just find the worst loud bozos in the community, criticise their obvious flaws, and declare the job done.
Every generation renames existing concepts and pretends they invented them. To the extent that things are any different now, it may be because there is less of a common mass culture.
Whatever. I'm pretty skeptical about a lot of the higher-level stuff (paperclip maximizers, AI x-risk, anything Yudkowsky says), but if you treat it as a modestly-right-leaning bunch of geeks you can have a good time arguing and shooting the shit at LW meetups.
It's better than the social justice religion where you spend all your time hating yourself or the neofascist BAP one where you're tanning your testicles.
John Derbyshire, who is way to my right, said when talking about the Anglican Church a lot of religion is just a way to do a group activity around people like you, and all the theology is just indoor fun for intellectuals.
Forget the sequences, read Zvi and Scott Aaronson to learn about what this AI stuff is doing, read Hanania to hear the view from the right that accepts how dumb they are, read Falkovich to learn about dating, read Aella for the weirdest sex stuff you'll ever see, watch Simone and Malcolm Collins to see some neat speculations and laugh your head off, make your own list that includes none of these people. Study your experience, take what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is essentially your own. There is no guru with the true way. There never was.
Surely you only mean right-leaning relative to communists?
Wokies and communists aren't the same thing, though they do overlap. (How often do you hear wokies talk about workers?) But yeah, right-leaning relative to both.
I said '*modestly* right-leaning'.
"There is no guru with the true way. There never was."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Guru,_No_Method,_No_Teacher
"The album title is evocative of a 1966 quotation by Jiddu Krishnamurti: "...there is no teacher, no pupil; there is no leader; there is no guru; there is no Master, no Saviour. You yourself are the teacher and the pupil; you are the Master; you are the guru; you are the leader; you are everything."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmDhTMdUGR0
That wasn't the source I was thinking of, but maybe I picked it up through osmosis.
And for you, of course, there is a guru (more than a guru!), but it's a different Jewish guy, from Nazareth instead of Chicago. :)
If you want to produce some original and insightful critique, then I'd advise to read them all.
If some vibe based sneering that everyone has already seen multiple times is enough for you - then you probably didn't have to read even this far.
When I say "criticize the Rationalist community", to be clear, my chief criticism is that it is a community, like any other, that spreads biases among its members. There would be nothing inherently wrong with that were it not a community that claims to be exceptionally self-aware of cognitive biases. It probably is more aware of avoiding, say, the sunk-cost fallacy, but there are bigger and worse biases at stake here. AI x-risk has spread through the community like Ice-9. Fear is the most contagious of the various emotions.
It's fascinating that ideas about Rationalism and ideas about how an AI "thinks" are so incestuously intertwined. Eliezer views thinking in terms of utility functions as a rationalist ideal and behold: that is exactly how AIs will think! Rationalism means not only making the map a better match of the territory but also it means arranging the future state of the universe to be in line with your desires. That's how AIs will think too!
For all of Scott's epistemic humility, we get an evil, opposite twin in Eliezer, who has not one iota of epistemic humility. That probably wouldn't matter if Scott weren't so influenced by Eliezer. But as things stand, Scott is irrationally influenced by the Rationalist community, which seethes irrationally like small townspeople in a Twilight Zone episode full of existential doom over nothing but fear itself.
> thinking in terms of utility functions as a rationalist ideal and behold: that is exactly how AIs will think!
You clearly lack in understanding here. It matters not "how the AI thinks" on a mechanical level - regardless of its internal mechanisms, we can *model* it from the outside as having some utility function that it it maximizing for. The same analysis can be done for anything that has a decision process of some kind.
Can you model some utility function that GPT-4 is maximizing for?
Come now. AI x-risk isn't any more absurd than cryonics or s̸e̸a̸s̸t̸e̸a̸d̸i̸n̸g̸model cities.
It's not necessary to assimilate anyone's theology before rejecting their conclusions. Just don't make fun of them on Twitter.
I'm not in software engineering, so there's not much I can do. I have my doubts Yudkowsky's as smart as he thinks he is; maybe he's got people thinking about the AI getting out of control, which may be for the best if they develop better ways to control it.
I just sort of roll my eyes at the AI stuff and read all the other interesting stuff in there. Maybe they're right, I don't know.
> I have my doubts Yudkowsky's as smart as he thinks he is
To be fair, nobody is as smart as Yudkowsky thinks he is.
Yud is ultimately a doomsday profit and is constrained by the laws of doomsday doomsday prophecy (e.g. if he was different, you wouldn't be talking about him).
"I just sort of roll my eyes at the AI stuff and read all the other interesting stuff in there. Maybe they're right, I don't know." This community were COVID doom maximalists early in the pandemic if that helps you calibrate.
That was not my impression, at all. Scott and Zvi recognized early that a pandemic was possible, provided useful advice throughout (I bought some essentials before the big lockdown rush), and pushed back against the poor messaging about how the virus spreads, but also quickly updating downward their early overly pessimistic assessments. What are you referring to?
Scott was wearing a full respirator out in public early on. When the diamond princess numbers came out (march 2020ish) it was pretty clear that the whole thing was overblown. I ended up leaving the community shortly after because the people were so hostile to the good news.
> AI x-risk has spread through the community like Ice-9. Fear is the most contagious of the various emotions.
This would be an evidence of terrible bias if you could prove that AI x-risk concerns are wrong. Otherwise it just as well can be reasonable reaction to a terrible danger. You can't just point at an emotion and deem it a priori irrational.
> It's fascinating that ideas about Rationalism and ideas about how an AI "thinks" are so incestuously intertwined.
There is nothing fascinating here. Rationality is the systematic way to find truth. AI have to possess such ability. Insights about rationality are intertwined with insights about AI because they are simply the same insights.
"he estimates that $100K - $200K in campaign funds" for 120,000 signatures. Exceptional value if true. Average cost per signature in 2022 was $12.97.
https://ballotpedia.org/Ballot_measures_cost_per_required_signatures_analysis
I wonder if the acx dictator book club will last long enough that it can uncontroversially do one on netanyahu. I give it like 3-5 years on average.
Likening Bibi to a dictator is pretty funny to me. The guy has given up is PM position multiple times after losing.
Plus the English language reporting on this courts situation is ridiculously misleading. The courts aren't just "independent" in a US/UK sort of way, they have insulated them from political feedback of any sort. Imagine if, for some reason the US courts operated like this:
In the 1780s a bunch of Federalists were appointed to the Supreme Court. They then appointed a bunch of other Federalists to lower courts. The Federalists then lose every major election for decades, eventually no longer existing as a real political party. However, the courts are still all Federalists. Federalist SCOTUS justices appoint all the lower court justices, and their replacements on SCOTUS. It is not merely that the courts in Israel are out of step with the electorate, they are even out of step with the left leaning part of the electorate. We aren't talking something like the 6-3 SCOTUS we have right now. We are talking about a SCOTUS with 9 Clarence Thomas types where the last 8 presidents were 6 Obamas and 2 Joe Manchins.
After his last term expired he successfully extended his term and delayed the election for several months. It did eventually fail and he was forced to go to another series of elections (which he eventually lost), but that was in part to to intervention by the courts that he's now depowering. You have to be pretty naive to think he won't at least try to mess with the next one.
(And no, the court in Israel isn't particularly activitist, especially compared to the American SCOTUS. They have something like 1% of the rate of overturning laws iirc).
In what universe can a leader who's lost an election and then peacefully left office twice, and who has not tried to suppress an economy-paralyzing mass protest, also twice, be considered a dictator?
Your expansion below is super interesting. Can you elaborate on the nature of inappropriate arrogation to the Court and how the proposed reforms are targeted to resolve that without meaningfully undermining antimajoritarian functions or their prerequisite judicial independence?
I am confused as to how allowing the governing coalition to perpetually control the judicial nomination committee can be construed as other than an undermine of the court? That one seems very clearcut from here (metropolitan USA, lapsed conservative Jew), I'm curious what I'm missing. I mostly lack context to evaluate critiques or defenses of the Standard of Review reform enacted Monday.
I am not an expert on this topic, and am not strong on the details (not a good enough Hebrew reader to be). Eugene Kontorovich would be who I would recommend you read for the maximalist scholarly pro-reform side in English, you should be able to find him on Twitter and his articles on Google.
But my opinion is based on the following broad-strokes understanding of the history:
- Israel does not have a constitution.
- It does have a series of "Basic Laws" which provide the legal framework for the Knesset and supreme court to operate.
- The "Basic Laws" are very, well, basic and do not clearly delineate separation of powers and responsibilities.
- From the founding up until the early 90's, the Israeli Supreme Court was a very minor player in the country's politics and legal foundation. The Knesset passed laws, the Cabinet executed them, and when something needed reform, they passed more laws and amended others.
- The ISC was, from the founding, a left-leaning and insular institution. New justices were nominated by a system that gave strong weight to the preferences of existing justices and the attorneys who argued the higher-level cases, with minimal input from the Knesset. This meant that the ISC was exclusively made up of the secular Ashkenazi economic and cultural elite who founded the country at the start, and remained so even as the country's demographics shifted.
- Despite all this, the ISC was not a target for reform even when the right wing took power for the first time in 1977 because they had such minimal power and involved themselves so rarely in hot-button issues.
- This all changed when a very talented, ambitious, and ideological jurist named Aharon Barak became president of the ISC. He turned the ISC decisively activist, and began asserting that the court had the right to veto certain Knesset and Cabinet actions. They began to do so more and more often, and began claiming a wider and wider aera of action.
- The ISC and the circle that appointed it's justices also created the independent position of Attorney General, and the system for nominating them. This AG also quickly accrued more power and influence, while shedding the responsibility to defend the Cabinet's actions in front of the ISC when necessary if he or she just didn't feel like it. Just like the ISC, no one voted for these changes, and there is nothing in the "Basic Laws" that calls for it.
- Now the right-wing begins to wake up, but it takes decades for the true understanding of what just happened to filter into the mass consciousness. Decades of ISC and AG interference with right-wing governments and right-wing reform programs and individual right-wing politicians. Decades of clear anti-Religious rulings. Decades of disenfranchisement of the ascendant Mizrachi majority, who lean right-wing and were denied entry into the legal elite, denied seats on the courts and entry into the law firms who argued before them.
- Beginning with the more activist wing of the right, demands for judicial reform begin becoming part of party platforms and coalition negotiations. Bibi Netanyahu, master politician that he is, spends almost a decade fighting off this wing, playing party off against party in order to keep building his coalitions without having to poke poke this bear.
- But the shifting demographics of the right eventually force his hand, and this time, when he builds his coalition, he has no choice but to promise his partners that he will go ahead with reform.
That's how we get to here. Are the reforms a good idea? Not sure. There are some things I like and some things I don't. Are they anti-democratic? Laughable. A strong and durable majority of the populace wants this reform to happen, while a wealthy and cultural elite are threatening to bring the country to its knees to prevent it. Will the reforms break the balance of power and create a majoritarian nightmare? I don't think so. The hypothetical post-reform future would look very similar to the structures in a lot of other strong and durable democracies. Will the reforms "undermine" the courts? That depends on your definition of the word I guess. I personally don't think taking power away from an entity that just helped itself to it counts as "undermining" in the traditional sense of the word.
So that's my long-winded response to your Q. Hope it was helpful.
Thanks for the analysis and recommendation. Haven't gotten there yet but talking more anyway:
The revolution didn't come out of nowhere, it followed from the 1992 basic laws which are very clearly structured as (part of?) a Bill of Rights. It was totally foreseeable that the courts would undertake judicial review of primary legislation to enforce a bill of rights, even if they hadn't undertaken it before and even if doing so wasn't inevitable. This is important context because a) the point of a bill of rights is to be anti-democratic, and b) if you
i) endorse enforcement of a bill of rights but specifically dislike judicial supremacy as the enforcement mechanism, then you propose changing the mechanism of enforcement, whereas if you
ii) disendorse enforcement of a bill of rights but expect this would be a facially unpopular position, then you propose undermining the enforcement mechanism without offering a replacement.
Israel is going through scenario b-ii.
The 9-member judicial election committee initially made its recommendation based on a strict majority of 5 votes, but now requires 7 of 9 votes to advance a candidate to office. Five seats are reserved, as you described above, for incumbent Supreme Court justices (3) and members of a lawyers guild / bar association thing (2), but the government gets the other 4 (Justice Minister, another Minister, 2 MKs appointed directly by the Knesset) so bloc politics was possible initially, but isn't anymore.
'Our group should control who goes on the court' isn't actually a principled improvement on 'that group controls who goes on the court'.
Israel also is engaged in ongoing military occupation of an ethnically distinct population, so extra rigor in maintaining rule of law and liberality in the democratic regime seems particularly important. You'd expect that to be unpopular, and that's a reason to do more of it not less.
As came up in a sub-thread, while you are denotationally correct, I think 'democracy' connotes anti-Hobbesian liberalism commonly enough in discourse that it's worth discussing/clarifying rather than arguing semantically.
Get into power, gradually undermine the courts while increasingly paint your opposition as illegitimate is fairly standard dictator playbook. I don't think he was there in 2003 but he's working hard towards it now.
In fairness I do expect this to be fuzzier than "suddenly dictator" - gradually undermining democratic norms that make it harder for him to stay in power (I expect the next step after finishing the judiciary will be to try to ban Arab parties once the courts can't stop him, left-leaning Jewish parties will probably be a harder stretch). And he's old enough that he probably doesn't have more than a decade or so left, which isn't really enough to break the system singlehandedly. But I wouldn't be surprised if by 2030 it's uncontroversial in the west to lump him with Erdogan and Orban.
The ironic thing is that Bibi is the most "small-d" democratic leader in history. He's been in power for 15 years, and has won 6 and lost 2 elections in that span, plus a few elections that he participated in that didn't produce a working coalition. That's the history of a person who has been in constant dialogue with the citizens of his country and who has spent more time directly responding to the public's desires and shaping his message to their needs than any other democratic leader I can think of.
You can only call Bibi a dictator or even vaguely dictatorial if you either:
A). Accept the premise that West Bank Palestinians are disenfranchised from Israeli elections, and that therefore any Israeli PM is a dictator
B). See an attempt by an elected, representative branch of government to claw back some of the power an un-elected branch has accrued to itself over the last 30 years as dictatorial.
So I would be surprised if it was uncontroversial in 2030 to call Netanyahu a dictator. You can hand-wave away the history of the Israeli Supreme Court all you like, but the people of Israel never agreed to give that body that power it currently wields, and when the dust settles, the attempt, successful or not, to rein it in will most likely not be seen as an illegitimate power grab by the super-majority of the country or fair-minded international observers.
We've had Erdogan (and modi) in the dictator book clubs, and both won elections (modi won more voted in a democratic election than anyone else in history!). We call them (wannabe) dictators because they work hard on undermining balances and limits to their power, which Bibi has done a lot of (most famously by undermining the courts, but also by avoiding having a deputy to remain unchallenged, and he has in fact delayed elections past the legal limit before).
Modern dictators operate according to the rules of democracy. Look, I am a legitimate leader, we had elections and everything! I was democratically voted into power eighteen times over the past forty years!
I'd be fascinated to read a book club on Bibi, but "he won in elections" isn't an all-purpose denial of dictatorship.
Modern dictators win elections by cheating, and they never lose elections and then go away quietly. Bibi has never done the former and he has done the latter twice.
There's winning elections, and then using that power to change election rules to ensure your hold on power and whipping up religious and and ethnic majorities into intimidating the minority away from voting, and then there's winning 6 elections without any reasonable accusations of fraud and losing 2 without making any public accusations of fraud over more than two decades.
I'm sorry, but comparing Modi, let alone Erdogan, to Bibi strains just credulity.
"he conceded an election he didn't effectively have the power to challenge twenty years ago so he's probably well-meaning and trustworthy when trying to dismantle the courts' power to check him" is... Not reassuring. Especially since in 2019 he did do the maximum amount of shenanigans to try to delay or avoid losing power (note that the 2015 government did in fact last beyond its term limits).
Since I'm new here I will test feeding the troll.
To what specific actions of Joe Biden do you refer? I will grant that he has characterized the coup-attempting wing of his opposition as illegitimate, but I'm mystified what you're pointing to w/r/t courts.
There's an obvious asymmetry in that Biden is on the team that the prestige media and cultural elites like, and Netanyahu is on the team that they dislike. So even in an alternative universe where Biden and Netanyahu did exactly the same things, it would still follow that Biden is bravely upholding democracy whereas Netanyahu is engaging in coup-like behavior.
This just reads as bizarre. What judges are suffering 'intimidation' by 'mobs'? You list a series of major court holdings that create a strong presumption against anyone being intimidated.
Also, like, what laws? The right to peaceably assemble and to petition for redress of grievances shall not be infringed, bro.
I know of some folks who already packed the US Supreme Court, and none of them was named Biden. Merrick Garland still has the receipts for a little while. No, not the receipts ProPublica found; we're talking about the court-packing receipts, not the corruption receipts.
If you have some substance here I'm curious, but I don't hold my breath.
To get at it from a different lens, are you willing to classify Orban as a dictator in Hungary at this point? Whether y/n, what do you see as the rubicon there that he has (not) crossed?
My impression is that Netanyahu is changing the procedural rules so that the Supreme Court has less power within the government. I am not aware of Biden attempting to do anything like that.
I interpreted the comment to mean that Netanyahu is not yet a dictator, but will unambiguously become one in 3-5 years. I don't agree with that, but at least it's a testable prediction.
Ahh, you're probably right. @shaked my bad for misunderstanding.
For the record I'm 95% confident that Bibi will never do anything that will allow an honest observer to call him a dictator, if we're just making predictions here. He's old and unwell, his coalition is shaky, and the majority of the right wing doesn't actually have the stomach for dominating the left in that way.
What about his political partners? What might they do in 3-5 years, assuming they hold on to power that long?
What they said they wanted to do--create Greater Israel. My impression is that centralizing political power in the executive is a means to that end.
I picked up an old backburnered, simply for fun, programming project yesterday. I want to code up an app that will let me generate themed crossword puzzles in the style of those offered by the NYTs. I would enter a few answers that establish a theme and the code would fill in the rest.
I have an XML file with about 100,000 thousand words and phrases. It's been so long since I worked with the data that I've forgotten who I stole it from. It's a great list in that there are few entries that are terribly obscure.
Here's a handful from the 15 1etter section of the XML.
ALTOSAXOPHONIST, ANCESTORWORSHIP, ANCHOVYDRESSING, ANGULARMOMENTUM, ANIMALHUSBANDRY, ARTIFICIALHEART
These are great for my purposes. I'd like to make the puzzles challenging in the newer NYTs style of word play rather than simple obscurity. In the late 90's and early 2000's the later in the week puzzles were made more challenging using clues like "Second place finisher in the 1932 Kentucky Derby." Yuck.
But eyeballing the list yesterday I realized there were no plurals. I think this would seriously hobble the fill in the remaining answers algorithm, making it more likely that the code would be forced to pick, oh say, specialize botany terminology. I plan to manual purge those sorts of words from the list as they appear.
If the data set had part of speech markings, I could easily write code to create plurals for the nouns, but no such luck.
In poking around I've found data sets with plurals included but they contain too many obscure words and none of them contain common phrases.
So can any one point out a similar data set similar to what I now have with nouns along with their plurals?
I'd look into using ChatGPT (or more likely one of the underlying APIs) to solve this problem by augmenting the word list you already have, I suspect that would do a good job of determining what words are in a provided phrase, whether they can be pluralized, and probably also could handle things like changing the tense of verbs. It's possible using a large language model could also work well for generating or verifying clues, although that might take more prompt optimization.
https://openai.com/pricing
This looks like it has a lot of potential in building this app. Thanks for pointing it out.
Professional crossword creators seriously guard their wordlists. They're constantly adding new entries to their lists as new phrases enter the lexicon and they (rightly) see the word list as key to their creation process far more than the particular software used.
You can find some word lists for purchase here: https://www.reddit.com/r/crossword/comments/nqsuku/all_the_downloadable_word_lists_ive_been_able_to/
Would it be good enough for your purposes to just add in all the words that end in "s" where the "s"-less form is in the list you like and the full form is in one of the lists that you already found that have plurals but also too many obscure words? This probably would have some false positives but worst case they'd be occasional obscure real words, and the words where false positives are most likely are short words, which are less likely to be obscure. You could even allow a variety of changes to the last few letters to include verb conjugations (other than the third person singular present tense "-s") and irregular plurals.
What non fiction book would you recommend that will change the way I see the world and make me understand much more of what is going on around me.
I am planning on reading Gödel Escher Bach, the book of why (Pearl) , the Feynman lectures, the elephant in the brain (Hanson), Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), Quantum Computing since Democritus (Aaronson) and other similar books.
I haven't ready any of them yet, only started some. Do you have any similar books. They don't have to be very similar, I wouldn't mind reading something about linguistics, anthropology or history.
I think Chesterton's Orthodoxy has a great chance of changing how you look at the world, even if you're not a religious person.
I would second somebody else's recommendation of Plato. It's hard to overstate how much we're still living in the shadow cast by The Republic.
Something about the list makes me feel like you would get more out of Nietzsche than Wittgenstein. I seem to remember Wittgenstein having a pretty steep on-ramp.
Important non-fiction reads for me over the decades:
Rene Girard, I See Satan fall like Lightening which might lead you to his other earlier works.
Henry George, Progress and Poverty
W E Deming, Out of the Crisis and The New Economics and short paper On Probability as Basis for Action
Gould and Lewontin paper "The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme". And anything by Gould
Voegelin, From Enlightment to Revolution
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura)
Umberto Eco, his short collection Serendipities. The most important essay is The Force of Falsity.
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
Laudato si'
Populorum progressio
Laborem exercens
Plato's dialogues (although I suppose not really non-fiction.)
Aristotle, Politics and Nicomachean Ethics
Wow, so many replies, thanks to everyone ,I can't wait to read some of those books, already downloaded a couple : )
I read Gödel, Escher, Bach in 1980 and it made a lasting impression on my worldview. A book that expands on G.E.B. and is similarly intriguing is Incomplete Nature by Terrence Deacon.
The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins. About evolution.
Just one?? Flat out impossible. I can't responsibly recommend less than an entire bookshelf:
"Tom Brown's Field Guide to the Forgotten Wilderness" and "Reading Nature" Tristan Gooley will give you a reasonable grounding on the physical world around you.
Stephan Gould's "The Flamingo's Smile" for insights into how evolution plays out in the natural world.
"The Story of Philosophy" by Will Durant (who also wrote an extensive series of history books) provides a readable background into some of the world's most influential thinkers.
"The Better Angels of Our Nature" by Steven Pinker is an optimistic yet empirical treatment of the decline of deaths by violence over the last 400 years or so.
"Rationality" by Pinker again is an overview of the most common skills for objective thinking.
"Evil Genius's" by Kurt Anderson is an overview of the effect dark money has had on American politics in the last half century or so.
If you want to challenge yourself, anything by Isaiah Berlin. Literally anything.
Forget "the book of why", not worth it. I love the Feynman lectures, but not for everyone. (And he makes things sound to simple sometimes, you need to work problems on your own to test your physics understanding.) Two books I read recently that changed my world view are; "The Selfish Gene" and "The Goodness Paradox". ("Who we are and how we got here" is also good.) I'll think of three others as soon as I post this.
I read somewhere (I think on Less Wrong) someone wrote he read "the book of why" at the same time he was learning about econometrics, and liked it, and I will take an econometrics course at university soon so I thought I would read it at the same time. But thanks for the advice, If I find it boring I will make sure to read something else instead.
I didn't find it boring. It was hard to understand. Way harder than the Feynman lectures.
Got stuck in the "book of why", too. The part about the "proving that smoking causes cancer" was interesting. My key insight from it is that: "The statement 'A causes B' is a counterfactual statement, in that it says that in the counterfactual / alternative world where A didn't happen, B wouldn't have happened either."
My "everything book" is Behave by Robert Sapolsky. It's different to those you've mentioned (that I've read), but was much more readable for me.
It's about human behaviour: from what's happening in the brain when you do something, through hormones and genes to social structures. It may not be the perfect book for any one of the topics it covers, but it goes reasonably deep and will help you find out which bits interest you most.
Another recommendation, also historical, but which can further understanding of how the ideas develop, and anyway, historia magistra vitae est, or something like that..., is Alec Ryrie "Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt", which presents a history of development of atheism from medieval Europe to modernity, and it really shows you the mechanisms.
If you do not want the book you can simply listen to the author on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgFD8gzk0bcwk-iWaO6h2MG-WVPS79mR7
(I have no idea who made the playlist I link above, but the lectures themselves are from Gresham College, i.e., they are completely respectable)
Perhaps (sadly late) Patricia Crone (a well known historian of Islam) "Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World". It is an accessible book book about, well, preindustrial societies and their constraints. It really makes you appreciate how world changed in the last two centuries, to the extent it is not so much a gradual change as phase change.
While you asked for non-fiction, I would nevertheles recommend also a "Voyage to Arcturus":
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1329
which you may read for free (its out of copyright): a very weird philosophical sci-fi from the 1920 which explores themes which should of interest to the readers of this blog: consciousness, meaning of life, and how our worldview or even morality in contingent on our senses and other bodily features. A warning: do not read it if you are depressed, it will make it worse, I know from experience.
Duped: Truth-Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception by Timothy Levine.
Excellent social science meta-meta-analysis that builds a framework for how people act in their day-to-day lives. Really incredible in its universality. Great insight into (problems with) social science studies, statistics generally, and humanity.
Reasons and Persons by Parfit changed the way I think about some things.
Factfulness, by Hans Rosling.
My go to recommendation for this is The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. It isn't like any of the books you have list there. It's technically fiction so it doesn't really qualify for your question (sorry), but the fiction is just a device. Think of it more like a very long anecdote in a non-fiction book.
Anyway, it's a story about process optimization (basically how best to run a factory) and the authors "Theory of Constraints". But it has lessons for all sorts of processes. It's highly adjacent to things like just in time processing or lean. The core theory of constraints has changed the way i think about a ton of things around me including global supply chains, economics, programming, even how to best clean the house or cook dinner.
The style is very polarizing so there is a good chance you'll hate it, but it's a short book you could skim/read in a day.
The WEIRDest People in the World, by Joseph Henrich .
Thinking Fast and Slow.
For any of you that went to the meet up in Berkeley or are otherwise familiar, could you point me in the direction of the discontinued history forecasting project that Scott was referring to during the Q&A?
He was talking about various AI’s that were to compete against one another in a forecasting tournament wherein they would attempt to predict historical outcomes with a limited dataset. For example, the fall of the Byzantine empire, or other verifiable outcomes from the past. He mentioned that the project was funded by FTX and was discontinued.
I’d love to look into it and read more if anyone knows what I’m referring to.
Aw man, has FTX not left one thing without spoiling it? That's the kind of project I would be very much interested in to see if AI could do anything there (there are so many gaps in the historical record, if we could get accurate forecasting in line with what we knew happened in the real world, then turn it loose on the parts where we don't), and of course it went under in the Great Fake Money Disaster.
I'm trying to finally read the Sequences, but am constantly annoyed that it reads like it was written by a teenager. For instance:
"This is one of the secret writing rules behind Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. When I write a character, e.g. Draco Malfoy, I don't just extrapolate their mind, I extrapolate the surrounding subjective world they live in, which has that character at the center; all other things seem important, or are considered at all, in relation to how important they are to that character. Most other books are never told from more than one character's viewpoint, but if they are, it's strange how often the other characters seem to be living inside the protagonist's universe and to think mostly about things that are important to the main protagonist."
The Sequences is a world in which Harry Potter exists but 20th century literature does not.
I wanted to answer "I don't know what you're reading, but it's not the Sequences - they were finished in 2009, while HPMOR started in 2010." Then I Googled your quote and noticed it's from that single Sequence which he wrote in 2012, so you're technically correct.
I'm curious now what most people mean when they say: "Read The Sequences." On Less Wrong, it says, currently, on the home page menu: "Rationality: A-Z (or "The Sequences") is a series of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky on human rationality and irrationality in cognitive science. It is an edited and reorganized version of posts published to Less Wrong and Overcoming Bias between 2006 and 2009. This collection serves as a long-form introduction to formative ideas behind Less Wrong, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, the Center for Applied Rationality, and substantial parts of the effective altruist community."
Do you think that's what most people mean?
Well, he's really just using $5 words to describe something any half-competent writer would know: when using 3rd person limited, describe the setting through the point of view character's eyes.
Not coincidentally, perhaps that also describes many of the sequences.
FWIW, I read about 2/3 of HPMOR a few years ago, having enjoyed SSC and a bit of less wrong. Only 2/3 because I would agree: it was not very well written. Which may have been tolerable had it not been paired with the impression that Eliezer thought he was writing psychological fiction on par with Tolstoy.
This is a product of its time, not anything related to being a teenager. At the time he was writing, the internet had a ton of HP fan fic and a huge audience of people reading HP fan fic. He wanted to write a fictional story through the lens of his worldview, and chose HP because that fan fic was by far more likely to get views than one on say Picture of Dorian Gray.
The part your quoting is talking about his experience writing. He can't give examples from something he didn't write, or at least it would not be as effective. Truthfully you could replace Draco Malfoy with Gollum from LotR, or any other side character, and it would also be true.
I'm referring to his ridiculous claim that: " Most other books are never told from more than one character's viewpoint, but if they are, it's strange how often the other characters seem to be living inside the protagonist's universe and to think mostly about things that are important to the main protagonist."
"[I]t's strange how often the other characters seem to be living inside the protagonist's universe and to think mostly about things that are important to the main protagonist" doesn't strike me as being wrong, it strikes me as being surprising that anyone would find it strange.
Most works of fiction tell a story. The protagonist is the main character in a story; the story is the protagonist's universe. If you change the thought to "it's strange how often the other characters seem to be living inside the [story] and to think mostly about things that are important to the [story]" it seems almost redundant. The characters in a story are almost by definition connected to the story. If they weren't, there would be no reason to include them. If we're seeing their thoughts, it's because we're viewing the story; their thoughts are interesting in proportion to their relation to the story.
Not the same thing at all. Eddard Stark is the protagonist of A Game of Thrones, but when Jon gets a chapter he's not constantly thinking "where's Eddard, how will this affect Eddard?" He's got his own plot going on. That's why he gets a viewpoint.
Presumably, whatever Jon gets up to will have some relevance to Eddard down the line. I don't know ASOIAF, so I'll go with a Bond reference. When we see the villain early on in a Bond movie, he's not thinking about Bond. He's thinking about his nefarious scheme, his henchmen or about his girl. But all of those are important to Bond later. Jon's plot in ASOIAF will connect with Eddard's larger plot at some point in the story, and what happened to Jon will be important. It may merely be to set up who Jon is so his interactions with Eddard will be meaningful to the audience.
It may be a more valid criticism of the original quote to focus on the word 'book' when many stories these days are spread over multiple books (or movies) and the seemingly unimportant gun mentioned in book 1 may actually only be important several books down the line when the gun is fired.
Villain cutaways are different; they're pretty much always setting up a problem for the protagonist. Or they basically ARE the protagonist, like in Netflix shows. I can't think of a Bond movie that had a second significant viewpoint character; it's all Bond, all the time.
Yakuza 0 is an example. It has two protagonists, with two separate stories, that intersect and resolve in such a way that neither protagonist ever knows the other one is there.
A Song Of Ice And Fire (aka Game of Thrones) is definitely an outlier, but it's really the strongest example against; Eddard is the central protagonist of Book 1, and then at the end of Book 1 Eddard dies, and the plot rolls on through the other books without him. And that's the difference between other characters revolving around the 'protagonist', or revolving around the 'story'.
So you are claiming that most books are indeed written from more than one character perspective in a way that point of view characters do not seem to be living inside the protagonist universe? And that it's ridiculous not to agree with this statement?
This doesn't seem obvious to me at all. Surely, there are a lot of books that do it, it's not some secret technique that only EY possess. But whether such books are the majority among all books ever written is a priori unclear. How sre you so certain in this?
The key words Eliezer writes here are "if they are....". I suppose it's possible he mostly has young adult books in mind and not, say, As I Lay Dying or The Sound and The Fury... so maybe his experience with books told from the perspective of multiple characters aligns with what he says.
My point is only that he doesn't seem to write for a literate audience, and that, because of that, I have trouble wanting to read further.
> The key words Eliezer writes here are "if they are....".
So? Are you claiming that among those books where there are multiple point of view characters it's not the case that often these characters seem to be living in the protagonist universe?
> I suppose it's possible he mostly has young adult books in mind and not, say, As I Lay Dying or The Sound and The Fury
He literally said "most books". So I suppose it's reasonable to assume that he meant exactly that. Do you believe that there are more books such as As I Lay Dying or The Sound and The Fury than young adult books?
Nobody has read enough to know what is in most books. I don't know and neither does Eliezer.
I do know there are classic books, such as William Faulkner's, which have the quality Eliezer claims rarely exists in fiction. So one of the most famous American novelists wrote works with the quality which Eliezer claims almost never exists.
HPMOR is self-insert fan fiction. I think Yudkowsky can write engaging, fun, fictional snippets but I would no more take them as life advice than I would anything off reality TV.
Can you give us some context as to what you're referring to?
I mean his claim: "Most other books are never told from more than one character's viewpoint, but if they are, it's strange how often the other characters seem to be living inside the protagonist's universe and to think mostly about things that are important to the main protagonist."
It makes me think he has only read children's books. There are plenty of classic novels written from more than one character's viewpoint which he has obviously not read. Nothing wrong with that, but he speaks as if he is well read when he obviously isn't.
Context as in: WHO are you talking about? WHAT are you talking about? ;-)
I'm talking about Eliezer Yudkowsky's The Sequences, aka Rationality: A-Z on Less Wrong, which I am told is the major text behind Rationalism, which I am undertaking to understand.
I think that if they ever were the major text behind rationalism, they have been superseded by other works since. Pinker's "Rationality" comes to mind.
Yale has in recent years perpetrated/enabled several of the most egregious examples of academia spinelessness in today's culture wars. I was therefore pleasantly surprised to find this article in the current issue of the alumni magazine:
https://yalealumnimagazine.org/articles/5696-yale-s-view-on-trigger-warnings
Seems like a sensible, thoughtful and clear institutional attitude to the topic -- a new feeling to be having regarding Yale's current administration.
I feel like there should be a climate group, just stop oil or extinction rebellion style, that releases SO2 to try to lower temperatures. Reading https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/06/06/we-should-not-let-the-earth-overheat/ makes it quite clear that this would not be that difficult to achieve... you'd need a motivated billionaire and few dozen engineers (plus some good opsec). The big problem would probably be arousing suspicion from distorting the sulphur market, although I'm sure there are ways round that.
I assume you'd only need to do it for a few months before it would have noticeable effects (I'm no climate scientist so maybe it would take more/less time), and it would be an instant global story for days or weeks, at which point you'd all probably be arrested. BUT the cat would be out of the bag, and I think it would have a high chance of making geoengineering done by governments a reality.
What do we think.
Let's hope the new climate group has a strategy to cope with the most fiendish of threats - balloons! 😁
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P0bN4Tmel0
Lil' Missy there blaming the Daily Mail is just extra hilarity - yes, how dare some grubby proles interrupt your nice luncheon in an historic building while a harpist provides background accompaniment for your highly important schmoozing? The mid-upper middle classness on show there is just part of why these groups annoy ordinary people so much.
Hey now, I'm upper middle class and they annoy me too.
Wouldn't that result in acid rain?
People seem to think that the lower local concentration, compared to factory smokestacks back in the day, wouldn't be enough to result in acid rain. But it's the kind of thing we'd want to check.
Bah, "acid rain" is old and busted.
SO2 + H2O → H2SO3 is still valid though? So if you are right it has to be a matter of concentration, atmospheric advection and other factors.
I think you also need the Queen of the Netherlands on your team for that to work, and even then some Indian-Canadian martial artist will show up at your facility with a dirty bomb.
https://www.amazon.com/Termination-Shock-Novel-Neal-Stephenson/dp/0063028050
More seriously, A: anything that requires a billionaire in an active and thoroughly committed role, is not "stop oil or extinction rebellion style" by any standard, and B: as Stephenson correctly points out, people are going to push back in unpredictable but problematic ways. Including people who run governments, and I think you skipped a step between "the government arrests all the protesters for doing [Thing]", and "[Thing] is now official government policy".
I would prefer to organize protest lines outside of fossil fuel burning power plants. Get a local high school or college involved. Of course, people are already doing that, so maybe volunteer? Or donate?
If you mean a technological innovation as a subversion, I don't think those really exist. The closest I can come is a fund-raising campaign to buy poor people solar panels (or upgrade their home in multiple ways).
I got news for you, Victor. The electrical power which is generated to run the devices on which you are posting, and we are reading, this, and which you would use to notifiy and co-ordinate your volunteer protestors mostly comes from fossil fuel burning plants.
We're not yet at the point of totally green energy, and if your protest works and they shut down the plant right that minute - well, no more phones. Are you ferrying everybody to the protest by public transport? Electric vehicles have to be charged by - you guessed it - and ordinary vehicles burn fossil fuels. Unless your power plant is on the doorstep, or everyone sets out to walk miles on foot, you're dependent on the fossil fuels as well.
That's the trap. That's the problem. That's the Gordian Knot feel-good protests won't do a damn thing to cut.
Heh, I realize that you are probably trolling me, but on the off chance you aren't, and for anyone reading this, I'll take your objections seriously. Of course the amount of electricity used by the phones to organize a protest is trivial compared to the amount of power even one fossil fuel burning plant produces, so if that investment causes us to shift to green energy sooner, resources well spent I guess.
In general, it's also obvious that one cannot carry out a protest movement from within a society that relies on fossil fuels without expending more fossil fuels, but the same considerations apply. Carbon is killing us, so it seems wise to expend the carbon it takes in the short term to get us to expel less carbon in the long term.
And that seems to be true of any form of technical innovation whatsoever. One designs the next big operating system using the old operating system. One designs new architectural innovations while working in a building designed using the old principles. Until the new technology becomes widespread, we must continue to rely on the old technology.
Yet somehow technology changes...
It's in the zeitgeist these days. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/07/superfreakonomics-on-geoengineering-revisited.html
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/952/467/927.png
Hahaha exactly
I'd prefer to see solar mirrors at the L1 point, the effects are less unpredictable and they can easily be turned off.
I found an old paper which estimated the cost of reducing solar insolation by 1% at something like a trillion dollars, but with the SpaceX Starship you could presumably do it a lot cheaper, possibly cheaper than (say) buying Twitter.
Someone please get Catturd to propose that to Elon, he might listen...
Orbital mirrors may contravene the "militarization of space" treaty. (Whether or not the stated intent includes frying/shading anyone in particular.)
There is no "militarization of space" treaty, nor any treaty that would prohibit any realistic near-term orbital mirror. Also, the extent to which orbital mirrors can be used as death rays is greatly, *greatly* exaggerated, usually by people who have never heard of the conservation of radiance.
The treaty in question: https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/introouterspacetreaty.html
No idea whether actually pertinent, however.
At that distance (1.5 million miles from Earth) I don't think they could be used to usefully fry anything on Earth. I guess it would be worth proving rather than guessing.
Ooh that’s clever. Know where I can read more about it?
I think this was the paper I read originally https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0608163103
"I feel like there should be a climate group, just stop oil or extinction rebellion style, that releases SO2 to try to lower temperatures."
You reference the two most useless, annoying, irritating try-hard groups out there that have achieved nothing except to make ordinary people angry and think climate change activism is a bunch of lunatic narcissists?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsHynYihGik
If they tried releasing SO2 they'd only blow themselves up or make the problem even worse. You'd do better suggesting Barney the Dinosaur as a leader and inspirational exemplar.
Worse yet, the "cure" might send us into yet another ice age.
If we were lucky. Any movement that thinks throwing paint and sitting in the middle of the road is going to work to end capitalism and climate change is not going for the most effective route, is what I think.
They'd end up doing worse than the Ice Age by accident since I don't think they have a clue what they are doing in actuality.
just out of interest, what do you think would be a form of protest thats on a more effective route? From my perspective these groups have put some thought into their form of protest and are aware of the backlash they create while still arguing that they further their cause as a whole.
And I'd say there are definitely examples for extreme public protest by few or single actors thats has been very successful. (eg. the suffragettes, or judging by currents levels of meat consumption maybe also Peta)
I don't think PETA is effective. The suffragettes did have big public exhibitions, but they also had a plan of campaign and worked to get things done by legislation, not simply by relying on stunts.
You need a solution that you present to the public alongside "stop using oil". Don't drive cars, don't have the industrial civilisation you are living in - great, but what do you put in its place? And there isn't a coherent answer to that, or at least not one that gets out as a public message unlike "sit in the road, hold up traffic, piss people off and make them less sympathetic to the movement".
Hey, I'm totally down with throwing paint and sitting in the road and then getting dragged away by the pigs in handcuffs! They were the high points of my youth! I think of protests as a sort of coming-of-age youthful folly.
Folly because, over the past fifty years, I can't think of any example in the First World where protests have made any significant change. Even the Vietnam War protests didn't really end US involvement in the war (despite what the aging peace activists claim).
My concern is that very smart people are so very very stupid.
Correction: smart people can be stupid because they think they know the answers without researching deeper into the subject.
For instance, some knowledge of Pleistocene and Quaternary climate variation would be helpful. Also, a little history of the progression of Phanerozoic climates would tend to put the current global "warming" situation in perspective.
Folly is the thing. It's not helping publicise the problem, it's simply making people angry and inconveniencing them, and the protestors then have the warm glow of virtue over having 'done' something.
Maybe his point was, instead of doing something useless like these groups, they could do something useful by doing geo engineering.
Just about any conceivable "geo enginnering" could be construed as an act of war by countries which did not agree to have the planet they stand on geo-engineered (e.g. Russia, which stands to benefit from warming.)
The thing is, he said "just stop oil/extinction rebellion style" which I read as "in the style of those groups".
Since their style is to be ineffectual nuisances, that's not what I'd hope an effective and useful movement would copy. Even the idea of "pop up guerilla geo-engineering" is something you want to consider *very carefully*, because mucking around with the climate is not something you can go "ooops, didn't intend that" and mop it up with a dishcloth.
Yes exactly
If you support unilateral geoengineering, I can only presume you support euthanasia of undesirable global influences. And if not, why not?
What kind of global influences..?
Political leaders standing in the way of necessary environmental solutions, obviously. If one has the right to intervene in the global ecosystem, it would take a bizarrely religious attitude towards human lives to declare them outside your sphere of action.
It occurs to me in hindsight that one factor that weighed in significantly in determining my career path, quasi-consciously, is evaluating likeness to prospective peers. While it's normal enough in the first place to ask yourself what everyone else is doing, I was bothered by the perception that I wouldn't fit in or didn't like anyone - or that the jobs in question weren't something "guys like me" would do (self-image/narcissism did some lifting here, but I was mostly concerned with whether I would enjoy the work). Later when I discovered that many software developers either pined for or had an interest in drastically different fields, I questioned if that was foolish, or if those particular devs are also different than I am.
Judging in-group potential intuitively like a book cover was probably foolhardy. I've never seen a crowd I would describe as "my people", not at rat meetups or otherwise. I like individuals, I knew few. I was never compelled to follow in their path.
I can't say I've ever found a burst of enthusiasm for woodworking, farming or whatever, but sometimes I identify with the desire to set aside the abstract work I don't measure up to, and pick up a tool. Not for mindlessness, but the kind of focus and flow that is... just going through the motions. Even if I were to entertain this seriously, it seems unwise now. So many trades take 5+ years to become a journeyman, notwithstanding time and money sunk into education, and fighting for an apprenticeship. And of course, the grass is always greener. But I do feel burned and over-matched. I don't belong.
What do you currently do, and can you say more about how you feel like it's not a fit?
I write high performance software using niche in-house tools. We are a small team, this sometimes requires some low-level engineering and sifting through technical specifications/docs, and solving things on my own. It is frustratingly difficult, and I find my performance to be mediocre. Management is only part of the problem (they don't like my performance either, and I expect to be pushed out if I don't leave). I am just not a 10x who easily grasps and loves this stuff.
I'd like to excel or have more "flow" in my day-to-day. I know that doing "hard things" is a necessary step towards mastery, but I'm not improving much, and I'm not motivated to. I am more inclined to procrastinate or get things done so I can move on to the next.
The recent post on laws of trading mentioned knowing your edge. If I do have one, it's being a generalist with decent diplomatic and social skills, and a shallow interest in a myriad of things. The only thing I have a deeper interest in is music. I'd like to do that more for fun, but it's difficult to focus on it when I feel my career is in jeopardy.
What do you think about other software jobs? Music software isn't huge, but it seems like a niche one could get into. You might be more into engineering if it's not as low level.
I'm not sure since I never had another one. I guess the first step is to see how I'd fare elsewhere in the industry, then decide if I want to stay.
It doesn't take much to reset the brain. I just signed up for a bow making apprenticeship, which I am pursuing in addition to my job. Just a few hours a month, but I feel better--I'm having fun!
It's a nice thought, but I don't need another hobby. I have those. And a family to take care of.
I swear Brian Caplan is just trying to give Scott an aneurism at this point
https://betonit.substack.com/p/abusers-give-vice-a-bad-name
My own strawman of his argument is:
1) We have previously established that everyone has free will everywhere all the time, even when it seems they haven't
2) Therefore when drug abusers do bad things to get more drugs, they are doing it willingly.
3) And we should blame them for that
4) We have also previously established that if incentives don't work, you just didn't try big enough incentives.
5) Therefore let's increase the punishments for drug abusers who commit other crimes ; that should work.
Apologies for the length, but I needed to get this out.
Caplan mentions the "Success Sequence" in his argument, and I found the link enlightening to his viewpoint on moral culpability:
"The underlying moral principle: You shouldn’t blame people for problems they have no reasonable way to avoid. You shouldn’t blame them if avoiding the problem is literally impossible; nor should you blame them if they can only avoid the problem by enduring years of abject misery.
The flip side, though, is that you should blame people for problems they do have a reasonable way to avoid. And the steps of the success sequence are eminently reasonable."
https://betonit.substack.com/p/what-the-success-sequence-means
"Eminently reasonable"? Says who? Says Caplan? Well, guess what: I know people who found the steps to being athletic champions to be "eminently reasonable". I know people who found the steps to being witty, extraverted, and popular to be "eminently reasonable". I know people who found the steps to making excellent grades and high test scores to be "eminently reasonable". So are high schoolers who aren't Popular-Athlete-Valedictorians just lazy bums, then?
To me, "eminently reasonable" ultimately translates to nothing more than, "X is easy for me, therefore it is easy for everyone, therefore everyone is culpable for doing it." To Caplan I would respond that that's simply not true. If someone is born in rural America with below-average intelligence, below-average conscientiousness, and maybe above-average impulsivity, then it's going to actually be quite hard for them to perform the "eminently reasonable" steps of High School, Job, Marriage, and Children. It might not seem hard to Caplan (a UC Berkeley and Princeton educated economist) or his readers, but then again, having a cumulative 4.0 in the most difficult classes didn't seem too difficult to the top minds in my class.
Bringing this back to the topic at hand: sure, it may seem obvious to people like Caplan that severe drug abusers who harm others just shouldn't do what they do, because it's "eminently reasonable" not to. But if you have a brain structure that's highly sensitive to chemical reward, a tendency towards heavy impulsivity, and yes, a degree of selfishness (which is also partially caused by inherited qualities), staying away from destructive substances may be just as difficult as it is for a C student to be Valedictorian. We can't just judge others relative to what's easy for ourselves, when that standard so obviously differs throughout the population. So Premise 3 doesn't follow from 1 and 2.
Of course, whether drug prohibition is justifiable is another matter, one involving the questions of whether a government has the moral right to do so and whether prohibition reduces drug abuse. I am skeptical of the former and uncertain about the latter.
But reading Caplan's article, he obviously is opposed to prohibition for the same reasons I am. When I first saw this post, I thought that Caplan was going to argue that we should increase punishments on abuse directly, and that stuck me as highly un-libertarian. But his actual remedy is to increase (or at least effectively enforce) punishment for property rights violations. This will decrease abuse simply by nature of not letting people get away with abuse-related activites. And while I'm personally uncomfortable with increasing "punishment" in the sense Caplan talks about (see David Boonin's The Problem of Punishment)... I actually can somewhat get behind this. Just because I don't morally judge abusers doesn't mean that I want to see them continue their destructive behavior, and if protecting property rights has the effect of doing so, then I see that as a win-win for non-abusers and abusers.
If we're being real here, in my utopian vision, drug abusers would have access to far more effective medications that could block their natural addictive tendencies, at least long enough for those people to get themselves out of the environments that keep their behavior and sense of self stuck in "addict-mode" (addiction psychologist Marc Lewis makes similar arguments in his book The Biology of Desire). Since I honestly believe that most addicts would willingly choose to get better if getting better was as easy as taking a pill and moving out of town, I think that the free market could supply this - not much government "punishment" needed.
Whew, that was a lot. If this would be better suited as a blog post, tell me; I'm no more the kind of person who likes to read essay-length comments than you are.
I fundamentally disagree with Caplan's arguments for free will, but I agree with his suggestions for handling crime, because whether you believe in free will or in Sam Harris's argument that it doesn't exist (https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-illusion-of-free-will, etc), it's kind of obvious that only force can prevent undesirable behavior.
Spit-balling from the "No Free Will" perspective:
1. No one has free will, even when it seems like they do.
2. When drug abusers do bad things to get more drugs, it is because they were *literally* *incapable* of doing otherwise.
3. Thus we should not blame drug abusers.
4. We have established that current incentives do not produce the desired outcome of lessening crime.
5. Therefore drug abusers who commit other crimes must be forcibly prevented from doing so (by physical deterrents and defense/imprisonment/execution/magical behavior control brain chips/etc).
I think it's pretty hard to disagree with the conclusion of #5. After all, if nothing else, forcibly preventing crime by imprisonment (or killing in self-defense of a person or property, I suppose), has the indisputable benefit of minimizing reproduction and intergenerational trauma, which reduces crime in the long run.
"Abusers don’t just mistreat their families, friends, neighbors, and passersby. Even worse, they give vice a bad name. Abusers inspire the indiscriminate, unjust “wars” on innocent users. They inspire prohibition, which takes production out of the hands of ordinary businesspeople and into the hands of criminals."
I don't give two straws about "innocent" users. They can go take a long walk off a short pier, because they are the whitewashing of the entire problem. "Oh, it's not *me*, I just have some fun and I know my limits, it's the unwashed crazy druggies living on the streets and smashing in car windows to rob whatever they can sell for their fix that are the problem". The gangs are just as happy to take your money as the thief's money, they have the impartiality of Vespasian about where it comes from, and both of you are buying the same shit off the same bad guys.
No, *both* of you are the problem, and I am damn well willing to be tough on *both* of you. Because in yet another job, I've heard yet another story about drugs and kids. And the social worker involved had nothing better to say than "Drugs are normal, now". That's the goddamn "innocent users" mindset at work.
If an 'innocent user' wants to decriminalise fun party goods, then they should be the ones having to stand in front of a crying five year old whose drug user mother broke yet another promise about coming to collect them from childcare, and tell the kid "It is your mother's right to prioritise fucking off to buy drugs over caring for you, and you have no right to inflict your opinions or view of what the law should be on her by crying about 'don't you love me?'"
There are no 'innocent people/innocent users' when it comes to drugs. You're single/have no committments, go ahead and bake your brain. You have dependents, drop the 'it's my choice, I'm harming no-one' bullshit.
I think this argument would apply equally well to alcohol. Anyone who buys a beer ought to stand in front of a crying five year old and explain why their daddy drinks himself into a stupor every night, otherwise you're just normalizing alcohol abuse.
Consumption of chemicals that happen to have an effect on the mammalian reward evaluation pathway aren't the only things that cause compulsive behavior that gets unhealthy for some % of the population. This is also true of, for example, shopping. You could move the argument there too. Any time you purchase something that isn't a need to keep you alive, you should have to explain to a crying five year old whose parents compulsive shopping habits are throwing their lives into chaos before you're allowed to do it. Eating food that isn't a warm mush meant to keep you alive for one more day? Well...
I absolutely am coming around to this view. The older I get, the more I am in the world of work, and the more I see how people fuck up their own lives - which is their own business - and their kids lives, which is where I draw the line.
Anyone who wants to defend drinking/smoking/fun party substances *should* have to see the first-hand damage; not the college students who will straighten up and fly right once they graduate, or the Bay Area programmer who gets his brain hacks off the grey markets, but the crying children who don't understand why Mommy or Daddy is always, *always* disappointing them (and the useless social workers who enable Mommy and Daddy because well you don't want to be judgemental or authoritarian now do you?)
Stand knee-deep in the manure and argue the same position, then I'll countenance it.
(Social workers do have a terrible job and burn out, but Jesus, Mary and Joseph, they come out of the colleges with this fucking social liberal ideology firmly crammed up their arses and reality bites very late, if at all).
Everyone who uses household cleaning chemicals shares responsibility for accidental poisoning.
Everyone who drives a car shares responsibility for car accidents.
Everyone who goes to parties that end after 9PM shares responsibility for fatigue related accidents.
Everyone who swims recreationally shares responsibility for drowned children.
Everyone who eats tasty foods shares responsibility for obesity related deaths.
Everyone spends their days doing things not strictly necessary for survival, many of which have the potential to have nasty impacts if they go badly. The argument proves too much.
Criminalizing Wrongfun has a long and proud tradition of making everyone's life worse. From Cromwell to Carrie Nation to Cuomo, using nth-order "societal harms" to remove icky people from one's line of sight is an impulse that, like communism, just needs to be implemented correctly to bring about utopia.
It is Wrong. It ain't Fun.
And what benefit a man if he gain everything but lose his immortal soul? Ban that pagan degeneracy Christmas!
Prohibitionists seem to be entirely immune to argument. They define away the damage they do as "criminals getting their just desserts", and proceed from there. The police state required to enforce their vision they view as "not a bug, but a feature."
To be fair, some (most?) of the problems occur because concurrently with decriminalizing (some) wrongfun, people have been criminalized for ejecting trespassers from their own property.
People, not tools. We need to rid ourselves of those people, not the drugs they're on. There are some edge-case tools that need to be banned. Drugs aren't it.
"Argumentum ad crying five year old" cuts both ways.
A former mayor (!) of the town I live in (USA, near Wash. DC) once woke up to police breaking down his door, shooting his dog, on an anonymous dope tip. (None was found.) Who should stand in front of his crying five year old? How about those shot in ganglang crossfires that did not exist prior to the prohibition mania?
Those engaging in gangland crossfires would still be shooting each other over something else - gambling, porn, hookers - if drugs were miraculously legal. That argument about "think of the poor criminals" doesn't convince me.
Who should stand in front of the mayor's child? The people who did that. The person who phoned in the tip-off. But by the same token, that does not get "yeah I'd rather get wasted and break my word about collecting my child, who as far as I am concerned can go hungry and neglected, because I'm off on a date with my drug dealer boyfriend" off the hook.
You're the only person here talking about a bad parent being let off the hook. What other fun activities would you like banned because a minority population abuses them? Do you have a list? Video games, porn, maybe? Bicycles? Red meat? Tobacco? Rock climbing? Sky diving? Should someone who likes hiking stand in front of his friend's child who lost his father because of a hiking mishap? Or is there a line somewhere, where an activity instantly becomes immoral after a discrete number of fatalities occur?
I used to be "live and let live" and "meh, if you want to fuck yourself up, I disapprove but you're free to do what you want".
Then like I said - I got older. I worked in various jobs. I saw the consequences of "it's my right and I'm free to do what I want".
If we were starting from scratch, we probably would ban alcohol consumption and other things. Also, it's odd how the people arguing over "why are the other lot so obessed with what we do/our bodies/our private lives?" then turn around and demand that it is our business what they do with their bodies. I don't care about what bathroom you use. If you cry and stamp your foot and declare it's genocide unless laws are passed so that 1% of the population can inflict their delusions on the rest of us, you're making it my problem when I don't want it and don't care about it.
"Then like I said - I got older. I worked in various jobs. I saw the consequences of "it's my right and I'm free to do what I want"."
*Of course* there are consequences to living in a free society. We have known this forever. There are a lot of guilty people who are tried and let go because in our justice system in which we are innocent until proven guilty, we can't prove that they're actually guilty. There are endless negative consequences to being free. I'll refer here to Benjamin Franklin's quote about freedom and security. We need a balance, but your suggestions are too far into the authoritarian/safe side. And we know what happens when we give authoritarians authority. They suddenly start deciding things that might threaten their power are unsafe. I reject your authoritarianism.
"There's a problem over there, therefore I'm going to punish people before they can become part of the problem" is one of those universal arguments that can be used to justify any behavior.
Bryan's post ignores another category between abusers and moderate users: addicts who ruin their own lives but don't commit crimes that have victims. The woman who lives in a flophouse and supports her drug habit with casual prostitution isn't victimizing anyone, but most everyone wouldn't want their daughter to turn out like that. It's concern for these people that drives the "drug war." I'm not saying prohibition is the answer: I'm genuinely unsure.
As to Bryan's policy prescription of enforcing existing laws against the homeless, I agree strongly.
Whether or not an addict has free will when they inject their thousandth dose of heroin, they had free will when they injected the first one.
Saying "it's not my fault, I'm an addict" is like saying "it's not my fault where the bullets land, I just fire them up into the air". It's the choice to take addictive drugs in the first place that's the evil one, and that's the one we need to be punishing a lot harder.
That's a bad argument. "Free will" is a poorly defined term, that can mean lots of different things. And it may well be that nobody has "free will". They didn't in Newton's universe, and it's not clear that quantum theory has changed anything.
You can reasonably talk about the harm they do in various direct and indirect ways, but bringing in "free will" just muddies things.
"Free will" usually has a technical meaning that refers to libertarian free will, which is a minority position in philosophy that is very hard to plausibly support and is defended mostly by people with prior religious commitments to the concept. Here, people mean something more like "choices you are morally responsible for" which isn't free will per se, but is something that a more respectable number of people are willing to argue in favor of with arguments that aren't obviously deficient. But they don't believe any choice a person makes is "free" in these sense either and would regard having to defend that as a strawman.
This person is arguing something like that they can understand that the effects of an addictive substance are such that they rob a person of agency in the sense (choices they can be held morally responsible for), but the first "choice" to use is made free of the influence of those substances. The natural counter-point is that people get addicted to substances sometimes as a result of decisions where a person's moral responsibility is murky, such as someone starting use when they were very young and where consent is ambiguous or where the effects of their choices weren't foreseeable to them even if we think they should've been.
"Whether or not an addict has free will when they inject their thousandth dose of heroin, they had free will when they injected the first one." Yeah, but they are often so immature when they start that they should not have an opportunity, at that age, to exercise their free will about something so important. I started smoking at 17 because older college students I admired were smoking. While I was aware that smoking is terrible for you, I was just too young to really get that I, too, could get hooked, or even to fully grasp that I was mortal. And if you think actually I was old enough to make a sensible decision about whether to buy a pack of cigarettes, consider that the tobacco companies at one point were handing out free cigarettes on *playgrounds*. I'm not saying that addicts don't have free will, just objecting to your implication that they bear full responsibility for becoming addicted.
They do have free will before the first time.
But I think it’s likely that those lucky enough not to be living a life of despair have a lot more free will in their tank than those that have been beat up by life through no fault of their own.
+1
Caplan's point was precisely the opposite : that for each drug there are a lot of casual users who manage to keep a reasonable behaviour beyond their first use and that punishing them for an (as yet) victimless crime is counter-productive.
Yes, that sounds dumb. I would punish them all equally.
Drug crimes seem like a no-brainer to punish harshly, because by putting someone in prison for long enough you can cure their addiction. (Assuming the prison is competently run, of course, which I understand that they are most certainly not in almost all parts of the world.)
Because being an addict is worse than being an addict with a prison record? Is that really what you're saying?
Don't know much about the topic, but I think it is pretty hard to keep drugs out of prisons.
You are discounting all the utility people get from drugs.
To suggest my nonviolent behavior should be punished harshly is insulting to me and a threat to my life and values, and many feel the same. It's also wasteful societally because it doesn't really stop people effectively, it just costs a great deal as a policy and (much more importantly) makes people no longer able to be productive (many drug users are productive)
The punishments you are proposing inflict their own sort of harm, both on the user, and on all the people that the user's life touches. And putting a person in prison for a long time for consuming an addictive substance that risks a substance use disorder, such as drinking a beer, is likely to yield more aggregate harm than what you're seeking to prevent. This doesn't mean that alcoholism doesn't cause a lot of problems, but this is about as classic of an example of a cure being worse than the disease as there is.
Brian Caplan is giving biased thinking a bad name.
I've seen several economics papers trying to estimate the costs of climate change. Usually these find GDP losses of 3 to 6% by 2100, compared to GDP if there was zero warming (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/11/claims-about-the-costs-of-global-warming.html). Which means that the world would still be much richer, just slightly poorer than if there was zero warming. I found that some of them don't account for climate tipping points. But according to some papers adding them raises to cost of climate change by 24% (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2103081118).
This... doesn't seem that bad. Do you know of a book/article criticizing these estimates and making the case for radical climate action ? How reliable are these estimates ?
2 key pushbacks occur to me.
1, climate impacts keep getting much worse into the far future, costs probably get a lot worse after.
2, From reading the comment threads at Tyler's blog, it seems like these are extrapolations from the economic effect of the slight temperature etc changes we've seen so far? IOW this is strictly a dramatic underestimate because they just haven't considered discontinuous thresholds and predictable-but-unseen forms of damage at all? Like, wet bulb > 35 C is a red line condition for humans, some regions will become outdoor-uninhabitable, that's super expensive. Flash flooding and flash drought in agricultural regions destroy crops, at the same time that sea level rise inundates productive river valleys with salt, that's super expensive. There's a lot more to 4 C warming than doing the first degree of warming 3 more times.
I've given this some thought. I agree that the GDP numbers often don't seem terrible. I can't really say whether they're reliable, but they're the best we have.
But having read The Ministry of the Future and absorbed the catastrophic potential of a wet bulb mass casualty event, I thought about it in human terms. How many people account for 3-6% of GDP? I don't know the exact answer, but based on back of the napkin math I believe it's around 2 billion. What if part of that GDP loss came about because many of those people simply died? Just as a thought experiment, would we feel better about a billion people dying prematurely because they only contributed a couple of percent of world GDP?
Another thing to consider is that the estimates probably combine gains and losses from climate change. Northern countries might gain 5%, and hot countries might lose 11%, netting out to a "this is fine" 6% loss. Except not if you're in the hot countries.
So yes, those estimates make me feel better about the robustness of human civilization to climate change, but I think they're pretty incomplete for considering how hard we should work to avoid climate impacts.
On the bright side, we seem to have most of the technology identified to stop climate change, and renewable energy is quickly becoming cheaper than fossil fuels, so I think with a smidge of geoengineering we'll be on the right track.
The hot countries are already hot. They will get richer. The biggest changes are in moderately hot countries, in the mid latitudes, in places like Europe. Watch the headlines now. Europe won’t get all that much richer unless things economically improve. It might be one of the poorer regions on earth by 2100.
If people want to be doomsterish I would worry about the opposite to what environmentalists worry about, depopulation not overpopulation.
There's hot, and then there's "everyone who lives here dies if the power goes out".
I do hope that Europe gets some of its mojo back, but I don't think they're going to be as impacted by climate change. Sure, there will be heat waves, but overall I bet Europe benefits slightly from getting warmer.
Europe is where the excess deaths caused by heat are now happening. It’s much more likely that places not adapted to 100f will suffer more than places where 100+ is common already.
“everyone who lives here dies if the power goes out".
But that’s true of place like Doha and Saudi now. Max temperature in doha today is 44C. 111F. It’s above 105 all
Week. Peaking at 116F on Saturday. A few degrees more there won’t matter.
Meanwhile
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/environment/article/2023/06/26/heat-waves-have-caused-nearly-33-000-deaths-in-france-since-2014_6037460_114.html
33,000 deaths since 2014 in Paris. Crowded, ageing European cities with no air conditioning will fare the worst. There’s no respite from heat in Europe, go into a cafe or a pub, go home, go to the cinema and it’s hotter.
You also kind of give the impression you don’t understand the non-preponderance of artificial cooling with the “ everyone who lives here dies if the power goes out” because the power going out doesn’t matter in much of Europe and other parts of the world not used to heat, where air conditioning isn’t common.
Doesn’t affect the heat or cold indoors. There are poorer countries without air conditioning that are already hot, but their societies and built environment has over the centuries become accommodated to heat.
Let me introduce the concept of dry-heat vs wet-heat.
You can acclimate to a dry-heat weather. Sweat a lot, use air-circulating clothes, hide from the sun, etc. Thus even a 44°C is survivable by a traditionnal desert dweller. Plus desertic regions tend to go coller at night, so you have a chance to store cold into the walls of your house.
Now take wet-heat. If the humidity is above 80% you cannot sweat. Above 34°C your body just keeps heating up until you die. No amount of shading / air circulation / window opening or closing will help you because the air is hot everywhere all the time. And doesn't cool at night.
This is the condition that was reached in a large part of Pakistan last year, and is apparently the case right now in the lower mississipi swamp.
The only way to survive there is with a working AC unit.
Not sure of your point here regarding European deaths due to heatwave or not? It gets pretty humid in parts of Europe. Those kinds of temperatures and humidities could well happen in Europe.
I agree that Europe is suffering from the heat to some extent and that this will increase. It's also a fair point about air conditioning not being common in much of the world.
Poorer countries being more acclimated to heat won't necessarily help when wet bulb temperatures go above what the human body can survive.
+1 and Understatement award:
>> being more acclimated to heat won't **necessarily** help when wet bulb temperatures go above what the human body can **survive**
If you think about it, energy allows the creation of capital. So, don't forget to include the GDP losses when cheap plentiful energy sources stop being available. Without the ~26,000 Terawatt hours we consume every year, the current economic structure will be unsustainable. We're living in an economic golden age right now. Unless we have breakthroughs in nuclear fusion technology, we'll be back to living at a 1980s East German standard of living by the end of this century—that's if we're lucky. Well, "we" as humanity. I'll likely be dead before it gets that bad.
East Germany was one of the richest countries in the world in the 80s, but it was a very unequal world.
Why do people, in an era where we are discovering and optimising all kinds of energy technologies, think we are going to run out of energy?
If you're fine with reducing everything to GDP, and ignoring that some people die, while others are barely inconvenienced, then that may be a reasonable argument. Otherwise not.
Some people will die while others will be barely inconvenienced is an accurate description of literally all government decisions. Including things like setting speed limits or universal healthcare. You might want to make a more substantial, less demagogue-y argument.
If the GDP of Senegal is 3 times what it is now by 2100, deaths from climate change will very likely be compensated by better food and medicine. On net they will be better off, although not better off than under the zero warming scenario.
You are assuming that the increased wealth is distributed in some way approximating "fairly". This is not what I've come to expect.
GDP correlates positively with how good the people at the bottom have it.
All that matters is the distribution of air conditioning.
The issue is that those losses do not stop compounding in 2100. If you don't care about what happens outside of your lifespan then it's unlikely to affect you. If you do then you want to minimize the loss by taking sensible climate action. Sensible meaning long term, cost minimized transition to cleaner fuels, more efficient energy use, and perhaps things like carbon capture/scrubbing. The case for radical action, as you noted, is mostly overstated and more a matter of faith than science. As is the idea it will cause ecological or social collapse.
OK, but you've got to remember that thermodynamics guarantees that carbon scrubbing will cost more energy that was released in freeing the carbon. Currently it's mainly window dressing and an excuse to keep polluting. There are some lab studies where it's useful, though. But it requires exogenous energy inputs. (Solar, wind, wave, coal...something.)
I bet we're going to have more energy than we know what to do with in a couple of decades.
> but you've got to remember that thermodynamics guarantees that carbon scrubbing will cost more energy that was released in freeing the carbon
That is just straightforwardly wrong I think? You don't convert the CO2 back into coal or hydrocarbons, but store it directly or convert it into a form that has lower binding energy than the fuel. See e.g. here for some calculations for coal plants: https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/a/135335
If you're pulling it from the atmosphere, or even the ocean, you've got to re-concentrate it SOMEHOW, if only at the surface of the molecule. This is expensive. Pulling it from the flue only helps to a slight extent. (You've got to filter out all the waste products.) And the things you are building aren't THAT much lower in binding energy.
Build tons of wind farms offshore, enough to power a grid on a moderately windy day. Or on a slightly windy day ( remember that offshore is always breezier than onshore) - on very windy days use the excess to capture carbon, or generate hydrogen - or whatever.
it gets pulled from the atmosphere naturally by the weathering of certain rocks
While true. you need to grind that rock to powder to get very rapid re-absorption. That's cheaper than many approaches, but I'm not sure how cost effective it would be. And the rock doesn't exist everywhere. (Most places the rock is already old enough to have absorbed all it's going to absorb.)
I suspect that it's cheaper to build a solar or wind power plant and use the electricity to drive the conversion. Then you've got to convince people not to burn it again.
That's why I said perhaps. The ideal energy mix for minimal pollution in an advanced industrial economy is already solved. We just can't do it because it involves a lot of nuclear and Greens really dislike nuclear for... reasons.
I haven't read the papers in question, but I assume that in order to make this kind of argument, you have to consider a world that by 2100 still ressembles ours quite a lot.
In contrary I see basically two possible paths for humanity:
* either we fail to find a source of energy before oil runs out, and the civilisation basically crumbles -> the GDP loss is on the order of 99%
* or we+AI developp a free abundant form of energy, plus all the technology to mitigate and/or reverse global warming -> the GDP gain is on the order of 10000%
Either way, the pure consequences of global warming seems a blip on the radar. (although a post-apocaliptic civilation would still rather have a livable planet than not).
The oil will never run out. Long before it runs out it will be replaced by other technologies - which we already have for the most part. We will have to legislate to keep the oil in the ground eventually.
Yes, as oil gets harder to find the price will go up and people will transition to other things gradually.
That is the issue with most climate change discourse. They say to believe the science, but then when you actually look at "the science" (if economic papers can be called that*,) you usually see numbers that hardly seem worth worrying about.
*IPCC estimates are probably as "science" as it comes, and those definitely do not support all the doom and gloom you often hear as the right stance to have.
"hardly worth worrying about"? Why don't you tell that to all the conservatives who were losing their mind over a mere 9% price increase last year?
Empirically, people *do* care about negative economic disruptions much smaller than what climate change might cause.
The IPCC has consistently low-balled their predictions by excluding those models that predict extreme events. And they've been pretty consistently wrong, predicting less change than happened. If you want to consider them "sciency", use them for the low-ball line of your whisker graph.
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/testing-ipcc-projections-against
Well, your page contradict two other reports that I've read, so I'll need to think a bit about whether to adjust my beliefs, continue to hold them, or try to do the calculations myself. (That last is quite unlikely as it's not that high on my priorities.)
Complicating things is that the two prior reports may have been based on the same study. I read it in either Science News or New Scientist, or perhaps both. And I don't remember enough about the articles to track the original study. Also this article was at least 5 years ago.
OTOH, I've been continually encountering articles where someone involved in a climate science project says that the results they are getting are well above what their models predicted. So I'm going to have trouble if I try to lower my belief that the IPCC has been underestimating warming. (Granted, articles carry comments that evoke interest, and this strongly biases what they report. Still....)
There's a bunch of stuff out there about how actual data is coming in below the IPCC forecasts, I believe mainly because their "business as usual" scenario hasn't taken into account actual technological progress. This came up on a quick search: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25734211-000-the-worst-case-climate-scenarios-are-no-longer-plausible-today/.
And this is before exponential growth in solar and batteries fully kick in, let alone progress on geothermal, fission, etc.
I've already read that. I wasn't presuming the worst case even before I read it. But sea level warming is happening. (i.e. the top layer of the sea is getting excessively warm). Permafrost melting is happening. (Check out Zombie fires.) They keep finding new ways that the ice is melting faster than they've previously noticed. Unexpected sources of methane keep showing up. (There was a new one this week, though I don't remember the details.) Forests are drying out and catching fire more than usual.
Now I can't tell how serious any of this is, probably nobody knows for sure. But it's all headed in one direction. (Well, not ALL. Mainly.)
The current warm spell was sort of expected as part of the normal cycle, but it's a lot hotter than was expected.
"hardly worth worrying about" is a stretch, they're still much bigger than the negative impact of any mitigation policies in the Overton window (if not as big as some hardcore environmentalists would support).
This is my take as well. Some (many?) things, the closer you look, the further you realize reality is from the average narrative.
I wasn't able to find 3 to 6 % in linked blogpost, but that is indeed somewhat in the range of mainstream estimates (IPCCC etc.) for plausible levels of warming.
I am not sure what you mean by "radical climate action" (some conservatives I've met seem to think that any sort of action in this area is, like, tantamount to impending communist revolution), but in general climate doomerism of "Extinction rebellion" variety is not supported by scientific evidence.
The problem is that the climate models become quite unreliable when you get into uncharted territory. We don't really know that the "doom" scenarios are wrong. And some of the official models have actually predicted some of them. (E.g. "no more clouds". I couldn't find a link in a quick internet search, but it came out a few years ago. I only read a popular summary, but the gist was if temperature rises ? 5 degrees? F or C? then all the cloud cover will disappear). You can't trust those models, though, because the climate models become quite unreliable when you get into uncharted territory. It might well not be that bad. Or it might be worse.
Do we have a good example where the mainstream models has significantly *under* predicted negative impact?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0310-1
This is only if we triple current CO2 levels.
I *think* that's a different article. The abstract didn't talk much about increased temperature. (Of course, I never read the original article. And that's in the right time-frame to be the same paper. Or perhaps a second paper reporting on the same simulation...you can usually frame things more than one way. The abstract does mention that they were doing multiple simulations, as, I guess, one should expect.)
OTOH, I may just have remembered the pieces that impressed me. "CO2 levels rise above 1,200 ppm" doesn't yield, to me, any intuitive sense that they're talking about tripling the CO2 level, and that's clearly very significant.
On the third hand, the model shouldn't be taken too seriously, because it's well outside the range at which the models have been validated. Even where we are we keep finding unexpected feedback loops.
I mean, yeah, there is definitely a possibility that things will turn out to be worse than mainstream models predict, just like there is a possibility that things will turn out to be better than those models predict. What is virtually impossible to not happen is large scale collapse of civilization
ation because we will slightly miss Paris targets. All rhetoric about "we have /insert low number/ years to save the planet" is wildly exxaggerated.
The planet's in no danger. Civilization is, but it's unlikely that warming alone will cause civilization to collapse. Social unrest caused be warming (e.g. starvation riots) is another matter. That might well get serious enough the civilization collapsed, probably by causing someone to start a major war. And it might be unrecoverable. MIGHT. I can't assign any defensible probability weighing to anything in that area.
Catastrophic war might happen even without climate change having anything to do with it; after all, most recent major war was started by a country (Russia), that is not exactly on the top of the list of regions most vulnerable to global warming.
I do agree that a world with higher living standards is less likely to have catastrophic social unrest, so to an extent that climate change mitigation helps to raise overall everyday quality of life, it marginally decreases chances of a major war, but at the same time, humanity is perfectly able to find reasons to destroy ourselves with e.g. nuclear weapons even without climate change.
David Friedman has a number of blog posts basically arguing that the estimates are extremely uncertain and we don't even know what sign the cost of global warming has. There was some discussion about this in a previous thread: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-261/comment/12342030
On the other hand, last I checked he was still repeating the "cold deaths > heat deaths" argument that Scott already debunked. (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/chilling-effects) Also, "lie back and think of all the new farmland in Siberia" isn't terribly encouraging to people who don't live in Siberia.
Having read that thread, it didn't look like any sort of debunking. Scott raised a lot of interesting questions that focused on one study indicating about ten times as many cold-related deaths as heat-related, and starting with "that seems wrong; is it?" and then going from there into the details of how that study laid out its reasoning and standards of measurement. Overall, he's skeptical of what nearly everyone is reporting.
That said, some of his questions had been addressed by an argument David Friedman had made about 35 years prior to Scott's article, and Friedman himself addressed some of the remaining ones in a comment on that article.
I also have some questions about the studies that claimed to model increases in mortality related to warming. Even assuming all the models are perfectly correct, As quoted by Scott, Bressler writes: "For all 23 countries, Gasparrini et al. predict an increase in heat-related excess mortality and a decrease in cold-related excess mortality under climate change scenarios, with most countries experiencing a net increase in mortality."
However, if you look at Gasparrini's study, under the RCP 2.6 scenario, they predicted increased mortality in 11/23 countries, which is not most countries.
Even under the RCP 4.5 scenario, they only predicted increased mortality in 12/23 countries, which is the barest possible majority.
It seems like a much more accurate version of what Gasparrini said about this scenario is that net mortality would increase in about half of countries and decrease in about half of countries.
It’s encouraging to people who import food from Siberia. 🤷♂️
Not Siberia, but northern Canada? It should be possible to find out if farmland is expanding in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and I'm not the only inquiring mind that wants to know. Reasons to be sceptical - 1 Farmers actually want fewer extreme weather events more than just warmer temps. 2 Increased CO2 does cause more plant growth but weeds benefit more from it than cultivated crops (source - an article in Science News I once read). OTOH, if Canadian farmers are benefiting, some media might want to not mention it.
How are the extremists running the show? By yelling at people on Twitter? Or by giving people a rebate for buying a heat pump? In the everyday world, I still see everyone driving around in their SUVs, so while I get frustrated with doomerism too, I think they've gotten worked up in part because they've seen so little progress.
On the bright side, technology and capitalism will mostly take care of it for us, so the politics of climate at this point are mostly a sideshow. The real heroes were the people who subsidized solar panels and wind from the 70's through the 2010's.
Um, how many millenials do you talk to? :-). It sounds like contact with us is some strange experience for you :-)
Short story recommendation! From a 2016 anthology of Lovecraftian fiction, the story "Bright Crown of Joy" by Livia Llewelleyn.
There's a summary here but it doesn't convey the strangely beautiful writing, which is chock-full of body horror (if you look at it one way) but the narrator doesn't, and so we don't either:
https://www.tor.com/2021/06/09/the-party-at-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-the-world-livia-llewellyns-bright-crown-of-glory/
There seems to be a strain of new Mythos writers who take the side of the monsters, and while generally I harrumph about that, this story is beautiful and strange and poetic. I recommend it! The anthology is "Children of Lovecraft" edited by Ellen Datlow.
You could say it's a kind of transhumanism.
And while "Humanity is becoming something without consciousness or individuality" I much prefer Llewelleyn's take on it than Peter Watts in "Blindsight".
Do you know how to do spoilers tags (hiding text) on substack?
Because if I can figure that out ,I have some thoughts and Qs on blindsight.
I'd love to find some way to do formatting in the comments, markdown seems not to work and Substack pages are more interested in getting you to be an author yourself and publish on Substack rather than give any help.
Hmmmm well how many comments “down the line” does it take to make comments fall underneath the “expanding fold?”
Maybe I can just reply to myself “spoilers!” enough times
I'm reading this on laptop, and the really long comments get cut off at the bottom, until you click to expand it. So I think it would work if you did this:
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That was enough "Spoilers" to even be cut off on my desktop.
A ton of events in Prospera upcoming in H2-2023: https://lu.ma/infinita
Aug 24-25: Devfest Honduras on Island 2023 with Google Developer Groups https://lu.ma/googledev2023
Sep 8-10: Contech, Hardware & Material Superabundance 2023 - A Próspera Builders' Summit https://lu.ma/contech2023
Nov 3-5: AI & Crypto Futures 2023 - A Próspera Builders’ Summit https://lu.ma/crypto2023
Nov 17-19: DeSci & Longevity Biotech 2023 - A Próspera Builders' Summit https://lu.ma/longevity2023
There are two special events that we're currently collecting a waitlist for:
Oct 30 - Dec 15: Prospera Buildweeks https://lu.ma/buildweeksH22023
- We plan a full 6 weeks of permanent residence for 100+ entrepreneurs
- Zuzalu-style decentralised organization of events, workshops, co-living
Dec 8-10: Prospera General Summit 2023 https://lu.ma/general2023
- All members of the core Prospera community are invited
- Discussions about the past, present and future of Prospera with the full leadership team
So the other day I came across the following short poem by Abbas Kiarostami:
Beyond good and evil,
the sky
is blue.
It's clearly(?) meant as a haikuesque juxtaposition of the timelessness objectivity of natura versus the tumultuous abstract life of humans. I like that interpretation, it feels nice and simple yet powerful, like this sort of poem ought to be.
Yet to me it immediately developed an entire new dimension because it brought to mind EY's "A Fable of Science and Politics". (If you haven't read it, I encourage you to do so here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6hfGNLf4Hg5DXqJCF/a-fable-of-science-and-politics The connection will be clear.)
It is highly unlikely that the two texts are causally connected in any meaningful way, but how amazing would it be if one had influenced the other?
Anyway, I love that works of literature can develop such disparate dimensions that the author could have never dreamed of.
Can you think of other examples of this phenomenon? :)
Hi ACX readers,
I just wrote a short essay on ritualisation vs habitualisation: https://open.substack.com/pub/zantafakari/p/build-rituals-not-habits?r=p7wqp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Have a read and subscribe if this kind of thinking interests you!
Anyone have sources for ideas about architecture that adapts to its environment and climate?
I live in the Far Southwest at 32° latitude outside Tucson; our climate is similar to that of El Paso, so we share a lot of architectural practices. But I’d like to look into building techniques, especially passive ones, that mitigate extremes at 32° latitude north or south, e.g.
Tel Aviv, Jordan
Santiago, Valparaiso
Buenos Aires
Perth, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne
Alexandria, Cairo
Beirut, Damascus
Lahore, Delhi
Madeira Islands, Morocco
Nanking
Nagasaki, Miyazaki
Does anyone else sleep outdoors?
I found Aysegul Seker IIlgin’s master’s thesis for Middle East Technical University — Form and Space in Roman Domestic Architecture: The Architectural Language of the Atrium House — online. It’s been a great resource for discovering how Roman engineers used architecture to adapt to their environment and climate. But it’s about fifteen centuries dated.
You might also be interested in this: https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_3459_300062280.pdf
What does the wind rose look like in your area? Middle eastern vernacular architecture uses windcatchers to pull the prevailing wind down into houses. Or it can act as a chimney if the air is still
A good thick adobe should do what you want. You can also place an awning over it when the climate is hot, so it cools at night and then never really warms up during the day. I suppose you could use a mirror in winter to provide extra heat, if it's a dry climate.
But the basis is the adobe. You can't change it after you fire it, so work out the plans carefully. (Airflow patterns, water, and electric passages. You can't change the adobe after you fire it.) And I don't know that it works for more then two stories high.
The passive cooling Wikipedia page has all of the references you’re looking for.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_cooling
pre-AC Florida Cracker style homes? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_cracker_architecture
In Madeira I've never noticed anything special in this department. Just the same combo of good insulation, decent but not big windows and window doors. That more or less completely block out the sun. Funnily enough, some homes (usually of the well-off) even have fireplaces even though they're literally never needed (unless you're up in the mountains).
Most heat regulation revolves around opening and closing windows at the right time, as far as I can see.
Sleeping outside is not normal there.
We slept sort of outdoors in an eco-hotel on the Baja Pennnsula. Huge windows, taking up half the wall. No screens, no glass in windows and I'm not sure there was even a way to close the windows -- maybe there were some shutters. In any case, we slept with the windows wide open and unscreened, and it was cool and lovely. There were no mosquitos. I suppose bats and whatnot flew through while we slept, but whatever happened there open to the night did not trouble us at all, and we had deep wonderful sleeps.
I immediately thought of shotgun houses, which are pretty common in the American south at similar latitudes.
Brisbane has the "Queenslander", essentially a bungalow with a wide veranda around the whole house.
From talking to elderly relatives I think it used to be quite common that you'd have a huge verandah surrounded with flyscreens, and in the summer you'd put your bed out there and sleep outside. You'd basically move your whole life to the verandah.
Nowadays of course we just turn on the AC.
We call them "Arizona rooms" here. It's really just a screened-in porch surrounding the structure. They may have been used for sleeping before electricity and swamp coolers.
Yeah absolutely, I grew up that way (early 70s, small country town two hours from Brisbane). Only moved to my first residence with AC in the last few years because I hated sleeping in hotel AC (too drying) and assumed that residential would be the same. I was wrong, but I still don't leave the AC on overnight until it's 30deg+ as I prefer the ceiling fan.
This used to be common even outside climates we consider warm. I visited a national park in upstate New York and the old house there had a second story screened in "sleeping porch" where people would sleep in summer.
No sources, just ideas:
1. Evaporative coolers, aka swamp coolers
2. Geothermal cooling: pump hot water / air down a couple hundred meters, then back up. Get cooler water / air in return
3. Thermal convection: design the structure so that hot air can rise and vent out, drawing in cool air at or beneath ground level
4. Solar panel canopies
I've seen a thermal convection structure at the Tucson airport, and was pretty impressed. The Turkish architecture student writes quite a bit about Roman passive techniques of mitigating adverse environmental factors. Some cultures developed such techniques over centuries, and they're embedded in the culture.
"Geothermal cooling: pump hot water / air down a couple hundred meters, then back up. Get cooler water / air in return"
My thought too! What is the ground temperature there?
"Thermal convection: design the structure so that hot air can rise and vent out, drawing in cool air at or beneath ground level"
Cautionary note re air beneath ground level: Check for radon.
There’s also geothermal heat pumps. Even if the ground temperature isn’t *hot* where you are, you can at least count on it being stable, e.g. if you go below frost line you can be assured it won’t drop below freezing. This is helpful if you’re relying on a heat pump for your primary heat, since the conventional ones stop working when the outside air gets too cold.
Agreed. A stable underground temperature indeed is a very nice heat sink for a heat pump to pump to or from. ( A pity the system initial cost is so high. I considered it for the house I and my late wife had built, but the payback time was comparable to our expected lifetime at the time we decided. )
So [[Google Zeitgeist]] is at [[Wikipedia:RFD]].
What was Google Zeitgeist? It is referring to [[Google Hot Trends]] here, not their annual conference (nor a generic concept of attendance at an infamous SF bar). The filtered real-time feed of the top 100 "trending" search queries.
It was wonderful, and it was terrible, and eventually Google got people called "project managers" who realized that maybe Google should just not have that data stream available for free to the entire internet.
Book Recs on Family Systems Theory?!? (Family Systems Theory tends to focus heavily on individuals maintaining their integrity in the face of opposition, to use specialized meanings of the words "differentiation" and "regressive," and to worry about enmeshment more than about open conflict.)
I am slightly obsessed with a few books that build stuff on it--first "A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix" by Edwin H. Friedman, and now ones by the "sexual crucible" psychologist guy, David Schnarch... mainly "Passionate Marriage."
I haven't read the original one Murray Bowen yet, but I know it exists! Does anyone have other recs of good solid books that use this analysis? I'd like to have one to recommend to people that isn't "Here's this leadership book that was thrown together from some guy's notes after he died" or "Here's.. basically a sex book intended for people who've been in a long-term relationship for quite a while."
Yes! I have an excellent recommendation. But first I have to say that I am depressed to hear that absurdly diluted and debased versions of Bowen's ideas are all that's available. Wonder whether there's one on what Bowen would have had to say about the pros and cons of Brazilian butt lifts.
Anyhow, my recommendation : The Power Tactics of Jesus Christ, byJay Haley, who worked with Minuchin, another of the family systems guys. It's a collection of interconnected essays about family therapy, the dynamics of families with a schizophrenic child who is the identified patient, and, as the title says, the power tactics of Jesus. Last essay looks at key moments in the biblical story of Jesus, analyzing things he said from the point of view of their value as tactical moves to gain and maintain power in a complex situation. The book's rude, funny, entertaining and smart.
Also, if you're want to read one of the originators of the approach, Minuchin is a lot more readable than Bowen.
Thanks for the recommendation; I just read the first chapter, and I enjoyed it a lot! It is very funny and simultaneously points to important things. Reminds me of Eric Berne.
I'm glad you're enjoying it. I liked it so much that I still remember a few bits verbatim. One's in the chapter on schizophrenia, and how to be schizophrenic you need the proper kind of sibling, "a weak kind bastard of a sibling . . ."
> "But first I have to say that I am depressed to hear that absurdly diluted and debased versions of Bowen's ideas are all that's available."
It sounds like you're saying you inferred this from what I said!? Am I right?! If so... I wasn't intending to say that! I was just saying those are the books I've stumbled into so far on the topic. I, umm.. decided to ask here before going to any great effort to find Family Systems Theory books that didn't just jump off the shelf and hit me in the face. :D
And I didn't think either of those two books was bad ...just... one of them the author didn't live long enough to finish putting the book together himself, so we maybe don't get to read exactly what he was intending to write and... the other book is applying FST to one very specific (though significant) part of people's lives.
Thank you for your recommendation!! (I intend to say more later!)
Strange question: can anyone point me to good resources - preferably academic writings or advanced blog posts - that thoroughly deal with / argue against Radical Skepticism? (like Epistemological Nihilism, Pyrrhonism, etc.) I'm aware of Meditations on First Philosophy, but I was interested to know if there are more.
I'm asking for a friend. No, I'm dead serious - I recently had a debate with an old friend where he (as far as I could tell) honestly defended the idea that - paraphrasing his own words here - all truth is relative, or if it isn't it's impossible to know, that believing the truth "doesn't matter" anyway, and so on. He even went so far as to express doubt over his own existence.
Personally, I find nihilism like that to be repulsive and pseudo-philosophical, and obviously wrong. But what kind of resources would - at least in theory - help someone like my friend pull himself out of whatever hole he's fallen into? (He admitted to me that he thought nihilism was stupid, but he couldn't see any way to avoid it; so he's open to changing his mind.)
One of nihilism's advantage is that it's one of the few philosophies that might actually be true.
Weird recommendation, but Hogfather by Terry Pratchett. There's a conversation between Death and his granddaughter at the end that I often reflect back on in moments of nihilism. "YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN'T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME?"
That's an interesting recommendation. I read Good Omens ages ago, and never got into Discworld. I should check it out. Thanks
The main problem with radical skepticism is that you never have time/resources/inclination to check everything. And it's a real problem. Most solve it by only being skeptical in a limited area. If you want to be really radical, though, you can never take a step, because you don't know the floor will support you.
OTOH, this is quite different from the position that "all truth is relative". That phrase is basically meaningless, because it has too many possible meanings. But if you want to challenge it, you could do worse than "cogito ergo sum". Or consider "thus I refute Berkeley" if you want an argument. (The appropriate refutation depends on how your friend thinks about things.)
OTOH, radical skepticism isn't the position that "all truth is relative", but rather "all truth is unknowable", which is probably correct, though I have a math-oriented friend who disagrees with me about that. (N.B. "all truth is unknowable" is snappy, but what it means is that we can never be certain that something is true, or, in Bayesian terms, priors should never be either 0 or 1.
It's true that you can never fully check everything. But I feel that you have no choice but to take that first step, at some point. I may not be able to prove with 100% mathematical logic that the sun will rise tomorrow, but through inductive intuition I can say it almost certainly will, and that I should believe it will. That is where my friend disagrees; he says that induction is invalid, and that all we can really say is that we (paraphrasing here) choose to have faith in induction if it makes us happy. If we don't want to, we don't need to, and there is no deep sense in which not believing in inductively proven statements is just wrong.
What you say about relativism makes sense to me, and is the main reason I reject it. I another comment, however, I explained that this didn't work for him; he just bit the bullet and through out the law of non-contradiction (and if you look up Dialetheism on Wikipedia, you'll find seemingly serious philosophers doing the same, as crazy as that sounds to me.)
Personally, the "all truth is unknowable" thing bothers me, because while it is trivially true (as you say, priors can never be fully 0 or 1, due to the natural uncertainty of our perceptions and cognitions), you can't use that as an excuse to drop out of making any knowledge claims ever - like my friend. Sure, I can't prove 100% that my cat exists when I see him and pet him; I can't prove 100% that seeing something and petting something is even valid grounds for belief at all. But come now; we're serious adults here. If we see a car hurtling towards us at 100kmph, you can sit and say that it's impossible to know anything for sure - I'm going to jump out of the way.
Not trying to be confrontational, by the way. Those last sentences were addressed more to my friend than to you. Your comment was very good and made me think harder about my positions.
But knowledge claims ARE invalid. What is valid are claims of what your estimates are. I'd never bet against the sun rising (though this isn't a claim that it would be visible), but I don't claim to KNOW it as TRUTH. And I don't claim that about 1+1 = 2 either. I just claim that it's so likely it would be absurd to bet against it.
You don't really give up anything important by refusing certainty. Not if you accept that probabilities can be really high or low.
I'm something of a radical skeptic; truth is unknowable.
That said, the entire premise of the website "Less Wrong" is that, even if we cannot reach truth, we can get closer to it; we cannot be "right", or at least to be certain of our own "rightness", but we -can- become, incrementally, less wrong.
Relativity may or may not be correct, but it is less wrong than Newtonian gravity, which in turn is less wrong than what predated it, which is less wrong than what predated it, where "less wrong" in context means "In greater agreement with reality". Newtonian gravity is "close enough" for almost all purposes, however; one note about becoming incrementally less wrong is both that, historically, the math has gotten increasingly difficult, and also that the areas in which each succeeding model fail become smaller and smaller.
That last point is critical; most people don't even need Newtonian gravity. All you really need to know is that things fall downwards, and fast enough to damage something. The areas which this fails in your daily life are basically nonexistent for the majority of people. Being less wrong about gravity doesn't help most people!
(If this offends your sense of scientific literacy, well, why does it matter that people properly understand -this- thing? The sphere of knowledge is expanding faster than any one person could ever keep up with. We live in tiny islands of knowledge surrounded by vast oceans of ignorance. The proper thing to do is to learn to adapt to this situation, not to try to insist that the island you happens you occupy is the one everybody should live on.)
I believe that every intelligent alien species we meet will have a version of Pythagoras’ theorem. (Amongst others).
Which rules out human social construction.
"A version of" is doing all of the heavy lifting there.
Let me rewrite.
The aliens will have the exact same version of Pythagoras’ theorem as we do, with differences only in the mathematical symbols. If we used dots for numbers it would be exactly the same.
That, I think, is false, because it assumes that the aliens take the same route through mathematics we did.
Consider the possibility of aliens who don't use arithmetic; say, aliens whose core path through mathematics revolves around knot theory.
I think Kristian is right that the problem with your friend is unlikely philosophical but is instead psychological/emotional. Radical Skepticism and Nihilism are contradictory positions. A nihilist believes that something doesn't exist, while a radical skeptic believes that beliefs about anything are unjustified since we can't have enough knowledge to confidently make such claims. Radical Skepticism on it's own is self-defeating since a radical skeptic holds the belief that you can't hold beliefs, which is absurd. But even if one is loosely adopting these positions, at best they should be an Absurdist, not a Nihilist. Martin Blank is also right that radical skepticism is just a pointless position to adopt, maybe suggest your friend read some Kierkegaard or Frankl?
I've seen multiple people point out that Radical Skepticism / Relativism / Nihilism are not the same thing. Fair enough; there are technical differences between the three. But I would argue that, in practice, they all lead to the same place: a state of profound doubt of intuitions that I consider basic to all intellectual progress, namely the beliefs that statements are objectively True or False, and that this can be known through the correct epistemological rules. This is where my friend seems to be.
The point that Radical Skepticism is self-defeating seems clearly correct to me. Although I worry that it's almost too obvious; the Radical Skeptic could simply dig themselves in deeper hole by denying the law of non-contradiction. In fact, this is what my friend did when I challenged him with this point. Worse still, while I think rejecting basic principles of logic is clearly insane, some apparently thoughtful thinkers seem to actually claim otherwise - see Graham Priest's Dialetheism, a form of logic that allows self-contradicting statements(!)
I agree that Absurdism is far more sensible than pure Nihilism, and I actually think that Kierkegaard or Frankly could be great for my friend. Thanks for the recommendations.
https://meaningness.com is great. This page is specifically about nihilism: https://meaningness.com/preview-eternalism-and-nihilism. "[E]ternalism and nihilism are each half right. Eternalism rightly recognizes that the world is meaningful to us, and that it must be accepted as it is. This is the acknowledgement of pattern: the world in all its variety, pain and pleasure alike. Nihilism rightly recognizes that there is no eternal source of meaning, so there is no ultimate basis or necessity for rejecting anything. This is the acceptance of nebulosity: the chaos and contingency of the world, and the recognition that we are free from divine law."
Although this seems to be opposed to my viewpoint, it's an interesting resource regardless. Thank you
The strange part is you describing common sense positions as if they were some kind of aberration.
It’s a bit unclear whether his problem here is philosophical or psychological. I don’t want to be offensive, but often people justify their emotional problems with philosophical rationalizing. Is this just an intellectual debate or is he hurt someway by this?
He admitted to me that he thought that nihilism was "stupid" but that he couldn't find a way out of it. He was open to me showing him a different way.
I personally intuited that he was disturbed by his thinking. And yes, I certainly could see that he's really just rationalizing his own depressive feelings. I know I've done the same in the past.
👍
You can't argue yourself out of chemical imbalance.
On a philosophical level, we can talk about what "existence" is, we can discuss Tegmark multiverse, Everett branches, etc. It is fun (but has diminishing returns after some point).
Saying that "truth does not exist" is often just a refusal to update on a specific uncomfortable information. Turning this into an abstract epistemological debate is walking in exactly the opposite direction.
But if there is actual *behavior* corresponding to "nothing is true, I probably don't even exist", such as dropping out of school, neglecting former hobbies, or not leaving the bed for the whole day, then the required resource is therapy and/or a pill.
Not sure if this is precisely what you're looking for, but Eliezer has a fairly rigorous sequence of posts titled Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for Beginners that discusses the nature of truth and why you should care about it:
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SqFbMbtxGybdS2gRs
Yes, this seems like an excellent resource. I haven't read the Sequences yet (yes, you may gasp at my lack of education), but Eliezer definitely strikes me as the kind of person who's both skilled and meticulous enough to give me the kind of "start-from-the-beginning" epistemology that I'm looking for. Will read. Thanks
But he's not quite right. A lot of stuff is metaphor, which is neither true or false until interpreted...and often not then. It's frequently "this is the way to act with this group of people, if you want to be accepted by them".
If Eliezer is talking about true things, and metaphors are "neither true or false", then how exactly does that make what Eliezer says not-right?
I object to the claim "Any meaningful belief has a truth-condition, some way reality can be which can make that belief true, or alternatively false."
There are many things humans will never understand or know. Religious beliefs may not have a "truth-condition"; interpretations of quantum physics may not have a "truth-condition". Yet beliefs about those things can be meaningful and useful. Our brains may not be big enough to understand much of what is really going on in the universe, and dividing things into simple categories of truth/untruth may be good enough for 4-year-olds but not all that meaningful to an entity significantly smarter than us apes.
Could you give a couple concrete examples of beliefs with no truth-condition and how specifically you think they are meaningful and useful?
Believing in Christianity could be one. Christianity might not be the literal truth, yet it could be a belief system which is no falser about humanity's place in the universe than is atheism or other religions and therefore meaningful and useful, useful in the sense that it may lead to a happier life for the believer and others that the believer spends their life around. There may exist no religious or philosophical belief or belief system which could correspond with either truth or non-truth, because the dichotomy of truth/non-truth could be a social construction by humans.
Another could be the multi-worlds interpretation quantum mechanics. There may be no correct interpretation of quantum mechanics. But believing in the multi-world interpretation might be meaningful in the sense that it could cause one to make different decisions in life than they would otherwise.
Typical obvious examples of beliefs within Christianity, like "god exists" and "Jesus was resurrected", definitely have truth-conditions. If you have in mind some particular Christian beliefs that lack truth-conditions then please be more specific.
I am not willing to say that a statement has meaning or truth just because it gives you emotions or changes your actions. Saying "garble snarble fiddle gux" could plausibly change someone's emotions or actions in some way, but that doesn't imply that it's meaningful or true.
And saying "the dichotomy of truth/non-truth could be a social construction by humans" just sounds like you're trying to muddy the waters. What do you mean "could be"? Do you have, like, actual REASONS for thinking it could? Eliezer has a pretty reasonable-sounding story about how "truth" is whatever thing determines the outcomes of experiments; do see some problem with that or have some alternate story?
I have a problem with buying something because it has a pretty reasonable-sounding story. Eliezer invokes Nietzsche regarding the nature of truth. Those are deep waters to dive into without more swimming gear than a pretty reasonable sounding story.
Probablism and Fallblism allow sceptical objections to be addressed by lowering the bar on non-scepticism -- indeed, they could be seen as scepticism about certainty.
There is no knock down argument to radical skepticism, other than you can’t do much of anything with it and it is much more practically and emotional fulfilling to just get on with life and stop staring into the coal pit of skepticism.
Douglas Adam's Ruler of the Universe is a fun example of a radical sceptic. Obviously, it has the flaw of being dependent on outside workers to maintain his existence, but still.
This seems correct to me. Ironically, despite radical skeptics often presenting as anti-metaphysics, I find radical skepticism to be far too metaphysical; in the real world, nobody actually acts like truth doesn't exist, and it's seemingly very hard if not impossible to do so, so why not just admit that our basic day-to-day intuitions are correct and move on with life?
Radical skepticism may be a good way to stop worrying about philosophy and getting on with the practical things of life. Some of the happiest, most practical people I know are nihilists.
There's an argument against radical scepticism to the effect that it is self defeating ...at least, the sceptic has to abandon the principle of non contradiction.
No philosophy is livable unless you either choose to reject the principle of non-contradiction or add a set of epicycles/exceptions to the purported principles.
Does believing the truth doesn't matter harm your friend? Is he happy?
I don’t fully understand why believing truth to be relative must lead to nihilism.
Relativism.and scepticism are quite different. Relativism implies an abundance of truth. Admitedly, both reject a singular absolute truth.
Yeah. Embrace the mystery.
I’ve noticed that I have an inherent distrust for advertisements. When I see an ad for a product, I come away wanting to buy it less (~95% of the time) and will often make a point of avoiding buying it. I never thought about it much but I realized that I must be in the minority here, or ad campaigns wouldn’t be a thing that companies did. Do y’all ever buy anything from ads?
I rarely find advertisements for *brands* consciously convincing (as in “here’s a product you are going to need one way or the other, buy it from us instead of the other guy”). I usually do other research for big purchases that would outweigh it. Then again, these might still be influencing me in more subtle ways, maybe associating brand A with “excellent service” and brand B with “lowest possible cost”, subconsciously impacting which brand I consider.
But “awareness” ads definitely work on me to some extent, either “here’s a cool product you didn’t know about” or “hey this thing you like already? It’s on sale this week!”
I think most people _think_ they distrust advertisements, but in fact they're working perfectly. It's easy to watch the nine out of ten ads that advertise something you're not interested in and say "pah, stupid ad, I'm actively going to avoid buying that, heh, that'll show them" but then the tenth ad comes along and you say "oh wow there's a new hunkdorian veeblespritzer coming out?" and you forget all about how much you hate ads for a moment.
I suspect most people on this forum view things this way, including me, and I also suspect we're wrong, including me. I think the flaw in most people's thinking is that a particular viewing of an ad gets one to buy things, whereas it is the cumulative effect that works.
That said, throwing advertising dollars out to get your message out isn't enough if it isn't done well. Coca Cola is famous for its advertising campaign, so they know what they're doing; if they let up, then they will see a drop in sales.
"Five strange tricks to loose weight, number 4 will blow your mind" will print money but not for the average ACX reader. For better or for worse, most ads (and most media for that matter) aren't made for us.
Ads work when you trust the brand. When you don't, they become a lot less effective. And even if you trust the brand, it has to be selling something you want.
OTOH, if you suddenly decide that you want a veeblefetzer, you are likely to look for someone you know that sells them. This may be a lot less true when you're buying over the web, but I notice that I'm skeptical about the quality of things sold under a brand I've never heard of before.
I was just thinking the other day I could use a veeblefetzer, since I don't have one, and you never know when you will need one.
Every ad isn't for every person. If EVERYONE hates an ad, then it won't be effective, but sending out a message to a million people, 99% of whom hate it, is $1 per person if it costs $10,000 to send out. And with how expensive veeblefetzers are these days, I'm sure you can see how cost-effective that is.
Me too, but that just applies to specific brands, not products. I'll often want to eat e.g. nachos after I see a character in a TV series eating nachos, just not the same brand of them.
I would also like to claim that I am mostly immune to advertisement, but on further reflection, I can't be sure. I am doubtful that a victim of advertisement is aware that they are even influenced by it.
The internet is mostly ad-free for me, so there is little reason to suspect I am affected by internet ads. I definitely see ads on the subway and the like, but I'd like to think they don't influence my consumer decisions.
Empirically, I buy few branded goods. In my daily life, mostly Coke (Zero), which is a bit suspicious given that Coke has probably one of the biggest advertising budgets on the planet.
(By contrast, from my understanding, the producers of Club Mate (another favorite of mine) are blissfully unaware of the cult status their product has acquired within the German hacker community. I think their lack of advertisement was actually a prerequisite to gaining that status. Still, you can accuse me of liking it because it is associated with a lifestyle I like.)
You may be in a minority, but you're certainly not alone! I'll give an advert a brief look the first time I see it, if it involves something that might interest me. But I also actively avoid buying something which I recall being advertised repeatedly over time. My rationale is that the product is probably no better than its competitors and, given all the money the sellers are spending on advertising it, very likely worse. Even if it is slightly better than similar products, I don't much care to pay for my own brainwashing!
As an example, take Casillero del Diablo wine, "from the Devil's cellar" they boast! Normally one can fast forward through TV ads, but Casillero del Diablo has some deal whereby its ads appear at the start of films and at each intermission. Now the prices of this product in supermarkets are the same as for other wines one doesn't see advertised. Ergo, despite its claims, it must be gut rot compared with the competition, or else the advertising funds would have been put into improving the wine's quality somehow, such as leaving it to mature for longer or something.
"My rationale is that the product is probably no better than its competitors and, given all the money the sellers are spending on advertising it, very likely worse."
This is not, strictly speaking, true, although it can be true in practice. A company with a healthy advertising budget is likely to just be selling a lot more product than its competitors, leaving it more to spend on not just advertising but R&D, quality, etc. Advertising is presumably a rational spend for companies, so there's got to be cases where they make more money from doing it, even after accounting for costs, than not doing it.
"the product is probably no better than its competitors and, given all the money the sellers are spending on advertising it, very likely worse"
Yup. I'm _particularly_ averse to financial products, since they are, to a 0-th approximation anyway, a zero-sum game. There was one instance where a car salesman actively pushed a lease deal at me, and the mere fact that it was in his interest to push it made me more and more distrustful of him as his pitch wore on.
I have wondered about the same thing myself, how ads work. Especially ads on the internet. Maybe a poster in a mall or a supermarket has affected my purchases, but I don’t think I have ever bought anything because I saw it advertised on the internet (I don’t include the ”similar products” type of thing on vendor websites when I say this, those are obviously helpful if I am looking for a specific type of product). An ad only has to work on a small percentage of people to work though. And I suspect a lot of the work ads do is just making people aware something exists.
I don't know how effective ads actually are. I'm not sure if advertisers know, either.
However, I think most people greatly underestimate their susceptibility to advertisements, because when they reflect on how ads affect them, they (1) overly focus on the ads they most hated, and (2) mostly think about how they felt while watching the ad, rather than how they felt a month later when choosing which product to buy at the store.
I make a conscious effort to penalize companies for ads that I disapprove of, in an effort to make such ads a less-effective strategy. I suspect I put more effort into this than most people. I still do not think I put enough effort to *reliably* make showing me such ads a negative-EV proposition for the advertiser, though. (Partly because most such ads are for things I would never have bought anyway.)
I have, on rare occasions, happily bought something as a direct result of an ad. I do think it's possible to do non-evil ads (though hardly anyone does). IMO good ads are ones that provide true information that rationally influences the audience; for example, informing me of some product that I would already be buying except that I didn't know it existed, or pointing out legitimate advantages or use-cases that I hadn't thought of. In principle, even just giving evidence that they're better than their competitors--though in practice it is so common for ads to give misleading evidence and so difficult for a viewer to identify it as misleading that I mostly just try to ignore stuff fitting that pattern.
Basically, I approve of asymmetric weapons - https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
> I think most people greatly underestimate their susceptibility to advertisements
Probably, I imagine, ads are generally most effective not so much at persuading people to buy something out of the blue which would never have occurred to them otherwise, but to remind them to buy something more often that they would and do buy anyway.
If you don't buy things, you don' buy them. If you buy them anyway, you already have established preferences. Ads are the most effective at the sweet spot where you're just deciding to buy something, but have no prior knowledge about either the thing you want to buy or the options that are available on the market.
Definitely. I bought Coke Zero entirely because I liked the packaging better than regular Coke, and I've bought at least one game after seeing their demo. For more traditional ads, I played the online RPG brawler Dungeon Fighter Online entirely because I saw a banner ad for it and said "this is a genre I didn't realize I wanted." Although that might not count since it's free-to-play.
I've had Adblock up for a decade now, but before that movie trailers got me interested in movies. I never did watch Dead Silence, but still have the urge to, just because of how... utterly trash their trailer was. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8b_HVtHmK30&t=17s ("The ventriloquist who LOST HER VOICE!")
Coke Zero is interesting, because the product is a near direct clone of Diet Coke with different branding so men can drink it without feeling feminine.
No, it tastes totally different. Diet Coke has a strange metallic aftertaste.
Now I am trying to think of other grocery store products that sit next to each other, are nearly identical, but are packaged/branded differently to each gender. Seems like there must be, but I am drawing a blank.
Razors.
True
For a while, I bought Carlton Draught-brand beer more than the taste and price point would have made me otherwise, because they were producing funny and creative add that I wanted to encourage. And sometimes, an ad mentions a feature that I wouldn’t otherwise be aware of (e.g. I thought there wasn’t much competition in paper sustainability beyond “FSC good, PEFC is sponsored by logging companies”, until an ad mentioned it, and I learned that they were making toilet paper from bamboo), and then that information affects my purchases (I don’t buy that toilet paper, but I might if it starts feeling better).
I think most of the time someone is already in the market for something and advertising becomes the portal for further exploration. I think that’s true for me anyway.
It's possible that you're in the majority and ad companies rely on 'whales', the minority of people who actually buy stuff from ads. I suspect most people have, if not active disdain, a healthy skepticism towards mass advertised products.
I can't find it now, but I believe Scott made a post theorizing that ads work not because people want the things advertised, but because the ad allows them to signal something to other people, like "I'm environmentally conscious" by buying an electric car. It's far from ironclad though. I think it's more likely that ad companies have convinced the industry at large that they need ads for their products to succeed, even though buying ads is a huge waste of money.
Car Ads tell you nothing. A car drives along a scenic road. There’s nice music. That’s it.
All the features of the car, all the added extras, why it’s better than last years model, or the competition, its mpg, speed, safety features, the mapping software, the technology - nothing. Sometimes car shows like Top Gear will go into detail but TV ads and print ads gave nothing.
It's similar to spam: if the ad annoys hundred people, but convinces one person to buy the product - and the profit from that one extra buyer exceeds the costs of showing the ads to the hundred - it makes sense to do so, economically. The other people feeling annoyed is just a negative externality no one cares about. Most of them wouldn't buy your product anyway.
I can imagine two kinds of good targets. First, mentally weak people, who literally believe when the ad tells them that something is the best choice. Second, people who buy stuff for someone else (e.g. as a gift) which they really do not understand, so they are happy to follow any advice.
"it's more likely that ad companies have convinced the industry at large that they need ads for their products to succeed, even though buying ads is a huge waste of money."
This is my strong suspicion regarding a number of sectors, and I have one rather vivid piece of real-life experience to back it up with.
Just over twenty years ago I was the managing director of a young professional theater company in Chicago (despite not being a lifer in that industry -- long story). As is true for most professional theater companies ticket sales were the financial lifeblood of operations, and this company was too young to have yet built up a season-subscriber base. Hence successfully selling tickets to individual productions was crucial.
The theater artists involved were all absolutely certain that the placing of attractive and sizeable, hence expensive, display ads in the city's two newspapers was essential to selling tickets. So was the marketing director, and the rest of the small salaried staff all of whom had experience in professional theater. Accordingly, for the first full season in the company's new theater in the Loop we spent piles of operating cash on those ads.
I detected no positive correlation in the results: the size/frequency of those ads compared to sales results. Examining more closely the behavior on this point of the city's larger more established companies (Steppenwolf, Goodman, etc) did not support the idea that placing those ads was "the way" to sell tickets to live theater productions. I voiced these tentative conclusions, and also raised the possibility that online techniques might generate results at least as good at a fraction of the dollar costs.
This was before social media and a time when lots of adult Americans didn't yet spend much of their daily life online, so that last part came across to staff and ensemble alike as dubious at best. And the idea of cutting way back on the expensive newspaper ads sparked borderline hysteria among the core artists who were the face of the company -- they'd all grown up with newspaper ads being "the way you sold tickets". I was able to trim things a bit at the margins but in large part simply had to back down.
The ultimate fate of the company didn't directly support or contradict my hypothesis; it eventually shut down but this was just one issue among many. Trends during the last two decades in Chicago professional theater more broadly though have definitely supported my skepticism, which has been a blow to our [staggering, shadows of their former selves] two newspapers.
Personally I regret to this day that I didn't dig in my heels and insist that our theater company stop wasting a lot of precious operating cash on those newspaper ads. With that one ongoing fiscal wound staunched we could have at least gained some more time to address the startup's other issues. (No guarantees of success of course.) And I doubt very much that it would have harmed us much at the box office.
In the late 1990s I worked for a three-person on-site computer repair business. After assorted periods of feast and famine the owner decided it was time to go big or go home, and contracted a radio ad by Howard Stern through a local station. This type of local spot was a bulk deal for Stern; 15 second recordings about how such-and-such outfit he'd never heard of was the greatest. The ad cost $10,000 in late 1990s dollars.
Hearing our skills and wisdom crisply endorsed by Howard Stern in a public broadcast was surreal and invigorating. Subsequently, we received zero discernible customer contacts through this ad. (In retrospect, I'm not sure how we found customers at all. Maybe by word of mouth, or by dropping off business cards--IT services were in demand.) Unsurprisingly, since we had no money, we didn't pay. I believe the owner worked out an alternative deal with the station that combined a token pittance, shame over the ad's total ineffectiveness, and some free computer work.
The ad stayed in rotation for months, perhaps even a year after this debacle, by which time we'd all had to find gainful employment elsewhere. Gotta fill those slots!
This anecdote made me laugh; I like that "alternative deal" a lot.
Unfortunately newspapers had learned how to deal with startup theater companies long before I got involved with any of it -- all our display ads were on a strict cash-up-front basis!
I too have a background in theatre, and I agree with you. It’s not a great way to build an audience for an unknown theatre company. You have to start close to the ground and build word of mouth. Takes time.
Yes. That was one of our group's overriding mistakes, lack of patience and long-term view.
This is why product placement is so much more effective. I saw the Apple logo on the back of iPhones in films for 5 years before I developed any urge to buy one. But eventually I did cave.
Do you remember your distaste for products that you've seen in advertisements when you see them in a shop? A lot of advertising seems to just be about keeping the name of the brand or product cached in your memory so that you have a manufactured sense of familiarity if you see it in a new context. Even if it annoyed you at one point, maybe recognition of the product would still be influential?
I think this is true.
I guess I usually don’t remember(except for when Reece’s ran an awful ad campaign and I have actually bought less Reece’s since then). I do remember that I saw a Cane’s (chicken fast food) billboard and it made me go get Cane’s, but that was only after I’ve already been to Cane’s a lot and really like their food.
I’ll also say that I would never ever by a product from a brand I don’t recognize off of an Instagram ad, I trust them even less
I find many food or restaurant ads lessen my appetite because I find the invitation to indulge in and salivate over food offputting.
I've wondered this too because I find ads really grating, but also people are subconsciously attracted to objects associated with prestige, even if the prestige is connected in an arbitrary way (e.g. basketball player recommending a yogurt brand).
Personally when I hear an annoying commercial I think "ugh, a commercial" rather than "ugh a commercial by Reece's" or whatever. Maybe if you harbor a more personalized grudge you would have more resistance to the brand.
I've had a go at an "Explained Fiction" about ubiquitous LLM virtual assistants. I think we're not far away. The fiction is shorter than the explanation. I welcome all feedback, especially from the discerning ACX hoards.
https://fourofalltrades.substack.com/p/explained-fiction-the-ride
No Barbie/Oppenheimer discussion? Personally I enjoyed them both, but probably enjoyed Barbie more. Barbie had that 30 Rock/Mean Girls energy where even if I don't agree with everything in it it was still fun to watch and felt like a breath of fresh air. By far the worst scene in it is the car chase for it's gratuitous ad placement. Oppenheimer was fine I suppose. I liked the execution of the bomb scene, and the movie flew by (definitely did not feel like 3 hours). I wish Nolan would've focused more on either Oppenheimer or on the dilemma behind creating the bomb. As it is it felt to me like a weird mix of the two (along with the RDJ scenes). I haven't read the book it's based on though, so perhaps this is just how the work is structured. Really though it was nice being back in a theatre, can't wait for Dune Pt 2 later this year!
I thought Oppenheimer sucked. Too long and trying to do way too much.
I read "Oppenheimer", the book, just last year and it was really, really good. Highly recommended.
But, I've through experience learned a strong policy against seeing films made from books that I'd really liked. So although the reviews for this film are tempting and obviously the subject matter is of interest to me....Hollywood's track record with this sort of thing is just too risky, and it's really hard to un-see a movie that's mangled a good book.
Oh but 3 hours with no intermission. I have no trouble sleeping 8 hours without peeing but to sit for 3 hours wondering, Do I have to pee yet? That’s another story altogether. A whole lot of distracting squirming will be involved in the last half hour.
I've just accepted I have a weak bladder. I buy seats near the aisle and am just ok with missing 1-2 minutes part way through the film. Better that road than sitting there praying for the film to end
Have you considered taking your breaks during chase scenes? Perhaps it's counterintuitive to leave during an exciting part. But I imagine that your friends can summarize them for you in <10 whispered seconds. (Some screenwriters supposedly just put "insert chase scene" in their scripts.) And Youtube is full of them.
I'm boycotting biopics for the next decade as they are the most insidious movies Hollywood produces. There are worse genres, but nothing is more responsible for unimaginative films supplanting imaginative ones than the biopic craze.
Looking forward to Barbie, though.
OK, this comment made me realize that Barbie and Oppenheimer do not appear in the same movie. I am finding the world so fucking weird now that I barely blinked at the idea of a movie that's a biopic of both together. Maybe they hook up at some point in the movie. Um, whatever, you know?
Here's how I imagine it goes as one movie. Nuclear war kills us all over a few weeks or months, mostly through radiation sickness. Luckily, the radioactivity was just enough to bring Mattel's dolls to life. Barbie meets Oppenheimer on his deathbed, and he entrusts her with some special MacGuffin. Thus one civilization succeeds another.
So we would get not just Barbie and Oppenheimer, but also some combination of transhumanism and cyclical eschatology (Hinduism being one of Oppenheimer's personal interests).
Come one Scott we need the kabbalistical review of Barbie! It's Eve and more
Have not seen Barbie nor will I likely ever, but I imagined that it was a version of the Pinocchio story.
Eve:Barbie::tree:telephone pole::sex:jerking off:adventure:fun at the mall
You keep doing that at the mall, you're going to get arrested.
Barbie's been hanging with Madonna?
EdRealist was getting spicy lately about Caplan, so I went back and read his things about the Caplan. What struck me is:
"Caplan argues that only students from the Excellent or Good categories should invest in college. The NAAL report finds that only two percent of blacks read at proficient levels, 31% score at the intermediate level. If blacks or colleges took Caplan’s directive and only went to college with that qualification (which is actually broader than Caplan would like) just 4% of the overall population would be black college graduates."
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2018/12/01/the-case-against-the-case-against-education-average-was-always-over/
I'd hope Mr. Ed can come and explain why the best answer isn't just. "So?" Why not? Are black college graduates from the lower tiers of achievement worth educating in this way in some objective way? Or is it just some sort of racial balancing desire and we must always take into account the peculiar desires of college administrators to be around black twenty somethings?
I haven't read either author, except for listening to Caplan (if it's the same guy?) appear on Sullivan's Dishcast and sound absolutely out of touch about open borders.
Premises:
1. The racial wealth gap is worse than not having a racial wealth gap.
2. There is still a wage premium for college degrees, if you read in a sufficiently technical field.
Claim: A higher proportion of black college grads earning the wage premium is a valuable societal goal b/c it decreases the racial wealth gap.
Racial wealth gaps are only a problem because people talk and think about it.
If we made it taboo to talk about it (the same way we make it taboo to talk about the wealth gap between Jews and others) then people wouldn't care about it (the way nobody cares about the wealth gap between Jews and others).
IIUC, this as pointing to Jews having disproportionately greater wealth / less poverty, which I think is the true direction of variance if any.
Minority wealth isn't a problem unless it has oligopolistic tendencies (as the ultra-rich in the US / the global economy today do in fact, but that's extraneous). Minority poverty is a social problem because minority social networks are in aggregate ~ more cohesive than adhesive (not sure this is the optimal phrasing), so the deprivation is stickier and creates pockets of extreme poverty which a) is bad prima facia and b) causes broader social problems.
Discussing Jim Crow in the south was super taboo, and yet racial discrimination was problematic.
I'm not sure I follow. Isn't there a whole ecosystem of antisemites and conspiracy theorists that care deeply about this issue, notwithstanding whatever alleged taboos bar us from talking about it? "Make it taboo to talk about" (assuming that effort has been successful) doesn't seem to have been effective in making such people stop caring about it. Mainly it just seems to (a) push them out of polite society and into dirty corners where they maybe do less to pollute the rest of us but also grow more extreme in isolation, while (b) making them more prone to marketing their nonsense as a "hidden truth *they* don't want you to know about" and the like.
If you read to the end of the article you link, I think you'll find this is pretty well addressed: fundamentally, the objection is that that would mean that a lot of black Americans who would benefit from going to College would not be doing so.
I don't see him clearly demonstrate that that Caplan's guidelines don't apply to Blacks. The closest I see is his claim that low proficiency Blacks who graduate from college are able to graduate from college. I don't see him showing that the percentage of low-proficiency Blacks who *will* graduate from college is high enough for them to benefit from going to college.
Even were it true that the degree of proficiency necessary for college to be a worthy investment differs by race, I don't know that that's a major issue for Caplan.
Of course, the more you break down the data, the more exact your predictions will be. That doesn't invalidate the disaggregated data.
If you want to claim that low-proficiency Blacks are likelier to graduate than average, such that low-proficiency Whites are less likely than the disaggregated average, then fine so be it.
Probably, if you were to break down the data along all sorts of dimensions, you'd find differences. I don't see how any of that affects Caplan's main points.
It seems that Clutzy's characterization was correct. The mains complaint consisted waving angrily at the implications, rather than actually rebutting them.
+1 Richard's comment below.
To broaden that reasoning: race also correlates independently with wealth, private tutors do a LOT to improve academic credentials/skills when there are gaps, which confounds the 'achievement' measures as a comparison between students even if the schools are comparable.
I'm thinking of test prep tutoring, and application polishing services, and also straight-forward 1:1 academic intervention services.
At the end he is talking about the benefit of high school for black Americans.
Its no doubt that blacks that go to college benefit from the degree because of accreditation creep. But mostly only if equally unqualified Whites/Asians are excluded from doing so based on race.
If there is evidence that black students do better at college than white students with similarly low levels of achievement at high school, I'd anticipate this being that the black students have higher natural aptitude for academics (ie g), which would make sense as they're from a higher percentile, but they have (on average) been in an inferior educational environment (worse schools, less well educated parents) and going to college puts them in a similar environment to other college students, and their higher natural aptitude means they can start catching up on their peers.
If race is a proxy for bad parents and a bad high school, then that would explain why you adopt lower standards at entry for some races than others: because you're aiming for the same standard at exit.
Obviously, this will mean that upper middle class black students will get advantages at admission that they don't deserve. But someone is going to get undeserved advantages, because any proxies you are using are imperfect. Even test results are only a proxy for ability to study at college level and we know they're not a perfect proxy.
Question about legal marijuana growing: I'm trying to help some people whose very difficult adult son has filled their back yard with marijuana plants. In our state, people with medical marijuana cards, which the son has, are allowed to grow "up to twelve flowering and twelve vegetative cannabis plants in your home for personal use." Can someone explain what the point is of the distinction between flowering and vegetative plants. I looked up marijuana cultivation and it seems like a vegetative marijuana plant is just an immature one that has not reached the flowering stage yet. Is that right? If so, what's the point of having the law written this way, rather than just stating that people with medical marijuana cards are allowed to grow 24 plants per year? Is the point that people have to stagger when they plant the things, so that the second 12 reach maturity a month or so later than the first 12? The law in a neighboring state is similar, except for allowing fewer plants in each of the 2 categories. What's the point of the state micromanaging the planting schedule? (And also, isn't 24 plants a ridiculously large number for personal use? The plants are *big,* like 5 feet or more tall. I looked up how much weed you get from each plant, & google said 1 lb per plant average. 24 plants/yr. works out to an ounce per day!)
Yeah that's easy. You want to grow female plants and kill the males before they can pollinate the females. It's the female flowers that have all the THC and such. You can't really tell the sex of a plant till it starts to flower. So if you want to allow people to grow 12 females then it makes sense to allow them to start with 24 total plants.
I grow 2-4 plants every year. This gives me way more pot than I can use and I give at least 1/2 away.
That's interesting, but unless I'm missing something it's not addressing the question I'm asking: People are allowed to have 12 vegetative plants and 12 flowering ones at one time. So they have to stagger when they start plants, right? Start one batch of 12, then wait a few weeks til those start to flower before starting the second batch of 12. My question is, what is the point of insisting on that, rather than just saying a grower can have 24 plants?
Isn't this rule just making it possible for a person to wind up with 12 plants -- you have to plant 24 to get 12 female plants if roughly half are going to be male and aren't going to give you any buds. ?
It could be, but that doesn't explain why they don't let you plant all 24 at once.
Thinking about this as a vegetable gardener... you want to sow seeds repeatedly in order to have a steady harvest rather than one big harvest all at once. So perhaps the regulation is intended to allow a person to continuously grow pot for personal use, but then is seeking to limit how much they can harvest at any one time. They could have just limited it to 12 plants at any stage, but perhaps wanted to allow a person to have fresh buds to harvest year round for a steady supply (presuming indoor growing, in which you can control flowering by how many hours of light you supply I think).
Yes, if by "12 vegetative and 12 flowering" they mean that at any one time that's all you can have. But that would mean that a person can start 12 new plants every 5 weeks, for a total of 60 plants a year, each giving about a pound of marijuana. This law applies to people with medical marijuana cards growing it for personal use. They're going to use 60 lbs a year? 4 ounces a day?!?!
Speculation: Anti-seed production? Which might either create an industry that they weren't willing to figure out how to regulate and/or the "propagation of non-native invasive weed problem"?
Actually, can't be a measure to protect against seed production, because both male and female plants have flowers, or at least something called "flowers" in the industry. It's there that most of the THC is concentrated. Looked up marijuana growing, and vegetative plants are just immature plants that haven't flowered yet.
Then (and after reading about "immature") it sounds like it's a measure to actual prevent cultivation of THC.
My understanding is that, with controlled (as opposed to natural) lighting, the vegetative state can be maintained indefinitely. The duration here roughly determines the overall size and yield. Typically veg for 3 months, then flower for 2 months to determine final yield, maybe?
Indoors, you could veg for 3 years, then create a huge harvest after flowering for a couple months. You run into serial/parallel tradeoffs. If I want 10 units, I can veg one plant for 10 months, or instead 10 plants for one month.
No idea what motivation is behind the legislation.
Why are your friends letting their son do this? It sounds bad for both them and him.
I mean Marijuana is very valuable compared to anything else that easy to produce.
Given the highly market distorting "X plants per medical Marijuana card" it makes sense for an industrious young person to grow their quota! Probably good for him if he manages to not smoke too much of it.
People do things like this all the time, as I'm sure you've noticed. I asked here for some factual info that will be useful in helping the situation, and am not prepared to discuss my friends' psyches.
Fair enough! No offence meant.
Cannabis flower refers to the dried flower bud, sometimes referred to as a “nug,” of a female cannabis plant. Typically, the flower of a marijuana plant is what’s harvested, dried, cured, and sold at dispensaries, but flower is also used to create other cannabis products like concentrates, tinctures, and oils.
https://www.verilife.com/learn/flower-101
I think the point of the limit is just to keep the crop in the “for personal use” range.
24 full sized plants looks like production for sale.
Thanks. But do you have any idea of what the point is of distinguishing between vegetative and flowering plants? According to Google a vegetative marijuana plant is just a plant that has not yet reached the flowering stage. So why say person’s allowed 12 in vegetative
Stage and 12 in flowering stage? Is the point that people shouldn’t start more than 12 at once? Then they have to wait til those 12 reach the flowering stage before starting the second 12? What use is that? Also, it’s unclear what the yearly limit is. Can somebody have 12 veg + 12 flowering at any one time, but keep that up all year? If so, then somebody could start 12 plants approx every 5 weeks — as soon as the prior crop has reached the flowering stage. So that would let them grow about 100 of these suckers per year ?
Never thought I’d be someone angry about weed cultivation! But in this case a middle-aged, unemployed adult son is living in his elderly parents basement and has filled the garden plots they usually fill with vegetables and flowering plants in the summer with something like 30 marijuana plants. Parents don’t know what to do.
Plus law in my state seems absurdly unclear and permissive, and while I like weed I don’t like stoopit governance.
Honestly I think the reason the law is weird is because it had to be passed by a majority of folks who don’t know much about marijuana cultivation or consumption. A number is proposed, some legislators object, so they come up with some confounding comprise that pleases no one.
My state’s new law goes into effect on the first of August. It allows possession of 2 ounces on your person but up to 2 pounds within your residence.
The way the bill was originally written a person could possess up to 8 pounds in their residence. But compromise brought that down to 2. I look at this and all I can do is shrug.
The new law permits a person to grow up to 8 plants for personal use with no hair splitting about the stage of growth.
One pretty sensible thing our new law does is revoking the right to sell “soft drinks” with up to 50mg of THC that had been in effect since last July. That amount has been reduced to 5 mg a serving.
A couple of 50 mg doses is what a late stage cancer patient might take to control pain and nausea. It would only be considered recreational for somebody like Willy Nelson.
I’m thinking of buying a couple of cans of the 50mg stuff in the remaining days of July simply as conversation pieces.
"Honestly I think the reason the law is weird is because it had to be passed by a majority of folks who don’t know much about marijuana cultivation or consumption. "
Now guess how gun laws get written.
So I wrote a loooong piece on YIMBYism recently (https://woolyai.substack.com/p/yimbies-overpromise) and one of the things that confused the dickens out of me was the New York and Washington DC suburbs.
See, for data I was looking at Metropolitan Statistical Areas, which are less about cities and more about cities and burbs, like New York is really New York plus Jersey plus any place you could get in an hour's drive from Manhattan. And these MSAs show those prices are...really well managed and affordable. Like, apparently the New York burbs are some of the most affordable, at least in terms of price growth, in the US. Which is superweird but I went and grabbed the raw zillow data (https://www.zillow.com/research/data/) and it looks like it's true.
Which is kinda wild to me, because I ain't an East Coast boy and if you go an hour outside of LA or SF, like Dublin or Napa, the prices are still stupid. So I'm sure we got some East Coast people here, what's going on with the NY burbs. Is it like Manhattan is stupidly expensive but you can get a nice house in the burbs for a reasonable price or is it prices are stupid everywhere and I'm missing something? Because I genuinely couldn't figure this out.
Nice post. Re. your question here: Did you use Google maps to figure out how far you could get in an hour's drive from Manhattan, or did you just look at a map and imagine you can travel thru NYC as quickly as you can travel thru Los Angeles? 'Coz you can't. Not nearly. Aside from how slow the traffic always is everywhere in NYC, each bridge you cross adds half an hour at rush hour.
Also, are these low-rent places the parts of Jersey that stink day and night like a fire in a rubber factory? Also, consider crime statistics.
It was honestly just my best guess.
I use the official MSA definition, see here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area, mostly just for a standardized definition that each dataset could use. Like, it's not just me deciding what is and isn't in New York, the AEI and Zillow and Census datasets all need to use the same definition which means MSA, CSBA, or Zip.
That's hard to avoid, since the data is grouped that way. But when talking about reasonable housing prices within range of a city, we should be comparing prices of houses that are an equal commute time away from the city, not an equal physical distance away. California is much more car-friendly than New York City, where it can take an hour to go 10 miles. Also, in Californian cities, people can park at work. In NYC, they have to park at a train station, take the train to a subway station, and then take the subway in, which at least doubles and could triple the commute time.
So I think your intuition that prices seemed too low "within commuting distance" of NYC was probably right; and that was probably because you were looking at houses that were not in fact within commuting distance of NYC.
I lived in DC for years, and any two randomly chosen places within DC are probably not within commuting distance (eg < 1hr) of each other. Commutes by train and bus within the DC metro area could be 2 hours each way.
There are two big piece of data missing from this analysis (and its not your fault because i dont think they even exist): first, how many people WANT to live somewhere, but can't either because they have been priced out and have to move or can't afford to live there in the first place; and second, who is competing for housing that is for sale and how much money they have to spend.
No idea if the first data set exists, but its probably unlikely a group would spend the money to collect that data (and if the FRED doesn't have it that means it probably doesn't exist on a wide scale to their standards).
For the second, I think you can reduce the impact of this by looking at rented units only and not houses/condos for sale. Rents aren't as subject to negotiations as sales are and the prices are more set by the market than the marginal buyer. And in many cities, the people buying houses are different than people renting apartments or renting houses. Having the savings to make a down payment on a house makes you a different person than someone who doesn't have those savings even if you have the same household income (it likely means you are older but could reflect credit difference or other things).
This second piece, I think, is really throwing off your intuition around Austin. My theory is that despite lots of new housing, prices keep increasing because the new people moving in are much wealthier than the average Austin resident. You can see this in the FRED data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AUST448PCPI per capita income has gone way up, especially after COVID.
Some anecdotal stuff:
Over the past 10 years, an area of Washington DC called Navy Yards has been redeveloped. 15 years ago it was taxi parking, some gay bars, sketchy auto shops (and a naval base as well as some DC city offices). Now it's at least 10 square blocks of high density housing (as high density as DC gets as there is a height limit on buildings). There have been similar booms around H street, the Wharf, and in the suburbs in Bethesda, Clarendon, Court House, etc. Basically they have built a ton of housing for the young professionals that make up a huge portion of the new residents and did it without tearing down much old housing stock. All of these have been huge wins for YIMBY groups as some of these areas needed to have zoning changes or fight off political challenges.
Also on DC: the differing municipalities that DC MSA spans make a big difference when you compare to places like SF or LA. If you want to build a big housing development in the DC area and MD says no, you just go to VA and they will probably welcome you. VA especially has been encouraging a ton of house building. Some of it, like Clarendon and Courthouse referenced above as well as Reston and Tysons Corner and others, have been explores of "new urbanism": high density mixed use build around public transit. Others are just classic sprawl. The sprawl lets people "drive til you qualify" and keeps costs low. DC is also strange because of the effect of the Fed Government which keeps unemployment low, turn over high (presidential changes lead to lots of people moving in and out), and acts as a big weight on salaries.
Anyway, I really have to object to your conclusion:
"So, just a straight up for the people who are really confident in their stance on YIMBY/NIMBY/housing...just be less confident."
At least for me, I don't support deregulation of housing (call it YIMBY if you want) because I think the data shows it to be "correct". I support it because I am extremely skeptical that the current process involving municipal planners dictating land use and tiny minorities of residents using civic and legal processes to derail private developments will produce positive outcomes. And right now that skepticism is looking pretty good as housing in places people want to live jumps up in price and the "affordable" housing is pushed farther and farther away from economic cores. I don't believe that building more housing will necessarily lower prices. I do believe it will reduce the increase in prices relative to wages and at some point the market can reach an equilibrium, just like most markets we have in the economy.
In general I dont think you can do analyses like you have done to conclude anything about what *will* happen in a housing market. The market is way too heterogeneous and the force too complex for us to model with the data we have. And this just pushes me more to believe that removing barriers to building housing and letting the industry be more dictated by market forces will allow us to see what the "true" housing market is like. Right now regulations and zoning etc put their finger on the scales. But it's not a scale, it's a three body problem that we just can't model accurately.
So thanks for the really detailed response.
I agree those are both good data to add on and I think the second one is probably doable. If I figured out the Census API, I could probably pull median income and per capita gdp figures and it would be really interesting to see whether that is a major determinant.
I'm not sure I understand your critique at the end though. Like, I agree accurate prices are good but...it's kind of abstract good compared to the very material and concrete good of lower housing. Is that actually what you value?
And if the housing market is too complex to model, how do we know that more housing stock will fix it? Like, it should work that way, but does it?
Yeah sorry my concluding part wasn't very clear, i'll try to restate.
For me, I am against policies which restrict housing inventory (zoning, height limits, etc) or artificially increase the cost of new construction (parking minimums, some building codes, environmental reviews, public hears, etc), because I am skeptical humans can create a set of policies which don't cause harm by "getting it wrong" on how land should be used. Essentially this is the Economic Calculation Problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem) applied to local housing policy.
The negative effect of bad policies my be raising housing costs or could be a lack of housing or housing in the wrong place (exurban sprawl for example). We get a mix of these things and others in many cities.
I took your conclusion to be that YIMBY proponents should be more skeptical that their ideas will solve the problem they are trying to fix (high housing costs). I just wanted to note that, for me, this is a side effect not my main reason for being against restrictive policies. (Also most people would call me a libertarian and so I bristle whenever the government wants to restrict people's freedoms such as doing what they want with their property).
> how do we know that more housing stock will fix it? Like, it should work that way, but does it?
So above I claim lowering housing costs isn't my primary motivation, but I do believe adding more housing will lower housing cost *growth* and probably lower it *relative to wages in a locality*. How do we prove or disprove it? Your analysis is a good contribution as well as a lot of the other amateur or academic research on the subject. Research reports such as this from UCLA: https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/market-rate-development-impacts/ make me less skeptical that supply and demand doesn't apply to house. Unfortunately, the only way to "prove" is de-regulation will work is by doing it at a large scale and running those policies for 4 or 5 decades - not exactly easy!
I also think if we flip the hypothesis around, it's easier to at least say we need some thing to change. So if we ask "on average, does our current housing policy regime, create a healthy housing market". I think the answer to that ("no") is more clear than what the effect of any change in policy will be.
Anyway, I hope you didn't take this as criticism of your analysis which I thought was great! I agree looking at census data on median income per census tract would be helpful but you'd still be missing the income data on people that want to move somewhere but can't. I did find an interesting data set yesterday that show housing units per capita in various cities: https://datacommons.org/tools/timeline#place=geoId%2F3651000%2CgeoId%2F2255000%2CgeoId%2F4261000%2CgeoId%2F0820000%2CgeoId%2F1150000%2CgeoId%2F5167000%2CgeoId%2F0667000&statsVar=Count_HousingUnit&pc=&denom=Count_Person I believe its based on census data but I haven't put in the work to confirm the numbers are accurate.
Jersey City and the area is one of the few places in the country that builds a reasonable amount of housing, so outer suburbs of NYC are surprisingly cheap yeah. Part of the problem with the west coast is that it's all low-density and nimby, NYC metro area is still much denser than anywhere out west.
On the other hand: (a) it's worth noting that NYC proper is much bigger than San Francisco (more analogous to SF+ East Bay and the peninsula), and (b) you don't ever want to driver into NYC (but otoh commuter rail is much more extensive than anywhere on the west coast).
How many other states does your California example run into? My initial take is comparing an aggregate of prices across New York and New Jersey, or D.C and Virginia and Maryland, to prices entirely inside California, seems iffy.
None.
I can't really control which example cross state lines and which don't; I'm just using the standardized MSA definitions. It was either that, CSBA, or ZIP codes.
No expertise or data to back this up, even though I live outside NYC.
I wonder if differences in duration from settlement to industrial urbanization are contributory here? East Coast being older might have different levels of functionality to the municipalities, or different (earlier?) histories of zoning practices that modulate lot size or something?
There may be a case here of "the average patient's temperature in the hospital, including the ones in the morgue."
DC (personally can't speak for other cities) has a quarter or so where you definitely would not want to live (property crimes being a regular thing, and ~zero interest from police) or even walk (constant threat of violence, occasionally made good on) if you have any way of avoiding it. The properties in said quarter palpably pull down the average prices.
I guess it depends on what you consider reasonable. I live in Nassau County on Long Island and can get to Manhattan in 40 minutes by train. Depending on the neighborhood you can get a house around here for as low as 400K (bad neighborhood) up through several million dollars. I guess right now an average single family house in a good school district in Nassau will run you somewhere between 600 and 900 thousand (ours was 580K when we bought it 7 years ago; it’d be closer to 700K now).
Property taxes are murder here though.
Woo, I'm not crazy!
Yea, that was the thing that threw me. 40 minutes outside of SF by BART (it's like a train but pareto suboptimal) you'd be in...Contra Costa I think, which is 1.2-1.5 million in my brain.
I have heard your property taxes are brutal though.
Yeah California's prop 13 and terrible property tax regime has done all sorts of things to screw with housing prices over there.
Would gas lines in urban areas continue to work during extended, multiday or longer power outages? So any heating system that uses gas, mostly involving a boiler. Extended outages could be caused by a natural disaster, cyberattack, war, etc.
One could construct a battery to run the boiler itself. My question is- would gas continue to flow through city infrastructure if power were out for several days, weeks, longer....? I mean the gas plant must itself run on electricity- right? Because if the gas doesn't flow from the city line without electricity, then everyone with a heat source that's not firewood is in pretty bad shape
The US natural gas grid is historically quite reliable, with the notable exception of earthquakes (where large chunks of it tend to get turned off preemptively to reduce fire hazard from broken pipes.) But even so, FWIW the industry standard for data centers, telco exchanges, sewage pumping stations, hospitals, etc. is still diesel (with typically 2-3 weeks of fuel kept on site.)
How do hospitals etc. store 2-3 weeks worth of diesel? I can imagine in an industrial site you just have a large stainless steel tank or something. But that's a very large quantity of diesel fuel- a car tank of maybe 16 gallons wouldn't last 24 hours. Do hospitals have giant vats of diesel somewhere on site.....? Seems like they'd be enormous and a huge hazard
yes its dangerous but it will keep people alive, so the trade off is easy.
But diesel has a much higher flash point than gasoline. Of both, it's the fumes that burn, not the liquid. Gasoline turns to a gas at very low temperatures so it's constantly trying to turn into fumes. But Diesel needs to heat up to turn into a gas, much hotter than the environment would normally be. So storing diesel isn't very dangerous if it's in a proper tank. And usually the tanks are under ground adding more protection.
Diesel is (afaik) quite similar to the oil burned for heating buildings. So if buildings can keep oil tanks holding enough energy to get them through the winter, it is very plausible that they also have oil tanks storing a few weeks worth of their electric energy requirements.
Typically they are underground (and often 10,000+ gallons) and there are fireproofing measures.
What about the 2021 power crisis? In February 2021 temperatures were way below normal, causing a massive spike in natural gas and electricity demand as well as the shutdown of a lot of natural gas infrastructure that wasn't designed to work in the extreme cold. Prices skyrocketed as everybody needed it, and some people who elected to buy their natural gas at market rates (as opposed to a fixed rate from a gas company) ended up owing thousands of dollars for a few weeks worth of gas. Of course, this was a unique situation in that it was a nationwide problem rather than a localized natural disaster, but something similar could happen any winter and gas companies haven't made the investments needed to prevent this from recurring.
I am not sure your memory of this is correct.
You are right that this was a unique situation, but the "crisis" was not nation wide but specific to Texas which has a unique (to say the least) power industry. And customers got big electric bills, not gas. The demand for gas shot up as a substitute for other electrical generation sources which weren't functioning. Yes the price of gas went way up but it was passed through to consumers on their electric bill. I dont think gas heat is very common in texas as it doesn't get very cold so the costs savings aren't there like it is in other colder parts of the country.
During Sandy in NYC there were 4-5 day blackouts in areas of the city but our gas supply was not affected. Fwiw
I wonder how that worked- wouldn't the boiler in your building not have worked without power?
You’re right, it didn’t. It wasn’t that cold out luckily. If you had a gas stove then that helped.
A basic gas water heater isn't connected to power, and needs very little power to function. You can trigger the pilot light by just pressing a button or even using a match in the old days.
Some heaters can do the same. Central air may have issues if it uses a blower fan. Hot water boilers just need to heat the water and (outside of large buildings), convection will do the rest. Thermostats don't need to be connected to mains power to work. Some modern furnaces/boilers may not work or lose some functions but in principle you dont need power to run these things.
Well luckily it wasn’t cold so heat wasn’t an issue. Food was an issue and restaurants and such could cook. My most profound memory of those times was the Life Cafe on the corner of 10th St. and Avenue B making scrambled eggs and coffee for a flat fee because the gas was working. That and the pizza on the corner of 11th and B was the only game in town unless I wanted to hike up to 34th St. where the electricity was still going.
My girlfriend at the time happened to be in Ukraine monitoring the elections and I had to take care of her cats. She lived in a building on Avenue C and 11th St., which had an elevator that did not work because there was no electricity. It was kind of a nightmare. There was one bar in the neighborhood that stayed open with candlelight and warm beer. Not so bad.
Natural gas infrastructure relies on pumps, compressors, and valves that are typically electrically operated. However, usually they have backup generators to continue working during a power outage. How long they last depends on how much fuel they have on hand/can get access to during the outage. A couple of days, probably yes, much longer than that, and I'd guess that they would start to run out of fuel. Weeks, almost certainly not.
What fuel do those generators use? Speaking as someone who knows nothing about it, it seems like they should run on natural gas.
Traditionally they run on the gas they are pumping.
There is a much better design argument from physics than biology. In this episode of our podcast Physics to God, we argue that the qualitative laws of physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity, exhibit clear signs of being designed.
We do not argue about science as the intelligent design argument does in biology. Rather we accept the scientific position about the laws of physics and only argue about the proper philosophical conclusion to be inferred from these laws. This leads to an independent support for the existence of an intelligent cause of our universe.
Physics to God is available on all podcast platforms or at https://youtu.be/j-oI3fVMJCs
> This leads to an independent support for the existence of an intelligent cause of our universe.
Why intelligence? It's not necessary in the capacity of having a prime mover. It's also hard to reconcile "design" with the notion of God being inseparable from eternity / existence, as is usually accepted by theists. Design would have to be contingent on a finite godless universe cycling through it's time interval, and another plane of existence beyond it, which seems redundant (what "designs" the other plane? why is intelligence necessary for the Universe but not for conceiving God? This just circles back to eternity, which by definition is uncomplex)
You're right that the ancient "Prime Mover" argument doesn't imply intelligence, but only a force that "moves" the universe. We're making a different argument from the purpose of the laws and constants of producing a resultant complex, ordered, and structured universe.
The reason intelligence is not necessary for conceiving of God is because God is simple with no complexity. But you are indeed right that anyone who believes in a complex god with parts is involved in the logical fallacy of begging the question.
It's easy to explain the appearance of design by assuming the existence of endless universes, each with different laws of physics, and we live in the only one whose physics supports life (in the same way that there are endless sterile planets, and we live in the only one that supports life).
That's a naive version of multiverse theory and it doesn't work (and even multiverse scientists know that). It's essentially a theory of the gaps that can explain any universe. i.e. if there are an infinite number of universes, then everything possible happens.
Multiverse theory has to additionally show that we live in a typical universe with intelligent observers and that is much more challenging. We'll discuss that in our upcoming miniseries on the multiverse.
If we don't live in a typical universe with intelligent observers, and the laws of physics appear to have been designed, then what have they been designed for?
a universe with real planets, stars, galaxies, life, etc. as opposed to a universe filled with random chaos and a lot of ephemeral boltzmann brains who mistakenly believe there are planets, stars, galaxies, life, etc.
How do you know you're not a boltzmann brain?
I know multiverse isn't a good theory, so for me the skeptical doubt that all my memories are the false recollections of a boltzmann brain can be dismissed as mere radical doubt.
The better question is how you, who profess to believe in a multiverse, know that you are not a boltzmann brain, when the overwhelming number of intelligent observers in the naive multiverse you proposed are boltzmann brains?
My thought, exactly.
Sounds interesting! Reminds me of the Heisenberg quote: “The first drink from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
That is an updating of an old Francis Bacon quote, which I can’t look up right now since I am in bed.
Yep, his Essay on Atheism
http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/EtAlia/bacon16.html
And therefore, God never wrought miracle, to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it. It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion. For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity.
If I’m going to pick my favorite metaphysical physicist quote I’ll go with Erwin Schroedinger’s “We are all god almighty. Atman = Brahma.”
And the Buddha is dried shit on a stick.
Max Planck?
If you're accepting all scientific conclusions, then does that mean you're arguing for a Deist view of God? God's role is solely as the prime mover, setting the physical constants and then kicking off the big bang?
Basically. We're leaving it (providence) as an open question; something that we don't plan on arguing for one way or the other on the podcast.
So you are Unitarians?
We're Jewish, so I guess that means we're not Unitarians. We are going to argue for the existence of one God with no complexity, so it's possible we share a common idea of God...
My comment was tongue in cheek. You can tell when I’m doing this the same way you can tell when lawyers are lying. :)
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just wanna plug nicomachean.substack.com cus I think its pretty awesome and I would love brutal feedback on how to improve which is something the rationalist community does well. HIT ME BABY!
Well... mainly it makes me want to play Hypnospace Outlaw again. https://www.pcinvasion.com/weird-wednesday-hypnospace-outlaw/
This would fit perfectly in Teentopia next to Zane's page, with the flames and handguns and MSPaint avatar of himself. I can hear the Squishers theme kicking up. SQUISHEEERRRS! (squishers)
Like, I have no idea why Zeus is skateboarding while blasting off green lightning, or how that relates to growing kindness, but it sure does make me smile.
To make you smile is reward enough!
Do AIs dream?
Ok, ignore the clickbait lede and forgive my non-knowledge of AIs/LLMs. I think what I'm asking is, are AI models performing downtime processing and/or code changes? To be more specific, lets say you have an LLM with a single text input box as it's only input, ask it a question, and then took a hash of the code immediately after closing the input window. If you took another hash six hours later would it be the same? And if no, are the code changes analogous to our own neural processing? Are the models constantly replaying inputs and strengthening/weakening/trimming connections?
Reinforcement Learning-based AIs will sometimes re-use previous outputs as a part of their training, which is kind of "dreaming", in the sense that AI is not processing some "current" information, but rather something it seen before. As others pointed out, AIs do not usually update their weights outside of training. This is certainly true of current LLMs. But I imagine e.g. a game AI which is designed to adapt to player's style, and therefore never stops at least fine-tuning some of its weights will have to "dream" a lot, relieving the same episodes over and over again simply because it would get only a very limited number of new experiences.
I mention this, even though there is no released in any game I know of which implements such AI, and game AIs currently aren't center of public perception. But as a game programmer, I always wanted to try to add a continuously-learning AI into a single-player game, so I spent some time thinking about. Actually, games are probably the best environment in which one can safely implement agentic, learning AI and see what comes out.
This is along the lines of what I was thinking. I know current LLMs are sandboxed and not in learn mode, but I assume that continuously learning AIs exist in labs somewhere, where any query is integrated into the model. My imagination is wondering if the output algorithm also triggers a single re-weighting event then the model sits senescent until the next input, or if it is continually "dreaming" and churning through it's own code, reweighting itself.
I'm not privy to inner workings of AI labs, but I would imagine that continually dreaming model is not very useful. It is either already trained to required quality, and will not benefit much from additional training (and may even degrade into overfitting), or has not achieved it yet, and then exist in normal training mode. If the dataset is expanded (e.g. with new queries and correct answers), it makes more sense to gather new information into a big batch, and then run training for a while, until good results are achieved on the new data, then shut down training again (it's expensive, and running it past good point may harm the model, just as dwelling too much on the past might be harmful to a human).
I think that generally, with contemporary AI, training phase is separate from usage phase. And there is no constant replaying of inputs or any other activity when nobody is watching. Think of training as writing a computer program. Once it is written it does not change while you are using it.
I believe that current LLMs do nothing after they are trained and before you use them. In fact, they don't even have memory between queries - it's just that the code of the page feeds them the past 2000 words of queries and responses as part of the query that you feed this time, and it responds to that whole thing in a way that makes it seem like a continuous conversation. If you were to copy and paste in part of a past conversation, it would pick up as though it were continuing that one (though if there was actually some change in the model between then and now, it might not say precisely the same thing it would have continued with then).
I think you are correct that the model is not changing/doing anything in between queries, but, depending on the settings your provide, you will get different answers even with the same exact prompt because the model has some noise/randomness in it's responses. I _think_ you can turn this off so that it gives the exact same answer to the same prompt, but I don't believe that's the default.
More strictly speaking, neural networks usually generate (deterministically) probability distributions over classifications/next tokens/etc. Then you can either pick most probable solution, or if you want to be extra creative you can sample from this probability distribution.
I'm not knowledgeable, but here'e something interesting & related: I have logged a LOT of time playing with Dall-e, and in the process have stumbled upon 2 prompts that make DAll-e produce nightmare images -- intensely bizarre, grisly, lewd images. And the prompts that produce them are not in the least violent or sexual. And Dall-e is exceptionally prissy. It refuses to make images from prompts that are mild-to-moderately sexual or violent. If is willing to generate images for prompts asking for impossible beings, such as two-headed dogs, but complete fails at representing the bizarre element. Can give some links to some of the grotesque images it's made to the nightmare prompts if you're curious.
It's easier for me if the NYC meetup is in Brooklyn.
It's easier for *me* if the NYC meetup is in Kamuela.
Can we move the Kamuela meetup to Brooklyn then?
I'm not near either one, but Kamuela sounds like the better place to meet up.
I have an international tax question, not particularly deep but difficult to google, and I wonder if anyone here might have answers.
I’m a dual citizen of the US and Germany with both passports. I like Europe--I lived in NYC for decades and I’m done. I want to stay this side of the pond. What I’m looking for is a ~Schengen country I can 1. live in on the basis of my German passport and 2. work in remotely for a US employer: normal US job, normal US paychecks, earning dollars, paying the IRS first. This is not viable in Germany. Last fall my US employer gave up on trying to solve it and set me up with German HR at a sister company. Alas, that job has recently and suddenly become untenable. Other than the global factor, it wouldn’t be a problem. I’m in high demand. But it will be much easier (endanger my prospects of retaining US payscale much less) if I don’t have to ask a new employer to do this whole sister-company maneuver. In Germany it’s the only way. So, as much as I was just starting to feel settled here, damn it, it seems reasonable to look at other options.
My research this last few years was oriented to third-country nationals, focused on residency/path to citizenship. Now that I have the holy-grail Schengen passport, those aren’t issues any longer, and I feel almost back to square one. Portugal’s non-habitual residency still seems interesting. Bulgaria may be a thing? It’s tricky. I now have multiple critical search terms that aren’t normally expected to go together and basically nothing I find online fits.
Is there a go-to answer, resource, or recommendation?
(To clarify, I’m not rich enough for, like, Monaco. I’m talking about a middling New York non-finance salary: kind of rich in much of Europe in day to day terms but nothing like tax-haven rich. I just want to do, like, normal-person-level tax planning.)
The obvious answer is to have one of those international firms figure things out for you. PwC, Deloitte, or one of the others. It seems like a fairly standard thing, right?
Are you trying to reduce overall tax burden or are you trying to avoid illegal employment?
My two top priorities are 1. to avoid illegal employment and 2. to continue to get paid at US payscale. To that end, I’m trying to figure out if there’s a reasonably accessible arrangement somewhere that doesn’t force the employer to execute a complex procedure such as “opening a new branch overseas” requiring an extensive team of lawyers and accountants. The nice-to-have third priority would be 3. paying less. I’m interested in that mostly because it seems as if low onerousness and low tax rates might conceivably be found together in some country in, say, southern Europe or the Baltics, that’s actively decided to make it easy to work there.
1. Have you considered the social aspects of forming friendship and being part of a "community of place"?
2. Is it reasonable and ethical for you to expect a US pay scale without living in US?
Rule 2.1 "In representing a client, a lawyer shall exercise independent professional judgment and render candid advice. In rendering advice, a lawyer may refer not only to law but to other considerations such as moral, economic, social and political factors, that may be relevant to the client's situation "
"Is it reasonable and ethical for you to expect a US pay scale without living in US?"
'Ethical'? Odd way of putting it, is this something like tech not paying Bay Area money to workers in the mid-west ... for ethical reasons?
1. Meh.
2. These are US jobs that make US time and intensity demands resulting in a US work-life balance or lack thereof, so no, I can’t say I’m enthusiastic about working like an American but not earning like one. It would be a great outcome, though, if it turned out that a pleasant to live in country had a residency status I was eligible for where they would let me work remotely to the US and not make it a requirement that my US employer open an office there ... even if they charged me a high, social-democracy-compatible tax rate, which, at the end of the day, I support.
There was recently a sequence of articles on the topic on the German news site Spiegel Online.
Here is an article discussing the problems. Many of them don't just apply to Germany/US:
https://www.spiegel.de/karriere/arbeiten-im-ausland-erst-verhandeln-dann-verreisen-a-0f1dc151-629b-4db2-b34c-37c9311c28db
And here is one discussing the supposedly best solution, "Employer of Record". There are companies which offer to take over the role of the sister-company. The article is paywalled, but I can copy/paste it into a dm if you don't have access.
https://www.spiegel.de/karriere/employer-of-record-mit-diesem-trick-arbeiten-sie-dauerhaft-legal-aus-der-sonne-a-c86f353c-82ea-4e5f-8f54-0c563c8d457f
I don’t have access, and I’d appreciate it. Thanks.
I did a bit of looking into this; the general trend is:
1) developed countries want you to pay taxes for living there, and using their services
2) developing countries are okay with you living their without paying income tax, since you'll boost the economy in other ways
The difficult part on the USA side is getting the employer to let you work abroad, because it makes the tax situation so complicated (this is sidestepped if you're a "digital nomad" who doesn't stay long enough in any country to trigger tax residency). One (questionably-ethical) solution is to just lie, and use something like keepyourhomeip [dotcom] to maintain the illusion of physical presence in the USA. In the event that the employer discovers, you can be fired, but not much else (they could sue you, but they'd have to show damages somehow).
On the non-USA side it's tricky because you do, in fact, have to follow the tax laws of the country where you are resident (since for tax fraud you can be jailed, rather than just sued). Count on paying a CPA who's double-licensed in both countries, and count on it being expensive (i.e., a couple thousand dollars to have your taxes done - still cheaper than fucking up and being subject to penalties).
So offhand, Eastern Europe might be the way to go - developing enough to not be too picky about how you pay (i.e., happy to just collect sales taxes and indirect property taxes through your rent). PM me if you'd like to discuss further.
Have you looked into Scandinavian countries?
Which and why? Love the north but don’t particularly associate tax-friendliness with it.
It seems that Sweden is much less bureaucratic than Germany, though you may end up paying more taxes overall: https://www.greenbacktaxservices.com/country-guide/tax-guide-for-americans-living-abroad-in-sweden/. All the tax treaties are in place though.
Plus, Swedish is much much easier to learn than German, if this is a consideration for you (at least according to my partner).
From that link it looks like the difficulty would be keeping nonresident status, without which the tax bill would be appreciably higher albeit possibly less onerous than here. Noted and thanks. I do love Stockholm, tho tbh it was hard enough finding an apartment in Berlin.
Yeah, you would be considered a resident for tax purposes, like in most places in Europe. But that comes with the social safety net that does not exist in the US, not anymore, anyway. Whether the trade-off seems fair to you, well, is up to you. I assume you did the calculation.
Right, the ~40% of GDP going to entitlements just... does not exist. Social security, food stamps, unemployment, disability, medicaid, public housing - none of those things exist either. All science fiction.
I guess we really should figure out where that $10 trillion has been going!
It’s a perfectly reasonable tradeoff and one I broadly support. Like, I moved to Germany on purpose. I am in favor of infrastructure and transit and safety nets. I’m literally just trying to figure out how to optimize my situation for a new job search. I moved on the basis of an existing, known salary. The more seamless and low-hassle I can make it for the next employer to hire me, the less likely they are to decide they don’t need to pay me in line with what I’ve been making because oh, look, European pay scales. (These are US employers with US work cultures and US time demands, and I’m not interested in doing what I do for them for a third of the money. I don’t automatically get a humane work-life balance just because I live here.) I’m looking down the barrel of a job search that’s likely going to involve tricky negotiating, thinking about how to optimize for it, and going hmm, is there a tax regime where it’d be easier than here to just straight up work remotely?
Paying the IRS first is odd if you are not living in the US. Can you not tell them you are abroad? They will still need returns - all US citizens need to do that. However double taxation agreements will largely protect you from paying the IRS anything.
To a point. Sigh. If you have a US paycheck, the deductions on it go to US taxes. This is the Wrong Way to Do It when you live abroad and will make a deeply hideous tax mess. You do claw most of it back in the end but risibly huge bills,accounting onerous as hell, it’s a bad scene. I initially moved kind of ass backwards in the pandemic and wasn’t my most sober adult planning self about it and tax year 2021 was a nightmare I’m not eager to repeat. But I gather that not all countries are as difficult as Germany in various respects about this. It might be more viable with better advance planning in a different tax regime.
It’s not just Germany. It’s the US. Germany would be happy to have your tax. You need a legal entity in Germany (or elsewhere in the EU - Schengen isn’t important except for travel) that bills the US company and pays you. Let that company handle the employee taxes.
That’s what I do in Ireland while working for a Canadian company. Online accounting firms do it for a fee, they have already existing companies set up and you join as an employee or a director or both. The director route has some tax advantages in terms of what you can expense but the fees are higher. I get a paycheque from the Irish company, tax taken out at source.
As an American Citizen you do have to file returns but there should be no extra wage taxes.
As a Germany citizen resident in Germany you should be paying taxes there. Also as a German citizen you can be resident and work anywhere in the EU.
Ps I don’t recommend Ireland right now because of the housing crisis but other European countries will allow this, in fact I’m surprised that Germany doesn’t.
Employer of Record, right? Question there is how easily I could find one on my end and whether doing that could make it more or less turnkey for a prospective employer.
More than odd, my guess is that it's illegal, as well as pointless!
If you're a contractor they don't have to do any additional paperwork beyond what they'd need to do for a standard contractor. It slightly complicates your own tax picture and means you won't get benefits. But you probably aren't going to get benefits living abroad anyway. But that's what most digital nomad types do.
Possible in theory but freelancing is unfortunately pretty rare in my function. Be good to think about that more, though, it’s strongly appealing for its own sake, it’s a question of if the work is out there. (I do core brand strategy for biopharma clients--you see a lot more freelancing in creative or even account.)
I am solely talking about the legal part. You sign a contract that's a normal contract except it fits the parameters of a contractor instead of an employee (which if you're working on another continent you probably meet). And then you work normally. They have to file a pretty limited set of forms and you have to file a somewhat more complex ones. And that's it.
Clearly something to look into! My impression is that freelancers’ hours are strictly capped so you can’t do a facsimile of full-time on a freelance basis, but I’m hazy on the specifics and maybe it’s a less meaningful limit than I was assuming. Thank you.
No, that's not necessary. Retainer contracts where hours aren't tracked are perfectly allowed. The IRS definition is here (https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/independent-contractor-self-employed-or-employee)
The standards are (not a lawyer etc):
1.) You must be able to work when and where you want with a minimal control over your location and schedule. Obviously they can require you to attend meetings but not, for example, to be in a specific office from 9-5.
2.) You must mostly own your own equipment, pay your own expenses out of the contract money, and be free to offer your services to anyone (ie, work on a non-exclusive basis).
3.) You can't receive employee like benefits or have a contract that otherwise is basically an employee contract but with "I am a freelancer" written on top.
Capped hours are definitely a thing for freelancers in my industry. I think it may literally just be about budget control. Freelancers are expensive. And if ~every employer has these capping policies then it doesn’t matter that the law says it’s fine not to. I will find out what the actual situation is, though; it may not be a dealbreaker.
Can you name any interesting powerful people worth learning about that aren't very well known to the public? Looking for powerful but relatively obscure figures.
The first example that came to mind for me is most of Biden's cabinet [0]. Looking through that list I barely recognize anyone, and yet they all probably wield a good amount of power within their area.
A different kind of example would be how two developers were the only ones responsible for OpenSSL back in 2014 during the Hearbleed bug, despite how important it was to the Internet.
Are there any really important things which are basically propped up by 1 or 2 people continuing to maintain something?
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/cabinet/
I have been listening the Martyr Made podcast which has deep (long) episodes on very historical topics and the people profiled have often been lost to (common) history but were very powerful (lost of figures from pre-ww2 europe or the civil rights era). If you are looking for current day - not sure but you could definitely start with the richest people in authoritarian countries. They probably have to be powerful to stay alive and gain wealth and probably aren't well known in the west.
Possibilities:
- The people running some of the big hidden infrastructure stuff (I have no idea who the CEO of asml is)
- apparently there are <40 people who actually know how a modern CPU works and one bad bus crash at a conference could be... bad.
- in the US: whoever's in charge of the dockworker unions has a huge impact on the economy (could crash it with a strike or boost it by allowing automation)
No.
More specifically: all of the contemporaneous people I know of who are obscure, interesting, and powerful wouldn't want the attention.
And historically, after enough years, the combination doesn't exist: interesting stories become either well-known, or forgotten.
A month is a decent time to wait to get a first cold look at a complex event, and so we have one the best summaries I’ve seen of what that Wagner rebellion was about. Here’s a reasonable translation from the original Russian:
“Today is a month since Wagner rebelled and moved to Moscow, capturing two Russian regional centers in the course of movement, not meeting the slightest resistance.
Then, of course, we were informed that next to Moscow he would have been met and defeated, but it is difficult to say how it would be in reality. Several fainting soldiers and ten bags of sand near the Moscow Ring Road somehow did not look like an indestructible line of defense.
In reality there was no rebellion. There was a banal dispute between economic entities, which was to be resolved through supreme arbitration long before its acute phase. But the problem is that the arbitrator is no longer able to make prompt decisions. What is the reason, it does not even matter, the main thing here is the statement of this regrettable fact.
It was the lack of a solution to the dispute that led to an escalation, an increase in the conflict and its self-developing state. It is possible that Prigozhin was not going to go to Moscow, but the logic of events dragged him, it was impossible to stop.
In fact, Lukashenko literally saved Putin by acting as such an arbitrator and fixing the situation without bringing it to the point of no return. If this mess had lasted for another day, Wagner would have crossed the Moscow Ring Road by that time, and then events could have begun to develop according to their internal scenario. It was enough for one or two ministers to run to Prigozhin with an oath of allegiance, and the mass defection to his banner would not be stopped - officials have their own understanding of the situation, they always swear an oath to the strong. And on June 25, Lukashenko would have nothing to manage, but he would have to congratulate the new Fuhrer of Russia.
In general, Putin was very, very lucky, as it is unlikely that it would all end well for him personally. Someone has to be responsible for all the outrages.
Nevertheless, the events of June 23-24 should not be presented as a rebellion. Rather, they are described by the phrase "it happened."
The main thing in these events is what they have demonstrated - the regime is absolutely vulnerable. It has no way to resist in the event of a real, not cardboard, internal shock. And these shocks are inevitable, as Putin has ceased to play his role and ceased to perform his functionality. More precisely, now he's doing it randomly. And bringing another dispute between two or even more criminal clans to a boiling point in such an environment is a matter of time. Maybe in a month everything will happen again with other organized criminal groups, maybe in a year. But this is most likely inevitable. And Lukashenko may be busy at this time and will not have time, as a month ago.”
Original: https://t.me/anatoly_nesmiyan/11576
I mean, if Prigozhin thought he had a good chance to unseat Putin, why would he let himself to be persuaded by Lukashenko to back down?
I think that's just the thing: the author proposes, and I tend to agree, that Prigozhin wasn't trying to unseat Putin to start with, the whole thing just spiraled out of a "mafia clans" of sorts (any analogies to organized crime structures are imperfect, but it's really hard to come up with a short description without a deep dive into the culture, which is... just no.) fighting over resources/power.
If I were hazard a guess, Prigozhin came to deeply regret his involvement in this Russia's insanity in Ukraine, and would rather be back in Africa doing whatever things he was doing there.
If Prigozhin wasn't trying to unseat Putin, then I don't understand why Putin is lucky that it didn't end badly for him, and how it could be that Lukashenko might well have to congratulate new Fuhrer of Russia.
I mean, I get that it might be that Prigozhin didn't plan to challenge Putin initially, but when he refused to back down after being declared a rebel, he clearly and willingly chose to do so. Just to change his mind after Lukashenko's intervention. Occam's razor imho implies that in few hours between these two events he started to think that things are not going well for him.
Prigozhin would almost certainly have been happy with, A: Shoigu and Gerasimov out, Prigozhin as the Kremlin's go-to guy for victories in Ukraine, and the new defense ministry backing him up on that or. B: Putin out and Prigozhin as the kingmaker who appoints the Tsar of All Russia or, B': Prigozhin as the Tsar of All Russia. It doesn't really matter which of these he preferred, which he was "trying" to do, because he never reached the point where he had to decide. Right up to the point where he called the whole thing off, the path to all three outcomes ran down the M-4 expressway from Rostov to Moscow, by mechanized column at all possible speed.
But there's only a narrow range of outside support, in both kind and degree, that allows for Plan A. Too little support, and Prigozhin simply loses. More than a little support, especially if it's not support very closely aligned with Prigozhin's interests, and those supporters are going to insist on getting more out of the plan than a shakeup in the Russian MoD - roughly speaking, they're going to want to be big players in the new regime.
So Prigozhin had to plan for all three outcomes, and he had to understand that no matter what he was personally after, plan B or B' was more likely to come about than Plan A. Hence, Putin was at real risk of being replaced (and defenestrated) even if that wasn't Prigozhin's preferred outcome.
Yea, that sounds about right.
Exactly, Prigozhin may not have had the initial goal of unseating Putin but once he got the ball rolling the inescapable logic of events may have had propelled him toward the inevitable. So both things could be true: Prigozhin didn't start with unseating Putin in mind, and yet had Luka not intervened that's where the party may have ended.
And we can't exclude the possibility that Prigozhin realized things actually were going "too well" for him, and in a few hours he would be faced with a real possibility of... what? take Putin prisoner? declare himself VolkFuhrer? Supreme Leader of a failed state spiraling into a civil war? and he panicked and started looking for a way out because he had no intent to go THAT far...
I highly doubt that Prigozhin panicked on the thought of things going too well and going to far. I've read his CV, and he is many things, but "risk averse", and "fearful of chaos" are not among them.
"Then, of course, we were informed that next to Moscow he would have been met and defeated, but it is difficult to say how it would be in reality."
El-Murid, perhaps out of a long and justifiable habit of criticising Putin, overstates this difficulty.
The rebellion was the tantrum of a volatile man who was about to have his PMC taken away by the MoD. A few of his better paid/higher-ranking mercenaries, who would have been integrated into the regular armed forces by MoD contract and asked to perform duties more dangerous than final-phase mopping up after prisoner-recruit waves, were presumably also not happy.
The military scenario of 1.5-4k unsupplied Wagnerites taking Moscow was as close to impossible as anything in this war, even without Kadyrov moving in to help.
The political scenario in which significant elements of Rosgvardia and the army proper join Prigozhin's rebellion, and a general 'let's get rid of Putin for bungling the war' sentiment rises, was not impossible, perhaps. However, Surovikin's 'hostage video' quickly demonstrated to any lesser dreamers that the behind-the-scenes safeguards are working. And why on earth would ministers risk treasonous oaths to an unstable courtier upset about money, who has no support in the army, the security services, or society at large - and no independent patronage networks beyond the PMC and a bit of media? In what world was he the strong horse to back?
Whether the whole affair is the breach of a taboo against rebellion (and shows the regime's weakness in letting it get that far, etc.) or a demonstration of the regime's resilience (bloodless resolution without much given away) is very much arguable both ways.
I… don’t know? They met no resistance, took Rostov, shot down several aircraft, and people were taking selfies with them. Why would we expect Moscow defenses to be any better/different at this point?
Even if Moscow is completely undefended, it's still a city of twelve million people. To minimally garrison and police such a city, even with a generally friendly populace, requires a lot more than the maybe 4,000 men in Prigozhin's flying column. If he somehow managed to "take" Moscow, then unless Moscow's government and police actively supported his cause most of Moscow would be left to its own devices with nothing to stop any Putin loyalists from plotting revenge. And there were going to be way more than 4,000 Putin loyalists in Moscow, so any plan that leaves them free to organize and raid armories is a Very Bad Plan.
Prigozhin absolutely needed more support if he was to prevail, by any path or standard. Sometimes early spectacular success brings out new supporters. Sometimes it doesn't.
It's true that the Wagnerites met no resistance in Rostov-on-Don. There were no orders to stop the 'heroes of Artyomovsk' from moving about. Prigozhin declared his mutiny on the night of Friday, June 23rd, while already in Rostov.
In what sense did he 'take' the city, though? Did he replace the civilian administration with Prigozhin loyalists? Did he in any sense become the leader of the Southern Military District? Did he force Yevkurov and Alexeyev, the senior generals on site, to surrender or swear allegiance? Did Wagner commandeer the military aircraft at the blockaded airport, or even so much as ransacked the local ammunition dumps? None of this happened. Prigozhin indulged himself in a lot of insolence and then drove off for Voronezh.
His Petersburg cronies (Shugalei et al) stayed silent. The Tula governor Dyumin (Prigozhin's friend and desired minister of defence) came closest to a kind of support by way of not declaring an emergency and choosing not to make a public statement of loyalty to Putin when every other governor did, but later made up for it by helping to broker the Lukashenko deal. General Alexeyev's reaction likely reflected the sentiment of much of the officer corps: seething at the prospect of the collective West laughing its collective arse off at the whole clownshow.
Of course, all that was before ten o'clock on Saturday, June 24th, when Putin declared the former heroes to be mutineers and enemies of the state. At that point, the ambiguity was over, and the state was going to fight. Fighting the 2nd Guards Rifles at the gates of Moscow is on the bucket list of no mercenary ever.
Actually, the aftermath, not the event itself, is at the heart of the pro-weakness argument: Putin went on television and, in overwrought stentorian tones, accused a man of trying to destroy the country; then, a few days later, during a somber ceremony, held a minute of silence for the army pilots killed by that man; and that man is still enjoying his freedom, exile or not.
But yes. There were selfies.
yes, I see your point. if the city is not even trying to resist, what does it mean to "take it"? They didn't seem to know what to do with it. My point in bringing up selfies was that maybe they didn't have widespread population support (how would we know?), but definitely there were signs of popularity among the locals.
Definitely agree with the weakness argument; not only Prigozhin, no one was even investigated. Several aircraft down, some 10 men dead, and... nothing.
Because it's Moscow, and because coup-proofing Moscow is the Putin organisation's top priority.
The US government doesn't really think about the scenario where some fraction of the US army decides to take Washington DC, because that's not a plausible scenario in the US, but in Russia it's the number one scenario that keeps Putin up at night.
Prigozhin, for his part, was hoping for a preference cascade. His tiny force couldn't possibly manage a coup on its own, but he gambled that if he stood up and said "actually fuck Putin, it's coup time" then other elements of the armed forces would join him. In the end the gamble didn't work but he was lucky enough to escape with his life.
I think a lot of this is mistaken. He had considerable support in the military and the populace. He had saved up supplies for some time.
I'm pretty sure this is the correct analysis. Prigozhin was desperate because he was about to lose approximately everything and become a politically inconvenient nobody, so he did something desperate. It was an extreme long shot, that depended on both military and political factors lining up perfectly. And, perhaps in testament to Prigozhin's talent as a mercenary captain and his understanding of Russia's weakness, the military side did seem to be lining up pretty well as far as it could go. The political side, wasn't coming together and that was completely outside his control. So when Lukashenko stepped in as mediator, Prigozhin backed down.
We'll see how that works for him. You come after the king, you'd best not miss. And wimping out at the last minute isn't much better. But maybe he'll have a peaceful retirement in Belarus.
Everyone says he's not in Belarus. Some say he's gone to Africa. Whether this means he's getting it back together or is next to dead I cannot guess.
CNN is saying he is in Belarus, on account of his having been seen and filmed in Belarus a few days ago. "Everyone", is not everyone.
Thanks rightfully go to an AI translator for doing the bulk of the work, I just fixed a few obvious bloopers.
The guy is a decent system analyst. He does go off into wild directions on subjects where his initial conditions are way off. But here he gets the big picture correctly, IMHO:
Russia is a failed state
Putin is an incompetent coward
The system is incapable of planning beyond the immediate reaction to events.
From these basic premises the likeliest explanation is that various groups are jockeying for position, and we just happened to see a move get out of hand and almost spiral into chaos.
This is far from over.
Yoram, how much would you proposal cost an average middle class individual that doesn't qualify for EITC and doesn't live in a rural community? It seems in the neighborhood of $50-60 per year on gasoline and a 10% increase in utility bills on gas and electric, both increasing regularly for the foreseeable future. That gets pretty steep pretty quickly.
Utah already has fairly high state income, and very low property taxes. Your proposal feels like yet another strike against younger people, typically transplants, who live in SLC, don't have family roots in the state, don't own real property in this state, and typically are disliked by the legislature of this state, yet seem to be expected to pay for everything in the state while subsidizing longtime residents/property owners/landlords who pay very little. I haven't been here for very long and frankly I'm not sure I'm staying much longer, why would I want to pay more to maintain the value and usability of their property? Good luck on this bill but I don't think I want to volunteer, if anything it seems directly against my interests.
If you write a ballot act that pays for this with an increase in our laughably low property tax or a tax on a certain non-profit entity I won't name, I'll be all for it.
Hi Jacob: I think you're missing the cut in the state sales tax on groceries. For more, here's a link to our analysis of the "Beehive Family", created by the Utah Taxpayers Association to show the impact of taxes on a typical Utah family. Our analysis is that the sales tax cut on groceries roughly balances out the impacts of the carbon tax, with the Beehive Family ending up with $26 in _savings_. Each household is of course different, but this analysis suggests that our proposal is pocketbook-friendly: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Xb8o4vBIMgAJcW8oE0Kf8Ao6t1FBzyXFUCa4Y_fKe-I/edit?usp=sharing
Scott, not sure how to reply but unless I am badly misunderstanding this bill and his proposal, the projection is revenue neutral in the sense that it collects a lot of money and spends all of it without adding to debt, but that is not the same thing as me paying $100 and getting $100 back.
Per Yoram's website, "They estimate carbon tax revenue of $243m in FY 2026 (i.e., the year ending June 30, 2026; note that our policy goes into effect Jan 1 2026 so this is only a half-year of revenue), $569m in FY 2027 (the first full fiscal year for our policy), and $611m in FY 2028." (1), put simply he wants to fund his ideas with a $569m carbon tax in 2027 across gasoline, electric etc.
Then, per Yoram's website,"
$100 million a year for cleaning up local air pollution from wood-burning stoves, dirty school buses, and more.
$50 million a year for rural economic development through the Governor’s Office of Economic Development.
Some revenue goes to airports and highways because of legal and economic considerations described in other FAQs. (This is 35m on the pie chart)
Elimination of the state sales tax on grocery store food and other regressive sales taxes. (this is 220m on the pie chart)
A 20% match of the federal Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income working families. (This is 75m on the pie chart?)
Any money “left over” goes to additional tax cuts as determined by the state legislature. (This is 90m on the pie chart)", (2) which is a total of 570m out.
Of the $570m carbon tax,
$220m pays for the state sales tax on groceries, which, to my original point, a smaller percentage of which will probably go to me than the carbon tax I'm paying as I do drive for work, heat my home etc. but do not have 10 children like many families in this great state.
$100m to clean air programs which are nice but not as important to me, a new resident and possibly not long term resident, as they should be to landowners who pay very little property tax and are not particularly hit by this proposal.
$50m to rural economies I don't live in.
$35m to Airports and Highways because of federal laws. If anything this is the part of the bill that benefits me the most fairly as I use both, and probably fly more than the average Utahn.
$75m to EITC which is nice and all but again I don't see why this should be paid for by a carbon tax and not a property tax. We already have gas tax and our property tax is pitiful, meanwhile legacy family landowners and a certain non-profit group hold all the political power.
$90m to be determined by a state legislature I don't remotely trust or support, did not vote in favor of electing, and don't think is the best user of my money. They are currently trying to throw away over $500m on a pointless Gondola to private ski resorts as a massive handout to a well connected former government official who owns the land, I guess this will help them pay for it.
I've read through the two page more detailed PDF and was not impressed by it. To your response, at best, if you include EITC and the misc. cuts, of the $570m in revenue $385m is returned through tax cuts and EITC.
tl;dr I am not a fan of my state legislature and their financial decision making. I feel that I and people in my cohort of educated, transplanted, renting SLC dwellers overproduce and are overtaxed compared to the majority of the state, yet have very little political power. I don't support additional taxes that don't increase the property tax to make landowners pay their fare share, and I certainly don't support anything that increases my taxes to provide open ended funds to the state legislature. I strongly encourage you to read about the gondola below if you think doing so is a good idea.
tl;dr per Yoram's website
"They estimate carbon tax revenue of $243m in FY 2026 (i.e., the year ending June 30, 2026; note that our policy goes into effect Jan 1 2026 so this is only a half-year of revenue), $569m in FY 2027 (the first full fiscal year for our policy), and $611m in FY 2028.
They estimate FY 2027 impacts to the General Fund (from lost sales tax revenue on groceries) of $221m.
They estimate FY 2027 impacts to the Income Tax Fund (from the expanded EITC match) of $75m."
(1) https://www.cleanthedarnair.org/legal-language-and-fiscal-note/
(2) https://www.cleanthedarnair.org/faqs/ "Where does the money go" https://www.cleanthedarnair.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/PieChart-800x447.png
https://www.cleanthedarnair.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/230109PolicyOverview.pdf
https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2023/07/12/udot-approves-gondola-little/
https://www.reddit.com/r/SaltLakeCity/comments/14y2gvi/lcc_gondola_is_going_to_be_shoved_down_our_throats/
https://www.reddit.com/r/SaltLakeCity/comments/14yytar/full_comment_analysis_of_the_final_eis_gondola/
Hi Jacob: Thanks for doing such a thorough look at our proposal! Other than re-recommending our Beehive Family analysis (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Xb8o4vBIMgAJcW8oE0Kf8Ao6t1FBzyXFUCa4Y_fKe-I/edit?usp=sharing) I think the best I can do is suggest that we actually do the numbers for you. If you're interested send me an email (yoram@standupeconomist.com) and we can set up a google doc or otherwise work through an estimate of how much you'd save from the sales tax cut on groceries and how much you'd pay in carbon taxes. My guess is that you'll end up pretty close to zero, but of course each household is different.
Does Yoram even live here? My sense was that he’s a policy vagabond trying to implement his neat ideas wherever he can get traction.
The difference between Yoram and the “few dozen refineries and steel mills” be proposes taxing is the latter actually provides something to valuable to society that people are willing to pay for.
I look forward to seeing this ballot initiative crushed and Yoram’s good idea fairies flutter to a better aligned constituency, like California or New York.
We have a wonderful thing going for us here. Let’s not let some pseudo intellectuals fuck it up.
I've lived in Utah since 2017. Prior to that I was in Washington State, where I worked in I-732. As for your sense that I'm a "policy vagabond", I do work on pocketbook-friendly climate policy in other states as well. I'm not sure why you don't like that kind of approach: maybe you're not convinced by climate science? If so I encourage you to join the bet that Bryan Caplan made with me! https://standupeconomist.com/2023-update-on-my-global-warming-traffic-light-bet-with-bryan-caplan-and-alex-tabarrok/
By "here", do you mean ACX, or Utah?
I certainly don't live in Utah, but I will comment anyway. I do not expect this referendum to pass.
Energy taxes are enormously unpopular, and this will be sold as a massive tax hike. What this immediately does is increase the gasoline tax from 34c/gal to 43c/gal. The promises of adding another dollar over the next two decades are just promises. Even if this referendum succeeds, Utah will not be bound to the dead hand of the past.
There is also a bunch of random ear-marked spending and tax bailouts. It is an attempt to do a compromise-based approach to legislation. But it is doing the epicycle approach to government budgeting; targeted handouts to hopefully reach "51% of taxpayers are better off under this proposal".
Hi Alex: Energy taxes are unpopular, but so are sales taxes on groceries. Local air pollution is a big issue here in Utah as well. So our proposal in a nutshell is to "tax pollution, not potatoes, and use the money that's left over to Clean The Darn Air." I certainly can't guarantee that our proposal would pass, but I think we'd have a fighting chance if we made the ballot!
I didn't even realize that. I left the east coast to get away from people like that, and if he's asking me to volunteer to bring that nonsense with me I'd strongly invite him to fuck off back to the state he actually lives in and lobby for tax increases that he, not I, will be on the hook for.
Hi Jacob: I'm not sure what you're referencing here, but as I wrote above I think you misunderstand our proposal and I recommend our Beehive Family analysis (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Xb8o4vBIMgAJcW8oE0Kf8Ao6t1FBzyXFUCa4Y_fKe-I/edit?usp=sharing).
Apologies, I relied on the other commenter and your Wikipedia which both had you moving from California to Washington. Of course if you live here you're fully entitled to lobby for political change in the state. Either way my tone was unacceptable, sorry.
Thanks for the apology, I appreciate it. (Feel free to edit my Wikipedia page! :)
It's stated as revenue-neutral and offset by lower sales taxes, I'm not sure any of the groups you mention disproportionately use carbon over buying goods and services.
It's revenue neutral in the sense that it increases taxes on gas and utilities to give money to parts of the state I don't live in, and people connected enough to get state funding for some pork environmental projects. Any tax increase for Utah that doesn't propose increasing taxes on real property and/or a certain non-profit entity that he may not have even heard of if he doesn't live here is absurd. I won't be volunteering and will be voting no.
I think you’re misunderstanding. This is a tax increase, so it is paid for by a tax *decrease* on sales taxes. If you buy products that are subject to sales tax, and if your purchase of those and of gasoline are average, then you have no net change in your tax burden.
The bill purports to be overall revenue neutral. This means the energy tax hike pays for the sales tax cut AND Uta services AND rural community??? AND green energy grift AND whatever other junk is in the bill
Hi Jacob: The bill purports to be (and is) _mostly_ revenue-neutral, not 100% revenue neutral: a big chunk of the carbon tax revenue is going to cut the state sales tax on grocery store food, but as you note there is some money for things like local air quality programs. (If you think that's junk then you're entitled to your opinion, but perhaps you haven't lived in Utah long enough to becoming aware of our local air pollution problems.) As noted above, I think the best way to see how close it is to revenue neutral is to run the numbers: we did that for the Beehive Family (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Xb8o4vBIMgAJcW8oE0Kf8Ao6t1FBzyXFUCa4Y_fKe-I/edit?usp=sharing) and they ended up with a net _savings_ of $26. I'd be happy to work with you to run the numbers for your household: email me at yoram@standupeconomist.com if you want to do that!
I ran it for myself. 400 gallons a year (vs. 1152? in your spreadsheet), $4000 groceries (single household, your spreadsheet has $5334 for a 2.7 person household and 18038 for a 5 person), my actual gas and electric expenditures for the previous twelve months of 21.8mcf and 68**kwh(derived with your constant from my electric bill), which left me at a loss of $29.57 (Gas -38.88, Natgas -14.37, Electric -46.32, Groceries +70).
That's not as bad as I expected, but on principle I am still quite opposed to increasing other Utah taxes while our income tax is quite high and our property taxes are so low. We (moderate republicans and democrats in Salt Lake City, which might include you?) just lost our congressional seat in the gerrymander, have very little social or political power compared to the mormons, have above average incomes and pay above average income taxes already. I don't think we should be paying any more for this state, if new taxes are required they should be assessed against property, which has been skyrocketing to the benefit of longtime residents and the detriment of transplants who moved here and have to rent or buy into it.
Hi Yoram,
Interesting, I'll probably take a crack at the numbers myself. However just skimming through I am single, not a family with 5 kids, so I'd be far closer to your starting figures rather than spending 18k a year on groceries.
In fact, that was essentially my initial point. That family of 5 probably owns a home on which they pay some of the lowest property taxes in the state. My income roughly matches theirs but because they have a much larger family they are getting more back in a grocery tax rebate, all the while paying very little in the property tax on their home. I think if you'd like to raise taxes in Utah it should be on homeowners
Recently, 7 US AI companies - including OpenAI and Meta - pledged that they would make their system safer to use for public. And one way they thought to go about is to 'watermark' the content that AI generates.
This would look effective on AI gen image. But it feels superficial, doesn't it?
Watermark on Ai gen image? You could always remove it via Crop and Photoshop. Same is the case with watermarked AI gen videos; there do exist tools online which you can use to remove watermarks on a video.
Watermark on Ai Gen Audio? Silence that specific frequency, and (maybe) layer it with non-watermarked sound. Watermark on AI-generated essays? Well firstly, how would you go about watermarking a 'text'?
Is this even as effective?
What, in your opinion, is the best way to watermark AI-generated content?
It sounds to me like they're using safety as an excuse to cover up how many other people's watermarks their AI are creating because they're using indiscriminate training data. "We'll train our AI to exclusively make this one watermark, and no others. For SAFETY!"
True. Both OpenAI and Microsoft were sued by artists and writers for violating copyright and IP rights to train their LLMs.
And putting watermarks on these plagiarised material is indeed hilarious.
Authenticity can be demonstrated with digital signatures. At the audio/video recording level, this could work at the hardware level -- e.g. this video is signed by a device certificate signed in turn by a trusted root certificate associated with Apple, therefore we can have reasonable assurance that this is unaltered video recorded from an iOS device.
I think this ends not with being able to infallibly demonstrate that certain content is AI-created, but with a general downgrade in the evidentiary value of unsigned material, (which might be AI generated, or might be the kind of material the author wished to have plausible deniability for).
What prevents people from signing something AI generated?
To clarify: Your proposal is that, instead of watermarking ai-generated content, we should instead sign all NON-ai-generated content? Like, ALL of it?
That seems logistically impossible, and if you somehow did it anyway then the security would be broken before you finished rolling it out. (If my iPhone signs all videos I record with it, that implies that the digital signing key is stored on my iPhone, which implies that a jailbroken iPhone can sign anything you want.)
Not all of it, but all of it that a human cares about being verifiably authentic.
I don't see how that meaningfully helps with either the logistics or the security.
For example, that caveat won't save you from needing to put a signing key on every smartphone.
This kind of thing massively boosts the payoff for finding exploitable vulnerabilities, and not merely in software but extends all the way through bringing out the electron microscopes, ion beam workstations, and similar "heavy artillery" where the searcher is not afraid to blow away tens of millions of dollars to extract a key or otherwise produce an "authentic, really, don't you know $iron is impossible to fool?" signature.
Point that camera at a screen playing an AI-generated video, and now you have "proof" that the AI footage is real.
Wouldn't that degrade the video quality in detectable ways?
Probably, but putting it on a physical screen is a pretty crude way of doing it. (It's just a really easy example to understand). The fancy CIA way would probably be to open up the camera and find a way to send your own video feed to the signing chip. The less fancy way would be to just compress the video heavily so any telltale signs of it being on a screen get covered up with compression artifacts.
The "less fancy" CIA way would be to subpoena+gag order the key from the vendor itself (or individual employees thereof who happen to have custody of it.) Which is commonly believed to be exactly what happens with SSL certs, firmware signing keys, etc. A piece of paper from the FISA kangaroo court is orders of magnitude cheaper than reversing.
The proposal I've heard for watermarking a text is the following:
Divide the dictionary into two halves, basically randomly.
When the text-generator is generating its next word, have it down-weight the half of the dictionary that word was in.
If the fraction of pairs of consecutive words from the same half of the dictionary is substantially less than 50%, then that is a strong statistical signature of the text having been generated by this generator. This will be robust to small edits of the text, especially for long texts.
If the different language models use different random divisions of the dictionary, you could even identify *which* generator was likely to have generated this text, or if the text was pasted together from the outputs of multiple generators.
The signal is going to be weaker for very tightly constrained texts, like a sonnet where every word starts with the same letter of the alphabet.
Very likely, something similar would be possible for audio and images, which would be nearly undetectable by humans, and moderately hard to hide.
Interesting solution. And separately I recognized your name from the Netflix show on infinity which was cool!
Oh thanks! That’s always fun when someone sees that.
It's clever, but I imagine you could remove it pretty easily just by asking another non-watermarked LLM to rewrite the text. Then you could use the expensive, high-quality but watermarked LLM to create your text, and use a smaller, cheaper LLM for watermark removal. Then someone would probably make a free online watermark removal site.
I think that would be true for *any* watermarking method. “Watermarking” relies on cooperation by the generator of the text.
I agree. I'm predicting that if watermarking becomes popular, free online watermark removal tools will become popular shortly after. This diminishes their usefulness for catching dishonest people (eg, cheating students) as it will only catch those that don't know about the watermark or are too lazy to remove it. It'll still be useful for checking the work of honest people, as in people who aren't trying to hide the tools they used but may not have actually declared it anywhere.
That is possible. I don't think every AI company on the globe would sign some sort of pact to not do something like this, and play all fair.
Forget AI-generated text, the normal texts that you find online can easily be made 'unique' by using tons of paraphrasing tools available online.
Is this scheme likely to identify human authors, too? I know I have a bunch of preferred words and others I avoid, whenever I look at a thesaurus I can divide the synonyms into these categories.
This is called text fingerprinting (or at least it was, when I was involved in that stuff 20+ years ago). It's a mature art, almost in the same reliability ballbark as physical fingerprints. Given a large enough text corpus (maybe surprisingly, in practice not very much text is required) known to originate from person A, any text of more that half a page or so can quite reliably be judged if it was authored by the same individual, if no effort to conceal (like thesaurus randomizing plus scrupulous spelling, punctuation and grammar checks) was made. But even with effort to conceal, text has so many dimensions of possible idiosyncrasy that anonymous writing is almost impossible these days. The tools for text fingerprinting are quite trivial and take almost no compute. Any old laptop can do it in a heartbeat.
The more involved (and less reliable) task is the reverse: Given a text by individal X, go and find other texts out there by the same individual (so that we may identify him). This is obviously way harder, but for anybody in possession of a fulltext mirror of the internet, a quick computer, and the right tools it's only a matter of seconds. Not quick enough yet for Google or the NSA to do it with every text entered anywhere in real-time as a matter of routine AFAIK, but not far off either. GPT-like AI will not speed that process up: the compression inherent in LLM action is only useful along a few of the idiosyncrasy dimensions of text even in theory, and in practice would slow things down there too with current tech. Brute-forcing large volumes of text is quick, LLMs are not.
The difference is that with your preferred words, you prefer them in *every* spot, and not in every *other* spot.
Probably yes, but you would need a lot of text. If it's just one sentence, almost anyone could have written it. If it is a book, an algorithm could probably compare it with a few other books and say which one has the same author.
The question is how much text is necessary to figure out that e.g. this Substack user is the same as this Reddit user. Though there would be a lot of noise, for example you probably discuss different topics on different websites, which obviously also has a huge impact on word frequency.
This (and other "watermark") schemes suffers from a problem already well-explored (in re: images) in the late '90s: if an attacker has ready access to the watermark detector (even if the latter is a remote service and must be treated as "black box") he can simply permute the input until the detector reports a negative. And often enough, random permutation will give a still-palatable but de-watermarked output, even without access to the detector. And any attempt at making the latter more sensitive will crank up the false positive rate.
See e.g. https://www.petitcolas.net/watermarking/stirmark/
It’s definitely not going to be secure enough for some applications. But for others, like reliably identifying when a student is trying to turn in an AI-generated essay as their own, it seems likely to be sufficient.
Seems like the maximum possible work that might be required to circumvent that scheme is to slightly paraphrase everything in the essay. That's not a trivial amount of work, but is still considerably less work than actually doing most writing assignments honestly.
In fact, that sounds so much easier that I bet a talented high school student could take a weekend to write a program to do the paraphrasing automatically (and then put that program online for the entire world to use). So even if you could somehow guarantee that 100% of "AI" programs abide by your watermarking scheme, I don't think that gets you very far.
>Seems like the maximum possible work that might be required to circumvent that scheme is to slightly paraphrase everything in the essay. That's not a trivial amount of work, but is still considerably less work than actually doing most writing assignments honestly.
It might work to Goggle translate into Russian and translate back into English.
Who was it that said all translation is paraphrase?
- Not a rhetorical question. I honestly don’t remember. -
Edit
Holey bucket I was looking for the source of the quote and found that the Grammarly app will paraphrase text. They specifically mention avoiding plagiarism by rewording someone else’s ideas or research.
https://approachableai.com/grammarly-paraphrase/#:~:text=The%20full%20paraphrase%20feature%20is,one%20sentence%20at%20a%20time.
The cheating student is not likely to put in the sweat of removing watermarks with his own hands, but will simply buy text from a cheat shop which does so -- exactly like how they currently buy human-written essays.
For higher education, I really don't see a way around requiring that work done for a grade be done in a monitored environment. Homework is practice, assigned for your benefit to assist you in mastering the material. It forms no part of your course grade. Anything done for a grade, including short and long form writing, is done in a monitored room. This does not have to imply it is timed -- a student might check into the essay-writing lab, spent as short or as long a time as they like, come back later to revise or complete the work before submitting, etc. The important part is that if it's for a grade, we will monitor the room in which your pencil is on the page, or your fingers on the keyboard.
<cynicism on> Require every piece have an identified human author, and punish that author for falsehoods and anything else we don't want AI doing. Publishing AI-generated content then becomes too risky for anyone with sense.</end cynicism>
That would be bad for other reasons - anonymity serves various useful purposes. But our problem mostly isn't with AI-generated content; it's with lies, confabulations, etc. Humans are perfectly capable of writing falsehoods, complete with fake footnotes; all AI does is facilitate doing this at scale.
Yup
Open Source AI tools are far more powerful and 'safer' than those by private AI companies. OpenAI at this point is burning money to keep GPT4 up and running. Comparatively, in this sense, Open Source AI is much more economical and efficient.
KYC is an interesting approach to avoid being fooled by these algorithmic monsters. I've read that the EU in its AI Act is incorporating this KYC approach in its AI Act.
So I'm keeping my hopes high - I don't want to exchange my privacy for the development of these artificially intelligent beings.
Last year, I read with great interest on ACX a very well-written review of the book "Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts" by Stanislas Dehaene. Based on the book, Dehaene defines consciousness as the subjective awareness of oneself and the external world. He considers the main function of consciousness to be the brain's "global workspace," acting as a central hub that integrates and transmits information from different specialized brain modules.
After reading the review, I started to contemplate whether consciousness, as a global workspace that integrate information ‘spatially’, from different parts of the brain, could also play a similar role temporally in integrating different successive events into episodic autobiographical memory. To my delight, I later came across a paper that mentioned, "Previous research suggests that episodic autobiographical memory, autonoetic consciousness, and sense of self rely on one another." So my hypothesis seems in fact an already accepted idea!.
I wanted to test whether correlates of 'consciousness' would positively correlate with episodic memory but not with other types of memory. To conduct the test, I created a short survey using mostly existing scales developed for cognition studies. I selected scales that estimated the frequency of inner monologue and self-awareness as correlates of consciousness, while including episodic memory as my primary focus, and semantic and spatial memory as controls. I have a particular interest in inner monologue since I barely experience it, making it a rather mysterious phenomenon to me! I posted two slightly different surveys on one of ACX's open threads, and on ACX and Sam Harris subReddit about a year ago, and recently reposted them.
To my surprise, my seemingly obvious hypothesis turned out to be generally false: people with frequent verbal inner monologue do not, in fact, have better episodic memory. Self-awareness showed only a small positive effect on it. The factor that strongly correlates with episodic memory is visual self-talk. These results were consistent across two different samples from ACX readers, providing me with a reasonable level of confidence that it is not just a random outcome. My current proposed explanation (kind of an ad hoc explanation!) is that may be verbal thoughts are too recent on an evolutionary time scale to have been integrated in our memory processes.
https://preview.redd.it/t7ybaqfxdldb1.jpg?width=1415&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3722c610994df0590cd1f48a64fb6f3186b07992
I was quite surprised by the absence of link between inner monologue and episodic memory. Moreover, individuals with frequent verbal inner monologue not only don't have better episodic memory, but they also, on average, perform slightly worse in spatial memory. This led me to wonder whether inner monologue is more related to personality than cognition. As a result, I included a measurement of personality (Big Five) in the second version of the survey. Interestingly, inner monologue showed no significant relationship with these five personality traits, while visual self-talk displayed significant correlations. So this inner monologue thing remains very mysterious for me!
I would be, of course, very interested in any comments you might have on this subject
This is a really awesome project!
I think I have a different concept of inner monologue. I am also a person with little to none inner monologue. As a mathematician, I think this is rather unusual. When I develop a proof, then there are almost no words involved. I struggle to say what is involved instead. Some images are involved, but sometimes I have the feeling that it involves neither images nor audio. I have talked to a few other mathematicians, and most of them seem to use verbal thinking in order to develop proofs, for example they would internally "read" involved formulas verbally to themselves.
Anyway, what I want to get to: I think that verbal inner monologue is one way of conscious thinking, where the internal state centers around words. But that there are other ways of conscious thinking that center around images or even other modes. There has been related research on how people count.
An example: some people seem to count verbally, while other people count visually. (And perhaps there are yet different ways?) In some experiments, people were told to count while they had to do some competing verbal tasks. It turns out that people who count verbally are slowed down by the competing tasks. The hypothesis is that the counting process is briefly interrupted and resumes with the old speed after the other task is finished. But people who count visually are not slowed down. So we have some more evidence than just introspection on that.
So if inner monologue is just one of several modes of conscious thinking, then the questions about inner monologue are perhaps not a good indicator for the strength/frequency of consciousness, but rather of its mode of operation. You and I don't have inner monologues often, but I wouldn't assume that we are less conscious than other people. So I find it quite natural that there is no correlation between "verbal self-talk" and "episodic memory"/"semantic memory".
On the other hand, "low self-awareness" does sound like an indicator for weak consciousness, so it seems natural that it correlates negatively with episodic and semantic memory. (Though from the example question for low self-awareness it might be a bit circular, since it literally contains the phrase "can't remember why". Perhaps this already tests episodic memory?)
I don't have a very good explanation for the strong correlation between visual self-talk and episodic/semantic memory, though. This is the most surprising bit for me. Perhaps it is as you say, and verbal thoughts are evolutionary younger. We are a pretty vision-based species after all. It's all ad-hoc, but it also seems to me that most of my episodic memory is visual. Since I don't use inner monologue, I am a poor data point, so I wonder whether episodic memory for other people is also more visual than verbal?
For the negative correlation between verbal self-talk and spatial memory, this also makes sense if verbal and visual are two different modes of thinking. Visual people probably have an advantage for spatial tasks because spatial information is much easier to represent visually than verbally. So if people can either think verbally or visually, then the visual group has a lot more practice with visual representations, and is thus better on spatial tasks. And the verbal group has less visual practice and is worse. It's as if you ask right-handed and left-handed people to use a pair of left-handed scissors. The right-handers are generally not so good with their left hands because they use them less, and so they will not be very good with the left-handed scissors.
"but sometimes I have the feeling that it involves neither images nor audio" a note that Hurlburt calls this "unsymbolized thinking". See the Descriptive Experience Sampling codebook: https://hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu//codebook.html
I tend to call it "conceptual thinking". I use it a lot - more than verbal I think, but I'm not sure. It seems particularly useful for maths/computers.
Highly recommended digging into Hurlburt's work, that gives lots of terminology that would be invaluable for this conversation!
Cool, thanks for the recommendation!
"I don't have a very good explanation for the strong correlation between visual self-talk and episodic/semantic memory, though. This is the most surprising bit for me. Perhaps it is as you say, and verbal thoughts are evolutionary younger. We are a pretty vision-based species after all. It's all ad-hoc, but it also seems to me that most of my episodic memory is visual. Since I don't use inner monologue, I am a poor data point, so I wonder whether episodic memory for other people is also more visual than verbal?"
That was also the big surprise for me, as I did not expect any special relationship between visual thoughts and type of memory. I did not realize it but now that you mention it, same as you, if I am remembering old memories, they tend to be based on pictures. It might also of course be due to me not using verbal thoughts much. I note to ask people whether whether their episodic memory is also more visual than verbal!
"For the negative correlation between verbal self-talk and spatial memory, this also makes sense if verbal and visual are two different modes of thinking. Visual people probably have an advantage for spatial tasks because spatial information is much easier to represent visually than verbally. So if people can either think verbally or visually, then the visual group has a lot more practice with visual representations, and is thus better on spatial tasks. And the verbal group has less visual practice and is worse. It's as if you ask right-handed and left-handed people to use a pair of left-handed scissors. The right-handers are generally not so good with their left hands because they use them less, and so they will not be very good with the left-handed scissors." Yes, it seems a very plausible explanation.
Yes, I would also be interested to know whether other people's episodic memory are visual as well. It might be something to ask in the next Open Thread.
There's a symptom called Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM) where people have a very poor episodic memory, because they don't have a visual imagination.
This applies to me. I'm hypophantasic (almost aphantasic), and I don't recall specific events. Only for really really important life events I get some spatial memory, no colour or texture. Instead I remember concepts and facts about what happened to me and reason from those, which is ineffective for lots of kinds of recall.
Judging by talking to people about this, and my own experience, what I now call episodic memory is entirely sensory - mainly visual, but people also recall other senses. I think fact-based conceptual or verbal memories I have about the past are likely a different kind of memory.
I will try that :-)
"So if inner monologue is just one of several modes of conscious thinking, then the questions about inner monologue are perhaps not a good indicator for the strength/frequency of consciousness, but rather of its mode of operation. You and I don't have inner monologues often, but I wouldn't assume that we are less conscious than other people. So I find it quite natural that there is no correlation between "verbal self-talk" and "episodic memory"/"semantic memory"."
I do agree that that inner monologue is just one of several modes of conscious thinking but I had the, false, expectation that it would be linked with self-awareness. It seemed to me that an inner monologue was a stronger indication of someone being 'there' than the presence of images, which does not in fact seem the case.
"Though from the example question for low self-awareness it might be a bit circular, since it literally contains the phrase "can't remember why". Perhaps this already tests episodic memory". Thank you for the comment. I used the following questions, with only one mentioning memory. I will check whether removing it changes the relationship.
Questions :
- It seems that I am frequently “running on automatic pilot,” without much awareness of what I’m doing.
- I often daydream while doing daily tasks.
- [I often find myself doing something and can't remember why.
- Most of the time I am well aware of what I am doing and why I am doing it.
- I start doing tasks that I don't intend to do because they are more common tasks that closely resemble the intended task (i.e. open the wrong app on my phone).
Ah, I see, thanks! Then it was really only this one question which mentions memory, so it's probably not an issue.
Thank you for you extremely interesting post!
"I am also a person with little to none inner monologue. As a mathematician, I think this is rather unusual. When I develop a proof, then there are almost no words involved. I struggle to say what is involved instead. Some images are involved, but sometimes I have the feeling that it involves neither images nor audio" A description that I have seen for thoughts that are neither verbal nor visual is "abstract". Or, on a related post on Reddit, someone proposed that it probably consists partly of sense qualia.
Another commentor used a metaphor that I find very illustrative : "I think in concepts to and describe them as clouds of 'stuff' which does include words which are not articulated, but belong to the 'concept'. This is compatible with the Thousand-brains-theory of Jeff Hawkins, who claims that we store frameworks of 'stuff' in neuronal networks: The concept of a cat is made up of the neural correlates of fur, meowing, cat eyes, scratching, hunting mice, and so forth. When we think about a cat, we activate those neurons and there you have your cloud of 'stuff' that makes up a cat.
Seems to me that inner monologue and language is downstream from that. In a sense, concept thinkers are assembler coders of the mind, whereas people with inner monologue use higher order 'coding languages' that are built on assembler."
Yes, "abstract thought" and "concepts" describe it quite well for me. I can zoom into sub-concepts. For example, when I prove a theorem, I start with the overall concept of "this statement is correct and this is how the proof goes", and when queried I can fill out the details of the various proof steps.
Very interesting, and I find impressive that you are able to 'catch your brain' when working on a proof and describe the underneath process.
demost_ and Emma_B - I'm starting a podcast about inner mental experiences, and it would be great to have a conversation with either or both of you on it about the topic of this thread! And Emma's survey.
If you're up for it email me francis@flourish.org or reply to this message with a way to find you (e.g. on Twitter).
Thanks!
I'm very interested in consciousness, & researched phenomenology in grad school. You mention that you used scales that estimated frequency of inner monologue and self-awareness. Were these self-report scales, with items like "I engage in inner monologues" and answer choices along the lines of "never, occasionally, fairly often, ....etc."? If so, I don't believe scales like that are valid for measuring mental processes.
First of all, I don't think the meaning of the phrase "inner monologue" is nearly as clear as it sounds. As it happens, today there was a moment when I asked myself whether I was having an inner monologue. (I ask myself stuff like that a lot.). I had been walking along a sunny sidewalk, thinking about how to express myself in an upcoming difficult conversation I knew I was going to have with someone I was annoyed at. And when I asked myself whether I was having a mental monologue, I couldn't decide.. There were definitely actual phrases in my train of thought -- mostly things I was imagining saying. But they weren't long speeches, just phrases like "it's not reasonable to expect me to . .." Then mixed in were some mental images of the situation I was annoyed about, and of the prospective talk. And then there was a lot of *thought* about the situation that was neither words nor images, but ideas -- for example, the idea that if I spoke too harshly the person would probably tune me out. So here I am, a psychologist, fascinated by phenomenology, catching a train of thought hot off the press, and yet I am unable to answer confidently whether I was having a mental monologue.
Second, even if I were able to identify clearly occasions when I was having a mental monologue, there's no reason to think another person asked about mental monologues would be using the same criteria as I do to decide whether they are having one.
Third, if the tests asks retrospectively about how often people have mental monologues, I really do not think that is something people are able to answer. I can tell you approximately how often I pee on a given day, or how often I turn a key in a lock, but I haven't the faintest idea how frequently I have something that even sort of qualifies as a mental monologue. In fact I can remember very few of the actual individual thoughts I had today, let alone what modality they were in. I can certainly tell you the topics that were on my mind today, on my mind either because they are current preoccupations or because they were related to major events of the day. But almost all of the individual thoughts are gone. Early in the day I rode my bike to work. I can remember that it was a beautiful day and I was feeling tired but in a good mood, but trying now to remember what I thought about on that bike ride, I cannot remember a single topic, much less the individual thoughts about the topic.
So the upshot is that I do not think it is possible to get valid measures of characteristics of subjects' thoughts by self-report questionnaires. If you want to do that you have to do thought sampling, and train your subjects ahead of time on what counts as an "inner monologue" or a "mental image" or "self-awareness."
I just read a book by Eric Schwitzgebel called *Perplexities of Consciousness," which is mostly about how little clarity we actually have about our own phenomenology. It's a good book, & I recommend it highly. Reviewed it for the book review contest, actually -- review is on the Substack called Book Review Group.
Out of interest, what do you think of Hurlburt's Descriptive Experience Sampling for getting more objective accounts of inner experience? Schiwtzgebel is skeptical, and I read the book where he and Hurlburt discuss this, but I still think DES is way way way better than giving up!
I agree that it is way way better than nothing. I think it is most useful for practical purposes. Here are 2 examples:
-In one study somebody, it may have been Hurlburt, interviewed subjects before thought sampling and developed a Current Concerns list for each subject -- the 5 or 10 things most on their minds that week -- then used list as part of categorizing collected thoughts. I think a lot more could be done with that than experimentors did. For instance it's likely people's current concerns influence their take on experiences they have -- there's a selective attention thing going on.
-I just read the wiki entry about DES and it mentioned a subject who believed he mostly felt anxiety, but thought sampling revealed that a lot of his thoughts were angry. I'm a clinical psychologist, and I think thought sampling would probably be an excellent way of putting people in touch with feelings that they might otherwise take a long time to recognize.
On the other hand, I think a lot of the qualitative stuff about inner experience is much less easy to capture than it seems -- things like how visual the experience is, how much of it involves words. Overall, I think simple things like topic of thought are possible and useful to collect, but not more subtle qualitative things. I've done a fair amount of thought sampling using myself as subject, so that conclusion is based not mostly on theory but on careful examination of my own experience. I loved Schwitzgebel's *Perplexities of Consciousness.* He observations about the weird gelatinous hard-to-capture quality of much inner experience absolutely match. mine.
I think consciousness is like a field of icebergs. A lot of what is happening is below the surface, i.e. not accessible via introspection. But the stuff below the surface isn't the Freudian unconscious -- it's cognitive processing via alrorithms, etc. We don't figure out what we think and see by paying careful attention to our inner experience and percepts. We know what we think and see because the knowledge pops into conscious experience along with the wispy remnants of the raw material it's based on.
I wrote a review of *Perplexities of Consciousness,* summarizing Schwitzgebel but also including a lot of my own thoughts and observations. If you're interested, it's here: https://bookreviewgroup.substack.com/p/review-of-perplexities-of-consciousness
Why are you interested in this stuff? Are you in the field, or more just personally fascinated?
Also, thanks for the book review, will read it and look into that book!
Personally fascinated, and would love more people to be aware of and talk about this stuff. In general everyday life, people know people are good at different things, but because we don't have the habit and vocabulary to introspect at all, we're often more mystified than we should be.
I realised the variety existed when I found out I'm basically aphantasic (actually I have a bit of imagery, but very very minimal). And then discovered that everyone else uses their imagery in different ways with different qualities.
I half want to start some kind of public phenomenlogy institute - so helping spread that everyone's minds (what we can observe of them) work differently, that you can learn different ways of working (I get more imagery when I'm paying attention and doing exercises that might lead to that - I'm confident if I did that intensely it would get a lot better), and helping use it to improve things like teaching, and self-improvement.
Meanwhile I'm recording things for a podcast! Very amateur though.
Of course I agree with you that asking people a few questions about their recollection of their thought process is not going to produce an accurate and detailed description of that process ... but I think it does allow useful rough estimates to be made with reasonable reliability.
As for the problem of "inner monologue" not being clear enough, as is common with the approach I used, I asked several questions from a published scale about different aspects of inner monologue (cf below), and then extracted the common latent factor among the answers. This allows both to clarify (a bit!) what is meant by inner monologue, and also to average the answers from several questions related to various aspects of this factor.
The questions were from the Internal Representations Questionnaire by Roebuck et al. (2020):
- I often think about problems in my mind in the form of a conversation with myself.
- I often talk to myself to review things that have happened in the recent past.
- I often talk to myself to anticipate what someone will say and how I’ll respond to him or her.
As for the problem of people not remembering their thoughts accurately, yes, it would be much better to use experience sampling. But given that we are dealing with large differences (from zero to almost constant monologue) for an extremely common phenomenon for most people (thinking!), I am reasonably sure that the memories are sufficiently correlated with the process that there is a signal in the data.
More generally, this sort of approach, a series of questions to which people answer on the basis of their subjectively remembered experience, has a long history of use in psychology (for example, in personality measurement with the Big Five model), and we have plenty of evidence to suggest that it works, i.e. that it measures things with some reliability. To name a few: internal consistency of the scale, repeatability of the estimate between two time periods, correlation between different scales measuring similar traits, correlation with objective measures.
Finally, thanks for the suggestion, great idea to centralize the reviews and wonderful to start one with a Nabokov quote! I really liked Speak memory and am still thunderstruck by Ada!
Always a pleasure to meet another Nabokov fan!
Here's an example of something that I ran across that supports what I said about people using different criteria to decide whether they are having a certain experience. It's an article by someone who says they cured their aphantasia in 2 weeks using a little online e-course. But the most interesting thing to me is that they had the wrong idea of what mental images were like: "[The course] starts by laying out a huge misconception that many people with aphantasia have. Which is: usually people with aphantasia imagine that visualizing people are really seeing images. Like, when they close their eyes, they don’t just see a black void. But that’s not true! Most people see a black void just like aphantasics do. They just have a sense of an image alongside it, hovering in some imaginary parallel nether-space."
I would never have described myself as having aphantasia, but when I close my eyes I too see a black void, but have a sense of an image in some other space. And the images I have are like the ones Sasha Chapin describes after successfully completing the course. He seems to think they're lower quality than most people's, but they sound just like mine: "My visual pictures aren’t great. They’re pretty low-detail, colors are faint, I can’t do more than a word of text, and, with faces, I can imagine flickers of characteristic details—vivid eyes, a vehemence in the smile—but the full picture is hazy." I can offer a couple of bits of evidence that my flickering and detail-poor mental images are of at least average quality: I am certainly not a good artist, but I can draw familiar sights from memory well enough that they are recognizable. For instance I could draw a cat in any one of a number of postures and a viewer would recognize the posture. I have an unusually good memory for color. I actually took a little test of that once, and scored 90-something percentile. Here's the aphantasia article: "https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/i-cured-my-aphantasia-with-a-low"
My review of Schwitzgebel, once you get past the intro, summarizes his views of about 5 other mental experiences, and his case for maintaining that people's notions of what they are like are inaccurate.
I totally agree that people do not report accurately about their experience. But I think that we have a lot of evidence supporting the idea that people can report it accurately enough for the data to contain signal and not only noise. For example, I think that it is reasonable to think that, in average, people with high level of visual imagery will report higher frequency of visual imagery than people with low levels.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06098-1
I just read this yesterday, and I think it’s interesting in the context of the issues that you were discussing. The TL; DR of it is that the shape and size of the brain is more significant because it’s kind of a resonating chamber. The model of specific areas controlling specific things does not correlate very well.
I’m not a scientist, but it seems to make an interesting case.
Very interesting thank you. I was totally unaware of the importance of these shapes and size factors.
Here's a common take which I would like to understand better: "Investment/stock analysis, even among professionals, doesn't really work. Passive investment strategies are the way to go. One time Warren Buffett made a bet.... [etc. etc.] ....and that's why actively managed funds are terrible and you should just put your money in the S&P 500".
Obviously this is a little shallow. Given that 1. there are a bunch of analysts still employed, 2. they seem to be paid decently well, and 3. (judging by the previous book review) they seem to have reasonably sophisticated techniques, I have to assume there's a bit more to this story. I know that many finance jobs are not entirely about profit-maximization (and instead something like managing risk), but as I understand it, there are still tons of people in hedge funds with the sole goal of making money from markets.
Could anyone shed light on this topic? I'm especially interested in eg an essay by a professional trader defending their usefulness in light of common criticisms of actively managed funds.
(this is not a question about personal finance. I just want to understand)
*On average* "Investment/stock analysis, even among professionals, doesn't really work". Which is why for most people passive will be best. Just like there are some professional gamblers that make money but you probably wont go to Vegas and come out very much ahead.
Most jobs in the finance sector are boring administrative jobs. The one we think about when we say "finance" like at hedge funds or investment banks are mostly sales jobs and highly relationship based. They often make money (for themselves or clients) through providing services (so it doesn't matter what the market does), underwriting (which again isn't solely market dependent), or in deals which aren't in the stock (or bond) market like private debt offerings and such.
There are traders that try to make money from "beating" the market. And they usually use leverage to do this which makes these riskier on an individual level but at a large firm across a lot of traders or trading strategies, the risk can be reduced and profits can be found.
I think that something was lost in translation. Actual correct take is that passive investment stategies are the way to go FOR-NONPROFESSIONALS (edit: meaning people who don't work as/for investors). As a non-professional, you are usually not able to pick which actively managed fund is good and which is not.
I think the key part you are missing is the fees. Active funds charge much higher fees, which turn out to completely eat the advantage of having a professional stock picker. One way to look at this is that the labor of the active manager provides some value, but they take it all as compensation. I'm not sure why that would be, but it seems to be empirically demonstrated (see Malkiel's books for details.)
I can't recommend Peter Lynch's books on the stock market enough. He was the manager of Fidelity's most successful fund and he consistently beat the stock market getting a 29.2% annual return.
The main point expressed in his books is that the best (and pretty much only) way to consistently beat the market is to know something it doesn't. His mantra is: "Invest in what you know".
Much of his books consist of anecdotes about how his job as a hedge fund manager consisted mainly of getting information and on companies that other people don't have, and getting to know these companies intricately and he invested based on that knowledge, and that is basically what those analysts do all day, they get to know companies and recommend investments based on that knowledge gained.
For the average joe, you basically have 2 options. Either "invest in what you know": Companies which you know intimately due to your profession/hobbies/personal life etc. (and intensive personal research) or just stay with the indexes if you can't/don't want to do that.
From a retail investor perspective, there are two big issues with investing in professionally managed funds. The first is what Shaked Koplewitz already replied, that the level of effort necessary to (on average) beat the market by a nontrivial amount is very high, to such an extent that management fees tend to eat up that outperformance and then some.
The second problem is that picking good actively managed funds is itself a fiendishly difficult problem. Sure, some funds do outperform the market even after fees, but the trick is identifying those funds in advance rather than with hindsight. The funds that will outperform over the coming years aren't necessarily the same ones that outperformed last year (or the last five or ten or twenty years).
A fund might outperform the market on average simply because it's riskier. Perhaps due to use of leverage (i.e. borrowing some of the money you invest, which multiplies both gains and losses to your equity investors), or perhaps due to a "picking up pennies in front of steamrollers" strategy (i.e. stuff that pays off a reasonable amount something like 99% of the time, but the other 1% you go broke).
Or a fund might outperform because it bet heavily on a particular company or industry and happened to be right over the medium term. Anyone who bet heavily on tech stocks in the 90s looked like a genius for a while. Likewise for people who bet heavily on banks and financial services companies in the early to mid 2000s. After 2000 and 2007 respectively, somewhat less so.
So the actual rough estimate is "active investment lets you beat the market, but the effort and payoff is roughly proportional to your skill and the amount of work you put in". People in hedge funds who make money work hard to find new strategies that tend to become less viable over time and have limited potential payoff - for example you might spend a year working on a strategy that makes 200K the first year and then decays by half each subsequent year. (Of course, a lot of hedge funds never manage to find much and collapse).
I'm not especially going to defend trader usefulness here - some hedge funds (including both my current and previous employers) do consistently beat the market over long periods of time, but they generally won't take money from a random investor (the EMH also applies to investing in hedge funds, not just buying stocks).
To the degree that "the market" is in fact engineered to, among other things, maintain a caste system, i.e. reliably move value from designated losers to designated winners, it is then no great mystery why "they won't take money from a random investor."
How was it "engineered" to do that?
"Engineered" may have been a poor choice of word.
But it isn't exactly a secret that hedge funds and investment banks can do things which you cannot do -- even on a correspondingly-smaller scale -- with a typical household budget, even if you are a domain expert; and not simply in the "quantity has a quality all its own" sense. They have various licenses, access to real-time market data, access to trading without risk of being front-run (unlike e.g. "Robin Hood" et al. users), ultra-low-interest loans from central banks and other financial corps, and, often enough: bailouts, in the event of "losing big".
That's not how it works. They have access to more data because they spend a lot of money on getting and aggregating it - basic data like 10-Ks is publicly available on the SEC website. And front running trading isn't a thing the way you seem to think - Robinhood users actually get better deals than institutional investors (because they're less risky to trade with). Also, hedge funds don't get funding or bailouts from central banks, only heavily-regulated banks (that *can't* just do this sort of trading) can get those.
It's probably worth reading a Bogle book (guy who founded Vanguard) to understand the arguments and theory underlying index investing. For my money, it's hard to beat "The Little Book of Common Sense Investing" by Bogle.
In theory (the theory is called the Efficient Market Hypothesis), asset prices are based on all available information. That is to say that at any point in time there is no such thing as a good deal, and that you can't 'beat the market' by being smarter/more informed. The logical conclusion is to just buy index funds. The alternative is that asset prices are not based on all current information, and that it's possible for a trader to get an 'edge', which is worth paying them 2% or so for. Read the latest book review from a few days ago, it discusses it in some detail
>asset prices are based on all available information.
Would it be more accurate to say that asset prices are based on the prevailing interpretation of all available information ? I wonder.. assets can be mispriced under that scenario.
From what I read and remember, one of the important reasons is that for huge amounts of money, passive funds can be worse then active management, esp. considering tax optimizations. Bundled derivative products allow for clever schemes that outearn passive instestments.
Another thing is that hedge funds employ very, sometimes extremely sophisticated methods. Read about medallion fund, it is fascinating.
Evidence based software engineering is something of a niche topic. Publicly available data is hard to find (yes, there is lots of code on Github, which is a bit like saying that there are lots of animals in the jungle) and good data analysis skills are rewarded in many other venues. There is now a discord channel https://discord.gg/hAPX2UrV
What *is* evidence-based software engineering?
Not the person you are asking... but there are a lot of debates within software engineering about which practices are best or at least better than the known alternatives. These debates don’t usually have scientific studies to cite. Instead it is based off your experience and delegating to well known personalities.
Some examples:
* are static types or dynamic types better?
* are some programming languages better than others, or is it preference?
* how much should we value developer time vs computer time?
Two examples that I think are solved:
* strong vs weak types. Strong types won.
* formatting. This has been studied. The thing that matters most is consistency. As long as consistency is maintained, the particular style doesn’t seem to matter.
>Strong types won.
This seems off. I guess much of it depends on how you define "weak" and "strong" in the first place (and whatever definition you assume, I'm no expert and in no position to correct you), but a more specific, and in a way more fundamental objection I'd raise here is:
Dialectics won and gave us duck typing.
As far as I understand, dynamic and, particularly duck typing can still be strong: python is arguably strongly typed language, only types are attached to values, not variables or function parameters. A better argument for weak typing not being completely defeated is that while strong typing is indeed prevalent in typical application programming, people still use and love C in system and embedded programming precisely because its typing is weak, and you can do everything with your values (which may be needed in those applications)
Pretty much. Hence, dialectics.
The problem with "weak" as a descriptive term is that it seems to encompass two fundamentally different concepts. First is, just like in your example, low-level languages that just let you assign types on the fly to chunks of raw data, the second is high-level languages that implicitly convert between data types and let you (force you to) entirely ignore how the data is represented.
Duck typing allows for arguably "strong" languages to vastly simplify the former, and basically reproduce the latter entirely. (It also, at least to an extent, fixes the inherent lack of clarity of high-level "weak" languages like JavaScript.) Problems of both approaches fixed, dichotomy resolved.
Incidentally, duck typing has also static version in the form of typeclasses: the canonical version can be found, of course, in Haskell, but a programmer without a Phd in category theory may look at a more limited, but analogous constructs in other languages (Golang interface may be considered a very limited form of a single parameter typeclass).
I've mostly experienced those debates as a new fad every year or two. If there's any "evidence" presented for them, it's either a single cherry-picked study, or one restricted to a narrow use case, but hyped as if it was more generally applicable.
Thus for example it seems that C++ is better than C - it prevents some types of dynamic memory abuse (yay!) and that's more important than the ways that inheritance and such can be - and are - used to make it difficult or impossible to predict what a given line of code will actually do.
FWIW, even though I'm retired now, and so no longer need ammunition against fad-chasing managers, I'd be interested in citations to whatever research exists.
My book Evidence-based Software Engineering discusses what is currently known about software engineering, based on an analysis of all the publicly available data. pdf+code+all data freely available here
http://knosof.co.uk/ESEUR/
Thank you
The Wikipedia engineering article does a much better job of describing it than I can https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering
Given the miniscule amount of data currently available, we are many decades away from having some semblance of real theories of software engineering
That's a big article, and doesn't use the term "evidence-based". I also didn't see any likely matches (under a different name) in the Methodology section.
FWIW, I'm not so sure we have theories of civil engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, etc.. Compared to software engineering, those fields have more established methodologies, and we have a lot more willingness to punish practitioners and firms that produce non-functioning or dangerous implementations. But theories?
"... real theories of software engineering" ->
"... real theories of use in software engineering"
In the sense that Maxwell's equations, Ohms law, Faraday's law of induction, etc are of use to electrical engineers.
You mean like algorithm costs?
Part of strangeness of software engineering is that a significant part of it is really about humans: how to write source code in such a way that it is understandable and easy to change. and extend by human programmers.
I'm considering getting into Hexachess, as in chess with a hexagon board (yes CGP Grey inspired).
Anyone have experience with it? Is it worth the investment or just a clearly inferior gimmick?
No experience with it, but Wikipedia says there are several different versions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_chess
That's something of an understatement. Chess is a popular game to design variants of, and hexes are one of the more obvious variants. A search for "hex" on chessvariants.com turns up over 1000 hits.
Looks like a gimmick. I'd give shogi a try.
Instinct to Morality (diagram & table)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Elc_yhGFvn1gYeViFRvnu1WGasT6AXa8/view?usp=sharing
- - -
A Balanced Sense of Self (micro-treatise supported with endnotes)
https://1drv.ms/b/s!Av3DdRPJXjSngTvaHplrV0yFbGlz?e=FSHC60
[links work better w/ installed .pdf reader]
Elo everything is good and all, but what about restricting the scope a bit? Ideas: ranking cities (people who lived in both cities say where they liked it more), diseases (more/less painful), employers… It seems like a weekend project, especially with gpt4. Getting people on board to kickstart it is the hard part.
Is this purely for entertainment, or are you hoping to get actual usefulness out of it? If you want actual usefulness, you're going to have all the problems of any review platform: You need to somehow get large amounts of honest user input while resisting spam and manipulation attempts, and you start at a huge disadvantage against incumbents because usefulness grows with size.
I guess it depends on the project. The disease one would be interesting from a purely academic point of view and I suspect that the incentive to lie about which disease hurts more would be low-ish. On the other hand sorting cities by the feelings of people who actually lived there would be practically useful, probably more than similar lists built using various indicators like walkability etc. But then there is a strong incentive to lie.
Has anybody been using lemmy? What do you think of it and its architecture?
It's pretty good but not where I'd expect the tech to be considering we had diaspora in 2009. Would be nice if users and communities could be matched up/coalesced across instances.
aha! same thing i've been saying here: https://lemmy.world/comment/1584583
it is still a possibility to make that happen
I used Mastodon/Pleroma for a while. Couldn't stand the userbase.
Thank you, I love the language chart!
The three words on the chart are, as far as I can tell, Wall, Lady, and Arm. Any particular reason you chose these three?
Which century is each part of the diagram about?
Thank you.